Pachyderme

The comic opens with Carice, a well dressed middle-aged woman walking through cars stuck in traffic on her way to the hospital where her husband’s been taken to, after a drunk driver hit him. A dead elephant blocks the way. The image of the pachyderm, wretchedly laying in the middle of the road sets the tone for the comic, imposing a sense of unease and sadness, a sense of waste. Possessed by urgency, she decides to skip through a nearby woods.

Inside the hospital she encounters friendly nurses, visions of an unfulfilled life, a conspiratorial secret agent who travels through pipes, the dead who whisper secrets and labyrinthine halls which at times trigger what appear to be flashbacks to her life as a piano teacher who could have been a star. In the search for her husband she actually explores her own wants and needs.

I know that lynchian is a overused adjective when describing dreamlike narratives, but here it’s totally invited. A lynchian work isn’t simply one that’s weird or a bit oneiric, but rather one whose strangeness, whose surrealism is the release of tension between two opposites, usually one contained withing another. And Pachyderme fits the bill up to a fault.

Because there’s a sense of doing things by the numbers, of reaching for the kinds of conflicts explored by this kind of fiction even before Mulholland Dr. The referentiality is too blunt. The symbols too easy to parse. All while the cold war set dressing manages to feel contrive, drawing attention to itself and imposing a time limit outside the desires of the main character, outside the comic’s thematic concerns.

There are two things that salvage the graphic novel. One is the humor. Without being funny Pachyderme has a sense of fun, of self-awareness and at time lets the macabre to swing on the other side, over to the comic. Not as extreme or powerful as is the case with Lynch’s work, but enough to save it from becoming more self-serious than the story warrants.

Then, there’s the graphic storytelling. Beautiful cartooning that manages to set-up a sense of place, of physicality, while maintaining expressive figure work. There’s enough detail in the figures and the backgrounds for verisimilitude, but they blend in. The spaces are developed and feel occupied, they feel traversed. The body language of the characters, the way they carry themselves and react, does the heavy lifting when it comes to their characterization. Especially when the climax of the comic is a pages-long game of seduction. Scene by scene the framing and sequencing of action is more than apt and at times extremely successful in what it’s trying to achieve, without ever feeling forced or formal.

But, while every scene by itself is wonderful, the connective tissue is weak. Which wouldn’t be a shame if there wasn’t a very strong thematic kernel ready to bloom into something smart and even a bit brave.

There’s another part to the lynchian style and that’s revealing the grotesque underneath the banal; be it showing the violence and depravity in suburban areas or the pain and shattered dreams underneath Hollywood’s glamour. Here, instead, there’s a reversal of that. There is normality uncovered underneath the grotesque.

A woman fulfilling her dreams, loving another woman, but more importantly loving herself is revealed not to be some dark tendency, rather the other way around. Here, strangeness is not the darkness underneath corrupting the facade, but the light breaking through. Of course it hurts when you see the light for the first time.

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