Beyond Narrative Subjectivity, Beyond Filmic Narration. David Lynch’s L.A. Trilogy and the Limits of Narrative

Abstract

David Lynch’s L.A. Trilogy – Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire – has often been described as structurally ‘unreadable.’ This paper philosophically interprets the trilogy’s ‘poetics of unreadability,’ and identifies its aesthetic structure and implications – emphasizing the trilogy’s post-narrative aesthetic form, and the aporetic experience it immerses the spectator in. First (section 2), the paper applies a Gennettian film narratological framework to the trilogy to demonstrate how it both provokes and undermines narrative readings: on the one hand, the films of the trilogy invite spectators to reconstruct coherent histoires from the filmic discours; on the other, they simultaneously undermine every such reconstruction through irresolvable contradictions concerning diegetic organization, focalization, and temporal order – a radical and paradoxical aesthetic strategy the paper conceptualizes as ‘post-narrative.’ Moreover (section 3), the paper identifies two complementary yet mutually exclusive readings this post-narrative aesthetic provokes: a subject philosophical interpretation that reads the trilogy as a critique of narrative subjectification, and a media ontological interpretation that exposes the structural absence of a narrating instance within the filmic medium itself. As both readings are internally aporetic and lead the spectator into the other, the trilogy immerses the spectator in an endless oscillation between these two modes of reading.