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C O N T E M P O R A R Y F I L M D I R E C T O R S

David Lynch

Justus Nieland
 David Lynch

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i-xii_1-190_Niel.indd 2 1/23/12 1:43 PM
 Contemporary Film Directors
Edited by James Naremore

The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

well-written introductions to directors from around the
world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief
aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists,
to give serious critical attention to their work, and to il-
lustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.
Contributors to the series include an array of internationally
respected critics and academics. Each volume contains
an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview
with the director, and a detailed filmography.

A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.

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i-xii_1-190_Niel.indd 4 1/23/12 1:43 PM
 David Lynch

Justus Nieland

Universit y
of
Illin o i s
Pr e s s
U r ba n a ,
C h icago,
a nd
S pr ing fiel d

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 © 2012 by Justus Nieland
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Frontispiece: David Lynch, at the William Griffin Gallery,

Santa Monica, California, © Paul Jasmin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nieland, Justus.
David Lynch / by Justus Nieland.
p. cm. — (Contemporary film directors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
isbn 978-0-252-03693-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) —
isbn 978-0-252-07851-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
isbn 978-0-252-09405-7 (e-book)
1. Lynch, David, 1946– —Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
pn1998.3.l96n54   2012
791.4302'33092—dc23   2011034119

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 Contents

Acknowledgments | ix

wrapped in plastic | 1
Interior Design 8
Bad Plumbing: Eraserhead 10
Inhuman Windows: The Elephant Man 20
Sexy Tchotchke: Blue Velvet 28
Furniture Porn: Lost Highway 47

The Art of Being Moved 62

Radio-Affectivity: Wild at Heart 65
Melodrama’s Crypt: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me 79
Moving Impersonality: Mulholland Dr. 94
Organism 111
On Moving Pictures: Six Men Getting Sick 114
Animated Humans: The Grandmother 119
Good Machine: The Straight Story 124
Vital Media: Inland Empire 134

interviews with david lynch | 161

Filmography | 171
Bibliography | 177
Index | 185

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i-xii_1-190_Niel.indd 8 1/23/12 1:43 PM
 Acknowledgments

James Naremore has been a superb editor and provided extremely help-
ful advice about the argument of this book. His generosity is as broad
as his learning, and his patience is seemingly infinite. Joan Capatano,
once again, was terrific to work with. Danny Nasset saw the project to
the end with cheer and shockingly prompt responses to my every query.
And Jill Hughes did an expert job as copyeditor. How lucky I was to have
an editor so familiar with the book’s subject. Thanks to audiences at the
Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference and at Concordia Uni-
versity, Montreal, where I presented portions of this book and received
perceptive comments and questions. Thanks especially to Omri Moses
for the invitation, and for many stimulating exchanges about this work.
I also want to acknowledge Gerritt Terstiege at form magazine (www.
form.de) and Rob Wilson at Sight and Sound for permission to reprint
two previously published interviews with David Lynch.
I am lucky to have wonderful friends, colleagues, and students in
the Department of English and the Film Studies Program at Michigan
State University, many of whom heard or read parts of this book, always
asking the most productive kinds of questions, and matching my own
excitement about the project. Portions of the book were hatched in the
classroom, and I want to thank in particular the students in my classes
“An Erotics of Cinema: Surrealism and Film Theory” and “Cinemas
of Affect: Hitchcock, Buñuel, Lynch.” Their passion, smarts, and all-
around liveliness helped me arrive at the conceptual heart of this book.
Thanks to my chairperson, Steve Arch, and the College of Arts and
Letters for the post-tenure sabbatical that enabled me to get writing.
A special thanks to Akira Mizuta Lippit, Todd McGowan, and Jona-
than Rosenbaum, all of whom have written—and continue to write—­

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 brilliantly about David Lynch. They gave me the kind of intelligent,
candid feedback that proved decisive to the final shape of the book. Jen
Fay, Pat O’Donnell, and Karl Schoonover are my most valued readers
and colleagues. Their friendships sustain me.
To Sarah Wohlford, my partner in life, I owe everything. Lila and
Iris, our daughters, make everything real. They became obsessed with
The Wizard of Oz, in its many incarnations, at a rather uncanny time. I
dedicate this book, with love and gratitude, to my cinephilic family: my
brothers, Andrew and James, and my parents, Maury and Sue Erickson
Nieland. Like me, they liked The Straight Story. We used to live in Iowa.

x | Acknowledgments

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 David Lynch

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i-xii_1-190_Niel.indd 12 1/23/12 1:43 PM
 Wrapped in Plastic

Wrapped in Plastic, as any fan of David Lynch will know, is the name
of a long-running fanzine (1993–2005) devoted to the critical and cult
phenomenon of Twin Peaks (1990–1992), one of the most innovative
shows in the history of network television. The title refers to the state of
Laura Palmer’s dead body as a found object, waiting to be revived in the
quirky fantasies of the living. The corpse of this high school homecom-
ing queen and incest victim, enshrouded in semitranslucent synthetic
sheeting, washes up on the shore of a river in a small, Pacific Northwest
logging town. The body incarnates the inaugural secret—“Who Killed
Laura Palmer?”—that spawns countless mysteries over the course of
the series. Wrapped in plastic of the most everyday sort, beached as the
unforeseen waste of a presumably more natural environment, Laura’s
embalmed body is rather like the synthetic environment of Twin Peaks
itself: in its reanimations of absence, in its uncanny blurring of the quo-
tidian and the strange, and in its perverse contaminations of the “nature”
of small-town American “culture.” Critic Andrew Ross had just this kind

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 of plastic in mind when he referred to Twin Peaks as “one of our first
examples of ecological camp.”1
David Lynch’s corpus has undergone its own plastic embalming. The
evolution of his filmmaking career—from the midnight-movie success
of Eraserhead (1977), his astonishing first feature, to critical darlings
like Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990)—dovetailed with the
academic consolidation of postmodernism, a cultural logic Lynch’s films
came to embody for the likes of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek,
both of whom have written brilliantly about Lynch.2 The postmodern
Lynch came prepackaged with its own theory of plastic, the ur-material
in Lynch’s aesthetic of depthlessness and superficiality, semiotic excess
and cliché. Plastic named Lynch’s detached emotional orientation—
cold, ironic, and insincere. Plastic materialized Lynch’s relationship to
history and the political, at once nostalgic for a past that never was and
shrink-wrapped against the realities of the present. And plastic was the
medium of psychic reality, approached by Lynch chiefly through the
malleable stuff of fantasy.
Rather than scrapping this story of plastic, since it accounts for much
of Lynch’s work, we might take plastic even more seriously as the prime
matter of Lynch’s filmmaking, essential to his understanding of cinema.
This means understanding plastic not as a static substance—reified and
hard, unchanging and resistant to history—but rather as pervaded by a
mysterious dynamism. In 1957, for example, Roland Barthes described
plastic as a properly alchemical substance, pulling off the “magical op-
eration par excellence: the transmutation of matter.”3 For Barthes, the
fascination with plastic—evident in awed crowds lined up to witness
new secular gods like Polystyrene—was doubly historical. It was both
the latest stage in the evolution of bourgeois “imitation materials”—that
is, their prosaic fall from the domain of appearance to actual use—and
the by-product of France’s rapid postwar modernization.
Materializing the “very idea of infinite transformation,” French plas-
tics marked the belated arrival of the United States’ own postwar dream
of consumption. This arrival led to a broader makeover of the domestic
interior as modern that would be satirized in films like Jacques Tati’s
Mon Oncle (1958), one of Lynch’s favorites. Of course, Lynch’s obsessive
returns to the styles, songs, and domestic environments of the 1950s are
often read as part of his nostalgia. But Lynch’s own remarks about the

2 | David Lynch

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 cheery decade suggest a more thoughtful reckoning with the utopian
kernel of mid-century design and its promesse du bonheur:

It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways. Cars were made by the right
kind of people. Designers were really out there with fins and chrome
and really amazing stuff . . . They were like sculpture, you know, that
moved . . . The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying
the groundwork for a disastrous future. All the problems were there,
but it was somehow glossed over. And then the gloss broke, or rotted,
and it all came oozing out . . . pollution was really good and started [sic].
Plastics were coming in, weird studies of chemicals and co-polymers and
a lot of medical experiments, the atomic bomb and a lot of, you know,
testing. It was like the world was so huge you could dump a bunch of
stuff and it’s not gonna matter, right? It just kinda got out of control.4

With typical gee-whiz enthusiasm, Lynch offers a rather shrewd micro-

history of postwar material culture, which found itself catering to Amer-
ica’s burgeoning middle-class consumers with all the outrageous, revo-
lutionary new products and designs of cold war modernity. The excesses
of this brave new built world—evident in Detroit’s fins and chrome but
also in fiberglass chairs, molded plywood, and the multifunctional fur-
niture ensembles of mid-century modern designers—were the material
fantasies of America’s postwar, democratic futurity. As Lynch knows, the
irrevocably changed substance of postwar material culture gave us not
only the synthetic stuff of consumer fantasy—“Euphoric 1950s chrome
optimism,” he calls it elsewhere—but also the catastrophes of the built
environment: environmental and ecological contamination, the atom
bomb, and other kinds of scientific experimentation run amok.5
Plastic, for Lynch, may be the future’s happy medium, but it is also
the stuff of inevitable disaster and chaos and the too-fragile gloss of fan-
tasy’s containment. If plastic has a dominant mood or tone, it is one that
merges the soul of postwar utopian sincerity and domestic security and
its retrospectively ironic rejoinder: “Little did we know . . .” Positioned
between the innocence and experience of America’s material environment
at mid-century, plastic is a fretful substance—uncanny anxiety material-
ized as kitsch. Epitomizing Lynch’s ambivalence toward the lure of the
mid-century, the promise of plastic is its material, affective, and tem-
poral dynamism. Lynch’s thing for the 1950s is a form of attentiveness

Wrapped In Plastic | 3

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 to a transformed material environment. In it, nature is transfigured by
technological second nature, homey euphoria is haunted by unease and
intimations of disaster, and movement into a happy future is blocked by a
nagging, still unprocessed trauma in the domain of human making. Given
this, might we understand his films as themselves environments? They
are as affectively unstable, as riddled with temporal ambiguities, as filled
with hybrids of nature-culture as the postwar world that haunts his filmic
imagination. In these atmospheres, spectators are wrapped in plastic.
It should not come as a surprise that Lynch would understand film-
making as a way of shaping, plastically, a moving environment. He came
to filmmaking, after all, following a failed European apprenticeship in
painting with Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka (Lynch left Eu-
rope soon after arriving, before meeting the painter). And in 1965 he
enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia—
then dominated by the prestige of American action painters like Jackson
Pollock, Franz Kline, and Jack Tworkov. By this time, the American art
world had witnessed a series of attempts to rethink aesthetic produc-
tion on the model of a more dynamic experience, an ongoing situation,
or a contingent Happening. This began, perhaps, with Allan Kaprow’s
so-called Environments in New York in the late 1950s and continued
through the development of installation art in the 1960s and ’70s. In
1956, for example, Kaprow suggested that the artistic movement toward
assemblages, three-dimensional spaces, and his own multimedia “Envi-
ronments” was inaugurated by the enlarged “arena” of action painters
like Pollock.6 Similarly, Lynch’s first “film,” Six Men Getting Sick (1967),
was conceived as an attempt to extend the capacity of painting to move
and, in moving, to frame a situation for an active viewer. Six Men is
a thoughtful, multimedia investigation of cinema’s relationship to the
plastic arts—to materials that are capable of being shaped or molded in
three dimensions. It is also the first of many of Lynch’s films to under-
stand cinema as theatrical in its orientation to the contingent situation
and embodied experience of its viewer, anticipating the tendency of his
films to turn into tableaux, or arenas of gestural intensity, or a proscenium
for all manner of performances.
Many filmmakers have come to cinema from painting, of course,
and Lynch is not the first to align processes of cinematic construction
with the plastic arts. As part of its preoccupation with the ontology of

4 | David Lynch

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 the cinematic, classical film theory made similar comparisons. Take,
for example, French art historian Élie Faure’s 1923 essay “Cineplas-
tics,” which insists on cinema as “plastic first.” By plastic, though, Faure
means not “motionless, colorless forms called sculptural,” but cinema
as “moving architecture,” one whose primary characteristic is “a living
rhythm and its repetition in time.”7 Because he understands cinema
as an aesthetic whole, dynamic, moving in time, and thus producing a
“sudden coming to life,” Faure sees the product of cineplastics as an
“autonomous organism” whose skeleton is a “web of feeling.” In this way,
cinema materializes “the plastic” in the obsolete sense of the word, as the
creative or procreative principle, bringing into being a new, surrogate
form of life.
Remarks like these may strike us today as dubiously animistic or
vitalistic, but they need not be. Instead, they make a strong claim for the
plastic materiality of cinema and its capacity to fashion moving aesthetic
environments for experience. In Lynch’s case, these transient situa-
tions are occasions for an experience of human life as itself plastic, shot
through with kinds of media that are life’s original supplement but that
over the span of Lynch’s lifetime have estranged life irrevocably from
itself. This, the plastic excess lodged at the very heart of life, everywhere
energizes Lynch’s filmmaking.
This book explores three nodal points in Lynch’s plastic environ-
ments. “Interior Design” takes up plasticity’s capacity for infinite trans-
formation as an architectural and design dynamic, a feature of mise-en-
scène, and a mode of fashioning, and psychologizing, cinematic space.
Lynch’s films imbue rooms with the erratic force of organic nature. They
produce atmosphere in the fashion of unforeseen weather patterns,
incipient environmental disturbances, or ecological disasters. As well-
wrought climates, Lynch’s interiors are made more lovely through their
systematic deformations of habit and habitat—the failed boundaries of
intimate life, the incursion of foreign bodies, unaccountable behavior,
or eccentric textures and objects that, by not fitting the scene, further
volatize it for the spectator. Discussing Eraserhead, The Elephant Man
(1980), Blue Velvet, and Lost Highway (1997), I turn to Lynch’s various
ways of giving us a sense of an interior, both domestic and psychic. This
aesthetic preoccupation has recently turned entrepreneurial in Lynch’s
collaboration in the fall 2011 opening of Club Silencio, a Rue Montmarte

Wrapped In Plastic | 5

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 nightclub combining concert hall, restaurant, library, and cinema with
moody interiors designed by Lynch himself and modeled on Mulholland
Dr.’s mysterious venue of the same name. Exploring how Lynch’s films
stage interiority, for he shows insides to be emphatically theatrical, I
consider how his films have always bespoken a familiarity with the cul-
tural history and iconography of a broad range of modern design idioms,
especially the mid-century domestication of modernism and its attempts
to supplant avant-garde austerity with bourgeois pleasure. Lynch is a
kind of constructivist, an engineer of atmosphere, and the mysteries of
the inside—to which so much of his work is devoted—are plastic.
“The Art of Being Moved” explores the emotional registers of plas-
ticity, attempting to explain a key affective paradox in Lynch’s work: the
way it seems both so manifestly insincere and so emotionally powerful,
so impersonal and so intense. Plastic’s instability as a substance raises
the problem of Lynch’s famously unstable tone and the nature of his
artistic knowingness or sophistication. Attempting to distinguish the
melodramatic sincerity of Blue Velvet from the forms of ironic cruelty
so common in 1980s cinema, Lynch once described the film’s curious
sentimentalism as an attempt to capture the way “radiation had become
an emotion.”8 Thus do historical mutations of the biosphere of the 1950s
find their way into the unstable affective environments of Lynch’s films,
energizing their plastic arrangements of culture. Marked by a high de-
gree of medial self-consciousness, Lynch’s work is an archive of some of
the most esteemed emotional strategies of aesthetic modernity—com-
bining and oscillating between modes such as the lyric, the grotesque,
irony, the emotional vicariousness of kitsch, the uncanny, black humor,
romantic passion, trauma, melodrama, and the sensational, voyeuristic,
or pornographic. But in films like Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk
with Me (1992), and Mulholland Dr. (2001), Lynch offers particular
canny meditations on mediated affect. In these films, which are some
of his most emotionally complex, Lynch explores the contours of feeling
as it is shaped, deformed, and conditioned by particular media environ-
ments, protocols, and technologies. Exploring the problem of affect is
one way Lynch performs media history.
“Organism” takes up Lynch’s persistent tendency to think of forms
of media and forms of life as related species. Here, plastic is useful for

6 | David Lynch

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 conceptualizing his picture of the human organism as malleable and
heterogeneous. Lynch’s unruly understanding of human biology, its ten-
dency to exceed its own mortal limits and the boundaries of time and
space, is often engendered through forms of media—whether cel ani-
mation, slow-moving lawn mowers, or low-grade digital images—which
themselves become monstrously vital. Lynch wants art, and cinema, to
animate aesthetic environments that are life-like; however, for Lynch, life
is productive mostly for its capacity to never be simply itself but rather
to spawn the unaccountable and the unforeseen. What this amounts to
in films like Six Men Getting Sick (1967), The Grandmother (1970), The
Straight Story (1999), and Inland Empire (2006) is a version of human
nature and human culture as productive assemblages, sites of relentless
activity and transformation made even more dynamic by organic nature’s
original contamination by the inorganic. Here, Lynch reveals himself to be
a surrealist in anthropology—sharing with the historical surrealists both a
sense of the organism as living in uncanny hybridity with technology and
mediation and a subversive awareness of culture as a basically incoherent
arrangement of norms, rules, and limits on human freedoms.
These ways of asking what it means, in Lynch’s art, to be wrapped in
plastic assume that in some fundamental ways plastic is the ur-substance
of modern experience. And this means taking seriously the category of
“experience” itself—a category some of the most compelling recent
treatments of Lynch tend to dismiss as the hallmark of a retrograde myth
of fullness, a form of New Age mysticism, or an anything-goes mode of
aesthetic evaluation. Lynch is, of course, always insisting on cinema as
a kind of unfathomable, qualitative experience—a ritual, a thing to be
suffered, or a passion to be undergone. And perhaps unsurprisingly, he
has increasingly linked this endeavor to his stumping for Transcendental
Meditation, which, we are told, will be the subject of his next film. This
does not mean we are to take his word on his art; rather, it should at
least remind us that “experience” has been an indispensable category
in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and in theories of the strange
vitality of the moving image in particular—as Walter Benjamin, André
Breton, André Bazin, and Roland Barthes knew well. To think about
the kinds of exemplary experience that Lynch’s works, as singular en-
vironments, offer to their spectators is essential to any reckoning with

Wrapped In Plastic | 7

i-xii_1-190_Niel.indd 7 1/23/12 1:43 PM

 his experimentalism and to understanding what, if anything, it offers as
a way of thinking about cinema and its digital afterlife.

Interior Design
Interiors are mysterious. It is an old saw, even a tired metaphysical
proposition, and yet its infinitely plastic potential everywhere propels
Lynch’s mise-en-scène. Consider the interior photographs of one rather
famous Los Angeles home, the Beverly Johnson House, designed in 1963
by Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., the son of the even more famous modernist
architect. The photos offer a series of views of the home, whose fur-
nishings are spare, tasteful, and modern: the cheery red, armless mid-
century lounge chair in the dining room; the yellow Bertoia Diamond
Chair (designed in the 1950s for the Knoll furniture company) by the
glowing hearth; the sturdy leather club chairs and their set of matching
geometric wood and steel tables; the strategically small kitchen (fig. 1).9
This more rational, more harmonious modern vision—in which the

Figure 1. Dreams of
good design: the
Beverly Johnson House

8 | David Lynch

i-xii_1-190_Niel.indd 8 1/23/12 1:43 PM

 natural and corporeal are reorganized by good design—is the message
of the home’s signature concrete-block ornamentation, visible outside
the window of the bedroom and picked up inside around the hearth.
It is an abstraction of a pine tree, with chevrons as needles, squares as
pinecones. In this mid-century design flourish, nature is domesticated
as culture—forest-cum-concrete.
The rooms are unoccupied and seem as anonymous as Inland Em-
pire’s Smithy (Smithee?) set. But the opened glass doorway in the bed-
room and the roaring fire give the scene an ambivalent, transitory feeling
of desertion or apprehension, of someone having recently left the scene
or just on the verge of entering. Something is happening. The house
may be empty, but its decor bears the unmistakable traces of its famous
owner, David Lynch, who bought the home in 1986 after finishing Blue
Velvet. Lynch, who credits Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. as one of his favorite
architects, was struck by Jr.’s modern design. Its attractive combination
of organicism and modern abstraction was somehow homey, recalling the
piney Pacific Northwest of Lumberton and Lynch’s own childhood. The
two square tables in the master bedroom are similar design monsters:
built by Lynch himself in the manner of Pierre Chareau, they turn warm
wood into a cold, hard assemblage of nested iron squares and sharp
angularity. But the most flagrant piece is the little table in the master
bedroom, topped with a lace antimacassar and a curiously dead plant.
Fans of Eraserhead will recognize this as a cinematic object, a prop
central to the frightful inner workings of Lynch’s first feature. There it
sits abjectly next to Henry Spencer’s anxious bed, in his claustrophobic
apartment room (fig. 2). Materializing the film’s vision of grotesque or-
ganicism, the tree, on the stage of Henry’s fitful dream, assumes obscene
proportions. Next to it, Henry will lose his head when something more
forceful erupts within him, and the undead tree oozes rivulets of blood
in an act of uncanny sympathy. This patently irrational object, so small
and out of place in a photograph of a stylish modern home, poses only
questions, turning a self-evident inside into an enigma. Is this a species
of latent domestic horror masquerading as furniture, or one more piece
of a kitschy design collection, or a canny prop in a home transformed into
theater—a stage for a self that is present only in its atmospheric effects?
When asked about his preferred architects, Lynch answers with a
roster of modernist heavyweights: “From Bauhaus, all the students of

Wrapped In Plastic | 9

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 Figure 2. The kitsch grotesque

the Bauhaus school, and Pierre Chareau, he did the House of Glass in
Paris, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, all the Wright Family, Rudolf Michael
Schindler and Richard Neutra. I like really beautifully designed, minimal
things.”10 These investments place Lynch in a long line of modern direc-
tors (Sergei Eisenstein, Jacques Tati, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock,
Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others) who are
sensitive to the relationship between architecture and the spatiotemporal
art of the moving image, of cinema as a “cineplastics,” in Faure’s terms.
For Lynch, interior design is a similar matter of engineering atmosphere
and producing dynamic, totally synthetic affective environments. At
stake in Lynch’s persistent psychologizing of spatial form is the problem
of interiority—of a picture of psychic insides less as reservoirs of spirit
than as material works, quintessentially modern products.

Bad Plumbing: Eraserhead

Eraserhead is Lynch’s first great poem of interiority. Like period-specific
ideas about domesticity and intimacy, “interiority” was invented as an
ideological by-product of a nineteenth-century public world shaped by
the traumas of industrialization and political revolution. The result was
the notion that spatial and psychic insides might swaddle the individual
in shared protections against a traumatic exterior. The interior, “defined
in the early modern period as public space,” now became what Diana

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 Fuss calls “a locus of privacy, a home theater for the production of a new,
inward-looking subject.”11 Fuss’s terms for such inwardness are theatri-
cal or cinematic, but Walter Benjamin’s are more specifically Lynchian.
Describing this “addiction to dwelling,” in which inwardness becomes
material nesting, Benjamin famously explained how nineteenth-century
modernity “conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and
it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s
interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case,
where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep,
usually violet folds of velvet.”12
Over the course of the nineteenth century, interiority was steadily
redefined as both a psychological concept and an architectural idea, or,
better, a way of understanding physical space itself as haptic and sen-
sory, a dynamic product of experience rather than a passive container of
unmoving things.13 As Anthony Vidler has argued, this late nineteenth-
century psychologizing of spatial form led to a fully modern understand-
ing of space as “a production of the subject, and thus as a harbinger and
repository of all the neuroses and phobias of that subject.”14 If one side
of this modern formulation is the compensatory security of bourgeois
privacy, on the other side lie the newly pathologized phobias of public
life (alienation, agoraphobia) and the tendency of privacy to overgrow
itself, to become phantasmagoric. In interviews, Lynch has captured the
dilemma precisely: “The home is a place where things can go wrong.”15
In Eraserhead the historical relationship between interiority and
industrialization is staged with exaggerated clarity and built into its titular
joke. While Henry (Jack Nance), the “Kafkaesque clerk,” is “on vacation”
from his printing job at La Pelle’s factory, his dream reveals the feared
culmination of his psychological trial as a grotesque putting-to-work.16
When Henry is decapitated, his mind, which hosts a rich but fragile inner
life, is materialized as brain, and the brain is quickly instrumentalized—
psychic negation, Eraser-head. Perhaps more telling is the composition
that frames Henry’s arrival at the home of Mary X (Charlotte Stewart),
where one of cinema’s most astonishing dinner-table scenes is about to
happen. Tipped off to Mary’s dinner invitation by the alluring Beauti-
ful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Roberts), Henry shambles through the
Hopperesque terrain of melancholic concrete, abandoned train tracks,
and darkness. We cut to a murky shot of a chain-link fence that opens

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 onto some unseen industrial hell whose immaterial traces are the hiss
and billow of stream. Lynch reframes the fence and clarifies its astonish-
ing proximity to the Xs’ home—so close that the fits and starts of smoke
befoul its tiny front porch. (The closeness of factory and family nest will
be echoed through Lynch’s work, most obviously in the recurring static
panel of his long-running Los Angeles Times comic strip, The Angriest
Dog in the World.) To put it mildly, the adjacency has not done much
for the Xs’ yard. At frame left, two gangly, bloomless stalks of what once
might have been sunflower plants line Henry’s path to Mary X, peering
expectantly at Henry through the window in the front door; at frame
right, another vine seems to grow, waywardly, from the yard through the
chain-link fence. Is the vine a natural tendril snaking outward through
the fence, or is it an industrial pipe from the neighboring factory rooted
in the front yard? It is impossible to tell, and this indiscernability an-
ticipates the home’s uncanny continuum of nature and culture, most
obvious on its inside.
We might say that the home’s plumbing is all wrong. Consider the
strange way Mr. X (Allen Joseph) greets Henry in one of the film’s more
uncharacteristically prolix bits of dialogue: “I thought I heard a stranger.
We’ve got chicken tonight. Strangest damn things. They’re man-made.
Little damn things. They’re smaller than my fist! They’re new! I’m Bill
. . . Printing’s your business, huh? Plumbing’s mine. I’ve seen this neigh-
borhood change from pastures to the hellhole it is now. I’ve put every
damn pipe in this neighborhood. And people think pipes grow in their
homes! Well. They sure as hell don’t! Look at my knee! Look at my
knees! Are you hungry?” Even as the patriarch conjures nostalgically a
lost pastoral world, his speech attests to strange hybrids of nature and
culture that are so theatrically on display in the Xs’ home. The novelty
of tiny, man-made chickens conjures a world whose plumbing collapses
organic and inorganic processes, natural and mechanical orders, hope-
lessly troubling the security of the domestic interior in the process.
In other words, pipes do grow in people’s homes in Eraserhead, a
point Lynch makes by ironically framing Mr. X’s speech with the black
ventilation tube of the fireplace, which comprises the left border of the
shot and extends vertically out of the frame. Shortly after Henry’s gro-
tesque carving of the tiny chickens, whose spilled guts have sent Mrs. X
(Jeanne Bates) into an erotic fit, he is cornered by her in the living room,

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 asked to divulge whether he and Mary have had “sexual intercourse,”
and then licked and kissed. When Mary interrupts Mrs. X’s unseemly
assault, the shot is divided vertically by the same black pipe. The pipe
now separates Henry and Mrs. X from a horrified Mary and substitutes
precisely for the internal archway dividing the living room, where Henry
is trapped, from the family dining room in the background (fig. 3). The
architecture of the shot corners both Henry and Mary in different states
of psychological extremity. Henry’s anxious spot is notably devoid of
decor, as the façade of the bourgeois family is stripped bare through
Mrs. X’s incestuous violation of Henry’s sexual privacy. Mary’s horror at
this spectacle of domestic obscenity is framed by the pipe against the
bourgeois dining room’s compensatory domestications of nature—an
extravagant floral arrangement sits on a table in front of a painting of
flowers affixed to a floral wallpaper pattern. Henry’s and Mary’s corners
are both bad nests, host to families and family rooms in which nature
has run amok.
In this same sequence, Mrs. X announces that there is a baby, that
Henry is the father, and that he’ll soon have to marry Mary. With the
abrupt revelation of the baby’s premature birth, the cultural machinery
of bourgeois propriety kicks too quickly into gear—paternity is estab-
lished, marriage is inevitable. The baby’s speedy materialization poses
again the problem of another improper inside within a domestic space

Figure 3. Domestic plumbing

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 whose inner speeds and rhythms are constantly out of synch or ill-timed.
The baby is the film’s most untimely gestation; its suddenness is mim-
icked in Henry’s own bodily reaction, an involuntary nosebleed. All of
this domestic havoc transpires next to the exposed fireplace tube—the
uncanny infrastructure of the violated interior.
In Eraserhead what is proper to bourgeois privacy fails to stay inside
or is violently exteriorized under the aesthetic sign of the grotesque.
Henry’s introduction to Mrs. X is interrupted by the noisy squeals and
slurps of a litter of puppies nursing on the living room floor. In moments
like this the domestic interior houses just too much animal life; in others
it suffers from unsettling absences of vitality or from darkly comic incur-
sions of mechanism into domestic rhythms. The grandmother (Jeanne
Lange), secreted in the kitchen, is catatonic and tosses the salad for din-
ner only with the prosthetic aid of Mrs. X’s arms. The rest of the family is
prey to equally disturbing lurches in and out of animation: Mary is prone
to seizures; Mrs. X to convulsive sexual arousal; Mr. X to numbness,
non sequiturs, and frozen grimaces. Eraserhead’s grotesque inversions
of natural and cultural orders are most obvious at the Xs’ dinner table:
Mr. X can’t cut the man-made chickens because of his unfeeling arms,
while the birds themselves are monstrously lively; they dance gamely,
and then, sliced open by an obliging Henry, they spill more blood than
their tiny bodies would seem to allow. Here and elsewhere, there’s a lot
more happening through the internal mechanisms of things than seems
possible. Lynch’s plumbing is excessive and irrational.
While sexual reproduction is surely horrific in Eraserhead, the film’s
meditation on “plumbing” is more than a puerile metaphor. Because its
mise-en-scène positions grotesque inversion against the stability of the
domestic sphere, Eraserhead participates in a challenge to the ideology
of bourgeois privacy. Central to the early twentieth-century avant-garde’s
revolt against modern social forms was a grotesque denaturalization
of the modern family. This was often accomplished by eschewing or
estranging the kinds of sentimental emotional protocols thought to se-
cure the distinction between private and public life. Rather than simply
refusing domesticity, the avant-garde turned the home into a kind of
domestic laboratory, experimenting with and remaking not just the mate-
rial structures of the home but also the forms of intimacy, sexuality, and
gendered behavior organized by more traditional architectural forms.

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 For a film about violated interiors, Eraserhead also spawns them
compulsively. Insides reproduce and multiply. They hatch inside of
each other, and in the process they become subject to strange cor-
respondences, passages, or thresholds of energetic transfer. The apart-
ment lobby, from hindsight recognizable as the first iconically Lynchian
room, is also Lynch’s first nested interior. The expectant openness of
the lobby, its expanse of zigzagged carpet, spotlit like a vacant stage, is
twice echoed: first in the rows of smaller mailboxes at frame left, most of
them empty, and then more comically as Henry, inside an inside, waits
forever for the elevator doors to close (fig. 4).
More telling in this regard is the decor of Henry’s one-room apart-
ment. The tubular, black metal frame of Henry’s bed extends the bad
plumbing at the Xs’; it will later frame Mary’s spasm of jerking at the foot
of the bed—a frustrated act that seems masturbatory, or a simulation of
sex, but is later revealed to be an attempt to dislodge her suitcase and
flee to her parents. As the failing heart of conjugal intimacy, the bed is
the space of sexual frustration, troubled sleep, and boredom. Dominating
Henry’s room, it is something to be escaped, or transformed into a place
from which to watch something more interesting in the radiator, or dis-
solved in a milky dream of sex with the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall.
On one side of the room, Henry’s anxious bed is surrounded by
an ensemble of prosthetic insides extending in row. There is, first, the

Figure 4. The nested interior

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 gramophone that plays several Fats Waller recordings and so provides
some of the room’s scant warmth, no less soothing for being mechanical.
A tinny organ snuggled in a wooden box, the gramophone is one of the
film’s less uncanny monsters of technology and organicism; its encasing
of media in wood will later appear again in Lynch’s own furniture design
for Lost Highway. Then there is Henry’s wooden dresser, whose top
drawer he opens to examine a severed photograph of Mary X. Stranger
still is the small, empty cabinet adjacent to the dresser in the room’s
darkened corner. This box seems to be a locus of secrecy itself, awaiting
its role in some unknown ritual. Like many Lynchian interiors, the box
does double duty as both cage and stage. In his mailbox in the hotel
lobby, Henry has received yet another mysterious box, which he later
opens furtively on the street, extracting the small, spermlike worm he
will then enclose in the cabinet in his room that seems to have been
waiting for it. Lynch later explores the force field built by this curious
web of resonant interiors when Henry—abandoned by Mary to minister
to the crying baby—opens the cabinet to check on the sperm-worm, his
other, smaller organic charge. The opening triggers a fulsome electric
hum that bridges the shot of Henry in front of the cabinet and Lynch’s
abrupt cut—first to the set of mailboxes in the hotel lobby and then to
a close-up of Henry’s empty mailbox.
The unmotivated cutaway suggests a kind of irrational sympathetic
correspondence between these spatially scattered insides—the cabi-
net, the mailbox, the sperm’s tiny container. Editing and sound build
and connect insides across gaps in space and time. Cinema, for Lynch,
is a relentlessly interiorizing technology. These correspondences, and
their cinematic nature, will become grotesquely literal inside the ra-
diator—the film’s most famous and fragile interior. The Lady in the
Radiator (Laurel Near) is only the most exaggerated version of the film’s
failed wish to endow furniture with the promise of better, because more
profound and secret, insides. Is the radiator a kind of metaphysical
plumbing? Its toasty inwardness makes literal the metaphor of bourgeois
interiority as a home theater. After all, Henry watches the radiator like a
virtual window—a television set or, better, a movie screen placed under
his room’s actual window, which frames only the claustrophobic view of
a brick wall. But like all the other interiors in the film, the radiator fails
to secure the metaphysical boundary between inside and outside. In the

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 midst of the Lady’s performance of “In Heaven Everything Is Fine,”
her stage is rained on by larger versions of the spermlike substance that
has already proven its ability to travel porously between Lynch’s nested
boxes. And the Lady’s spotlit stage itself—with its tableau-like frontality
and geometrically tiled floor—is anticipated both in the mise-en-scène of
Henry’s lobby and later echoed in Henry’s dream, when the tiny doors of
his bedside cabinet open and the sperm, now itself a spotlit performer,
dances before transforming itself into a mouth, which opens to swallow
Lynch’s camera.
The camera’s movement toward the heart of a dark interior is an
obsessive tool in Lynch’s visual style. Eraserhead’s trippy opening se-
quence contains Lynch’s first complex series of interiorizing movements
and enfoldings of textural density. Its impossible series of nested insides
reminds us that Lynch’s interiors are always designed—their spaces
made tactile by attention to textural surface and sound. The architecture
of the interior, in short, is cinematic, as we see again in the conspicuous
mise-en-scène of frames and enframing in Henry’s room: the ripped
photograph of Mary, the menacing window/wall, the radiator/theater,
and the room’s one piece of wall art—a framed photograph of a mush-
room cloud, which, for Lynch, is the sign of postwar “plastic” gone bad.
Lynch’s approach to interior design is less soulful than constructiv-
ist; the inside is not so much a romantic reservoir of feeling than an
effect, a tool of feeling’s formal manipulation. Cinema builds interiors;
mise-en-scène imbues rooms with their particular atmosphere (“room
tone,” Lynch has called it elsewhere); the mysteries of the inside are
plastic. Such, at least, seems to be the lesson of the film’s greatest and
best-kept secret, which has always been a constructivist one: how did
Lynch make that baby? The very question still makes Lynch uncomfort-
able, and he is quick to shift the conversation in what he considers the
properly cinematic direction—away from the question of genesis and
toward the effects and affects of the well-built thing.
Eraserhead ends with the fitful death of one mysterious contrap-
tion. Henry’s act of infanticide, a violent opening of a mysterious in-
side, precipitates the film’s final sympathetic transfers of energy across
interiors—of bodies and walls, proximate furniture and distant planets,
lightbulbs and radiators. The electric din in Henry’s room intensifies
in proportion to the baby’s foaming guts. Sparks shoot from inside an

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 electrical socket, causing Henry’s lamp to flicker stroboscopically, blind-
ingly, before burning out. The burnout cracks a hole in the very planet
first plumbed in the film’s prologue, an opening that Lynch’s camera
(again) follows inside to find the Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk), his levers
kicking off their own sparks, desperately trying to maintain control of
his machine before all is lost in the final, white-hot union of Henry and
the Lady in the Radiator.
But Eraserhead also opens with a similar irrational fantasy of interior
design. In fact, its inaugural montage functions less as a cosmic allegory
than a kind of lesson in the plastic architecture of cinema and its differ-
ence from the hellish built environment in which Henry lives. The daz-
zling sequence ends abruptly with the contrast between the mysterious,
textured insides that are assembled and traversed in the prologue and
the monumental, impassive urban architecture in which Henry first finds
himself in the city. The contrast seems to stage, in inverted fashion, the
tension between the supposedly fixed frame of the photographic view and
the mobile experience of body within architectural space: for Lynch, it is
the camera’s frame that is volatized, and against the interiorizing move-
ments of the prologue, the static menace of Henry’s built environment
that rigidly circumscribes his movement becomes all the more apparent.
The mystery of the Man in the Planet, his hand on some monstrously
powerful lever that seems to join in machinic assemblage a host of discrete
insides and outsides with no rational connection, is thus also the aesthetic
wonder of Eraserhead’s baby. The magical plumbing over which both the
Man and baby-maker preside is cinema as interior design.
In the film’s prologue and concluding apocalypse, the Man in the
Planet sits before a broken window. As a design feature, the window has,
at least since the seventeenth century, framed the ideology of bourgeois
humanism. A limpid glass membrane between the inside and the outside,
the window buttressed a middle-class denial of the public world, offering
both protection against the trauma of public life and ways of folding it
inside, domesticating it. The window also abetted the humanist fantasy
of unmediated representation—of the optical veracity of a world set in
front of, framed for, the presiding viewer. This dream culminated, or
collapsed, in the modernist glass utopias of the early twentieth century
and their foundational myths of transparency: “transparency of the self
to nature, of the self to the other, of all selves to society, and all this rep-

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 resented, if not constructed . . . by a universal transparency of building
materials, spatial penetration, and the ubiquitous flow of light, air, and
physical movement.”17
And yet this rationalist myth was always haunted by a counter-En-
lightenment tradition of visual opacity—of windows marred by dust and
dirt, panes ruptured by the terror of political life, or uncannily darkened
by non-knowledge and anxiety. The Man in the Planet’s cracked win-
dows frame Eraserhead’s consistent deployment of windows that fail
as humanist technologies of transparency, unmediated representation,
and sheltered privacy. Henry’s first glimpse of Mary, which is also ours,
finds her face pressed nervously against the grimy glass of her parents’
home—besides her face, only darkness is visible. The relentless opac-
ity of the windows Henry passes on the street is echoed in the lonely
window of his apartment, whose view onto a brick wall becomes one of
Eraserhead’s running visual jokes. While its panes are intact, the window
is doubly broken—it fails to frame a dematerialized view, finding brick
where light and air should pass, and it proves threateningly porous to
Henry. Later in the film, it passes from its usual state of excessive, even
comic, opacity to reveal a murky view of some vicious beating on the
street outside. When asked about the main influence of Eraserhead’s
anxious interior design, Lynch’s standard reply is “Philadelphia.” Living
with his wife and daughter in an impoverished South Philly neighbor-
hood, Lynch has often described his urban life as the experience of a
vulnerable interiority that, in fact, psychologizes urban architecture:
“There was racial tension and just . . . violence and fear. I said to some-
one, all that separated me from the outside world was this brick wall
. . . But that brick wall was like paper.”18
Yet the film itself refuses to establish a conservative version of privacy
against the depredations of the inner life. Instead, Eraserhead offers
Lynch’s first, antihumanist formulation of the bourgeois domestic sphere
as virtual. The electrical storm that follows Henry’s infanticide is itself a
kind of virtual window. As a series of insides and outsides are magically
traversed by air, electricity, and light, the dark room of Henry’s apartment
returns the window to its etymological roots—wind and eye, a visual
opening, an aperture—for the passage of air and light. And yet both
Henry and Lynch’s viewer experience this opening not as a frame onto a
painterly view but as an exposure to the entrance of blinding, stroboscopic

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 light that disrupts the security of our controlled view, plunging us into
intermittent darkness. The light entering through this kind of window dis-
possesses the human being, exposing it to an alterity within itself. What’s
more, this kind of violent overexposure happens in a dark room that is
explicitly photographic. In other words, Eraserhead offers us Lynch’s first
fully mediated living room—this domestic interior, like Henry’s own, is
primordially displaced from itself, its artificial light linked up to a strange
circuitry of rhythms, currents, and forces that keeps home life always
uncanny. Henry’s apartment room is an avant-garde interior—a domestic
laboratory that refuses to settle finally into culturally legible patterns and
habits. Its experiment is to keep the scenes, bodies, and behaviors that
constitute proper domestic life always estranged from themselves.

Inhuman Windows: The Elephant Man

The Elephant Man’s large budget, high production values, and esteemed
cast of British actors would seem to mark a significant departure from
the low-budget design of Eraserhead. The famous nineteenth-century
case of John Merrick (John Hurt), circus freak turned medical curiosity
turned proper Victorian gentleman, offers Lynch a fitting window to
historicize bourgeois humanism and its inhuman, monstrous, or gro-
tesque limits. In The Elephant Man, this fantasy and its impossible
outside are given precise architectural and cinematic forms and inserted
into a relentlessly spectacular society. Merrick’s anguished plea to be
recognized as “a human being, a man” rather than an animal plays out
visually and narratively as a search for normal bourgeois interiority that,
Lynch makes clear, is both a kind of proper human feeling and a style
of home decor alike contaminated by performance.
After playing his part as an unspeaking prop in Dr. Frederick Treves’s
(Anthony Hopkins) medical lecture, where his mental state is described
as complete idiocy, Merrick returns to his other life of exploitation in
Bytes’s (Freddie Jones) freak show, where he is brutally beaten. Mer-
rick is then rescued by Treves and, for a time, hidden in the isolation
ward in the attic of the London State Hospital. This room is surely an
improvement over the windowless Victorian dungeon that was his home
as Bytes’s property, but the nature of its own isolation is evident in the
room’s absence of decor and privacy. It possesses a fireplace with a bare
mantel and a tiny window cut crudely out of the ceiling. And it has

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 already been intruded upon, first by the unsuspecting nurse delivering
Merrick’s food, whose shocked first glimpse of Merrick’s face doubles
Lynch’s spectators’ first, unmediated view of the elephant man, and then
by the night porter, who threatens another form of spectacularization
under the guise of being sociable. As in Eraserhead, so in The Elephant
Man, mise-en-scène stages the problem of the vulnerable human inte-
rior. As Merrick sits silently on his bed, the head nurse explains to Treves
the terms of Merrick’s status as a social creature: “It’s like talking to a
brick wall.” Convinced that Merrick has something to say, Treves explains
that to help him, he has to understand what he’s feeling and thinking:
“We have to show them that you’re not a wall, do you understand? I
want you to talk to me.”
Merrick’s apparent inhumanity is figured through his wall-like
opacity or idiocy, echoed by Lynch’s framing. The two shot corners a
frightened Merrick at frame left, an aggressive Treves at frame right,
and in between them an expanse of bare wall, punctuated only by the
tiny window—the promise of Merrick’s opening to speech and feeling,
to the transparency of human sociability. Lynch cuts to a close-up of
Merrick’s disfigured, grotesquely textured face, the editing rephrasing
the question of Merrick’s “thingly” obscurity or human transparency in
a specifically cinematic register. The close-up is cinema’s most storied
window onto human interiority—an inside accessed in the face’s promise
of legible human character. Lynch’s more overtly sentimental features—
The Elephant Man and The Straight Story—are highly skilled manipu-
lations of the affective work of the close-up and other melodramatic
conventions.19 Yet technologies of sentimentalism in Lynch’s work are
consistently undermined by the affective uncertainty of the grotesque.
Lynch’s windows, as Eraserhead makes clear, are forever clouded by
the obscurity or density of matter, just as the window’s membrane of
protection from the public world is ever threatening to morph into a
proscenium framing a more uncanny otherness within the self.
Ensconced in the isolation ward, Merrick’s speech acts turn him from
wall to window. His recitations of biblical verse at first seem merely rote
animal parroting but are later proven to be spontaneous expressions of
a noble soul moved by the products of human culture. They set him
on the path toward the acquisition and cultivation of a better, more
fully human interior. Its rituals have to be learned, of course, which

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 is why Merrick, just after receiving his new room with a view on the
ground floor of the hospital, is so emotionally overcome by his visit to
Treves’s house. There, he meets the good doctor’s lovely wife (Hannah
Gordon), a vision of beauty that sends him into a burst of tears. Having
composed himself, he is treated to a proper spot of tea in the Treveses’
overstuffed living room. We now know that Merrick is quite sensitive to
Victorian life’s finer things—artful language and beautiful women—so
we are not surprised when Merrick apologizes for his sentiment and then
promptly asks after the Treveses’ decor: “I like the way you’ve arranged
the pictures on your mantelpiece,” he notes. “Is that how they do it in
most houses?” The question provokes an exchange of photographs: the
Treveses take from their mantel images of their children and parents
to show Merrick, and Merrick reciprocates the social gesture, showing
them in turn a small image of his dead mother. Merrick’s sincerity leads
Jane Treves to burst into tears—another sentimental effusion sparked
not so much by the pathos of Merrick’s impossible desire for his mother’s
accepting gaze as by her own shame at having removed her children
from the home—presumably so as not to be too shocked by Merrick’s
appearance. If Merrick’s fit of weeping follows from his fear of having
spectactularized himself, Mrs. Treves falls to pieces for having played
her role in a disingenuous sham of home life. As in Eraserhead, photo-
graphic absences—here the faces of beloved others who can no longer
see or cannot be allowed to see—trouble the security of the bourgeois
family and its architecture.
Nevertheless, Merrick’s many acts of nest-feathering within his
new, windowed room are clearly attempts to become more at home—
“normal”—in the Victorian domestic order. Home decoration becomes
its own kind of mimetic performance. Before Merrick is welcomed into
his new room, his well-meaning caregiver bans mirrors from the room
to keep Merrick from seeing himself as he was seen by a cruel public
world—a grotesque thing, a freak. This kind of external, dehuman-
izing gaze, troped by the mirror, is juxtaposed with Merrick’s own act
of careful, humanizing design—his methodical construction of a tiny
replica of St. Philips Church. Importantly, Merrick builds this church
while seated in front of another, putatively humanizing structure—the
window. The window is first shown to look directly onto a brick wall,
returning to Eraserhead’s running visual joke. But this opaque view

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 is reframed from Merrick’s seat and now looks upward, over the wall
topped in iron spikes, and toward the majestic spires of St. Philips in
the distance. Merrick’s church-building is an obvious metaphor for the
kind of humanistic, interiorized seeing that would emerge in the nine-
teenth century under the rubric of the Romantic imagination, another
reaction formation to industrial modernity. Notice how quickly Merrick
has made this new turn inward: only recently given his own room, he’s
already fleeing its creature comforts for the immaterial rewards of the
mind’s eye. The scene also frames Merrick’s act of imaginative design
as a virtual solution to a mimetic problem: mournfully, he turns his gaze
from his artwork in progress to a picture hanging on his wall across the
room. The charcoal sketch portrays a girl lying peacefully in bed under
a window—her own massive head of hair perhaps a nod to Jack Nance’s
gravity-defying ’do in Lynch’s first feature, but surely an ironic echo of
Merrick’s monstrous macrocephaly. If the church requires an act of
imagination—of seeing inside, and representing, a complete building
that remains physically obscured to Merrick—it is one that responds
to certain, painfully felt, limits of representation. Merrick may become
schooled in bourgeois social rituals, his room nested with its stuff, but he
will never fully imitate the act represented in that picture. His physical
deformity destroys his wish to sleep like normal people—the price of
this kind of simulation is certain death.
And so Merrick, trying so hard to be a good bourgeois, will decorate
his room with photographs, a dutiful portrait of Queen Victoria above his
hearth, and other gentlemanly clutter. Celebrated as a public curiosity
in newspapers that Lynch’s editing shows to be read by London swells
and working stiffs alike, Merrick begins to enfold the public world into
his room. The more Merrick’s interior plays host to society, the more his
room becomes stuffed with the compensatory trappings of bourgeois
privacy. In a particularly striking piece of editing, Lynch cuts from Mer-
rick’s nurses, reading aloud the details of a gossip paper, to the inside of
Merrick’s room. The nurse reads aloud: “Owing to a disfigurement of the
most extreme nature, Mr. Merrick has never been properly presented
to London society, but knowing that wherever Mrs. Kendal goes others
inevitably follow, the question arises, will London society present itself
to him?” On the word others, we cut to a slow tracking movement across
Merrick’s mantel, now littered with photos of his guests, the frozen gazes

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 of others in his home. Merrick, once a guest in a similar scene, now
plays the host, in front of his own glowing hearth, pouring tea for his
guests, who have just given him a silver-handled walking cane. An apt
pupil, he has stolen the Treveses’ decorating tricks, and in the process
he seems to have accommodated himself to the inhuman limits of his
society’s forms of hospitality.
Merrick, his room inside the hospital, is always both host and guest.
The limits of bourgeois hospitality, Lynch makes clear, are echoed in the
hospital’s own rules of caregiving. The debate over whether Merrick’s
room should be vacated “for more deserving cases” hinges on utilitarian
protocols of care. The hospital’s sacred duty is to aid the sick—namely,
those who can be cured. Since Merrick’s case is incurable, his room
should be given to another. The debate among the hospital’s governing
committee is promptly overruled by the visit of Alexandra, Princess of
Wales (Helen Ryan). She reads a letter from Queen Victoria commend-
ing the board for providing Merrick with “a safe and tranquil harbor,
a home.” But the princess’s rhetoric of charity may very well just be
good public relations; the queen reads the papers, too, and thus has an
investment in maintaining the appearance of the state’s infinite com-
passion now that Merrick has become a celebrity. Lynch’s more cynical
reading here is evident in a visual pun. Merrick’s acquisition of a stable
interior in the London hospital is symbolized by the gift of another fine
thing—an exquisite gentleman’s dressing case. This nested interior is
the case Merrick deserves, having been deemed a “deserving case.”
Care is contaminated by giving. In the next scene, this case fuels one
of Merrick’s most extravagant acts of bourgeois performance. Dabbing
himself with perfume from one of the case’s bottles, holding his new
silver cane in one hand and a cigarette holder theatrically in the other,
Merrick announces to his photo of the celebrated actress, Mrs. Madge
Kendal: “I’m John Merrick, very pleased to meet you” (fig. 5). His fantasy
of Victorian dandyhood is interrupted by the night porter’s abrupt entry
into the room. Another show is about to begin.
Merrick’s room has always been subject to ritualistic spectaculariza-
tion from desiring spectators on both sides of the class divide. Sonny
Jim, the night porter, will now “carnivalize” Merrick’s interior with yet
another retinue of paying viewers. Spectacular culture is, of course,
omnipresent in The Elephant Man: in its repeated performances of

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 Figure 5. The performance of bourgeois propriety

bourgeois humanity and its rituals (tea, hosting, gift giving, psalm read-
ing, exchanging photographs, and sentimentality itself) and in its various
theatrical cultures (the freak show, the traveling circus, Shakespeare,
photography, and the Victorian melodrama). For Lynch, nineteenth-
century sociability is primarily spectacular. Merrick’s trajectory of bour-
geois humanization (from inhuman freak to interiorized human seer)
founders on the inevitability of spectacle, of being always subject to
curious views. Merrick moves from Bytes’s freak show (stage), to the
hospital (room), back to Bytes’s circus in France (stage), and then back
again to the hospital (room), and yet every seemingly final room is always
a stage, every window looking out becomes a proscenium for the self’s
own spectacle. While wealth is divided unevenly in the Victorian world
of The Elephant Man, classes are joined in curiositas—the lustful wish
to see secrets hidden on the inside of things.
The obsession with seeing, and talking about, the most unseen and
obscene dimensions of private life was one of the signatures of Victorian
England’s disciplinary society—its myriad ways of talking about secret
life so as to better control, order, and classify the social world, separat-
ing “the normal” from the deviant or monstrous. And these disciplinary
protocols were evident not just in modes of spectacular culture like
circuses and freak shows, or new visual technologies like photography,
but also, as Michel Foucault argued famously, in the new administrative
institutions of the state: schools, prisons, clinics, and hospitals. In fact,
Merrick’s change of room from the isolation ward in the attic to his more
vulnerable interior on the ground floor is less an act of humane charity

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 than a disciplinary technique of visibility. As Mr. Carr Gomm (Sir John
Gielgud), the kindly director of the hospital, explains, “A hospital is no
place for secrecy, Treves.”
Put more bluntly, The Elephant Man’s interior design is inevitably
pornographic. The following scene confirms the architectural terms of
this spectacular culture, hell-bent on obscene insides. Merrick, seated at
night at his window and building his church, is interrupted by Sonny Jim,
tapping at the window outside. At night the windowpane’s transparency
thickens into a dense, textural surface. Merrick is doubly spectacular-
ized—both by Sonny, who leers through the pane menacingly, and by
the mirrored reflection of his own face and the tower of his church, all
of which seem to occupy the same flat plane of the brick walls and iron
outside. As in Eraserhead, this kind of irrational visual opacity is matched
by another stunning montage of Lynchian “bad plumbing.” A terrified
Merrick murmurs “nighttime,” and we fade to black. As we fade in, a
low sonic hum swells as the camera moves alongside the top of Merrick’s
textured head and pushes into the darkened eye-hole of his cloth mask.
Fade to a tracking shot along a line of moist, sweaty pipes bolted to the
ceiling of the bowels of some building as the audio track shifts to the
sound of the muffled billows of an unseen machine. The camera tracks
backward out of a door, its movement superimposed with the image
of a woman in the throes of an open-mouthed, slow-motion cry. The
blurred scream, one of the film’s several visual echoes of Francis Bacon,
will recur in Lynch’s later work. Here we know it to belong to Merrick’s
pregnant mother, whose trampling by wild circus elephants, revisited
in the film’s opening montage, caused her untimely death and Merrick’s
disfigurement in Lynch’s version of Merrick’s tragedy. We cut to a shot
of a hole ripped in a brick wall and then to another shot of three men
carrying a mirror toward the camera in which Merrick’s face becomes
visible. The close-up of Merrick’s eye, cinema’s own technological win-
dow onto the soul, is itself rendered opaque—superimposed with the
mouth and then the eye of an elephant. We cut to a time-lapse shot of
clouds outside, and the sequence ends abruptly with a cut to the interior
of the Treveses’ home.
The sequence replays, in more specifically nineteenth-century terms,
the infrastructure of the violated interior. The montage bridges and de-
territorializes disturbed insides, beginning with Merrick’s nightmare, but

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 ending with Treves’s own fitful sleep. The rational doctor is awakened
to the fact of his own irrational kinship with Mr. Bytes. Like Merrick
faced with the mirror, Treves is disturbed by a surprising foreignness in
himself: “I’m beginning to believe that Mr. Bytes and I are very much
alike . . . It seems I’ve made Mr. Merrick a curiosity all over again.” This
nightmare of uncanny dispossession, shared by Merrick and Treves, is
also the story of industrial modernity’s own haunting by the very kinds
of monsters that have always frustrated its taxonomies and schemes
of order—hybrids of nature and culture, animal and machine, human
and inhuman. Notice how the sound of wild elephants dissolves into
the clanking of machines and shots of bare-torsoed men laboring over
clanking wheels and levers throwing off steam. In an earlier scene in
which Treves ministers to the victim of a grotesque industrial accident,
Lynch has shown how modern machinery produces its own monstrous
calamities of the flesh. Like mad elephants, machines, Treves observes,
are “indomitable things . . . You can’t reason with them.” The shared
unreason of organic nature and machinic culture is clearly the obscene
outside of Merrick’s humanity, haunted by both its thingly, inhuman
exterior and its status as mechanical second nature.
Lynch tends to understand broken windows dialectically: they be-
lie the transparent self of the Enlightenment, but they also serve as
media for mysterious correspondences between human and inhuman
orders. This is one way to consider the conclusion of The Elephant Man.
The sequence follows Merrick’s final trip to the theater, which would
crown the achievement of his humanity and his social normalization
by changing the terms of his relationship to spectacle. In his opera box
high above the stage, Merrick is a fully humanized, empowered seer
who looks through opera glasses at a magnificent Victorian spectacle
that seems to unfold just for him. Mrs. Kendal clarifies this when she
emerges at the end of the performance to dedicate it to Merrick, and
when Merrick stands in his box to accept the crowd’s applause, he is, in
reverse angle, looked at yet again. This time, presumably, the spectacu-
larization is benevolent; Merrick is finally enjoying himself in public.
We fade to Merrick’s room, after the performance, where an excited
Merrick relives moments of the performance, and Treves promises to
take him there again. When Treves leaves, Merrick takes his seat by
the window. With a gentle breeze rustling the window curtains, Mer-

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 rick signs his name to the completed simulacrum of St. Philips, and
Lynch’s camera, in close-up, traces the magnificent arches, windows,
and spires of Merrick’s own making before Merrick stands, gazes twice
at the image of the sleeping girl across the room, and lies down in his
bed, ending his life. The camera pans slowly across the photographs of
Mrs. Kendal and Merrick’s mother at his bedside, lifts over his church,
and holds at the open window. We fade to a starry sky, in which first the
voice and then the face of Merrick’s mother appears against an eclipsed
sun. The mother’s stilled, photographic face is magically, cinematically
reanimated, pronouncing that “Nothing will die.”
The ending’s transcendent gesture is a cinematic solution to the ar-
chitectural problem of the broken window—here the historical failures
of the category of the human. Merrick’s humanity, within Victorian ar-
chitectural protocols of care and curiosity, is impossible. His last human
act is not the completion of a successful work of the imagination but a
failed performance. Rather than stabilize Merrick’s humanity, Lynch’s
window opens a gap between the “John Merrick” who signs the built
church, and thus confirms the human as homo faber, and “John Mer-
rick” as a botched performance of bourgeois humanity and its deadly
nineteenth-century limits. The window fails as a technology of human
interior but succeeds in opening webs of relationships with a network of
fantastic, inhuman outsides—solar eclipses, or the stagey implosion of
a cloud of smoke, or dead mothers made cinematically alive. Transcen-
dence, the promise of immortality, is the ideological compensation for
the cruel materialism and determinism of Victorian life, and its medium
is cinema, a virtual window.

Sexy Tchotchke: Blue Velvet

The dream of total design that Lynch first fulfilled with Eraserhead
during its four-year-long production on back lots of the American Film
Institute, and that collapsed so spectacularly in the big-budget debacle
of Dune (1984), would be realized again in the astonishing degree of
creative control he exercised over Blue Velvet. For better or worse,
Blue Velvet persists as Lynch’s masterpiece. It is also the film in which
Lynch’s idiosyncratic style of interior design becomes typical, hardening
into a glossy adjective: after Blue Velvet, certain kinds of rooms, verging
on self-parody, will inevitably be described as “Lynchian.” Their quirky

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 collections of objects, textures, and details of decor will be read as recur-
ring, directorial obsessions. One can’t not be fascinated by Blue Velvet’s
details. As Pauline Kael noted in her approving review of the film, the
style is so theatrical, so flagrant, that “you feel as if you’re seeing every
detail of the architecture, the layout of homes and apartments, the fur-
nishings and potted plants, the women’s dresses. It’s so hyperfamiliar it’s
scary . . . The style might be described as hallucinatory clinical realism.”20
The intense debates sparked by Blue Velvet over the last few de-
cades—debates dominated by the question of Lynch’s postmodernism
and, relatedly, the nature of his overt interest in gender, sexuality, and
erotic desire—hinge on the politics of room tone. How exactly should
we interpret the ambivalent atmospheres of Blue Velvet’s well-built en-
vironments? How to feel about their surfaces and psychological depths?
Consider one influential answer, Fredric Jameson’s landmark reading,
“Nostalgia for the Present.” Jameson’s interpretation dwells on the de-
sign of Blue Velvet’s most conspicuous interior: Dorothy Vallens’s (Isa-
bella Rossellini) room at the Deep River Apartments. This is, of course,
the room where young Jeffrey Beaumont’s (Kyle MacLachlan) drama of
sexual maturation unfolds so theatrically over the course of the film, but
Jameson is particularly interested in Lynch’s final staging of this space.
Jeffrey’s curiosity as an amateur detective having merged with his taste
for perversion, and brought him deep “in the middle of [the] mystery”
of Blue Velvet’s shaggy-dog criminal plot, Jeffrey returns inexplicably
to Dorothy’s apartment. He finds there a deathly tableau ringed about
the floor of the singer’s living room: Detective Gordon, or “The Yellow
Man” as Jeffrey has dubbed him, stands, dead but uncannily erect, posi-
tioned between a smashed television set, encased in wood, and another
relic of the fifties—a floor lamp with a black lacquered bell shade. The
Yellow Man’s frozen body is turned toward Dorothy’s once-kidnapped
and now-quite-dead husband, Don. Dead Don is seated in a chair—his
brains splattered on Dorothy’s Formica kitchen counter behind him, his
severed ear visible, and a scrap of Dorothy’s blue velvet robe protruding
from his open mouth.
For Jameson, this monstrous interior is nothing less than Lynch’s
conservative parable of the “end of the sixties” itself: “What Blue Velvet
gives us to understand about the sixties . . . is that despite the grotesque
and horrendous tableaux of maimed bodies, this kind of evil is more

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 distasteful than it is fearful, more disgusting than threatening: here,
evil has finally become an image, and the simulated replay of the fifties
has generalized itself into a whole simulacrum in its own right.”21 This
room’s stagey collection of inert bodies and outmoded furniture contains
the threatening political energies and affects of the ’60s by converting
them to a static image bereft of historicity. In the process, “the end of
theories of transgression,” the politics of the 1960s are aestheticized in
their conversion to furniture—distasteful, even disgusting, but noth-
ing to really worry about. A wax museum of transgression-cum-kitsch,
Vallens’s apartment, for Jameson, is of a piece with the gothic shelter
of small-town Lumberton itself, “lovingly preserved in its details like a
simulacrum or Disneyland under glass somewhere.”22
The political aesthetics of Lynch’s interiors come up rather short for
Jameson. But isn’t that kitsch doing its job? Kitsch always poses the prob-
lem of aesthetic inadequacy, of art falling short of its capacity for power-
ful, “transgressive” sensations in a cool, postmodern world of flat affect.
It is a quintessentially modern problem, connected to the post-Romantic
fall of aesthetic experience from transcendence to immanence—now the
product of tangible, finite works of art. But also, in the form of camp, it
encodes a more transgressive historical relationship between aesthetic
and erotic object choices, recalling a mid-century queer sensibility that
would became a crucial aspect of the radical political energies of the
1960s. Blue Velvet’s kitschy mise-en-scène is the primary terrain of the
film’s aestheticization, its irony, and its investigation of the false bound-
aries—aesthetic and sexual—between “normal” and “perverse” taste.
This, in part, makes it one of Lynch’s most Hitchcockian films, continu-
ing Hitch’s aestheticist associations between artifice itself and “human
sexuality that is deemed incipiently perverse.”23 Kitsch is the sign, in the
domain of taste, of Blue Velvet’s denaturalizing of heterosexual domestic-
ity, of the home’s campy becoming plastic. Its final false robin is as queer
as Hitchcock’s antisocial avian attacks. In this way the persistence of the
1950s in the 1980s of Blue Velvet can be understood less as nostalgia
for an earlier, simpler time of American cultural and family life than as
a knowing micro-history of the mid-century psychologizing of interior
design and its reformulation of the seemingly boundless “nature” of
bourgeois taste and bourgeois sexuality.

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 Some of Lynch’s favorite architects and designers, like Charles and
Ray Eames and the émigré Viennese architect Richard Neutra, partici-
pated actively in the mid-century’s broader transformation of modernist
architectural and design principles. Postwar architecture and design in
the United States saw the modernist formal orthodoxies of functionalism
and rational efficiency give way to a new interest in domestic pleasure.
If a certain dominant strand of modernist architecture of the 1920s
and 1930s fetishized the pure, universal space of an abstract void, mid-
century designers rethought domestic spaces as dynamic environments.
The “affective mise-en-scènes” of domesticity, in Silvia Lavin’s terms,
were “traversed, constrained, polluted, agitated, modified by a whole
range of forces.”24 Central to this shift was the popularization and do-
mestication of psychoanalysis in the Unites States in the postwar period,
where, in the work of Neutra and others, it developed a new relationship
to architectural practice. Now competing with interior designers like the
Eameses, catering to an exploding middle class, the modern architect
was himself rethought of as a kind of haute bourgeois collector. The
postwar shockwaves that followed from modern architecture’s new at-
tention to the habits of middle-class consumption and taste were also
felt at the normally elitist CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture
Moderne). In the immediate postwar years, the CIAM hosted intense
debates about whether and how postwar architecture might expand
its vocabulary of forms to make room for the “common man,” so that
“peoples’ emotional needs can find expression in the design of their
environment.”25 As Yoke-Sum Wong explains, the CIAM meetings of
1946 and 1949 were haunted by Clement Greenberg’s seminal essay,
“The Avant-Garde and Kitsch”; at the heart of the matter, in other words,
was the conflict between a new “postwar egalitarian sentiment” about
modern design and the “fear of architecture sliding downward into or-
dinariness and ultimately kitsch.”26
Like young Jeffrey himself, Blue Velvet’s interiors undergo a sort
of trial by kitsch, but without sacrificing affective complexity to cheap
sensation in the process. Greenberg’s famous, modernist indictment of
kitsch decries its “self-evident meanings,” its tendency to “pre-digest
art for the spectator and spares him of effort, provid[ing] him with a
short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult

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 in genuine art.” Kitsch, for Greenberg, is plastic—“synthetic” art that
provides “vicarious experience for the insensitive with far greater imme-
diacy” than real art.27 Kitsch is all happiness and sensation with no work.
And yet in Lynch’s case, rather than waning or burning out, room tone
increases in intensity and complication in the presence of pseudo-art—
no easy trick, but one mastered by Lynch. In fact, avant-garde sensation
(shock, disgust, horror, unease) and bourgeois sentimentalism become
inextricably tied in Blue Velvet’s exploration of their shared hedonism
and obscured complicity in matters of taste and fantasy.
As a moment in the history of modern design, Lynch’s “fifties”
names a broader transition through which modernist architecture scraps
avant-garde austerity for bourgeois pleasure. As the mid-century home
is warmed up, turned into a dynamic environment, and made newly
moody through a widespread middle-class taste for Eames chairs and
Freud alike, it merges fitfully with the enveloping coziness of middle-
brow culture, sentimentality, and bourgeois contentment. This histori-
cal fact helps make sense of Lynch’s otherwise curious response to the
question of what kinds of modern architecture most impress him: “I like
Bauhaus,” Lynch answers, “that kind of pure, formal thing. I like grey
rooms that have nothing in them except a couple of pieces of furniture
that are just right for a person to sit there. And then, when the person
sits there, you really see the contrast, and then the room looks very good
and the person looks very interesting. Architecture is really the most
fantastic thing.”28 Why, one might ask, would the creator of some of
cinema’s moodier, more irrational films single out for praise this school
of modernist rationalism if he didn’t somehow understand avant-garde
minimalism and kitschy maximalism as always dialectically bound? This,
then, is the dilemma of sensibility raised by Blue Velvet’s interior design
and its minimal ornamentation: what happens to the powerful sensations
and uncanny feelings of modern interiors when psychoanalysis itself
goes mainstream and becomes its own form of kitsch?
The film’s narrative arc is most often described as a too-familiar
masculine coming-of-age story, one that courts banality and cliché at
every turn and yet manages to produce something both strange and
familiar. Jeffrey Beaumont’s arc of maturation begins with the traumatic
collapse of his father, the victim of some unaccountable seizure while
watering the family lawn, which brings young Jeffrey home from col-

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