#this image is more an amalgamation of the scene than a specific moment

[artsyunderstudy]

“‘We’ve been seeing each other for a week, Snow,’ I say. It’s biting, and I don’t know why—why the fuck I’m being like this. I’ve put that look on his face now, the one that’s downturned and pouty and red and angry all at once. I want to hand him his pants so he can withstand whatever fucking mood I’m in with some sense of dignity, but I can’t move.”

London Loves Us Only by imjusthereforthefreefood

Carry on Countdown | Day Five: Fight

This year I decided I wanted to honor the incredibly talented fic writers of this fandom, so I chose one fic per prompt to do an illustration for. I didn’t double up on authors so that I could do this for as many people as possible. I realized while planning this that there are way too many fics and authors that I love, and even after having picked 30 of what I consider some of my very favorites, I could have easily kept going. Please check the fics out if you haven’t, they all come highly recommended.

[kraehenightwyng]

tree of heaven; root of evil

A/N; this is a scene of kraehe fighting yggdrasil (my primal oc) for the second time, taking place between the ending of HVW and the beginning of STB. It’s the culmination of her efforts to pursue the truth behind the slaughtering of her village, as well as the cruel circumstances of her family’s death, and her final showdown with an old and elusive enemy

TW: depictions of gore, violence, blood, body horror, and specifically depictions of eye trauma. --- --- ---

‘I’m being torn apart,’ she thinks, hardened roots slicing her abdomen as she’s flung backwards. She tastes the acrid bitterness of rotten undergrowth, the salt of her sweat, the sourness of her blood. Her flesh is torn and beaten raw, a patchwork of wounds, but she’s always been a glutton for punishment— especially when it’s self imposed. Scrambling to find purchase, she rights herself once more. Kraehe spits, red pouring from her ruined eye, from between her lips as she advances.

Yggdrasil is a horrifying nightmare of a Primal, more formidable than the rest. The Tree of Heaven is an amalgam of roots twisted into knots, its petrified bark resembling faces stretched in eternal agony. With every swing of her lance, blood pours thick like sap from the cuts in its bark. It’s leaves smother sunlight above, and what little filters through is tainted by a cloud of rotting spores that constrict her breath; make her eyes water and burn. Yggdrasil looms overhead, and edifice to a pervading sense of wrongness that tries to seize her by the bones.

Still, she stubbornly grits her blood stained teeth, mouth split somewhere between grimace and manic grin. She’s steeling herself, willing her body to go beyond its natural limits as she’s always done when pushed into a corner. The other Scions scolded her for her stubborn streak, the twins especially, but Kraehe simply could never help herself, and they knew it was futile to stop her. She pushes her hair from her good eye, damp tendrils clinging to her skin. Her lance feels steady in her hands as she tightens her grip, balanced, right. Kraehe draws back, imperceptibly fast, even with her wounds slowing her movements.  

‘No,’ she corrects herself, ‘No, keep going. You have to keep going.’ And then she advances, one foot in front of the other.

Her ears are ringing and her head is aflame, pulse pounding and breath coming out in ragged, dying gasps. There’s a far off piercing sound, and suddenly her vision goes white. Kraehe can feel her feet moving still, but the ground slips out from beneath her and her stomach lurches forward.

“Shit.” She mutters, but her voice doesn’t reach her own ears before it becomes a garbled sigh of static noise. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Her heart races, thrumming erratically in her chest and threatening to choke the air from her lungs. She’s been waiting for this singular moment, where she becomes displaced in a time and place that holds the answers she’s pursued for so long. Her good eye burns before images slowly come into focus again, and Kraehe’s become suspended in the memories of another; unseen till now, but achingly familiar.

Like a veil, the gossamer of collected dust lifts to reveal the truth. And Kraehe watches, captive to the memory.

She’s standing somewhere like an altar, and it takes her a moment to recognize it as the base of the cliffs just outside her home village. The ground slopes uneven, leading down into the calderas and foothills below. She peers at the familiar sight with a weight in her chest, standing from the top of the path. Behind her, the mouths of the ceremonial caves. Even from her limited vantage point, she could see they glittered with aether crystals, shimmering in the moonlight. Back then, they’d been used exclusively for the mage guild and their training— a trial and sanctuary to become one with the aetherial flow, as she recalled. Though her mother had been a talented mage, Kraehe never had skill in the arcane, and thus no reason to ever enter despite how she loved her mother’s magic. She feels a sudden pang of longing for something that would never be hers, but presses onward.

The feeling only worsens as two figures make their presence known, voices long unheard conversing amongst themselves. Hesitantly, she begins to turn, their silhouettes coming into view. Her fingernails bite angry crescents into the palm of her hand, skin stretched tight over her knuckles. Certainly it was a strange feeling, to see a dead loved one as if they were alive once more. Stranger still, for them to have had their life wrung out by her own hands. It was beyond comprehension, beyond words. The very last time she saw her parents, their blood was soaking into her clothes. She’d been plunging her fishing spear into their chests. She’d struggled to squirm free from beneath their heavy, lifeless bodies. She’d killed them.

‘I’m being torn apart’, she thinks, and her hands sting as her nails dig deeper. If she were to look at them, would they be dripping red? And who’s blood would it be on them?

“Are you certain?” a woman’s voice cuts through the wretched buzzing in Kraehe’s ears. It’s hurried and uncertain, but there’s a comforting and gentle lilt to the sound that makes her feel fragile for the first time in her life. Her mother appears worried, brow furrowed as she looks at Kraehe’s father with a hard stare. “Reiher, are you certain this is the only way?”

“We’ve tried everything else.” Her father nods grimly. Assured as he seems to be, he looks none too pleased to say it aloud.

“But what if—“ her mother starts.

“We don’t have time for ‘what if’, Fasan!” Reiher interrupts, manic as he pulls a book from his hip pouch, tossing it to the ground at his wife’s feet. He ran his hands through his thinning hair, panic creeping into his voice. “There’s no other way!”

Fasan huffs impatiently. She pauses placing the aetheryte, instead plucking the book and thumbing through its well-worn pages. She turns to a page with old illustrations of a resplendent tree, her fingers tracing the branches. Her frown deepens as Reiher continues.

“We’ve tried everything else!” He says, kneeling beside her as he chucked more crystals into the heap. His voice was gentler now, though still despairing. “You’ve seen it yourself— the food stores have run out, the soil’s gone sour, and the only life in the rivers are algae and weeds. If we do nothing, the village will die.”

Her mother pauses in her work, piling dimly glowing aetheryte crystals at the altar’s base.

The weight in Kraehe’s stomach becomes heavier,  mouth dry and jaw tight as her mind works to make sense of what is happening. Kraehe had seen this before: the Sahagin, the Ixali, the Kobolds, the Amal’jaa; it couldn’t be that her parents—

“What have you done?” Kraehe barely finds her voice, just above a whisper. The sound to her own ears makes the weight in her stomach grow heavier, makes this all the more real and true. A feeling somewhere between grief and horror draws her nearer to her parents’ shades. She stands above their kneeled figures, fists clenched. Her hands ache, blood smeared between her fingers, beneath her nails still biting at the raw flesh. Blood drips from her wounds, through the pages of the book and onto the ground. She wished it landed on the pages themselves, smearing the ink, making it illegible. But it only served to remind her that she was a captive witness to the horrors about to unfold, useless.

“What have you done?”

“O holy Yggdrasil, Tree of Heaven and Revered Savior!--”

“Stop.”

“--Thy humble servants have summoned Thee forth from the boundless aether--”

“Stop!”

“--that Thou might nourish our bodies with Thine generous bounty and bathe our barren lands in Thine golden light so we may grow anew.”

“STOP!”

A white light blinds her, and the scene changes. She stands, covered in blood, seeing her younger self pinned beneath the corpses of her parents.

“What have you done?” she repeats, eyes fixed on the bodies of her parents. Her hands are shaking as she reaches towards her child self. She has to help her. She needs to tell her everything. She needs to rescue her.

“What have you done?”

But everything is gone. She is back amongst the roots and rot and undergrowth, a root plunged through her abdomen like a spear. Her good eye is wide, shining with unshed tears. Her ruined eye is torn open, bloody and raw because it just never wants to heal. She chokes on her blood, spilling from her mouth. Her armor wet and glistening and red and for a moment she thinks of Estinien and how different they are, but how alike they’ve been.

She realizes it now; how many times she’s been at that moment, how many times she has died just to be brought back by the grace of Hydaelyn, her Echo stronger than before. Her Echo only allows her to hear the dead, amplified over time by incidents of losing consciousness, and furthermore by the presence of the Warrior of Light. She’s been her own ghost, her own nightmare, trying desperately all this time to protect herself while trapped in this vicious and tragic cycle.

Kraehe grapples for purchase against the roots, coughing and sputtering. Her body cries out in protest, but somwhere between Hydaelyn’s urging and her own stubbornness, she persists. She must.

“You... lied... to them.” she grinds out through bloody teeth, speaking directly to it for the first time.

Yggdrasil speaks, voices overlapping old and new, “I upheld the agreement.”

“You slaughtered... an entire... village!” Kraehe gasps, attempting to free herself from the roots. The pain is agonizing as the bark scrapes her wounds. But Yggdrasil’s next words make her numb to it all:

“Not one of you starved to death, did you?”

She tears herself free, a fount of blood pouring from her abdomen, her mouth, her eye. Kraehe heaves her breath in defiance, her muscles ache as she wills herself not to choke. Her head is pounding, her vision fading at the edges and doused in red. She hears herself call out to her partner, bidding Belladonna to cast Astral Fire and end this. Her ruined eye burns, light shining resplendent; Blood of The Dragon runs through her veins, made manifest by a dragon’s eye glowing amidst her scars.

Kraehe dives up one last time, the air feeling thinner than it had previously. She aims her sight down at the tangle of roots below, vision sharp. Her lance is poised to kill, her grip unfaltering after all this time. She doesn’t have the strength to speak aloud, pouring it all into her final strike.

May you wander adrift, starved of aether. May your roots wither and your blood run dry. May you never know relief from your wounds. May you suffer my wrath. May you suffer as we have.

Kraehe descends, her body a honed weapon, piercing Yggdrasil’s heart as his body is engulfed in Belladonna’s hellfire.

“Burn!” she cries, twisting the blade deeper, cutting and carving into its dense bark. The flames burn to close to her skin, but she continues to plunge her lance further. The smoke and rot chokes the air from her lungs, but she feels the warmth of Hydaelyn’s hand on her back, and gone is the tightness in her chest. Her wounds no longer ache despite her blood still flowing freely. The sea of ever-present voices in her ear grow louder, clamoring and crying out her name. The blade sinks deeper into Yggdrasil’s heart, and with a sickening crack of finality, clefts the charred knot of wood in twain. The bark hisses, its blood sap bubbling in the heat of Belladonna’s flames.

Suddenly, an explosion of light, of aether; the voices louder than ever before, threatening to tear Kraehe apart. It takes her several moments, in the haze of her headache, her fading battle high, her loss of blood, to recognize them at all. Each and every one, a familiar sound long unheard, as if from a memory long forgotten.

They’ve been trapped, she realizes wearily, all this time. That’s why I couldn’t hear them before.

It’s her village, her parents. She’s come home, and everyone is so thrilled to see her. Overlapping voices praise her efforts, thank her for freeing them, and two in particular speak of their immense pride, and their immense regrets. Carefully, she steadies herself onto her feet, still clutching her lance tight. Tears well in her eye, a rheumy film spilling forth at once as she is stunned into a silence. The voices steadily fade out, beginning their pilgrimage to the next life.

For the first time in many, many years, she allows herself to weep. A part of her longs more than anything to go along with them, to not be left behind once again. But a hand is at her back once more, this time Belladonna’s urging her to rest. Exhaustion overcomes her, and she all but tumbles down to the ground, Belladonna scrambling to support her weight.

“Kraehe?! Kraehe! Listen, just stop moving around--“ panic colors Belladonna’s voice, but her cool hands are steady and reassuring, “--Gods, you need to just lay there until we can get you healed, okay? You need to heal!”

Her vision grows hazy through her tears, through her worsening state, but she can concede to that, at least.

“Yes.” she croaks out, in spite of an immediate chiding from Belladonna to not overexert herself. “Yes, I do.”

[seasidewriter1-writes]

Replying to @elizabeth0020 for: Hello!! I’ve always wondered how you decide what arcs/episodes you’re going to write? There are sooooo many, how do you know what’s a good one for your story vs one that isn’t? And a second question (if you feel like answering lol): how do you picture all the details you wrote? Like lighting, movements, facial expression etc? You’re so good at that and I’ve always been amazed at how you come up with them!

I love answering anything and everything, so never worry about sending me too much! I don’t often get to talk about the technical stuff (like the questions you’ve asked), so I love getting any chance I have to talk about them! (So hold on tight, ‘cause this is a ramble! 😂)

So, for the first question regarding the arcs... I picked out what episodes/arcs I thought were beneficial when I did my first watch through of the Clone Wars this past summer. I had a google doc that I wrote down all the episode names in, then jotted down the preliminary ideas. Let me tell you, with a show that has seven seasons of 20+ episodes, it was... so daunting to even think about narrowing down what episodes and arcs to use. It was what initially deterred me from using any of them at all. So I started to look for things that I felt would directly impact Elara, her character, and her development. For example, I didn’t really use all of “Cat and Mouse” because the episode, on a whole, wouldn’t have Elara much involved in it. It did, however, provide a wonderful backdrop for her time on Christophsis, which is why I didn’t nix it entirely. Aside from forcing Obi-Wan and Elara to be tied together, ���Dooku Captured” and “The Gungan General” were used to introduce her to Hondo, whom both allows her to be more playful, and showcases her knowledge of the seedier side of the galaxy. And there are plenty of episodes that I love and adore that I just... don’t think would fit. For as much as I love “Senate Spy” and the introduction of Clovis, there’s no way for me to put Elara into that episode and not have it feel forced. That’s another huge thing I look for when picking episodes; if Elara doesn’t feel like she would naturally fit into the storyline somehow, even if it’s indirectly, I’m not going to force her into it. That’s when I do things like mention the events of the episode in a chapter (like with “Clone Cadets”) instead of doing a whole episode. So Clovis is obviously going to get a mention (she’s Anakin’s sister and Padmé’s bestie, of course she’s going to hear about the debacle), but the whole episode won’t be written out.

Then, of course, you have the arcs. The ones that I had immediately chosen are (and these probably come as no surprise): Ryloth, Mandalore, Mortis, Slavers, and Deception. The arcs I find easier to choose because you have a chance to work with more surface area so to speak. It gives me a chance to really flesh out Elara’s part in the story, focus in on her and her emotions and how she’s tied to this particular plot. With the Mortis Arc, for example––Elara is a Skywalker. She is strong with the Force, and in the “Balance” verse, considered a Chosen One. That ties her into the Mortis Arc very interestingly, since it’s not just Anakin going God Mode. It’s going to lend me the chance to really dig deep into Elara, her connection to the Force, to the Light and Dark (the Daughter and Son), and her relationship to being a Chosen One. At first I was like ‘holy shit I’m never gonna be able to do this arc,’ and then when I buckled down and really thought it over... I realized it’s going to be really important for her as a character, and particularly her relationship with Anakin (stay tuned!). It also probably comes as no surprise that a lot of the arcs (and episodes) that get picked are influenced by whether or not Anakin or Obi-Wan are in them. Which is why I almost turned a blind eye to the Umbara Arc until someone brought it up. I did a rewatch of it and knew I had to include it, too. Because that’s going to be an awesome opportunity to flesh out how close Elara is to the 442nd, and be able to contrast her ideals as a General against those of Krell. A lot of the picking of episodes and arcs ends up being trial and error. I wrote the first four-ish pages of “Clone Cadets” before I realized it just didn’t flow right.

All this being said, I like to envision Elara is around for all of the Clone Wars episodes, so I’ve got lots of fun little random snippets for things that I’ll probably never write, but figure would happen in some part of a CW episode.

And after all that, here we finally are at your second question! ☺️

Coming up with all those small details is actually an amalgamation of things at work. I do attribute a lot of it to my training as an actor/theatre artist. I think about how, if I were directing it, how I’d want the movements to look, and how that would translate on both a small scale, and a large scale. A touch of a hand for Obi-Wan and Elara can feel like a world shifting movement––but come off as nothing but a simple, friendly gesture to their fellows. On a small scale, what makes the difference is the way the touch happens. How light the pressure of the touch is, how long it lasts, how slowly their fingers brush against the other person’s hand... all those things help me figure out the mood of that touch and how they’d respond to it. Also, when choosing words to describe movements I often think about the attitude attached to it. A ‘turn of the head’ when Anakin’s being moody may end up being a ‘swivel,’ or the ‘arch’ of an eyebrow from Obi-Wan is more sarcastic than a gentler ‘raise.’ I often agonize picking out those sorts of words. I’ll sit there and try them over and over again, then put them all into a Thesaurus website because I worry I use the same words too much. The thesaurus (particularly when writing Obi-Wan), is my best friend.

When I write mannerisms for canon characters, I use a lot of reference for. I’ll literally just scroll through gifs, watch movie clips, or rewatch the scene I’m writing to pick up on character-specific mannerisms. A couple chapters ago I was describing Anakin’s angry face, and I just looked at images of him from Revenge of the Sith (him alone in the Council room, him being knighted as Vader, his expressions on Mustafar, etc.) I’ll also do this for vocal ticks/inflections. I will also unashamedly admit I will sit there and compose my face into whatever expression I’m trying to describe. Sometimes feeling it physically, or physically composing it helps me come up with words or ways to describe the look. Same thing with touches AND with vocal inflection. Do I sit by myself and read what I’ve written aloud in my best Obi-Wan Kenobi cadence? Yes, yes I do. And has it helped me figure out what words/phrases do and do not work? Yes, it absolutely has!

Also, a lot of describing the details of motion/facial expression/touch gets affected by music for me. Like, if you listen to “Stairway to Heaven” as played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra while reading, say, the scene in “The Gungan General” where Obi-Wan and Elara wake up pressed up to one another... that song is just THE feel of that moment. Listening to the right music when writing (the little details especially) is big for me. Kinda like how “Blue Monday” is the music that works best for the bunker scene in “Storm Over Ryloth.”

There are also a lot of details that I pull from real life. I remember when I wrote Elara seeing Naboo for the first time—and consequently grass, trees, and flowers, too—it was summer time for me. I was staring out at the trees and the way the light filtered through them, watched how they swayed... the grass had just been cut and the breeze smelled sweet... and I was like ‘god, imagine experiencing this all for the first time.’ So I took what I felt and elevated it a little, tried to add a kind of wonder to the things that we all, for the most part, kinda take for granted. I like pulling on experiences I’ve had in real life as a basis.

I ask attribute a LOT of my detail work to my training as a theatre artist. I think about lighting now differently than I did a couple years ago; because I learned what kinda of light fit different moods. Like the scene of Obi-Wan at Dex’s would feel completely different if I’d described the light as cool toned. It would lack a sense of hope. His reminiscences would be sadder, it would feel more stark. The warmer tones suggest that there’s still heart and hope, a possibility for things to get better, and that reflects his inner life better than colder, bluer light. Or how I used light when I wrote Elara seeing Watto again after 10 years to describe her struggle between Dark and Light in that moment. She stepped out of the sun and into the shade because, for a moment, she almost gave in to the Darkness. (Inspired by the scene in Force Awakens where Kylo asks for Han’s help and the light shines down on them... with hints of red low lighting to hint at the struggle... only to have the light disappear as he overrides his own vulnerability, reverts to the Darkness and kills his own father).

I also love using physical objects as emotional triggers, like is done in theatre quite a bit. A good recent example being Elara’s lightsaber. Obi-Wan having it reminds him of his worries regarding her safety, and his struggle with choosing what path to take in regards to his feelings towards her. Or Elara with the Snow Blossom. These things have the ability to spark different emotions depending on the situation. On a good day, the Snow Blossom will make her smile; on a bad day, it may make her feel more sad than happy. And sometimes they don’t have to be objects—they can be bruises or scars or healing wounds. Having something physical spark an emotional response can be really helpful, and has actually helped me though rough spots in my writing.

I could literally go on for hours about all of this kind of stuff! So thank you for asking about it and giving me a chance to discuss it even a little bit! ☺️

[yume-fanfare]

hi i am that anon from like 29th Dec (last dang year) who said i read ur tsuki no hime and loved it and that u understand Aizou. i have read more of ur stuff since then and now i NEED to ask you for writing advice, on both characterization and general writing tips since I didnt mention it before. Sorry about that! i just forgot i sent an ask and i do not get notifs at all (or does anon asks not get notifs?) Also, ART STUDENT! That's why the nice art and art leaning!! I feel smart for sensing it

oh yup, tumblr doesn't send notifs for anon asks! but i'm glad you did see the answer anyway

this post is hideously long, so answer under the cut!

so, on characterization: it is mostly a matter of what would they say, rather than what you want them to say. the joke about "the characters do what they want to" instead of what the writer wants is pretty much true if you want them to be in character lol (that's why sometimes a little bit of OoC isn't too bad)

checking the source material is the most important thing: look at prior similar interactions the characters have had and how they reacted

this is kind of hard with LIPxLIP, as there aren't that many translated texts about them but with honeyworks the most canon and reliable thing to use as reference are the mvs. the mvs are drawn in a way that can pretty much be understood even if you don't have the lyrics, and sometimes it's even better if you can't read them, to properly focus on the images better

look at their expressions closely: while aizou is always explosive in his anger, yuujirou often has a more indifferent expression. so, when they fight, aizou is probably the one to blow up first while yuujirou maintains his composure better. it's kind of the classic "this was only a brief passing panel but i am going to expand on it" www

but the thing about fanfiction is that it's always a bit of a character analysis in itself. you don't start writing having already a color-coded folder of possible situations and reactions a character would have for each setting. you just throw the characters in a scenario and then think from there onwards, and eventually you'll be able to have the folder of situations and what you think their reactions would be like. (though, this links back to the prior point, if the characters have gone through a similar situation in canon, use that as guide! plus, finding little references to canon when reading is always fun)

for general writing, i'm going to mostly talk about my own experiences and process! i'm in no way a professional though

the basic is reading a lot. not just books but also fanfic. in fact, since you're writing fanfic, i Encourage you to read fanfic. even if your story ends up novel length, the way of treating the story is different from that of an actual novel. for example, because you're working under the premise that everyone knows the characters already. the general style of fics is different as well.

in fact, the style is the main reason i'm saying this slfkslfkslkf

read a lot of stuff and find a style you like. think of it as sewing together pieces from here and there to make a frankenstein amalgamation: this person's metaphors, the comparisons from here, the descriptions from there

personally, i adore the "long one-shot with a long title formatted (like this)" fics that are mostly feelings and descriptions and as little dialogue as possible, and some that occasionally play with the "show don't tell" rule, and some months ago i read a book whose descriptions amazed me because you could feel what the character was focusing on the most, rather than being general descriptions of the situation (i actually have a lot of thoughts about descriptions but that's a post for another day). but also i really like dialogue and plot-driven stories, descriptions can get boring and before trying to break rules, you have to be really good at following them

but, let's go step by step: developing an idea

for this i'm going to mostly reference the multichap i finished a while ago as an example

i started with just a few vague concepts in mind: non-idol au with aizou who does some sport and likes music but is insecure about his singing and yuujirou who does some music related thing and encourages him to sing in a way that's somehow related to the hozier song to noisemaking (sing), because it's what inspired me to write in the first place

then, from then onwards i wrote down what would happen in the first chapter of the story bullet-point-list-style, including things like the roommates part or the clubs the boys were in (at first yuujirou was in the choir club lol the change was a last second decision that idk why i took) and then bits of dialogue here and there that would be The Turning Points. those first dialogues were for the fight at the end of ch 1, the apology-date in ch 3 and then some vaguely unused ones for the "yuujirou encourages aizou" part, as those were the first key moments i thought of

because, since it's enemies to friends to lovers, an important aspect was character development

not all fics have character development bc not all of them are long enough (if you're aiming for short and sweet then there's no need). but if they do, i recommend you write down how the character was at the beginning of the story and then how they were at the end and then fill in the middle later, think of what those key turning points that made the character change were (the more little things you add, the more gradual it'll be)

samishigariya illustrates this very nicely: the song starts and finishes with the same lines, but the ending ones feel more light-hearted. the beginning has pre-arisa ken and pre-getting-along-with-yuujirou aizou, when they were the lonely people the title mentioned, and the ending, when they're not lonely anymore. the in between can be seen in depth during the other songs: ken before arisa was a playboy who didn't take love seriously, but after meeting her he realized that games were not all there was to love; and aizou used to be quite cranky and high-key a loner, but then he "meets precious things and knows of love". i will not elaborate on that because this isn't an aiyuu post but Oh You Know

for the fic, aizou would go through that same process, more or less: someone who doesn't really form meaningful connections with people but who, in the end, would end up having quite a bunch of people who care about him as his relationship with yuujirou advances too

since the relationship was the main focus, i wrote a very simple outline for how it would develop throughout 5 hypothetical chapters that was just: 1. civil w each other but mostly bad > 2. bad > 3. half friends > 4. pining > 5. date

and then with that in mind and the bullet point list, the final basic outline ended up like this:

there were scraped ideas and ideas that made it in later, but i believe having a simple outline, a bare skeleton to add things to, is important. stories need continuity, development requires a prior buildup

it's especially important in multichapter fics where you post as you write, you need to have a more or less clear idea of what's going to happen because you can't ignore scenes you've already posted

shorter stories don't need it as much, you can think as you go, but it's still helpful to know where you're going with things to avoid getting stuck

and, on getting stuck: don't be afraid of deleting things. if you can't figure out how to continue things, then delete the situation and start again. it might feel like you'd be wasting time but in the end, it is so much better than being stuck on the same scene for weeks

in fact, you don't have to write in order. jump to the next scene and you'll figure it out later. you Can write the scene you want to write and then build everything else around it

it's normal to write a scene and then realize it would make more sense later in the story, or that it would be better if you added another scene earlier, or sometimes you just find it easier to jump from one part of the story to another. rely on your outline to keep track of what you've written, what you have left to write and what's the best way to arrange your story. make your story understandable

which bring us to editing

there's a lot of much better posts on editing stories, but yeah ctrl+f is your best friend: don't repeat yourself too much. and be sure to vary sentence and paragraph length, as well as sentence structure, to give dynamism to the writing

now, i've mentioned before the show, don't tell rule, but i'm going to talk a bit more about it because it's quite important

once again there's a lot of posts that explain more in depth what it is, so i'm not going to expand too much on that, but, very basically, try to avoid things like "then some time passed and they became friends". explain it: what happened exactly? how did they become friends? if it's important, show it to us, instead of summarizing

since things like these make the story longer, it also gives room for more development and proper explanation for things that happen

for example, the fic was originally going to start with them already in the room, and the whole situation would have been explained in a single paragraph somewhere, but by actually adding the scene where they first arrive to the dorms and argue with the lady at the main desk, the story flows better and it let me actually describe their first meeting

and uuuhhh i think that's all? this took super long to write i hope i didn't forget any super basic stuff lol

i want to add that for enemies to lovers i greatly recommend this post bc it's super good but yeah i think that's basically it, if you have any more specific questions just shoot me an ask

[elaz-ivero]

Poetry Fieldnotes ||Broken Artists Collective||

[image description: a block print with a bright red border around a greyish blue grainy image. Atop it is a pair of discoloured hands, palms facing forward, red and outstretched. Above the hands in white Garamond font are the words, Broken Artists Collective and in smaller font, and other poems. /end id]

Over the past week, I may or may not have fully embraced the concept of a broken artist finding myself unable to conjure up a single creative thought unless I'm lying on the floor surrounded by scrawlings and broken-spined books. For a long time, I have been trying to cater my work to a series of magazines that clearly yearn for a very specific 'type' of poetry that I am incapable of producing. These poems are ones that applied pressure, the ones that were crammed into inattentive submission boxes and were returned in empty emails.

Here are the poems,

[image description: a photograph of a boy laying down looking upward, a lit cigarette stands upright in his mouth and his features are overlayed with the shadows of ferns and other plants. He wears an orange collared shirt and around him are the words in white Garamond font, Floor Bound Echo Location. /end id]

Floor-bound Echolocation is a disjointed 403-word prose poem that is a coalesce of liminal spaces, chaotic ingenuity and a reversal of grief. Like many of my poems, it describes a series of small events and feels more like a corrupted scene from a novel than a stand-alone poem. It's a short tale of a brother and sister cleaning out the garage-workspace of their genius, estranged and recently deceased cousin. It opens as follows...

All the lines are in lowercase and of sporadic length, every so often a single random word is isolated and highlighted. These are the words that were isolated throughout the poem.

//enigma //a test of patience //satisfied //memorized

I adore this poem and it feels strangely personal (my own experiences often slip into my work unconsciously like fears finding their place in dreams) as a creative I fear the idea that a lot of my work and unwritten ideas will never be read or known. The poem focuses on one of the cousin's creations, a geometric pattern drawn in chalk on the concrete floor. This pattern, its design obsessive and laid out like a triggerless trap takes over the narrative of the poem. The characters wash it away and the pattern, the physical manifestation of this dead cousins genius clings to the idea of being appreciated, recognized.

[image description: a boy sits up against a wall in a barren green and blue-tinted room, to the right of the image, is a window showing trees outside and beneath it a gas heater is attached to the wall. The boy's wearing a similar orange shirt and on the wall beside him are words, 'it blends and swirls with the oiled water and tidals along the length of the driveway to passer-by's what remains of it asks, begs, to be, memorised.' /end id]

I wrote 'floor-bound...' in a day and made subsequent edits over the course of a couple of days, I tend to write out my ideas and make minor changes to word choice and sentence length before I add in the details that make each poem unique. The isolation of individual letters was a way to almost mimic the process of looking in a cluttered space you'll see something recognizable and latch onto it.

Status: Submitted

[image description: A girl with long black hair, olive skin and a tired solemn expression face forward, an unlit cigarette held loosely in her mouth. She stands in a red elevator, the doors are closed and on the left on the image is the metal switchboard showing she has reached level 12. On her right is the word, 'Peephole'. /end id]

Peephole is a mirrored poem and is split into 'Inside', and 'Outside' with Inside, aligned to the left and Outside, aligned to the right, they are reflective of each other, mirrored. Peephole is about a young drunk woman staying inside her boyfriend's cramped apartment inspired by the 43-Square-Foot rooms in South Korea and an image from the article below inspired the entirety of this poem.

She, aware that the apartment seems to reject her, steps out into the hallway, the 'Outside' which feels apocalyptic with a burning wining sun and a ghost standing by the elevator, a personification of her sickness silently assessing how she is still alive and if she could find her way home in this state. The women in turn assess how this hallway faintly reminds her of the one from 'The Shining' leading into a breaking of the fourth wall.

[image description: A photograph that looks similar to a corrupted piece of film, tinted red and showing a woman's profile looking toward the right. Words on the left of the image read, 'I take an imaginary drag as if setting the scene of some ninety's horror, slasher, mounting suspense with the final girl, alone, a lonely lamb how easy would it be to just end a film right here.' /end id]

The tone of the poem is gritty, realistic and almost elusive in its design. I love writing poems without intending to care about its audience, with no closure, no clarity, no kindness. This poem is an amalgamation of all the recent media I've consumed, 'The Shining', Final Girl, Wikipedia dives into the housing crisis and psychological horror. I love writing poems that reflect a blend of culture, using language as a way to implement distinctive voices in my writing.

[image description: Another room tinted green, on the bottom of the image head barely in frame is a women looking off into the distance, above the cigarrete she holds red smoke reflecting in the shine on her face twirls and unfurls. Text reads, 'Tiger balm and salt, "kapuahi ahi" his whisper hurts my ears and sounds like, toungue on velvet, tooth in cheek.' /end id]

Status: Submitted

[image description: a close up of a brides face covered by a sheer veil in front of a black background, her eyes are tinted with red eyeshadow and she looks forward with a bored stare. Large text in the upper left-hand corner reads, 'Chekhov'. /end id]

Chekhov, my most recent poem is- as the title suggests- from the perspective of a gun, a woman on her wedding day is left at the altar by a cheating groom and hunts him down in the orchard venue with an heirloom of a gun. I love the perspective of this poem, the way it slowly reveals the origin of the 'voice' and grows darker and darker as the wedding dress soils and darkens with dirt and blood. Few of my poems spur from ideas rather than images but the idea of a furious bride filled with anguish and horror brought this poem to life.

[image description: a young bride looking behind her as she runs toward a patch of dark trees in the middle of a field. One hand holds up the edge of her white dress, it's evening. Text on the left-hand side of the image reads, 'Darling when my steel feels soft, revoke your vows and kiss something just as cold and cocky. /end id]

This poem is split into three stanzas, before the wedding, during and the evolving aftermath. I feel like I could extend this into a short story saving the strange gunpoint perspective till the final scene.

Status: Completing

[image description: A black and white image of a boy looking up, his expression a mix of horror and fear while blades point down at him and hold steady inches from his neck. The image is a still from "Ivan the Terrible" by Sergei Eisenstein. Text aside it reads, 'The Sound of Hamlet Rehearsed. /end id]

The sound of Hamlet Rehearsed, inspired by my own recent exploration of scriptwriting and theatre. The sound of Hamlet Rehearsed is about a boy being held accountable during a faux court hearing, on stage on opening night. The narrative slowly switches from fiction to reality as it dawns on him that the punishment is about to be dealt and he struggles with understanding how much of his reaction is performance or authentic. It's structured in a sporadic unbroken series of words and moments.

Tone-deaf touchtone tipping point Ziplock bags and scented zip ties off script the boards atop the trap door tremble imagine the conductor beneath torch amongst teeth briefly making out direction from diction.

Status: Editing

Those are the poems I've been working on! I'm not going to write any more poetry until I come to my poetry course next trimester and instead are going to focus on short stories (I'm developing two right now, three-course meal and Wren versus the Russian Government) and continuing by Worldbuilding Diaries series.

-E

[soyosauce]

On Using Culture As Language In Last Tango In Cyberspace

“THIS REVOLUTION IS FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY.”

Last Tango in Cyberspace makes culture a character to be explored in equal measure as the main character. Lion, an empathy-tracker, or em-tracker for short—uses his unique talent to consume curated content provided by clients and extrapolate a future; not at an individual level, mind you, rather as a glimpse at the cultural significance regarding the content in the future. It’s an amalgamation of genetic drifts which hardwires an em-trackers’ pattern recognition. Hacking their intuition to do a sort of cultural prognostication.

“A small robot standing on a busy city street corner, looking around. I SEE HUMANS BUT NO HUMANITY.”

Em-trackers methods vary with the person and there are very few known trackers, at least in so far as ones operating in the same capacity of Lion, doing this very niche work for a living. A very good living at that.

Lion, in particular, is rigged to make these deductions from words and logos, though it’s gestured that each tracker would be completely different. He processes the content he’s given, reacts, and tells the client if he sees a future or not. It’s usually a binary answer; a “yes” or a “no.”

“His journalism days are behind him. No longer does he get paid for the plot. Now, he’s paid for saying yes or no—the sum total of his contractual obligations. His work in the world reduced to one-word responses. When, he wonders, did his life get so small?”

Superficially, this book is about Lion being contracted by a major corporate entity to take a look at a crime scene and apply his talents… but this is a very unorthodox application of his gifts and one which ends up taking him down a rabbit hole. Ostensibly it’s a murder mystery wrapped up in noir trappings, something people might expect from cyberpunk. This is where the clear iterations from the sub-culture come into play, however. Within the tropes of a pleasurable whodunit, there’s much more to be consumed.

“You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.”

A specific trope that follows noir elements in cyberpunk, the investigator in over their head, is a unique vernacular used. There is typically a colloquial dialect that is foreign to the reader and makes them feel a fish out of water. The reader interprets what these cultural elements are in the future with the remix of certain words or the use of completely fictional words, from time to time. Interestingly, the dialect used in this novel is pop culture itself. Not in the very limited sense of Ready Player One, where games, gamers, and gaming is the language—but in landmark moments in cinema and literature that is reasonably absorbed into the general intellect of society. The most common being the novel Dune. Lion carries it with him all the time and is the cornerstone for the explanation of Lion’s gifts and poly-tribalism, a central component to the way Lion looks at culture in the story. People are intersectional beings with complex identities. Tracing the identity back to its origin is possible with technology these days. Appealing to particular facets of the identity can be a predictor for if something is to be successful and thrive or be consumed by another identity that dominates it.

'“Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope.” He points at the images. “This doesn’t feel like hope.”

I think this approach both hinders and helps Last Tango in Cyberspace. For one, it’s an interesting use of the trope which proved satisfying to read for me, personally. I had never read Dune but it is explained as needed. I never felt lost. However, I could see some people who had read the book and disagree with the cultural impacts asserted in the text having a problem with most of the book, as it draws from it heavily at a personal level for Lion, as well as a fundamental shorthand for what is happening in the plot; ingrained in the theme and a permanent fixture.

“Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy.”

The frenetic pacing that accompanies cyberpunk literature is replaced with a sort of artificial acceleration with the structure of the book. Lots of very short chapters, in other words. This allows for expounding on the cultural aspects that are conveyed during the text. You notice what Lion notices. These details becoming foundational to the extrapolations he draws on later. What this means though, is the pacing is somewhat sacrificed in order to get the reader to do the same types of pattern recognition Lion does during the book. It’s clever, but a slow burn.

”Hybridization, he figures, is destined to become one of the ways this generation out-rebels the last generation. How we went from long-haired hippie freaks to pierced punk rockers to transsexual teenagers taking hormones.”

For me, the slower pace made it feel reminiscent of Takeshi Kovach in Altered Carbon. Envoys in that novel “soak up” culture in order to fit in and navigate foreign cultures. Lion’s talent feels like it takes that idea and explores it more thoroughly, engaging with it more, and this method allows you to soak up the information as well. If it were frenetic some of the details would be lost, I feel.

“Lion glances back at the pigeons. Sees a flicker he didn’t notice before. Remembers that the de-extinction program was a failed effort, realizes he’s looking at a light-vert. An AR projection of an almost. The bad dreams of a society disguised as a good time.”

A concept continually being reiterated in the novel is “living the questions.” Something that also subverts first wave cyberpunk, the characters of which are generally on the spectrum somewhere, unlikeable and/or anti-social, and live on the fringes of society in a sub-culture of some kind.

Lion, however, is an embodiment of empathy. He is in stark contrast to those protagonists, relating to most everyone and so can assume their point of view. To the extent, in fact, he resolves to not use his talents on other people.

“We ache for this feeling, but it’s everywhere. Booze, drugs, sex, sport, art, prayer, music, meditation, virtual reality. Kids, hyperventilating, spinning in circles, feel oneness. Why William James called it the basic lesson of expanded consciousness—just tweak a few knobs and levers in the brain and bam. So the drop, the comedown, it’s not that we miss oneness once it’s gone; it’s that we suddenly can’t feel what we actually know is there. Phantom limb syndrome for the soul.”

Last Tango in Cyberspace feels like a love letter to cyberpunk while updating it. In Neuromancer, for example, Gibson’s Rastafarians were a source of major critique. They are also featured in this novel but the author instead traces the cultural aspects and importance of Rastafarian influences on western mainstream culture. It felt as though it was making a point to correct the caricature found in the original source material. Whether or not it succeeds I leave up to someone who’s more educated on that and can speak to it—but the intent is clear.

“the failure of language.” “It’s a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.”

This led me to the only thing I didn’t like about the novel and a personal pet peeve of mine: authors phonetically using foreign language in dialogue. It’s usually done as a form of cultural appreciation and authenticity, I’m sure… but it results in the author needing to clarify what is being said regardless and it just feels uncomfortable. It’s pretty much always from a Western perspective on a minority culture and usually is the default assumption of what the culture sounds like. Lion is able to converse with them for plausible reasons, often not the case when this is encountered, but it’s always left me feeling squeamish. Just tell me they have an accent, placing them in whatever area if that is relevant.

“…what is genuine emotion and what is business strategy. The modern condition.”

As Lion navigates the mystery and ping-pongs about the globe consuming the clues surrounding the mysterious death the reader, too, is engaging in this meta-language. Both in terms of how it subverts or remixes cyberpunk tropes, as well as the cultural context and information Lion imparts as his process. All of which is given weight. Hooking the plot into these details down the line as it comes together.

Most interestingly of all perhaps, the author goes out of their way to state that all of the technology exists in the world today, or is in a lab somewhere being worked on, at the very least.

“The car sees emotions. Signals have been pre-programmed, down to the basement level, below Ekman’s micro-expressions, getting to the core biophysical: heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels. And all from pointing a laser at a tiny vein in the human forehead. The car sees emotions, yet feels nothing. So morality too has to be pre-scripted into the code. Aim for garbage cans and not pedestrians; aim for solitary pedestrians rather than large groups. Empathy programmer, he’s heard it called, someone’s job now.”

This makes the future we are presented with prescient in the same way Neuromancer did with the advent of the Internet and the rise of technology in the ’90s. But where technophobia is firmly rooted in first wave cyberpunk. Last Tango in Cyberspace is making a virtue of humanities peculiarities, some of which we barely grasp. While the Internet is not something we may understand, so too are we learning the same of our own minds. Empathy, after all, is not something we gained from modernity.

“Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What’s truer than that?”

And empathy seems to be the thing we desperately need right now, rather than the consensual hallucination that allows us to connect to others while, at the same time, enabling us to dehumanize each other.

“Last tango in cyberspace…the end of something radically new. Copy that.”

“Pitch black again. Like someone extinguished an angel.”

[aion-rsa]

The Rod Serling Christmas Movie You Never Saw

https://ift.tt/2LtOQF3

A Christmas Carol is the definitive Christmas story. Yes, you might try and argue it’s the nativity, but the volume of movie adaptations begs to differ, and I can tell your heart’s not in it. And yes, I see those of you rushing to the comments to tell us it’s Die Hard and I think you’re very big and clever.

But A Christmas Carol has everything, all the trappings of Christmas, that sliver of darkness running through the whole thing, and above all a strong seasonal message to remind us what Christmas is about.

The story has been reimagined and retold endless times since Charles Dickens’ book came out, from textually accurate recreations such as A Muppet Christmas Carol (seriously) to modern-day reimagining like the Bill Murray vehicle, Scrooged.

And across all of these different retellings, the seasonal message is usually the first casualty. Scrooge’s lesson is often softened into “charity is good” or “don’t be mean to people”, or, at its worst, Scrooge’s sin is made out to be that he doesn’t like Christmas.

But A Christmas Carol itself is unflinching in its look at poverty, and poverty as a direct result of the actions of the powerful, and Scrooge’s argument for “decreasing the surplus population” still wouldn’t look out of place in several mainstream journalism outlets today. Very few adaptations of the book, even the faithful ones, capture the anger that runs through the original story. It’s not a general anger at the idea of “meanness”. It’s a very specific anger targeting political ideas and rhetoric that people held then and now.

Over a hundred years later, Rod Serling was another writer who wasn’t afraid of using his writing to express political anger. Anyone who’s seen even a handful of episodes of The Twilight Zone will know Serling used his platform to target McCarthyism, war, bigotry, and conformity.

The opening narration of one of the most famous episodes, ‘To Serve Man’, reads:

“The world went on much as it had been going on, with the tentative tip-toeing alongside a precipice of crisis. There was Berlin to worry about, and Indo-China and Algeria and all the other myriad of problems, major and minor, that somehow had lost their edge of horror because we were so familiar with them.”

That atmosphere of dull, routine, existential terror will sound familiar to anyone who has just lived through the post-2016 Hell Years.

But while Serling was determined that The Twilight Zone would tell stories about the issues he cared about, he also had to fight tooth and nail against networks and advertisers that wanted nothing less than to be associated with anything “political”. So Serling’s political messages were frequently veiled in magic, “Men from Mars” and hypothetical futures.

So it’s surprising that, in all 156 original Twilight Zone episodes, most of them written by Rod Serling himself, that the show never tried its own twist on the classic Christmas story that was in many ways tailor-made for the Twilight Zone treatment.

Except Rod Serling did write his own take on A Christmas Carol, as a TV movie featuring Peter Sellers, and it’s been almost completely forgotten.

A Carol for Another Christmas

A Carol for Another Christmas was a TV movie, aired on the American Broadcasting Company on the December 28 1964. It was the first in a planned series of movies promoting the United Nations. The final one of these films, about a UN narcotics agent, is believed to be the last story written by Ian Fleming before his death.

Read more

Movies

A Christmas Carol: The Best and Worst Adaptations

By Robert Keeling

That A Carol for Another Christmas was part of this series is probably why Serling was free to be far more openly and explicitly political than we’ve seen in even the angriest episodes of The Twilight Zone. It takes the line “Mankind was my business!” from Charles Dickens’s story, and turns it into a tale about America’s role on the international stage. It doesn’t linger on the trimmings of Christmas, instead taking a long, hard look at the dead, the dying and the suffering. At times it feels like a Christmas special from the makers of Threads.

The film also boasts a turn by Peter Sellers as a terrifying post-apocalyptic cult leader.

Peter Sellers appears in a modern remake of A Christmas Carol penned by the writer of The Twilight Zone and Planet of the Apes seems like a genuine piece of television history, and yet it’s virtually impossible to find today. Since its first broadcast in 1964, the film was only available to view at the Paley Center for Media in New York and Los Angeles and the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles, and rare bootleg copies.

In 2012 TCM broadcast it for the first time since its original showing, and has done annually since, and has made it available for limited-time on-demand streaming via TCM.com. But there has never been a home video or DVD release and the film has never been broadcast elsewhere.

So as we go into a recap of the film itself, we’ll issue the standard spoiler warning, but also beware that if you’re waiting to watch it yourself you might have a long search ahead of you.

Three Very Different Ghosts

Watching A Carol for Another Christmas is a strange experience. The film is both frighteningly relevant but also weirdly dated, and extremely of its time. The structure of the story is the one you already know.

Scrooge- here called “Daniel Grudge”, is approached by his nephew, argues with him about Christmas, then is approached by three ghosts bearing the three usual messages, “You weren’t always this way”, “Others are not like you”, and finally “This is what will happen if you continue this way”.

Grudge, a wealthy industrialist, is approached by his nephew, Fred, who is furious because Grudge has put a stop to a foreign academic exchange scheme, and we’re already seeing here where Serling is leaving the source material behind.

Grudge’s sin isn’t mere miserliness. He’s an all-out American isolationist. He wants the foreigners to stay behind their fences while America stays behind its own, and Fred’s argument that America has no choice but to engage in the international community falls on deaf ears.

Grudge’s motive for this is that his son, Marley, is a soldier who has died fighting a war elsewhere (based on the timing we can reasonably guess it’s Vietnam). He’s angry that every 20 years the US gets dragged into a foreign war, and sees the UN and foreign exchange schemes and similar as getting involved in and giving handouts to places where it isn’t America’s business. His ideal is for the USA to stay behind its fence, building faster jets and bigger bombs so that other countries know to leave it alone.

After seeing a brief apparition of Marley, Grudge is transported to a boat, filled with coffins covered in the flags of different nations. The Ghost of Christmas past that introduces himself to us is as the war dead. Not just the American war dead, but an amalgamation of everyone who ever died in a war.

In a line that will have unexpected resonance for modern viewers, Grudge describes the war dead as a “sucker brigade”.

It’s a fascinating but confusing exchange. Serling, through his stories and his words, was openly against the Vietnam War, and yet his proxy, the Ghost of Christmas Past, makes a passionate case for America’s involvement in foreign wars “every twenty years” with a clear nod towards the combat in Vietnam. Ultimately, the Ghost of Christmas Past is arguing for the importance of talking. “When you don’t talk, you fight,” he says.

The most chilling moment comes when the Ghost reminds Grudge of his comment that other countries need to know America “isn’t too chicken to use the bomb”, and points out that they already know it.

The next scene takes Grudge back to his naval service, inspecting a hospital in Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped, and for a piece of 1960s prime-time Christmas viewing, it does not pull its punches. Rod Serling served in the occupational force in Japan and he has no time for sugar-coating this.

A doctor introduces young Grudge to Japanese children who looked up as the bomb detonated and had their faces flash burned off. The film lingers on these children and refuses to move on until you get a sense of the true horror of Hiroshima. It’s something you can’t picture TV doing today, and definitely not on ABC on the 28th of December.

“Watching Makes all the Difference”

The Ghost of Christmas Present at first seems far more like the one we remember from the Muppets. A man in a dressing gown gorging himself on a banquet. The Ghost of Christmas Present isn’t here to take Grudge on a rooftop flight, however- even with 1960s TV budget permitting.

Read more

TV

How The Twilight Zone Influenced Are You Afraid of the Dark?

By Chris Longo

Instead, the dark background lights up to reveal this banquet table is right next to the barbed wire fence of an internment camp for displaced peoples, another image that is horribly resonant for modern audiences. As Grudge criticises the ghost for eating his feast while starving refugees watch, the Ghost simply responds that the “watching makes all the difference”.

Once again, Serling isn’t here to talk about “the needy” as some vague concept to make people feel better about themselves. He talks about giving people around the world vaccinations for their children, rolls off figures such as 13 million people with tuberculosis, 130 million with malaria, three billion suffering from hunger. He talks about people closing their windows as violent crimes occur in the street- mere months after the murder of Catherine Susan Genovese, the story which would eventually lead to the codifying of the “By-Stander Effect”.

The Ghost of Christmas Past says “You were not always like this”, the “you” is America, the “were not always like this” is (even with Hiroshima) a somewhat rose-tinted view of America’s foreign policy interventions.

The Ghost of Christmas Present says “Others are not like you”, and in this case shows us the suffering around the world and the USA’s responsibility to it.

Anyone who’s seen a version of A Christmas Carol before knows what comes next, and it doesn’t take a Ghost of Christmas Future to guess what the next vision will entail.

Grudge finds himself in his local town hall, a bombed-out wreck. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a far more verbose spirit of Christmas future than we’ve come to expect, points out that in this future people have “less need for a platform for debate”.

One of the things that most jars with a modern audience watching this film, aside from an oddly uncritical perception of America’s role on the world stage, is the film’s constant refrain that “debate” is a good thing. In this film “debate” is what you do instead of fighting, it’s a way to find compromise, to solve problems. It rings very strangely in a time when “debate” is mostly associated with rhetorical games played in bad faith, and the idea we have some sort of duty to listen to and validate even the most toxic ideas.

We learn, unsurprisingly, that when the talking stopped the fighting started, and now the last few humans are living in the radioactive ruins of the civilisation that came before.

Then we meet Peter Sellers’ character, the Imperial Me. This is Sellers at his most comic and sinister, dressed up like an 18th-century pilgrim wearing a huge hat with “ME” written on it in giant sequins. Sellers is leading a horde of post-apocalyptic cultists to war against a nearby community that wants to “talk” and “debate”. The Imperial Me takes Grudge’s philosophy to its ultimate extreme, all that anyone should look out for is themselves. The Individual Me is above all, and after this tribe has killed off all the other rival tribes, they will set to killing each other, until the last individual is alone in the perfect society.

I’ve friends who work in the NHS with patients who won’t wear a mask “because it protects you, it doesn’t protect me”, so this scene hasn’t lost any of its bite.

Anyway, you know how the story goes from here. Grudge asks if these are things that will be or things that may be. He wakes up at home on Christmas morning. He reconciles with his nephew, admitting that “no man is an island”.

Read more

TV

The Twilight Zone Forever: Celebrating 60 Years of Rod Serling’s Classic Anthology

By Anne Serling

But one thing this version misses is Grudge doesn’t then go on to eat a fabulous feast with his family. Instead, he takes his morning coffee in the kitchen, while his black servants work around him (and probably wish he’d sod off back to his study). It’s an oddly sparse ending compared to what we’re used to with our Christmas Carols.

Carols for Other Christmases

At the time this strange, didactic retelling of A Christmas Carol saw mixed reactions. It’s a film that doesn’t mind lecturing its audience, and quite a few reviewers took against it for that. The right-wing advocacy group the John Birch Society particularly took against it, organising a letter-writing campaign against the film before it was even broadcast.

Is the film preachy? Hell yes. But so is the source material. Where it differs from the source material is that it offers far less comfort, far less of the warmth we see with Fred and Fezziwig and Bob Cratchit, while the threats it warns of are a great deal more severe.

Perhaps it’s a film that is most interesting as an artefact of a particular time and the anxieties it had.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

But also it’s an example of the power of Charles Dickens’s story when it’s allowed to be more than a twee festive tradition. It’s a story that should have a sharp political bite as much as warm fuzzy nostalgia. As much as it’s a Christmas story, A Christmas Carol is a ghost story, and ghost stories are meant to be scary.

The post The Rod Serling Christmas Movie You Never Saw appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[cloudytreefolk]

Assignment - Making a Poster

Research, brainstorming and moodboards

I designed a poster for Chvrches, a synthpop/indie rock band. I started by making a visual collection of band concert posters to get an idea of what’s out there, then listened through Chvrches most recent album a few times and read interviews and articles about the themes and concepts behind the album, song lyrics, and visual content of the band including album artwork, music videos, photo shoots and posters to get a sense of their iconography and visual identity.

I feel like with pop music from the 1950s bands and recording studios have become more aware and intertwined with the art and illustrating worlds and how fruitful this relationship can be commercially and creatively. A strong example that springs to mind is The Beatles and how they used evolving visual language to theme albums and films, signposting new creative eras for the band (Britrock A Hard Day’s Night, more hippy Help era, Sgt. Peppers, Yellow Submarine, stripped back the psychedelics for The White Album and Let it Be). More current bands and pop artists use drastic changes in visual language to signify new phases too - My Chemical Romance in the mid2000s going from general emo vibes to Goth Marching Band to Futuristic Desert Latex Rockers - Taylor Swift’s new music video for the single “Me” where a snake, the symbol from her last visual/musical phase, literally transforms into butterflies, the symbol for her new phase. So I also researched the musical, lyrical and visual thematic timeline of Chvrches through their album covers, music videos and posters to get a sense of their journey.

I came up with some ideas that applied more generally, associated with Chvrches across their whole timeline and probably a bit more geared towards their first album, looking at the combination of classical kind of spiritual imagery mixed with science fiction and dystopian themes in their music and lyrics.

Their third album lyrics have a bit of a different focus, more specifically about humanity in conflict with itself or being disenchanted with humanity. The genre of the music is leaning more towards pop and exploring their 80s influences in a different way. 

Below - markmaking while listening to “Love is Dead” album, colours inspired by the album cover.

I went through some collections of artwork and inspiration I’ve been building up over time and picked out images that I felt resonated with the themes I’d identified in Chrvches’ music. This moodboard collected ideas I might use for the content of my poster.

I created another moodboard of artist inspiration and ideas for the style and tone of my poster, which came to mind while I was making the content moodboard. Gustave Doré for his illustrations for The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, literature I associate strongly with grappling with humanity and morality and spiritualism. Tove Jansson for her similarly dense linework and exploration of psychological/existential themes in the later Moomin books. I feel like her swirling ink shading really draws you into the emotion of the scene and the character, the environment matching the emotion in pathetic fallacy. Kay Neilsen for his illustrations of classic folk tales, which have a kind of fable-like association for me. Particularly his illustration on a man in a red cloak striking out through the night in snow shoes really struck me with this idea of a quest for humanity, which I felt reflected Chvrches’ theme of searching for light in dark times.

Thumbnails - interactions of elements from content moodboard and style moodboard (labelled A).

I picked these two to develop because I felt they were the most effective in portraying my themes and appealed to me compositionally. In the left thumbnail there’s an minotaur climbing down from ruins into a grotto with a glowing crystal at the bottom with plant life growing around it, fed by it’s light. this was my interpretation of the “quest for redemption/humanity’s worth” theme, with a dystopian scene at the top, then a quest through a dark grotto/labyrinth, then light and life at the bottom, so the image has a beginning, middle and end structure, in keeping with classic fables and folktales. I was inspired by Pedro Requejo Novoa’s minotaur sculpture (which you can see a bit clearer in a moodboard below) and his nuanced and humanising portrayal of an ancient monster from mythology. I liked the idea of having a monster as the protagonist of my design, because when we’re looking for good in humanity we’re looking for good in ourselves too, so it’s his quest for redemption and worth being portrayed.

The thumbnail on the right shows my idea of having some sort of warped, monstrous creature skeleton, like a dinosaur turned dragon, long dead and withered away but protecting a glowing crystal/egg which could still hatch. I was thinking about themes of life in death or from death, like the phoenix myth, and therefore sparks of good in bad (again this idea of finding redemption or worth in warped/monstrous  humanity).

Some of my other thumbnails were very inspired by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and John Carpenter’s The Thing, the first text being preoccupied with humanity and technology’s potential for good or evil, the latter featuring a lot of body horror, mutations and monstrosities of the human form.

Moodboard below looking at poster design and ways of placing an illustration into a poster format, I also drew some thumbnails to see how my “minotaur” and “grotesque” designs could work as a poster (B).

Producing line visuals

Minotaur moodboard - key influences (and refs?)

Then minotaur layout process - drawing up and value studies (C)

Grotesque key influences - layout

Annihilation film - the creature and production design of this film is incredible. Features an alien process “infecting” an ecosystem and plant, animal and human life, creating beautiful and disturbing amalgamations of the three.

Jurassic Park - the idea of preserved life in a little glowing piece of amber and humanity interfering/disrupting natural life

Medieval quasi-fantastical monster designs, chimeras of different animals

Originally I was planning to draw my creature as a dinosaur/dragon, but I thought my design would imply monstrous humanity if the skeleton I designed had more mammalian than reptilian features, like a shorter, rounder skull. I used references from a tiger, historic cave bear, dog and monkey skeleton, used a kind of bat wing/seal flipper skeletal structure for the hand, then the lower leg, foot and claw is from a velociraptor as a reference to the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptor clicks her claws against the floor.

Layout process (E)

Line visual/Layouts

I picked my “grotesque” line visual to work up into a rendered piece. I had designed it as a poster from the start, whereas with the “minotaur” design I still had to figure out formatting, text placement etc. I also felt a lot more confident drawing a skeleton and crystal egg rather than a whole grotto scene with depth and perspective and trying to make the character look like they’re interacting with the environment, this is a bit technically beyond me at the moment so it just didn’t look as convincing as the skeleton design. There’s a lot to be said for simpler elements arranged and drawn more sophisticatedly instead of attempting something really complicated and not quite pulling it off.

Colour and rendering key influences/ideas

I went back to my earlier research on Chvrches’ graphic design and looked at Jamie McElvie’s posters created over the course of the band’s career. I liked the idea of trying to make my fit in with their band aesthetic, and noted down some key visual elements that were present in his latest poster and the band’s latest album cover:

- clean line art, flat blocks of colour with cell shading

- neon bright bold colours but a little muted, some more muddy tones like in bottom right corner of album design (this combination also present in these artist posters for Annihilation)

- mostly warm tones of pink, red, orange, yellow, contrasted with blue and green pops

Below I tried two different types of line art, the first is more my regular style, using my favourite brush pen and keeping things spontaneous and a bit messy, thick lines. With the second I tried s style inspired by Jamie McElvie’s - geometric, thin lines, clean and sharp. I used this second style for my poster.

Colour/background colour experiments

Trying different amounts of cell shading layers. I’m still not sure whether I prefer the left or the right, the extra highlight on the right adds this eye-catching pop, but having just three layers on the left might be stronger for its simplicity.

Outcomes

[donheisenberg]

Mad Men 10 Years On, 10 Scenes; It’s Not a TV Show, Its a Time Machine:

As to commemorate Mad Men’s tenth anniversary I will be doing ten pieces breaking down ten scenes from the show. As always spoilers ahead.

Once at school I wrote a 5000 word dissertation on TV and art and on what art is. There are various definitions of what art really is but what I found was that trying to define art misses the point somewhat. Truly great art has a nebulous quality because beauty itself doesn’t appeal to criteria. But maybe at the centre of art is some kind of truth, emotional or intellectual and what makes the carousel quite possibly my favorite few minutes of television, is not only its many layers, but the way it connects with me.

Great shows, big shows, may have a moment in their run that seeps into the popular culture and maybe even becoming an indelible fixture. Whether it’s “I’am the one who knocks”, “Not Penny’s boat” or “The Red Wedding”, there are some moments, some scenes bigger than others, some that just stick with you for longer. The carousel speech, the climax of the season one finale The Wheel, is one of those moments. Its a scene that saw Mad Men transition from critically adored, little watched show into cultural behemoth. Its a scene, a piece of writing that can make grown men cry and that remains a moment that stands out in the whole of this incredible series.

Don uses pictures of his family, Betty, Sally and Bobby, delving deep into his own soul and laying himself emotionally bare for all to see, but in delivering this deeply personal pitch Don and the show captures something truly universal, nostalgia. I can’t describe nostalgia any better than Don, so instead I’ll evoke his words, nostalgia extends beyond pain or pleasure in its potency. Stronger than memory alone it is something that transcends any system of categorization, instead speaking to what it means to be a human being.

For Don and many of the other characters on Mad Men, they are in something of a perpetual state of longing, caught on a carousel of their own. Mad Men is obsessed with cycles of behavior,  in particular how these people trying to fill the void inside of them by chasing after something that would make them whole but that is already gone. It is the show’s most common motif and Don perfectly distills it here.

In season one’s sixth episode Rachel Menken explained the two meanings of utopia “ 'eu-topos', meaning the good place, and 'u-topos' meaning the place that cannot be.” The ideal and reality are two concepts inseparably tied but forever diametrically opposed. No matter how good reality gets it can never be the ideal, a never ending cycle of want that only breeds emptiness. Don imagines the scene where he arrives home but in reality his family have already gone and he is left to sit alone as Dylan pontificates about “the lonesome road” assuring us where he’s bound he “can’t tell”.

Prior to the scene in question Don reaches out to Adam, the last remaining family who Don had earlier pushed away, gets the news that in fact his brother had died, once again demonstrating Don’s seemingly constant pursuit of something that is no longer there. He captured what he had and what only now he truly wants on camera but Don is as always too late.

Photographs had been a running motif throughout season 1, more specifically Don looking at images and seeing things clearly. When he looked at a photo of Midge and her boyfriend he came to the conclusion that they were in love, when he looked at Betty’s coca cola shoot he made his decision to not join McCann Erickson. Betty claims that Don does not know what family is, to her therapist, but in that moment Don knows what he is seeing. He’s been looking for acceptance and love elsewhere but here he sees that if he really wanted it, it is there for him in his home.

Six seasons later we would have the scene in the finale where a previously unseen character describes how others have been trying to love him and he just could not recognize it and that resonates with Don. Here as he looks at those photos its that realization that in part that his isolation is a choice and that connections are ready to be made if he could just see that.

Unfortunately for Don the carousel develops into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Throughout the rest of the show Don’s pitches would all in some way present as versions of this. Whether he’s trying to capture that same sentiment as he pitches himself to Betty at the end of season 2, or in the Hershey’s meeting where we get the perfectly inverted form of this scene, Don would chase after this pinnacle moment in his career until he bought the world a coke.

I’ll return to some words I had been using in my previous piece on the episode which directly precedes The Wheel, “A man is whatever room he is in” said Bert Cooper and the man who was in the room in episode one who said “love was invented by guys like me, to sell Nylons” is the same man in the room buying the American dream he is selling.

Don, like everyone else, is an amalgamation of contradictions. The womanizer with seemingly no sense of monogamy, who at the same time values loyalty. The proverbial man in a suit, who hangs out with hippies smoking weed. The ad man cynic who doesn’t believe in love, standing there feeling something, in his otherwise numb existence.

All of which brings us back to nostalgia. Like Don nostalgia is profoundly complex as an emotion, it is a unique combination of the pleasure a happy memory conjures and the quite pain of knowing what can never be again. This is what makes nostalgia an emotion which almost defines us as complex and contradictory beings that we are and no show ever captured this better than Mad Men. Call it “the signature of the artist”

[thekoppelproject]

16 Artists 16 Days

The Hive studio artists Exhibition 2016 ‘16 Artists 16 Days’ The Koppel Project Hive (26 Holborn Viaduct EC1A 2AT)

Anna Klimentchenko / Col Self / Daniel Curtis / Darren Black / Katerina Barampouti / Kirsty McEwan / Mary Savva / Michael Crossan / Molly Rose Butt / Nadine Shaban / Nicole Price / Pauline Batista / Rikki Turner / Robert Strang / Rumi Josephs / Seana Gavin

The first studio artists exhibition at The Hive is on until the 26th of January. 

Each participating studio Hive artist occupies the entire gallery space for one day to actively engage and participate with the public. 

JANUARY EVENTS

Day #8 Seana Gavin: Seana Gavin and the Art of Collage Friday 6 January 4pm - 6.30pm

Seana Gavin is an Artist working in the medium of collage creating fantasy landscapes using found photographic imagery from old books and magazines. 

Join on her on Friday 6th January from 4pm-6.30pm to find out more about her practice and approaches to collage. And then attempt to create your own paper artwork to take home with you. Please bring along any specific material you may like to include, and a pair of scissors and a pritt stick. Any donations of unwanted books/magazines are welcome.

Day #9 Robert Strang: Enclothed cognition for further understanding Saturday 7 January 1pm

In this performance piece Robert Strang will be exploring the premise of enclosed congnitioning and using this tool to further understand a single artwork. In this work Robert will adorn his Artistic Deity garms to look further than a surface level and explore the notion of time, future and moments on a single canvas (77cm x 53cm). This performance not only looks at the notion of time and moment, but also humorously plays with the concept of contemplation and dedication looking to the East, in the way so many lost souls do in an attempt to understand something unfathomable. Inevitably to get lost in a pleasure pursuit.

Day #10 Anna Klimentchenko: Nice memories Friday 13 January 11am - 7pm

On Friday the 13th Anna Klimentchenko will exhibit additional artworks and will be present in the gallery throughout the day to answer questions and tell you more about her work and her inspirations.

Day #11 Molly Butt: The Knot Saturday 14 January 11am - 7pm 

On Saturday the 14th Molly will be creating an installation that responds to her exhibited paintings. These paintings are part of an ongoing series that explores the relationship between 2D and 3D works, using repeated motifs and formations to create an abstracted sense of landscape. Using found materials and made objects she will play around with collaging these mixed mediums into a new set of works.

 [The Knot relates to the idea of the work being an open-ended exploration of composition and form, where each fragmentary piece is a building block for multiple variations. These in turn trigger new configurations that continually refer to but never return to the starting point]

Guests are invited to join her in the space throughout the day to see the work in progress. 

At 5pm there will be an informal discussion about sculpture and painting and the expanded field (bring something to drink, if you like).

Day #12 Nicole Price: Memory and the Family Album Wednesday 18 January 11am - 7pm

On Wednesday the 18th Nicole Price will hold an all day workshop using old family photographs. She will work with copies of photographs, collaging and amalgamating images to create disrupted scenes. She will paint from these collages, further distancing them from the photographic source material.

Nicole invites visitors to bring photocopies of family photographs, which can be incorporated into the work, and would encourage discussion of memories triggered by these photos and the family album. By using familiar and unfamiliar photographs the artist questions the private histories and public narratives associated with the photograph.

Day #13 Nadine Shaban: VACUUM

Saturday 21 January 3pm - 6pm

Vacuum is a project between visual artist Nadine Shaban and physical theatre performer Petra Casale. On the afternoon of 21st January they will be showcasing the first works from this collaboration at The Koppel Project Hive Gallery.

On show at the gallery will be the studio artist's exhibition alongside an extension of Nadine's sculptural work comprising of movement and models.

This work explores the power of matter outside of ourselves, the exterior skin that we create and the body as void.

Please RSVP to paul@thekoppelproject.com to attend the event. See full calendar here http://thekoppelproject.com/the-hive-studio-artists-exhibition-2016/

[chocolateheal]

Seven Various Ways To Do Artists Similar To Jackson Pollock | artists similar to jackson pollock

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – The adventure sounds like article out of a blur noir brought to life.

Abstract Expressionism – The Art History Archive – artists similar to jackson pollock | artists similar to jackson pollock

It has every aspect of a acceptable mystery: a socialite who spent her canicule assortment with New York’s best and brightest, a absent painting begin years afterwards in an abrupt place, and — conceivably best conspicuously — a abeyant $15 actor amount tag.

So aback a attenuate Jackson Pollock painting was begin in an Arizona garage, addition out its origins wasn’t aloof about allegory besom strokes. Like any acceptable mystery, apprehension the painting’s history took tracking bottomward the bodies abaft it.

‘God, that looks like a Jackson Pollock’

The abstruseness began with a active L.A. Lakers poster.

When a Scottsdale, Arizona, man was headed to a retirement home, a acquaintance allowance with the move begin the collectible in the barn and appropriate contacting an abettor to adjudge it.

Josh Levine, buyer of the bargain abode who was alleged to attending at the poster, estimated the active Lakers memorabilia would be account about $300. But aback they went to the man’s garage, what they begin could be 50,000 times added valuable.

A accumulating of several avant-garde paintings were amid the man’s accouterments — one of which featured an amalgamation of splatters and swirls agnate to Pollock’s abreast style.

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“As we’re activity through the assemblage and we’re bottomward to this aftermost allotment … I was like, ‘God, that looks like a Jackson Pollock,” Levine told CNN.

The paintings seemed out of place. In a arena area best homes are abounding with acceptable southwest art, the aberrant shapes and abstruse capacity were “really weird,” Levine said.

Levine brought the artwork aback to his office, area it sat for three months. He struggled to acquisition the articulation amid a man from Nebraska and his little accumulating of avant-garde New York art.

The socialite connection

When Levine contacted the owner’s attorney, he bridged the gap amid the Arizona barn and New York’s avant-garde art scene: a half-sister, Jenifer Gordon Cosgriff.

Gordon Cosgriff, a New York socialite, was advised the “black sheep” of the family, Levine said. While the blow of the ancestors ashore to the Midwest, Gordon Cosgriff spent her time abrading amateur in the 1950s with aristocratic associates of the art association on the east coast. She ran in the aforementioned amusing circles as notable art analyzer Clement Greenberg, avant-garde artisan Hazel Guggenheim McKinley … and Jackson Pollock.

Learning about Gordon Cosgriff’s history and relationships was a axis point in Levine’s research. The allotment that had aboriginal seemed evocative of Pollock’s assignment now had a believable affiliation to the artisan himself.

Painting found in garage could be work of legendary artist – CBS … – artists similar to jackson pollock | artists similar to jackson pollock

When Gordon Cosgriff died in the ’90s, her brother arranged up her accouterments — including her art accumulating — and put them in his garage, area they would abide until January 2016.

The cher authentication

But it would booty added to prove the painting’s origins than a claimed affiliation amid Gordon Cosgriff and Pollock.

For about 18 months afterwards apprehension the painting, Levine spent tens of bags of dollars aggravating to accredit the piece.

He fell bottomward a aerial aperture of analysis into Gordon Cosgriff’s life, poring over her belletrist and hiring a clandestine investigator to help. His ultimate goal: to clue Gordon Cosgriff’s area bottomward to a Pollock assuming area she analytic could accept acquired the painting in question.

Once he accepted her appearance at his showings, Levine brought forensics experts into the mix to assay the painting itself.

“All I was absorbed in was, was it accomplished afore Jackson Pollock was dead, afore 1956?” Levine said.

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After analytical the affectionate of acrylic used, the forensics address accepted what Levine had hoped: The painting was acceptable one of Pollock’s missing gouaches, a specific appearance of painting application baptize and a bounden agent, from about 1945 to 1949.

“I absolutely acquainted weightless,” Levine said. “I was absolutely affectionate of afraid I was accepting a agitation advance or something.”

Restoration for a new home

The painting is heavily damaged and needs to be restored, Levine said. The darker, cream-colored swirls throughout the canvas would accept originally been a brighter white.

Levine said the accident comes from the artwork spending years in a abode with abundant smokers, which was not abnormal for the mid-20th aeon aback it would accept resided in Gordon Cosgriff’s home.

Restoration, a action that involves charwoman the painting by duke over a brace of weeks, could amount up to $50,000.

Despite the damage, Levine’s aerial aperture is accepted to pay off. Afterwards actual out of the accessible eye for years, the untitled Pollock allotment will be auctioned off on June 20.

Abstract Expressionist New York | MoMA – artists similar to jackson pollock | artists similar to jackson pollock

Bidding starts at $5 million, but Levine expects the final amount tag to be anywhere from $10 actor to $15 actor — far before the estimated $300 amount of the active Lakers poster.

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[latestnews2018-blog]

The Time Proto Zoa From 'Zenon' Was More Popular Than William F**king Shakespeare

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/the-time-proto-zoa-from-zenon-was-more-popular-than-william-fking-shakespeare/

The Time Proto Zoa From 'Zenon' Was More Popular Than William F**king Shakespeare

Last year Phillip Rhys was touring William Shakespeare’s former residence outside London when he spotted a huddle of whispering girls, but he thought nothing of it.

“Sometimes you kind of know when you’re being recognized,” the former Disney actor admitted, “but because I was in the home of the greatest playwright of all time, I was mildly distracted ― more interested in that.”

By the time he reached the exit, the murmuring was impossible to ignore. “Oh, my God, are you Proto Zoa?” one of the girls asked

He replied “yes,” and “these young American girls” started screaming, he said. “I thought, ‘We’re in the home of William fucking Shakespeare! Let’s honor this moment. Forget Proto Zoa. This is what we should be pulling our hair about.’”

Instead, hair was pulled over a star of “Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century,” a 1999 movie about teens who live on a space station orbiting Earth in 2049. “I go, ‘Oh, isn’t that funny?’” Rhys recalled. “Popular culture trumps the Bard.”

Even after almost two decades, Proto Zoa could still make hearts go boom boom.

Disney; Getty

Phillip Rhys as Proto Zoa in 1999’s “Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century” and in 2011.

So, yes, fans regularly recognize Rhys, who rode a Disney Channel wave to fame like his colleagues Hilary Duff, Bella Thorne and Zac Efron. Playing the movie’s intergalactic rock star character made him, as he put it in an interview with HuffPost, a ”prepubescent Bradley Pitt for the mid-’90s.”

Twenty years later, the mania persists. Ikea cashiers have been known to spontaneously jump over registers to hug him. 

In the time since “Zenon,” Rhys has appeared in roles for TV shows such as “Nip/Tuck” and “24,” has had parts in Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin” and Al Pacino’s “Salome” and directed a short film starring Sandra Oh called “The Scarecrow.”

Now Rhys is starring in Syfy’s upcoming series “Nightflyers,” based on George R.R. Martin’s novella about an ill-fated space voyage. Rhys joins the series as Murphy, a systems engineer who is said to be very busy in the premiere. 

“[Proto Zoa} is back in space years later!” Rhys joked.

His perspective on acting has changed since his Disney days, when screaming fans were the sign of a job well done. “Jobs I get now feel earned, and they seem to fit better with the richer and more diverse life I try and live,” he said. “A life that isn’t about just acting. It’s a much healthier place to come from.”

Part of that more diverse, healthier outlook comes from what has happened in his personal life. He is now married with a son. So you could say Rhys is done looking for his supernova girl. At least he would.

“I found her,” he said with a laugh. “Oh, my God, she chuckles with that.”

During our conversation, Rhys divulged as much as he could about “Nightflyers,” graciously looked back on the “Zenon” franchise and (zetus lapetus!) teased a possible Proto Zoa return. 

What is it like being in space again?

The ship’s a lot bigger. The craft services is healthier, maybe? No, it’s great. You know, this production, it feels very special. There’s a certain energy on the set where we all feel like we’re involved in something that people are engaged in, excited to see. We’re doing a lot of firsts. We’re using augmented reality, which I had no idea what it was at the time ― deals with depths of field. There’s all sorts of fancy perspective where we can look outside the ship and see Earth going by. We’re using these lenses Ridley Scott used back in the day, [with] this dirty sci-fi feel to it. [It’s a] much more real, grittier vibe. Everything is anamorphic lenses. It’s like you’re getting a 10-hour movie.

Why were you interested in “Nightflyers”? What makes it so special?

They’re pushing certain boundaries … The guys who are running that, they’re about story. It’s not about what’s cool. We all love a cool shot. We all love a cool image, but at the end of the day, if the story sucks, you’ll get the kids for a moment, and they won’t be coming back. The story has to sustain, and they’re coming from that place. When you’re working with a George R.R. Martin, he knows story.

How involved was George R.R. Martin? Was he able to be on set, or was it just kind of approving things from behind the scenes?

I believe it’s the latter. Yes, they’ve taken the novella, and they’ve gone at it. I don’t know how much material was there for a 10-episode season for the first season or even subsequent seasons, but they’ve used that as a launching pad, a jumping-off point. Much to his blessing, he’s endorsed it all. He’s been very positive about what he’s seen, and I think due to contractual reasons with HBO, he can’t be a creative on this, but we’re at least allowed to say “from the mind of George R.R. Martin.” 

Of course, your first foray into space was in “Zenon.” What’s it like looking back on it? 

I’m incredibly proud of it because, by all accounts, it should’ve just been another kids’ TV movie. Even when I read it, I said, “This is good. This is really good.” I went in with a specific thing. I said, “If I’m going to play this role, I’m going to do it like this.��� I think I was doing a play at that time … so this was an amalgamation of this character I’d done in a play … [Proto Zoa] wasn’t written English, and it wasn’t written with blond hair [or with] that swagger … I went in, and I did it, and they were incredibly open to it.

We had a screening a few months later. It was really well received. I watched it with my adult friends at the time, and they thought nothing of it. Just, “What the fuck are you doing wiggling your hips around?” It was lost on us. It was lost on kids in their 20s. It wasn’t for them. It was for a generation before us and even younger than that, and it clicked. It really clicked, and I can’t believe it. 

It still comes up, especially on social media. Have you seen the comparisons to Guy Fieri? People say that’s what Proto Zoa looks like today.

Oh, yes. I have seen this. I’m fine [with it]. I’ll be honest with you, I had no idea who he was, not until that moment. So the first time I saw it, I said, “Who is this guy?” So I looked him up. OK, I’m fine. It’s all, you know, if people are looking and talking about your work in a reasonably positive way, I’m fine with it. And Guy, I’m sure, is great at what he does. He’s a cook, right?

Yeah, he’s a celebrity chef.

OK, so I don’t really watch those programs, but God bless him. God bless him if I could one day be Mr. Guy Fieri. I probably should watch the shows, and I could learn from him if we ever did a 20-year reunion, a “Zenon” reunion. I could bring some of his flair. Maybe he’s a chef now, Proto Zoa.

Guy Fieri is Protozoa from Zenon grown up pic.twitter.com/0A6OhGR9oT

— woooooooooof (@gilwoof) May 8, 2014

I mean, the 20th anniversary is next year.

Where do you see Proto Zoa 20 years later?

He’d be a manager for the next hot band, selling the next boy group or something to the world. And living off-world, probably because the polar ice caps have melted and all of it. It’d be a bit of a downer. It’d be a post-apocalyptic “Zenon.” Everyone would be in boats.

Boats that could go in space, I hope.

Oh, my goodness. That immediately is the second thought you go to. Could my hair sustain all that peroxide? Jeez. That was a summer I was playing a lot of musicians, and I shot the first “Zenon” in September, so I just did a whole summer of various degrees of musicians, successful and otherwise, so I had let the peroxide grow out. I went and auditioned like that, and they were like, “We love it. We love the hair,” and I was like, “Oh, Christ.” I was actually going to dye it back normal, and they’re like, “No, keep it. Keep it.”

Does Billy Idol still wear [his hair with] the peroxide?

Actually, yeah, he does. I saw him with it on “The Voice.”

Does he? He’s still rocking that hairdo? I need to Google him. What about Bowie? He was a dirty brunet always going around as blond.

Yeah, I mean, David Bowie changed his look a lot.

I took a bit from Bowie, a bit from Elvis, a bit from Liberace, I think. That’s “Zenon.”

Are you still friends with Zenon?

I haven’t seen Zenon [Kirsten Storms] in a while, no. Holly Fulger, who plays Judy, I see her every now and then for a coffee. We catch up.

When I think about “Zenon,” obviously one of the most memorable things was your song.

Zoom, zoom, zoom. Make my heart go boom, boom, boom.

With that, we had Michael Jackson’s choreographer come up to Vancouver. Suzanne de Passe managed the Jackson 5, and she produced “Zenon,” so it was heavy. This gentlemen came up and was like, “OK, let’s do it. Let’s do this choreography dance number,” and I was like, “I have two left feet.” I was like, “Hold on, hold on, hold on.” It was kind of like the day before we were going to shoot, and … [the choreographer] does this, “You gotta go left, right, chassé, twirl with the guitar, play the song, and go!” I did it, I fell over myself, and it was ridiculous, and seeing the producer’s face, they were like, “What the fuck have we got here?” Because every actor says they can do everything, right? Until you’re on set. The band were much better than I, so if you look, the band was doing most of the dancing, and I was just doing two steps to the left and two steps to the right. 

Wow, and that was Michael Jackson’s choreographer?

Yeah, one of the guys at the time, whoever that was. Yep, so when we did the second [movie], they were aware of my limitations as a dancer. I did a lot more pointing in the sequel. Just put your feet on the ground, just start pointing to the stars and the galaxy.

How do you feel about the aliens basically using Proto Zoa to get to Zenon in the “Zequel”?

Bastards! Right? I know, they used me as this conduit. I was used and abused.

Why weren’t you in the third one, “Z3”?

I was shooting “Nip/Tuck” at the time, and … I was committed to it. It was Ryan Murphy’s first big thing, and I just couldn’t leave, really. I actually know the gentleman who played Proto Zoa [in the third], though, bizarrely enough. After a few months, he came into my world. I met him via a friend, and he’s a lovely guy. That’s not easy taking over the role. He’s American. He had to do an English accent as well. That’s tough, just not fair.

For sure. Nathan Anderson is his name. He’s a lovely guy.

I’ve seen this debated, but was it “zetus lapetus” or “cetus lapetus”?

Didn’t she go “zetus lapetus”? It’s a Z. But she’s pronouncing it with an S … “cetus lapetus,” right? Yeah, when I hear it. What’s the Earth translation?

“Crap” is probably better for Disney. The movie also predicted Chelsea Clinton would be president.

More of her discussions in the media have been politically skewed, I think. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, right? And maybe she’ll want to right the wrong of whatever happened at the last election. I wouldn’t bet against them, but what happened with Ivanka Trump? Wasn’t part of her agreement with daddy that she would also run at some point and they would get behind her?

So you think it could be Clinton vs. Trump again?

Because they were friends pre–this nonsense? Maybe a Clinton-Trump showdown.

Possibly in a new “Zenon.”

A new “Zenon” would be perfect, right?

Brad Barket / Getty Images

Rhys attending the Tribeca Film Festival Shorts in New York City in 2016, with stars of his short film “The Scarecrow,” Sandra Seacat and Darren Pettie.

What have been the biggest challenges you’ve overcome since “Zenon”? What have you learned in that time?

What I learned from 20 years as an actor? The obstacle is the path. When you’re denied the roles and jobs you think you want, it forces you to get even clearer on what you really want and why. It forces you to be at peace with the outcome and look for other things in life to fulfill you creatively. By doing this, you discover your unique truth and what’s valuable to you … so when a job does come along you want, you can basically take it or leave it … There’s less fear or desperation in and around the work. 

So what’s next? You directed “The Scarecrow.” Do you want to direct a feature, or are you planning on focusing more on acting? 

None of it is mutually exclusive. I’d like to direct a feature. I’d like to continue very much on “Nightflyers” and other shows of comparable quality, stuff that’s good stuff, that challenges me in front of or behind the camera. I mean, if you’d asked me a week before I’m shooting this pilot, I never thought I’d be on a George R.R. Martin show. These things happen, they present themselves, and you grab them when they’re good.

And there’s always the possibility for another “Zenon.” Gary Marsh, president of Disney Channels Worldwide, even said there could even be a “Zenon” TV show. Would you be into that?

Yes, I read that. I heard about it too. We’ll see. Maybe they’ll commission the writers and stuff. I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything. Actors are usually the last people to hear. I would be open to it, of course. Of course.

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Section 1: Creative Investigation-

To what extent is David Lynch an auteur and how does his style create questionable representations of women?

For my creative investigation I will be exploring to what extent that David Lynch is the author of his own films using a basis of Sarris’s auteur theory to analyse Lynch’s claim to the creative rights of his work. I will also reflect on how the representation of female characters in his films is entwined with his style but could have questionable ethics, using feminist film theory (Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp.117-130.0) alongside auteur theory (Grant, B. (2008). Auteurs and authorship. 1st ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.) to consider this. I will investigate if the eccentric mystery of this director makes him the auteur of his eccentric and mysterious films. I will discuss how his origins as a painter and artist, his life outside of his film career and his collaborations affect his film work and his authorship over it. I will consider this in an analysis of three of his focal films. Firstly, ‘Eraserhead’ (Eraserhead. (1977). [film] Directed by D. Lynch. USA: American Film Institute (AFI)) is a horror written and directed by David Lynch starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph. Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child. This film was the first definite choice to look at when analysing Lynch’s filmography. It is his first feature film after his original shorts, ‘The Alphabet’ (Lynch, D. (1968). David Lynch the Alphabet. [video]) and ‘The Grandmother’ (Lynch, D. (1970). The Grandmother - David Lynch. [video]). In these shorts he was really testing out his style and techniques but with minimal plot or story, it was his transition from the classical art world to the film art world so was heavily based on image and colour and light. This film is his first foray into feature films, so it is very dark and intense and focused on unnatural imagery to unsettle the audience. It is one of his most complex and non-linear works and something really career defining I believe. Secondly, ‘Blue Velvet’ (Blue Velvet. (1986). [film] Directed by D. Lynch. USA: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) is a drama-mystery-horror hybrid written and directed by David Lynch starring Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper. The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child. In my opinion ‘Blue Velvet’ is one of Lynch’s more logical and plot-based films and is more naturalistic than ‘Eraserhead’ for example. I think this is an interesting contrast between his work that is extremely surreal and his work that has more thriller elements. And finally, ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ is a drama-mystery-horror hybrid written and directed by David Lynch starring Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Madchen Amick. A young FBI agent disappears while investigating a murder miles away from Twin Peaks that may be related to the future murder of Laura Palmer; the last week of the life of Laura Palmer is chronicled. I chose this film as I am very interested in the Twin Peaks series and film and it is the first work of Lynch’s I saw years ago. I feel it amalgamates a lot of Lynch’s styles and techniques of horror so would be really beneficial to look at. It was also controversial in people’s opinions when it was released as Twin Peaks series fans did not like it, however other spectators struggled to follow it as they did not have the context of the series. This meant it missed its market in some people’s opinions, however personally I enjoyed the film and think it is a good insight into lynch as a director and creator. It’s use of base, family disturbance to hit on key human fears is an important part of Lynch’s style and this film really plays on that.

  ‘David Lynch: The Art Life.’ ((2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda) was an invaluable source to begin my research at as it was fully narrated by Lynch himself and spanned his whole life up until the making of his film ‘Eraserhead’ which created a picture of his life and the circumstances that lead to him making the films he did and how he is personally connected to them.  Additionally, further into my research the book ‘David Lynch Decoded’ (Stewart, M. (2007). David Lynch. Bloomington: AuthorHouse.) was a brilliant companion to the multiple different relevant theory (Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.) as it was a discussion into Lynch’s films individually which gave me contextual knowledge of all his work, as well as my focal films.

In the introduction to Stewart’s book he says: “Everybody’s got that moment. If you love film, you had a moment at some point in your life…. It’s that moment when you had an epiphany, you realised what film was really capable of…I went to see a late showing of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – Fire Walk with Me and I was instantly hooked on film forever. No filmmaker had ever affected me the way Lynch did.” I found this notable because I said the same thing in the initial thoughts of my preparation for this question which suggests Lynch is noticeable, important and stands out to multiple people. This recognisable style is an attribute of an auteur.

Stewart talks about Lynch’s films having interlinking themes, styles, and characters. This is a suggestion of authorship according to one of Sarris’s premises of authorship. “I have come to the conclusion that these characters are connected to each other, that they are connected in specific ways which repeat themselves thematically and visually throughout the majority of Lynch’s filmed works, and that over time Lynch has developed a visual language that we can interpret with regard to these characters and the strange world they come from.” We can see these links in clear duality between the verisimilitudes of Lynch’s separate films, and also, we see the reoccurring use of duality inside films. There are countless examples of duality in Lynch’s films however I think his dual female characters are particularly distinct as it has a consistent and possibly two-dimensional representation of women in his films. Just some prominent examples of dual female characters in the focal films I studied are Laura and herself in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, Laura and Dorothy/Sandy which are respective characters in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ and ‘Blue Velvet’, Dorothy and Sandy in ‘Blue Velvet’, the Roadhouse singer (Julee Cruise), Dorothy and The Lady in the Radiator from all three focal films. There are many examples of dual events and places in all three focal films which will become clear as I compare scenes, especially ideas of dual realities and dreamworlds which occur in all Lynch’s works. Graham Fuller addressed this in his Sight and Sound article saying, “Lynch had Originally intended to use ‘Crying’ in Blue Velvet but opted instead for Orbison's ‘In Dreams’. Dean Stockwell’s Ben lip-synchs the song with the same baroque affectedness demonstrated by Del Rio, but he too is cut short when Frank rips the cassette of the song from the tape recorder. On both occasions Lynch is Breaking through the dream fabric of the film, reminding us of the fragility of cinema’s hallucinatory power.” (Fuller, G. (2001). Babes in Babylon. Sight and Sound, (12), pp.14-17) and this highlights the links between Lynch’s films and the interchangeability of music, character, and actors. However, I am going to consider the clear and influential duality of female characters between and in the focal films as it does effect Lynch’s claim to authorship over these films. It could be argued that Lynch’s clear use of duality and ongoing style and theme contribute to his authorship over these films as links to Sarris. However, this could also be viewed as Lynch’s subconscious misogyny as his creation of female characters is clearly repetitive and conform to the Madonna/Whore stereotypes which are have been seen through film continuously since cinema began.

The character of Laura Palmer in ‘Twin Peaks’ is the crux of the whole TV series and subsequent film, as they all ask, ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ and maybe the more important question, ‘Does it matter?”. Laura’s character is Lynch’s most well-known and she is a perfect example of duality. One half of her personality is the all-American, beautiful daughter, and glowing prom queen, and the other half of her life is cocaine fuelled, sex-filled parties and abuse. The character Donna who is Laura’s school friend is a parallel and representation of Laura’s good side whereas the character of Ronette who is Laura’s companion from the secretive half of her life, reflects dark side. The ‘Twin Peaks’ ring unifies Laura as it appears to her when she is daughter, prostitute, and visionary. This duality of Laura’s character can also be seen by the characters of Sandy and Dorothy in Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ where Lynch is again portraying two representations of women that are creating a narrative that suggest as a female you are either the typical obedient, placid, beautiful, and conservative girl or the dark, sexy, hysterical bad-girl. In ‘Blue Velvet’ Sandy is the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl-next-door that is presented as the ‘right girl’ for a sensible young man such as Jeffrey to date. Whereas the character of Dorothy is the dark-haired hyper-sexualised mysterious woman with a sultry accent that Jeffrey just can’t keep off his mind. These two characters clearly reflect the creation of Laura’s character in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ as she holds both these two juxtaposing traits at once which makes her such an elusive and enthralling mystery. However, the linking female characters continues across to Lynch’s first feature film ‘Eraserhead’ as well, there is even a parallel of three women from all three focal films, being united by a scene where they sing on a stage in front of curtains in a scene with an intense dream-like quality. In many films neurotic behaviour is prevalent in the ‘villains’, with strangely heightened and dangerous sexual awareness in the ‘heroine’. In the symbols of dream images, and the unconscious desires expressed in dreams there is there is key element of Freud’s theories.  As Roger Luckhurst and James Bell said in their Sight and Sound article” The world of Twin Peaks sits in a broader Lynchian universe, which at times can feel like a unified whole- perhaps one could meet Eraserhead’s Henry Spencer in the Black Lodge or run into Dorothy Vallens from Blue Velvet at the Roadhouse. As well as taking cues from and prefiguring other elements of Lynch’s work, Twin Peaks echoes a variety of other filmic influences.” there is a clear Lynchian universe where all of his films and characters and worlds have his auteurs signature all over them. This consistency can be seen in Lynch’ films through his ongoing themes and his representations of women. On very pivotal and important theme running through Lynch’s work is his use duality between his films, in his films, in his characters and his places and events. In considering and discussing Lynch’s work considering duality is vital as it is central to a lot of the interior meaning in his films. Sexualisation of women in Lynch’s films cannot be overlooked when considering his work critically. It is known that Lynch uses the hyper-sexualisation of women in his films and it is picked up by the media and audiences and sometimes lavished upon. However, this itself creates a conversation about Lynch’s knowledge and control behind these representations and the reactions they produce. As Roger Luckhurst and James Bell noted in their article “The UK tabloids went crazy (largely, it must be admitted, for Sherilyn Fenn’s tight sweaters and dexterous tongue)” (Luckhurst, R. and Bell, J. (2017). The Owls are Not What they Seem the World of Twin Peaks. Sight and Sound, [online] (6), pp.18-25.) However, this use of duality by Lynch consistently could be a consideration of authorship, as Fuller said ”Twinning, of course, has been a consistent theme in Lynch’s later work, as witness the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Dale Coopers in Twin Peaks and the two Arquette characters in Lost Highway.” (Fuller, G. (2001). Babes in Babylon. Sight and Sound, (12), pp.14-17). Almost like Shakespeare moulding and developing characters from Hamlet, to Othello to Macbeth we see Lynch using similar character tropes but building layers of character and meaning onto them

 The second premise of Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory is that a director must have a distinguished personal style, and Lynch arguably fulfils these criteria. One clear stylistic element in Lynch’s work is his use of dream sequences to access a more abstract tone to his films. It can be complex to distinguish between Lynch’s complex and eclectic realities, and the dream sequences within them but there is a tonal change. Lynch’s dream sequences often seem to explore emotional tensions, revealing new information. Lynch’s belief in the Upanishads means he believes in different levels of reality, so Lynch’s dream sequences do sometimes blur the lines of reality and bring into question which reality is real and which is the dream, or both or another. This use of dream sequences link to the early surrealist movements in the 1920’s and 1930’s, in ‘Film and psychoanalysis’ it says they were in a ‘quest for new modes of experience that transgressed the boundaries between dream and reality’ (Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp.77-89.). This clearly something Lynch was consciously or subconsciously drawing on as he began in painting and moved onto film as a way of being able to gain more control over his and an express himself more intensely calling film ‘moving paintings’ (David Lynch: The Art Life. (2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda.). It continues to say “They were deeply influenced by Freud’s theory of dreams and his concept of the unconscious. To them, cinema, with its special techniques such as the dissolve, superimposition, and slow motion, correspond to the nature of dreaming”. I feel as if this heavily influenced Lynch as his work is very motivated by image and dreams and he also moved onto the world of film to utilise these new techniques.   As the dream sequence in ‘Eraserhead’ (Lynch, 1977) begins we see the radiator open up like a door, letting us into the dream world. Lynch uses a dissolve here to take the spectator from the ‘real world’ of Henry’s bedroom to the dream world. The use of this dissolve gives the effect of when in a dream something absurd begins to happen and new locations and scenarios come out of nowhere, but the sleeping brain makes them seem slick and rationalised. The dissolve moves the scene into the strange dream-world as not to alert the audience, creating the effect as if the spectator is falling asleep with Henry. The first images we see are the black and white tiled floor and the curtains. This referencing other dream world in Lynch’s films such as The Red Room/The Black Lodge in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’. There were also electrical light bulbs flickering into life, which is another example of Lynch using electricity to symbolize dream sequences. Although ‘Blue Velvet’ may present as one of Lynch’s more restrained with a more prominent narrative than most of his work, a lot of dream sequences and alternate realities are alluded to. In the opening scene we have this zoom into a dream world, implying maybe the whole of ‘Blue Velvet’ is a dream. This is different to the narrative style of Eraserhead’ as his first feature film has much stronger ties to his abstract art world and his personal life. To add to the concept that ‘Blue Velvet’ is a dream is also the final scene as we zoom out of Jeffrey’s ear and back into the perfect world we saw at the beginning. We see the perfect all-American streets but then the tension is built by showing the hose pipe getting trapped and quite literately tension building in the water. We then see the man drop to the floor and slow-motion effects are used. The camera then tracks in an extreme close up through the grass to soil and beetles rustling with disgusting animalistic crunching noises. This zoomed in extreme close-up implies that we are going to a dream in world in what is colloquially coined ‘Lynchland’. It is the same technique as used in ‘Eraserhead’ as we zoom into the radiator to the dream world. This scene in ‘Eraserhead’ also links to ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me’ as the electricity motif is continued and developed by Lynch to be used in this film to represent a dream state again. In the scene where David Bowie’s character Phillip Jeffries arrives after two years of disappearance electricity is used to symbolise another reality or dream world; the electricity flares up and lights flash when Gordon tries to contact someone about Jeffries. In the nightmare sequence we even see an extreme close-up of a mouth say the word ‘Electricity’, it is a man layered in thick white paint with blackened teeth and a long white nose which gives him an eerie look of an 18th century plague doctor. The dialogue is used as another tool of Lynch’s to create disturbance and highlight the dream sequence, as in the Red Room/Black Lodge or when a character is in the alternative reality the dialogue sounds growling and deep and unsettling. Lynch used a technique where he would get his actors to learn their dialogue backwards by learning the sounds the words would make when said back to front. He would then record these backwards sounds and turn them around in the edit, in theory making the words sound forwards and correct again. However, of course this process would distort the sounds in an eerie way as a spectator you understand the words being spoken as they come across normal, but you cannot quite put your finger on why all the sounds coming from the actors sound wrong and distorted. Lynch uses this technique alongside electrical whirring and snapping sounds to create an atmosphere of unease and tension, Lynch wanted to create these altered reality scenes to have this effect because the sound became normal, but just slightly off and disturbing and this is the exact feeling Lynch wanted his dark alternative reality in the Red Room/Black Lodge to have.

Another notable element of Lynch’s personal style is a cleverly manipulative use of family tensions and fear to create a distinct tone of psychological horror. His control of the spectator’s emotions and darkness is intricately manipulative, a most perfect example of this is the character of ‘Leo’ in Twin Peaks who in the film is an utterly despicable character full of starkly dislikeable traits as a domestic abuser and criminal, however by the end of the series of ‘Twin Peaks’ Lynch has the audience feeling sympathy and almost warmth towards this character. This highlights Lynch’s power of manipulation, and almost love affair with it. This power and intense relationship with complex horror stemming from family issues comes from his personal life, despite his own personally described idyllic childhood, he struggled with marriage and children as he his style and art in a film format was developing and solidifying. We see this evolving first in his short films ‘The Grandmother’ and ‘The Alphabet’. The short ‘The Grandmother’ opens with a painting style animation, which comes up throughout the short to symbolise changes or things that are happening between shots. This implies Lynch has authorship because he was a painter before he was a film maker and went to art school, and still to this day paints and has a painting studio. He also has described his transition to film as him wanting to create moving paintings. So, the painted animation style is very personal. We see the use of blurred edges around the shot with a lot of light contrast and chiaroscuro lighting. This is heavily used in ‘Eraserhead’, enhanced by the black and white, to create the sense of it being a dream-world, not set in reality. It also uses soil that is dumped on the protagonist’s bed, which is used in the bedroom in ‘Eraserhead’, this enhances the sense of darkness and unknown and makes the supposed safe space of a bedroom become dirty and unpleasant, this shows Lynch is developing images and styles. There is use of stop-motion animation for some scenes, which is not really used in Lynch’s feature films, but it is in his shorts. However, Lynch does heavily use the technique of using models and lights and sort of animation style scenes in his future films for the dreamy, non-realistic effect. This short uses a lot of red and black colour schemes and Lynch uses these colours a lot in his future films, for example, ‘The Red Room’ in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ (red and black is massively used in pretty much all of this film) or the stage scenes in ‘Eraserhead’. Although when Lynch started filmmaking he had to shoot in black and white, however the black and white shooting style does carry on through his filmography. He uses black and white for effect in Twin Peaks and he uses the noir style chiaroscuro lighting. There is the use of CU on the antagonists faces to show the spectator the fear the protagonist is feeling in ‘The Grandmother’, this use of shot is used by Lynch a lot, for example the close-up of Jack Nance in ‘Eraserhead’ when he is scared of the baby, and the close-up of Bob and Leland and Cooper in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, and the close-up of Jeffrey in ‘Blue Velvet’ as he watches through the wardrobe at Frank. This persistent use of family situations to create psychological horror highlights how Lynch used his own personal fears to begin to create a style of horror in his shorts and ‘Eraserhead’, and as he progressed as a director he developed, and this style evolved.  

Sarris’s third premise of authorship is that an auteur must have a consistent personal link between all their work and art. The character known as ‘The Arm’ or ‘The dwarf’ from the Red Room/Black Lodge talks of “Intercourse between the two worlds”. The Red Room/Black Lodge is a visual representation of this ‘intercourse’ as it is almost a limbo between the physical world and the fantastical realm of dreams that Lynch depicts. The man then says to the illusive and evil ‘Bob’ character ‘with this ring, I thee wed’ and that could be said to be the ‘Twin Peaks’ ring that is the symbol of the link between the town and the dark realm and this ring becomes Bob’s talisman. The man then says the crucial line ‘Fire walk with me’ and in this moment we see Red room dwarf and Bob create the Black Lodge/Red Room. A close-up of the dwarf fades into a medium shot of the iconic red curtains of the Red Room. In an overhead shot we watch them both walk into the Red Room together and the curtains swing shut behind them. This scene is a critical moment in the narrative of this film and the whole ’Twin Peaks’ saga as we see the creation of the link between reality and other. These two characters literally bind the two worlds together as the dwarf says ‘wedding’ them. This is also an important scene to consider authorship for

The Upanishads are a part of the Vedas, which are ancient Sanskrit texts that contain some of the central philosophical concepts and ideas of Hinduism, some of which are shared with Buddhism, and Jainism. Among the most important literature in the history of Indian religions and culture, the Upanishads played a critical role in the development of spiritual ideas in ancient India, marking a transition from Vedic ritualism to new ideas and institutions. This is a belief system that Lynch is involved in and influences his life. Of all Vedic literature, the Upanishads alone are widely known, and their central ideas are at the spiritual core of Hindus. The Upanishadic age was characterized by a pluralism of worldviews and the concepts of Brahman (ultimate reality) and Ātman (soul and self) are central ideas in all of the Upanishads. So, it is clear that Lynch’s personal involvement with this does affect his beliefs and how he makes his films because themes of ultimate reality and soul and self are massively influences on his work. Brahman is the material, efficient, formal, and final cause of all that exists. The word Atman means the inner self, the soul, the immortal spirit in an individual, and all living beings including animals and trees. I think the fact that Lynch follows these ideas influenced his symbolism and creation of reality in his work. For example, the Upanishads believe the immortal spirit is in a person, animal, or tree and in the film ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me’ all three of these things bring information from the alternate reality. The people such as, ‘The giant’ bring Cooper information about what is happening in the Red Room/Black Lodge, the owls also are almost possessed by the alternate reality and arrive in the scene when the two realities may merge, and finally of course the character of ‘The Log Lady’ has part of a tree the whispers to her, giving her advice to tell Cooper and malicious intentions of the other reality. Hendrick Vroom explains, "the term Maya [in the Upanishads] has been translated as 'illusion,' but then it does not concern normal illusion. Here 'illusion' does not mean that the world is not real and simply a figment of the human imagination. Maya means that the world is not as it seems; the world that one experiences is misleading as far as its true nature is concerned.” (Timesofindia.speakingtree.in. (2016). Maya (illusion). [online]) According to Wendy Doniger, "to say that the universe is an illusion (māyā) is not to say that it is unreal; it is to say, instead, that it is not what it seems to be, that it is something constantly being made. Māyā not only deceives people about the things they think they know; more basically, it limits their knowledge. In the Upanishads, Māyā is the perceived changing reality and it co-exists with Brahman which is the hidden true reality.” (Timesofindia.speakingtree.in. (2016). Maya (illusion). [online]). Clearly these ideas about Maya link quite directly to Lynch’s work, in particular ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me’ as the Log Lady even says, “The owls are not what they seem” (the owls which symbolise the alternate reality). The interior narrative of ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ is based upon the idea that the world one experiences is misleading which is made clear by all of the complex characters with many secrets highlighted of course by Laura’s double life. Also, the Red Room/Black Lodge is another reality co-existing with Twin Peaks however you never know which is perceived reality and which is hidden true reality, and I feel this idea is something that Lynch uses through a lot of his work. Even Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ says “We live inside a dream”.

In ‘The Alphabet’ which another of Lynch’s early shorts, opens with a white flag with orange circle at the centre and this image is replicated in ‘The Grandmother’ (1970) when Lynch outs an orange circle in the centre of the boy’s white bed sheet when he is being beaten on it. The first section of the short film is the sound of someone singing and on screen is an animation of colours and shapes and musical notes and letters. Lynch is a music artist as well, so this means that he is gathering all parts of his life and personality to come together to create his films. There is use of closeups on faces to make you uncomfortable which David Lynch explores in his next short film and the rest of his feature work. For example, there is a close up of a wet mouth speaking and it is unsettling and horrible. There is a moment where there is the sound effect of a baby crying but in an intense unpleasant way which is definitely used as an important part in ‘Eraserhead’ (1977). Also, horror derived from family themes is one of Lynch’s strong stylistic points used in all his work. There is then an animation of what looks very phallic with blood rushing through it, it then turns into a face and breast spitting blood. This supposedly is all linked and imagery of childbirth. It uses chiaroscuro lighting liked Lynch does a lot to help create that dreamlike state where there are no borders of reality. Dream states and imagery are a massive part of Lynch’s style. Another poignant image is a woman trapped on a bed with her arms wrapped in the bars of the headboard, she is writhing about and started choking up blood. This seems symbolic of childbirth. There is a very small production company and wasn’t even released until decades later, this means it was a passion project for Lynch and gives him strong authorship to the film and the styles he has carried through to his other films. These themes are so strongly based on Lynch’s life as he had his first child Jennifer in 1967 with Peggy, who is playing the mother in this film. Peggy even described him as: “[Lynch] definitely was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. Hey, I was pregnant when we got married. We were both reluctant.” (David Lynch: The Art Life. (2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda.) So, he has strong claim to the authorship of this film because he worked on every element of creating this film and it was directly based off his life. This could link to his representation of women and mothers in his films as he had a daughter as said ‘reluctantly’ and this created a fear in him of children and women’s power to create life. Freud’s idea of the unconscious is one of the dominant ideologies expressed in horror film- the idea of secret desires that lie hidden from the conscious mind but drive our motivations.

Lynch does have strong claim to authorship over his film as he consistently takes on multiple roles in the film making process, and in his early work it was solely created by him, and the links between his short films and his feature’s is very clear as I have discussed. For ‘Eraserhead’ Lynch was the director, writer, producer, musician, editor, production designer, art director, sound effect designer, special effects designer. For ‘Blue Velvet’ he was the Director, writer, and composer. And for ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ he was the writer, director, actor, producer, and sound designer. So as for Sarris’ being need for an auteur to be technically competent there is no question that Lynch has control over all elements of the creation of his films and is very capable of working in all departments. This alongside his clear style and personal connections to his work would suggest Lynch is an auteur. His sexualisation of women and lacking representation may be a negative to his work, however I have discussed how it comes from an inherently personal place so could to be said what Sarris called ‘élan of the soul’ which is where a director’s personal personality and take on the world is reflected through their work, adding to their authorship. A good example to support David Lynch being a stylist is that he is clearly used to sell his films as they are being advertised. David Lynch’s style is clearly recognised by a mass audience as name ‘Lynch’ has connotations with his own unique style and genre of work. I came across his work consistently being called ‘David Lynch’s…’ (Fuller, G. (2001). Babes in Babylon. Sight and Sound, (12), pp.14-17.) in articles which highlights this.

However, to counter all of this there is of course still a strong argument to the concept of all film making being a collaborative art and there are many examples of influential collaborations in Lynch’s filmography.

Lynch does collaborate which some of his work and this of course could be argued that his collaborators could be called auteurs, or at least they would all hold a collaborative authorship rather than Lynch being the true auteur. One example of his collaborations is the reoccurring actors which has become a feature in his films. It is discussed whether Lynch has favourite actors and the reasons why he chooses to work with the same people. However, this choice does bring into question whether these actors have a claim to authorship over his films due to their performances, how can it be said that Lynch is a true auteur if we have not seen him work on feature films without this talent? Even just considering reoccurring actors in my three focal films there are multiple. Jack Nance who plays the protagonist in ‘Eraserhead’ also stars in both ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, Kyle Mclaughlin who plays the protagonist in ‘Blue Velvet’ also stars in a major role in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, Laura Dern and Frances Bay from ‘Blue Velvet’ also stars in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ and these actors also have roles in other of Lynch’s feature films.  Also, it cannot be said Lynch’s work is not highly influenced through genre and a bricolage of techniques that came before him. His use of noir techniques such as high-contrast mise-en-scène framing. This genres aesthetic influences of German expressionism with the asymmetrical tendencies and dramatic use of light and shadow can be seen throughout noir films in off-kilter camera angles, direct front and side lighting, mysterious silhouettes. Lynch uses a bricolage technique to bring together elements from noir, post-modernism, German expressionism and surrealism to create his own signature style. Despite this, it could be said reoccurring actors be part of his style. He is known to be an unconventional person so only finds a connection with a few people, so is this limited choice of actors is part of his personal style? He does work with the horror/thriller genre however, explores and pushes boundaries, he isn’t conventional and brings something personal to standing conventions. Bricolage means he is pulling elements of lots of styles to make his own so in effect it’s still personal and he is just influenced by everything around him and his way of creating and interpreting through that arguable could mean this does not affect his authorship over his style.

 I think the strengths of my research were that I used different formats to gather my information, so my research was wide-ranging and came from both personal and critical sources. I began my research with the documentary ‘David Lynch: The Art Life’ (David Lynch: The Art Life. (2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda.) as this gave me a personal insight into Lynch’s opinion on his work as it was fully narrated by him alone. It also was very useful in considering the authorship part of my creative investigation as I began to build up background knowledge about Lynch himself and how his personal style evolved and developed and the influences that affected him and his work. Also, then moving onto his own documentary called ‘Eraserhead Stories’ (Lynch, D. (2001). “Eraserhead” Stories. [video]) where he just talks about his stylistic influences, opinions and the zeitgeist of his life that came together for him to create ‘Eraserhead’ and make it the film it is. This source was also incredibly valuable because it is where I learnt of his family and personal life at the time of making ‘Eraserhead’ and I began to make connection between his film style and his personal life, as I have utilised and discussed in this essay. I then used a variety of e-journals and Sight and Sound articles which were valuable to gauge a more public response to Lynch’s work at the time and to get an insight into how his work was received by audiences and critically, and what other people analysed from his films. I think reading the book on Lynch ‘David Lynch: Decoded’ was a really useful piece of research before I began my own essay as it brought up different angles and theories on Lynch’s work I may not have considered and therefore reinforced or challenged my own analysis. Since Lynch’s films do fall into the psychological genre and my essay was a consideration of authorship and representation, my research into film theories that were relevant to this proved invaluable in building up my knowledge to analyse the focal films in-depth and with and understanding of the theory behind why and how he Lynch uses these techniques and its wider value and interior meaning. So, my sources from the ‘Oxford Guide to Film Studies’ (Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.). And of course, I felt that looking into some of Lynch’s early art and film work was crucial to understanding his artistic development and his control of audio-visual language, so analysing his early short films ‘The Alphabet’ (Lynch, D. (1968). David Lynch the Alphabet. [video]) and ‘The Grandmother’ (Lynch, D. (1970). The Grandmother - David Lynch. [video]) which he made prior to the focal films I am considering in this essay was useful in linking all of Lynch’s work and personal style. In addition to my research cited here I used this as a stimulus to continue to look into information about Lynch, his work and important facts or ideas that do not feature directly in my work but helped me build up a wealth of knowledge. However, some of the limitations of my research were that I had so much contextual knowledge and information it was difficult collating valuable quotes and being critical on what routes to investigate and write about and what was not completely relevant. It took a lot of time and critical decisions to pick apart the vital parts f information to create an essay and that was focused and detailed and I explored my own opinions and analysis.

Overall, in my opinion and in reaction to exploration and research I would say David Lynch is an auteur of his own films. I believe his representation of female characters can be two-dimensional and misogynistic however it is flawed and complex like Lynch himself and he is so intertwined with his work. Lynch clearly and consistently brings parts of himself, his character, and his life into his work and style and I feel there is links between his intricate use of the audio-visual language and his own personal development as an auteur.

   Bibliography:

1)Newman, K. (2002). Mulholland Dr. Sight and Sound, [online] (1), pp.50-51. Available at: http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/1886 [Accessed 18 Sep. 2017].

2)Luckhurst, R. and Bell, J. (2017). The Owls are Not What they Seem the World of Twin Peaks. Sight and Sound, [online] (6), pp.18-25. Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/june-2017-issue [Accessed 18 Sep. 2017].

3)David Lynch: The Art Life. (2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda.

4)Fuller, G. (2001). Babes in Babylon. Sight and Sound, (12), pp.14-17.

5)Rodley, C. (1996). David Lynch Mr Contradiction. Sight and Sound, (7), pp.6-10.

6)Clarke, R. and Figgis, M. (2007). Daydream Believer. Sight and Sound, (3), pp.16-20.

7) Stewart, M. (2007). David Lynch. Bloomington: AuthorHouse.

8)Lynch, D. (1970). The Grandmother - David Lynch. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p5qEt766ZQ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2017].

9)Lynch, D. (1968). David Lynch the Alphabet. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ_t1eOAipo [Accessed 12 Oct. 2017].

10) Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp.67-75.

11)Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp.77-89.

12)Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp.96-104.

13)Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp.117-130.

14)Beckman, F. (2012). From Irony to Narrative Crisis: Reconsidering the Femme Fatale in the Films of David Lynch. 1st ed. Texas: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, pp.25-44.

15)Ingle, Z. (2017). Authorship and the Films of David Lynch: Aesthetic Receptions of Contemporary Hollywood by Antony Todd (review). 1st ed. [eBook] New York: Centre for the Study of Film and History, pp.82-84. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/543547 [Accessed 5 Oct. 2017].

16) Lynch, D. (2001). “Eraserhead” Stories. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLwtXoyNKgo

17) Grant, B. (2008). Auteurs and authorship. 1st ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

18) Timesofindia.speakingtree.in. (2016). Maya (illusion). [online]

[junker-town]

The Players Championship is golf’s biggest festival

The Players Championship is golf’s biggest festival. It’s a prestigious golf championship, social gathering, family picnic, college bar, food market, tailgate, and chugging capitalistic engine spread over 400-plus acres in Florida swampland. It accommodates those who love golf, those who casually know just a little, and those who might not even know what “par” is and don’t much care to find out.

Golf has no rigid definition. It’s a game that can be The Masters or the U.S. Open or the Euro Tour’s new GolfSixes or the LPGA’s International Crown. It’s a game that can be going out with a few friends to play as many holes before dark on a crusty dog track course that has no flags on the greens (if this seems specific, it’s because I played this way down here this week and it was a fantastic evening chasing the sun — just hit it and hope the hole is near where your ball landed). We don’t have to define the game as one particular thing and not the other.

At the pro level, we get so occupied with sorting and categorizing events, players, and courses to bring some more definition. The Players has been jabbed for being “not a major.” After the Masters, it’s the biggest event in golf held annually at the same venue everyone immediately recognizes. For a long time, there was an yearly debate to fill up air time about whether or not this was the “fifth major.” Sure the Tour probably wanted its marquee event to carry the resume weight of a major, but it was mostly a TV and media talking point. That discussion has subsided in recent years. The Tour is not trying to elbow The Players into the major championship discussion. And the press has become quieter about it.

The debate subsiding is largely because of the identity that The Players has carved out for itself. It’s not a major, but it’s much bigger than some upper-tier event on the weekly PGA Tour. It is entirely its own thing, floating alone. The Tour does not seem to care so much that it’s not a major. What they have made is the strongest field of the season, with one of its most lucrative purses, on an instantly recognizable course that reliably throws this festival each and every year.

A True Stadium

The Stadium Course at The Players has a remarkable versatility. For actually watching golf, it’s maybe the best venue in the game. A simple grounds pass should give you a view of just about every shot on every hole. Inside the ropes access is not necessarily an advantage for watching golf here. Almost no course offers that with an event of this magnitude, with most other big events ballooning to five and six and 10 deep along the ropes. You can get stuck just looking for a peek of the top of a golf club at the Masters or just trying to see a handful of shots in an entire afternoon at the Ryder Cup.

The course also prompts debate among the golf architecture diehards. So for watching actual golf, played by the best golfers in the world on a course that, if nothing else, is interesting, this is about as good as it gets. The golf, however, is just a piece for so many who come to this event.

A True Party

Pro golf can be a punchline, mocked for being a stuffy thing for old people. But if you go to any number of PGA Tour events, you can find a big outdoor party with an ancillary tournament running alongside it. Some stand out more than others, and the peak events on Tour are undoubtedly the Phoenix Open and The Players.

The Players is Jacksonville’s Kentucky Derby. This is a tradition that the local culture has embraced and one that the PGA Tour wants to foster. There are few pretensions here. After going to Augusta National a month ago, it was hard to think of a more polar opposite environment among the larger golf tournaments. There are more tattoos and fewer quarter zips. A variety of high class club and golf course insignia are less prevalent, exchanged for more Jumbo Shrimp and Jags logos.

It’s not all Jacksonville, as fans from across Florida, Georgia, and the South Carolina coast make the annual pilgrimage to Pete Dye’s place. Imagine that, another SEC amalgamation at a golf tournament. One fan along a high-trafficked walkway at the 17th hole spent a portion of his afternoon looking for fellow Tennessee fans. When what looked like a comrade in orange walked past, he inquired enthusiastically, “Go Vawls!?” The response he got was a shout that resonated in the amphitheater, “Helllll no, Roll Tide!” Moments later, he found a fellow Vawl and his afternoon was made, screaming wildly. There were Hotty Toddys and Go Gators, and even a #BBN sighting. There was also golf somewhere nearby.

Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

The 2017 winner, Si Woo Kim, tees off on the 18th hole.

This atmosphere exists throughout the course, and the PGA Tour wants to foster the celebration. There’s a “Wine Lounge” behind the 8th green. If you’re trying to cut across the back nine, you’ll just stumble upon a bar scene materializing in the middle of the woods. It’s far enough away from a fairway so the noise would not impact play, with couches and a TV set up for fans to keep monitoring the actual reason we were all gathered. Bloody Mary bars are set up inside two gates, ready and waiting for those who enter right at 7:30 a.m. As I watched players on the 17th, I overheard one group losing interest in the scene and wanting to go back to “The Oasis,” apparently the name for another public bar on the property. There’s a full lineup of these alcohol outposts listed under the encouraging slogan of “Get Refreshed.”

A Concert at 17

The entire 400 acres is a celebration, but the vortex of raucousness sits just over a half-mile from the grandiose (or gaudy, depending on your taste) clubhouse. The famous 17th “island” hole is maybe the most hyped par-3 on the PGA Tour. Everyone knows exactly what it looks like and how it plays from years of TV coverage.

On the ground, the 17th is a concert with 48 different acts throughout the day. Like any outdoor concert venue, there are lawn seats and grandstands and high-class suites. It gets more subdued on the lawn and suites behind the green, which could be the field boxes compared to the bleachers atmosphere at more distant parts of the hole.

Augusta’s par-3 down in Amen Corner is a social gathering, too. But there the purpose is more to be seen, peacocking about in pastels. Here, the purpose of the eclectic mix of cigars, strollers, and sundresses is to holler and have fun. There are also multiple video boards broadcasting every shot, brands plastered everywhere, phones in every hand, and hopeless marshals raising their hands to try and still what becomes a constant crowded-bar hum. The only commonality with the 12th hole at Augusta was par.

Mark Hubbard, who was playing in his first Players this week, has gone into that similar atmosphere at the Phoenix Open. “There’s probably only 150 people watching every shot,” he said of TPC Scottsdale. “They’re just there to party.” His approach this week would be the same as Phoenix. “So if they don’t really care what’s going on, you shouldn’t be thinking about your shot anyways. So just have fun with it.”

The scene is bustling all weekend, hitting capacity around lunchtime and staying that way until the final groups come through almost seven hours later. There were older folks who caught mid-afternoon naps in their lawn chairs, and younger folks who caught late afternoon naps on the turf. By the end of the day, the seagulls hovered above as the crowd started to provide openings for the birds to swoop in on some of the trash that piled up.

Getting late in the day at 17...trash piling, seagulls hovering, people napping http://pic.twitter.com/FjMC35nXWi

— Brendan Porath (@BrendanPorath) May 13, 2017

It was not some lawless mess, with security lurking around the players and police walking within the crowd. Occasionally someone got over their skis up in a grandstand or behind the tee box, but it was well-monitored. There was often one idiot standing out, yelling “Get in the water!” indiscriminately after a tee shot went into the air. But one caddie told me the scene was “respectful on 17, unlike Phoenix.” Some players have been heckled to the point of disruption, with the most notorious being the unrelenting abuse Sergio Garcia took here in 2015, when things were particularly charged as Rickie Fowler went on his dramatic run and just one year after Sergio’s Sawgrass beef with Tiger.

This year, with a green jacket now in his possession, they chanted “Ole Ole Ole” for him as he approached the green.

A Brand Parade

The Masters is infamous for de-branding everything. It’s just “light beer” and “diet cola.” At the Players, fans complained about a lack of Bud Light, with options for just Bud heavy and Mich Ultra, an obvious attempt to funnel attendees to the partner beer as a stand-in. Brand after brand and partner after partner is set up throughout the property, offering one experience or another that may or may not be a waste of time away from the golf. There’s a golf simulator and a mini-island green competition and VR booth.

The bar is not just a bar, but a Grey Goose Lounge. A hospitality suite is not just a suite with pricier tickets, but an Oakley benefactor compound, an 11,000-square-foot climate-controlled tent. The local smaller guys get the best food spots, with a “Taste of Jax” court and the now-famous “Tacos on 12,” a crowded plaza and a spot that’s become a tradition here. At the merch tent, even the 17th hole now has it’s own logo and “island life” collection of gear. It’s Darren Rovell’s twitter feed come to life.

This exists at almost every non-Masters golf tournament, but the scale of it all at The Players, where the hosts have mastered a property setup for such annual “activations” and “experiences,” is unparalleled. This is the PGA Tour’s main event and the opportunity for a capitalistic bonanza is not passed up. It can be nauseating but the different non-golf-watching activities and suites are part of what makes this a festival. Pro golf can be both this and the Masters.

Tiger is here in spirit. You can have Augusta's low cost standbys, I'll have this. http://pic.twitter.com/SKam5xbOjs

— Brendan Porath (@BrendanPorath) May 13, 2017

Getting Everyone Involved

As a plane flew overhead advertising for an area strip club, families walked through the kid zone, a playground set up in a grove next to a Nickelodeon tent where they can get slimed. The rowdiness of the 17th gets all the publicity, and rightly so, but strollers were ubiquitous on every hole. Kids wedged their way along the fence line for autographs and hi-fived every player along rope lines from tee-to-green and green-to-tee.

While some locals came to booze like it was a Jags tailgate, this is an annual family outing for Jacksonville too. Tipsy millenials locking arms to keep each other upright walked the cart path up the 18th while kids in whatever we’re calling the next generation did barrel rolls down the hill up above. Neither generation was pre-occupied with the golf shots. Across 400 acres and not jammed into one section of an NFL stadium, the different purposes all seemed to co-exist without incident.

* * *

I’ve made snarky comments about the “fifth major” and a Sawgrass shortcoming or two in the past, but recent powerhouse winners like Tiger Woods, Jason Day, and Rickie Fowler have pumped juice into the event. An aggressive effort to create a celebratory vibe on the grounds and for TV have made it so a winner that’s, well, not a powerhouse can be weathered. Its identity as both a golf tournament and an event has never been stronger, approaching a point where The Players can be the star, not the winner.

While the grounds at Augusta can make you feel like you've been dropped in a different world, The Players has a recognizable piece of almost every familiar Saturday afternoon activity. There’s a barbecue and a family walk and a golf outing and a trip to the mall and a bar crawl all happening at the same time. As a golf tournament, I don’t know how we neatly define it. It’s not a major. It’s not regular old PGA Tour event.

As an event, it’s The Players, a festival at the golf course, and there is nothing else like it in the game.

[sachaferrier]

Ambiguity of Meaning Within the Photographic Image

Within the specificity of photography personal interpretation and perceived significance of a photographic image is dependent upon several disparate methods of understanding. Structured semiotics, predominantly within advertising provides direct intentional meaning through linguistic, denotative and connotative signs, of which an individual’s intellect and cultural knowledge determines the level of interpretation acquired. However as Roland Barthes (1915-1980) identifies within his essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (Barthes, 1977:32) the depicted message is merely the start, as coexisting within there can be found relational and personal meanings, which interact with both the conscious and unconscious mind.   

The photographic image undeniable as evidence to an event supplements its self with the consternation of discontinuity, a reality to the factual detail of what is seen and will never occur again, yet as a memento the image offers solace, a sense of proximity to the occasion. Meaning becomes powerfully emotional, our connection an indexical link joining both photograph and viewer of which Barthes calls ‘the umbilical cord of light’ (Barthes1981: 81) unable to detach itself from the residuum of a discontinued instant, the reminder and prophecy of death.  

Photography as a medium of remembrance acts as a form of reconnection, the attraction toward a particular image is often unexpected, never prepared for what connects or causes us to gaze longer than predicted the images allure continuing subsequent to the actual viewing. Attachments proceed to multiply, stimulating not only conscious thoughts but coax to the surface repressed memories not directly associated to the original image, reinvigorated memories superseding the initial signified. 

How then do photographs install a sense of meaning, what is the structural feature or enchantment, which serves to entice our interest and deliberation, provokes contemplation towards an association? What does the photograph show us, how should it be read, decoded and analysed? For it is realised images are not illusions, nor are the objects signified actually present, yet we all see, albeit individually, non-conformist to each other an element that personalises our experience, attracts and connects. 

Through a process of mediation on photography within ‘Camera Lucida’ (Barthes, 1981) Barthes explores the photographs of the family archives searching for an image of his mother, not so much as an act of remembrance but more so to reveal the mimetic power of the photograph. Painstakingly his futile examination of the many photographs fail to produce in totality a clear and concise representation, dismissing images that show a direct physical resemblance, simple recognition of the person he knew was not enough, what he sought was his mothers essence ‘Photography authenticates the existence of a certain being, I want to discover that being in the photograph completely’ (Barthes.1981: 107). Finally Barthes discovers his objective within the ‘Winter garden’ an image that precedes his own life, the physiognomy and characteristics of his mother as a child that revealed for him the ‘air’ an ‘exorbitant thing which induces from body to soul- [animula]’ (Barthes.1981: 107) 

Barthes had, for him, found his Mother, not just a representation but within an image that to him revealed her true being, a totality of all that makes the person, yet this image was never shared, never printed within ‘Camera Lucida’, Barthes declared that we as the viewer would feel no connection ‘for you it would nothing but an indifferent picture’ (Barthes.1981: 73). Subsequent images have been made available, images of his mother as a young woman of which Barthes appears ambivalent towards attachment yet the reason we are permitted to view some and not others is precisely that, his indifference of opinion, the ‘winter garden’ for him contains an aggregate of his mother, becomes cherished, crucial not only as a form of remembrance but as a way of reconnecting to the person he loved, her completeness within the image completes him, thus remains private, just for him.  

Although not directly similar there can be seen within the work of Japanese photographer Seiichi Furuya (b:1950) certain correlations between Barthes writings in ‘Camera Lucida’. Barthes motivation was to seek his mother through the mediation of photography whereas Furuya uses the medium as a form of remembrance and reconnection. From the moment of meeting his future wife in 1978 Furuya began taking photographs unremittingly in an almost fanatical manner up until her unfortunate suicide in 1985, not due to preconceptions in regards to her illness but more so that she became his focus, muse so to say.  Having no comprehension of what the future held in regards to her death the images have transpired into a major act of retrospection, a journey of discovery both emotional and investigative.

   In his book ‘Last Trip to Venice’ (Self Published: 2002) Furuya included a number of images (see fig.1) of which the film he used had apparently already been exposed. The resulting images became double exposures; two separate moments of time unified within an unbreakable discontinuity. The duality of scenes reveal very different messages their connection ambiguous, one of family intimacy the other a travellers snap yet it is this combination that allows the viewer access. The iconic denotative messages within an image Barthes suggests ‘naturalises’ the symbolic elements within bringing a form of innocence to the connotative thus allowing the primal meaning of the image signifiers to portray a sense of awareness, a natural representation of ‘having been there’ dis-intellectualising the scene as now it is recognised within the everyday. To summarise the connotations of death, are somewhat cushioned as we recognise associations within our own lives through the familiar signified objects for example ‘building, streets’.  

Through the amassed images Fuyura has published (see fig.2) we begin to see or sense a connection, the symbolic character familiar enough to allow assimilation into a narrative of remembering. Fuyura’s work reveals nakedness into his personal life and that of his wife; through his images we are witness to a developing illness at times within an uncomfortable intrusive proximity. The viewer is unknowing as to what they are seeking within the image, yet there is a level of expectation and curiosity in that the scene may reveal some personal intricacy from the artist’s life ‘a tiny spark of contingency’ providing some form of clue toward the unfortunate outcome.

Where as Barthes image produces totality for him within a single frame, Fuyura’s work presents his wife’s ‘essence’ through ‘relay’ a term Barthes presents within ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (Barthes, 1977). Images vary from composed portraits to candid family snaps, technicality towards production not consistent yet within their abundance contained within the pages of a book seem to function as a form of metonymy, guiding the viewer toward a wider view of the subjects life.  It could be suggested however that to reiterate a subject continually dilutes to an extent the intended meaning soothing its impact toward our own interpretation, yet equally for Fuyura this process persists in maintaining a connection through an indexical relationship to the outside world by placing within the public eye. 

Focus within my own practice explores the process of grief and the human desire to seek a trace of continued existence outside of the intelligible. The composite image (see fig.3) presents us once again a duplicate of time and space, although albeit intentionality of the author is acknowledged due to its preciseness. In contrast to the Fuyura image the viewer is supplied with less information in regards to text as to actual meaning and relevance within the body of work, insufficient in ‘anchoring’ a specific interpretation thus rendering the image ambiguous. Predominantly the subject matter is again remembrance and searching, comparative to both Barthes and Fuyuras’s quest, the deceased as child is brought into the future fused into a state of anomalous conflict within an opposing time spatial. Separation of time specifics is evident within the frames, one being a faded ‘polaroid’ indicating a discontinuity between the two events pictured, causing an element of discourse.

The ‘air’ or ‘essence’ to which Barthes refers displays a similitude towards Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) notion of ‘aura’ of which he describes is an anomalous amalgamation of both time and space, not so much a continuity of the past but more a ‘ghostly apparition project[ing] into the present which wounds’ (Stevens DD). Fuyaru’s composition purely accidental, my own intentional and Barthes psychological yet within all three a search for an apparent apparition of character is evident. Within both Fuyara’s image and my own the key signifier separating the echelons of time is further accentuated through the images ordering, in that one appears to be behind the other. This illusion correlates to Benjamin’s notion of ‘aura’; the faded almost transparent image of the supposed past seems to seep into the future through the superficial image layered above, thus suggesting the apparition of character can be both a psychological experience whilst also visually identifiable. Although Benjamin argues that the aura consists of originality and authenticity, not to found within the photographic image due to the mechanical intervention removing these qualities, it could be suggested that within the ‘winter garden’ image the originality and authenticity was present, not through the medium but through Barthes imaginative investment.

An emotional attachment toward an image does not always rely on association towards an individual depicted. Images void of relations to a living subject may still serve to stimulate interconnection through inanimate objects, scenes or colour, the viewer reading the image by process of signifiers represented by the signified objects photographed, an analogical naturalist representation of a literal image. The constituent of this reading consists of external references, knowledge fettered to perception, ‘what it shows invokes what is not shown’ (Berger 1967:20), what defines this meaning is that the relationship between the signifier and signified are virtually one of the same, the image of an apple is by all accounts an apple non dependent on culture or experience yet beyond this literal object reliant on an individuals investment of memory correlations to experience can surface. 

Triggering towards this attachment is diametrically conditional to the viewer, polar to the generalised feeling of aesthetic appeal or inconsequential taste felt vis-à-vis an image, appearing through the unintentional content, of which the authors intended meaning may permeate.  Barthes begins to locate this detail within his essay ‘The Third Meaning’ (Barthes, 1977)) in which he examines a number of ‘Sergei Eisenstein’ (1898-1948) film stills (see fig.4).  As the title implies he professes that these images contain three elements of communication, the first two inherited from structured linguistics where as a further level of meaning described as ‘evident, erratic and obstinate’ (Barthes 1977:52), unable to be identified or named supplements his attachment. Barthes proposes to call this third meaning the ‘obtuse’, a detail protruding from the image, rising above the narrative, a ‘pejorative connotation’ (Barthes 1977:55) extending further than referential motif forcing an interrogative understanding. 

To explain further the profundity of Barthes suggestions, within ‘Camera Lucida’ we see an elucidation, distinguishing two factors in understanding a photograph, the ‘studium’ and ‘punctum ’. The first relates to the indifferent, an attraction essentially rudimentary in which the author’s intentions usually appear, the determining factor toward an individuals resolve of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’. However ‘punctum’ emerges through the ‘average effect’, similar to the‘obtuse’ in penetrating the gaze, an unexplainable detail subjective and private. If within the ‘winter garden’ image what Barthes sought was the ‘essence’ then ‘punctum’ was essentially the vehicle, allowing him to discover it.

In an attempt to identify that, which is seen only by the individual, we shall return again to the subject of loss. Remembrance within photography often presents itself to the viewer masked by an unbreakable façade of ambiguity; intentions emotionally placed by the author remain intimate and undisclosed, the viewer unable to interpret or discover the existential relationship or indexical trace. However at this juncture the reading of the image becomes purely individual, the viewer albeit unconsciously generates a connection, one of either general acceptance ‘studium’ or deeper implication ‘punctum’.  Paul Hill’s (b: 1941) body of work ‘Corridor of Uncertainty’ (Hill, 2010) created following the death of his wife, reveal personal visual references towards quietus, despair and pain, ambiguous metaphors undoubtedly significant to him yet possibly obscure to the viewer (fig.5). The mien of an image it is suggested embraces a prophetic quality its meaning extending further than the direct signified object, more gratuitous in offering an intelligible reading yet still insufficient as it remains dependable on the individuals want for answers, a prophet may communicate to the masses yet each takes their own interpretation away. 

What Hill’s image is essentially producing is a ‘coherence of signs ’ the viewer reading absorbs all of the signifiers depicted arranging connection, which instigates ideas towards new personal meaning. My (Fig.6) own image resonates a very emotional response unique only to me yet within its ambiguity the various signifiers work to produce as in Hill’s image assonances to each other of which remain individual to each reader. However the meaning one allocates to an image may not correlate an alliance to the actual photographic content, connection being triggered through subconscious thoughts and memories, which are only brought into consciousness through an images stimulus of connotations. Barthes identifies within a ‘James Van Der Zee’ (1886-1983) (see fig. 7) image a significant detail of which produces the ‘punctum’ appears for him located within a girls shoes, however once the image has been removed from sight he revisits from memory, professing to alter his opinion toward an alternative detail of a gold necklace of which triggered thoughts relating to one seen worn by a relation. Interestingly Barthes description was erroneous, the gold necklace in fact pearls baring no resemblance to the original image, Margret Olin (DD) argues the detail was in fact ‘transposed from one of his own family pictures’ (Olin.M. cited Hirsch 123), suggesting that the image had awoken the subconscious mind reconnecting memories of past.

The association toward an extraneous event containing no actual historical evidence of involvement has provoked a great deal of discourse within the studies of neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Research within these fields has identified instances where a subjects remembrance of actual and illusory experiences became entwined, leaving a memory trace of the imagined event now perceived as reality. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in his lecture regarding ‘latent dream thought’ comments;

‘The dream that is remembered is not the real one, but a distorted substitute, which is to help us approach the real dream by awakening other substitute formations and by making the unconscious in the dream conscious’ (Freud 1916:93)

Freud’s idea was that the ‘latent’ (symbolic) content of a dream would transpose into the ‘manifest’ (actual) content through a process of ‘dream-work’, bringing the unconscious into the conscious in a form of unity. 

Within photography an image showing dissociated events could therefore be argued stimulates memories tenuous in relation to the viewer, producing acts of remembrance towards non-empirical experiences. Is it possible that Barthes awareness of his mother within the “winter garden’ image was informed by memory not the unintelligible; as he writes ‘for once photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance’ (Barthes 1981: 67). Annette Kuhn’s (DD) argues that the unconscious mind is not stimulated through systematic logic but visually, bringing to the conscious mind a sense of familiarity toward an un-witnessed event, suggesting that remembrance requires no actual presence or connection to the scene. (Kuhn: 128). Similarly within the area of ‘post memory’ later generations of survivors who experienced traumatic events during the “Holocaust” have been known to inherit memories through intergenerational testimony, appearing so vivid that at times the memories can replace their own.

Freud identified that disturbing or traumatic memories are unconsciously (repressed) and consciously (suppressed) placed into the subconscious as a means to forget. Within repression the individual does not know the source of the memory ‘there are mental things in a man which he knows without knowing that he knows’ (Freud 1935: 93) Simon Boag (2010,pp) argues that influenced with prompts the unconscious can be developed into the conscious mind, which implies that unrelated images to an individual could stimulate meaning and connection previously unknown.

David Bate (DD) posits a notable simile between notions of “voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ memory proposed by Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in his famed work ‘In Search of Lost Time’. Repression as we’ve already noted is an unconscious or in Proustian terms ‘involuntary’ reaction, whereas suppression is seen as conscious ‘voluntary’. In referring back to Barthes claim of what actually attracts his attention toward an image, ‘punctum’ is in fact ‘involuntary’ an unknown reaction whereas ‘studium’ is seen as ‘voluntary’ connection easily associated. Bate’s suggest that in following this path from image to memory we may succeed in stimulating awareness towards both suppressed and repressed memories, which further strengthens the idea that Barthes connection to the ‘winter garden’ was in fact one of supposed memory, suggesting a photographed scene doesn’t always necessarily reveal the literal content or meaning but effects us unconsciously triggering memories both suppressed and repressed creating a relational connection.

The lack of direct connection or frugality of content can also be seen within the area of ‘transcendental’ film. French Director Robert Bresson (1901-1999) in describing the sense of realism incorporated throughout his work suggests an act of ‘Privation’ a suppression of actual plot offering only the obvious. In this approach Bresson can to a degree manipulate the viewer towards investment of his or her own emotion within the film, as the diegesis is fully understood from the outset, placing the creation of drama into the mind. Photography can perform in a similar manner within images void of any actual plot or in cases where the topic is communicated to the viewer in its totality. Images that depict death or bereavement offer beyond the literal, access to a more prominent meaning albeit incidental to the individual.

Within my own work the emphasis is toward reducing content that may act to direct the viewer’s interpretation, leaving only the obvious and literal, a sense of ‘privation’ of what actually should be present. Within the image(see fig.8) death is the obvious meaning, yet within its context we are denied any further associations towards identity or family, the narrative is left entirely to the viewer to devise through their own personal experiences, which could allow repressed thoughts of a similar occasion personal to them to surface, placing them at the scene psychologically. The actual intended meaning is ambiguous, becoming unnecessary in that“The referent hides the true meaning of an image”(as cited in Bate 2009:17). Suggesting that the depicted object or scene is in fact a facade of an additional meaning, paradoxically the image has depth, only accessed through an individual’s own investment. 

John Berger (b: 1926) states that ‘when we find a photograph meaningful we are lending it a past and a future’ (Berger 1967:64), both past and future are as one within the image (see fig.8) yet only visible through imaginative investment, whereas similarly when the viewer is presented with an image that clearly defines these boundaries of time an equal amount of investiture toward the image is required in order to acquire meaning.

Richard Avedon’s (1923-2004) imagery although depicting an actual subject (see fig.9, fig.10) distinctly shows life and death, a literal meaning seen within the figure. Yet there remains a suppression of information joining the two images, although past and present are reflected in both images the viewer is unaware of the physical journey leading one to the other, this ‘privation’ works again unconsciously to entice investment towards the missing piece. Association toward an image it could then be suggested is predominantly achieved by what is missing as opposed to what is actually there.

Conclusion

Barthes states “in order to see a photograph well, it’s best to look away or close your eyes’ (Barthes, 1981: 53). Although we may be fully aware of the photographs status as a representation, an appearance of an object or person, the psychological and emotional effects experienced remain unexpected and profound. 

Within the familial confines the photographic image of a deceased family member offers solace, bringing a sense of reconnection thus allowing memories to remain active.  In these circumstances the photographic evidence of past events can offer a form of retrospection allowing an insight into the cause and effect assisting in the grieving process.

The image whether of a singular object or relational event can bring about as a consequence through its initial denotative meaning a flow of memories taking prominence over what is visually seen. Through investment the photograph possess the capacity to stimulate latent thoughts, memories brought to consciousness forming an association of meaning, personal yet often unrelated to what is actually seen. Even once the photograph has been removed, it seems the persuasive allure continues to occupy the conscious and unconscious mind, proceeding to develop attachment through past experiences and knowledge.

Although within many images the intention of meaning is pre-determined by the author, through the research explored it is of my opinion that within photography specifically the ambiguous and everyday family image, the depicted content is largely irrelevant. The individual can locate a connection dependent on their state of mind, drawing an association through past memories, the photograph acting as a blank page, allowing the viewer to fill the void with his or her own interpretation of meaning. Although impossible to gauge the personal response one feels towards an image or the level of meaning or association attached, it remains evident that when an emotional connection is created the attachment far exceeds the actual image itself.

   Bibliography

Barthes, Roland (1981) Camera Lucida. (25). Great Britain: Vintage.

Barthes, R (1977) ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ In: Heath, S. Image, Music, Text. Great Britain: Fontana Press: pp. 32-52

Barthes, R (1977) ‘The Third Meaning’ In: Heath, S. Image, Music, Text. Great Britain: Fontana Press: pp. 52-69

Bate, D (2010) ‘The Memory of Photography’ In: Photographies Vol.3, No. 2 [Online] At: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17540763.2010.499609# (Accessed on: 20.04.15)

Bate,D (2009) The Key Concepts of Photography. (3rd). London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Benjamin, W. (1999) ‘Little History of Photography’ In: Totuusradio.fi Vol.2. 1927-1934 [online] At: http://www.totuusradio.fi/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/benjamin-little-history-of-photography.pdf (Accessed on 01.02.15)

Benjamin,W (1932) Selected Writings, In:totuusradio.fi Vol. 2, 1927-1934[Online] At: http://www.totuusradio.fi/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/benjamin-little-history-of-photography.pdf. (Accessed on: 27.02.15)

Berger, J (1967) Understanding a Photograph. (08). Great Britain: Penguin.

Boag, S (2010) Repression, Suppression, And Conscious Awareness. In: Psychoanalytic Psychology Vol.27. No. 2 164-181 [Online]At: https://www.academia.edu/1526503/Repression_suppression_and_conscious_awareness (Accessed on: 18.03.15)

Brynie, F (2013) ‘Remember Something That Never Happened’ In: Psychology Today.com [Online] At: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-sense/201307/remembering-something-never-happened (Accessed on:10.4.15) 

Ebner, F (1999) Photography’s Other Latency. At:http://www.furuya.at/reviews/31999Bulletin_e_d.pdf. (Accessed on: 26.03.15)

Freud, S (1987) A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Great Britain: Wordsworth Editions Ltd

Gibbons, J (2007) Images of Art Recollection and Remembrance.(01). United States: I.B Tauris & Co ltd

Hirsch, M (2008)’ The Generation Post Memory’ In: Poetics Today 29(1)[online] At: http://www.fsf.ane.ru/attachments/article/157/mar.pdf : (Accessed on: 21.03.15)

Hirsch, M. (1997) ‘Mourning and Post Memory’ In: Family Frames. 2nd ed. Great Britain: Harvard University Press. Pp. 17-40

Kuhn, A (1995) ‘Family Secrets-Acts of memory and imagination’ (2nd) Great Britain: Verso

Metz, Christian (1985) ‘Photography and Fetish’ In: Jstor.org Vol. 34 [online] At: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/visualarts/Metz-Photography-and-Fetish-October-1985.pdf (Accessed on 27.10.14)

McLeod, S (2013) ‘Sigmund Freud’ In: Simple Psychology.org [Online] At: http://www.simplypsychology.org/Sigmund-Freud.html (Accessed on:12.04.15)

Pettersson,M (2011)’Depictive Traces: On the Phenomenology of Photography’ In: Academia.edu 69(2)[online] At: https://www.academia.edu/245627/Depictive_Traces_On_the_Phenomenology_of_Photography: (Accessed on : 14.03.15) 

Sontag, S (1978) On Photography. (08). Great Britain: Penguin.

Stephens, R (Unknown) ‘On the Reception of Photography: Between Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin’In: The Conversant [Online] At: http://theconversant.org/?p=8017 (Accessed 02.04.15) 

 Illustrations

Figure 1. Fuyura. S (1985) Memoires.1984-1987. Graz/East Berlin 1985 [Analogue Photograph] At: https://wolkinger.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/seiichi-furuya-die-grenzen-des-erinnerns/ (Accessed on 15.04.15)

Figure 2. Fuyura. S(1985) Memoires.1984-1987. [Analogue Photograph] At: http://hyunminlee.egloos.com/m/808355 (Accessed on 15.04.15)

Figure 3. Ferrier, S (2015) Greylag [Digital Photography] In possession of: Ferrier, S : Barnsley.

Figure 4. Eisenstein, S (1944) Ivan The Terrible: [Film Still] In: Image, Music, Text. Plate 7. Great Britain Fontana Press:

Figure 5.Hill, P (2010) Corridors of Uncertainty [Digital Photography] In: Corridors of Uncertainty Plate No: 40.Dewi Lewis Publishing

Figure 6. Ferrier, S (2015) Greylag [Digital Photography] In possession of: Ferrier, S : Barnsley.

Figure 7. Van Der Zee, J (1926) Family Portrait [Analogue Photography]At: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/39125090488231864/ (Accessed on: 14.04.15)

Figure 8. Ferrier, S (2015) Greylag [Digital Photography] In possession of: Ferrier, S : Barnsley.

Figure 9, Avedon, R (1973) Jacob Israel Avedon [Negative Print] At: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/04/richard-avedon-jacob-israel-avedon-1974.html (Accessed 09.3.15). 

Figure 10, Avedon, R (1973) Jacob Israel Avedon [Negative Print] At: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/04/richard-avedon-jacob-israel-avedon-1974.html (Accessed 09.3.15). 

[s0022093a2film]

Section 1: Creative Investigation-

To what extent is David Lynch an auteur and how does his style create questionable representations of women?

For my creative investigation I will be exploring to what extent that David Lynch is the author of his own films using a basis of Sarris’s auteur theory to analyse Lynch’s claim to the creative rights of his work. I will also reflect on how the representation of female characters in his films is entwined with his style but could have questionable ethics, using feminist film theory (Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp.117-130.0) alongside auteur theory (Grant, B. (2008). Auteurs and authorship. 1st ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.) to consider this. I will investigate if the eccentric mystery of this director makes him the auteur of his eccentric and mysterious films. I will discuss how his origins as a painter and artist, his life outside of his film career and his collaborations affect his film work and his authorship over it. I will consider this in an analysis of three of his focal films. Firstly, ‘Eraserhead’ (Eraserhead. (1977). [film] Directed by D. Lynch. USA: American Film Institute (AFI)) is a horror written and directed by David Lynch starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph. Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child. This film was the first definite choice to look at when analysing Lynch’s filmography. It is his first feature film after his original shorts, ‘The Alphabet’ (Lynch, D. (1968). David Lynch the Alphabet. [video]) and ‘The Grandmother’ (Lynch, D. (1970). The Grandmother - David Lynch. [video]). In these shorts he was really testing out his style and techniques but with minimal plot or story, it was his transition from the classical art world to the film art world so was heavily based on image and colour and light. This film is his first foray into feature films, so it is very dark and intense and focused on unnatural imagery to unsettle the audience. It is one of his most complex and non-linear works and something really career defining I believe. Secondly, ‘Blue Velvet’ (Blue Velvet. (1986). [film] Directed by D. Lynch. USA: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) is a drama-mystery-horror hybrid written and directed by David Lynch starring Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper. The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child. In my opinion ‘Blue Velvet’ is one of Lynch’s more logical and plot-based films and is more naturalistic than ‘Eraserhead’ for example. I think this is an interesting contrast between his work that is extremely surreal and his work that has more thriller elements. And finally, ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ is a drama-mystery-horror hybrid written and directed by David Lynch starring Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Madchen Amick. A young FBI agent disappears while investigating a murder miles away from Twin Peaks that may be related to the future murder of Laura Palmer; the last week of the life of Laura Palmer is chronicled. I chose this film as I am very interested in the Twin Peaks series and film and it is the first work of Lynch’s I saw years ago. I feel it amalgamates a lot of Lynch’s styles and techniques of horror so would be really beneficial to look at. It was also controversial in people’s opinions when it was released as Twin Peaks series fans did not like it, however other spectators struggled to follow it as they did not have the context of the series. This meant it missed its market in some people’s opinions, however personally I enjoyed the film and think it is a good insight into lynch as a director and creator. It’s use of base, family disturbance to hit on key human fears is an important part of Lynch’s style and this film really plays on that.

  ‘David Lynch: The Art Life.’ ((2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda) was an invaluable source to begin my research at as it was fully narrated by Lynch himself and spanned his whole life up until the making of his film ‘Eraserhead’ which created a picture of his life and the circumstances that lead to him making the films he did and how he is personally connected to them.  Additionally, further into my research the book ‘David Lynch Decoded’ (Stewart, M. (2007). David Lynch. Bloomington: AuthorHouse.) was a brilliant companion to the multiple different relevant theory (Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.) as it was a discussion into Lynch’s films individually which gave me contextual knowledge of all his work, as well as my focal films.

In the introduction to Stewart’s book he says: “Everybody’s got that moment. If you love film, you had a moment at some point in your life…. It’s that moment when you had an epiphany, you realised what film was really capable of…I went to see a late showing of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – Fire Walk with Me and I was instantly hooked on film forever. No filmmaker had ever affected me the way Lynch did.” I found this notable because I said the same thing in the initial thoughts of my preparation for this question which suggests Lynch is noticeable, important and stands out to multiple people. This recognisable style is an attribute of an auteur.

Stewart talks about Lynch’s films having interlinking themes, styles, and characters. This is a suggestion of authorship according to one of Sarris’s premises of authorship. “I have come to the conclusion that these characters are connected to each other, that they are connected in specific ways which repeat themselves thematically and visually throughout the majority of Lynch’s filmed works, and that over time Lynch has developed a visual language that we can interpret with regard to these characters and the strange world they come from.” We can see these links in clear duality between the verisimilitudes of Lynch’s separate films, and also, we see the reoccurring use of duality inside films. There are countless examples of duality in Lynch’s films however I think his dual female characters are particularly distinct as it has a consistent and possibly two-dimensional representation of women in his films. Just some prominent examples of dual female characters in the focal films I studied are Laura and herself in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, Laura and Dorothy/Sandy which are respective characters in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ and ‘Blue Velvet’, Dorothy and Sandy in ‘Blue Velvet’, the Roadhouse singer (Julee Cruise), Dorothy and The Lady in the Radiator from all three focal films. There are many examples of dual events and places in all three focal films which will become clear as I compare scenes, especially ideas of dual realities and dreamworlds which occur in all Lynch’s works. Graham Fuller addressed this in his Sight and Sound article saying, “Lynch had Originally intended to use ‘Crying’ in Blue Velvet but opted instead for Orbison's ‘In Dreams’. Dean Stockwell’s Ben lip-synchs the song with the same baroque affectedness demonstrated by Del Rio, but he too is cut short when Frank rips the cassette of the song from the tape recorder. On both occasions Lynch is Breaking through the dream fabric of the film, reminding us of the fragility of cinema’s hallucinatory power.” (Fuller, G. (2001). Babes in Babylon. Sight and Sound, (12), pp.14-17) and this highlights the links between Lynch’s films and the interchangeability of music, character, and actors. However, I am going to consider the clear and influential duality of female characters between and in the focal films as it does effect Lynch’s claim to authorship over these films. It could be argued that Lynch’s clear use of duality and ongoing style and theme contribute to his authorship over these films as links to Sarris. However, this could also be viewed as Lynch’s subconscious misogyny as his creation of female characters is clearly repetitive and conform to the Madonna/Whore stereotypes which are have been seen through film continuously since cinema began.

The character of Laura Palmer in ‘Twin Peaks’ is the crux of the whole TV series and subsequent film, as they all ask, ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ and maybe the more important question, ‘Does it matter?”. Laura’s character is Lynch’s most well-known and she is a perfect example of duality. One half of her personality is the all-American, beautiful daughter, and glowing prom queen, and the other half of her life is cocaine fuelled, sex-filled parties and abuse. The character Donna who is Laura’s school friend is a parallel and representation of Laura’s good side whereas the character of Ronette who is Laura’s companion from the secretive half of her life, reflects dark side. The ‘Twin Peaks’ ring unifies Laura as it appears to her when she is daughter, prostitute, and visionary. This duality of Laura’s character can also be seen by the characters of Sandy and Dorothy in Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ where Lynch is again portraying two representations of women that are creating a narrative that suggest as a female you are either the typical obedient, placid, beautiful, and conservative girl or the dark, sexy, hysterical bad-girl. In ‘Blue Velvet’ Sandy is the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl-next-door that is presented as the ‘right girl’ for a sensible young man such as Jeffrey to date. Whereas the character of Dorothy is the dark-haired hyper-sexualised mysterious woman with a sultry accent that Jeffrey just can’t keep off his mind. These two characters clearly reflect the creation of Laura’s character in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ as she holds both these two juxtaposing traits at once which makes her such an elusive and enthralling mystery. However, the linking female characters continues across to Lynch’s first feature film ‘Eraserhead’ as well, there is even a parallel of three women from all three focal films, being united by a scene where they sing on a stage in front of curtains in a scene with an intense dream-like quality. In many films neurotic behaviour is prevalent in the ‘villains’, with strangely heightened and dangerous sexual awareness in the ‘heroine’. In the symbols of dream images, and the unconscious desires expressed in dreams there is there is key element of Freud’s theories.  As Roger Luckhurst and James Bell said in their Sight and Sound article” The world of Twin Peaks sits in a broader Lynchian universe, which at times can feel like a unified whole- perhaps one could meet Eraserhead’s Henry Spencer in the Black Lodge or run into Dorothy Vallens from Blue Velvet at the Roadhouse. As well as taking cues from and prefiguring other elements of Lynch’s work, Twin Peaks echoes a variety of other filmic influences.” there is a clear Lynchian universe where all of his films and characters and worlds have his auteurs signature all over them. This consistency can be seen in Lynch’ films through his ongoing themes and his representations of women. On very pivotal and important theme running through Lynch’s work is his use duality between his films, in his films, in his characters and his places and events. In considering and discussing Lynch’s work considering duality is vital as it is central to a lot of the interior meaning in his films. Sexualisation of women in Lynch’s films cannot be overlooked when considering his work critically. It is known that Lynch uses the hyper-sexualisation of women in his films and it is picked up by the media and audiences and sometimes lavished upon. However, this itself creates a conversation about Lynch’s knowledge and control behind these representations and the reactions they produce. As Roger Luckhurst and James Bell noted in their article “The UK tabloids went crazy (largely, it must be admitted, for Sherilyn Fenn’s tight sweaters and dexterous tongue)” (Luckhurst, R. and Bell, J. (2017). The Owls are Not What they Seem the World of Twin Peaks. Sight and Sound, [online] (6), pp.18-25.) However, this use of duality by Lynch consistently could be a consideration of authorship, as Fuller said ”Twinning, of course, has been a consistent theme in Lynch’s later work, as witness the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Dale Coopers in Twin Peaks and the two Arquette characters in Lost Highway.” (Fuller, G. (2001). Babes in Babylon. Sight and Sound, (12), pp.14-17). Almost like Shakespeare moulding and developing characters from Hamlet, to Othello to Macbeth we see Lynch using similar character tropes but building layers of character and meaning onto them

 The second premise of Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory is that a director must have a distinguished personal style, and Lynch arguably fulfils these criteria. One clear stylistic element in Lynch’s work is his use of dream sequences to access a more abstract tone to his films. It can be complex to distinguish between Lynch’s complex and eclectic realities, and the dream sequences within them but there is a tonal change. Lynch’s dream sequences often seem to explore emotional tensions, revealing new information. Lynch’s belief in the Upanishads means he believes in different levels of reality, so Lynch’s dream sequences do sometimes blur the lines of reality and bring into question which reality is real and which is the dream, or both or another. This use of dream sequences link to the early surrealist movements in the 1920’s and 1930’s, in ‘Film and psychoanalysis’ it says they were in a ‘quest for new modes of experience that transgressed the boundaries between dream and reality’ (Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp.77-89.). This clearly something Lynch was consciously or subconsciously drawing on as he began in painting and moved onto film as a way of being able to gain more control over his and an express himself more intensely calling film ‘moving paintings’ (David Lynch: The Art Life. (2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda.). It continues to say “They were deeply influenced by Freud’s theory of dreams and his concept of the unconscious. To them, cinema, with its special techniques such as the dissolve, superimposition, and slow motion, correspond to the nature of dreaming”. I feel as if this heavily influenced Lynch as his work is very motivated by image and dreams and he also moved onto the world of film to utilise these new techniques.   As the dream sequence in ‘Eraserhead’ (Lynch, 1977) begins we see the radiator open up like a door, letting us into the dream world. Lynch uses a dissolve here to take the spectator from the ‘real world’ of Henry’s bedroom to the dream world. The use of this dissolve gives the effect of when in a dream something absurd begins to happen and new locations and scenarios come out of nowhere, but the sleeping brain makes them seem slick and rationalised. The dissolve moves the scene into the strange dream-world as not to alert the audience, creating the effect as if the spectator is falling asleep with Henry. The first images we see are the black and white tiled floor and the curtains. This referencing other dream world in Lynch’s films such as The Red Room/The Black Lodge in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’. There were also electrical light bulbs flickering into life, which is another example of Lynch using electricity to symbolize dream sequences. Although ‘Blue Velvet’ may present as one of Lynch’s more restrained with a more prominent narrative than most of his work, a lot of dream sequences and alternate realities are alluded to. In the opening scene we have this zoom into a dream world, implying maybe the whole of ‘Blue Velvet’ is a dream. This is different to the narrative style of Eraserhead’ as his first feature film has much stronger ties to his abstract art world and his personal life. To add to the concept that ‘Blue Velvet’ is a dream is also the final scene as we zoom out of Jeffrey’s ear and back into the perfect world we saw at the beginning. We see the perfect all-American streets but then the tension is built by showing the hose pipe getting trapped and quite literately tension building in the water. We then see the man drop to the floor and slow-motion effects are used. The camera then tracks in an extreme close up through the grass to soil and beetles rustling with disgusting animalistic crunching noises. This zoomed in extreme close-up implies that we are going to a dream in world in what is colloquially coined ‘Lynchland’. It is the same technique as used in ‘Eraserhead’ as we zoom into the radiator to the dream world. This scene in ‘Eraserhead’ also links to ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me’ as the electricity motif is continued and developed by Lynch to be used in this film to represent a dream state again. In the scene where David Bowie’s character Phillip Jeffries arrives after two years of disappearance electricity is used to symbolise another reality or dream world; the electricity flares up and lights flash when Gordon tries to contact someone about Jeffries. In the nightmare sequence we even see an extreme close-up of a mouth say the word ‘Electricity’, it is a man layered in thick white paint with blackened teeth and a long white nose which gives him an eerie look of an 18th century plague doctor. The dialogue is used as another tool of Lynch’s to create disturbance and highlight the dream sequence, as in the Red Room/Black Lodge or when a character is in the alternative reality the dialogue sounds growling and deep and unsettling. Lynch used a technique where he would get his actors to learn their dialogue backwards by learning the sounds the words would make when said back to front. He would then record these backwards sounds and turn them around in the edit, in theory making the words sound forwards and correct again. However, of course this process would distort the sounds in an eerie way as a spectator you understand the words being spoken as they come across normal, but you cannot quite put your finger on why all the sounds coming from the actors sound wrong and distorted. Lynch uses this technique alongside electrical whirring and snapping sounds to create an atmosphere of unease and tension, Lynch wanted to create these altered reality scenes to have this effect because the sound became normal, but just slightly off and disturbing and this is the exact feeling Lynch wanted his dark alternative reality in the Red Room/Black Lodge to have.

Another notable element of Lynch’s personal style is a cleverly manipulative use of family tensions and fear to create a distinct tone of psychological horror. His control of the spectator’s emotions and darkness is intricately manipulative, a most perfect example of this is the character of ‘Leo’ in Twin Peaks who in the film is an utterly despicable character full of starkly dislikeable traits as a domestic abuser and criminal, however by the end of the series of ‘Twin Peaks’ Lynch has the audience feeling sympathy and almost warmth towards this character. This highlights Lynch’s power of manipulation, and almost love affair with it. This power and intense relationship with complex horror stemming from family issues comes from his personal life, despite his own personally described idyllic childhood, he struggled with marriage and children as he his style and art in a film format was developing and solidifying. We see this evolving first in his short films ‘The Grandmother’ and ‘The Alphabet’. The short ‘The Grandmother’ opens with a painting style animation, which comes up throughout the short to symbolise changes or things that are happening between shots. This implies Lynch has authorship because he was a painter before he was a film maker and went to art school, and still to this day paints and has a painting studio. He also has described his transition to film as him wanting to create moving paintings. So, the painted animation style is very personal. We see the use of blurred edges around the shot with a lot of light contrast and chiaroscuro lighting. This is heavily used in ‘Eraserhead’, enhanced by the black and white, to create the sense of it being a dream-world, not set in reality. It also uses soil that is dumped on the protagonist’s bed, which is used in the bedroom in ‘Eraserhead’, this enhances the sense of darkness and unknown and makes the supposed safe space of a bedroom become dirty and unpleasant, this shows Lynch is developing images and styles. There is use of stop-motion animation for some scenes, which is not really used in Lynch’s feature films, but it is in his shorts. However, Lynch does heavily use the technique of using models and lights and sort of animation style scenes in his future films for the dreamy, non-realistic effect. This short uses a lot of red and black colour schemes and Lynch uses these colours a lot in his future films, for example, ‘The Red Room’ in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ (red and black is massively used in pretty much all of this film) or the stage scenes in ‘Eraserhead’. Although when Lynch started filmmaking he had to shoot in black and white, however the black and white shooting style does carry on through his filmography. He uses black and white for effect in Twin Peaks and he uses the noir style chiaroscuro lighting. There is the use of CU on the antagonists faces to show the spectator the fear the protagonist is feeling in ‘The Grandmother’, this use of shot is used by Lynch a lot, for example the close-up of Jack Nance in ‘Eraserhead’ when he is scared of the baby, and the close-up of Bob and Leland and Cooper in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, and the close-up of Jeffrey in ‘Blue Velvet’ as he watches through the wardrobe at Frank. This persistent use of family situations to create psychological horror highlights how Lynch used his own personal fears to begin to create a style of horror in his shorts and ‘Eraserhead’, and as he progressed as a director he developed, and this style evolved.  

Sarris’s third premise of authorship is that an auteur must have a consistent personal link between all their work and art. The character known as ‘The Arm’ or ‘The dwarf’ from the Red Room/Black Lodge talks of “Intercourse between the two worlds”. The Red Room/Black Lodge is a visual representation of this ‘intercourse’ as it is almost a limbo between the physical world and the fantastical realm of dreams that Lynch depicts. The man then says to the illusive and evil ‘Bob’ character ‘with this ring, I thee wed’ and that could be said to be the ‘Twin Peaks’ ring that is the symbol of the link between the town and the dark realm and this ring becomes Bob’s talisman. The man then says the crucial line ‘Fire walk with me’ and in this moment we see Red room dwarf and Bob create the Black Lodge/Red Room. A close-up of the dwarf fades into a medium shot of the iconic red curtains of the Red Room. In an overhead shot we watch them both walk into the Red Room together and the curtains swing shut behind them. This scene is a critical moment in the narrative of this film and the whole ’Twin Peaks’ saga as we see the creation of the link between reality and other. These two characters literally bind the two worlds together as the dwarf says ‘wedding’ them. This is also an important scene to consider authorship for

The Upanishads are a part of the Vedas, which are ancient Sanskrit texts that contain some of the central philosophical concepts and ideas of Hinduism, some of which are shared with Buddhism, and Jainism. Among the most important literature in the history of Indian religions and culture, the Upanishads played a critical role in the development of spiritual ideas in ancient India, marking a transition from Vedic ritualism to new ideas and institutions. This is a belief system that Lynch is involved in and influences his life. Of all Vedic literature, the Upanishads alone are widely known, and their central ideas are at the spiritual core of Hindus. The Upanishadic age was characterized by a pluralism of worldviews and the concepts of Brahman (ultimate reality) and Ātman (soul and self) are central ideas in all of the Upanishads. So, it is clear that Lynch’s personal involvement with this does affect his beliefs and how he makes his films because themes of ultimate reality and soul and self are massively influences on his work. Brahman is the material, efficient, formal, and final cause of all that exists. The word Atman means the inner self, the soul, the immortal spirit in an individual, and all living beings including animals and trees. I think the fact that Lynch follows these ideas influenced his symbolism and creation of reality in his work. For example, the Upanishads believe the immortal spirit is in a person, animal, or tree and in the film ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me’ all three of these things bring information from the alternate reality. The people such as, ‘The giant’ bring Cooper information about what is happening in the Red Room/Black Lodge, the owls also are almost possessed by the alternate reality and arrive in the scene when the two realities may merge, and finally of course the character of ‘The Log Lady’ has part of a tree the whispers to her, giving her advice to tell Cooper and malicious intentions of the other reality. Hendrick Vroom explains, "the term Maya [in the Upanishads] has been translated as 'illusion,' but then it does not concern normal illusion. Here 'illusion' does not mean that the world is not real and simply a figment of the human imagination. Maya means that the world is not as it seems; the world that one experiences is misleading as far as its true nature is concerned.” (Timesofindia.speakingtree.in. (2016). Maya (illusion). [online]) According to Wendy Doniger, "to say that the universe is an illusion (māyā) is not to say that it is unreal; it is to say, instead, that it is not what it seems to be, that it is something constantly being made. Māyā not only deceives people about the things they think they know; more basically, it limits their knowledge. In the Upanishads, Māyā is the perceived changing reality and it co-exists with Brahman which is the hidden true reality.” (Timesofindia.speakingtree.in. (2016). Maya (illusion). [online]). Clearly these ideas about Maya link quite directly to Lynch’s work, in particular ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me’ as the Log Lady even says, “The owls are not what they seem” (the owls which symbolise the alternate reality). The interior narrative of ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ is based upon the idea that the world one experiences is misleading which is made clear by all of the complex characters with many secrets highlighted of course by Laura’s double life. Also, the Red Room/Black Lodge is another reality co-existing with Twin Peaks however you never know which is perceived reality and which is hidden true reality, and I feel this idea is something that Lynch uses through a lot of his work. Even Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ says “We live inside a dream”.

In ‘The Alphabet’ which another of Lynch’s early shorts, opens with a white flag with orange circle at the centre and this image is replicated in ‘The Grandmother’ (1970) when Lynch outs an orange circle in the centre of the boy’s white bed sheet when he is being beaten on it. The first section of the short film is the sound of someone singing and on screen is an animation of colours and shapes and musical notes and letters. Lynch is a music artist as well, so this means that he is gathering all parts of his life and personality to come together to create his films. There is use of closeups on faces to make you uncomfortable which David Lynch explores in his next short film and the rest of his feature work. For example, there is a close up of a wet mouth speaking and it is unsettling and horrible. There is a moment where there is the sound effect of a baby crying but in an intense unpleasant way which is definitely used as an important part in ‘Eraserhead’ (1977). Also, horror derived from family themes is one of Lynch’s strong stylistic points used in all his work. There is then an animation of what looks very phallic with blood rushing through it, it then turns into a face and breast spitting blood. This supposedly is all linked and imagery of childbirth. It uses chiaroscuro lighting liked Lynch does a lot to help create that dreamlike state where there are no borders of reality. Dream states and imagery are a massive part of Lynch’s style. Another poignant image is a woman trapped on a bed with her arms wrapped in the bars of the headboard, she is writhing about and started choking up blood. This seems symbolic of childbirth. There is a very small production company and wasn’t even released until decades later, this means it was a passion project for Lynch and gives him strong authorship to the film and the styles he has carried through to his other films. These themes are so strongly based on Lynch’s life as he had his first child Jennifer in 1967 with Peggy, who is playing the mother in this film. Peggy even described him as: “[Lynch] definitely was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. Hey, I was pregnant when we got married. We were both reluctant.” (David Lynch: The Art Life. (2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda.) So, he has strong claim to the authorship of this film because he worked on every element of creating this film and it was directly based off his life. This could link to his representation of women and mothers in his films as he had a daughter as said ‘reluctantly’ and this created a fear in him of children and women’s power to create life. Freud’s idea of the unconscious is one of the dominant ideologies expressed in horror film- the idea of secret desires that lie hidden from the conscious mind but drive our motivations.

Lynch does have strong claim to authorship over his film as he consistently takes on multiple roles in the film making process, and in his early work it was solely created by him, and the links between his short films and his feature’s is very clear as I have discussed. For ‘Eraserhead’ Lynch was the director, writer, producer, musician, editor, production designer, art director, sound effect designer, special effects designer. For ‘Blue Velvet’ he was the Director, writer, and composer. And for ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ he was the writer, director, actor, producer, and sound designer. So as for Sarris’ being need for an auteur to be technically competent there is no question that Lynch has control over all elements of the creation of his films and is very capable of working in all departments. This alongside his clear style and personal connections to his work would suggest Lynch is an auteur. His sexualisation of women and lacking representation may be a negative to his work, however I have discussed how it comes from an inherently personal place so could to be said what Sarris called ‘élan of the soul’ which is where a director’s personal personality and take on the world is reflected through their work, adding to their authorship. A good example to support David Lynch being a stylist is that he is clearly used to sell his films as they are being advertised. David Lynch’s style is clearly recognised by a mass audience as name ‘Lynch’ has connotations with his own unique style and genre of work. I came across his work consistently being called ‘David Lynch’s…’ (Fuller, G. (2001). Babes in Babylon. Sight and Sound, (12), pp.14-17.) in articles which highlights this.

However, to counter all of this there is of course still a strong argument to the concept of all film making being a collaborative art and there are many examples of influential collaborations in Lynch’s filmography.

Lynch does collaborate which some of his work and this of course could be argued that his collaborators could be called auteurs, or at least they would all hold a collaborative authorship rather than Lynch being the true auteur. One example of his collaborations is the reoccurring actors which has become a feature in his films. It is discussed whether Lynch has favourite actors and the reasons why he chooses to work with the same people. However, this choice does bring into question whether these actors have a claim to authorship over his films due to their performances, how can it be said that Lynch is a true auteur if we have not seen him work on feature films without this talent? Even just considering reoccurring actors in my three focal films there are multiple. Jack Nance who plays the protagonist in ‘Eraserhead’ also stars in both ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, Kyle Mclaughlin who plays the protagonist in ‘Blue Velvet’ also stars in a major role in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, Laura Dern and Frances Bay from ‘Blue Velvet’ also stars in ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ and these actors also have roles in other of Lynch’s feature films.  Also, it cannot be said Lynch’s work is not highly influenced through genre and a bricolage of techniques that came before him. His use of noir techniques such as high-contrast mise-en-scène framing. This genres aesthetic influences of German expressionism with the asymmetrical tendencies and dramatic use of light and shadow can be seen throughout noir films in off-kilter camera angles, direct front and side lighting, mysterious silhouettes. Lynch uses a bricolage technique to bring together elements from noir, post-modernism, German expressionism and surrealism to create his own signature style. Despite this, it could be said reoccurring actors be part of his style. He is known to be an unconventional person so only finds a connection with a few people, so is this limited choice of actors is part of his personal style? He does work with the horror/thriller genre however, explores and pushes boundaries, he isn’t conventional and brings something personal to standing conventions. Bricolage means he is pulling elements of lots of styles to make his own so in effect it’s still personal and he is just influenced by everything around him and his way of creating and interpreting through that arguable could mean this does not affect his authorship over his style.

 I think the strengths of my research were that I used different formats to gather my information, so my research was wide-ranging and came from both personal and critical sources. I began my research with the documentary ‘David Lynch: The Art Life’ (David Lynch: The Art Life. (2017). [film] Directed by J. Nguyen. Independent: Absurda.) as this gave me a personal insight into Lynch’s opinion on his work as it was fully narrated by him alone. It also was very useful in considering the authorship part of my creative investigation as I began to build up background knowledge about Lynch himself and how his personal style evolved and developed and the influences that affected him and his work. Also, then moving onto his own documentary called ‘Eraserhead Stories’ (Lynch, D. (2001). “Eraserhead” Stories. [video]) where he just talks about his stylistic influences, opinions and the zeitgeist of his life that came together for him to create ‘Eraserhead’ and make it the film it is. This source was also incredibly valuable because it is where I learnt of his family and personal life at the time of making ‘Eraserhead’ and I began to make connection between his film style and his personal life, as I have utilised and discussed in this essay. I then used a variety of e-journals and Sight and Sound articles which were valuable to gauge a more public response to Lynch’s work at the time and to get an insight into how his work was received by audiences and critically, and what other people analysed from his films. I think reading the book on Lynch ‘David Lynch: Decoded’ was a really useful piece of research before I began my own essay as it brought up different angles and theories on Lynch’s work I may not have considered and therefore reinforced or challenged my own analysis. Since Lynch’s films do fall into the psychological genre and my essay was a consideration of authorship and representation, my research into film theories that were relevant to this proved invaluable in building up my knowledge to analyse the focal films in-depth and with and understanding of the theory behind why and how he Lynch uses these techniques and its wider value and interior meaning. So, my sources from the ‘Oxford Guide to Film Studies’ (Hill, J. and Gibson, P. ed., (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.). And of course, I felt that looking into some of Lynch’s early art and film work was crucial to understanding his artistic development and his control of audio-visual language, so analysing his early short films ‘The Alphabet’ (Lynch, D. (1968). David Lynch the Alphabet. [video]) and ‘The Grandmother’ (Lynch, D. (1970). The Grandmother - David Lynch. [video]) which he made prior to the focal films I am considering in this essay was useful in linking all of Lynch’s work and personal style. In addition to my research cited here I used this as a stimulus to continue to look into information about Lynch, his work and important facts or ideas that do not feature directly in my work but helped me build up a wealth of knowledge. However, some of the limitations of my research were that I had so much contextual knowledge and information it was difficult collating valuable quotes and being critical on what routes to investigate and write about and what was not completely relevant. It took a lot of time and critical decisions to pick apart the vital parts f information to create an essay and that was focused and detailed and I explored my own opinions and analysis.

Overall, in my opinion and in reaction to exploration and research I would say David Lynch is an auteur of his own films. I believe his representation of female characters can be two-dimensional and misogynistic however it is flawed and complex like Lynch himself and he is so intertwined with his work. Lynch clearly and consistently brings parts of himself, his character, and his life into his work and style and I feel there is links between his intricate use of the audio-visual language and his own personal development as an auteur.

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14)Beckman, F. (2012). From Irony to Narrative Crisis: Reconsidering the Femme Fatale in the Films of David Lynch. 1st ed. Texas: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, pp.25-44.

15)Ingle, Z. (2017). Authorship and the Films of David Lynch: Aesthetic Receptions of Contemporary Hollywood by Antony Todd (review). 1st ed. [eBook] New York: Centre for the Study of Film and History, pp.82-84. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/543547 [Accessed 5 Oct. 2017].

16) Lynch, D. (2001). “Eraserhead” Stories. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLwtXoyNKgo

17) Grant, B. (2008). Auteurs and authorship. 1st ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

18) Timesofindia.speakingtree.in. (2016). Maya (illusion). [online]