The Lynch-Cronenberg Continuum: The Subconscious and the Scientist
​
I once had dreams of being a filmmaker, back when I was a teenager. These ambitions were probably fueled in part by where I was living then, and what was going on there at the time. I was in Memphis, in an apartment around Cooper-Young, one of those funky “transitional” neighborhoods popular with college kids and what used to be called hipsters.
In the neighborhood was a video store called Black Lodge, located in an old white house on a gently sloping hill. The store’s sections were divided by director rather than genre (very auteur-ish) and the staff were certified film buffs. I remember there was a red velour couch in the center of the store, facing a TV on a stand usually playing something black and white. One of the guys who hung around there named Craig had just made his own very low budget movie on digital that was doing the rounds of the local circuit. Craig turned out to be Craig Brewer, who would go on to direct the very Memphian hit film Hustle & Flow.
Sadly, Black Lodge was a casualty of Covid, though my dreams of becoming a filmmaker ended well before they closed their doors. At some point I realized I was frankly too socially withdrawn to engage in a collaborative art like filmmaking. I had enough trouble just communicating my ideas from my fingertips to the keyboard, forget other people.
Back when I had that cinematic ambition, though, I read a bunch of books on the subject. Some of them were helpful, some less so. One series I found fascinating were Faber & Faber’s series of interviews with various directors: Scorsese on Scorsese, Lee on Lee, etc. In the books the filmmakers would talk about their philosophies, their training, the complications and the joys of filmmaking. As with any creative endeavor the complications seemed to outnumber the joys, but the joys were what kept them coming back again and again.
Two of my favorite books in the series were Lynch on Lynch and Cronenberg on Cronenberg. For those not big into movies who can’t guess from the titles, the first book dealt with surrealist master David Lynch, the latter with body horror maestro David Cronenberg.
The men’s oeuvres are both completely original—sui generis in a way, despite their stated influences—and both have stood the test of time. The one thing they have in common (or had, since Lynch is sadly no longer with us) was an unwavering and uncompromising vision.
You could probably tease out some other similarities but the differences are more numerous and starker: David Lynch presents Francis Bacon-like tableaux onscreen, using music and light and off-kilter performances to evoke the muddled logic of a bad dream. Then, at strange and unpredictable moments, light breaks through, letting us see the darkness in a new context. He is interested in fabrics and surfaces, music and images that feel like non sequiturs impinging on our quotidian realm from a much stranger and deeper one.
David Cronenberg’s approach is more conscious and analytical, more that of a vivisector than a magician. He is interested in bodily decay and the vestiges of the reptilian lurking beneath our mammalian facades. Like with William Burroughs (whose “Naked Lunch” he adapted for the screen) there is a piercing intelligence intent on stripping layers away to arrive at a terrible core truth. That intelligence interrogates itself as mercilessly or more mercilessly than those around it. Like Burroughs, Cronenberg seems to believe there is a force at work in every man not working to his advantage, and he wants to root it out. But since this isn’t Scorsese, we’re not talking so much about catharsis as the excision of a cancer.
Both men were aware of their different approaches. Lynch hated interviews—comparing them once to a firing squad which you somehow survive. He also didn’t like to talk about his projects in any kind of detail. Not the ones he had done, because he wanted them to speak for themselves and allow audiences to arrive at their own individual interpretations of his work. Nor the ones he was working on, since, like Norman Mailer, he feared “letting the air out of the tires.” Probing too deeply into his intentions was to potentially spoil whatever was there, operating behind the curtain.
Cronenberg spoke of this tendency—not specifically as it applied to Lynch, but in general. He acknowledged that it worked for some people, but that he wasn’t one of them. He was more like Kubrick in that he constantly examined his intentions, before, during, and even after the process. “Why am I doing this?” “What is the significance of making this choice rather than that one?” “What is my unconscious trying to tell me and how can I make that a more prominent and conscious part of my filmmaking?”
He could no more go in relying on intuition and instinct than could a surgeon with his scalpel, or a chemist playing with highly reactive substances.
I’m sure that anyone reading this has their own preference: either to work from the unconscious without tampering with it or coax the meaning from the depths of the sleeping mind and to examine it under the brights before going forward. There are no doubt strengths and weaknesses to each approach, and the final call on how much to think about the meaning of what one’s doing is each artist’s own call to make.
And there’s no law that says you must stick with one method or the other throughout your entire career. One day you might wake up knowing every beat in a story that came to mind, knowing also its thematic significance. Then you might wake up the next day and put a pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) with a completely blank mind, writing automatically so that it’s almost like pushing a possessed Ouija planchette.
My own style seems to be a blend of both approaches, although I’ve found that as I get older I do tend to think more about what I’m doing (and why) before actually doing it. This is especially true with the novel, if only because it requires such an investment of time and energy. I feel far more fallible these days than I did in my twenties, and I know my time is limited and that I can’t afford to waste it.
Still, I do hold to the idea of not talking (too much) about a project while it’s in progress, but that seems to be more a matter of superstition than aesthetic choice. I can analyze it, but only alone and throughout the day. I talk to myself in the voices of the various characters while in the shower, or while walking the dogs. When out in public doing it, I make sure to mutter under my breath, and barely move my jaws like a ventriloquist. After all, I don’t want to be taken for a crazy man, just a mild eccentric.
I suppose, then, that there is no ultimate answer to which approach is better—letting the unconscious power the work or dredging that submerged impulse and harnessing its power consciously. Instead, there is only a matter of preference and the circumstances surrounding the project in question. No surprise there, since art is not a science.
Unless you take the clinically Cronenbergian approach, in which case sometimes art very much is.
Here we are then, back to square one, the Lynch-Cronenberg Continuum now turned Conundrum.
 

     
      My Angora Has a First Name: Or, How the Writing Gets Weird, and Weirdly Sexual

I used to be really obsessed with the filmmaker Ed Wood, officially Edward D. Wood Junior. Most people who know about him probably know about him mostly thanks to the feature biopic film, Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton. They also know (or think they know) that he is the worst director of all time.
Understand, it’s not that Plan Nine from Outer Space is the worst film ever made (I can think of a dozen worse movies off the top of my head.) Rather, it’s that the disjunction between Ed’s heartfelt ambition and what he actually put up on the screen is so wide. In his screenplays, he wrote things with utter sincerity, pouring his heart out, and yet the results, when uttered by actors, were completely ridiculous. His films are lead balloons, burdened by protracted soliloquys on man’s violent nature, his refusal to accept people as they are, and the danger of narrowmindedness.
And yet there tends to be some weird joy in the laughter of people who set out to watch his films with the sole intention of mocking them.
Why?
Everyone who cares about answering that question (not too many of us) no doubt has their own theory, and mine goes back to something said by author George Saunders. He claimed that, while fiction had to make sense on a line by line basis, poetry was more about the inadequacy of words to express those things we wish to express. Sure, the poet utilizes words, but in the best poetry the desire to express something outruns the ability of words to express the feeling the poet desires to convey.
The disjunction, then, between what Ed Wood wanted to do versus what he could do becomes its own kind of crazy poetry. Had he been merely a competent journeyman, we likely would have forgotten his films by now. Had he failed but less spectacularly, his movies likewise would probably be destined for permanent obscurity.
But, like a madman sinking his fortune into a doomed venture, there is something romantic, even monumental about Ed’s failure. It is—in its own wild and paradoxical way—better than a success.
Something even his detractors also readily admitted was that Wood was an auteur. His stylistic thumbprint was distinct, or, as one critic said, "You'll never mistake a bad Ed Wood film for a bad film by someone else.”
One of the things that make Wood’s oeuvre stand out is how prominent a role his own sexuality plays in his pictures. His contemporaries like Hitchcock or Lang might have included veiled or symbolic references to everything from intercourse to masturbation in their works. But there was no such veiling or subtle innuendo employed by Wood. Instead, he favored a different tact: addressing his sexuality head-on, despite his fetish—transvestism—still being incredibly taboo in the 1950s, outside of a kind of vaudevillian mockery of the kink.
Some might credit Wood with being brave. And while that might partially be true, I think narrator Gary Owens hit closer to the ultimate truth in the documentary, “A Look Back in Angora,” in which he claimed that Ed’s sexuality “bubbled up” in his work in the unlikeliest of places. Or, in other words, Ed had no choice. His truth betrayed him, manifested whether he wanted it to or not.
I sympathize with Wood in many respects, regarding myself as an earnest but failed artist whose best hope is to wait perhaps for some posthumous reassessment. Even if, as in the case with Wood, said reception is laced with irony and all the superlatives heaped on me involve variations on “The worst…”
I also sympathize, more specifically, with Ed’s inability to control revealing certain things about himself in his work. It’s a compulsion I share, one that—like the narrator’s in “The Telltale Heart”—can do me very little good and much harm.
No, I don’t risk imprisonment, but I do risk severe embarrassment, and since the words live on forever (in print and online) that embarrassment can always return to haunt me.
Looking back over my own body of work, there are multiple instances of me sharing too much information about myself and sexuality. My own sexual weirdness “bubbled up,” especially in my book “Veterans’ Affairs.” Maybe if the narrator of that novel were not such an obvious alter-ego for yours truly, it might not be embarrassing to recall all the stuff I confessed about myself: interest in femdom, “queening” (look it up), my various crushes which were ongoing at the time, my desire to be dominated by a woman, weird residual oedipal desires that make me look like a less violent but still hopelessly pervy Frank Booth. Some of these fantasies were so elaborate in their staging and orchestration that many of them could be spun out into their own novel-length works, had I any interest anymore in writing “erotica.”
All of this weirdness could have been easily forgiven if it had been relevant to the story, if it had added anything besides extraneous and bizarre details to the narrative. But the exact opposite is probably the case. The weird sex stuff, when introduced, tended to disrupt the narrative flow, “spoil it” as one reader complained about the erotic elements in another of my works.
I never considered that while writing, though, simply because I couldn’t consider it, as I hope I’ve impressed upon you by now.
I remember getting personalized editorial notes back from a slush pile reader at a publisher who had given the MS of “Veterans Affairs” to his boss for review. This pair of eyes must have liked the MS enough to pass it on, but his superior, while intrigued by parts, concurred with that reader who thought I tended to “spoil” my own best work with the sexuality that kept bubbling up.
The bossman’s notes claimed he had enjoyed the novel, but found all the gratuitous references by the protagonist to his sexual fantasies unnecessary. In his words, “it got old quick” and derailed the narrative.
I knew then and know now that he was right. And yet I couldn’t change a word, and instead went with a much smaller publisher who cared less about such things.
Even weirder (and more cringeworthy at this great remove) is that I was actually proud of my “accomplishment” with “Veterans’ Affairs” at one time. I was still in college when it came out, in a graduate program that had nothing to do with literature (subversive or otherwise.) And, like a dumbass, I gave copies of the book to other people in the program, fellow-students about whom I knew very little. Students who would now know the thoughts and feelings hidden locked away in the innermost recesses of my mind.
Imagine writing your darkest and strangest thoughts in a diary, and then having that diary published, and available for perusal by your coworkers. Now imagine being crazy or stupid enough not to care, or even worse, to feel a sense of pride.
Such cluelessness reminds me a bit of that scene in Taxi Driver, in which Travis Bickle takes the Cybil Shepherd character on a date to a porn movie. And then has the gall to be confused by her storming out of the theater in a disconcerted huff.
I even gave a copy of Veterans’ Affairs to an instructor about whom I wrote explicit sexual fantasies in said-book, without considering the implications.
She must not have minded, though, as we continued meeting and being on friendly terms after that. Or perhaps she did mind and was too polite to mention it. Or (and this is probably the most likely scenario), she put the book I gave her on a shelf and never bothered to read it; I certainly hope that’s the case.
What hell was I even thinking, though, by not only publishing that book, but giving it to people I barely knew?
I wish I could track down every copy of “Veterans’ Affairs” still floating around out there, heap them all onto a giant pyre, douse it with lighter fluid, toss a match and watch it burn.
Maybe that sounds a little harsh, but it’s how I feel sometimes about that early work, in which I most definitely shared far too much.
As to why I tend to be less confessional in my work now than back then, who knows? I could offer some suppositions, like that I’ve gotten it out of my system, or that a decade has passed and that, having entered middle age, I’m less ruled by my raging libido.
Both of which statements are true, but neither of which, considered alone or together, quite explain the disappearance of the embarrassing personal stuff from my writing. And besides, who’s to say I don’t eventually go back to “oversharing,” say, when I reach my early seventies? After all, the concept of the “dirty old man” didn’t appear from nowhere. Let’s just hope that if it comes to that, that next time the sex at least is integral to the plot. And is not so informed by my personal kinks.

             
               The Well at Morning, the Fountain at Twilight:
   Or Why Even the Unemployed Might Soon Lose Their Livelihoods

There’s a new book I’ve been meaning to read called “AI Snakeoil,” whose central argument you can probably guess without needing the subtitle. Here that is, anyway, though:
“What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, Can’t Do, and How to Tell the Difference.”
Its authors, Arvin Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, aren’t the first to recognize that the “rise of the machines” narrative may have been oversold. There was a brilliant and accessible philosopher named Hubert Dreyfus who made the same arguments in various books, one of which I read, called “Mind Over Machine.”
Sidenote: Dreyfus served as the partial inspiration for Professor Hubert Farnsworth on Matt Groening’s “Futurama.” If you’re not familiar with the show, Farnsworth’s the bald, bespectacled man whose overbite marks him as one of Groening’s creations.
In his book, Dreyfus cites various reasons for his argument that consciousness, reasoning, and abstraction are different from the calculative processes of even the most “intelligent” AI. His arguments are fascinating and well-argued, but, having said that, one must always leave room for doubt.
And those in my field—translation—have lots of reasons to feel insecure about their futures. Hell, there’s good reason to worry right now. Most of the job offers out there are to train software which, once trained to sufficiency, will replace those who trained it.
Still, there may be hope, as translation is as much art as science, especially when dealing with literature. I have no doubt that AI can already match or even best me when it comes to translating legal documents or directions in a manual on how to assemble furniture. But literature seems more something spawned of the alchemy of our 100 trillion plus synapses than something readily produced by algorithm. Poetry even moreso relies on an abstraction that manages to even stymie the majority of human beings. Most people don’t read it, even most writers. For instance, when I asked a buddy of mine who writes potboilers his opinion of poetry, he threw up his hands and shouted, “It’s bullshit! Just say what you mean!”
Of course, that’s impossible because—to paraphrase George Saunders from his masterful “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain”— “Poetry is the need to say something outrunning our ability to do so.”
While Bukowski’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I’ve always loved this final line from one of his poems that sort of underlines what I’m talking about: “All sadness grinning into flow.”
What exactly does it mean? Hard to say and open to interpretation, but it seems to express how sadness and joy merge with each other and double back on themselves, intertwine to give us the bittersweet. In five words it says something (at least to me) otherwise unutterable.
There was a sample exchange of dialogue that Dreyfus used in his book that stymied the best AI of his time at MIT. It went something like this:
WOMAN: I WANT A DIVORCE.
MAN: WHO IS HE?
Notice that the part that your mind automatically inferred was supplied without your really straining toward it. AI—at least back then—could not find this missing piece, and didn’t understand this exchange pertained to infidelity without mentioning it. Naturally someone could program it to do so—and probably did to fix that loophole after Dreyfus pointed it out. But there is a difference between trying to train AI to think in this sense and teaching it when to use “en passant” in a game of chess. Chess, despite how inscrutable it appears to the neophyte, is mostly a matter of memorization. There’s a ton of variety that produced by those 204 squares, but it’s nothing compared to what is possible with the roughly 20,000 word vocabulary of your average person.
Returning to poetry, let’s perform a small experiment. I will take a stanza from my favorite poet, Georg Trakl and translate it from German to English on my own. I will then take that same stanza, in German, and place it in Google Translate to see what the machine makes of it. I’m aware that there are far superior methods of machine translation (and no doubt more coming) but this will work for our modest purposes here. Additionally, I will include a third professional translation from German to English of the stanza.
This will allow us to compare not only human to machine, but human to human, and two different humans to machine.
Lastly, before getting started, I should point out that Trakl’s poems, while compact and concise, are incredibly difficult to translate.
I chose Trakl’s work in college on the misbegotten assumption that because his works were shorter they would be easier. It turns out that the opposite in fact is true. Shorter works offer fewer guideposts for the translator, and guard their untranslatable secrets well. A long poem is to the translator like a slower, bigger bird to the quail hunter. It is an easier target, especially if it has a refrain that helps one establish a rhythm. Trakl’s poems are paratactical, staccato. They pop up, fly for a short time, then go to ground before you can even draw a bead on them.
This, however, makes Trakl ideal for this assignment. If ever a poet existed to trick a machine as well as the unwary meatbag / moist robot, it was him.
Let’s get started. Here is a stanza of Trakl’s, untranslated.

Die Junge Magd:
Oft am Brunnen, wenn es dämmert,
Sieht man sie verzaubert stehen
Wasser schöpfen, wenn es dämmert.
 Eimer auf und niedergehen.
 
Here now is my translation of that stanza.
 
The Young Maiden:
Often at the fountain, whenever it’s twilight,
One sees her standing enchanted,
Ladling water in the twilight,
The buckets going up and down.
 
“Dämmern” is one of those curious verbs in German, and by curious I mean confusing. “Dämmern” can mean for morning to dawn but also for night to fall. Ricard Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” has been literally translated as “Twilight of the Gods,” but refers to “Ragnarök” the great end times event in Norse mythology.
Why then, did I choose “twilight” instead of “dawn,” here? There was no antecedent which would lead me to go one way or the other. Then again, night tends to play a much larger part in Trakl’s poetry than daylight, and this ain’t my first rodeo. He is, as the Deutsch say, a bit of a “Nachtschwärmer.”
Moving on, here is the other human contribution, put up here merely for educative purposes, with full credit to Daniele Pantano.
 
The Young Maiden:
Often by the well at dusk,
You see her standing spellbound
Drawing water at dusk.
Buckets plunge up and down.
 
Here’s why Pantano gets the big bucks while I’m writing this on my blog at 2 am on a Monday morning. He preserves the rhymes from German to English, which is not always an easy task. Granted, he probably made more than one pass on his version, but it’s superior to mine at least in that regard.
He also selects the word “dusk” as opposed to “twilight” for whatever reason. Do the words have different connotations? I guess they do if they do for you. For me, though, the words produce similar images. I will say there are some things I prefer about my version to the official one.  Pantano’s choice of “spellbound” makes this nameless maiden seem more hypnotized than magical. “Enchanted” leaves her some agency no matter what kind of spell she’s working under; in fact “enchanted” suggests that she possesses her own store of magic, rather than being yoked under someone else’s spell. The “bound” in “spellbound” makes the thralldom/shackling explicit.
 
Now, though, comes the scary part, as thus far we have only compared apples to apples, while now we compare apples to a silicon simulacrum of a shiny red Macintosh. Yes, without further ado, here is the machine translation. Copying and pasting this stanza in the Google Translate box, I can’t help but feeling a little afraid. Will poor Daniele Pantano end up sleeping under a bridge, having been usurped by the poetic equivalent of Deep Blue, the machine that spanked Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess?
 
Let’s find out.
 
The Young Maid:
Often at the well, when it's twilight,
One sees her standing enchanted
Drawing water when it's twilight.
Pails going up and down.
 
It’s curious that the machine chose “twilight” much as I had. It failed to preserve the rhyme between “bound” and “down” in the B and D lines, as well. Like Herr Pantano, the machine likes the verb “drawing,” while I’m somehow more comfortable with “ladling.”
Why, you ask?
I don’t need a reason, but if pressed for one, I would say that ladling has homier connotations. It is more gemütlich, as the Germans say, conjuring images of food, steaming soup scooped from a cauldron and splashed into wooden bowls for hungry children. It’s not just that, though. “Drawing” has the feel of utility about it. In the translation by the other human and the computer, the maiden’s at the well for prosaic reasons. She needs water (duh.) In mine, she’s idly killing time at a fountain, perhaps admiring her reflection as the bucket disturbs the water to send out rippling waves in mirrored shimmers.
You see, of course, another reason why I’m not a pro, why I’m maybe the one who deserves to be sitting under a bridge with a little cardboard sign...
The most important difference between my translation and those of the woman and the machine was staring me in the face from the very first line.
I had my maiden at a fountain, while theirs were at wells. How did I not lead with that obvious divergence between my version and theirs? Especially since the word “enchanted,” so close to “fountain,” would immediately suggest fairytale connotations, perhaps even hinting at the Fountain of Youth.
I’ll chalk it up to tiredness, though I’m sure you can supply less charitable speculations as to my negligence, oh notional and likely nonexistent reader.