David Lynch

This review ran on much longer than I wanted it to, so here's the upshot, up front:1. The update chapter to the 2nd edition ("Bridge-Man") is not worthy of Chion at his best. I believe you would not be missing anything by purchasing the first edition (~1995, with Isabella Rossellini aka Dorothy on the cover) instead of this somewhat expensive 2nd edition (2006). I have seen the first edition, used, for a small fraction of the 2nd edition price. I am pleased that I learned the phrase "vaguely orgiastic party" from this addendum, though I'm not sure when I'll have the chance to use it next.2. It might be useful to read the "Lynch-Kit" chapter first, then the rest of the book.My longwinded review:The other customer reviews here are a little out of date, simply because I think they were all posted before the second English edition (2006) came out. As far as I can tell from Chion's own comments in the book, the only real additions to the second edition are an updated filmography (through "Rabbits" and some miscellany through ~2005), and a 32-page extra chapter called "Bridge-Man", with reflections on LOST HIGHWAY, STRAIGHT STORY, and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. I thought that this update chapter to the Lynch book was almost _worthless_. There's far too much pure description (and not useful or particularly suggestive, "phenomenological" description) of the narrative events of the films; the way this is done is pointless for those who have picked up the book, because they almost certainly have seen all the films discussed more than once, and by 2006 I believe almost everything by Lynch was easily accessible on DVD. Perhaps not LOST HIGHWAY? I cannot remember.It really pains me to say this, because there's so much that Chion could have said and _done_ with these later films...and done better than most of the English-language writers I've read on Lynch, thus far. I'd like to emphasize my enjoyment and admiration for much of Chion's writing, in the past---including monographs and essay collections like THE VOICE IN CINEMA, AUDIO-VISION, and FILM: A SOUND ART---because the missed opportunity to get deeper into Lynch's film-world really seems like an anomalous mistake on his part. More time should have been allowed to pass, and then we might have also gotten an investigation of the troubling and provocative and deeply strange INLAND EMPIRE, which is probably well worth its own chapter, if not its own book. The wild popularity of Lynch in academic circles alone could have justified a much larger book, without the wasted space devoted to completely superfluous film stills (actually mostly publicity/production photos, probably...used here to no avail whatsoever, not even as a supplement) and the rather superficial "re-telling" description of plot and events from the narrative dimension of the films.Honestly, my overall impression of the rest of the book is only somewhat better, though I can only say (in the limited space here) that Chion seldom seems to go deep enough. I might suggest reading his "Lynch-Kit" chapter first, which I found both the most abstract by far, and also most vertiginously exciting and suggestive, rather closer to poetry than "theory", though never tipping over into what I would personally disparage as pretention. In other words, the shattered, relentlessly cross-referenced sur-analysis (of the "Lynch-Kit"'s glossary) actually risks terminal glibness in its "glossy" approach, but for me succeeds in rendering the whole body of work through TPFWWM as a kind of luminous, cross-sectioned diorama. It has the effect of time-lapse photography. "Abstraction" is a word that the seemingly honest but inarticulate Lynch has used frequently, as something he courts/likes in cinema, as a possibility of cinema. Maybe I like the "Lynch-Kit" chapter so much because it seems determined to distill this quality---"abstraction", but in a special sense---in a way that almost seems....archetypical?Though I hate to say this merely in passing, my sense of Chion's "ethical" engagement with Lynch's work (which seems to be articulated in many ways, among them the insistence that one attend to the content and images "literally", not as an occasion for scoffing at Lynch's characters and/or Lynch himself and/or whatever) is something that makes me like Chion very much, and trust him all the more as a writer and thinker. The same ethical concern comes through in David Foster Wallace's very entertaining and somewhat interesting (but maddeningly and obesely chatty) long essay on Lynch (found in its entirety in the A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING... collection), though there it amounts to little more than some hand-wringing and raw assertion about the "true", which isn't very helpful. Chion doesn't spell this sense out terribly much more clearly, but he repeatedly returns to it in a way that becomes suggestive rather than prescriptive; and I value his writing immensely for this quality, especially since he's writing (still!) in and perhaps against a veritable ocean of corrosive and ethically-/politically-questionable antihumanism, just as Jean Renoir was.

Chion, who is a critic for Cahiers du cinema as well as an experimental composer, is the author of several exemplary works of film theory (including Voice in Cinema and a wonderful monograph on Kubrick's 2001; the one notable exception is his short book on Eyes Wide Shut, which is a bit of a stinker). Academics may not find his work theoretical enough, and lay audiences may find them too theoretical, but, for me, they are a perfect mixture of concrete analysis and speculation: one leads to the other and back again.It is not surprising, considering Chion's interest in sound and sound/image relations (AudioVision is the title of one of his earliest books), that he would be drawn to the cinema of David Lynch. Lynch, of course, is known not only for collaborating on some of the music (writing lyrics for Angelo Badalamenti) but for designing his own sound mixes.The first four sections cover, in roughly chronological order, all the films from Eraserhead to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The final section, "Lynch-Kit: From Alphabet to Word," is arranged around a series of Lynchian subjects/motifs, listed in alphabetical order, and is the highlight of the book. Chion's observations here are inspired (see, for example, his comments on Lynch's idiosyncratic use of reaction shots in "Reaction"). Although his books ends with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, it is not hard to see how the Lynch-Kit could be extended to include everything which follows, and not by way of "explaining" them (and thereby containing the Lynchian universe) but by allowing them to resonate and continue to grow, to proliferate.An excellent book, which, by the way,is neither a biography nor in Spanish!

as well as a very detailed analysis of his early art and ideas, only draw back, no "lost highway" chapter

Todd McGowan's essay on INLAND EMPIRE is unsatisfactory with little understanding of the film. He offers no verifiable explanation of anything in the film and instead fumbles in the dark in his attempts to apply theory. He refers to meaning behind the AXXoNN formula as unknowable when it has already been explained in my work on the film to the satisfaction of all who have read it.