Can you hear me now?

The most arresting chapter to be found in Peter Brunette and David Wills’s now almost 20-year-old text Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory is “Black and Blue,” which presents on facing pages, as though a bilingual translation of a single text—a gimmick borrowed from Derrida—two analyses: of François Truffaut’s La Mariée était en noir and of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. That chapter sports an introduction announcing that, unlike the rest of the collaborative text, the two portions of “Black and Blue” were written non-collaboratively—but without specifying which author wrote which analysis. A born sucker, I found myself ensnared by this ploy, wondering who had written the fair-to-middling Truffaut piece, and who had written the stunning Lynch piece. I had few clues to guide me; I know nothing of David Wills’s work, and all I know of Peter Brunette is that he committed a major gaffe in the first five minutes of his commentary track for Blow-Up by claiming that the protagonist, Thomas, is never named in the film (after which error I stopped listening). I’d guess that Wills probably wrote the Blue Velvet portion, based on the conjecture that that portion seems to read like what I imagine a Pynchon scholar would produce, whereas the Truffaut portion reads like what I imagine a Neorealism scholar would write. I suspect that consulting any other text written by either author individually would immediately solve the mystery, since the two analyses are written in such radically distinct styles of prose. But, neglecting that course of action, I’ll stick with blind speculation.

No matter. What matters? “Black and Blue”—the rectos, at least—amounts to the single most insightful piece I’ve ever read on David Lynch’s most enduring cinematic masterpiece. Fuller than Michel Chion’s analysis (despite, or perhaps because of, its refusal of anything like Chion’s assumed authoritative univocity), less routine than Todd McGowan’s, less hare-brained than Slavoj Žižek’s, and less amateurish than Martha Nochimson’s, Brunette/Willis’s reading is apparently the earliest major academic take on the film to reach publication. All the right theoretical moves are there, and all the crucial details are observed. As the author states, “the elements that invite a psychoanalytic reading have never been more explicit” than they are within Blue Velvet. And attached to that single word explicit—in the middle of a sentence that goes on to purportedly refuse the possibility of a “comprehensive” psychoanalytic reading of this film—we find the following long footnote:

Dismemberment, falling trees, scissors, knives, a man playing with a snake, the absent, emasculated father, the detective surrogate—the sorts of combinations that have given rise to close critical attention to the films of Hitchcock in recent years are all here. Central to such a reading would be the episode of voyeurism as Jeffrey watches Dorothy from behind the closet door, is discovered, and then witnesses her rape by Frank. Remember that he is drawn into this by the discovery of a severed ear; he determines to find out for himself the truth about such a castration—“I’m seeing something that was always hidden,” he will later tell Sandy, “I’m in the middle of a mystery and it’s all secret.” After witnessing the semi-nakedness of woman, the suggestion if not the fact of her castration, his attention is drawn to the frame Dorothy pulls out from under the couch. Later revealed as that of little Donny, it means that mother and son, although within different representations, were together on the plane of visibility exposed to Jeffrey, as if in the mirror. The scene is interrupted by Dorothy wielding a knife. “What is your name?” she asks. “Jeffrey,” he replies. “Jeffrey who?” “Jeffrey nothing,” comes the answer as he declines to assume the name of the father. Then, encouraged by a nick across the face from her knife, he fills in the gap. It is his turn to stand naked in front of the mirror—“Get undressed Jeffrey Beaumont! I want to see you”—and her hands, mouth, and the knife come dangerously close to the genitals. She invites him to consummate the incest wish, but he instead becomes the spectator of a primal scene more perverse than that of the Wolfman, and so on and so forth. Later, of course, there will be a song about the Sandman, who threatens in Hoffmann’s tale to rip out children’s eyes, which Freud reads as a fear of castration in The Uncanny. (153)

What interests me in this footnote is not the particulars of the author’s reading. That Orbison/ Hoffmann connection is the only one I hadn’t already made independently. “Black and Blue’s” truly stunning (and truly deconstructive) observations are to be found elsewhere; they pertain, for instance, to the synaesthetic slippage contained in the lyric “bluer than velvet was the night,” or to the anagrammatic play the film permits among “Don,” “Donny,” “don’t,” and the crime-scene tape that is cut by scissors through the Gordian “o” of “Not” in “Do Not Cross.” No, no, I want to make a critical move not nearly so impressive as all that dirty deconstructive dancing. I want merely to point out that the hogging-one’s-cake-and-disdaining-it-too attitude, the appropriativeness disguised as ambivalence, that is visible in the maneuver of disavowing psychoanalytic interpretation in the main text while offering a perfectly serviceable psychoanalytic interpretation within a footnote to that text—this maneuver is itself characteristic of psychoanalysis both in theory and in (critical and clincal) practice. For psychoanalysis theoretically instructs us to understand that appropriativeness-as-ambivalence as perhaps the central and originary psychic mechanism, and critically it produces readings (of texts and subjects) that infect us with delight in the beautiful performance of that mechanism; yet, as writers like Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips have begun to show, psychoanalysis also persistently reveals that mechanism’s inadequacy to our psychic experiences of desiring. The “cake”—whatever substance it may be—must thus become formally suspended in a double oscillation, between being-desired and being-disdained (the vulgar oscillation, which neglects to challenge the boundary between internal subject and external object) but also between having-been-consumed and never-having-been (the oscillation of shining, which disperses subjectivity throughout the world along pre-existing lines of correspondence).

What I am really (also) talking about, of course, is deconstruction’s own attitude toward the metaphysics of presence.