Back to Back 35 - I Have to Return Some Videotapes

Contrasting films that open up mysteries based on videotapes left on the doorstep

Lost Highway (1997) - co-writer/director David Lynch, co-writer Barry Gifford
Hidden [Caché] (2005) - writer/director Michael Haneke

Genre: Psychological thriller/horror - hot expressionist (Lynch); cold realist (Haneke)

Negative Capability, that is, when a [person] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…
John Keats, letter to his brothers, 22 December 1817

This is where the Back to Back concept really earns its keep by taking on board two films that resemble each other so closely in premise and structure, and yet are worlds apart in their artistic approach. With these two films the ‘banging things together’ methodology will either be completely vindicated or shot down in flames, finally exposed as, in the words of one Reddit commenter, “real stupid”. You shall decide.

Recently I was writing about fictional doubles, and how they're some of the most powerful and effective devices both within the horror genre as well as in what we might call ‘surrealist’, ‘neo-expressionist’ or just ‘weird’ fiction and cinema.

2011's pair of doppelganger movies, Enemy and The Double are both good examples of both convergent and divergent ways that the theme of doubling can be realized. They have a lot of similarities despite the clear difference in tone, based mostly around straight male insecurity and desire, and images of masculinity in relationships with women who are barely sketched out as archetypal bitch/spouse/mother etc.

David Lynch is clearly fascinated with such doubling, and all of his late-period work features it strongly. You might even say it's the main theme, how we are not one but at least two persons contained in a 'single' personal identity. There are many ways to interpret this, from Hindu/Buddhist metaphysics in which the unitary soul is yet another illusion, inhabiting as it does various lives which are most likely happening simultaneously but also linearly, to the more mundane but not-even-incomptatible Jungian concept of the self and its shadow.

It's possible that the genesis of all this late period Lynchian obsessing over self-and-double(s) came in discussion with Lost Highway co-writer Barry Gifford. Lynch asked “What if one person woke up one day and was another person?”, the premise of many a high-concept comedy and thriller before then, and so hardly original, but in the way Lynch and Gifford chose to handle it the possibilities suddenly ballooned exponentially - and arguably got way out their control. ¹

Because the fact is that every single main character in Lost Highway has a double. Not just Fred (Bill Pullman) doubling into Pete (Balthazar Getty) and Renée doubling into Alice (both played by Patricia Arquette). Gangster Mr Eddy is also Dick Laurent, who is both dead and alive simultaneously. The white-face Mystery Man is also a lowlife fence living in a desert shack, and maybe also Renée and Fred as well, some of the time, and is demonstrably able to occupy two spaces at once.

Even the minor characters seem to double up: there are two detectives, two prison guards, and then another two detectives. Only Pete's solidly middle-class Mom and Pop (Lucy Butler, Gary Busey) are unitary, and they are constantly traumatized by all the doubling going on around them.

The essential high-concept “What if one person woke up one day and was another person?” is also shared with Franz Kafka, whether that is a man who finds himself transformed into a giant insect, or (more relevant to the present story) a man who wakes up to find that he is a dead man walking, condemned to death - though he doesn't know it for quite a long time to come.

Before Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe more or less pioneered the weird tale in which individual identity is troublingly fluid in his story "William Wilson", though simultaneously Nikolai Gogol wrote "The Nose" in which a man wakes up one day to find he is also his nose, which is altogether more charismatic and successful than him. The founding fathers of Weirdness.

So these are some of the literary precedents for what Lynch is attempting to do in Lost Highway, and Lynch has Kafka particularly in mind. He had Kafka's face printed on the shooting script of the film, as both encouragement to be unexpected and unexplained, and as an authorial talisman ('If Franz can do it, I can do it too'). Unfortunately Kafka was barely appreciated in his own time, and Lynch is condemned to be the same, at least for the mainstream which he was still at this time attempting to impress.

Getting back to doubles, there are many ways in which doppelgängers can act on the narrative and particularly the themes of personality - an evil twin, a sexually-successful alternate self, a trans-sex self, an older or younger self, a self with a different racial identity. And of course the ones we think about constantly, namely selves who just take different decisions, alt-selves from one’s personal alt-history. Narratives generally, and films in particular, are spaces where the self is allowed to experiment with doubling, to become Other in either a playful or a disturbing way - or both, as is the case in Lost Highway.

For despite the highly-charged dream atmosphere of horror and erotica that Lynch creates, there is also goofy comedy, as in Guard Johnny's deadpan delivery of the line "This is some spooky shit we got here", the detectives standing next to a double bed asking "Is this the bedroom? Do you sleep here?", or Gary Busey's tearful eyes welling up at the thought that there's something that ain't quite normal goin' on here with my boy and that unknown man. Or in the penultimate sequence, where the detective refers to murder victim Andy as "Mr Dent-Head here."

But the prize in the dark comedy stakes has to go to Alice, now changed from hapless damsel to heartless bitch, but still nominally Alice, calmly looking at the confused Pete as he says "We killed him." To which she responds, after a suitable pause (deadpan) "You killed him". No extra emphasis, no snarling comeback. But we know where we are now. Her later line reveaing to Pete that "You'll never have me" comes as no real surprise after that.

The story begins and ends with the line "Dick Laurent is dead," spoken at first by an anyonmous voice over the home intercom. Lynch had this experience happen to him and it struck him as a mysterious wonder. If you've ever had an anonymous voice call you on the phone to inform you that "X is dead" you'll know what an eerie experience that can be. I don't know if it's more or less disturbing if you don't know the identity of X.

This and the videotape that the voice appears to have left behind ignite Fred’s disquiet and disgust with his wife Renée’s freedom from his own control. She can try to console him for his lack of sexual prowess, but still he needs to prowl around his own house, in a trajectory that the final videotape will recreate perfectly. By this time his head is a TV, playing videotapes only he can show.

I am Become Darkness and TV

When the deed is done - or at least committed to videotape, if not actually physically done - Fred wails at the detectives “Tell me I didn’t kill her!” But like with the Kafka story that his punishment now recapitulates, what he actually did or didn’t do is unimportant, because he is on trial for his desires.

Once we accept the fact that the spirit world of desires and punishments can transcend mere physical existence - and if we’ve come from Twin Peaks, why wouldn’t we? - then the transmutation of Fred into Pete, and the (dead?) Renée into Alice, and all the other doublings, simply makes sense without any need to chart it or worry about the mechanics of it.

Negative capability, as Keats called it: the ability to accept that uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, just are. Alice points to the photo and says “That’s me”, but says nothing about Renée’s appearance right next to her. Then she starts to multiply: she’s on the ground floor, getting dressed and grabbing the loot, she’s upstairs, mocking Pete and screwing someone else. And she’s on the silver screen, getting some in a brutal hardcore flick. The magic of cinema.

— INTERMISSION —

To me it seems obvious that Michael Haneke was inspired by Lost Highway to make a mystery without a resolution deriving from a series of mysterious videotapes, and in which the mystery in turn gives way to greater mysteries relating to the nature of human existence. Yet these are very different filmmakers, the fiery passion of Lynch, engaging without shame at the most emotional level, contrasting absolutely with the cool detachment of Haneke.

Take music, for example. Where music is present almost constantly throughout Lost Highway, there isn't a single note of music in Caché. These people don't even put on soft ambient music for their dinner parties, or to relax, or get jazzed. The soundtrack, which is as carefully crafted as anything else, has nothing like this. No subliminal ambient melodies, no horror stings, not even diegetic music.

I'm not sure if the absolute absence of music is intended to convey a meaning or is just a narrative device to remove a standard cue for emotional meaning, but to me it suggests that these people, who seemingly live for the written word, have no connection to the prosaic word's elder siblings, music and poetry. When the poet Rimbaud is discussed in a TV show it's to consider lurid details of his private life, not the words that burned with such disturbing insight.

In fact it's the soundrack that first grabs our attention, as the main characters speak over a street scene, voices close and their anxious tone apparently disconnected from the ordinariness of the scene, a completely puzzling intervention of words that soon has a reveal and an explanation. Here the soundtrack forms part of a trick, and early misdirection by Haneke, making us believe that puzzling details, eruptions of the anomalous, will get an eventual resolution. Don't worry, viewer, mysterious things will be revealed in time. As if.

Or we could consider the many 'expressionist' camera and editing effects that Lynch uses to signify a wild state of fury, confusion or passion, like weirdly tilting angles or blurring shifts of face from one character to another. Here in Caché, when 'memories' and 'dreams' from the protagonist's point-of-view are interjected, there is nothing visually or aurally to signal that it's not the strict documentary objectivity of the initial video footage. Everything, from 'objectively true' video footage, to the film drama scenes, to the horror moments, gets the same visual look. Only the TV screen is different.

Indeed we could consider the video footage itself. In Lost Highway, the mystery video is clearly different in visual texture from the film of the movie's main narrative: grainy, black-and-white, with horizontal bands throughout. In the end the maker of these videotapes is shown, but since that Mystery Man is himself a mystery, nothing is resolved on the literal level and a viewer determined to get a who, how, and why for the videotapes is left frustrated.

In Caché, the video is just as crisp and high-definition as the rest of the film, and as our eye adjusts to that fact, we use the only cue we have to differentiate - the camera movement. The mystery videos are static, apparently made by someone invisible to the protagonist; the film narrative shots move and are edited. What then of the final shot?

In her excellent monograph for the BFI, Catherine Wheatley breaks down Caché into four thematic strands: "1. the film as thriller; 2. bourgeois guilt; 3. political accountability; and 4. reality, the media and its audiences." ² Just thinking about those four things and watching the film is explanation enough for a sensitive viewer. Every single element is calculated to fit, either consciously or subconsciously, into those four strands. And everything is both hidden and stunningly obvious.

She then begins with a detailed analysis of the final sequence as possible clue to the way Haneke explores these themes, but without falling into the obvious trap of trying to 'explain' the mystery of who actually made the tapes - to do so would presumably get her thrown out of the BFI film-egghead club for the capital crime of literal-mindedness. Roger Ebert waffled about having found the "smoking gun" shot, but even he stopped short of the crass mistake of declaring the mystery solved.

Always someone watching - how can you keep it hidden?

To understand the film is to understand that the central mystery of the videos is a vast misdirection, that the real aspects to understand are hiding in and around this enormous red herring that Haneke borrowed from Lynch. Sometimes these things are right there in plain sight, like a comment on a massacre that took place more than 60 years ago. Or a politician's bastard daughter, hidden as a state secret for many years, now appearing on TV. Or a pair of characters that in theory shouldn't know each other having a friendly chat right there in the corner of a busy street scene.

What these elements mean needs puzzling out, but the conclusions the viewer comes to shouldn't be wasted on resolving the irrelevant "who made the tapes?" whodunnit which carries the film along as a narrative engine. Just as in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, (2009), also starring Juliette Binoche, and its central mystery of what relationship the characters have which gives way to more central mysteries of why they feel the way they do, this film invites the viewer to chuck away the old Hitchcock routine and think about what the drama is really all about.

I am Become Darkness and TV

NOTES

1. Greg Olson, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark (2011), p436

2. Catherine Wheatley, Caché [BFI Film Classics] (2011), p16