Alphabet
Written by Gauntgirl, copyright 2001
David Lynch was still a young man just finishing art school when, in 1968, he was commissioned to make the film Alphabet. In his reluctance to associate himself with any particular artistic movement, Lynch combines philosophies and techniques from surrealist, expressive theories with the emerging postmodern concepts coming out of the art revolution of the 60’s. Alphabet is both a testament to Lynch’s fears and frustrations and an illustration of the poisoning effect of social/educational institutions governed by rationalist ideology, where language has both the power to create and destroy.
Undeniably, the 60’s were a decade of great change in social and artistic modes of seeing. Despite the efforts of the US Supreme Court, Nelson Mandela, and Malcolm X racial segregation remains a dominant issue. Despite years of protests by students and artists the massacres of the Vietnam War are still a reality. In a world where it seems that pleas and protests fall on the ears of the deaf and the ignorant, David Lynch was confronted by the limited power of speech, of words. Within the art school arena, the social and artistic climates of the 60’s coupled with Lynch’s personal torments to give birth to the pastiche film, Alphabet.
Toward the end of the sixties many of Lynch’s artistic contemporaries were becoming interested in the usefulness of the written word in the visual arts. In New York, the Loeb Students’ Center exhibited the installation The Collage of Indignation (1967) that used written words to express a political agenda against the Vietnam War. Conceptual artists were also interested in words. Lawrence Weiner (Statements, 1968), Mel Ramsden (Secret Painting, 1967-68), and Joseph Kosuth (Art as Idea as Idea, 1967) challenged the distinctions between art and language by describing an object or concept to be imagined rather than visualized in painting. Lynch’s use of words in Alphabet is a twisting of these theories. Lynch is interested in the expressive properties of words. Whether they express a political philosophy, an abstract concept, or an emotion; words will always lack authenticity and will never be able to articulate the contemplation that finds origin in the subconscious.
The workings of the subconscious are as important to Lynch’s work as it was for the Surrealists. In Alphabet, the subconscious is the site where Lynch’s fear of language plays out. The animated cartoons (representing the girl’s nightmare) depict the letters of the alphabet in defiance of their linear rationalist nature. They pop up and float around confusing their natural order. The letters are given an organic quality – big ‘A’ gives birth to small ‘a’ and some letters grow like plants. The letter ‘A’ is also the head of the hermaphrodite figure. The head is fed some more letters and grows until it seems to explode or hemorrhage. In these animated nightmares we see the subconscious being imposed upon by letters/language as if it is a disease of the mind. The child awakes to the repetition of ‘ABC’ as if the alphabet has stalled in its struggle to remember what comes next. As the girl recites the alphabet in full she finishes with the rhyme ‘now I’ve said my ABC’s, tell me what you think of me.’ In this ending rhyme, social expectations for rationale and normalization are clear. The girl looks for approval (both literally and ironically) now that she’s been able to conform to the linear rationale expected of her. But despite (or because of) her normalization, her diseased subconscious manifests its symptoms on her body and she vomits forth blood. For David Lynch involuntary bodily functions, such as vomiting, are representative of a loss of control. Under the constraints of the language rules that form our thought processes we deny the naturally chaotic nature of our minds and beings. We’ve relinquished control over our own minds to the demands of language. Yet, Lynch reminds us that this fact is only human. Between the animated nightmare and the live action sequence we see an upside down mouth with a prosthetic nose at the chin that says “Please remember, you are dealing with a human form.” Language and linearity remain inevitable conditions of humanity, but Lynch ironically plays with this statement by ‘carnivalizing’ rational perceptions of the human face. He is defiant of the linearity of logic up to and including the codes of the human face.
In 1968, David Lynch seems to be at the forefront of emerging Postmodernism. He is questioning the unifying fact of language, something that most people take for granted. He defies the notion that through the articulation of ideas (speech) one human can connect in some meaningful way to another. He has already touched on the Pomo belief that there is no linguistic norm (no authoritarian properties of language), and in forcing normalized language upon our children (elementary education) we are constructing them to be fractured subjects. Lynch plays with the idea of the fractured subject in the hermaphroditic figure in Alphabet. This figure has a body with both feminine and masculine features (representative of the naturally androgynous state of the child before it is positioned within the confines of a gender construct.). Its head, however, is formed by letters/language/rationale that cause the head to change and mutate from its natural state until it hemorrhages. In other words, it is constructed to death.
Lynch uses the technique of pastiche to avoid any naturalization in the message of his images. He borrows from the Surrealist technique of juxtaposing apparently disparate images as a link to the subconscious. Alphabet comes together as a cut and paste of ‘real’ and fabricated images like the images of a dream. But his point goes beyond dreams to say that reality itself is merely a construction of social linguistics. So the essential question at hand is ‘what’s real and what’s construction’. Lynch doesn’t have an easy answer to this question. For him the ‘real’ is something deep within himself (within the subconscious) and any attempts to vocalize the ‘real’ only reduce it to a construction. This is the ‘Other’ of David Lynch’s films. The ‘Other’ is the ‘real’ self, that which sets each person apart from any other and prevents us from making any meaningful connections. Our ‘real’ selves are trapped within us by the oppressive nature of language and the rational expectations we put upon ourselves.
David Lynch’s first film Alphabet was informed by his reactions to a world in great turmoil. He saw his personal struggles with self-expression as symptomatic of a society where linguistic articulations can give orders to massacre hundreds of Vietnamese women and children yet fail to assure basic human rights. He’s responding to the social institutions that have long dictated what it means to be male, female, black, white, young, old, intelligent, creative, ignorant, human. For Lynch, linguistics is all about dictatorship. Language is the dictator that tells us who we are, who we should be, and what rules to follow in the process. We are all slaves to our own speech and this fact will inevitably tear each of us apart from the inside out.
BibliographyLynch, David. Lynch on Lynch. Edited by Chris Rodley. London: Faber and Faber, 1997
Lynch, David. Images. New York: Hyperion, 1994.
Nochimson, Martha. The Passion of David Lynch. Texas: U of T Press, 1997
