"Who's Lila?" and Lynchian mystery

 

Who's Lila? is a point-and-click adventure game with an emotion mechanic heavily influenced by the works of David Lynch. It's about four and a half hours of gameplay and I liked it. Can I get into the analysis now?

Full spoilers for Who's Lila? and potentially a bunch of David Lynch films follow.

Initially, Who's Lila? appears to be an experimental adventure game about the role that facial expressions play in how we interact with the world. Saying something while frowning will contain a wholly different meaning to saying it while smiling or with no expression at all. We are seemingly controlling a possibly-neurodivergent young man named William Clarke who struggles to convey how he feels and must force his emotional reactions when interacting with others. A standard play-through of the game's narrative establishes a few mysteries: what happened to Tanya Jennings, who was last seen by William himself? Why, when William receives a phone call early in the game, is he referred to as "Lila"? And, indeed, who is Lila?

It seems from following the game's directions that Tanya was a young woman William knew; he murdered her and dismembered the body. Lila is William himself or something inside William. In the end William is arrested and enough evidence found to convict him of the crime.

However the game does not have one storyline but many: when you confront Tanya's friend Martha, who is assisting the police, on the roof of the school, it's possible for William to get thrown off the building by Tanya's boyfriend Graves and end up in a surreal other-world. It's possible, after being arrested, to confess to the murder, frame Graves for the murder, or confess to being Lila and not William. It's possible to not bother going to school at all: to go to the train station instead and confront Strupnev, the last other surviving member of the Lila-summoning cult of which William was a member. It's possible to explore the burnt-out ruins of the cult's headquarters. It's possible to take the bus back in time to the night of the party at which William and Tanya first met. Each of these storylines has its own end, after which the game returns to the menu screen. Apart from some information conveyed in some storylines which grants the player knowledge of how to find others, and a few items carried from one storyline to the other, many of the storylines can be played in any order.

As this might indicate, the game touches upon a number of philosophical ponderings: the nature of time and possibility; the concept of identity as merely a momentary perception of the self on the part of one's own mind; whether consciousness and ideas have an existence in and of themselves which humans merely access or perhaps imitate. The most central, however, is implicit in the game's title itself: who's Lila?

"Augmented Reality" elements of the game suggest that Lila the character is a kind of sentient idea which feeds on human attention, summoned by the cult of which William was a member. The game of course mockingly addresses a number of other common analyses of such characters, such as that Lila is a demon, or a ghost, or a representation of the character's inner psyche. Detective Yu, whose name is an obvious pun, seems to represent a player who wants the mystery to have clear answers. In that sense Lila is the game itself, which "feeds" on players playing it, thinking about it and discussing it. But speaking to a hidden character in the game reveals that "Lila is the mystery of who Lila is."

Before I go into this it's worth discussing the overt influence of the works of David Lynch on the game. This influence is not at all subtle. There is a Blue Velvet poster on Martha's bedroom wall, and William/Lila hides in her closet like Jeffrey does in that film. The bin area outside William's building resembles the yard behind Winkie's in Mulholland Drive. And at several points William encounters a silent character who resembles but is not quite identical to himself, identified as "The Stranger", whom the game's developer has compared to the Mystery Man from Lost Highway but is evocative of the many doppelgangers and not-quite-doppelgangers throughout Lynch's works (the latter always being more effective, in my view, than the former)[1]. And these are just the ones the developer has acknowledged on social media; there are plenty more. For instance, the creatures like Lila appear to travel through plumbing the way Black Lodge entities use electricity in Twin Peaks. Further, at one point seemingly the "real" William is encountered by the player (seemingly as Lila) in the form of a hissing, clanking mechanism not unlike the presentation of Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks' third season.

Throughout Lynch's work there is always a sense of something which is more intuitive than it is explicit. In some interviews Lynch refers to this as "think-feeling" and associates it with "dream logic", the idea that things which would not conventionally make sense in the cause-and-effect, object-permanent world of what passes for waking reality are accepted unquestioningly and appear wholly natural and correct in dreams. That is why when people watch Lynch's films they often try to piece together "clues" to explain what is happening in some rational, waking-world way. For example there is a conventional interpretation of Mulholland Drive which perceives the first two-thirds of the film, about Betty and "Rita", to be a mere dream on the part of Diane in the final act, an interpretation I largely reject. Similarly Lost Highway is interpreted as a parable about jealousy, and Inland Empire as a metaphor, much like Mulholland Drive, for the exploitative nature of Hollywood. And despite the fact that I have stated that I reject at least one of these (partly because it is just an effort to explain the story's events and not actually an attempt to contemplate its ideas), this is not to say that these interpretations do not lack validity, that the films do not address these points at all; they do. But the dreamlike nature of the presentation has a greater scope than those themes, which I think is not always grasped.

It is that reaching for a solution, an explanation, an interpretation which is one (but not the only one) of the main purposes of the dreamlike elements, because by resembling a dream Lynch conveys in his films the impression of things implicitly, intuitively, making sense, even if to the waking mind there appear to be gaps, omissions or inconsistencies. An enthralling intrigue is created by the feeling that things almost make sense, that there is key to all of this that, were it merely discovered, would put everything into place, like the dénouement of a detective novel. It is that feeling that these things make sense, that they must make sense, but it is not clear why, that gives truly dreamlike narratives their impact.

And thus the answer to the question "Who's Lila?" is that Lila is the mystery of who Lila is. The mystery is the answer, it is the point. The question is its own answer. And thus Who's Lila? functions effectively as an interpretation of more or less any Lynchian mystery without, despite its heavy and often overt influence, being a Lynchian mystery itself. This is not to say that the game is not Lynchian at all, regardless of influence; it is, but it's much more willing, perhaps even eager, to explain itself than one of Lynch's own works, a few ambiguous elements notwithstanding. I was probably enjoying the game the most during my first couple of plays-through in which, as far as I could tell, by a wholly dreamlike reckoning it seemed that William, Tanya and Lila were all the same person, and no further explanation was necessary.

It may seem a bit trite to simply say "the mystery is the point", and this arguably does not in itself fully address the impact and significance of Lynchian mysteries, but it is at least refreshing to experience a piece of media which is willing to state that rather than trying to either explain things neatly or, by contrast, explain them away metaphorically or symbolically. There's more to go into concerning how the gameplay extends outside the game itself, with the augmented reality elements, the "Daemon" program which can run alongside it, and even the online sharing of hints and datamining being part of the gaming experience, and that's not even getting into how the game's visuals and control scheme relate to the experience. But others will, I think, explain that better than I can right now.

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[1] A particular highlight for me was noticing in the interrogation scene that, when William is shown Tanya's photograph by the police, Tanya, who at all other times is shown as being exactly identical to Lila, is here shown as strongly resembling her but not actually looking the same.

The Dreamlike, and "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"

SPOILERS for various things follow.

When, as I do, one watches a lot of weird horror films and a lot of David Lynch films, one becomes acclimatised to certain things. I'm always looking for the Weird Itch to be scratched, and lately I've only really been able to do so through literature, namely the weird fiction of Thomas Ligotti and Jon Padgett, and to a certain extent the postmodern oddness of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. So when I heard of the new Netflix release I'm Thinking of Ending Things described as functioning on "dream logic", I was immediately intrigued.

Those who've watched I'm Thinking of Ending Things know what happens in it, and those who haven't probably are best served by not reading any kind of plot summary, so I'll refrain from including one. Suffice to say it's unsettling and dreamlike, a narrative of eerie delusion not unlike the works of Lynch. However, the film it most reminded me of was 2017's Ghost Stories (not to be confused with A Ghost Story), in that a disturbing sequence of events is ultimately revealed to be an elaborate morbid reverie on the part of a comatose or dying person, a tradition dating back through things like Jacob's Ladder to the classic Ambrose Bierce short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and probably beyond.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things was almost everything I wanted it to be: intentionally disjointed, dreamlike, discomforting, a musing on the collapsing of identity and reality, as well as being stylish and powerfully-acted — right up until the end. To me, the final sequences somewhat damaged the ambiguity of everything that came before, as it becomes wholly apparent that the protagonist is actually a figment of another character's imagination, and that said character appears to have been living out either an elaborate fantasy throughout his life or just as he dies.

Such narrative conceits are entirely valid. There's nothing wrong with them, even if, considering the examples I've listed above, they're a little tired. Apparently the novel on which this is based makes this concept even more obvious, although I haven't read it. I'm generally reluctant to watch films based on novels without having read the novel first, but I felt like seizing the moment. In any event, they can make for quite moving ruminations on the nature of regret, self-loathing, and the fragility of a sense of self and presence in the world in the space of our short lives.

However, I can't help but feel that Dreamlikes, as I'm terming them, of this stripe, exist in a certain degree of contradiction with their presentation. The Dreamlike tends to be crafted from a consistent set of elements: a shifting sense of time, place and character, the intrusion of otherwise unconnected elements from waking life, the expression of a world which seems to only exist in the immediacy of experience, flowing into a new shape from moment to moment.

There is a reason why Lynch is a master of the Dreamlike, and why many other usages of the mode fall short: they never fully engage with this sense of immediacy. In so many Dreamlikes, things are symbolic, they are clues, they are hints to some terrible secret lurking just below the surface which, when pieced together, demonstrate to us the tragedy of human experience. And yet this in itself provides a somewhat comfortable narrative in which things ultimately make sense: the ghost our hero saw is actually the living person in the waking world trying to revive them, the rambunctious friend is actually a projection of suppressed elements of their own personality, and so on. Note the amusing parody of the conclusion of A Beautiful Mind at the end of I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

What a more Lynchian Dreamlike achieves is the much more unsettling and yet more accurate representation that, in dreams, things largely do not make sense. The "story" of a dream may have a certain direction, but is accompanied by or even assembled from largely disconnected and even random elements floating upon the surface of, or nested deep within, our minds ("We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along it."). And this is, in many respects, a more powerful reflection of reality, because, in many respects, reality does not make sense either.

Just as the dream assembles itself without our control (putting lucid dreaming aisde) from the countless images firing in our resting brains, life is pieced together through the interaction of an external world over which we, as beings with agency, have no external control, and an internal world, the organic jumble of lenses, sensory, psychological, cultural, biological, etc., through which we experience it. In most Dreamlikes, things ultimately come together: there is a stabilisation. But in reality, as in dreams, there is only constant transformation; Jon Padgett's narrator in his short story "Origami Dreams" observes that even death "is only a transition into yet another borrowed reality." This is why the ending of the third season of Twin Peaks has, to my mind, more allure than any narrative revealing a protagonist's dying or deluded imaginings (as another example of the latter, consider also Shutter Island), in that it evokes what I see as the true impact of the Dreamlike in general.

None of this is to say that I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not worth anyone's time. It's certainly worth watching for its own merits and arguments about loneliness, anxiety and fantasy. Ghost Stories, incidentally, is worth it for similar reasons. And I will also say that its use of the Dreamlike is effective in rendering a representation of the constantly rearranged, borderline delirious quality of deeply-involved fantasies and delusions. But things do ultimately settle into a state of equilibrium. I just wish that writers and directors utilising what I have here termed "the Dreamlike" were more willing to engage with what I see as the power it possesses that I feel only Lynch has truly tapped into in the cinematic field. Almost all of the Dreamlikes I've seen have used the mode to produce evocative, through-provoking, unsettling and challenging works, but the mode has the potential to go even further. There is always the inherent opportunity to exceed presenting difficult interpretations of reality, in order to query the notion of interpretability itself.