When Magritte painted a picture of a pipe with the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”) underneath it, he was trying to get the viewer to be clear, philosophically, about what a picture is. It is a picture, not a pipe. It’s not such a great painting, as paintings go, and the message isn’t that profound, you’d think. Which is why it’s sort of weird that Magritte’s painting has never stopped being popular. You see it, or some version of it, everywhere. And it always sort of tickles you, doesn’t it?

I suspect it’s because it is a lesson that has a hard time sticking. Sure, the cortex, our art history lobe, gets it, and yawns, “whatever.” But our limbic lizard brain, like some internal uneducated dumbass, cannot not see a goddamn pipe floating there and still keeps scratching his head over the contradiction. There’s a pipe. But he’s saying it’s not a pipe. Wha’?

Are we that stupid? Don’t we get it already?

Two of my favorite films remind me that no, we do not get it.

We’ve all played the Blade Runner drinking game, where one person drinks a shot every time they see evidence in the film that Deckard is really a replicant, and the other person drinks a shot whenever they find evidence he’s really a human. Well, maybe I’m the only person who plays that drinking game (playing both sides simultaneously). But few films inspire–or used to inspire–such avid debate by fans.

If you’re clever, there are lots of opportunities to drink a “he’s a replicant” shot: Rachel’s “have you ever taken that test yourself?,” Gaff’s origami unicorn and his “You’ve done a man’s job, sir,” at the end. Or, if you’re not so clever (as I wasn’t, the first ten or so times I saw the film), you can watch the movie and have it never occur to you that Deckard might be (gasp) one of the very androids he’s assigned to kill. But even if your cleverer friends laugh at you for being so naïve, you can counterargue that the film is much less poignant if it’s just about a robot who falls in love with a robot. Isn’t the whole moral of the story that maybe humans and robots aren’t so different, that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to love and death?

Making us question whether Deckard “really is” a replicant or “really is” a human is exactly what Ridley Scott wanted viewers to do. He has said as much. All the bits of evidence one way or the other are placed there deliberately, and he made some of his revisions in The Director’s Cut to actually bring the question of Deckard’s identity into clearer focus (the added unicorn sequence, for example—is it an implanted memory or just a metaphor??).

You could sort of compare Deckard to one of those visual illusions that can be seen two ways—one second it’s a duck, the next it’s a rabbit. E.H. Gombrich, writing about the psychology of such illusions, argued that humans can’t help but see them as either-or; you can’t see both a duck and a rabbit at the same time, you see them flop back and forth. But the philosopher Wittgenstein disagreed; he said it is possible, if you try real hard, to say “Well, actually, it’s a duck-rabbit.” Deckard is basically a duck-rabbit. If you try real hard, you can step back, stop drinking, and realize he’s neither human nor replicant. He is a fictional character. There’s no final truth of the matter, no more in the film than what we actually see. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

Mulholland Drive is the other great solitary drinking game movie. But it’s also one of the most “sociable” films David Lynch has made. One of the best things about it is the conversations it gets one to have with friends who’ve either hated it or been moved by it or both. Like Blade Runner, Mulholland Drive lures us into having conversations about what’s “actually real” in the movie and what parts are “not real,” and to figure out how the not real stuff fits into the real stuff (or vice versa). Is the whole first part of the film a dream and the second part reality? Is the first part the wish-fulfilling rationalization of the murder in the second part? Is fantasy/dream interwoven with reality throughout the whole film? Is Rita “really” just a version of Betty/Diane? It’s impossible not to bite, to play these “which part’s real?” games. As with Blade Runner, figuring out the truth feels important, not just like an empty intellectual exercise, because, however you slice it, there’s a real emotional core to the story. Parts of the film are really moving and heartbreaking. Like witnessing a car wreck, it’s hard sitting back and not getting involved.

Ultimately, all such discussions of the “reality” of Mulholland Drive lead to the Club Silencio scene. A trumpet player comes out on stage playing his instrument, but then he stops playing and the music continues. “No hay banda,” the master of ceremonies explains, “There’s no orchestra. It’s all a recording.” Then, a singer (Rebekah del Rio) comes out on stage and gives a wrenchingly emotional rendition of Roy Orbison’s song “Crying,” and at last collapses – again, her voice continuing with the song. We feel suddenly like real idiots, because we are just as shocked this time as we were just minutes ago with the trumpet player. It’s like we’ve learned nothing. We feel chastised, like a bad student.

Lynch is beating us retards over the head with the fact that nothing is real in this film. It’s not the depressed and brokenhearted Diane, alone and blowing her brains out in her apartment at the end, who is the “real” woman. She’s a lure for our belief, just like the mascara-dripping sad singer on the stage, before she collapses. Give up on either of them, on any of it, being real. Clearly, Lynch really really wants us to get this message. It’s important we get it, just like it’s important that Betty and Rita really get it, and from their tears watching the singer collapse in Club Silencio, you can tell that it hits them hard.

What is so important about this message though? Is Lynch just making some kind of clever philosophical statement about Art? I don’t think so—Lynch is more serious (and even down-to-earth) than that. So is Ridley Scott. And so was Magritte. Could it instead be that, by making us see our own complicity in being fooled by a movie or a painting, these guys were trying to show us something about life and our own complicity in being fooled there too?

Maybe we need to keep going back and repeating this lesson—go back to Club Silencio and re-learn the lesson of the collapsed singer on the stage. Oh right! It’s not real! And then keep re-learning it. Maybe eventually it will stick.

[Note (3/13/10): In the first version of this post, I began by proposing--I thought somewhat originally--that UFOs were like the laser pointers used to entertain cats. A reader pointed out, however, that that the UFOs-as-laser-pointer idea was offered a couple years ago by Mac Tonnies on his blog Posthuman Blues (September 29, 2006). I had not been aware of Tonnies' post when I wrote mine, but he surely deserves credit for coming up with the analogy first. I have now edited and shortened my post to its more essential argument on holography, to reflect this.]

“I believe that UFOs are physically real. They represent a fantastic technology controlled by an unknown form of consciousness. But I also believe that it would be dangerous to jump to premature conclusions about their origin and nature, because the phenomenon serves as the vehicle for images that can be manipulated to promote belief systems tending to the long-term transformation of human society.” –Jacques Vallee.

“People love to think. We are all detectives. We love to observe, we love to deduce. It is great to pay attention. We have a lot of fun this way.” –David Lynch

“The aim of [contradictory] commands from the viewpoint of a control system is to limit and confine. All control units employ such commands.” –William S. Burroughs.

I have argued in this blog, rather unoriginally and, I now realize, based on prevailing cultural assumptions, in favor of a variant of the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETH, originally put forward in the 1950s by Daniel Keyhoe: the notion that UFO sightings and encounters represent the presence either of alien visitors or, perhaps, visitation by automated and self-replicating constructs (von Neumann probes) created by far-advanced civilizations. But after reading more on the history of UFO sightings and UFO research, including the bombshell volumes I and II of UFOs and the National Security State by historian Richard Dolan and classic works by Jacques Vallee such as Messengers of Deception, I am coming around to the view that the UFO picture can’t be fully explained by the ETH, but may represent technology and intentions that are much closer to home. The suspiciously hominid appearance of “ETs,” their theatrical and often B-movie behavior, their travel in clumsy and large ships that seem to crash with great frequency, and their mysterious need for cattle genitalia or human genetic material, suggest a phenomenon simultaneously more bizarre and more mundane than visitation by super-advanced beings.

The main popular alternative to the ETH has always been that UFOs represent advanced aerospace technology, kept “above top secret” by their creators, likely the US government or some secret group within the government. But critics of such a view sensibly point out that the behavior of UFOs, their incredible maneuverability and speed, their ability to change shape, defy gravity, even become physically insubstantial, just renders an explanation of advanced military propulsion technology too farfetched. The idea that such technology may be reverse-engineered from captured extraterrestrial craft, or given to us by ETs, only begs the question, and brings us back to the ETH as the ultimate explanation for UFO sightings and encounters.

But there’s another possibility that I find quite intriguing. In his blog, Posthuman Blues, Mac Tonnies likened UFOs to the laser pointers that are one of the ultimate toys for entertaining cats and their owners. Like the moving red dot that cats find so irresistible, UFOs tantalize us and fascinate us and, just as we seem on the verge of catching them, they zip out of our reach. And I find that, besides the pure play factor, laser pointers also are a good tool for “social control.” I use mine to distract my cats from mischief, or to lure them out of closets I don’t want them to be in. You could say that a $9.95 laser pointer is a highly useful (and cost-effective) tool for deceiving and manipulating members of a less-advanced civilization. What if UFOs represent an advanced laser technology designed for deceiving and controlling humans, holograms deployed to “lure us out of the closet.”

Whatever the state of research into “antigravity” propulsion seemingly used by “flying saucers,” holographic technology has been around just about as long as the new breed of UFOs—the illuminated boomerangs and triangles, the shape-shifting vessels, and the alternating solid/insubstantial light formations that now seem to dominate the UFO literature. The real-world holograms most of us have seen in museums and on credit cards are actually illusions of depth on a two-dimensional solid surface; the far cooler kind, volumetric holography—that is, three-dimensional projections of images in thin air, like R2D2’s projection of Princess Leia in Star Wars—has been only a matter of science fiction until recently—or so Wikipedia would have us believe. But various means of producing volumetric simulations of three dimensions have already been developed and demonstrated on a small scale. It is not at all farfetched to think that such technologies have already been developed and tested on a larger scale, in secret, by the military or by defense contractors.

The simplest method of volumetric display projects lasers onto a physical substrate, sort of like the way the beam from a flashlight is only visible in fog or smoke. According to Wikipedia, “Several static-volume volumetric 3-D displays use laser light to encourage visible radiation in a solid, liquid, or gas. For example, some researchers have relied on two-step upconversion within a rare earth-doped material when illuminated by intersecting infrared laser beams of the appropriate frequencies.” I don’t know what “two-step upconversion” means, but “rare-earth-doped material” in the form of an airborn gas or powder does call to my mind some of the physical traces, like mysterious radioactive powder, found in the aftermath of UFO landings.

The latest approach to volumetric display doesn’t need a substrate at all. Wiki goes on to say (and please bear with me) that “Another technique uses a focused pulsed infrared laser (about 100 pulses per second; each lasting a nanosecond) to create balls of glowing plasma at the focal point in normal air. The focal point is directed by two moving mirrors and a sliding lens, allowing it to draw shapes in the air. Each pulse creates a popping sound, so the device crackles as it runs.” The interesting part is this: “Currently it can generate dots anywhere within a cubic metre. It is thought that the device could be scaled up to any size, allowing for 3D images to be generated in the sky.” (My emphasis.)

Check out a cool picture of this thin-air holography–albeit on a small scale–here.

The theoretical ease of using ground-based or, who knows, dirigible- or balloon-based laser arrays to produce believable images of solid or semisolid, astonishingly fast and even mutable aerial vehicles suggests holograms as a possible explanation for many UFO sightings. Some of the descriptions and photographic evidence produced both by the Arizona Lights event and the recent wave of sightings in Stephenville, Texas, for example, seem like they could be consistent with volumetric holography.

The purpose could be testing: They could be tests of laser projection systems ultimately meant to be used in warfare. One can imagine that projecting believably menacing holograms of nonexistent bomber squadrons, for example, could be useful for subduing an enemy in a war zone. Or projected UFOs may be used to create an ET cover story for more mundane, secret projects—who knows, perhaps involving abducting people and mutilating cattle. After all, the black helicopters are never far behind. It could be a combination of both of these things.

The uncertainty itself opens the door to the social control and manipulation Vallee warned of in his books. Like my cats chasing a laser dot, we may be watching and chasing laser projections, simultaneously thrilling to their mystery, the exotic possibility that they may be actual visitations by beings from distant stars, and also suspecting that there’s an all-too-human hand responsible for the spectacle. Is the Wizard real or is he just an Air Force engineer behind a curtain?

Police Chief Wiggam chides his nosy son in one Simpsons episode: “What IS your fascination with Daddy’s forbidden closet of mystery??” Part of the fun in any mystery is holding multiple interpretations simultaneously in mind; it’s also what tends to immobilize us or keep us glued to our seats as passive audience members. The same way cats can’t resist chasing a moving object, humans can’t resist playing detective. We love mysteries, so the contradiction between the two plausible interpretations of UFOs (they are real/they are fake) may be the strongest tool of our manipulation. It puts us in a double bind, and the result could be a heightened receptivity to social control.

The long history of tantalizing information and disinformation propogated by government agencies suggests not merely a “coverup” but, rather, an interest in perpetuating the ambiguity of UFOs, keeping both possibilities alive in the public consciousness by burying the signal in noise.

David Lynch seems like someone who gets possessed by a question and won’t let up until he tires of the question (not, that is, until he answers it—the questions he asks aren’t answerable, probably). The question in his recent films, at least, seems to be: What is Woman made of? Or maybe it is some version of the old “What does woman want?” Now, Inland Empire, Lynch’s most sprawling and, in some ways, astonishing work to date, he returns again to this question. In this film, we again have a troubled actress, and also follow the intertwining stories of the character she plays, a poor housewife, and other intermediate personas who might be her doppelgangers or facets of her unconscious, or both.

Near the beginning of the film, Lynch uses a shot that confirmed for me something I had already suspected: that Lynch is obsessed with Kubrick, specifically the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The shot is this: Laura Dern’s character, having an uncomfortable conversation with a strange Polish woman, looks across the living room and sees herself sitting on the couch looking back at her. Then, it is just her across the room, and there is no other “her” there with her. (I got chills when I saw this, and had to pause the DVD.) A variant of this same transition also occurs near the end.

Lynch has used this trick before, but it was first used (to my knowledge) at the end of 2001. Dave Bowman’s final transformation—or perhaps, transmigration—takes place in a white, vaguely Rococo hotel suite that could be on an alien world, in another dimension, or in Dave Bowman’s own mind. First, moving slow, as in a dream, Dave looks into a room and sees an older version of himself, in a bathrobe, sitting at a table. The older Dave hears a sound, looks up where the astronaut Dave was standing, and sees nothing. Now we are “with” this older Dave—he has, through this magical and uncanny transition, become the Dave of the story. This Dave then turns and sees an elderly version of himself lying in a deathbed. And then, just as before, we are “with” this elderly Dave and it is as if there was never any younger one sitting at the table. Lastly the dying Dave raises his hand toward the “Star Child” that we will lastly see hovering over the earth.

Many quintessentially Lynchian scenes recall the end of 2001. Lynch loves strange rooms—they are always curtained, usually in red or blue—and they seem to be either a dream space or some place of transition between life and death, or between death and rebirth. It could be something like the “bardo” of Tibetan religion. Lynch directly borrows the “transmigration shot” from 2001 and uses it near the end of Mulholland Drive: Naomi Watts sees herself making coffee in the kitchen, and then is herself making coffee in the kitchen. (Coffee, of course, is an important symbol for Lynch. Could it mean “waking up”?)

Lynch’s obsession with what could be called the “transmigration of the soul” goes back at least to Twin Peaks—an obsession with inhabiting spirits and multiple fragmented personas. Lost Highway is obviously another exploration of this idea, in which a man escapes into a completely other, alternate life (which might be a kind of dream fantasy or unconscious alternate reality), to fall in love with a dangerous double of his wife.

To feel palpably the occult connection between Kubrick and Lynch, watch Dale Cooper’s famous dancing dwarf dream in Episode 2 of Twin Peaks. The long shots on Dale sitting expressionless, experiencing something slowly, unsure, as though paralyzed (the way one is paralyzed in sleep). Like the middle-aged Dave Bowman, Dale is aged, covered with tiny wrinkes.

Kubrick’s The Shining is perhaps a relevant parallel/source here. The film is about a “possessing spirit” and ends with the uncanny shot of a photo in the Overlook Hotel of Jack Torrance amid revelers at a 1920s ball. Like Twin Peaks’ transmigrating evil spirit Bob, the murderous evil that takes over Jack Torrance’s mind subsists through time, inhabiting different bodies. The bar and bathroom where Jack meets the satanic bartender and his murderous predecessor are also distinctly reminiscent of the “bardo” in 2001, not to mention Lynch’s curtained rooms, esp. the Red Room in Twin Peaks. Could Lynch’s Red Room (the black lodge) be something like, or be a sort of (perhaps unconscious) reference to, “Redrum”?

Postscript: Around the time I saw Inland Empire I also happened to re-watch Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique, and was struck by the parallels. Double lives, obviously—an actress playing different versions of the same person, with separate (yet connected) fates. But also there’s that strange aspect of Poland. Kieslowski’s two Veronicas are connected to his own two lives, his first life in Eastern Europe (one that, perhaps, has died because it has gotten worn out, like an overused marionette) and his new life in France. (Veronica, of course, means “true picture”—representing the filmmaker? Film itself?) In Lynch’s film, the actress and at least one of her doubles is married to a jealous, possibly violent Pole, and we keep returning to this Polish girl watching a strange television program somewhere in Poland. It is almost as if Poland is, in this film, a kind of symbol of the unconscious. Which makes sense—Eastern Europe has always played the role of the “unconscious” of the West, a place of dark dreams, seething desires, fear, and repression.