The Act

"Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear."
- p166, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (from David Lynch Keeps His Head)

Difficulty, is steadying yourself in the midst of a flow that is racing to surface, showing like Cratilo, pupil of Heraclitus, that a person can never step in the same river even once, never bathe in its water. A river does not bathe; it is swift and carries itself past with unknown purpose, yet carries itself and is carried through ineluctable patterns. 

Surface. It is plain to see from David Lynch's work that it is not only unconcerned with the surface of that moving river, but in fact moves down current, trying to be still with the river, in an attempt to be the river and not imagine that it will slow down. Laura Dern in Inland Empire, that actress whose role is that of an in-real-life murdered prostitute, begins to become her script, moved by the same dark impulses that led to the woman she mimics, that very same woman, only moved by those dark shadows underlying her character's fated life. Rather than concern himself or his audience with what is apparent, Lynch finds what is being felt, deep resonant anguish crafted into an obscure but illuminating sign, so much like the universals found in Kubrick's The Shining; that precipice of not being understood in the midst of a great torment, an understanding that is always abstracted, always starkly felt as if a familiar silhouette on a dark landscape. And watching from a distance as that silhouette begins to appear identical yet nameless, understand and yet remain in formlessness, the creeping gesture of unconscious violence becomes steadily more real. 

Whilst Tarantino shoots Reservoir Dogs he understands that violence can only refer to itself, and rather than draw attention to the ear, it becomes the act itself that is visualized, thus depleting the consequence of what is violent, painful, incommunicable. Tarantino's work serves to deplete, saturate, achieving a strange eloquence in Hobo With a Shotgun that can only be seen through a thousand different lenses; the caricature of violence, the demonstration of the act rather than the description of what the act has done turns the audience into an extremely complicit spectator, so far absorbed into avante-terror, so unlike the works of Gaspar Noe where meaning-forming is all, that the body itself becomes valueless, stripped of its complexities. To witness violence becomes detachment, the strata of the victims effaced by that jargon of "grindhouse", "extreme terror" et cetera. That ear, it seems, is of profound significance. Michael Madsen's minimal performance, a performance suitable for the Andy Warhol era, and his unbuttoned shirt inside his suit jacket reveals the anonymity of this violence which the audience has become involved with, and it is either the work of an astute and careful film maker who is drawing on a sense of universal morbid fascination, or it is the work of someone who has degraded and sacrificed a profound film making perspective. That ear, it seems, holds the story.

 There is no adequate way to evoke something painful except in abstract, with the visualization of an internal story that is of course familiar to us all; like Henry Spencer in Eraserhead as he murders the object that represents both extreme value and also dread, that physical mutilation of a fetus-like creation, squirming and seemingly filled both with something piteous and something stark and torturing. This act is not only an act but involves the understanding that the act has deep consequences. Regardless of the ugliness of, the obscurity of, that act, it is the act; it is an act that involves all layers of suffering, the closest cinema can actually come to perceiving the intense emotional experience that is actually happening. Somehow in ignoring that ear, that living and connective tissue, which contains uncontainables, inexpressibles, a severance of a connection with an entire universe, Tarantino murders cinema, murders what it is and what it could be, and Lynch's hyper-involved latest work is a signal: we, of course, can express what we think is possible, but there is a whole world of oversight, surface, and self-deception that must be overcome.