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09-03-01

I watched David Lynch's film, Dune again the other night, on your recommendation. I have seen it before, but some time ago. It's a film which seems flawed in many ways. What do you like about it?

There is one scene which I like particularly; when Paul Atreides (played by Kyle MacLachlan) and his mother meet Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen on Arrakis. Stilgar is discussing with members of his tribe what to do with these intruders. He speaks in English, albeit with an accent. But there is one expression - a kind of grunt - which could not easily be transcribed. The suggestion is that this expression has meaning in the Framen language. This is used in the film, one would imagine, in order to signify the idea of tribal or primitive language. What's interesting is that the expression happens only once in all the dialogue involving this group of people in the film. It stands out as being odd.

Why should that be interesting?

Well, it becomes an anomaly. It's an example of something which appears, but which then somehow falls out with the film's narrative structure in a very curious way. And the effect is curious too. Rather than helping you in the natural - almost mechanical - tendency to follow the film's narrative, it seems to encourage you to deviate in your understanding of what is being presented - or even to force you to deviate. A whole new trajectory appears. As a viewer, you are compelled to follow this irrespective of the film's intended line. Or the anomaly casts the narrative which you thought you had comfortably in view, in an entirely different light.

Right, so what you are identifying here is a way in which the film becomes productive for the viewer in a way which was unintended by the director?

Well; yes, the quality is sudden, marvelous productivity, but I don't think it was unintended by David Lynch. I think he knew what he was doing. You can see the same kind of things appearing in his later films when there is no question over his control of the project. Dune was a film which he inherited as a project when things went wrong for its previous director I think. It was a career break for him - it was the chance to make a feature - even if it perhaps wasn't the film he would have chosen to make at the time. Looking at Dune now, in relation to his larger body of work, it is possible to see that the kind of anomaly which appears in Dune, cannot be dismissed simply as a mistake because Lynch's approach to film making can be seen, increasingly, to rely on this kind of thing.

A kind of 'happy accident'?

No, it's more than that. Lynch has a way of working which seems to operate far from equilibrium. I saw him interviewed recently on the telly. He spoke about how, in each of his films, there is an important scene. He refers to this as 'the eye of the duck'. And he is quite cryptic in the way he talks about it. But it seems to be a scene which somehow encapsulates the whole movie. The eye of the duck is something like an exact replica in miniature of the whole film, contained within the film - like a kind of homunculus - a tiny parasitic twin. I'm not sure why he gives the phenomenon this particular name.

Perhaps it relates to gestalt psychology?

What? Joseph Jastrow's 'duck\rabbit' illustration?

That drawing which Wittgenstein was so fond of, which can appear like a duck or like a rabbit, depending on how you happen to look at it.

So this scene in Lynch's films is like the eye of the duck/rabbit because it's an element which remains constant - a kind of pivot around which the whole film revolves? I like that idea. I wonder if the scene from Dune which you described is 'the eye of the duck' in that film?

That would make sense if it is, like you suggested, a moment in the film where a whole new film can suddenly, unexpectedly come into being for the viewer in the same way as the illustration of the duck looking to the left suddenly flips over to become a rabbit facing towards the right.

Someone spoke to me recently about a film in which a similar phenomenon occurs. It is Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa. There is a chase seen near the end of the film which takes place on Brighton pier. The bad guys are chasing Bob Hoskins, who's also chasing someone else. It's chaotic; stalls are getting knocked over, people are being pushed out of the way. And right in the middle of this mayhem, the shot lands on two midget-clowns who happen to be there on the pier performing for an audience - doing some kind of magic trick or something. As the main characters in the film all run by, the clowns also start chasing and hitting each other, as if they are acting out a miniature version of the scene, within the scene - or a miniature version of the film within the film. It's quite profound.

The eye of the duck, then, could be though of generally as anomalous. Its productive nature is based on the fact that it is a contained world - a tiny thing which, when it turns inside out, becomes the universe . . .

. . . and subsequently contains the previous world?

Perhaps.

I saw something else recently that made me think along these lines. It was a video recording of Fischli and Weiss's Der Lauf Der Dinge.

Fantastic.

It's an amazing piece. It gets better every time you watch it. I think they made it originally for a kid's TV programme. It's a bit like a domino-toppling experiment, but conducted with old tyres, jugs of water, ramps and ladders. It is a piece which is about the idea of 'continuum' I suppose - about cause and effect. And what's interesting about it is the relative slowness and fastness with which one thing leads to another. There are many places where you imagine that the experiment is going to go wrong - the tyre seems to be rolling off in the wrong direction, the firework is late going off, and a break in the chain is going to appear but somehow the mechanism keeps going.

That's true except that there are edits in the film. So we don't really know when interventions were made in order to keep the thing going. Actually, the edits seem quite carefully hidden and that, I suppose, could be seen as a bit suspicious. The camera tends to zoom in for a close shot of foam bubbling up on the surface of a baking tray, or something like that, so the cut is quite difficult to spot. Maybe judgments were being made about the attention span of viewers watching the piece on film.

I think that might be what's going on but in any event, the edits strike me as being of some crucial importance in the piece. And this relates back to the idea of the anomaly again. Within the logic of the particular state of affairs that Fischli and Weiss have set up, any film edit has to be anathema. And yet, to think about the edit is to become aware of a whole possible world of events which has taken place in this timeless gap - much in the same way that the anomalous 'errors' in Lynch's film become moments of potential. And Fischli and Weiss seem to make their own presence apparent in this particular work in the most striking way. At the same time, of course, they remain hidden.