The Deep Zoo

Witchcraft by a Picture

Near the conclusion of Lost Highway’s first sequence, the horn player sprawls beneath hell’s hot eye like an astronaut lost in space. This restless and excremental eye — both a firebox and the force that dissolves and reshapes the horn player’s already compromised identity — is the absolute axis of demonic intention. The compaction of Fred’s soul, so palpable from the start, is now mirrored by the astriction of his body — a collapse anticipated by the recurrent implosion and resurgence of the Devil’s cabin. Awash in estrangement, the enchanted horn player is suppressed, sucked in, and spat out as a fresh object of cosmical foul play. It is no accident that the doubled hero assumes the roles of musician and mechanic: Fred’s horn and Peter’s tool will damn him.

If the mechanic’s name is Peter “Ray,” his spirit is not spirited enough to save him. Reduced to a prick, he peters out — a defeat he shares with Fred and Mr. Eddie too, and that is conjured at the film’s beginning and confirmed at the end by the words Dick Laurent is dead. And if Dick is a dead dick from the outset, so Peter too is quickly undone, his cock replaced by a gun: “Stick this in your pants,” says Alice.

Lost Highway proposes a radically gnostic universe, one in which the material world is “some spooky stuff,” overseen by an envious and envenomed deity — androgynous, fond of boasting, and whose intentions are tirelessly malicious. In gnostic terms, the body is a vampire, a prison, and a tomb; reincarnation is a highway to hell, and time and space, “this magic moment,” the illusions of a fallen and deficient world, a world that is the gravity-bound sediment of a more luminous universe not given to the perfidious deceptions of space-time. The possibility of redemption explored in Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart is here entirely abandoned. In the world’s “Deep Dell,” everyone implodes. Even Evil’s henchmen cruise the Lost Highway on a collision course.

This gnostical vision informs Lynch’s other films as well. In Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles appears like a fallen slice of night sky or a treacly sea illuminated by a dubious and pustular phosphorescence. At any moment, the universe—“it’s all on tape”—can be shut down. What’s more, it fits neatly inside a small blue box. In Wild at Heart, Sailor warns Lula that “more than a few bad ideas [are] running around loose out there”; pricks like Bobby Peru are “all over,” and as Lula tells it, “We’re really in the middle of it now.” What’s more, the psychotic Dale’s obscure and torturous exertions on the kitchen floor may neatly map archonic intention and intervention.

From Lost Highway’s first moments, the camera assumes the potencies of the Evil Eye; at the end, the Evil Deity brandishes a video camera like a weapon. And if the Evil Eye is said to ejaculate venom, the contagion is holographic. It infects the picture’s every aspect and, with each frame, picks up toxicity and speed.

The Evil Eye is a desirous eye, a jealous eye; the film’s central male characters are not only bewitched, they are horned. Victims of the maddest sort of love, Fred and Peter (and Mr. Eddie too: “I love that girl to death”) are only murderous vehicles, lesser archons of a kind.

The symbol of the Fall, the Eye is seized again and again by fatal glamours — Deep Dell’s sumptuous Death Cunt—“you’ll never have me” Alice/reborn Renée — a creature of the darkest looking glass, who has been around since “a long time ago”—one thinks of the whore who brought Enkidu down — and who, like the Medusa, makes men fatally hard. And if like Orpheus the horn player descends into hell for love, there is no way back. “Sweeter than wine, everything I wanna have, we could get some money and go away together”—the fabulous forgery Alice/Renée has no intention of leaving. After all, she is hell’s counterfeit, a flame, a shadow, and a mindfuck in sumptuous drag. In a revelatory moment, one of many, Renée seems to be removing her makeup, yet her enchanting face remains unchanged.

In Renée’s arms, the horn player is discreetly vampirized when, with a patronizing gesture, the witch — and they are notorious for this; just take a look at the Malleus Malefacarum—unmans him. He may well carry a horn — that classic amulet — and despite his morbid languor blow into it with vigor, but Ialdabaoth is a permanent fixture in his classy rooms — the color of fever, of flesh, of muted fire; Fred has invited him in.

Renée’s caress is fatale; it creates a vacuum. Out of humor, on bile-green sheets, Fred might as well be an immune-deficient infant in isolation under glass. He visibly deteriorates. And when in nightmare, Renée calls his name, conjuring fire, the sexually leucemic horn player is further propelled toward meltdown.

This morbid caress is no accident. Marietta in Wild at Heart unmans her Johnny similarly, as does the Elephant Man’s “keeper.” It exemplifies the pathological nature of a world that like Sade’s Silling Castle has been created for the amusement of its masters and the torment of its slaves. And Silling is brilliantly mirrored when “I like to laugh” Alice, held in Mr. Eddie’s eager embrace, leers at the snuffing out of a bloodied fellow actor thrashing on Deep Dell’s screen, a screen that like her twinned cunt (a witch’s pupils are doubled too) is just another of hell’s apertures. This same screen will illuminate Peter’s crime, the scalding shimmer of Alice’s infinite cinematic possession, her “big bang” (and she’s a nightmare; like a mare, she’s fucked from behind) spilling across the murder scene like a toxic tide. Like Blue Velvet’s Pussy Heaven and Wild at Heart’s Big Tuna, Andy’s address is just another aspect of the Devil’s infinitely mutable cabin. In the submarine turbulence of Lynch’s gnostical light and shadow show, contagion, embodied by glamour-pusses and the jealous rages they inspire, is irresistible.

In Wild at Heart, the Evil Eye manifests as Marietta’s crystal ball, the venomous halo suspended above Lula’s face as she aborts Uncle Pooch’s child, Bobby Peru’s “one-eyed Jack” too eager to defile Lula’s fresh “fish market.” But the irrepressibly erotic lovers, Sailor and Lula, despite detours, malevolence, and seductions, manage to navigate the world’s contagions triumphantly. As does that gentle anomaly, John Merrick the Elephant Man, and his morally lucid doctor.

In The Elephant Man, the Evil Eye is the public eye, profiteering and tyrannical. Burdened by gravity more than anyone, John Merrick is victimized less by his visibility than by his fellows’ blindness. His spirit, so like Kaspar Hauser’s (and their stories are similar), remains transcendent. This spirit radiates from his eyes so that the monstrous mask falls away and one sees — as do his protectors — only a luminous being.

The staged marvels that unfold for Merrick’s pleasure so shortly before his death evoke the films Joseph Cornell made for his infirm brother, and Kaspar Hauser’s redeeming memory of a magic lantern show. Perceived with innocence, these marvels seem to flood our dark planet from some far brighter star, causing all our nightmares to dissolve, as a witch is said to do in water.

Merrick’s aberrant condition robs him of breath and voice. But when he manages to speak, it is to express acute delight in the things of this world: some crystal flasks, a tea service, clean clothes, and above all, a photograph of someone beloved.