David Lynch, ambiguity, one-eyed spiders & Tim Burton

Been thinking about multiplicity in interpretation. In the David Lynch approach, multiplicity derives from visual poetry. There's nothing to "get" from a Lynch film beyond the rich meanings and experiences evoked by his films. I guess there several kinds of multiplicities at work. In one, the meaning of the work is constantly shifting. In the other, each viewer is parsing the meaning slightly differently.

This is really different from the kind of interpretive ambiguity I'm attempting. There are two distinct threads in our film. You can interpret the story as "Ben is delusional" or "Ben has stumbled upon a truth." So I constantly have to go through the film checking to make sure each interpretation can be validated.

I'm also thinking about the peculiar unambiguous nature of film. In visual art, it's easier to make something like a shadow-person-figure-cloud. In a film, though, it's pretty tough to do that. I'm not talking only about the technology of photography, but about the way photography, as a cultural force, has shaped our vision. In film you can create a person, or a person in the shadows or a shadow of a person. But creating something with the same ambiguity as a drawing is tough. David Lynch's contribution to film is finding a way to make live action film function like animation.

On a different note, I've been working on the TV for the final exposition. It's evolving to look like a one-eyed spider—a small round TV screen mounted on a tripod backlit with tons of wires. Probably the first one-eyed spider I saw was in the Jonny Quest intro (above). The last, I think, was in Mirror Mask. Curiously, I don't think you'd find a one-eyed spider in a David Lynch film. You might, though, in a Tim Burton film. Tim Burton, moreso than Lynch is known for bringing a certain animation sensibility to feature film. I wonder if this has to do less with production design and more to do with a certain orientation to visual ambiguity. Nelson Goodman's term was "syntactic density" which means that a particular image/line/shape could be read in any number of different ways.