As I spent twelve hours in the hospital last week, waiting for my dad to recover from his long-belated knee replacement surgery, I found a liberating mode of escapism in devouring author and professor Martha P. Nochimson’s latest marvelous book, Quantum Screens: Nonlinear Universes in Film and Television. On the basis of its delicious theories regarding parallel timelines and how they are reflected in some of the finest films and television shows of recent years, who’s to say that I wasn’t, at that precise moment, simultaneously seated in a drab waiting room and lying on a sunny beach along the west coast?
I had previously interviewed Nochimson over a decade ago about her equally thrilling book, David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire, which invites readers to take a different and more provocative approach to interpreting the director’s work, beyond the realm of mere dream logic. Unlike many scholars who have written about Lynch, Nochimson had maintained a friendship with the director over multiple decades until his passing last year at age 78. I had the tremendous privilege of being subsequently invited by Nochimson to participate in a virtual seminar on Lynch, my favorite filmmaker, for Columbia University in which my esteemed fellow panelists were “Twin Peaks: Season 3” executive producer Sabrina S. Sutherland, Lynch scholar Eric G. Wilson and “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner.
Weiner’s under-seen series, “The Romanoffs,” is among the audacious works Nochimson explores in her book, all of which she argues owe a debt to the freedom Lynch harnessed in his own trailblazing artistry. The addictive chat that Nochimson and I had via Zoom earlier this week for Cinema Femme could’ve easily gone on for several hours, and I’m already eagerly awaiting our next mind-expanding conversation.
One of the great gifts David Lynch has given us with his work is that there are endless ways of delving into it.
I agree. There are no definitive ways. There never will be. It’s like a prism, and everyone has a different way of attaching onto it.
I was struck by how you begin the book with three films that have transcendent sequences that I consider a holy trifecta: the “ultimate trip” in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the birth of the universe in Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and the birth of Jowday in Part 8 of Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Season 3.” In all three cases, the filmmaker is taking an exhilarating leap outside any linear progression of the narrative and into the realm of the abstract.
I could see how that is a sacred triangle. Standing back from it, I’m like, “Oh my god, yes!” Unlike Rock Hudson’s famously bewildered reaction to “2001,” when I as a critic am in the hands of an artist, I almost never exclaim, “What the hell?!” Somehow, I’m just born in the flux of whatever they’re doing. So when what I call the “eons montage” happened in “The Tree of Life,” I just thought, “Okay, let’s go there!” [laughs] Of course, with Lynch, I am waiting for that to happen, and if it doesn’t, I’m not happy. I was so disappointed that on “The Sopranos,” David Chase eventually stopped taking us on those magical mystery tours. “Battlestar Galactica” also lost control of its narrative at the end, I think because they were trying to set up the spin-off.
I’m never upset if my logic doesn’t comprehend something. We as critics are not artists. Chase told me that he thought I was a kind of an artist, and I liked that, but I’m really not an artist. I’m basically a rationalist who is fascinated by new stuff happening. I never, of course, got the chance to speak to Kubrick, and I don’t think he would’ve liked me. I don’t feel like that would’ve worked out, but I would’ve loved to have tried. [laughs] However, having spoken to a few of these artists, I feel sequences like the ones you mentioned are just a natural part of what they’re writing. Malick is the most interesting of those because, basically, he was writing linear movies before “The Tree of Life,” and returned to it when he made “A Hidden Life.” That film is very linear and very journalistic, though it has the enchantment of bigger forces.
In teleology, the end is already in the beginning, so there’s never any question about where the narrative is going. What the films in my book are all about is that every minute, we can create the future anew. The sense that the linear stuff is fragile and not at all the shape of the movie is there from the first scene. So in the case of the eons montage or the unbelievably sublime Part 8, it seems to me that they’ve been prepared for. They aren’t suddenly there. It’s just that these elements of the composition are now ready to break free.
This book has the power to alter how we go about interpreting certain artworks, such as Kubrick’s “The Shining,” where the past, present and future all seem to coexist simultaneously in the Overlook Hotel.
That’s very true! I hadn’t actually thought about that, but yeah, it’s a good place to go.
Are there certain aspects about each of the artists you explore in this book that you feel make them open to transcending a linear approach to narrative?
I think it’s the same thing that made Einstein go where he did. There is something about the people who are leading and creating culture. They feel things in the atmosphere, and we don’t. There are artists, scientists, musicians, painters, authors, filmmakers—not engineers, god bless them—who feel it and are going there. How they work out this feeling is through their art or their science. Otherwise, they would be sick, depressed and lost. That includes theoretical physicists like Einstein, Schrödinger and Niels Bohr. Each of them in their own way sensed that something is happening that has never been seen before, or that was but has been forgotten. In the case of science, if you think about it, the ancient Greeks were talking about quantum mechanics before it went in the rationalist direction.
Arthur C. Clarke’s book of 2001, which spells out the author’s meaning of Kubrick’s abstractions in the film version, is akin to how Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks” books specify things that Lynch left unexplained, such as the identity of the girl in Part 8.
That really makes me angry because it encourages people to close up instead of to open up. I do make the point all the way through the book that emotionally, this nonlinearity is very challenging. It doesn’t make us comfortable, we want to flee back into linearity, and that’s what Frost is doing. I do not understand his partnership with Lynch at all. From the beginning, Lynch was happy to be working with Frost because he was already connected with the mass media. Lynch never wished to be a cult figure. He wanted a mass audience, but only on his terms. Having interviewed Mark, I know he’s a lovely man, as was David. One of the things that was very clear about David was that he was incredibly sensitive to all of the suffering in the world. He wanted to do something to make people suffer less, which is why his foundation has been involved in all it has been involved in. He was a very sensitive, emotional man.
When I interviewed Sabrina S. Sutherland last year, I told her of how “Twin Peaks: Season 3” editor Duwayne Dunham had been quoted saying that the intriguing lack of continuity during the Double R Diner sequence at the end of Part 7 was merely the result of an editing mistake. Sabrina replied, “All I will say is that David went through everything in the edit so many times, and chose to leave the work Duwayne did on that particular scene as-is.”
I think what you just said is so important. Anything that closes down our reading of Lynch is not a good thing. Don’t take anybody’s word for “this is it.” There are people who know more, and there are people who know less, and most of the people know less. The first time I visited David, his assistant at the time scheduled a lot of meetings for me with people who had worked with him. Near the end of my visit, David asked me, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen?”, and I said to him, “Nobody knows what you’re doing. They have no understanding of what you’re doing! But somehow they do exactly what you want them to do and it all turns out.” Most of these people have no idea what’s going on, though there are one or two who might have more knowledge, such as David’s cinematographers, Frederick Elmes and Peter Deming.
The most intimate thing in the world for David to talk about was his art, and there were only a few people with whom he discussed it. If either Elmes or Deming told me something, I would be more likely to give it weight. For example, Elmes spoke with Lynch about “how dark is dark,” and when he told me this, I knew it was important. Elmes understood what Lynch was doing. David doesn’t work on the usual polarity of “dark is bad” and “light is good.” Dark can be a fertile place from which something new emerges. Now there are some lights that are heavenly, such as the sunlight that bursts over the sheriff’s station in “Season 3,” which reflects an entry point into the ocean of consciousness. But when Sandy walks out of the darkness at the beginning of “Blue Velvet,” there is something new and beautiful happening.
I interviewed Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij years ago before they did “The OA,” which I have yet to see, though I loved learning in your book that their series featured Irène Jacob, who starred in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece, “The Double Life of Véronique,” another film prime for reevaluation thanks to your book.
Totally! There is definitely something splitting in that film. There are so many ways to go with these ideas, and I just hope that lots of people who read my book have your same response of, “Oh my goodness, now I have to think about that!” Your response makes me feel very happy. I think the book also makes people like you and me feel less alone. How many people are really open to trying to think about this? In a world like we’re living in, which is so troubled and there’s so much fear, people tend to want everything to stand still. They will do anything to seek out fiction that tells them, “You are here.” But there are loads of people like us who want to work out these feelings that we’ve had that we didn’t know how to express until we discovered these artists. I hear a lot of people who are artists and critics saying, “I want people to feel less alone.” That is my hope.
The one show you explore in your book, apart from “Twin Peaks,” that I have seen is Damon Lindelof’s masterpiece, “Watchmen.” Having it start with the 1921 Tulsa race massacre made people want to explore an atrocity from American history routinely left out of history books. The big bold yellow lettering of Black Lives Matter murals in the year that followed seemed evocative of the show’s title cards.
As soon as I saw the show, its connection to quantum physics was clear to me in the character of Doctor Manhattan, as soon as you have him not leaving history. Damon didn’t want to follow through on what happened after the final episode, which other show runners would’ve simply treated as a cliffhanger. In my book, he’s quoted saying, “If I had wanted to find out what happened afterward, I’d have written another season. I didn’t want to.” I just find that so incredibly fascinating.
Why do you think the show, with its fracturing of time, was perhaps more impactful than more linear historical parables?
That’s the kind of question that just stumps me. The thing is, the history it portrays in Tulsa is true! And people know it’s true. I was at the Museum of the Moving Image when they did a preview showing of “Lost Highway,” and when David was taking questions afterward—which I know he hated doing—some guy in the audience asked him, “Do you know what happened that night on the lawn?” David just sat there, and after a long time, he responded, “Yes…and so do you.”
I was astonished by the outpouring of love for David after he died. You saw it in newspapers that hadn’t been paying any attention to him at all. People from everywhere, from all walks of life, suddenly were expressing so much love for him. I wish he had seen it. I’m a special case. For whatever reason God saw fit, I got put into a very strange position vis-à-vis him. I don’t know why he liked me. I mean, he hated school and saw the academic world as a repressive place. But he liked me, and liked talking about those things with me. He and I were like two ends of reality.
I imagine he liked your work because, like his own, it invites us to open our minds to the possibilities of things we would have otherwise overlooked. As for “Watchmen,” I believe Lindelof made history feel more immediate and present by taking it out of the linear timeline. It’s not collecting dust on a shelf somewhere, but rather, is still very much in our world today.
I think that’s right. I like very much what you’re saying. I also think the show’s use of music and humor added to its appeal. What I think turned people off about “Westworld” was that it was virtually humorless. I enjoyed it because I was watching them play with these ideas in the most fantastic way, but my husband—when he read the book—said that was the one thing I described that he had no interest in seeing.
My wife loved the show until its final season, which like “The OA,” was the victim of a truncated vision as a result of its premature cancellation.
It’s tragic, in my opinion. There’s a lot of guilt to go around with the people who cut them off.
The first show I’ll be seeking out after reading your book is “The Romanoffs,” in part because of the involvement of Mary Sweeney, David’s former wife and frequent collaborator, as a consulting producer and co-writer for at least the episode featuring Isabelle Huppert.
When I watched “The Romanoffs,” I could feel the breakdown of linearity. I saw the episodes in order, but Matthew told me that his intention was for viewers to watch them in any order they wanted! In the last episode, you see the characters you’ve been following for the past hour enter a train station, while the characters from the first episode are seen walking out of the station. There’s also a wonderful sequence where historical characters from a Diego Rivera mural are released from what, in linearity, is repressing them, and you see them walking amidst the pedestrians along a street. It’s very subtle, as far as I’m concerned, and most people didn’t know what to do with it. If you see only one little piece of it, you might think you know what it is, but that’s merely a part of it!
The only thing about each of the artists I explore in this book that they have in common with Lynch is the freedom that he gifted them. Don’t stick a white fence or a little dancing man in your film and think you’re Lynchian! Anybody can do that. Everybody who I spoke to said Lynch was a major influence on them, but the influence is freedom. It’s the freedom to do these things, and I can feel that freedom when I’m watching something that has benefitted from Lynch. Take the manacles off these people so that they can create something that is unique and beautiful. Having said that, there is formulaic work I do like, such as the British detective series about inspectors Morse and Lewis. It’s a completely different kind of entertainment, and I’m happy with that too.
Where do you think the recent Best Picture Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All At Once” fits into this idea of storytelling influenced by quantum physics? I sensed a certain irreverent freedom in that film, and there’s actually a flash frame in which Michelle Yeoh appears to be in the Red Room from “Twin Peaks.”
Oh wow, I don’t think I picked that up! I think it’s nonlinear lite, just like “Doctor Who” and “Groundhog Day,” and yet, these are good things. I enjoyed the film, and there was a freedom to it. The people who made it aren’t great artists or visionaries, but it is Lynch who made their work—as with all fantastical mass media culture in the United States this century—possible. Some people are more deeply moved as creators than others. “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is fun! Its creators clearly had an enormous amount of fun doing it.
That film and “Groundhog Day” use their parallel timelines ultimately as a catalyst for sparking an inner evolution in their characters, leading Bill Murray’s weatherman to become a nicer person and Michelle Yeoh’s mother to mend her relationship with her daughter. Yet these pictures could serve as an entry point for people interested in going deeper.
On the day your book is released, Ray Wise will be at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre for a screening of two “Twin Peaks” episodes, one of which I hope will be Part 18 of “Season 3.” I never noticed how Mary Reber, who plays Alice Tremond and in reality is the actual woman currently living at the residence used for the Palmer house, has hair evocative of Laura Palmer until you mentioned it in your book.
When I spoke with Mary, I asked her, “Is that how you usually look or did David tell you that’s the kind of hair he wanted you to have?”, and she said it was him. In the show, she’s wearing the sort of bangs that look like they could be lifted off her head, as if it were a wig. Why David chose to cast her in this role is the part of his process that cannot be explained. When he and Catherine Coulson were working on “Eraserhead,” he drew a picture of a woman with a log, and he said to her, “You know, someday, you’re gonna play this.” I think Catherine had at least a partial understanding of David’s work. She and I maintained a friendship over many years, and I got to see firsthand how she was a force of nature.
It’s interesting how Lynch can be so open to the reality of things, such as how he had Catherine say, “I’m dying,” just days before her actual passing.
I agree with you. He did the same with Warren Frost, who I believe was on his last legs when he shot his scene in “Season 3.”
When I found out that Mary actually lived in the Palmer house, I thought, have Agent Cooper and Carrie entered our own world during the last scene of “Season 3”? Who can say, as Agent Cooper wonders, what year or dimension it is?
The first time I heard that line, I fell off my chair. The closest I can come to telling you how I felt during my initial viewing of that scene is, “Here I am, where I am?” I didn’t know where I was. I remember saying to David long, long ago, way before “Season 3,” that Cooper was the hero that I loved the best of all. He was a real hero to me, but as soon as I saw David’s reaction to what I had said, I knew I was in the wrong place. I wanted Cooper to be the hero he seemed when he first came to Twin Peaks, but in the universe that we live in, there is no hero like that. Throughout “Season 3,” I kept getting pushed away from that desire, and the final push was the end. There was no coming back from that.
I was fighting what David was saying to the last second, and eventually, I had to stop, go back and ask, “What kind of journey have I been on?” And when I did, it was glorious. I am a child of an America that no longer exists, where we believed everything would be good and that we were good. As the song goes, “We’d live the life we choose / We’d fight and never lose / Those were the days.” Of course, current events have shown me that maybe it never was. After my final interview with David, I realized that he had put equal weight on the tragedy and the triumph at the end of “Season 3,” because in Part 17, everything was the way that we wanted it to be. It was glorious, it was wonderful and it was doomed—or Cooper was doomed, because the rest of them were okay.
There was the good life, and there was also the tragic life, each an inseparable part of the same saga. And I’m trying to love that. I want to know how I can love life without a happy ending, and I think that the great artists are trying to tell us.
You see equal weight given to triumph and tragedy in Part 8 as well. Though Part 18 is certainly a tragedy for Cooper, there’s something about Carrie/Laura’s scream that makes me strangely hopeful. Cooper’s fate may be Lynch’s cautionary message for us in how to not go about figuring things out.
Agent Cooper has been going in the wrong direction from the beginning, only he didn’t know it. The guys who ultimately save others are Andy and Freddie. When Freddie asks, “Why me?”, the Fireman responds, “Why not you?” The one we think is the hero is the one who comes out of this linear structure that we have. We think he’s the hero and he thinks that he’s the hero too, as evidenced by how he says, “I am the FBI!” And he’s all wrong. If the Blue Rose task force continues to make Judy their whole “raison d’être,” every one of them will go down to nothingness.
The Judy that my mind keeps circling back to is Judy Barton from “Vertigo,” a film that haunts “Twin Peaks” from the early seasons, where Sheryl Lee appeared as Laura’s brunette doppelgänger. Her character’s name, Madeline Ferguson, combined those of Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak’s characters from the Hitchcock film.
I never thought of that! I will tell you that David did not put that in there. Mark was the kind of person who would’ve done that. He wanted everything to fold into each other, but I know David did not. I will say that Mark is very good at certain things. He was the guy who came up with Ben quoting Shakespeare by saying, “This is such stuff as dreams are made,” when coming into his daughter’s room in the whorehouse at the end of “Season 1.” And I thought it was absolutely brilliant. He’s essentially a talented craftsman, not an artist.
Most of the things people say about David’s fondness for “The Wizard of Oz” is pure garbage. The thing that David loved about the film that he spoke to me about was not Dorothy, it was the visual of the house spinning during the tornado. He said, “I liked the black and white much better than the color.” He turned me around about a lot of things, and taught me so much about art.
To me, Cooper seems as doomed as Scottie Ferguson in how he, at the end of “Twin Peaks,” brings a woman who he suspects is someone else to a place where he hopes to find all the answers. Instead, all he finds is an unwelcome presence (the nun in “Vertigo,” Alice Tremond in Part 18), a piercing scream and ultimately darkness.
The intersection of those two moments is totally fascinating!
Who knows what subconsciously filters into an artist’s work?
That is absolutely right. Thank you for this lovely time—and next time we’ll talk about “Sinners”!
Oh yes! The film’s most talked-about scene, where the past, present and future converge, would fit perfectly in your book.
Of course!
Quantum Screens: Nonlinear Universes in Film and Television will be published by the University of Texas Press on Tuesday, March 17th, and is available for purchase here.
