Lynch's Modal Bodies and Eroticism (4): The Fat Ontology Levers
Lynch's Modal Bodies and Eroticism (4): The Fat Ontology Levers
The standard critical move is to treat the “planet” sequence and the lever pulling figure as either (i) symbol, (ii) dream image, (iii) projection of Henry’s psychology, or (iv) a deliberately underdetermined flourish whose point is affect. Those approaches thin the ontology. They either collapse what we see into a code for something else, or they treat it as a way of presenting an inner state. Either way, the strange creature is not something over and above Henry’s predicament, it is a representational device. Fine is unusually tolerant of taking what is presented at face value, while also insisting that “what it is” can vary with the structure that is doing the presenting. When discussing social realities like a committee, a college, a university department, his central strategy is to avoid a forced choice between “it is only the people” and “it is only the building” by allowing a structured whole whose parts can contribute differently to different profiles, spatial, temporal, normative, and so on. The result is a hybrid because the object is genuinely a complex unity with different aspects recruited for different predications. Transposed to Eraserhead, the lever pulling figure can be treated as a genuine item in the film’s world, but one whose mode of being is like an element in a structured system that the film posits, where “the system” is not merely psychological but ontologically real within the fiction. The planet room becomes part of the film’s furniture in a way that is neither simply allegorical nor simply literal. It is a locus of control, of switching, of regulation, that helps constitute the form of the world Henry inhabits, even if it does not behave like an ordinary room continuous with the radiator set, the corridor, or the street. That is where Fine tends to thicken ontology. He makes room, conceptually, for entities whose presence conditions do not match the default template for material things. In the social talk, fellows can be “temporal parts” of a college without contributing to where the college is. Something can be a constituent without contributing to a particular profile. Fine is comfortable with the idea that location, even of very respectable objects, can be perspective relative without there being a single underlying “true” location of which the others are projections. He uses the rainbow as a model for a concept of location that is not backed by one privileged underlying position. If you combine those habits, you get a natural Fine style reading of the lever pulling figure. It is “there” in the film, but its there-ness is not obliged to be continuous with Henry’s ordinary spatial frame. Its location can be treated as perspective relative inside the fiction, relative to a cinematic frame or to the film’s own internal organisation of space. The planet room can be real in the story in the way the rainbow is real in the sky, not by being a chunk of matter sitting at a unique set of points, but by being an entity whose apparent locations are part of what it is to be that entity. The lever pulling creature then becomes a genuine constituent of a wider structured whole, the Eraserhead world, that includes Henry, the baby, the radiator stage, and the industrial ambience as parts that contribute differently to different explanatory roles. That yields a more populated ontology than dominant approaches because it makes it legitimate to say there really is a control figure, and there really is a planet room, and there really are events there, without having to insist that they are ordinary physical goings on in the same space as the dinner scene. A thinner approach tries to save ontology by saying, no, those are only presentations of anxiety, or only symbolic exteriorisations. Fine says: stop being frightened of fat ontologies. The world can have hybrid objects and perspectival locations, and it can still be perfectly well behaved once you stop demanding that everything be a single kind of thing. Williamson might think that if the film “gives” you a more populated ontology, that is a flaw. He might, depending on what you mean by gives, and depending on which Williamsonian pressure you emphasise. After all, Williamson’s modal metaphysics is not a simple austerity programme, because necessitism is itself expansive. If necessarily everything necessarily exists, then the inventory of what exists is in one sense maximal, although the differences between worlds are shifted away from what exists concretely and towards what is the case. But Williamson is austere in a different way. He is suspicious of introducing entities just because discourse or imagination seems to quantify over them, and he is hostile to a certain permissiveness where we infer ontology from the surface grammar of talk, or from the apparent content of a representation. So, if someone said, Eraserhead requires that there literally exists an extra realm and a lever pulling homunculus, Williamson might say that this mistakes the representational resources of a fiction, or of a mind, for ontological commitments. He could also say that a “populated ontology” is not itself a virtue, and that positing extra beings to match every image is the metaphysical analogue of bad theory, reifying appearances. In that sense, he may well treat ontological inflation as a flaw, especially if it is motivated by respect for a picture rather than by explanatory need. But Fine would resist the idea that ontological good behaviour is measured by minimal headcount. In the social talk, his complaint about many philosophers is exactly that they impose an antecedent view of what objects must be like, and then accuse ordinary discourse of “not being strictly true” because it will not fit. His Thought is that the space of possible objects is broader than the default model. If your ontology rules out hybrid objects, you will be forced into fake ambiguities or eliminativism. Fine is not frightened of saying the world, or a domain, contains complex structured unities. He would also shift the question from “how many entities re there?” to “what kind of dependence structure is at work?” In social talk, the college includes people and buildings, but the people may contribute temporally rather than spatially. That is a dependence claim about profiles. In Eraserhead terms, the lever pulling creature can be real as part of the world’s structure, even if it is not a spatial part of Henry’s flat. Ontological richness is controlled by structure, by modes of embodiment, by which aspects of constituents contribute to which aspects of the whole. Fine can also reject a demand for a single privileged underlying representation. Williamson’s is often the idea that we are mistaking a perspective for reality. Fine’s rainbow example says there are cases where that suspicion is misapplied, because the thing just is perspective relative in the relevant sense, and there need not be a single underlying location that all perspectives approximate. If you apply that to a film world, the “planet room” can be an ontological item whose place is not to be reduced to one continuous mapping into Henry’s ordinary space. Its perspectival presentation is constitutive of the kind of entity it is within that fiction. Put bluntly, Fine can say to Williamson, you are treating the only respectable objects as those that fit a single austere template, and you are then treating anything else as either illusion or mere façon de parler. But that is the very mistake I warned against. Once you let there be structured unities and perspective relative profiles, you can describe what is going on without semantic games and without metaphysical panic. The lever pulling creature is a functional node in the film’s structure, a role bearer in the world the film builds. If you refuse that, you will end up forcing the content into an impoverished ontology that cannot do justice to the work the image is doing. Fine could accept Williamson's methodological worry in general, but insist that the right moral is a theory of modes of being. The lever pulling creature is not being posited as an extra physical animal in Henry’s neighbourhood, it is being posited as part of a different layer of the film’s world, with a different profile of location and interaction, rather like the way the college has both spatial and non spatial contributing parts. That is not reifying an image, it is giving an account of how a complex presented world can be organised. So Fine yields a more populated ontology for Eraserhead than many dominant approaches, but it is a controlled pluralism about what counts as an object and about how an object can be present. Williamson might worry that this invites reification. Fine’s reply is that the discipline should be applied to structure and explanatory role, not to the reflex of thinning the inventory whenever we meet a hybrid case.
Fine is unusually willing to let the grammar of our talk, and the explanatory pressures inside a theory, license more kinds of entities than the dominant temper in contemporary metaphysics tends to allow. He thinks we should ask what sort of thing this creature is by asking what makes it the very thing it is. The creature seems at once bodily, theatrical, functional, and quasi cosmic. It is “there” as an image, but it is also “there” as a role in a system, it keeps the system going by pulling levers, it seems to regulate the world that Henry inhabits. Dominant approaches often force a choice. Either it is only an image, a cinematic sign that really refers to a psychological state, or it is a literal inhabitant of a diegetic world. Fine’s instinct is to resist the forced choice, because he thinks many objects are hybrids, structured wholes whose “matter” and “form” come apart in useful ways. The “matter” here is not just a physical body inside the fiction, it includes the shot, the lighting, the sound design, the machinery, the repeated gesture of pulling. The “form” is the organising principle that makes those elements count as one thing, namely the lever puller, the operator, the one who does this job, in this place, with these consequences. That is already a kind of hylomorphism, which just means a form and matter account, where the form is the structure or role and the matter is what fills it. If you insist that only one kind of matter can underwrite an entity, say flesh and bone, or only one kind of form can do so, say biological organisation, you will squeeze the creature out of existence. If you permit a wider menu of form and matter, the creature survives as an object with a peculiar constitution. Fine is also comfortable with the idea that some objects have their location, and in a deeper sense their mode of being, only relative to a perspective. The rainbow example is doing the heavy lifting: there is no underlying, perspective-free place where the rainbow “really is”, yet it is not nothing, it has a location relative to the observer. Lynch’s lever puller behaves like a rainbow object. It is not anchored to the apartment’s geometry. It belongs to a different spatial framework, the film’s cosmological backstage, or perhaps the film’s “operational layer”, which is not simply another room in the same space. We can say it is located “on the planet” and “behind” the world without committing ourselves to a naïve geography. The creature’s location is a function from perspectives within the film’s world, to regions in the film’s presented space. That function can be basic, it does not need to be derived from an underlying, single region that the creature occupies absolutely. It is enough that the film licenses stable perspective-relative answers to “where is it?”, and that those answers do explanatory work in making sense of what happens. Once you allow perspective-relative location, the lever puller becomes an especially clear site for Fine’s more general point about abundance. The dominant metaphysical style, including much analytic metaphysics, is suspicious of abundance. It prefers a sparse ontology, meaning as few kinds of entities as possible. So if you can explain the film’s effect using psychology, symbolism, social critique, or cinematic technique, then adding “a literal lever puller entity” is metaphysically gratuitous. Fine’s stance is almost the reverse. Do not amputate entities merely to keep the inventory tidy. Let the theory of what there is be guided by the roles that things play, by the explanatory advantages of treating them as objects, and by the way ordinary and artistic practices already parcel the world. Eraserhead, read through Fine, generates more entities than other dominant approaches and in a precise sense. Psychological readings tend to collapse the ontology into Henry’s mental life plus a thin set of props. Symbolic readings often treat the backstage world as a representational code, not a world. Even some film theory that is sensitive to materiality will treat the lever puller as an effect of production design, not as a denizen. Fine’s metaphysical generosity encourages you to treat the lever puller as an object, and then to treat its world as a space of objects too, including the levers, the knobs, the industrial textures, the planet itself as an engineered environment. The planet is a structured whole whose parts have statuses, just as a social institution does. Some parts contribute to “where it is” in the film’s spatial sense, others contribute to what it does, its function in the narrative economy of anxiety, birth, decay, and mechanical reproduction. You can push that further using Fine’s idea of embodiment. Think of the lever puller as a rigid embodiment: a structured unity whose constituents stand in a certain relation, operator to mechanism, watcher to process, caretaker to catastrophe. The “structure” is essential, which just means if you removed the structure, you would not have the same thing. The creature is not just a body that happens to be near levers. Its being that creature is constituted by the relation to the levers, the role of pulling, the timing, the maintenance of the world’s state. That is why it seems both pitiful and terrifying. It is a person like thing, but it is also an office, a function, a job. The creature is the bearer of a role, and the role helps constitute the entity. That brings us to the eroticism. The erotic charge in Eraserhead is not mainly located in explicit sex, it is located in the way bodies are made into functions and functions are made into bodies. The film’s images repeatedly conflate organs with machinery, intimacy with obligation, reproduction with industrial production. In that register, the lever puller is an obscene figure in the old sense of obscene, meaning off stage but governing what appears on stage. It is the fantasy that somewhere there is an operator of the body’s consequences, someone pulling the cords behind arousal, pregnancy, responsibility, disgust. The creature is simultaneously a bodily individual and an institutional node. It belongs to a regime, a system, in which “pulling the lever” is like authorising a regulation. That hybrid character is exactly what produces the erotic anxiety, because erotic life in these films is presented as neither purely private nor purely physical. It is always already social, normative, and administrative, saturated with tacit permissions and prohibitions that no one fully owns. Williamson will treat ontological exuberance as a defect if it looks like you are postulating entities without necessity. Williamson has argued for a robust, disciplined realism about what there is and about modal facts, but he is also associated with a kind of theoretical conservatism: do not multiply kinds of entity unless doing so yields clear explanatory payoff within a well motivated theory, and do not let our representational practices dictate ontology too easily. A Fine style “populated” Eraserhead might look like a metaphysical indulgence. It risks treating artefacts of depiction as new objects. It risks confusing ways of speaking, or ways of filming, for ways of being. Fine would challenge the diagnosis “gratuitous”. His complaint in the social group talk is that philosophers often project their ontological scruples back onto language and practice, and then declare ordinary discourse defective. The charge of indulgence often rests on a narrow preconception of what objects can be. If you allow only one kind of object, the rest become “mere façons de parler”, mere ways of talking. But if the world contains structured wholes, variable embodiments, and objects with mixed character, then the additional entities are not gratuitous, they are what your best theory of constitution and identity already predicts. He would insist on the difference between ambiguity and mixed character. Williamsonian restraint often leans on the thought that if “France” can be visited and can join the UN, then either the word is ambiguous or we are speaking loosely. Fine’s reply is that this is a bad inference from metaphysical discomfort. The same reply applies to Lynch. If “the lever puller” can be both an image and an operator of the world, then either the term is ambiguous, or we are speaking loosely, or, Fine would say, we are dealing with a hybrid object, and the predications latch onto different aspects of one thing. The apparently inflated ontology is often just the refusal to force false disambiguations. He would also reframe the methodological demand. The sparse theorist asks, “Do we really need this entity?” Fine asks, “What theory of identity, constitution, and structure best makes sense of the phenomena we already acknowledge?” In Eraserhead, the phenomena include the stable recurrence of the backstage world, its causal or quasi causal linkage to the apartment world, the sense that the film invites us to treat the lever puller as doing something, not merely signifying something. If you treat it only as symbol, you lose explanatory grip on why the film’s world feels organised rather than merely associative. Fine’s machinery of rigid embodiment gives you that organisation, and it does so without requiring that the lever puller be a biological organism in the same way Henry is. It can be an entity whose “spatial parts” are limited, whose “temporal parts” dominate, whose contribution is functional rather than locational, rather like a college where the fellows contribute to the college’s temporal but not physical presence.
