An edited version of Tom McCarthy’s brilliant Tate Modern talk on “The Prosthetic Imagination of David Lynch” appears in this week’s New Statesman:
“…Deformity, for Lynch, is not simply thematic: it is instrumental. In his films, what the continual, almost systematic replacement of body parts and faculties by instruments — crutches, wheelchairs, hearing aids and ever weirder apparatuses sometimes as large as rooms — produces is a whole prosthetic order, a world of which prosthesis is not just a feature, but a fundamental term, an ontological condition. And the implications of this world, this order, are, as Lynch himself might put it, big.
For Freud, prosthesis is the essence of technology. “With all his tools,” he writes in Civilisation and its Discontents, “man improves his own organs, both motor and sensory, or clears away the barriers to their functioning.” Ships, aeroplanes, telescopes and cameras, gramophones and telephones — all these afford man the omnipotence and omniscience he attributes to his gods, thus making him “ein Prothesengott”, a kind of god with artificial limbs, a prosthetic god. “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent,” Freud writes, “but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Man’s technological appendages both enhance and diminish him. It’s what Hal Foster, in his book Prosthetic Gods, calls “the double logic of the prosthesis”: an addition that threatens, or marks, a subtraction.
This double logic is writ large in Lynch’s films…
There is another way to think about prosthesis - as a form of puppetry. In his 1810 story-cum-essay “On the Marionette Theatre”, the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist recounts a meeting, at a fairground, with a choreographer who, watching marionettes being manipulated, marvelled at the way in which dance “could be entirely transferred to the realm of mechanical forces” and “controlled by a crank”. “Have you heard,” the choreographer asks the narrator, “of the artificial legs designed by English craftsmen for those unfortunates who have lost their limbs?” The implication is clear: prosthetic-clad man is like a puppet - which invites the question: who’s the puppeteer?
…For Kleist, puppetry lays bare a complex process through which man, robbed of the pure, naive grace of a puppet by self-consciousness, might regain it by advancing so far into knowledge that he re-emerges on the other side to “appear most pure in that human form which either has no consciousness at all or possesses infinite consciousness — that is, either in a marionette or in a god” — an event, the choreographer informs the narrator, that would constitute “the last chapter in the history of the world”.
…Wild at Heart’s main template is the ultimate cinematic fable of divinity and puppetry: the Wizard of Oz, who controls everything and can make all things happen, turns out, at the end of the Technicolor rainbow, to be no more than a feeble man cranking a crappy, low-tech, fairground-type contraption. Incredibly, mainstream commercial cinema managed to enact in 1939 the subversive fantasy that William Burroughs would spend decades toiling in the underground and avant-garde to formulate — the fantasy that the Control Room or Reality Studio that maintains the illusion that in turn conserves repressive order can be revealed for what it is, rumbled and blown open. For Burroughs, this day, when it arrives, will not only prompt panicked cries that “the director is on set”, but also herald the end of the film — the end of time, perhaps, and certainly the death of God (who, after all, is no more than a hack director, a degenerate crank-operator whose power over us makes “ventriloquist dummies” of us). Here, again, we come back to prosthesis: for Burroughs, God is like an irksome and unnecessary limb or organ.
…What’s this film [Lost Highway] about? The same as all of Lynch’s films: the outsourcing of the self and of reality to their prostheses — and the outsourcing of what is at once the triumph and catastrophe of God’s death to the prosthetic realm as well….”
First posted: Friday, January 8th, 2010.
