A poetics of desire

I dreamt that I reviewed David Lynch's new book on my blog, so here goes.

Already in Inland Empire Lynch has given us an unnervingly female perspective into a disturbed female psyche. Inland Empire's psychodrama takes us on a truly terrifying but ultimately redemptive wander through the mind of a traumatised prostitute. In his latest book he takes us the other way, instead of exploring woman via woman he explores woman via man. The work turns the premise of Inland Empire on it's head and offers us a distorted, mythologised view of what it is to be a woman.

The poetry of feminine fear and desire that traverses the contours of Inland Empire is transformed into a perverse construction of female desire. The story is a simple one, a female assassin is driven to shoot and kill her husband. Unwilling to get caught she goes on a killing spree, shooting anyone who gets in her way, until she befriends a pensioner (not unlike Alvin Straight) who conceals her in his retirement home where they hide from the authorities.

The book portrays a female forced into a Tarantino-esque role which she is increasingly uncomfortable with. In a bid to uphold the figure of adolescent male desire the narrator has her perform acts which he (for surely the narrator is a he) wishes, while the character tries to slip from the narrator's restraints. In scenes not unreminiscent to Mallick's Badlands she is forced to kill again and again when the narrator puts characters in her way which she is forced to escape from. It is when she is hidden by the pensioner that we find Lynch's own voice. The female escapes the grasp of the narrator and the oppression of his desire, to find a place of solitude where Lynchian themes abound.

Throughout the work runs the play of the double narrative that constantly tries to elude the reader. On the one hand a chase occurs where the protagonist is chased by the authorities for killing her husband, on the other the protagonist is chased by a narrator who wishes to place the constraints of his own desire upon her. We discover that it is not the authorities that we want her to escape, but the pomo world of male oppression and "playfulness" where men create women from their own fantasies.

|