A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
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Hix’s obsessive attention to detail is perhaps justified, though, by the fact that Morte d’ Author aims to be more than just a compendium of views on the dead-author controversy. Hix promulgates his own theory of authorship, one that he claims clears up the debate and lays the foundation for a more sophisticated approach to literary criticism in the wake of deconstructionism’s plumeocide. Though his solution to the problem isn’t the universal solvent he leads the reader to expect, his project is still a neat example of that modern commissure where Continental theory and analytic practice fuse. What Hix offers as a resolution to the debate is a combination of a Derridean metaphysics that rejects assumptions of unified causal presence and a Wittgensteinian analytic method of treating actual habits of discourse as a touchstone for figuring out what certain terms really mean and do.
Hix, early in his summary of modern theories about the author, divides the extant views into two opposed camps. The anti-death guys still see the author as the “origin” / “cause” of a text, and the pro-death guys see the author as the “function” / “effect” of a text. Hix posits that both sides of the debate “mistake… one aspect of the author for the whole.” All the debaters have oversimplified what “author” really means. They’ve done this because they’ve made what Hix calls “the assumption of homogeneity,” simplistically regarding “author” as referring to “a unitary entity or phenomenon.” If we examine the way “author” is really used in critical discourse, Hix argues, we are forced to see the word’s denotation as really a complex interaction of the activities of the “historical writer” (the guy with the pencil), that writer’s influences and circumstances, the narrative persona adopted in a text, the extant text itself, the critical atmosphere that surrounds and informs the interpretation of the text, the individual reader’s actual interpretations of the text, and even the beliefs and actions consequent to that interpretation. In other words, the entire post-1968 squabble has been pointless, because the theorists involved haven’t bothered to consider what “author” truly means and embraces before they set about interring or resuscitating the patient.
The wicked fun here is to watch how Hix uses the deconstructtionists’ own instruments against them. Derrida’s attack on the presumption of metaphysical presence in literary expression forms Hix’s blueprint for attacking the assumption of homogeneity, and Hix’s attempt to “undermine” and “overturn” an essentially binary opposition of author-as-cause v. author-as-effect is a textbook poststructural move. What’s more original and more interesting is Hix’s use of a kind of Austin/Wittgenstein ordinary-language analysis on the extension of the predicate “author.” Instead of joining his teachers in the metaphysical stratosphere they zoom around in, Hix quite plausibly suggests that we examine how smart readers really do use the term “author” in various kinds of critical discourse in order to figure out what the nature of the beast is before we whip out the spade or the de-fib paddles. His project, as he outlines it, seems both sensible and fun to watch.
Hix’s actual analysis of author-ity is way less sensible and way way less fun. For one thing, his actual argumentation is wildly uneven. In the same breath, he’ll recommend identification as necessary for determining viability, then say that a thorough definition of “author” is prima facie important because no satisfactory theory of text and reading is possible until there’s a solid theory of the author, which begs the poststructuralists’ whole question of whether a text even requires an author in order to be and to mean. Hix clearly does think a text requires an author, and so what pretends to be a compromise between the Bury-Him and the Save-Him camps is really a sneaky pro-life apology.
But the incredibly baroque definition of “author” Hix comes up with by the book’s final chapter, “Post-Mortem,” seems finally to commit the very homicide Barthes called for. The difference is that where Barthes simply argued that the idea of an author is now for critical purposes otiose, Hix so broadens the denotation of “author” that the word ceases really to identify anything. Nouns, after all, are supposed to pick things out. But while Hix claims that “to deny the assumption of homogeneity, though it entails that the historical writer is not the exclusive locus of meaning, does not entail that meaning has no locus,” he ends up preserving the idea of a meaning-locus by making that locus such a swirling soup of intricate actions and conditions and relations that he essentially erases the author by making the denotation of his signifier vacuous. It ends up being a kind of philosophical Westmorelandism: Hix destroys the author in order to save him.
Though his conclusions do not resolve the problem they address, Hix’s attempts to organize and defend them yield some impressive scholarly writing. He has a rare gift for the neat assembly of different sides of questions, and his complex theory has the virtue of being able to account for many of the ambiguities in the way we do in fact make such claims as that Luke is the author of the third Gospel, Jefferson is the author of the Declaration of Independence, George Eliot is the author of Middlemarch, and Franklin W. Dixon is the author of The Hardy Boys at Skeleton Cove. His section on “Schizoscription” is a fascinating discussion of the “implied author” in first-person persona-lit like Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” and it affords, believe it or not, a genuinely intelligible theory of how irony works. And ingenious examples, like that of the brain-damaged patient in A. R. Luria’s The Man with the Shattered World who could write but not read what he wrote, not only help Hix argue against the notion that the writer is the ultimate “insider” with respect to his own work, they’re also just plain cool.
It’s Hix’s flair for images and examples that may make Morte d’ Author of interest to general lit.-lovers. His prose is often witty and conversational, and his talent for constructing test cases offers a welcome relief from the painstaking academic detail he tends to fall into. I’m not sure just how much familiarity with twentieth-century literary theory the book requires. Hix does, roundaboutly, give most of the background to the dead-author conundrum. But a reader who’s not comfortable with ghastly jargon like Foucault’s “The conception of écriture sustains the privileges of the author through the safeguard of the a priori” is going to get flummoxed, because Hix tends to toss quotations like this around without much gloss. It’s finally hard for me to predict just whom, besides professional critics and hardcore theory-wienies, 226 dense pages on whether the author lives is really going to interest. For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane. As William (anti-death) Gass observes in Habitations of the Word, critics can try to erase or over-define the author into anonymity for all sorts of technical, political, and philosophical reasons, and “this ‘anonymity’ may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it.”
1992
David Lynch keeps his head
1 what movie this article is about
David Lynch’s Lost Highway, written by Lynch and Barry Gifford, featuring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty. Financed by CIBY 2000, France. ©1996 by one Asymmetrical Productions, Lynch’s company, whose offices are right next door to Lynch’s own house in the Hollywood Hills and whose logo, designed by Lynch, is a very cool graphic that looks like this:
Lost Highway is set in Los Angeles and the desertish terrain immediately inland from it. Actual shooting goes from December ’95 through February ’96. Lynch normally runs a Closed Set, with redundant security arrangements and an almost Masonic air of secrecy around his movies’ productions, but I am allowed onto the Lost Highway set on 8–10 January 1996. This is not just because I’m a fanatical Lynch fan from way back, though I did make my pro-Lynch fanaticism known when the Asymmetrical people were trying to decide whether to let a writer onto the set. The fact is I was let onto Lost Highway’s set because of Premiere magazine’s industry juice, and because there’s rather a lot at stake for Lynch and Asymmetri
cal on this movie (see Section 5), and they probably feel like they can’t afford to indulge their allergy to PR and the Media Machine quite the way they have in the past.
2 what David Lynch is really like
I have absolutely no idea. I rarely got closer than five feet away from him and never talked to him. One of the minor reasons Asymmetrical Productions let me onto the set is that I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview somebody and saw no real point in trying to interview Lynch, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed while Lost Highway was in production, because when he’s shooting a movie he’s incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little attention or brain-space available for anything other than the movie. This may sound like PR bullshit, but it turns out to be true—e.g.:
The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. I am not kidding. This is on 8 January in West LA’s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. Lynch is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the Base Camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee-drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take him to run down the Base Camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first sight of Lynch is only from the back, and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway’s cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch’s urinating in public, and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.
trivia tidbit: what movie people on location sets call the special trailer that houses the bathrooms
“The Honeywagon.”
3 entertainments David Lynch has created/directed that are mentioned in this article
Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1989), two televised seasons of Twin Peaks (1990–92), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), and the mercifully ablated TV program On the Air (1992).
4 other renaissance-mannish things he’s done
Has directed music videos for Chris Isaak; has directed the theater-teaser for Michael Jackson’s lavish 30-minute “Dangerous” video; has directed commercials for Klein’s Obsession, Saint-Laurent’s Opium, Alka-Seltzer, the National Breast Cancer Campaign, 1 and New York City’s new Garbage Collection Program. Has produced Into the Night, an album by Julee Cruise of songs cowritten by Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, songs that include the Twin Peaks theme and Blue Velvet’s “Mysteries of Love.” 2 Had for a few years a weekly L.A. Reader comic strip, “The Angriest Dog in the World.” Has cowritten with Badalamenti (who’s also doing the original music for Lost Highway) Industrial Symphony #1, the 1990 video of which features Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern and Julee Cruise and the hieratic dwarf from Twin Peaks and topless cheerleaders and a flayed deer, and which sounds pretty much like the title suggests it would—IS# 1 was also performed live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1992, to somewhat mixed reviews. Has had a bunch of gallery shows of his Abstract Expressionist paintings, reviews of which have been rather worse than mixed. Has codirected, with James Signorelli, 1992’s 3 Hotel Room, a feature-length video of vignettes all set in one certain room of an NYC railroad hotel, a hoary mainstream conceit ripped off from Neil Simon and sufficiently Lynchianized in Hotel Room to be then subsequently rip-offable by Tarantino et posse in 1995’s Four Rooms. Has published Images (Hyperion, 1993, $40.00), a sort of coffee-table book consisting of movie stills, prints of Lynch’s paintings, and some of Lynch’s art photos (some of which art photos are creepy and moody and sexy and cool and some of which are just photos of spark plugs and dental equipment and seem kind of dumb 4 ).
5 this article’s special focus or “angle” w/r/t Lost Highway, suggested (not all that subtly) by certain editorial presences at Premiere magazine
With the smash Blue Velvety a Palme d’Or at Cannes for Wild at Heart, and then the national phenomenon of Twin Peaks’s first season, David Lynch clearly established himself as the U.S.A.’s foremost avant-garde / commercially viable avant-garde / “offbeat” director, and for a while there it looked like he might be able single-handedly to broker a new marriage between art and commerce in U.S. movies, opening formula-frozen Hollywood to some of the eccentricity and vigor of art film.
Then 1992 saw Twin Peaks’s unpopular second season, the critical and commercial failure of Fire Walk with Me, and the bottomlessly horrid On the Air, which was euthanized by ABC after six very long-seeming weeks. This triple whammy had critics racing back to their PC’s to re-evaluate Lynch’s whole oeuvre. The former subject of a Time cover-story in 1990 became the object of a withering ad hominem backlash, stuff like the LA. Weekly’s: “Hip audiences assume Lynch must be satiric, but nothing could be further [sic] from the truth. He isn’t equipped for critiquing [sic] anything, satirically or otherwise; his work doesn’t pass through any intellectual checkpoints. One reason so many people say ‘Huh?’ to his on-screen fantasies is that the director himself never does.”
So the obvious “Hollywood Insider”-type question w/r/t Lost Highway is whether the movie is going to rehabilitate Lynch’s reputation. This is a legitimately interesting question, although, given the extreme unpredictability of the sorts of forces that put people on Time covers, it’s probably more realistic to shoot for whether LH ought to put Lynch back on top of whatever exactly it was he was on top of. For me, though, a more interesting question ended up being whether David Lynch really gives much of a shit about whether his reputation is rehabilitated or not. The impression I get from rewatching his movies and from hanging around his latest production is that he doesn’t, much. This attitude—like Lynch himself, like his work—seems to me to be both admirable and sort of nuts.
6 what Lost Highway is apparently about
According to Lynch’s own blurb on the title page of the script’s circulating copy, it’s
A 21st Century Noir Horror Film
A graphic investigation into parallel identity crises
A world where time is dangerously out of control
A terrifying ride down the lost highway
which is a bit overheated, prose-wise, maybe, but was probably put there as a High-Concept sound-bite for potential distributors or something. The spiel’s second line is what comes closest to describing Lost Highway, though “parallel identity crises” seems like kind of an uptown way of saying the movie is about somebody literally turning into somebody else. And this, despite the many new and different things about Lost Highway, makes the movie almost classically Lynchian—the theme of multiple/ambiguous identity has been almost as much a Lynch trademark as ominous ambient noises on his soundtracks.
7 last bit of (6) used as a segue into a quick sketch of Lynch’s genesis as a heroic auteur
However concerned with fluxes in identity his movies are, David Lynch has remained remarkably himself throughout his filmmaking career. You could probably argue it either way—that Lynch hasn’t compromised/sold out, or that he hasn’t grown all that much in twenty years of making movies—but the fact remains that Lynch has held fast to his own intensely personal vision and approach to filmmaking, and that he’s made significant sacrifices in order to do so. “I mean come on, David could make movies for anybody,” says Tom Sternberg, one of Lost Highway’s producers. “But David’s not part of the Hollywood Process. He makes his own choices about what he wants. He’s an artist.”
This is essentially true, though like most artists Lynch has not been without patrons. It was on the strength of Eraserhead that Mel Brooks’s production company hired Lynch to make The Elephant Man in 1980, and that movie earned Lynch an Oscar nomination and was in turn the reason that no less an ur-Hollywood-Process figure than Diño De Laurentiis picked Lynch to make the film adaptation of Fra
nk Herbert’s Dune, offering Lynch not only big money but a development deal for future projects with De Laurentiis’s production company.
1984’s Dune is unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch’s career, and it’s pretty darn bad. In some ways it seems that Lynch was miscast as its director: Eraserhead had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history, and its production staff was the size of a small Caribbean nation, and the movie involved lavish and cutting-edge special effects (half the fourteen-month shooting schedule was given over to miniatures and stop-action). Plus Herbert’s novel itself is incredibly long and complex, and so besides all the headaches of a major commercial production financed by men in Ray-Bans Lynch also had trouble making cinematic sense of the plot, which even in the novel is convoluted to the point of pain. In short, Dune’s direction called for a combination technician and administrator, and Lynch, though as good a technician as anyone in film, 5 is more like the type of bright child you sometimes see who’s ingenious at structuring fantasies and gets totally immersed in them but will let other kids take part in them only if he retains complete imaginative control over the game and its rules and appurtenances—in short very definitely not an administrator.
Watching Dune again on video you can see that some of its defects are clearly Lynch’s responsibility, e.g. casting the nerdy and potato-faced Kyle MacLachlan as an epic hero and the Police’s resoundingly unthespian Sting as a psycho villain, or—worse—trying to provide plot exposition by having characters’ thoughts audibilized (w/ that slight thinking-out-loud reverb) on the soundtrack while the camera zooms in on the character making a thinking-face, a cheesy old device that Saturday Night Live had already been parodying for years when Dune came out. The overall result is a movie that’s funny while it’s trying to be deadly serious, which is as good a definition of a flop as there is, and Dune was indeed a huge, pretentious, incoherent flop. But a good part of the incoherence is the responsibility of De Laurentiis’s producers, who cut thousands of feet of film out of Lynch’s final print right before the movie’s release, apparently already smelling disaster and wanting to get the movie down to more like a normal theatrical running-time. Even on video, it’s not hard to see where a lot of these cuts were made; the movie looks gutted, unintentionally surreal.