The City of Absurdity: David Lynch, Papers

Papers & Essayes

The Oblivious Transfer: Analyzing Blue Velvet

7. Bringing Up Baby

Attention to the knowingness of the text and the invocation of a knowing reader gives us a clue about the textual perversity of Blue Velvet, which has precisely to do with transference. The perversions, unlike hysterical symptoms, are to some degree symptomatic of the failure of repression. They are marked by a degree of conscious acting out. I would argue that Blue Velvet is perverse not simply in its depiction of perversions but to the degree that it is self-conscious and knowing and in the reading/analytic relationships it inaugurates thereby. To this extent I would disagree with Barbara Creed's designation of the film as an hysterical text, [8] except in so far as the process of analysis itself hystericizes every text. It is obviously crucial to underscore the fact that there are no absolute divisions between, for instance, the conscious and the unconscious, the perverse and the normal, and the hysterical and psychotic. But bearing this in mind I would nevertheless situate Blue Velvet more in the realm of the perverse - because of its knowingness and because it is to a large degree posited upon the perversion of the analyst, addressed as it is to she who suffers from cinephilia and psychoanalytic epistemophilia.

Blue Velvet is a text designed to snare the psychoanalytic reader, and more particularly to snare the psychoanalytic reader who is also a cinephile. I will not here address directly the way that cinephilia is invoked since it constitutes a paper in itself, but of course it is not unrelated to psychoanalytic epistemophilia and it is worth simply mentioning here the way in which the film invokes and almost gives a new meaning to the notion of "screen memories." But how does it lay its lure? The film is littered with "psychoanalytic tropes," scenarios almost encased in quotation marks. The temptation of course is for the analyst to frenetically identify the quotations, to get caught up in hermeneutic delirium and; in the process to miss the joke. Or to anxiously and repeatedly assert the joke so that the analysis itself becomes a running gag. Either way we fall into the trap. For instance, we might say that Blue Velvet gestures towards Freudian theory by alluding to the relation between a range of perversions and the existence of infantile sexuality. But as soon as we make this interpretation the tables are turned on us, the film declares the theory itself to be a joke. This is epitomized in Frank's refrain "Baby wants to Fuck." One way of reading Blue Velvet is as a postmodern remake of Bringing Up Baby where the wanting or the fantasy is neither repressed nor mobilized narratively, but rather explicitly articulated and acted out in the form of a slapstick - or lipstick - routine (and where the pet leopard that is "Baby" from the earlier film is heard roaring on the soundtrack). Perhaps there is no way around this. As Shoshana Felman says in Writing and Madness, "entering into the game, we ourselves become fair game for the very 'joke' of meaning." The point, however, is that the quotation of psychoanalytic tropes inaugurates a particular drama of transference. Felman puts it thus: "The psychoanalytic reader is, par excellence, the reader who would not be caught, who would not be made a dupe," [9] indicating a dynamic of seduction and resistance.

In Blue Velvet it seems to me this dynamic is articulated in such a way that the perversion is that of the seducer in the hysterical scenario. The patient might desire the analyst's ear, but the analyst might be seduced by the tales the patient tells, tales, that might also be cruel jokes. And the analyst might either take umbrage or be intrigued at this evidence of infantile envy translated into an attack on the mother. [10]

8. Hearsay

Blue Velvet is a noisy text. Contemporary criticism often asserts that it is the silences of the text, any text, that enable interpretation, that is, it is in the resistance to interpretation and the drama thus inaugurated that new meaning can be produced. If this is so then how do we read Blue Velvet, or rather, how do I read it given that I choose to orient my reading through the sense of hearing rather than (primarily) sight? One way of approaching this question is via the suspicion that noisiness and silence are part of the same economy; indeed, that this economy is embedded in the transactions involved in analysis and transference. If we enter Blue Velvet through the ear (there is a zoom into the interior via the ear near the beginning of the film) we might note that it is a dead and detached ear, and therefore a deaf ear. If we assume that as soon as the patient begins to speak he makes a demand of the analyst, insists on interpretation, it is equally true that he cannot hear what is said (he himself turns a deaf ear) and also is suspicious that the analyst turns a deaf ear to his speech. The intensity of this, suspicion may be transferred into a desire to literalize the deaf ear of the analyst, to cut it off, turn it into a dead ear, and return it to sender.

The noisiness is there not only in the sounds of the jungle (albeit it a miniaturized, David-Attenborough-type-jungle where insect sounds are amplified [11] and the lion's roar is miniaturized) but in the concatenation of quotation, allusion, mimicry, ultimately condensed in the sound-image of lip-syncing (a sound-image at once a composite and a separation/detachment). This is most striking in Dean Stockwell/Ben's rendition/of "In Dreams," but it occurs with a somewhat different inflection every time Dorothy opens her mouth and we hear the distinctive voice of "her" (Isabella Rossellini's) mother (Ingrid Bergman). An aural screen memory that returns to us the voice of the mother, but separated out, detached from the visual signifier.

But perhaps we are being too serious about all this. What is it that is transmitted through the ear, but quotation, allusion, intimation, mimicry? If quotation, allusion, intimation, mimicry indicate, within a postmodern framework, the absence of origin or original truth, then they have the same status as rumor and gossip, that is, hearsay. (Interpretation is on a par with speculation, of derivative significance; it is meaning derived from overhearing or listening in). For the moment, though, let us take seriously word-play, or what we might think of as textual parapraxis. The camera, as it zooms slowly into the interior of the ear "revealing" an enigmatic sound of roaring, is literally listening in. Sandy, who initially gives Jeffrey some "bits and pieces," thus enabling him to begin the investigation, says "I hear things." She overhears things because her room is over her father's office, or orifice. Jeffrey avoids hearing things, by flushing the toilet at the very moment when Sandy toots the horn; in flushing away the evidence of his own bodily presence he misses a vital clue. This is not, however, surprising, given his role as apprentice detective or heir apparent. He is in training to take the place of the father, not necessarily his "real" father, but the Detective Father, he who is presumed to know. The fantasy is that he will do this by solving the crime, and inheriting the mother. The mother is both good and bad. As bad mother (Dorothy) she seduces the son; as good mother (Sandy) she listens and enables Jeffrey's interpretation.

Already we fall into the trap the film lays for us. It presents us with psychoanalytic scenarios but refuses to take these too seriously. In its own practice it designates their significance as comparable to hearsay. However, in entering into the game we become fair game, and, I would argue this is where the drama takes place - there is a transference of intensity from the story to the dynamics of the viewer's investment and interpretation. The viewer listens, is enticed to listen - she is a listening viewer, and hearsay is all important - hearsay signifying the seeing ear, or the hearing eye. There is a diegetic drama, as always in the detective genre, about the relation between inheritance and hermeneutics. But there is also an extra-diegetic drama around the issue of the heir apparent. What is the status of the ear? Or should we say, that which appears to be an ear? It is apparently a (human) ear, but is it really? The analyst is apparently listening, but is she really, is she giving us her ear, or is she turning a deaf ear? And which parent is it that has the ear?

Blue Velvet is littered with quotations and allusions, it encourages us to identify these and interpret, and then it says, but it's just a joke, this is only a quotation, nothing but pastiche. However, within the body of the text how do these allusions fit? It seems to me that they function as imported or sliding signifiers, they do not "mean" (this or that) but rather they function to signify importation, displacement, expulsion. They function like part-objects; like foreign bodies they are subject to repudiation, to be internally excluded, excreted. What is suggested here is a drama of introjection. In a Kleinian drama this implies expelling dangerous substances (excrements) out of the self and into the mother. [12] "He put his disease in me." Dorothy repeats this, "He put his disease in me." I would argue that this alerts us not simply to a dynamic being played out between the dramatis personae of the film but to a dynamic involving the analyst. What is being manifested here is an infantile sadistic desire to contaminate the analyst/mother by implanting foreign bodies, or transferring symptoms (poison).

9. The Sound of My Own Breathing

The process of substitution is of course endless, but the robins come eventually, providing the sense of an ending. So let me mention one last substitution. To say (hat the patient wants the analyst's ear is to indicate a treacherous trajectory of desire. There are of course, more simple needs - for warmth, nourishment, fresh air to breathe. But the distinction is already, even as it is spoken, blur red. It is in the very substitution and conflation - a banal instance indeed - of ear and air that the sinister underside of wordplay makes itself felt. The fresh air of Lumberton materializes as a part-object supreme, a very fresh ear, It is at once a material object, severed and hairy and bloody, and nothing but thin air - like the imaginary locked box of the Oblivious Transfer. But there is another instance in which this substitution can be traced. In On Being Blue William Gass describes a recurring fantasy scene revolving around his neighbors wife (this is how he designates her). He watches her through the window as she stands at the sink washing salad. Eventually he realizes he is not in the scene:

Suppose, as I had wished a moment ago, I were inaudible. I should find, very quickly, how much I need to hear the sound of my own breathing. To hear the scene, but not myself: how odd ... how horrible... how whimsical . . . how unnerving. Now I understand what a difference any kind of distance makes. In Blue Velvet distance is dramatized, but we are not entirely excluded, indeed we are put in the picture, aurally. The sound of our own breathing materializes on the soundtrack as the consummate pervert Frank labors to breath. Not fresh air we assume, but some unnameable and unknowable substitute.

Although psychoanalysis often registers the importance of the aural dimension in the primal scene, there is a curious lack of elaboration, and this has been exacerbated by a strand of film theory that has appropriated psychoanalytic theory to concentrate mainly on the visual, on scopophilia and its variations. Blue Velvet draws attention to the aural dimension, not simply through dramatizing it diegetically (although it does do this) but through mobilizing a drama of transference revolving around the analyst and interpretation. Shoshana Felman reminds us that it is no coincidence that "the myth of Oedipus - the psychoanalytic myth par excellence - should happen to recount not only the drama of the symptom but equally the very drama of interpretation. The tragedy of Oedipus is, after all, the story no less of the analyst than of the analysand: it is specifically, in fact, the story of the deconstruction, of the subversion of the polarity itself that distinguishes and opposes these two functions" (238). So in the end perhaps this is not a paper about Blue Velvet, but a paper produced out of resistance, or a series of speculations upon the drama of transference involved in textual analysis. While we cannot of course ascribe to any text intentionality or sadistic desires we can appropriate texts that seem, appropriately, to dramatize certain issues. What Blue Velvet has demanded of me is that I listen to the noise. I find, however, that to do so positions me as perverse. The text tells me that I have no control over meaning. To which I turn a deaf ear. Not because I don't get the joke, for instance I can laugh when Sandy says "I guess it means there is trouble till the robins come." It's just that it is unclear which side I am on and whose story I buy. For there are other versions of Sandy's aphorism. We could turn to Freud's "A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease," but I think I will end with a song from an album entitled Death of a Lady's Man. Here are the first two stanzas of "Paper-Thin Hotel," sung by Leonard Cohen:

I stood there with my ear
against the wall
I was not seized by jealousy at all
In fact a burden lifted from my soul

I heard that love was out
of my control
A heavy burden lifted from my soul
I learned that love was out of my control.

We might say of analysis that, as in the case of the Oblivious Transfer, any "operation that enables such a scheme to work must act like a trap that's much easier to fall into than to escape." Or as Slavoj Zizek says about the "mystery" with which interpretation concerns itself: "This mystery is, in the final analysis, the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other." [13]

NOTES

Barbara Creed, "A Journey Through Blue Velvet: Film, Fantasy and the Female Spectator," New Formations 6 (Winter 1988): 97-117.
Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis, trans. Martha Noel Evans and the author with the assistance of Brian Massumi (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989) 228.
A number of texts dramatize this in narratives in which children tell fraudulent tales to their analyst. See for instance the film Clara's Heart, and the Anne Beattie novel Falling in Place.
Indicating, perhaps, a bug in the system. In his fascinating reading of the film David Wills argues that "most obviously, a psychoanalytic reading of Blue Velvet is disturbed by the bugs." See Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989) 155. "If the bugs escape the spaces of narrative, of thematics, and of readings like psychoanalysis that rely on such structured spaces," he writes, "it is perhaps because they inhabit the space of the ear, the severed ear lying open-ended in the grass" (157). He sees the severed ear as a breach within the circuit of language, an opening onto writing in the Derridean sense.
"Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms" in Juliet Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein (London: Penguin, 1988) 182.
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).

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