RELATED TERMS: Actant; Defamiliarisation; Liminality; Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics
According to Edwin Heathcote (2025), the interiors in David Lynch’s films suggest that, “our environment is somehow theatrical, temporary, a dream – an expression of the subconscious.” Lynch, while working with production designers, “conceived of these rooms as spaces with every bit as much character as the actors.”
In other words, in the language of Greimasian narrative semiotics and Actor-network theory, the room, as environment, is an actant. The room ‘acts’. It has ‘agency’ or rather actantiality, potential to act in an ensemble or network situation. In Lynch’s case, the designed rooms act to ‘disorient’ the audience-spectator, by imbalancing the degree of ‘agency’ distributed among the actors and the environment as ‘set’ or ‘set-up’. In turn, this alters the amount of attention that needs to be paid to the ‘set-up’ as much as to what the actors ‘do’ and ‘say’. Lynch’s interior sets perform an act of defamiliarisation and ‘making strange’. An awareness emerges that ‘this is a set-up’. ‘We’ have been ‘set up’. We have, like the actors in the drama, been ‘framed’.
Attention becomes more ‘distributed’, opening focal to peripheral ‘vision’, questioning what it is that one is ‘seeing’, pointing to a disruption of the hierarchy of seeing-hearing over the other senses (taste, smell, touch) through ‘seeing’ itself. The Lynchian scene or the filmic situation, with its distributed agency, disrupts, while at the same time exploiting, our ‘ocularcentrism’, the conventional or normal way of ‘seeing’. It thereby brings those conventions, norms and expectations of the ocularcentric mode of attending to a situation to the surface for deliberation.
In another sense, given a psychoanalytic orientation, the Lynchian filmic scene may be said to bring to attention the ’traumatic’ scene which the filmic character is experiencing or reliving through the scene of ‘presence’ or ‘presencing’. The character is responding to a double event horizon. It is a ‘double vision’ opening to a double action: The character continues to respond in the present to the ongoing situation, as if it is normal or usual, but is also responding (‘characteristically’) to the (ongoing) traumatic past. Each scene, in this context, is a potential place of (therapeutic) breakthrough or (psychic) breakdown.
Given a more (Tibetan) Buddhist orientation[1], the (Lynchian) scene of ‘presencing’ begins to open up to the diversity of the other scenes that are encoded in that moment of ‘presence’ and that are unfolding at the same time: the present moment, indeed any moment, as ‘bardo’, a potential opening to other states of consciousness and to an awareness of our being-between life and death, to our condition of ‘being-in-between’ or ‘being-with’. Each scene, in this context, is a potential place of transformation, a state wherein people can unlock their, if not greater then at least other, potential[2]. In this situation, a set design, as a narrative environment, can be understood in terms of bardo: transitional state, in-between state, conditional state, state of becoming. In another frame, it can be understood in terms of marginality and liminality[3].
What Lynch may be said to bring to attention is that, while the apparatus of the cinema is inherently ‘ocularcentric’, that ‘ocularcentrism’ can be used to put itself into question. He thus evokes other ‘senses’, both in terms of the logic of the scene and in terms of sensual perception of what is going on (happening) or what is ongoing (persisting), by dislodging the centre-periphery relation and focalising from the margins.
Notes
[1] As Paul Krug (2017) notes, “While the employment of Tibetan Buddhism and meditation as a signifier in the series [Twin Peaks] has not gone unnoticed in the secondary literature, it certainly has not received detailed attention.”
[2] Krug says of the protagonist FBI Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, his
“esotericism is tempered by the more rationalist and romantic aspects of his fascination with Tibet and the idealism of his self-professed belief that human beings can unlock their greater potential through yoga and meditation.”
Thus, the character of Cooper is, “at once an FBI agent working within the guidelines of bureau protocol, a rationalist who applies classical deductive methods, an idealistic and romantic nightstand Buddhist, and an occult esoteric convert who has managed to tap into a power of intuition that transcends the limitations of logical analysis.” (Krug, 2017)
However, Krug warns, given the pop-cultural televisual moment in US history in which Twin Peaks emerges, Cooper’s convert identity, along with that Cooper’s nemesis, the character Wyndham Earle, is eventually betrayed by the tragedy of its own superficiality.
[3] For Krug, liminality plays a significant part in many of Twin Peaks‘ primary and secondary plot lines. Thus, as much as the series plays with the maintenance and transgression of both physical and psychological boundaries, it also dislodges the social centre-periphery relation.
References
Heathcote, Edwin (2025). Head spaces. Financial Times, 1 February 2025, House & Home section, p.4.
Krug, P. (2017) “I’ll See You Again in Twenty-Five Years”, in Hackett, P. G. (ed.) The Assimilation of yogic religions through pop culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
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