‘I Kinda Like to Go Off the Track’: Finding David Lynch in the Middle World of Dune

For many scholars of David Lynch’s work, Dune is considered a spectacular failure, a costly creative misstep on the way to Blue Velvet. While it may not be regarded as one of his signature films, Dune contains enough of Lynch’s creative personality to warrant a critical re-examination. The purpose of this study is to place Dune within the context of his earlier work, namely Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, and to mine it for those tropes with which Lynch has become synonymous: enabling the grotesque, interiority and the unconscious mind, and the relationship between industry and flesh. By the director’s own admission, Dune forced him into an aesthetic middle world, wedging him between the midnight movie and mainstream cinema. Using Thomas Leitch’s theory of adaptation in both an archival and teleological reading of Dune, I demonstrate how Lynch asserts himself in this middle world, how he succeeds in honouring the source material while also meeting his authorial desire to reinvent it, to decouple from the archive and ‘go off the track’.

The beauty in the beast and the beast in the beauty. The voyeur’s view

This paper would like to analyse two films, The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1981) and Blow up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) and one classic myth, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, through the very poignant figure of the voyeur. We will investigate this observer of the unnamable focusing on two characters, two eyewitnesses: the scientist who discovers John Merrick and the photographer who becomes obsessed with finding a corpse in an amplified picture. Both these voyeurs seem to be in search of the bewitching and sublime darkness that lies within, a search that in a way is inaugurated by the Promethean doctor at the break of Modernity. The corporeal distance between monster and voyeur creates the unbearable morbidity that devours our gaze. And at that exact point, the figures are reversed and the voyeur becomes the actual monster. Soon enough, we discover that their perspective as voyeurs becomes ours, because through the cinematic experience the spectator becomes witness of the crime, part of the freak show, morbid viewer of the abject. Lynch and Antonioni, together with Shelley’s creature and creator, put the question of the body through a microscope and dare us spectators to look inside, to find the morbidity of truth and the limits of art.

“We understand each other, my friend”. The freak show and Victorian medicine in "The Elephant Man"

A large part of David Lynch’s oeuvre centres around corporeal anxieties and grotesque, divergent bodies drawing attention to their own biological nature. One such example is the 1980 feature "The Elephant Man", focusing on John Merrick, a freak show performer severely afflicted with a disfiguring disease. The film juxtaposes key characters in the film and moves between their different perspectives: that of Merrick, a freak show performer; Doctor Treves, a man of science; Bytes, an entertainer; and finally, a number of peripheral observers from both the high and low classes of Victorian society. The titular Elephant Man’s disfigured body becomes the object of spectacle both in a freak show and in a medical lecture theatre. This paper compares scenes presenting Merrick’s body as an exhibit and argues that Lynch draws parallels between the domain of sensational entertainment (Merrick as a carnival monster) and scientific analysis (Merrick as a medical specimen). In this way, the film highlights the similarities between the perception of the body in those two seemingly incongruous discourses. I suggest that the exhibition of a monstrous body in The Elephant Man, both in the context of a sideshow and Victorian medical lecture, are consciously theatrical.

O sound design de Alan Splet para David Lynch sob a perspectiva do horror fílmico

Resumo O sound designer americano Alan Splet (1939-1994) participou da produção de 25 filmes. Com o diretor David Lynch, criou efeitos sonoros e ambiências mais livres de vínculos com a verossimilhança. Eles trabalharam juntos no curta-metragem The grandmother (1970) e nos longas-metragens Eraserhead (1977), O homem elefante (The elephant man, 1980), Duna (Dune, 1984) e Veludo azul (Blue velvet, 1986). A forte influência surrealista na filmografia de Lynch estimulou soluções de Splet que se assemelham ao trabalho de som do gênero cinematográfico do horror, o que se reconhece até na recente temporada de 2017 da série de TV Twin Peaks, com direção e sound design do próprio cineasta. Este artigo aborda os procedimentos de edição de som mais usuais na filmografia desse gênero, comparados à edição de efeitos sonoros desse sound designer.

The Weirding Way: The Makers of Dune

This chapter talks about the production of David Lynch's Dune through the lens of the film's reputation, histories, and key players. It discusses the collaboration with El Topo director Alejandro Jodorowsky and famed French comic artist Jean 'Moebius' Giraud for the filming of Dune. It also recounts how the project for Dune sparked to life with the arrival of Lynch, who was fresh off the success of the Academy Award-nominated film The Elephant Man. The chapter mentions Lynch's reputation before and since Dune, which became part of its story, especially how the film sits both inside and outside a canonical view of his work. It outlines the events of the energetic phase that brought the Dune project to fruition.