The Review: Laura Dern and David Lynch; Kendi and Locke; Acteurism

On the famous actress and her art. ADVERTISEMENT [Academe Today Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. The beginning of this month marked the 20th anniversary of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a date I observed by reading Melissa Anderson’s new book on Lynch, Inland Empire ([Fireflies Press](. As the title indicates, Anderson focuses primarily not on Mulholland Drive but on what Manohla Dargis [called]( its “evil twin,” the muddy, digitally shot, three-hour Laura Dern vehicle released in 2006 and, to this day, Lynch’s last movie. Both movies are about actresses. Mulholland Drive’s Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), freshly arrived in Hollywood, is an exuberant naïf (“I’m just so excited to be here!”). Things don’t go well for her. Inland Empire, by contrast, stars Dern as a middle-aged star attached to a project called “On High in Blue Tomorrows,” which turns out to be afflicted by some sort of Eastern European curse. Things don’t go well for her either. I use the gendered noun “actress” advisedly, because Hollywood’s sinister sexism is one of Lynch’s major themes. As Anderson writes, “Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire suggest” that “the buying and selling of an actress’s body, her soul, is the most baleful kind of commerce ... one that too often leads to psychic, if not physical, death.” This emphasis on acting makes Dern’s work with Lynch — which began in Blue Velvet (1986) and has continued through Wild at Heart (1990), Inland Empire, and Showtime’s 2017 Twin Peaks: The Return — highly responsive to the critical lens of “acteurism,” which, in the words of the MoMA curator Dave Kehr, focuses on performers who “develop their screen personalities with sufficient consistency and vivacity that they themselves become vehicles of meaning in their movies.” In a 2016 New Yorker [piece]( Richard Brody claimed that “acteurism in lieu of auteurism” — “critical efforts to read movies in terms of the authority of performance rather than to see performance as an effect of direction” — has become the ascendent way of thinking about movies. Brody overstates the case. But Anderson’s acteurist reading of Inland Empire, which draws on Dern’s entire filmography, works beautifully, in large part because the film is a metafiction about the movies. “Watching an actress play an actress,” Anderson writes, “ignites an unmooring, yet not unpleasing, sense of ontological chaos in the viewer.” In Anderson’s account, Dern’s virtuosic performance holds the movie together — without her peculiar gifts, this “most free-associative, nonlinear movie in the director’s singular corpus” would fall apart, collapse into mere experiment: In a film structured by psychic and temporal unmooring, Dern must consistently fall apart but not completely shatter. How does she do this? … Dern — through her loose-limbed, linguine-thin body, her pliant face, her talent for modulated surfeit — makes this bewildering movie legible, lucid. Check out the book [here](. And for more on Dern, read Christine Smallwood’s New York Times Magazine profile [here](. 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And since Kendi uses the claim that Locke originated this particularly heinous racism to impugn the integrity of Western liberalism, the slander is rather a large one.” At Liberties, [Holly Brewer on what Ibram X. Kendi gets wrong about John Locke](. - A debate between Omer Bartov and Dirk Moses about the Holocaust, genocide studies, and German colonialism. Bartov’s opening remarks are [here]( Moses’ response is [here](. - “The oddly sculpted sentences are stitched together like tessellated fragments of absurdist comedy, like swaths of Bretonian automatic writing that have been systematically rewritten to elicit pleasurable, and pleasurably broken, prose rhythms.” At The New Republic, [Scott Bradfield on Donald Barthelme]( now canonized in the Library of America. 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