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SENSE AND ABSURD IN DAVID LYNCH’S FILMS «LOST HIGHWAY» AND «MULHOLLAND DRIVE» // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2016. Issue 3 (9). P. 125-131

David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive”, the classic products of postmodern culture, carry multiple interpretations and senses within their plots. Unlike other works, these two films exploit absurd, one of the most prominent instruments of modernity, adjusting it to current realities by disguising it as complex but logical narrative. On the one hand, researchers of absurd note its current decline due to abolition of binary oppositions, which has made the concept of common sense and, thus, possibility of opposing anything to it, ungrounded. On the other – while analyzing the works of modernist writers in his “Logic of sense”, Deleuze comes to the conclusion that absurd in this sense plays a rather different role than in so-called philosophy of absurd: if for Camus absurd is attributed to lack of sense, for an absurdist like Lewis Carroll it, on the contrary, signifies surplus of multiple senses. Thus, the abovementioned films represent a bundle of multiple readings, often conflicting, but never falling apart into incoherent stories. The concept of Umberto Eco’s “opera aperta” acquires different geometry here – multiple senses do not lie parallel to each other, from depthless to deeper readings, but constantly intersect, deflect and change directions. Lynch intentionally puts contradictions into each interpretation to let the viewer to assemble multiple senses as a puzzle over and over, configuring unique interpretations each time. The plot structure is conceived in such a way that each of the interpretations would be insufficient and tangled with others.

Keywords: film, David Lynch, sense, absurd, logic, film semiotics