Graphic Contexts
University of Texas at Austin
David Dreams of Doubles: Lynch and the Doppelganger View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Adam Daniel
Duality has been of key thematic interest to filmmaker David Lynch for the duration of his career, manifesting in works such as Twin Peaks (1990-91), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) Inland Empire (2006), and most recently in the contemporary return of Twin Peaks (2017). While Lynch demonstrates a keen fascination with duality within narrative and image, it most commonly emerges in the figure of the doppelganger. This paper analyses the presence of doubles and doppelgangers in the oeuvre of David Lynch, interrogating how they often exceed their role as counterpoints of Manichean evil to Lynch’s idealistic protagonists and instead provoke questions about the unstable nature of identity. To do so, I delineate the common variations of doppelgangers that populate Lynch’s oeuvre and examine the previous scholarly interpretations of their relevance, while also interrogating the limitations of these approaches. While it has been contended that Lynch’s films use the double to demonstrate the periodic confrontation with the shadow that is necessary for a healthy psyche, the borders between the shadow and its interrogator are often shown to be porous if not completely ineffective. Indeed, often both sides of the double are inextricably woven through diegetic overlap or a synthesis of identity. Although Lynch has often employed the double as an evil reflection of his protagonists, I contend that is through the destabilisation of the perceived hermetic boundary of identity that his works transcend the dynamics of Manichean dualism and move towards a profound and horrific affect.
The Relationship between Puzzle Films and Non-Linear Narrative Films: How Has Non-linearity in Pulp Fiction and in Christopher Nolan's Work Been Discussed? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marina HS Pu
Classical narrative cinema started production in Hollywood in 1920. Compared to narrative films, non-linear narrative films have recently not only become more and more popular among audiences and filmmakers but have inspired a great deal of research. The relationship between characters and goals has become the main motivation to construct the story structure in narrative movies, which has an impact on editing and soundtrack in post-production. Fundamentally, in classical movies, narrative time and space develop the story plot and logic. However, Puzzle films refer to a narrower subset: complex cinema generally has a specific structure, and it will offer unique viewing experience within ‘pervasive paradoxes’. They present impossible universe, despite the fact that are not performing physical impossibilities but principally including logical impracticalities, such as mutually special versions of events, looping temporal lines and alternative paradoxes. In this paper, we explore how non-linear narrative storytelling demands a formal design of narrative complexity impossible in puzzle films.
