First of 2012! Orwell, Calvino, the Anxiety of Reading, and the Danger of Stories

After my shameful report on my year in reading, it occurred to me that although I will never read enough to be a top literary blogger, if I'm going to keep a literary blog at all (if only for the amusement of myself and a few friends), I really ought to read a bit more. As a child and adolescent I lived under the pleasant illusion that I was well-read, which was true compared to both the peers and adults with whom I was surrounded; in university I was disturbed to discover that I was better-read than the average English student. But I'm not a serious or “ambitious” reader (to use the adjective I came across in a literary blog the other day) by the standards of the blogosphere, where bloggers posts lists of 30 to a hundred books they've read in a year. This sort of blogging tends does tend to bleed into bragging, like telling the world how many push-ups you can do at a time, an attitude to reading reinforced by the percentage bar on e-books, constantly informing you how much progress you've made (which, incidentally, puts the emphasis on you and your agency rather than, as with old-fashioned checking how many pages remain, on the book). The difficulty, rather than the pleasure, of reading has moved to the forefront of our experience (perhaps our definition) of it, turning it into an onerous duty alternately on behalf of the Self or the Book (both supreme), and God forbid you should take a lot of pleasure in reading, and devote a lot of reflection to what you've read, without reading a lot of books. In our positivist world we have no time for intangibles like quality of experience, only for measurable tangibles.

Orwell and The Overpraise of Books

Publishers have responded to the modern reader's sense that there's too much to read and too little time with series like Penguin's Great Ideas: little, cheap books of classic essays or collections of essays by well-known authors. I impulse-bought several of these in the last couple of years and then wondered when I'd ever get around to them. Now that I've launched my project of reading The Books in My House, however, I'm starting with these, and I've already knocked down one book in 2012: the Orwell collection Books & Cigarettes. The Penguin series is sure to multiply the number of books I read in 2012, though not necessarily the number of pages (or words, if we can no longer go by pages in the era of digital reading).

I have read – probably in Harold Bloom, who is not an admirer of 1984 – that Orwell's real strength as a writer lay in his essays rather than his fiction. I have only the dimmest memories of 1984, which I read in early adolescence (along with Animal Farm, which went right over my head), but I definitely enjoyed this slim collection, many of whose subjects bear on this problem of Modern Reading, starting with the first, title essay, which laments (in 1946) the willingness of the public (including the author) to spend its money on leisure activities like cigarettes, beer, and movies compared to its reluctance to spend it on books. Nevertheless, Orwell is not sentimental (or, in stark contrast to the literary blogger, bragging) in his attitude to books, which he characterizes, “There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single setting and forgets a week later....” In the second essay, “Bookshop Memories,” in which Orwell recollects his experiences of working in a second-hand bookshop, he writes, “Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening, and in the third essay, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” where he describes the misery and squalor of the life of this instance of the literary professional (“He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike”), “It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has had some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”

Misery, squalor, and Sartrean disgust are consistent presences in Orwell's essays, climaxing in the two longer essays that end the collection, one, “How the Poor Die,” describing his experiences in a French hospital in 1929, the other his childhood experiences in a boarding school. The last, longest essay is a tour de force of autobiographical writing, starting from the personal (and traumatic) to take a wider, sociological and psychological view. The result is interestingly Freudian – especially since a quick google search for Orwell and Freud turns up a 1978 Virginia Quarterly Review essay that claims, based on the biographical evidence, that Orwell considered psychoanalysis quackery and exhibited no interest in Freud.

Nevertheless, in “Such, Such Were the Joys” (written by 1947 and published in 1952, according to the note at the end of the essay), Orwell draws what can only be considered psychological conclusions – and fascinating ones – based on his recollection of childhood experiences and his subjective reactions to them, and writes about childhood sexuality (with reference to a group masturbation scandal) in the frank manner that I, at any rate, associate with the influence of Freud on intellectuals in the first half of the 20^th century (and from which I think we've largely retreated). To me, nothing could sound more Freudian than Orwell's interest in the inner life – the alien world – of the child, and his (ultimately scientific) method of approaching it through an honest recounting of his memories, undistorted by sentimentality, moralizing, or projection of adult values.

In fact, Orwell is so unsentimental on the subject of children that he argues (again, based on his experience) that children are not especially loving, and in fact may feel disgust, loathing, and incomprehension towards adults. It makes one wonder – if we do not sentimentalize the child (as Freud didn't, either), why are we concerned about the horrors he suffers due to the values of society and sadism of adults – about the shame and humiliation to which he's senselessly subjected? The only possible answer is that everyone is, at one point, a child; that children are among the class of the powerless and, although the concept is a relatively new one, human beings with rights; and that the experiences of childhood affect the adult one becomes, the society one shapes, and one's treatment of the powerless. The essay also gives the impression that although children are not kinder, more innocent, or more loving than adults, they are morally superior in one respect: they have not yet fully accepted the cruel, ugly, and incoherent values of society. Or rather, they do accept them (children are naturally conformist), but subjectively they know that these values are lies: they are still aware of the conflict between subjective, emotional experience and the consciously unquestionable truth of authority – the basic psychological conflict of childhood in Orwell's essay. Children still know, subjectively, that two and two equal four, whatever they are told; adults are no longer aware that any difference exists at all between truth and lies. (Orwell deals with totalitarian distortion of truth, or destruction of the concept, in the U.S.S.R. and its effect on infatuated leftist European intellectuals, in “The Prevention of Literature,” where he writes, “Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.”)

Calvino and the Story in Postmodern Fiction

At midnight on January 1^st, 2012, I was in the middle of the final novel fragment in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, making it both my last read of 2011 and my first read of 2012. It seemed like an excitingly fitting way to transition into a new year, reading the protagonist's recounting of an apocalypse that's resulted from what had appeared to be his fantasy of using the power of his mind to obliterate everything he dislikes in the world around him, starting with the surrounding buildings and ending with... everything. When the feat has been accomplished, strange officials (“the men from Section D”) approach him and congratulate him on ushering in a new era that they will control, whereupon he regrets his work but find he can't undo it. To erase is easier than to create.

For those who don't know (I didn't before I started reading it, though I knew of the title), the conceit of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is that the protagonist, the Reader (addressed as “you”), tries to read the book you are reading, or one called that and written by Italo Calvino, but gets cut off by a manufacturer's defect, and his efforts to get hold of the rest of the book place a series of apparently, but not actually, related books in his hands, each of which he is also cut off from reading for increasingly absurd reasons, at the same time becoming involved in an international conspiracy to replace the truth in books with tricks and lies. The chapters of If on a Winter's Night, recounting the Reader's adventures and the progress of his romance with the Other Reader, alternate with these beginnings of novels, which are pastiches of various genres, from the crime novel to European rural realism to Japanese quasi-pornography. Not straight pastiches, however, but liberally laden with postmodern strangeness (including those hoary tropes to which Bolano pays tribute, the mirror and the void), as well as a lot of kinky sexuality. The broadest pastiche of all, however, is the plot of “the novel itself,” with its conspiracies, Manichean agents and counteragents, and incidental UFO references.

The term “postmodern playfulness” still gets thrown around a lot, even though it's been thrown around so much that its lost all meaning and, therefore, usefulness as a critical phrase, since although it's true that a certain kind of playfulness, or lighthearted self-reflexivity, characterizes a lot of postmodern fiction, not all postmodern playfulness is alike – in fact, the playfulness of any two postmodern authors is distinctly different. Calvino's self-reflexivity and playfulness in If on a Winter's Night could not, for example, be more different from Bolano's in Nazi Literature in the Americas, although inventiveness and the vignette form are central features of both works (and after “postmodern playfulness,” “inventiveness” is the primary quality that comes to mind in reference to both). Calvino's playfulness is untinged by the sinister or any interest in evil, although like Bolano he is fascinated by violence, and he repeatedly returns to the subject of death. Maybe what I mean is that Bolano's playfulness slightly mitigates his sinister subject matter and tone, the reverse is true of Calvino: one's first impression is of playfulness, which is slightly mitigated by encroachments of the sinister and a sense of dread. In addition, while Bolano's inventiveness closes in on itself and gives the impression of privacy and inscrutability, Calvino's opens out towards the reader, issuing in lucid thematics and metafictional discourses on the nature of reading.

As much as I enjoyed Calvino's reflections on reading, especially as they bear on the odd experiment of the novel, this metafiction, and the plot about truth versus lies in novels (or different kinds of novels), were for me the least interesting parts of the novel. (Naturally, they're the things you'd have to write about if you were writing an academic essay on it.) Leaving the pastiches as the most interesting parts. They are not, in fact, much like the beginnings of novels (even allowing for their postmodern elements); rather, they are complete fictions in their own right, albeit with cliffhanger endings, with thematics and protagonist psychology established more thoroughly than they would be and plot developments occurring faster and thicker than they would in the beginning of any novel. They are, in other words, performances of invention and strangeness – of interest – that could not possibly be sustained for the length of a novel. Even if the writer could keep it up, the reader would become exhausted (and, perhaps partly for that reason, partly due to the lack of a single, sustained plot, I found my attention dimming towards the end of the book, as I did with Nazi Literature). And yet we wish writers could sustain, and readers endure, that level of inventiveness; that reading could always have that intensity, without the dull bits that allow readers to rest between dramatic episodes, without lapses of attention even during the most interesting parts.

Like Orwell, writing in 1946, Calvino, writing in the late 70s, expresses the anxiety of reading that has become so oppressive in our age of information-excess and sentimentality about reading and the book. In the first chapter of If on a Winter's Night, Calvino lists the different types of books that must be considered in making the decision to buy one and not another (or many others). In part:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read for Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working on at the Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With The Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Unfortunately for the devoted reader, reading takes not only time but effort: for the average reader, the shortest book (coming in, say, at a little under or over a hundred pages) will take at least as much time to read as it takes to watch an average-length movie (around 90 minutes), and much more effort. If on a Winter's Night seems to anticipate the eroding attention span of the digital era – the reader can't get past the beginnings of novels and constantly switches from one novel to another. This accommodation of my roving attention is probably the main thing that allowed me to read it much faster than I'm usually able to read most linear narratives of the same length nowadays. (Calvino's protagonist, on the other hand, is a traditionalist who is quite frustrated by not being able to follow the stories through to the end. I was reminded of the Sesame Street children's book classic, There's a Monster at the End of This Book, in which lovable furry neurotic Grover breaks the fourth wall, or whatever you call it in a book, and addresses the reader, imploring her not to turn the pages, and each time making greater efforts to construct a barricade that will prevent the progress of the story. The conceit of the Calvino is like that, but in reverse. TAMATEOTB was published in 1971; postmodern literature for adults took until the end of the decade to catch up with the experimentation of Sesame Street products in their sophisticated prime.)

Without knowing much of anything about Calvino, I suspect that If on a Winter's Night (published in 1979) is influenced by structuralism, that is, the idea that all narrative works are reducible to certain archetypal structural elements and therefore constitute (as Calvino has one of his numbered readers give voice to in the metafictional commentary of the penultimate chapter) One Story or One Book (as all protagonists are one, the abstract Reader, and all love interests One Woman, the Other Reader, who also turns out to be the Ideal Reader for whom the Writer writes). Not only the overarching plot but also all of the novels-within-the-novel are, whatever other genre they belong to, also love stories, with at least one woman appearing in whom the protagonist has an erotic interest before the fragment ends. This, I assume, reflects Calvino's conviction, conscious or otherwise, that eros is the basic motivation behind narrative. Towards the end, the protagonists become more aggressive and rapey towards their love interests, with the Writer (a character in both the framing plot and the diary fragments that make up one of the chapters) even attempting to assault the Other Reader when she shows up to confront him. This does not quite achieve the effect of universality that structuralism assumes, since it's hard to imagine a work of fiction that more absolutely assumes a male perspective, and I got a little tired of the identical episodes of priapism, although to be fair, the protagonist of the Japanese fiction pastische, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, is the only character who actually does get raped – by an older woman.

Not while I was reading, but now, in analyzing, If on a Winter's Night reminds me Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which also uses a framing plot (a couple of actors are making a movie whose script is cursed and at the same time becoming embroiled in an affair) to justify a series of vignettes that draw on archetypal scenarios – mainly involving sluttish women and brutish men – that obliquely mirror each other. Lynch is the least playful of postmodernists, veering even further to the horror side of surrealism than Bolano, although that's not to say that he doesn't have a sense of humour (I found many of the vignettes in the first half of Mulholland Dr. hilarious). I always thought that the premise of INLAND EMPIRE was derived from The Ring (whose premise was a lot more interesting to me than either the Japanese or American versions): instead of a cursed video tape, there's a cursed script. Although perhaps this was simply the zeitgeist, since Lynch had earlier explored the creepiness of video tapes in Lost Highway, which came out a year before Ringu.

In INLAND EMPIRE, the ur-story is ultimately a cursed Polish folk tale (Eastern Europe being the creepiest, most archaic part of the world according to American movies: see also Val Lewton's Cat People). All other stories are simply “adaptations” of this one, and all share its curse: storytelling is dark magic. Northrop Frye, who attempted in Anatomy of Criticism to identify all of the archetypal structures that make up “literature,” of which every individual story is an iteration, saw folk formulas like nursery rhymes, riddles, and charms as the basic units of literature, representing its basic impulses – a theory I once applied, in a graduate school essay, to The Waste Land. As fascinating as the idea of haunted technology is, the idea of the story as haunted is, for me, even more fascinating. It's the difference between thinking of the image as magic – and dangerous – and the idea of thinking of storytelling and literature that way. Perhaps it appeals to me because we are so used to thinking of books (even fiction, which used to be considered contemptible, with few exceptions – a view of fiction that comes up in Orwell's essays) as “good for us,” which is as much as to say that they're harmless, which is as much as to say that they're ineffectual.

To think of stories as dangerous returns their power to them.

David Lynch, Henry James, and Late Style

If I'm going to keep this blog going, I'll have to allow it to reflect my drifting interests, where literature hovers in the background even if I'm currently more interested in film or TV and vice versa. During my silence, I was on a film kick (Maya Deren and Joseph Cornell), then a TV kick (Battlestar Galactica), now I'm on another film kick, soon it'll go back to an author, and so the cycle will continue. At the moment I'm particularly, as I am perennially, focused on David Lynch, a director I pretended to like, but didn't really, as a teenager in rebellion against my middle-classness whose mature tastes were beginning to coalesce. I was as caught up in the Twin Peaks phenomenon as any bright 90s teenager, but increasingly disliked it after the first season, when it turned into a standard soap, and by the end, actively hated it. I still held out hope for Lynch, but it was not rewarded until I gave him “one last chance” after the critical raves about Muholland Dr.. I had been willing to believe the critics that Blue Velvet was a masterpiece (the way I have to take their word about Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey), but I only felt it with Mulholland Dr., which is also the first time I liked a Lynch film, and started developing an admiration-based affection for Lynch himself. I should note that I'm fairly indifferent to Eraserhead and that, perhaps properly, I think Fire Walk with Me is one of the worst films I've ever seen. Most critics agree with me about the latter, but a perverse few regard it as Lynch's masterpiece, and that's the thing about Lynch: even his greatest movies are so often so close to being terrible that it's hard to tell when he's being a genius and when he's being a moron.

But literature hovers in the background here, specifically Bolano and Henry James. Bolano: if Mulholland Dr. convinced me that cinematic masterpieces were still possible, 2666 persuaded me that it was still possible for the novel, too, when I had given up on that medium as well; both in the same decade; both seem unfinished (despite having endings) and unfinishable (not due to the author's failure, but as something inherent to their form); both consist of multiple stories and characters that are abandoned, occurring concurrently in Lynch and successively in Bolano; both are full of many, obvious moments of brilliance and many, obvious flaws that don't matter and that, for me at least, make these intimidating works more human and accessible. Before I read 2666, I didn't think it was possible for a novelistic masterpiece to be influenced by a cinematic masterpiece; for a writer of genius to be influenced by a filmmaker of genius. Bolano's namechecking of Lynch's Fire With with Me suggests that there is an element of influence, not just zeitgeist and artistic sympathy. It was freeing for me to realize that great novelists could take ideas from great filmmakers and use them to rejuvenate the older medium, because I knew that Lynch had become an increasing (unexpected and initially unconscious) influence on my writing over the years; and before Bolano, there were no contemporary novelists to inspire me, the way filmmakers could (although very, very few even of them).

Is This Finally That Henry James Essay I'll Never Write?

Henry James: internet fans of Lynch have noted that Lost Highway, largely dismissed by critics and ignored by audiences at the time, retrospectively looks like the beginning of a trilogy completed by Mulholland Dr. and INLAND EMPIRE. As such, it differs notably from them in that the protagonist is a man, which makes Lynch's trilogy comparable to the late James trilogy made up of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Like Lynch, James had two big hits nearly out of the gate, with the popular success of his novella “Daisy Miller” comparable to the underground success of Eraserhead, followed by a masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady, as Lynch delivered the eerily fully-formed masterpiece Blue Velvet. The two great talents then went into a long wilderness period characterized by strange experimentation that was not wholly successful, which finally issued in a “late period” flowering characterized by masterpieces that were more bizarre, more baroque, more idiosyncratic, and more self-indulgent than ever.

In a smart review of Lost Highway for Slant magazine, Jeremiah Kipp suggests that audiences and critics failed to respond to the film because unlike the two to follow, it was about “pensive male anxiety” rather than “female hysteria.” One could say the same for the Late James Trilogy, and it neatly explains why, as even James enthusiast Harold Bloom admits (unless I hopefully dreamed this), The Ambassadors seems the slightest and most boring of the three. And the parallels continue: The Wings of the Dove is widely regarded as the greatest of the late masterpieces, and is certainly the most emotional, which seems to be the critical consensus about Mulholland Dr.; while The Golden Bowl, like INLAND EMPIRE, is the most baroque. Both trilogies are about sexual anxiety, but while each male artist warms up to the theme, in the first entry, by giving their own, male, perspective, neither artist nor audience gets really involved until the male artist starts cross-dressing and portraying his own anxiety in the guise of female hysteria. (Is Lynch's obsessive, sadistic fascination in INLAND EMPIRE with shooting Laura Dern's ageing face, haggard by Hollywood standards of youth and glamour, in the most unflattering ways possible a reflection of his own anxieties about ageing; giving the film an extradiegetic relationship to Lynch favourite Sunset Boulevard?)

It's ironic that I should agree with Kipp about the source of Lost Highway's unpopularity when I'm normally resentful of the enormous focus on male anxiety, and male emotion in general, in indie film, which, unlike classical Hollywood film, seems to have so little interest in the female perspective, instead narcissistically feminizing the male to such an extent that no woman is needed – by him or by the film. (If she appears, she's an idealized or demonized projection of the auteur's – or both – with no subjectivity and not even the kind of major dramatic role the noir femme fatale had; and this is true in indie comedy as much as in indie drama.)

Also, it's not true that filmic representations of female anxiety and/or hysteria are favoured by critics and audiences over representations of male anxiety and/or hysteria. Rear Window and Vertigo are two of Hitchcock's most famous and well-regarded films (and you could also include North by Northwest as a comic version); Marnie does not have a comparable reputation, and although The Birds is well-regarded, it's not for Tippi Hedren's performance or character. Noir, an entire genre about male anxiety, has a much higher reputation than the woman's film (which in the same decade, the 1940s, increasingly dealt with female anxiety). And what about that film critic/geek favourite, The Shining – a representation of male hysteria if there ever was one? When male auteurs make films about female anxiety, like Antonioni's Red Desert or Cassavetes's Opening Night, it's usually obvious that the female protagonist is a stand-in for the auteur. Real male empathy with the female perspective, of the kind found in Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence, is rare in male auteur cinema. Occasionally you'll get a director who is capable of genuine projection into the female perspective while also using his female protagonists as stand-ins, like (creepily and ironically enough) Roman Polanski. Who, incidentally, is also capable of making a film about male anxiety (Chinatown) or about what might be called male female hysteria (The Tenant, in which, playing his own Polanski heroine, he grotesquely, openly reveals that he was Deneuve in Repulsion and Farrow in Rosemary's Baby all along).*

So why do I find Kipp's explanation of the apparent unimpressiveness of Lost Highway compelling (besides the parallel with The Ambassadors)?

“Did I Look Very Queer?” “Through This Window? Dreadful!”

The source of sexual anxiety is slightly different in James and in Lynch, but surprisingly similar beneath the surface. The Ambassadors is about an asexual man who learns about an illicit affair between a worldly woman and a man he's been sent to “rescue”; The Wings of the Dove is about the unrequited love of the heroine for a man who, she learns, is using her to promote his illicit affair with another woman; The Golden Bowl is about a woman who is unrequitedly in love with her husband, whom she suspects of having an illicit affair with another woman. In all three cases, the main character is in active denial of the affair, even as they voyeuristically pursue knowledge of it. Lost Highway is about a man who suspects his wife of cheating on him and (in one reading) fantasizes that she is a whore, involved in pornography; Muholland Dr. is about a woman who in unrequitedly in love with another woman, who (in one reading) abandons her, awakening enormous anxieties; Inland Empire is about a woman who is having an affair that awakens enormous anxieties, and who (in one reading) fantasizes that her husband is a dangerous monster who is so jealous and possessive of her that he will kill her if he finds out. In the first two cases, the main characters avoid the truth of their emotional situations by actively fantasizing alternative scenarios in which they are powerful and benevolent; what all of the fantasies of INLAND EMPIRE mean is unclear, since the film abandons its premise to give itself over to fragments loosely held together by the idea that they are the heroine's fantasies. In a way, though, The Golden Bowl, too, is more about the heroine's anxiety-generated fantasizing than it is about the soap operatic affair plot (also consciously soap operatic in INLAND EMPIRE), in a way that's closer to “The Turn of the Screw” than anything else James wrote after it.

There are many moments of weirdly close archetypal parallels between The Golden Bowl and INLAND EMPIRE (given how different they are in other details and even in sensibility: Lynch is a surrealist, James is not, though he can hardly be called a “realist” either in his late phase): Maggie, the heroine protagonist of The Golden Bowl, fantasizes (or perceives) that her beloved father, Adam, is murderously jealous and possessive of his wife, Charlotte, the woman who is probably having an affair with Maggie's husband. In one memorable extended metaphor, Maggie imagines him as keeping her on a long silken leash that he yanks and shortens at will, which I was reminded of during the jealous husband's sinister speech to Devon, in INLAND EMPIRE, about the ways in which his wife is “bound.”

Given how much self-indulgent crap there is in both Mulholland Dr. and INLAND EMPIRE (I suppose you could call it “fascinating filler,” although both films are largely made up of this “filler”), when the things that Lynch does achieve in the two films strikes me, I'm amazed anew. Many critics have commented on the astonishingly erotic – and emotional – lesbian sex scene in Mulholland Dr., which somehow manages to be exploitative and voyeuristic and subjective and intimate at the same time. In Inland Empire, however, Lynch achieves this sort of raw intimacy in a heterosexual context in the sex scene between Nikki and Devon that launches her identity disintegration. But what's intimate and comforting in the lesbian context of Muholland Dr. (even if everything is about to All Go To Hell) is terrifying and alienating in the heterosexual context of INLAND EMPIRE.

Homoeroticism is one of David Cronenberg's overt topics, but one seldom senses it in Lynch. There's the aggressive feminization of Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, echoed by the scene in Lost Highway where the creepy Mystery Man bears down on the protagonist with a video camera (in a reversal of the famous Rear Window scene where the vulnerable, wheelchair-bound, voyeuristic protagonist fends off the attack of the heretofore distanced villain with flashes of his camera). But in INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch puts himself in the position of imagining abject female sexual desire, without any of the voyeurism or objectification that attends the lesbian eroticism in Mulholland Dr.. Which is also what James (who is frequently accused by queer critics of homoeroticism, although I see just as much heteroeroticism in his work, and all of it neurotic) does in The Golden Bowl as one of its most remarkable features, after preparing himself for it by imagining Milly Theale's unrequited love for Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove. At the end (I think) of The Golden Bowl, James presents the reader with the startling image of Amerigo's enormous face, bearing down on Maggie, blocking her view of everything else, and depriving her of her ability to reason. INLAND EMPIRE reproduces this feeling of the oppressiveness of horrifying/erotic faces/presences with its claustrophobic, extreme close-ups (including several grotesque images of Dern's face that take the merged faces at the climax of Persona several steps further into surrealistic horror). Actually, the scene in which Dern confronts that camera with a distorted face that startles her when Lynch cuts to another Dern, pulling her head back in reaction, has its parallel in the bizarre sequence in “The Turn of the Screw” where The Governess starts upon seeing a terrifying face in the window, goes outside to investigate, looks into the window and ends up startling the housekeeper, who is naturally surprised and concerned to see The Governness out there looking in for no discernible reason. Among other effects, the little sequence, which The Governess describes as a “full revolution” or something of the kind, plays with time in a science-fiction-y way: with The Governess now in the position of the monster, and the housekeeper in the position just occupied by The Governess, it's as if, in some sense, The Governess was startled by her own image in anticipation of an act she hadn't yet committed, and which was prompted by... itself. (And INLAND EMPIRE is full of scenes of Dern looking out of windows, although Lynch probably got it from Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon.)

Here's the eerie sequence (I looked up the scene online):

It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had a full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just MY lines.... I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there's only one I take space to mention. I wondered why SHE should be scared.

James, you're such a freak. As much as one can understand what's behind this sequence for James, it seems to have something to do not only with the idea that The Governness's object of horror is herself all along, but that her voyeurism and narcissism extend to a curiousity to know what she herself looks like in a moment of terror. Compare, then, the most horrifying scene in Mulholland Dr., where the heroine breaks into a house and discovers a rotting corpse, which, on the dream reading, is her own, in anticipation of her suicide – and also, in my opinion, a metaphorical rendering of how she already feels inside.

It all makes me wonder if what Paglia (obviously among many others) has speculated is true: male artists, at their deepest psychological level, are feminine, and capable of feeling and representing specifically female emotions and anxieties such as hysteria and narcissism. (The reverse seems to be less frequently true of female artists – maybe because “the artist” is feminine. But now and then you get something bizarre and remarkable like Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, an exact copy of the style of Cassavetes that also seems like a deeply personal film and that deals with what certainly feels like specifically male – in fact, macho – anxiety and hysteria. Although the misogyny is so intense that that part feels female.)

But that still doesn't help me answer the question of why I liked Kipp's theory about Lost Highway and male anxiety.

What Kipp actually says it's that it's easier for audiences to accept female hysteria than male insecurities. The cultural reason for this would seem to be obvious: men aren't supposed to be hysterical. To be fair, culturally speaking, women aren't supposed to have sexual insecurities either. It produces things like the comedy Fatal Attraction and the horror movie Bridget Jones's Diary. The sexually desiring woman, certainly the sexually desiring heterosexual woman, is always a kind of monster, which Lynch fully explores in INLAND EMPIRE. Noir may explore male anxieties, but the noir hero can be weak and tough at the same time. Noir is about the fear of women, and the culture is always more or less okay with that. But although it uses the tropes of a pulpy noir, Lost Highway is about a man's fear of infidelity, which is not a noir theme, and about the protagonist's haunting by the image of a wife (not an Other Woman, although she contains the Other Woman within her) who is unknowable to him. It's pretty rare in fiction for either hero or heroine to be sexually betrayed, although James does it in Wings of the Dove and Golden Bowl. Infidelity and unrequited love are not comfortable emotions for an audience to identify with; in works about infidelity (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina), the protagonist is normally the cheater, not the cheatee. But a betrayed wife has the culturally acceptable role of being the sympathetic Victorian victim of beastly males; a betrayed husband is nothing. (Hence that great work about male anxiety, Othello, which is nearly unbearable reading. Actually, Shakespeare is pretty great at male hysteria: see also Hamlet and King Lear, and you might as well throw in Macbeth.)

The real reason that The Ambassadors and Lost Highway don't have the same impact as the subsequent works in these late trilogies is that James and Lynch don't put their male protagonists through the same paces as their women. Lambert Strether may be emotionally and psychologically affected by the affair between Chad and Marie, and may be drawn into a noirish web of deceit by Marie's allure, but there's not much question that he is distanced, removed, and incapable of adult sexuality. (The Ambassadors is basically Out of the Past without the affair between Jeff and Kathy.) Isabel Archer of Portrait of a Lady is similarly asexual and in love with no one in the book, although she's sexually drawn to (and repulsed by) Caspar Goodwood and soulmates with her (asexual, again) cousin Ralph. But Milly Theale and Maggie Verver, Victorian angels though they may be, are fully emotionally involved in the triangles they find themselves in (or quadrangles, in Maggie's case, since two married couples are involved, and Maggie and her father's close relationship is what's giving Charlotte leverage with Amerigo). And in Muholland Dr. and INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch, it would appear, subjects his central actresses to more emotional torture than Dreyer and Hitchcock combined. In fact, in a YouTube clip of an Actor's Studio interview, I watched Watts describe how Lynch had her masturbate in front of the crew and cameras, and didn't stop filming when she couldn't stop crying. Although it sounds a lot worse than the torture Hitchcock subjected Tippi Hedren to in filming the scene where her character is attacked/raped by the birds, we've come a long way, since Watts was apparently up for the emotional challenge, and in other interviews describes the joy of working with a real artist in a challenging role. And indeed, in an industry in which male actors have typically been more celebrated as actors than female actors ever since Method and Brando, roles that give actresses the chance to act their guts out are few and far between. Nor is there any egoistic scenery chewing in either Watts's or Derns's performance, of a Brando, Pacino, Hoffman, Streep, or Bette Davis kind. There's no sense of an actor showing off, only of a director incessantly demanding primal emotion in scene after scene (particularly in INLAND EMPIRE). (The last opportunity I can think of for an American actress to give a comparable performance is A Woman Under the Influence.)

In interviews that I found on YouTube, Lynch slyly describes the subject of Lost Highway as “a man in trouble,” as he later described the subject of the even more indescribable INLAND EMPIRE as “a woman in trouble.” The trouble is, culturally, we are not as interested in a man in trouble as we are in a woman in trouble. Hitchcock knew this when he said that the rule of drama was to “always put the heroine in danger.” Even in those great, culturally central works of male hysteria, Shakespeare's tragedies, there's always a woman in trouble, usually the pure victim of the hysterical male. The emotions that make this a rule of drama are complicated and disturbing: sadism and masochism (for both male and female viewers, I presume) as well as involvement and sympathy. A man in trouble is a feminized man, and Lynch doesn't shrink from this. Pure, passive Jeffrey is menaced by Frank to such a degree that we fear for him during the whole sequence. But that's a man in physical danger. A man in emotional trouble supposes a neurotic, soap operatic inner turmoil that is not normally the basis of male acting fireworks, although Jeremy Irons's performance in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers – a self-deconstructing masterpiece about male sexual-and-existential anxiety – is a rare example. Cassavetes's very different but equally extraordinary performance in Mikey and Nicky is another; and of course, the ur-example is James Stewart in Vertigo. But Lynch just doesn't have the interest – whether sadistic or masochistic, exploitative or empathetic – to go there with a male performer. So far, at least.

Lynch, Henry James, and Me: Working Methods and Dialogue

One final point of connection between the “late period” works of James and Lynch is the shift in their working methods. James began dictating his novels with What Maisie Knew (1897), and Lynch, with INLAND EMPIRE, switched to digital video. One may speculate that in both cases, the author/auteur sought a way to bring the obsessions crowding their imaginations more directly from their minds to the reader/viewer. (Looking up interviews, I see that Lynch has described his previous working conditions as a “barrier.”)**

Only in INLAND EMPIRE do you begin to see something in Lynch's dialogue that corresponds to James's infamous late period dialogue. Story: I wrote two James stage adaptations, one of The Wings of the Dove (a never-produced commission) and one of his novella The Sacred Fount, as a theatre school assignment. In the first case, I engaged in one of the most perverse and futile activities ever elected by a writer by attempting to figure out the psychological rules by which late Jamesian dialogue worked, in order to reproduce it organically – without reusing any of the novel's actual dialogue. I spent years intermittently working on this, and felt that my adaptation was a failure. (The commissioning theatre agreed, though probably for different reasons.) However, I used what I learned to write my adaptation of The Sacred Fount, a novella in which the characters regularly admit that they're not sure what's going on, and even James's most ardent academic fanboys agree. When my displeased program director complained that despite his intelligence, he couldn't follow what was happening in the play for a second, I felt that I'd finally successfully adapted James. I am immune to being made to feel dumb by James, since nothing can make me feel dumb (except crossword puzzles), but I do sometimes like to give up that irritable reaching after fact and reason and just go on a ride. I haven't thought much about that play since I wrote it, and have no idea if it was a success in any other terms, but when I think of my two characters spitting incomprehensible sentences at each other that even the other character complains they don't understand, the effect, for me, is side-splittingly funny, which is maybe another secret to James and to how he might best be dramatically adapted. Or maybe I'm weird.  

In adapting The Sacred Fount for the stage (called The Mask of Life after a crucial scene), I honed in on its dramatic mechanism and converted it into a two-hander: a dialogue between the unnamed narrator and his principal interlocuter in the novella, Mrs. Briss. To make matters if possible more confusing than they are in the novella, I also had him recount for her complex, ambiguous conversations that he has in the novella with other characters in separate scenes. However, I saw the dramatic situation clearly: the narrator must convince Mrs. Briss that his theory about vampiric sexual relationships between the other guests at a country house is true; if she is unpersuaded, he will be proved either the victim of a conspiracy or insane. When a few years later I saw Last Year at Marienbad for the first time, I realized that there was a similar dynamic at work between the main characters, and I was interested to read that the screenwriter, Robbe-Grillet (in a reference I can no longer find, of course), thought of X (the man) as attempting a kind of psychological rape of A (the woman) by forcing his version of reality on her. The difference in The Sacred Fount is that the woman is stronger-willed than the man and wins the psychological/perceptual battle.

Loose Baggy Monsters

Not that Lynch's surrealist/absurdist dialogue has ever been conventional or “realistic,” but in INLAND EMPIRE, something else is happening. The movie was filmed without a script, and many scenes feel like acting class improv exercises that break the principal rule of improv: never deny the premise offered by the other actors in the scene. Whatever character she's playing, Dern either offers assertions that are denied (often with a comment like “What is this?” or “What's going on?”) or denies assertions made to her. Frustration is one of the effects, since the individual scenes/storylines cannot advance even an inch. Paranoia is another, since Dern (whom the audience identifies with as protagonist) is put in a position of looking insane.

In late James, dialogue consists of characters making ambiguous statements whose meaning their interlocuter must guess, which is always a risk for the interlocuter, since guessing means exposing what they are themselves thinking. And so on. In addition, the main characters (notably The Governness, the narrator of The Sacred Fount, and Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl) often develop (sexual) theories that never receive direct confirmation, which leads to an atmosphere thick with paranoia. The protagonist's inability to discover the truth for certain results in frustration for them and for the reader, and the reader's sense of difficulty in advancing is enhanced by the endless, ornamented, ambiguous paragraphs of late James prose. (James thought he was presenting the epistemological situation of all of us, but of course there is a way to know if two people are having sex, called catching them in bed. But even James's most overtly voyeuristic protagonists, such as the SF narrator, refuse to be mere vulgar Peeping Toms, preferring to think of themselves as abstract sexual detectives.)

Is the giant, inherently unfinished/unfinishable INLAND EMPIRE, like the baroque late James masterpieces, the result of some sort of psychological/creative block that paradoxically issues in “loose baggy monsters” (James's name for what he thought a novel should not be, although it perfectly describes his late novels)? Dread, anxiety, and paranoia are subjects for both, and their mannerist late works are increasingly haunted by death – and by the decadent idea of the mask. The evil, mask-like clown face of Robert Blake in Lost Highway becomes Laura Dern's (conveniently mask-like already) grotesquely distorted mask-face in INLAND EMPIRE, in images that destroy the boundaries between surrealism and horror. Which, of course, matches up with the crucial scene from The Sacred Fount, in which James has his characters take different perspectives on an image from horror: a painting of a man with a corpse-like face, from which he has removed a life-like mask. James and Lynch (as early as Blue Velvet) share a view of knowledge as a delving beneath life's pleasant surface to discover the primal horror, sadomasochistic Darwinian struggle, and reality of death beneath. For whatever reason, however, James always presented himself as a social novelist rather than the horror-erotic novelist he really was, whereas except in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, Lynch eschews the surface and just gives us the tumultuous life of the unconscious, terrifying to waking consciousness.

*Obviously, the line separating “authentic depictions of female hysteria by men,” “hysterical women standing in for the auteur's male hysteria,” and “depictions of male female hysteria” is extremely subjective: YMMV. I couldn't tell you exactly what I mean by these terms, either. I seem to be using “hysteria” to mean “flamboyant, over-the-top anxiety” and “anxiety” to mean “quiet, low-key, depressive hysteria or angst,” which is pretty lame, really, but on the other hand, these two representations of neurosis – to introduce another loose term – are in fact represented in drama. Then on the other hand, you sometimes get quiet, low-key hysteria, like Cassavetes in Mikey and Nicky. And maybe by “male hysteria” I just mean “hysteria with anger and violence.” In which case, come to think of it, Lynch's Frank Booth is a classic representation of male hysteria. Unless I'm talking about Dead Ringers, in which case “male hysteria” refers to male fears of the feminine outside and inside them – including their own capacity for hysteria.

**In the same Collider.com interview Lynch speaks of working with digital video as allowing him to respond more spontaneously to the moment, which, it occurred to me, has a parallel in the difference between traditional and internet publication. Like film, traditional publication and the print medium may have their advantages, but in the hands of a skilled writer, the internet medium may produce advantages of fluidity and spontaneity.