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Reflections on / of the projected image: David Lynch’s Absurda
by Sam Harris
With Absurda, David Lynch makes a film about what it feels like to watch a David Lynch film. Absurda — like most of Lynch’s work — has you struggle relentlessly for an understanding, only to be met with a deep-down feeling of dread by the time the credits roll, and with nothing more than a small handful of the clues necessary to unlock his cinematic puzzle box. Where its beauty lies is in the way that Lynch does all of this in the space of only two minutes. Did we ever doubt him?
In 2007, the Cannes Film Festival commissioned a compilation of short films to be produced and screened in celebration of the festival’s 60th anniversary, inviting directors from across the globe to express “their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theatre”. Titled Chacun son cinéma: une déclaration d’amour au grand écran (English: To Each His Own Cinema: A Declaration of Love to the Big Screen), the anthology saw many of its thirty-six directors drawn to a common idea. A handful of these shorts centred around characters occupying an empty theatre — a tear streaming down their face, lit up by the projector’s light — sitting in on a retrospective screening of one canonical film or another. The Coen brothers pulled Josh Brolin’s character off the set of No Country for Old Men and threw him in for some comedy as he butchered the title of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game; David Cronenberg constructed an attempted suicide on live television as an allegory for the death of the cinema; and Takeshi Kitano channeled Beat Kitano in his role as a projectionist in a remote Japanese theatre.
Lynch, given the chance to flaunt his enigmatic vision, concocts something abstract, brimming with a looming sense of unease and an inevitable desire to collapse in on itself. In the opening — if you can find one; the whole thing feels subject to a grand looping — a group of people enter a theatre off-screen, looking to be shown a dance. There, hanging both from and out of the screen is a giant pair of scissors to which one character remarks “cool scissors”, unfazed by the glaringly abstract image that sits in front of him. The dialogue is janky, skewed; the characters speak in a manner too clean and unnatural to resonate as real. We are clearly witnessing a performance. These characters are hardly representations of real people, mere reflections of the projected image. After they enter, a man walks in on screen, and he too speaks in a distant tone. As the projection continues, he seems to be increasingly in control of the events unfolding. The characteristic suit jacket and directorial omniscience give the impression that this man not just the projectionist, but a representation of Lynch himself; the director, who possess the power to control the events being projected; gifted with a foresight; and tasked only with responding in riddles.
In all the film’s digital noisiness, the faces that are projected are obscured and we are never given a character to hold onto or identify with through the echoing screams and slicing scissors. As the projection goes on, the characters begin to see themselves in the images. Obfuscated bodies jump in and out of the screen. The static frame — as if untouched by human hands — renders us implicated in the happening; trapped. Its stiffness draws a greater attention to the movements that follow. With everything still, the motion that exists and unfolds within the frame is all the more terrifying; inhuman: the way the scissors move back and forth through the frame (within a frame) clearly animated and separate from real, human motion; the smoke that bursts at an accelerated speed through the frame and clouds the theatre acting as an all too real juxtaposition to the animation. As it begins to lift, the hum that encases the theatre is touched up with what sounds like Angelo Badalamenti on the keys, as if the title screen for the new Twin Peaks is about to materialise through the foggy projection and envelop us further in the maze. Lynch, as both on and off-screen director, looms over the theatre with full control and reiterates that we, as the audience, are all but puppets on strings, trapped in his dollhouse.
In Absurda, Lynch demonstrates what he finds most interesting about the theatrical experience: the implication of spectatorship. As audiences, we are active in the creation of this meaning—without us sits but a greying old man, playing with figurines in his workshop. There are no definitive answers, but of course this does not mean we should stop searching for them. For Lynch to give us an answer would be to undermine the importance of the audience. The joy is in the search. Art imitates life imitates art on an endless loop. Absurda knows this. Absurda is this.