The problem of interactivity of modern media on the example of the film "The Inner Empire" by David Lynch

Seleznev Evgenii Kirillovich Postgraduate Student, Department of Cultural History, Institute of Cinema and Television (GITR) 123007, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, 32a, 32a, Horoshovskoye Sh. street selezneuve@gmail.com Other publications by this author

The problem of automatism of perception of a work of art has been developed by many authors. The most significant contribution to its solution was made by the representative of the Russian formal school Viktor Shklovsky, who in his work "Art as a technique" proposed the concept of "exclusion". A conceptually similar technique was widely used by Bertold Brecht and was called "alienation". Alienation and estrangement are fundamentally different, but they pursue one goal — to confuse the viewer from the path of automatic reading of the work. In our work, we want to address the phenomenon of interactive cinema and use its example to consider how the techniques of exclusion and alienation affect the communicative act of the viewer and the work. 

To begin with, let's define that we will consider interactive cinema in its two manifestations: a) interactive cinema with a mechanism for selecting storylines; b) interactive cinema without a mechanism for selecting storylines — this type of cinema can also be defined as hyper-narrative cinema with interactive potential. The hypothesis of the interactive potential of the work is proposed by the author of the work.

Let's start with the classical idea of interactive cinema — this is cinema, which allows the viewer to influence the course of the narrative. This type of cinematography aims to shift the viewer from the position of a passive voyeur and make him an active participant in the screen action ^{[1, p. 5]}. In the work "Hyper-narrative in interactive cinema: problems and solutions" N.B. Shol writes: "[interactive cinema] appeared in order to enhance cognitive, emotional and sensory interaction with the work. However, intensive research and development of tools in this area did not lead to the desired result and could not achieve significant success in terms of sustained interaction of the viewer with the work. The promise of such development to surpass the modern pop-cultural works of the mass media — cinema and television — has not come true" ^{[1, p. 8]}. Already here we find a problem associated with the bet of interactive cinema on the "emotional and sensual" interaction of the viewer with the work. In our study, we will try to find the reasons why interactive cinema with a mechanism for choosing storylines could not be an effective means to enhance the viewer's communication with the work.

The fundamental basis of interactive cinema is the presence of a variety of narratives and the ability to switch between them. At such moments of choice — let's call them "forks" — the viewer must decide whether the hero of the work will choose road #1 or road #2. Usually such switching is carried out with the help of freeze frames and titles, interacting with which the viewer makes an interactive choice and continues viewing the work.

We can find similar techniques not only in interactive cinema: Jean-Luc Godard broke the narrative of the picture "Male — Female" with titles that are not directly related to the narrative, Gaspard Noe put the film "One against All" on pause and invited the audience to perform an interactive act — to leave the cinema or turn off the film before one of the most violent scenes in the film (the corresponding credits appeared on the screen and the countdown timer started), Michael Haneke paused "Funny Games", and then rewound the climactic event back at all, showing the viewer a potential plot deviation, but not allowing him to follow it.

In his cinematography, Jean-Luc Godard did the same thing as Bertold Brecht did on the theater stage — he created a distance between the viewer and the work. Godard achieved this effect not only through the credits, but also by turning the characters into the camera ("On the last breath") or by directly informing them that they are the characters of the film ("Weekend"). Such a distance is necessary so that the viewer loses the possibility of identifying with the character and begins to observe the action from the distance necessary for the director — a distance that gives rise not to feeling, but to thought, not empathy, but critical reflection ^[2]. It is the mental, not the sensual act that prevails in interactive cinema with the possibility of choosing storylines. However, using alienation techniques, Brecht and Godard do not let the public forget that they are watching a film or attending a performance, while interactive cinema tries to involve the viewer in the space of the picture on an emotional level — to make him an accomplice and make him empathize. Using the techniques described above — titles, still frames - the interactive film distances the viewer, revealing the illusion and openly demonstrating the constructability of what is happening on the screen.

The question arises: is it possible to use interactivity as a tool for deriving a work from the automatism of perception without distancing the viewer from the work itself? To begin with, let's define what the "automatism of perception" of the work is. The desire to present the film as a series of chronologically alternating events is an a priori desire of the viewer, who, according to D. Bordwell, always strives to construct a purposeful story in his imagination, constantly putting forward perceptual and cognitive hypotheses (based on the schemes that the viewer has in mind) and tries to fit the film data to them ^{[3, p. 31]}. In classical cinema, such hypotheses always work and the viewer, according to V. Shklovsky, perceives the work in automatic mode ^[4]. To remove a work from the automatism of perception, it is necessary to violate genre, plot, stylistic and other conventions. There are many ways to break such conventions, and interactivity is one of them. However, as we found out, interactivity based on the principle of alienation makes communication "inactive". And the next question that arises before us is "is interactive cinema possible without a mechanism for selecting storylines?".

In the work "The Language of New Media" Lev Manovich says that an interactive work does not necessarily have to be a work in which an "interactive tool" is incorporated in advance, and that interactivity itself rather indicates the return to the work of a certain "discontinuity" and fragmentation characteristic of early cinema and proto-cinematographic practices ^[5]. A similar thesis, questioning the interactive mechanism as a basic element of interactive cinema, is put forward in his work "Myths of Interactive Cinema" by Peter Lunenfeld, who argues that the interactive potential of a work can be contained in the very possibility of its modification (for example, remounting) ^[6]. At the junction of the narrative fragmentation of the work and its hypothetical possibility of modification, a new type of interactivity appears — interactive cinema without mechanisms for choosing storylines. Such cinematography is based on the principle of detachment, which places a certain interactive potential in the screen work.

To study the principle of operation of this type of cinema, we turn to the picture "The Inner Empire" by David Lynch. The key feature of the "Inner Empire" is its hyper-narrative. If in other Lynch films there is a single narrative that can be deciphered, from "Eraser Head" and "Twin Peaks" to "Mulholland Drive", then in "Inner Empire" there is no single narrative at all. This forces researchers to constantly decipher this work: to reassemble it in a variety of variations, correlate some storylines with others and constantly interpret them in the absence of an obvious logical connection between them. Fredrik Jamieson describes such an experience as "schizophrenic", since the viewer has to experience not a single stream of time, but the experience of isolated, disconnected, discrete material signifiers that cannot be connected in a sequential series ^[7].

Such an experience of interaction with discrete signifiers in the picture, expressed in the plot and form of the "Inner Empire", is compared by a number of researchers of David Lynch's creativity with the logic of Internet surfing and working with hyperlinks ^[8]. We will try to develop this idea and present the experience of working in cyberspace as a rhizome. The term "rhizome" was introduced into philosophy by J. Deleuze and F. Guattari and is endowed with the following meanings: "openness, nonlinearity and orientation to the unpredictability of discursive transformations through the possibilities of structure development in any direction; there is no center and periphery in the rhizome, and any element of discourse can become a "supporting structure" for text generation" ^{[9, p. 807]}.

"The Inner Empire" contains a number of storylines: some exist in parallel, and some overlap with each other.  The viewer has to slide from one narrative to another, the connections between which are not obvious. Such an experience is really similar to Internet surfing - a process when a person randomly travels through the Internet space without a specific goal, becoming a viewer of a huge number of banners, links, and so on. In such a journey, the Internet space appears to the subject as a branched structure, where "each point is potentially connected to any other, which is a reference to the rhizome" ^{[10, p. 68]}. This approach is reflected in the very process of implementing the "Inner Empire" — the picture was shot one scene at a time and was created by the method of free associations: "I came up with the idea of a scene, and I shot it, a new idea – new shooting. I didn't know how they would be connected" ^{[11, p. 90]}. Lynch himself honestly told investors only two things about the film — that he did not know what he was doing, and that he was shooting the "Inner Empire" on an inexpensive digital camera, which gives not a cinematic image, but something similar to home video and random Internet videos. In the "Inner Empire", digital space finally becomes for Lynch the space of the modern unconscious, as he already spoke about in Highway to Nowhere, endowing digital cassettes with the meaning of memories pushed into the unconscious ^{[11, pp. 88-91]}.

Disparate segments, parallel worlds, films and TV series inside the "Inner Empire" are combined into a story about a deep identity crisis. The main character crumbles into many avatars, among which it is almost impossible to determine the original. A similar plot is realized in the film "Perfect Sadness" by Satoshi Kon, whose work is closely intertwined with the cinematography of David Lynch. The main character of "Perfect Sadness" — Mimarin Kirigoe — decides to end her career as a singer and start a career as an actress. Returning one day to her house, the heroine notices that someone is running a page on social networks on her behalf. At this moment, the heroine splits — her avatar from the Internet begins to haunt her. At the same time, this is not the only split that the heroine will have to go through. At some point, the heroine ceases to distinguish herself from the heroine of the work in which she is being filmed. An identical trope is repeated by the heroine of David Lynch.

"Perfect sadness" appeared when the Internet was still studied from textbooks, Lynch creates his picture at its peak — the dominance of forums and the appearance of the first social networks. For Satoshi Kon, as for Lynch, the Internet becomes a space of the embodied unconscious — a space where the most terrible fears are displaced. In another Satoshi Kona film "Paprika", one of the main characters says: "Don't you think that dreams and the Internet are similar? And there and there consciousness pours out." Satoshi Kohn and David Lynch draw an equal sign between the Internet and sleep, between the surreal practice of automatic writing (with which the film "Inner Empire" was created) and modern Internet surfing (the way of reading the film). Thus, we can consider the "Inner Empire" as a neo—surrealistic work, where the area of the unconscious is not responsible for sleep, but the Internet - the unconscious of the 21st century.

Following the logic of the unconscious, the subject's plot on the Internet develops chaotically, he makes movements from one hyperlink to another, and the map of his route can be compared with a rhizome along which the subject travels, following a nomadic strategy — such a map does not have a start and finish, and all points are located in a horizontal surface, eliminating vertical hierarchies. The subject can easily move between narratives — links or banners — finding himself on the next gap or fold of rhizomorphic reality ^{[8, p. 70]}.

In other words, while watching the film "The Inner Empire", Lynch forces the viewer to perform interactive acts similar to Internet surfing and, following rhizomatic logic, reassemble the film again and again, since "any point of the rhizome can - and should — be attached to any other point of it" ^{[12, p. 12]}. The viewer of the "Inner Empire" is constantly forced to become an accomplice in the production of the film, which makes the automatism of perception impossible.

Thanks to a large number of narratives, David Lynch engages the viewer in direct interaction with the film, without creating a distance between the work and the viewer. Cause-and-effect relationships are motivated not within the work, but within the viewing subject. The viewer of the "Inner Empire" is forced to perform interactive operations not with the help of a freeze frame and titles, as it happens in classic interactive cinema, but in his mind - arbitrarily choose which element will be the basis for other elements.

As a proof of the work of such a principle, we can turn to the work of avant-garde directors of the 1960s, for example, to Paul Sharitz.  In his work "Touch", Sharitz loops the word Destroy. With repeated repetition, it loses its meaning, and then completely collapses, revealing new language constructions in its place: this girl, distraught, this drug is strong and so on. Choosing a keyword or phrase, the viewer makes an interactive choice, carrying out the interpretation of the work through the connection of the sound and visual series. Following the rhizomatic logic, "Touch" provides the viewer with unlimited possibilities for new configurations of words, images and meanings.According to the same logic, the "Inner Empire" functions, only whole scenes and plots take the place of words in it. In this way, Lynch realizes the interactive potential of the work without alienating the viewer from it.

The interactive potential also appears due to the fact that such a slip from one narrative to another cuts off their semantic layers from the objects in the film, since they cease to fulfill their conventional functionality. Lynch removes things and phenomena in the film, allowing the viewer to see them for the first time, discover new meanings in them and interact with them in a different way, use them for other purposes.

In the article "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" Frederick Jamieson writes that we do not perceive the outside world simply as a global undifferentiated vision: "we are always involved in its use, we tread certain paths in it, paying attention to this or that object or person inside it" ^[7]. In "Inner Empire," Lynch offers the viewer the opportunity to see the world from a different angle. The meanings attached to objects do not reveal the plot of the picture and are not in relations with other objects, they lose their purpose and cease to be a tool, but become, in Heidegger's language, "cash" ^[13]. The detachment introduced by Lynch into the work with the help of constant slipping from one narrative to another eliminates automation in the perception of such objects and, as a result, automatic reading of the plot itself. The plot of the "Inner Empire" moves due to a different kind of force, but not due to objects and phenomena, since these objects and phenomena are useless for the plot, they do not activate it, they just exist.

Let's analyze this with a concrete example. Almost the entire film Lynch draws a conditional world in front of the viewer, in which the icon signs mean only what the director needs to communicate with the viewer. The only "real" location becomes Hollywood Boulevard. However, Lynch shows him not at all as he is rooted in the mass consciousness of the viewer. Lynch removes from Hollywood Boulevard that layer of mythology that has long dominated representative images: Hollywood Boulevard has become not just a place, but a symbol — a symbol of success, fame, the fulfillment of the American dream, and so on. Hollywood Boulevard is not perceived as a street-by-itself. This is largely due to the form of demonstration of this sign: Hollywood Boulevard is closely associated with beautiful people in rich clothes, bright sun, green palm trees and the names of great people on shining golden stars. That is, in order for the sign to work as a symbol, it is necessary to comply with a number of conditions and conventions. It is these conditions that Lynch refuses, turning this sign into an iconic one (and equating it in the hierarchy with the rest of the signs of the painting). The Walk of Fame appears before the viewer as a sign-icon. This is a simple indication of the place: here is asphalt, here are the glass windows of shops closed for the night, here are palm trees, and, finally, the name stars. Hollywood Boulevard appears before the viewer distantly, not immediately revealing itself. By removing the ideological layer from Hollywood Boulevard, Lynch equalizes this sign with others and allows the viewer to create their own relationships between fragments and freely interpret them.

Such a collision with the unknown-the known - brings interactive potential to the film, strengthening the act of communication between the viewer and the work. Frederick Jamieson writes about the intensification of such an act: "when the temporal continuity is broken, the experience of the present becomes irresistibly, supernaturally alive and "material": the world opens to the schizophrenic with the highest intensity, it carries an inexplicable and overwhelming charge of affect, it shines with hallucinatory power. But what might seem to us a tempting experience — richer perceptions, libidinal or hallucinatory intensification of our, as a rule, ordinary and familiar environment — is felt here as a loss, "unreality" ^[7]. By removing Hollywood Boulevard from the viewer's perception, Lynch, on the one hand, enhances the act of communication between the viewer and the work, on the other hand, leaves the viewer space to identify with the same lost character of the picture (one of his many avatars) without creating a distance between them.

"Inner Empire" is a work of escape, giving the viewer unlimited interactive opportunities to reproduce new meanings without elements of alienation. Using such rhizomatic logic as a strategy for constructing a narrative, directors can use the phenomenon of detachment to eliminate the automatism of perception of their works and strengthening the communicative act of the viewer and the film.

Understanding the mechanisms of such work, the directors come to the conclusion that interactivity realized with the help of freeze frames and titles acts as an element of alienation, which means that it needs to be changed. This is how several interactive projects of a new format appeared that are of interest to our research — "Mademoiselle Paradis" by Marie-Laure Kazin and "Bandersnatch" by David Slade and Charlie Brooker. "Mademoiselle Paradis" excludes the element of alienation from interactivity (freeze frames and credits) and switches between narratives by reading the emotional reaction of the viewer. During the screening, a special device is put on the viewer's head — an electroencephalographic headset — which is responsible for reading the viewer's emotions and constructing the narrative of the film. The mechanism of the picture works as follows: if the viewer experiences fear, one version of the plot development is shown to him, if joy, then another. The picture "Mademoiselle Paradis" lasts about 20 minutes (depending on the running scenario) and includes two forks with four different options for the first fork and three options for the second (a total of 12 different scenarios) ^[14]. The example of "Bandersnatch" seems to us the most interesting, since it works not so much with the field of science and technology, but conceptually rethinks the very problem of interactive cinema with a mechanism for choosing storylines. The viewer of the work needs to choose actions for the 19-year-old Stefan, who is obsessed with the idea of creating an interactive game. Initially, Bandersnatch mockingly points out to the viewer the illusion of choice and uses alienation tools "just like that", offering to choose the most insignificant actions for the plot:  "biting your nails", "pulling your earlobe", choosing cereal for breakfast. There are also interactive forks in the picture, where there is no choice at all.  But all this is done so that at the right moment the hero of the work suddenly realizes that he does not choose anything, that some kind of impulse is simply born in his head, motivating him to act. At this moment, the director makes an original decision — he directly declares that the Viewer is a participant in the film, which sends signals to the main character through the Netflix platform: "It's like television, but on the Internet. I control it." You can consider this answer ("I [Netfix] control it") as the final proof that the viewer is omnipresent in Stefan's life. Paradoxically, this may also mean that in the real life in which this movie is being watched, Netflix controls and monitors the viewer himself, which makes Stefan's life a reflection of real life ^[15]. Thus, deliberate alienation is replaced by the involvement of the viewer. The subject finds himself in a situation of hesitation — he is directly responsible for what is happening on the screen. It is noteworthy that, just like the "Inner Empire", the film "Bandersnatch" assumes such a plot development when the entire film crew appears in the frame, directly indicating that the work is the result of the filming process, and not the real world that suddenly found itself in the Internet space. And this is an important moment for discovering the potential interactivity of modern media. Deconstruction similar to the "Inner Empire" and "Bandersnatch" does not contribute to the destruction of the illusion of realism, but on the contrary, exposes this illusion in order to involve the user in the film production process, to make him hesitate between the oppositions of alienation and involvement. Such a rejection of alienation by itself and combining it with the practices of deconstruction and exclusion create the interactive potential of modern media.

All this makes it necessary to monitor how the media and especially cinema will develop further, whether self-criticism and the ability to demonstrate the internal mechanics of production processes will become key structural elements of modern media.