Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers

by
Kurt Lancaster

In the films of David Lynch and in the stage work of Robert Wilson, we can see how
both of these directorsworking in different mediablend the surrealistic forces of
internal and external reality into stories that define their style and mark them as the
progenitors of a contemporary surrealistic movement for the postmodern age.
Wilsons original production of Deafman Glance, which premiered in Paris in
1971, was seven hours long and told the story of a woman who murders two
childrencausing the third child who witnesses the murder to become mute. In
Wilsons 1980 staging of the play, Wilson performs the lead role (formerly played by
Sarah Sutton), depicting the ninety-minute fourth act in which we see Wilson pour
each child a glass of milk and then stylistically and ritualistically stabs them both.
David Lynchs 1977 film Eraserhead, tells the story of a young man alienated
from his family. Lynches strong nightmarish imagessuch as the slimy mutated
babywould foreshadow the dream-like images in his later works.
Wilsons and Lynchs work, although widely divergent in style and use of
media both converge within Andre Bretons definition of surrealism. On June 1, 1934
in Brussels, Breton presented the motive force of surrealism: a desire to deepen the
foundations of the real, to bring about an even clearer and at the same time ever
more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses. But the reality

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

of the senses is still tied to the inner world of the mind, and their final unification is
the supreme aim of surrealism. Although interior reality and external reality are in
the process of unification, or finally becoming one, Breton makes clear that these
forces dont act on each other simultaneously or even as a contradiction to one
another, but rather they act one after another, in a systematic manner, allowing us
to observe their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration so that we can finally
perceive that they become one and the same thing.
Both Lynch and Wilson treat the unconscious and conscious as equals, not
privileging one over the other. This is what makes their work stand out from most
other filmmakers and stage directors. And this is what makes their work confusing to
many. In this essay, I examine how Lynch and Wilson use the surreal in their work
and in how they reference their work.
Louis Aragon, one of the progenitors of A Surrealist Manifesto (1925), wrote
a review in a form of a letter to the late Andre Breton after attending the Paris
premiere of Wilsons Deafman Glance. He places Wilson on a pedestal and names
him an heir of the surrealist movement:
The miracle we were waiting for has happened, long after I had stopped
believing in it: Deafman Glance. I have never seen anything so beautiful. No
other spectacle can hold a candle to it because it is, at the same time, waking
life and life seen with the eyes closed, the world of every day and the world of
every night, reality mixed with dream. Bob Wilson is not a surrealist. He is
what we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and
go beyond us.
For Aragon, Wilsons staging of Deafman Glance must have evoked one of the
dreams of the surrealist movement: to unify the external reality of the senses to the
inner world of the minds perceptions. Within traditional realism and naturalism, the
stage was designed to bring the reality of everyday onto the stage, so that one

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

would be viewing an illusion of a slice of life. And this was the form the Surrealists
rebelled against.
Rather than grab hold of the movement, however, the theater world (as well
as the world of film) increased the illusion of everyday life through the popular
dramas of Tennessee Williams, for example, and the rise of the studio system in
Hollywood rarely challenged conventional storytelling modes of realism. However, in
A Surrealist Manifestopublished just a few years before Konstantin Stanislavsky
toured America and took the theatrical world of New York by storm by presenting
some of the most natural staging in the history of theater (giving birth to Americas
realistic acting movement)and a few years before sync sound hit cinematic
multiplexes presenting onscreen what could only be witnessed earlier onstage,
Breton and Aragon claimed that surrealism is a means of total liberation of the mind
and of all that resembles it, further adding that it is determined to break apart [the
minds] fetters, even if it must be by material hammers! Aragon, however, must
have felt defeated after forty-five years of realism would, in the surrealists view,
fetter the mind, for he had stopped believing in itfor Aragon, perhaps, it lay in
Bretons grave. And this is perhaps why Aragon wrote ecstatically to Breton across
the grave and felt that there was a future in the surrealists dream in the works of
Robert Wilson.
Im not aware of Wilsons response to Aragon nor am I aware of Lynchs
knowledge of the surrealists manifesto. However, an examination of interviews by
both of these artists, do make clear that they purposefully challenge the privileging
of external sense-perception over the subconscious reality in western thought, a
challenge which the surrealists tried to remove by unifying the twothe supreme
aim of surrealism.
In an interview with The Denver Post during the release of Mulholland Drive,
Lynch says: "we know that when we're walking around we see the surface of things,

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

but sometimes we sense something more, sometimes what we sense approaches a

kind of dreamlike state. Those feelings take on a life of their own; they are just as
real as anything else." This echoes Bretons lecture that these often dichotomous
forces of inner and external reality are the one and the same thing. However,
Lynch does make note that we do approach these various layers of reality in different
ways: "We have waking, sleeping and dreamingfor most people that's what we
deal with. So all of them are real, though the brain functions in a different way for
each. Wilsons awareness of the surrealists can be seen in a television interview
given in Japan where he explained how he wanted his work to be a catalyst for
many ideas similar to a person sitting on a park bench and watching the wind blow
leaves on a tree or watching the clouds go by, or watching a sunset. He wants the
audience to be given room to daydream, to go beyond the boundary of the stage,
allowing the mind to become liberated from focusing only on the play on the stage.
To reach this moment Wilson takes a moment and extends it surrealistically
through time while creating dream-like images to accompany it. For example, in a
1980 production of the fourth act of Deafman Glance, in which Wilson plays Suttons
character, he takes three minutes to put a glove on, another 30 seconds to lower his
arm to his side, 45 seconds to hand off a glass of milk to the boy.

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

Sarah Sutton hands a girl a glass of milk in Robert Wilsons production of Deafman
Glance. When Wilson played Suttons character he took forty-five seconds to hand
the girl the milk.

In the original production seven hours long, the ritualistic stabbing of the two
children is witnessed by a third child, who becomes mute after seeing the murders.
Like Lynch, Wilson refuses to interpret his work to interviewers, but within the
elongation of the space-time continuum in Deafman Glance, he takes the audience
into another space and time, a place where the audience witnesses a character
stabbing two children to death with the same aesthetic beauty as watching a sunset.
The death of the boyfrom the time Wilson reaches to touch the boys
shoulder, bringing the knife in, and watching the boy slide to the floortakes five full
minutes. Arthur Holmberg contents that this slowing down of the time-space
continuum causes a moment to no longer be a moment but a glimpse of reality
(1996:197).

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

Sarah Sutton prepares to stab a boy in Robert Wilsons production of Deafman

Glance. It takes a full five minutes for this moment to happen on stage.

In an accident, we perceive time slowing down. Wilson stages these accidents in

excruciating detail, as if you were holding your breath for ninety minutes while
witnessing a murder. At the same time, Wilson provides a space for contemplation
and daydream, so that the mind becomes liberated from the excruciating pace of
everyday life. For one is as real as the other in the realm of surrealism. Arthur
Holmberg, in his definitive work on Wilson, quotes Wilson as saying that The
responsibility of an artist is not to say what something means, but to ask, What does
it mean? And: The only reason to do a play is because you dont understand it.
The moment you think you understand a work of art, its dead for you (1996:61).
For Lynch, he films visibly these feelings that take on a life of their own. Lynch
uses Bretons material hammersthe material of filmto visualize what we all
sense or perceive within the waking world. And this is why we are disturbed at his

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

films. We catch the truth of those moments that some of us are afraid to admit. As
Bill Pullmans character says to the detectives in Lost Highway in response to why he
doesnt like video cameras: I want to remember things not the way they happened,
but by the way I remember experiencing them.
The way we remember experiencing something in our minds perception is
usually far different than the way something happened externally, which partly
explains the several interpretations of the video clip of the Rodney King beating in
LA, which would lead to riots after the police officers were acquitted by a white jury.
What most of the country perceived was far different than what this jury saw in the
same video after the defense team slowed down and interpreted the video differently
than how others saw it. The movement of Kings leg as a self-defense reaction,
became a weapon in the mind of the jury, as John Fiske notes in Media Matters
The defense froze the leg [on video] at its maximum elevation, drew a circle
around it to isolate it from his hands [which he placed on his back in a handcuff position], and argued that it showed King was about to rise and attack
the officers once again: his leg was cocked. (1996: 130)

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

Los Angeles police office beat Rodney King. A bystander captured the action on a
video camera. The police officers defense attorneys would claim that King was trying
to assault them.

For Lynch, these kinds of interpretive moments occur all the time, and that is what
he depicts in his films. By treating the sense of things as being real as anything
else, Lynch fulfills Bretans ideal of surrealism: internal reality and external reality
are not seen as a contradiction, but as a revealing of their reciprocal attraction and
interpenetration and to give to this interplay of forces all the extension necessary for
the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the same thing.
In Eraserhead, a film that the BBCs Almar Haflidason calls, A nightmare of
the subconscious, we see Jack Nances character as Lynch himself being alienated
by fatherhood. The baby becomes a monster and his relationship to his girlfriend and
her parents become something more than whats seen on the surface. Another
reality lies beneath.

The mutated baby of Lynch surreal fears of fatherhood in his film, Eraserhead.

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

On the surface, everything appears fine. Jason Ankeny contends that the film is An
intensely visceral nightmare and marches to the beat of its own slow, surreal
rhythm: Henry's world is a cancerous dreamscape, a place where sins manifest
themselves as bizarre creatures and worlds exist within worlds. He adds that it is
Lynch who claims that the film is the product of his own fears of fatherhood and
thus it may make Eraserhead easier to digest on a narrative level, if need be.
Richard Sheib, writing in 1994, describes Nances characters visit to Marys
parents place: the conversation is something that would appear perfectly ordinary
in any other film but the characters seem oddly alienated by the banality of the room
they are in or maybe by the way they are seated, and the conversation instead
makes audiences laugh. However, Sheib has it wrong. The characters are not
alienated because of the banality of the room, but because of what Lynch indicates
about his approach to filmmaking in an interview about Mulholland Drive: So while
the surface is going on, it's pulling with it many layers that are beneath the surface,
or above the surface ....
Dinner with the Erasherhead in-laws takes on a life of its own, a life which
Lynch delineates with nightmarish clarity: a mutated baby and a surreal dinner scene
become the map of late twentieth century postmodern theory: that identity is
multivariate and there is no master narrative shaping our destiny. Rather,
perceptions, re-perceptions, and the repercussions of such perceptions become the
sole reality in Lynchs films. One body is swapped with anothers in the drive down
the purgatory of guilt and memory in Lost Highway.

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

10

Jack Nance has dinner with the in-laws in Lynchs Eraserhead.

While for Wilson, a witness of murder, becomes the timepiece of forever in

the cycle of life and death, in the cycle of inner impressions and outer reality
becoming one and the same thing. And the beauty of a babys birth becomes the
fear of fatherhood depicted as a mutation, the material imaginings of internal
realitythings best left unsaid and unseenentails the visual reality in Eraserhead
tied to the external reality of a birththe external is not privileged over the internal,
but for Lynch, treated as two adjoining realities becoming one and the same thing.
While Lynch will shock with disturbing external images shaped and made real
by inner impressions, Wilson takes you into a realm of stylized surrealism, where we
appreciate the beauty of the work, and shocked by the elongation of time. By doing
so, Wilson attempts to confront the audience simultaneously with multiple realities,
a process by which Wilson says dramatizes how we impose a mental construct we
call reality on the multifarious and dissonant stimuli bombarding our mind from
without (1996:53). A flash of blood for Lynch quickly precedes jail-time for
Pullmans character in Lost Highway, while the slow movement of a knife in Deafman

Robert Wilson and David Lynch: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers by Kurt Lancaster

11

Glance, becomes Dantes Inferno for the surrealist age, where lost souls are forced
to slow down an action receiving no redemptionexcept in the contemplation of art,
of dreams, of life broken apart by the surreal material hammers of Robert Wilsons
theater and David Lynchs films.