Humor as a deconstruction tool in the work of 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

I.

David Lynch is widely known as one of the most innovative and at the same time mysterious directors of our time. His films create a kind of cinematic universe where a dream is indistinguishable from reality, the plot has no integrity, and "owls are not what they seem." Viewers of Lynch's cinema are repeatedly confronted with a terrifying reality — superficially similar to ours, but challenging the perception of time, space and cause-and-effect relationships.

Lynch fundamentally refuses to interpret his own paintings, reducing the conversation to meaningful silence or reasoning about transcendental meditation ^[1]. For researchers of Lynch's work, the director's films are fundamentally open works, for the study and interpretation of which an almost unlimited number of lenses can be used: from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to deconstruction practices and modern gender studies. However, most of the research focuses on the Lynch canon — a kind of set of markers that added a word derived from his surname to the Oxford Dictionary. Now "lynchian" means "Characteristic, reminiscent or imitating the films or television works of David Lynch" ^[2]. Such a set of markers became surreal images, soundtrack (melancholic pop-jazz by Julie Cruz and Angelo Badalamenti, elements of ambient and drone in sound design), a sense of anxiety, elements of pop culture, absurdity, counter-narrative structures. Less attention is paid to the phenomenon of humor in the works of David Lynch, as it is often considered as an integral part of the strategy of absurdization of what is happening on the screen and the destruction of conventional cause-and-effect relationships.  We consider it important to turn directly to the phenomenon of the director's humor in order to see it as one of the tools for creating a "Lynch" atmosphere in the director's films ^{[3, p. 5]}. Such a view will allow researchers to take a fresh look at both the director's work in general and his strategies for disorienting the viewer in particular.

The research question posed in this article is as follows: what is the role of humor in David Lynch's films, how it affects their general meaning and affects the audience. This question is relevant not only for film critics and researchers of the director's work, but also for those who are interested in the complexities of humor as a social and cultural phenomenon. The key thesis of the article is the statement that Lynch's humor lends itself to a clear categorization and is one of the few conventional techniques in the director's toolkit. However, such "normality" is a multi-level trap, since the ultimate goal of Lynch is to deconstruct ideological attitudes, scrap binary oppositions and place the viewer in a situation of oscillation between several discourses: "real" and "unreal", "funny" and "creepy", "sublime" and "base".

II.

One of the most frequently mentioned characteristics of David Lynch's work is the feeling of anxiety from what is happening on the screen ^{[4, 5, 6]}. This is largely due to the hyper-narrative nature of the director's paintings: the storylines in them multiply, suddenly break off or even exist in isolation from each other, and the characters have doubles that exist both in parallel dimensions and meet with the characters within the same frame. This approach to the creation of narrative structures aims to confuse the viewer from the path of automatic perception of the work and offer him to see the world with a new look. Such a "lack of recognition" of the surrounding world becomes a source of anxiety. In some ways, this approach intersects with the exclusion strategy developed by Viktor Shklovsky, which presupposes the goal of creating a situation not of recognition, but of seeing reality ^[7].

Often, the director's approach to creativity is compared with the surrealist movement, pointing out that the process of writing scripts and making films of the director is similar to the technique of automatic writing and develops on the principle of free associations. For example, this is how Lynch spoke about the process of making the film "Inner Empire": "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" ^{[8, p. 90]}. However, in Lynch's films, you can also find elements of classic genres of Hollywood cinema, such as film noir, detective, melodrama and horror; elements of pop culture; references to world painting and much, much more.

All these genres, forms, strategies and elements add up to a fundamentally incomplete mosaic of the director's creativity, which is reassembled in a new configuration with each new film, and from where certain elements of the Lynch cinema language can be removed. For example, in the film "A Simple Story" there are no multiple narratives, and in the picture "Elephant Man" there are surreal elements. The invariable puzzle of such a mosaic remains humor, which is present in one form or another in every director's film.

Humor in the work of David Lynch is something more than an entertainment element and a "release of spectator tension". Lynch uses humor as a deconstruction tool that can undermine viewers' usual ideas about the world and human behavior, genre and stylistic expectations, generally accepted cultural norms, classical narratives and causal logic.

We can recall one of the functions of humor described by Henri Bergson in the work "Laughter: An Essay on the Significance of the Comic." In it, Bergson, not yet reasoning in postmodern terms, says that humor makes it possible to reveal the mechanical absurdity of human life. So, Bergson describes a situation in which a person writes a letter, but at some point a certain joker replaces the ink with dirt, which is why the author of the letter automatically writes with dirt. Humor, according to Bergson, lies in the fact that a person acts by inertia: "Habit has left its mark on everything. It would be necessary to suspend the movement or change it. But it was not there - the movement automatically continues in a straight line. [...] The mechanical inertia is ridiculous where one would like to see the precautionary dexterity and lively flexibility of a person ^{[9, p. 15]}. Humor, following Bergson's logic, becomes for Lynch an attempt to take the viewer out of the automatism of perception of both the screen work and life itself, and, as a result, a tool for demythologizing discourse. The objects of "mechanical inertia" for Lynch are the classical genres of cinema, in which he dresses his works. Humor, on the other hand, becomes one of the tools capable of pointing out the wrongness of automatic movement through conventionally created structures and narratives and an attempt to force the viewer to change the register of perception from confidential to skeptical.

III.

The above interpretation of the phenomenon of Lynch humor is just one of many. In a specific chapter, we will highlight three key interpretations of the use of humor in Lynch's work and focus on one that, in our opinion, is of considerable interest to researchers in the field of cultural studies and art criticism. We will also try to connect these interpretations with three theories of humor: detente, contradiction (inconsistency) and superiority ^{[10, p. 213]}.

The first interpretation is that Lynch's humor follows the Greek tradition of catharsis and is used by the director as a mechanism for "releasing tension" accumulated during the viewing process. Kant, in his Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, defined the concept of laughter as "an affect arising from the sudden transformation of tense expectation into nothing" ^{[11, p. 207]}. Lynch's humor also manifests itself in moments where tense expectation should come to a terrible denouement, but stops at the last step. An example of using such a strategy of humor can be a scene from the TV series "Twin Peaks". In the eighth episode of the first season, the main character — Agent Dale Cooper — is seriously wounded from a pistol. The second season begins with a scene where a dying FBI agent appears in front of the viewer in a pool of his own blood. At the same time, the local manager — an elderly man barely moving (which adds elements of physical comedy to the scene) — brings Cooper the milk he ordered earlier, is interested in the comfort of the agent lying on the floor and puts down the phone, ignoring the voice coming from there. Cooper finds himself simultaneously in two discourses — death and the conventions of universal communication. Obeying the last discourse, Cooper asks the manager to put the milk on the table and gives him a friendly thumbs-up. Fluctuations between discourses and the predominance of the second over the first allows the viewer not to be left alone with the heavy feeling of the death of the main character and balances the drama of the television series.

However, here you can see the shadow of the producer's dictate and argue that this element is a necessity — a requirement not to injure the audience of a television project with scenes of cruelty. In response, we can turn to the film "Mulholland Drive", a completely author's project of the director, and a scene with a killer who wants to steal a book with a list of phone numbers that are extremely important for Hollywood. The carefully planned murder in this scene does not go according to plan and the killer has to kill according to the snowball principle: first a woman accidentally wounded through a wall, and then a janitor who came in at the wrong time. The scene ends with the triggering of a fire alarm, which comically rhymes with the fact that the killer planned to solve everything with a pistol with a silencer (that is, not to make a sound). In this scene, Lynch destroys the image of the archetypal hired killer, questioning his competence, and also forces the victim to abandon the passive role and translate the plot from a "spy thriller" into a "physical comedy". According to Wolfram Bergande, humor in this scene also acts as a way to translate potential horror from the scene into the register of pleasure in order to distance the viewer from what is happening on the screen. At the same time, Bergande adds another connotation to the protective function of the comedy register — to convince the viewer that he enjoys the comicality of the situation, and not the fact of on-screen violence ^{[12, p. 4]}.

The second interpretation is used by researchers who follow the logic of Lynch himself and point out the fundamental openness of his humor and the impossibility of categorizing it. The specificity of humor in this interpretation is that it always consists of an arbitrary combination of different discourses, often contradicting each other.

In the article "Sociology of Humor: a Critique of the Three fundamental theories of the Ridiculous" S. Melnikov, referring to the works of such philosophers as M. Clark, E. Oring, T. Schultz and M. Mulcay, writes about the second theory of humor as a theory of humor contradictions ^{[10, p. 215]}. In this concept, the source of humor is found in establishing a connection between two different categories, which from the standpoint of common sense would be considered contradictory. Humor in this theory is completely freed from the rules of logic and scientific laws ^{[10, p. 215]}. Following this theory, Lynch's humor can also be seen as humor freed from all conventions and conventions and belonging exclusively to the individual sensitivity of the author. In this interpretation, humor is not an independent actor and becomes derived from the other Lynch elements already mentioned above — hyper-narrative constructions, the breakdown of cause-and-effect relationships, the logic of doppelgangers, and so on.

An example of such humor is the inexplicable transformation of Philip Jeffries from the movie "Twin Peaks: Through the Fire" into a mechanism that looks like a teapot.

The third interpretation of Lynch's humor has already been partially presented by us in this study, and it is on this that we would like to dwell in more detail. In this interpretation, Lynch's humor is understood as a form of deconstruction, the intention of which is aimed at destroying traditional ways of representation and demonstrating the absurdity of social norms and values. In the context of this interpretation, it is important to note that Lynch's humor, unlike his plots, seems cliched, naive and easily classifiable. However, this is one of the many director's traps aimed at breaking the automatism of the viewer's perception.

T. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that one of the reasons for laughter is the feeling of "sudden glory" in the laughing. Such fame can be caused by "the perception of some defect or deformity in another ^{[13, p. 41]}. In our interpretation, we argue that Lynch's humor arises precisely where Lynch sees a flaw or "ugliness" and rises above it for subsequent criticism. Under such a disadvantage or ugliness, the director perceives a mythologized reality created by conventional Hollywood genres, ideologized television and products of mass culture. Thus, the third interpretation of Lynch's work is associated with the third concept of humor — the concept of "superiority".

Following the strategy of superiority, with the help of humor, Lynch depsychologizes the heroes of his paintings and presents them to the viewer as caricatured and deliberately poorly written characters assembled from genre cliches of popular genres. Such characters act and speak mechanically, repeating rituals from the pictures preceding them. However, this technique is not limited to "mockery" alone. Lynch uses a strategy of templating and false genre to direct the visual path along a fundamentally incorrect vector of automatic reading of the work.

In "Blue Velvet" Lynch deceptively presents the hero Jeffrey as a kind of detective who is forced to unravel the dangerous reality of the criminal world of Lamberton. But in fact, Jeffrey takes a more complex and multidimensional position, which serves as a trap for the viewer. With the help of archetypization, Lynch simplifies the process of identifying the viewer with the screen hero, but then transforms him. Jeffrey's path through the sterile everyday life of the American suburbia abruptly turns into a new space, and Jeffrey himself transforms from a hunter into a victim who finds himself on the wrong side of the world of cause-and-effect relationships, usually accessible to detectives. The viewer, like the hero, has to be in the process of oscillation on the border of two dimensions — reality and its fantasmic superstructure ^[3].

Lynch's humor in "Blue Velvet" and other films of the director creates a false dimension of normality, which sharply contrasts with the narrative features of the work and is destroyed at moments when the false genre becomes obvious. Such a strategy can be attributed to the phenomenon of the "unknown known", which gives rise to the impression of "terrifying strangeness". Being under the influence of such a strategy, the viewer of Lynch's films begins to look at familiar objects in a new way, and the everyday dimension, usually associated with a safety and comfort zone, becomes a source of the creepy in Freud's understanding. Such deconstruction creates an aesthetic effect, no less significant than the reincarnation of destructive images through sound and image ^{[14, p. 277]}. In the book "Cinema by Touch", Dobrotvorsky writes that one of Lynch's tasks as a director is to cut out household comfort from his works ^{[14, p. 278]}.

The result of combining the known and the unknown in one object is the appearance of a "crack" in the myth, the prevailing discourses and power structures. A striking example of the presence of such a crack in the picture space is the film "Eraser Head", which begins as a film about family and upbringing, but eventually turns into an anti-family movie. The living embodiment of such a crack and at the same time the engine of the plot becomes a monstrous Child — a consequence of the merger of the known and the unknown. The family, as a conductor of power, embracing the individual from birth, is subjected to total deconstruction in the film "Eraser Head". The mutant child, the Lynch version of the insect from F. Kafka's "Transformation", defies any forms of ideological interpellation. One of the founders of schizoanalysis F. Guattari called the film "The Eraser Head" - "the miracle of miracles" ^{[15, p. 206]}. In this regard, D. Petrenko writes that the "Eraser Head" is an anti-Oedipus. "The child in the movie "Eraser Head" is not an object over which symbolic violence is committed, but rather, the source of a crack that gradually absorbs the already detached family model. The child in Lynch's film is a paradoxical object that distorts any possibility of a normative family configuration that allows it to be identified as an apparatus of power" ^{[16, p. 16]}.

Another example of an ideological fracture can be described in Slavoj Zizek's film "Pervert's Movie Guide", an example from "Blue Velvet". Zizek says: "What could be more normal than a father of a family watering the lawn in front of a white neat house? But suddenly my father has a heart attack, he falls on the grass. And then, instead of showing how the family lost their feet, calling an ambulance, or somehow trying to help, Lynch does something typically Lynch. The camera rapidly approaches the lawn, even penetrates through the grass, and we see what is really hidden behind this idyllic green lawn" ^[17]. Dennis Lim complements Zizek and concludes that in these two minutes you can put the whole meaning of the film — a story about order and its destruction ^{[8, p. 12]}.

As a result of the practices listed above, we can conclude that in the process of viewing Lynch's works, the viewer discovers a new emotional register, the activator of which is often humor. Such a register arises due to the process of the viewer's oscillation between opposite discourses, for example, "funny" and "creepy". It is in the appearance of this register that what many researchers call a unique sense of anxiety in the director's work lies.

IV.

The key thesis of our article is the idea that David Lynch's humor is subject to categorization. At the same time, his "normality" is deliberately superficial, which is a conscious strategy for introducing the "famous" category presented above into the film and its subsequent deconstruction. In this section, we will analyze the various types of humor present in Lynch's films, as well as their common motives and themes.

Irony is a form of ridicule; a "laughable" denial of what is claimed in words as if seriously ^{[18, p. 188]}. Irony itself is a key attribute of the twentieth century and, as a consequence, of the director himself. The ironic principle is the principle of distancing, following which Lynch avoids direct statements in his films and refuses any specifics in interpretations. At the same time, Lynch's irony can be called an open comment or an invitation to dialogue, behind which the form of "the author's evaluation position is visible and gives a special coloring to the work of art, in a peculiar way reveals the author's dissatisfaction with the surrounding world" ^{[19, pp. 25-26]}.

An example of the use of irony, or rather meta-irony, in Lynch's work can be considered the "karaoke" scene from "Blue Velvet", where the killer performs the song "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison before committing an act of violence. To illustrate the work of the metairony mechanism, we turn to the collection "Logical analysis of language. Linguistic mechanisms of comedy" and the work of I. B. Shatunovsky "Irony and its types". In it , the author writes: "In the case of meta-irony, the stimulus statement and the ironic statement are superimposed on each other, combined in one statement (or a number of statements). The narrative is constructed in such a way that the speech of the directly speaking hero of the work of art is not ironic, he says what he says, not ironically, seriously, from his point of view it is true and normal, however, the utterance (utterances) put by the author in his mouth, and the situation and context are constructed by the author in such a way that to make clear the “untruthfulness”, the anomaly in one way or another of this statement (from the point of view of the author and readers who joined him). The collision of these different-level opposite estimates is the source of the ironic effect here" ^{[20, p. 364]}. Now we will transfer this scheme to a scene from a Lynch movie. The singer of the song and Frank Booth — the antagonist of the picture — take this song seriously, they really like it, and for them it is "wonderful". At this "layer" their statement is true, but at the level of the author's and readers' "universal" assessment, this statement is false: since the antagonist falsely covers his nature with a "good song". The song itself, moving into an ironic context, is removed and moves from the category of the well-known "beautiful" to the unknown "terrible". And now the lines about saying goodbye to the character are perceived not as a romantic gesture of parting, but as a hint of the death of the listener-addressee. The cruel irony of this scene lies both in creating an audiovisual counterpoint and in undermining the ideological concept of nostalgia, where the past is considered an idealized safe place.

Camp is a phenomenon of imitation or parody, which demonstrates the postmodern ability to undermine audience expectations already at the level of a form that flirts with the "base" and elevates it through the author's statement ^{[21, p. 16]}. As an example of such camp aesthetics, we can consider the TV series "Twin Peaks", which mimics a cheap TV detective, and to which the description of Ya. Lurie can be applied — "postmodern camp noir, mixing the aesthetics of tabloid novels and soap operas with the preserved, but now slightly veiled by Lynch, element of the unconscious" ^{[22, p. 34]}. Such a description is given by Lurie to the film "Blue Velvet", however, in our opinion, it is also ideal for "Twin Peaks", which some researchers consider to be the heir of "Blue Velvet".

There are two camp levels in Twin Peaks. The first level is the content level, that is, the inner level of the work. The decoration of a provincial city itself belongs to this level: the interiors of diners, bars, apartments and hotels, the rise of fast food: "damn good coffee" and cherry pie. In the essay "Notes on the camp", Susan Sontag writes that the camp has an element of artificiality, since nothing in nature can be camp ^[23]. For Lynch, this element of artificiality and man—made is important as an opposition to the natural, irrational and unnatural - the forest as a haven for a creepy Black wigwam.

The second level of the camp is the formal, external level. At the formal level, "Twin Peaks" uses specially simplified camera techniques: camera hits, long television medium plans of characters made in the aesthetics of melodramas, the screen format corresponding to the average TV.

This use of camp aesthetics is necessary for Lynch to create a "simple" and recognizable space. A space that the viewer could see from his neighbors or even exist in it independently.

Following a similar logic, elements of kitsch are also found in "Twin Peaks". V. Shimko writes that kitsch is a form of public consciousness ^[25]. Therefore, Lynch's use of kitsch should be considered — not only as a "mockery" or a demonstration of his own artistic taste, but also as creating a recognizable space where the viewer can see echoes of his own life.

Describing kitsch, G. Klimova writes: "People need various forms of beauty: from the sweet and naive beauty of everyday "paradise" to the experiences of the beautiful in the heroic, sublime, sometimes even tragic in life and art. The universal human need satisfied by the kitschy creatures of social life is the need for emotional experiences. In this area, too, there is an unprecedented variety: from sweet and pleasant emotions, to feelings associated with genuine excitement and emotional excitement. These feelings can be a product of popular culture and even create the possibility of integrating people and are able to create a sense of axiological community. Such phenomena include not only political or religious rituals, but also sentimental serial production of literature, TV, cinema, etc." ^{[26, p. 27]}.

Kitsch allows Lynch to create something known at the level of people's behavior, shape and even the style of their clothes. For example, in "Twin Peaks" you can meet characters whose image fits into the description of the aesthetics of kitsch. Thus, Dr. Lawrence Jacobi is presented as a character whose "frank tastelessness becomes the principle of choice, and the striking incongruity of colors and interior items finds demand among people seeking to show their originality" ^{[27, p. 234]}.

Kitsch and Lynch Camp are addressed to several groups of viewers at once — cinephiles who know the director as a star of international festivals, and those who turned on the TV on a random channel after a hard day's work. Some see in this work the familiar space of their own world, while others see the author's irony, which moves "the artist's images from the profane area of cheap kitsch to the more intellectual area of camp" ^{[24, p. 102]}.

The absurdity in Lynch's work appears as a "confrontation between the human desire for meaningfulness, clarity and a "silent, cold universe"" ^{[28, p. 157]}. Lynch has been working with the absurd since his first short films, but he acquires the greatest importance in the pseudo-sitcom "Rabbits".

"Rabbits", following the interpassive logic — that is, the logic of delegating one's pleasure to another ^[29] — offer the viewer to synchronize with the off-screen laughter inherent in the sitcom. However, such synchronization turns out to be impossible, since laughter occurs at random, which makes the viewer feel the scrapping of conventions and genre "agreements" between the author and the viewer. Such a breakdown of expectations and a revision of the audience's perception strategies turns into a traumatic experience for the viewer and a feeling of discomfort from communication with the work.

Farce is a comedy of light content, which is characterized by physiology. Elements of farcical humor can be found in a scene from the feature film "Twin Peaks: Fire, Follow Me," in which a deaf FBI agent Gordon Cole (played by Lynch himself) instructs colleagues using a grotesque figure of a woman, whom he calls Lil. Lil wears an obviously fake red wig and a cartoon red dress with a blue rose. At the level of physical interaction, Lil makes grimaces and performs a number of exaggerated theatrical gestures. All this is accompanied by "comical jazz", turning the scene into a celebration of farce.

Black humor is humor that is based on situations that are inherently tragic or grotesque. The above-described scene from the film "Blue Velvet" fits the concept of black humor, in which the idealized life of an American suburbia is interrupted by a violent scene of a heart attack, where a man is forced to suffer from heart pain while his dog plays with a stream of water from under a hose with which a man watered flowers. The humor here lies in the situation itself, in which the idyll is replaced by tragedy, but instead of sympathy and bitterness, we get a shot of an imperturbable dog that rejoices in a stream of water from a hose, not realizing the shift of the situation into the discourse of death. With the help of black humor — the very definition of which refers to the concept of binary oppositions — Lynch, on the one hand, opens the door to the creepy for the viewer — the realization that the idialized external world will never save from the inner world, and on the other — protects it, helping to dull the fear of death and "emotionally overcome humiliation, discrimination" ^{[30, p. 127]}.

V.

In conclusion, we say that Lynch uses his humor not only as a way to defuse spectator tension, but also as a deconstruction tool that allows him to question ideologized narratives and modern mythologems. Lynch uses humor not only to entertain his audience, but also to challenge their expectations, subvert conventional narratives and explore dark, often taboo aspects of human experience.

With the help of humor, Lynch also introduces an element of "normality" into his hyper-narrative works, which receives the status of "famous" for the viewer. Fluctuations between "known" and "unknown", "funny" and "creepy" and the subsequent scrapping of binary oppositions allows Lynch to achieve the effect of "anxiety" in his films. Thanks to this effect, Lynch's film is sometimes reminiscent of a "silent comedy, then a body horror" ^{[8, p. 19]}. Through humor, counter-narrative structures and processes of absurdization, Lynch leads his viewer to the fact that he is horrified because of a new view of the world, and not a specific actor of fear.

In many ways, such a birth of the creepy from the everyday — its transformation through the banal and famous — is carried out by Lynch through his unique humor. So, the creepy monster from around the corner of the diner in Mulholland Drive looks like a homeless man or Baba Yaga from the Soviet film "Morozko", and the finale of the picture "Inner Empire" forces the viewer to face one of the most aesthetically ridiculous screamers in the history of cinema - a face distorted with a simple video editor, superimposed with a double exposure on another person. However, Lynch uses humor on a more complex level, endowing the "ordinary" with the connotation of the "creepy" and presenting the "known" as the "unknown". Against such a "creepy" there are no means of protection and there are no narratives through which the viewer can overcome it.

The viewer who came out of the convecial horror film is scared "in the moment", while Lynch lays doubts in the surrounding ordinariness, which will continue to haunt the viewer after the final credits.