(2025) 4

Notes on David Lynch







I
From Opposition to Transcendence





Having already fallen in love with David Lynch's art, how does one answer what love is? It is a mutual parody and entrance into each other; it is approaching art not as symbols, allegories, or puzzles to be decoded, but as a lover who is attracted to, accepts, and coexists with (Sontag, Against Interpretation, 8). Therefore for Lynch's work, one's viewing stance ought to be sensitive in presence, attentive to inner and sensual experience; as David Foster Wallace emphasized in his film review: “to be experienced rather than explained. (Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps his Head”)” One's critical stance ought likewise to be open and fluid, preserving a sense of “not being logically enclosed,” thus transcending binary-logic boundaries. Given this stance, this essay reads the oppositions presented in Lynch's short film Premonitions Following an Evil Deed -- good and evil, reality and illusion, light and darkness, the familiar and the unfamiliar -- as mirrored coexistences rather than logically exclusive binaries, bringing readers not into theoretical understanding but into a chaotic, transcendent sensory experience.

Opposition points toward transcendence, as Mircea Eliade states, “the coincidentia oppositorum in the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously... actual and potential. (Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, 449)” Take the moon as an example, simultaneously symbolizing death and rebirth. By containing opposing forces, it creates a “bothness” tension field, thereby unfolding an infinite extension that connects diverse matters: “birth, becoming, death, and resurrection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by a rebirth of lunar type... (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 156)” The tension of opposites opens a Coincidentia Oppositorum field of fusion and primordial unity, where all forms remain undifferentiated, enabling individuals to access infinite cosmic consciousness. Reality is thus revealed as only partial truth, while the sacred and the potential transcend opposition, bringing experiences of the sacred and the infinite. Lynch's Premonitions Following an Evil Deed can be experienced as a visual and psychological parody and reenactment of coincidentia oppositorum.   








i. Ambivalence

  •                            In Premonitions Following an Evil Deed, as in all Lynch's works (perhaps except Dune), the audience is placed in a state of perpetual oscillation and shifting between opposing elements. Heavenly visions and hellish spectacles intertwine: one moment immersed in a fairyland woven from nymphs, deer, and lush vegetation; the next plunged into the chilling torment at a freak show or scientific experiment. The visuals oscillate between light and dark: glimpses of the suffering female body in a dim perspective, flames suddenly flaring, blinding white light slicing the retina, then plunging the viewer back into darkness. Finally, the viewer is brought “home,” yet the familiar home feels strange under the burden of imagery; while the stranger in the window becomes eerily familiar. Within such ambivalence, there exists no certainty of resolution, no predictable narrative trajectory, and no rational, moral, or ethical safety barriers. The viewer is lured, rather than merely compelled, to oscillate between the poles of heaven and hell -- will this unknown protagonist / I ascend to paradise or descend into hell? Is what unfolds bliss or cruelty? The paradoxical entanglement of unheimlich and heimlich (Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”) extends an intimate invitation, summoning the viewer to discern, touch, even crave the shadow lurking in the light -- who is it? Stripped of all prior knowledge, the viewer stands naked and defenseless before the question. Within this oscillation where back and forth become mutual entrances, psyche and emotions are continuously destabilized, pushed to the brink until psychological defenses collapse.

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  • ii. Reversal of opposites: induces convulsions

  •                            André Breton's concept of convulsive beauty resonates with the principle of affective reversal of Freudian ambivalence, wherein emotion transforms into its opposite at extremes (Freud, Totem and Taboo, 57). When beauty ceases to be classical harmony and becomes convulsive on the mental and physical, manifesting as tremors, spasms, ruptures, explosions, and loss of control, extreme pleasure and wonder abruptly reverse into unease and dread; the moment of fascination reveals ugliness; at its most extreme, leads to its opposite (Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 120). Premonitions Following an Evil Deed is a microcosm. In a mere minute, the images shift abruptly, without logic, premonition, or NSFW warning, compelling the viewer to repeatedly cross the boundaries between light and dark, good and evil, life and death, heaven and hell, unheimlich and heimlich in an instant. The very rhythm of viewing is a convulsion. It strips away smooth continuity, turning film-watching into a series of irresistible jerks, twitches, and explosions. In the intervals of convulsions, the viewer's body is utterly engulfed. After that minute ends, the border of the screen begins to expand outward. The familiar room gradually stretches, chairs and corners losing their proportions. One recognizes it remains a room, yet senses it has overflowed all measure. Then, a trembling foreboding rises -- like fleeing in panic after lights-out on a childhood night, with nothing behind, yet sensing a threat lurking in the darkness, poised to erupt. Heimlich instantly subverts into unheimlich; safety transforms into menace. The image, a convulsive body, delivers irresistible tugs and caresses. And one’s body always convulses before reason: legs tremble, heart skips a beat, eyes shut in self-blindness -- surrendering before ever catching the shadow in the dark. 




  • iii. Surrender in convulsion: release unfolds

  •                             Instead of rational liberation, the release is a bodily surrender. Deprivation becomes an intimate entry. The viewer passively yet irresistibly opens oneself, coexisting, entangling, and merging with the images in a defenseless state, being drawn into the depths of experiencing the uncanny-infinite. After the initial viewing, this resonance persists in daily life: while cooking, writing, walking, bathing, lying in bed, or returning to dreams, familiar objects remain in a state of continuous sensory openness; the viewer is stranded in an unsealed, infinitely expanding space. Re-watching in this state of surrender, the voyeuristic impulse emerges -- the corpse and the nude in the vessel appear under wildly unstable light and camera movement, the viewer unconsciously leaning forward in one's seat, assuming the posture of a voyeur; simultaneously, abrupt, coarse metallic scrapes, jarring silences, and oppressive humming sound effects repeatedly sever the continuity of the soundscape, mimicking the viewer's act of peeping: a lift, a transgression, a closing, repeated. Thus, viewing becomes a full-body intrusion of voyeurism. It does not stem from an initial desire for possession, but rather an involuntary response after the subject is stripped bare; the image invades the body, and the body responds to the image with its own gaze. Finally, as a figure appears outside the window—both unfamiliar and familiar, or an overlap of both—the viewer leans forward again, as if to discern, approach, and draw near. Until the screen blacks out entirely, and in the blurred reflection of one's own face on the screen, the realization dawns that one has been drawn into a transgressive field. 


The reversal of opposites in Premonitions Following an Evil Deed plunges the audience into an extremely unstable liminal state. It is precisely within this state of loss, where the subject is lost “like water in water (Bataille, Theory of Religion, 23)”, that the conditions for traversing boundaries are granted: release, catharsis, transgression, and transcendence -- experiences converging with Freud's uncanny-infinite, Breton's marvelous, and ultimately Bataille's transcendence. 














II
Erect → Ejaculate → Prostrate






Opening Blue Velvet with the most mundane, innocent scene -- an old father, a hose, a dog -- David Lynch foreshadows the “erect-prostrate” mechanics of the entire film. At the outset, Jeffrey's father stands upright in the yard watering flowers: man erect, hose prostrate. As a phallic symbol, the hose still conforms to a state of natural equilibrium. This balance shatters abruptly when the father falls from a stroke. The camera executes the film’s first vertical-axis reversal: man prostrate, hose erect. The erect hose extends the man’s lost uprightness, as if releasing excess energy from his fallen body. Water jets upward in an unnatural vertical arc, no longer a functional flow of irrigation but an aimless expenditure. A dog soon runs in to bite the erect water jet, the animal horizontality breaking into the verticle structure in a comical yet destructive manner. This act severs the illusion of human elevation, constituting a mockery and castration of the erect posture. As Bataille writes in The Pineal Eye, "Human beings, tearing themselves from peaceful animal horizontality, at the cost of ignoble and painful efforts... have let themselves be polarized by the sky. (Bataille, Visions Of Excess, 83)” Man’s elevation is a symbol of reason, sovereignty, and spiritual ascent from animal horizontality through painful struggle. Lynch, however, inverts this elevation at the very beginning, where the erect symbol is devoured by animal return, collapsing verticality into a horizontal farce and mess.

This mechanical reversal establishes an underlying structural foundation for the entire film. Three core scenes -- rational erect in the voyeurism sequence, violent erect in the wasteland sequence, and induced erect in the copulation sequence -- each present a variant of vertical posture, together forming an energy trajectory: Erect → Ejaculate → Prostrate. Tracing this trajectory, the essay reveals the paradox of erecture in Blue Velvet: elevation no longer signifies transcendence but becomes the prelude to descent, as vertical sovereignty ultimately dissolves into horizontal coexistence.






a. From Rational Erect to Experiential Fall






  •                              The scene in which Jeffrey peeps at Dorothy in the closet is the most representative moment of “rational erect” in the film. Standing upright and holding his breath, his erect posture embodies not only the pleasure of scopophilia but also a detective-like drive of epistemophilia. Through this vertical and rational distance, he attempts to capture truth and position himself as an omniscient observer -- a subject of reason standing apart from the horizontal plane of narrative events. Yet the moment Dorothy discovers him, orders him at knifepoint to kneel, and pins him to the sofa, this erect stance collapses entirely. Jeffrey is transformed from vertical gazer to horizontal gazed-upon; the gaze structure reverses from vertical ( i.e., he watching her) to horizontal ( i.e., she subduing him). As Laura Mulvey notes in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, the cinematic gaze functions as a mechanism by which the male subject maintains control, a erect rational posture. Yet this control is inevitably undone by the very pleasure of being looked at, trapping the subject within the circuit of visual desire (Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”). Jeffrey’s collapse embodies this process: rational erect disintegrates under the intensity of experience, the elevation of gaze falling into bodily submission. 

                    When Frank enters the room, Jeffrey retreats back into the closet, resuming an erect stance in an effort to recover his rational detachment. Yet, as Bataille observes, the rational erect gaze resembles scrutinizing the sun. When one gazes directly through reason or faith into infinite light, the sun becomes horribly ugly, for the gaze itself is already a transgression; an attempt to internalize boundless energy as experience, ending in psychic and corporeal rupture: “a mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epileptic crisis. (Bataille, Visions Of Excess, 57)” Jeffrey’s epistemic gaze enacts precisely this transgressive logic. In trying to master truth through vision, to conquer the unknown, and convert the invisible into the visible, he is overwhelmed by the sensory excess of what he witnesses: Dorothy’s nakedness, violence, pain, and ecstasy. The rational erect implodes at its apex, its height collapsing into physical submission and sensual absorption.

                    After Frank’s departure, Jeffrey kneels to comfort and kiss Dorothy. This prostrate posture is not merely an act of pity or desire but signifies a fundamental shift in epistemic position: a surrender of rational inquiry to affective experience. Bataille’s formulation captures this movement: “I have acquired over what happens to me a power that overwhelms me. (Bataille, Visions Of Excess, 73)” Such power is not Nietzschean will or political mastery but a self-loss achieved through extreme experience. The subject, believing itself master of experience, discovers instead experience’s intensity exceeds all control and is ultimately engulfed by it.

                    Jeffrey enters the event seeking comprehension and mastery, yet finds himself drawn into a vortex of desire, violence, and chance. He is no longer a rational investigator perpendicular to the case but a participant horizontally absorbed within it. The rational erect thus reverses completely -- from seeking truth to a body subsumed within the horizontal coexistence of experience.






  • b. From Violence Erect to the Prostrate Other



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    •                 In the wasteland scene, Frank and Jeffrey step out of the car. Jeffrey, half-dragged and restrained, occupies a subordinate position, while Frank stands upright in full dominance, his chest open, neck extended, body lifted. The low camera angle enhances his verticality, rendering him a phallic column that embodies power, masculinity, aggression, and solar ascension. The subsequent sequence of three actions -- kiss, insult, and vow -- forms a chain of elevation. Frank first attacks Jeffrey with a sudden kiss, an act both erotic transgression and desecration of boundaries, pushing vertical will to the limit of excessive intensity. He sustains this tension through a barrage of insults and then proclaims, “With you forever in dreams.” As the background song “In Dreams” reaches the apex, Frank’s voice and gestures erupt together. His scream approaches the pitch of a slaughtered cry, while his fists discharge in violent bursts.

                    What Frank’s violence follows is the logic of elevation culminating in collapse. The force of his scream and punches tilts his body forward; verticality itself teeters on the brink of implosion, turning ascent into the prelude to descent. His assault becomes the enactment of his own fall. After repeated blows, Jeffrey lies sprawled on the ground, his body shifting from the vertical axis to a horizontal plane. Frank’s energy, transmitted through violence, passes into Jeffrey, who in turn bears the intensity that the aggressor himself cannot contain. At this moment, erect and prostrate no longer signify domination and submission but two states of the same energetic continuum: one rises to the point of imbalance, the other becomes its physical outlet. Frank seeks mastery through violence, but the intensity of violence overwhelms him; the excess is externalized onto Jeffrey’s body. The prostrate body thus becomes visible evidence of the erect subject’s descent.

                    At the intersection of phallic logic and Bataillean fall, Frank’s gestures trace the energetic chain of Erect → Ejaculate → Prostrate. The vertical will-to-violence explodes at its peak, its energy redistributed across the horizontal plane of flesh.






  • c. From Violence Erect to the Prostrate Other



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    •                 In the intimate foreplay between Jeffrey and Dorothy, the intensity of the bodies steadily escalates. When Dorothy pleads, “Hit me,” this utterance propels Jeffrey into a mechanical circuit reminiscent of Frank’s violence. Responding to her request, Jeffrey’s body rises halfway, torso lifted and spine aligned, forming a brief erect posture; a phallic gesture that is induced rather than willed. The subsequent motion of the raised arm and the slap divides the image along the vertical axis. The striking hand and the struck face create an upper-lower opposition, while breathing shifts from continuous panting to explosive bursts, marking the moment of peak intensity. Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “abject” reveals the trembling of the subject’s boundary in this moment of impact. The threshold -- the border between self and other, symbolic order and bodily chaos -- is precisely where abjection occurs. It refers to what the subject expels in order to constitute itself, yet incessantly returns: fluids, cries, tears, blood, uncontainable materials of affect and flesh (Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Chapter I). Dorothy’s prostration, sobbing, and pleading reduce language to pre-symbolic utterance, revealing the collapse of the symbolic and the return of body to affective intensity. In contrast, Jeffrey’s erect posture represents an attempt to raise a boundary from within this chaos; an effort to reassert symbolic order, reason, and control through a rationalized act of violence. Yet, as Kristeva notes, “The abject is excluded to maintain the subject, but it always returns. (Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 4)” The erect gesture thus summons the very force it seeks to expel. Violence both delineates difference and allows the return of chaos, creating an energetically closed loop.

                    If Frank’s violence is overt -- brutal, verbalized, externalized -- Jeffrey’s is passive, internalized, and rationalized. The former collapses in domination; the latter loses control through induction. When Jeffrey for the first time bears the vertical weight and intensity of his erect body, he crosses the threshold. Frank’s later words, “You are like me,” name this transformation: Jeffrey is no longer the one who controls but the one possessed by intensity. That slap, meant to establish a boundary, reverses at its peak into the dissolution of that very boundary. In the ensuing prostrate posture, Jeffrey’s body returns to the same horizontal plane as Dorothy’s. Vertical momentum turns into horizontal confluence; violent rupture softens into continuous intimacy. From rising to striking to coupling, Jeffrey mirrors Frank’s trajectory, completing the circuit of bodily transformation: Erect → Ejaculate → Prostrate.
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Each act of erect elevation in Blue Velvet culminates in its own fall into horizontality: rational elevation falls into the intensity of experience; violent elevation implodes into the overflow of energy; the induced verticality flattens at its peak into horizontal state of intimate coexistence. In this sense, the film’s visual practice resonates with Bataille’s paradox of “elevation as fall,” where man's erect posture itself is the preparation for descent.











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