Lynching the Lynch Mob

I'm a little baffled by Sean Murphy's article on what he refers to as the David Lynch Dilemma. Is the dilemma really one about David Lynch or is it about idolatry and hero worship? Lynch seems to be as good a catalyst as any for discussion on blind approval, rightfully cited as an administrative tool of realpolitik. But Murphy also seems to take cause with Lynch's entire career, criticizing the way in which Lynch's films, in his view, pretends to seek, using pre-established accolades as an excuse to essentially wank off against a film canvas. The advocates most certainly exist, but beyond my disagreement with his assessment (or his inability to assess) I find certain faults in survey of Lynch's cult, which seems to simplify a broad a diverse range of people.

To my recollection, Lost Highway was not reviewed very favorably upon its release. Dune, which was before my time, wasn't either.. And Blue Velvet, though now regarded somewhat unanimously as an American film classic (which I, like the author, would dispute), had its fair share of naysers.

Much of this argument seems to imply that the discourse regarding Lynch starts and ends with "If you don't like it, you don't get it", which couldn't be further from the truth. There are scores of books written about Lynch's movies, websites and listservs dedicated to pondering even the most minute of his many splendored arcana, Twin Peaks conventions, and countless college term papers (including a few written about him by yours truly). While no one has ever come close to cornering an absolutist interpretation of Lynch's murkier work, there have been plenty of interesting ones posited. Check out The Modern Word's take on Mulholland Drive, for instance. Speaking unscientifically, Lynch may be the most discussed American director living today.

Fanboys will be fanboys and it's hard to relegate God to the deist, but of those I know and have discussed Lynch with, none would claim his every work to be a masterpiece. I find him endlessly fascinating, each of his films worth repeat viewings. I can only claim two to be priceless endeavors (Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead) and only one other that qualifies as a great film (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, though it was very difficult to divorce that film from the tonally antithetical series, which may surpass all of Lynch's other work combined).

Film, along with perhaps music as its only brethren, holds a perplexing identity in Western culture. It is essentially an artistic and creative medium, but its entire output is coordinated by market forces. As such, film audiences are trained to consume media, not to think about and analyze the social, political, and economic ways in which it shapes them. It's unsurprising then that moviegoers of various stripes are unable to describe why they like something they've seen. My parents, for instance, think that examining a motion picture beyond its surface narrative "ruins" the flick. They've involved for entertainment, escape, and hence surrender.

Why the draw towards Lynch then for viewers of similar mute consent, albeit of sensibilities decidedly divergent from the popcorn viewer? Lynch offers the abstract within a digestible form. His experiments take place within the context of narrative films, often with potable themes, photogenic tableaux, hypnotizing sound sculptures, and recognizable film archetypes- be they extolled, admonished, or perverted (the small-town boy, the femme fatale, the cocky director, amnesia, a "woman in trouble").

It's ironic to me that viewers are often left unable to vouch for their love of Lynch's films since much of his work seems to be concerned with the inability of language to articulate our desires (hence the "empty" dialogue), or to save ourselves from danger. They are, after all, enslaved to their script. It is a "recording. It is all an illusion".


Film, as a visual and audial form of communication, has the verisimilitude of being the ultimate artform, and hence the ultimate artistic language, in that it assimilates all other art forms. Lynch's work shows the faults in this assumption by presenting sideshifting events, editing out large portions of important information, and leaving in huge gaps of unnerving speechlessness that confront the relationship between the author and the user. By focusing so heavily on non-plot-advancing devices, Lynch dictates that no narrator/director is reliable and that the altered state of film viewing is a tempered form of thought control.

Lynch's films mandate participation by making his viewers force meanings out of them. We interact with the characters all the more, because we too are put under great duress, cognitively of course, in being isolated in an alien world that defies a conventional categorical apparatus (shot from Chaplin's oft-quoted long-shot, all Lynch films could be Monty Python sketches). Those who reject the actions in a Lynch film as unperceivable weirdness for weirdness's sake refuse to accept disparate actions as narrative. It may as well be splatterart in this instance. Downright rejection of the existing plotlines and story arches, disparate though they may be, is also a refusal to draw corollaries based on the prerequisite of assumption as acceptable determinism. Being in a film universe is not enough. One must know this world, crack it, and thereby segregate it from one's own. Most films outside of the avant-garde usually leave a few stones unturned, but overall transpose an acceptable certainty of gaze to the minds of their audiences. Certainty not only that something has happened, but that it has happened for a specific purpose. Barring specific explanations, it has at least happened for the purpose of reaching the film's conclusion and to suspend our tension until the next time we enter the darkened multiplex.

Lynch's films are not so simple. His work informs us that sometimes reality only leaves us with crumbs. Our fate bears no specific seal, our lives leave no imprintable purpose. Weird shit happens and we'll never understand why. This is why Lynch's work is so commonly focused on the work of the unconscious mind, the dream state. About a third of our lives are spent asleep. Of those years spent unexamined, the most significant times is when we are watching our own personalized abstract films in dreams. If modern psychology is, as I believe it to be, one of the greatest breakthroughs of the 20th century (albeit probably still in its nascent stage and already being domineered by the corporate drug state), then we should agree that what goes on in dreams can teach us a great deal about our lives, even as their direct "meaning" is obscured.

People often criticize Lynch for proposing that even he has no idea what his films mean. Sometimes, he doesn't. He has often admitted this in interviews. As Salvador Dali once said, "The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning". Sometimes it's enough to recognize a visible cue, like an ear in a field or a melting clock, that will set the mind aflame in contemplation. Despite, or even absent a filmmaker's intentions, a film can have as many interpretations as there are vantage points, director's commentaries be damned. Call it Rorschach cinema (Maddin, Brahkage, Anger, Jordowsky, Deren, etc.).

Every year, millions of people hoard themselves to the cinemas to watch thousands of people die and hundreds of good looking people fuck each other, often within moments of each other. They walk out of the theaters smiling, never question what this could possibly do to their psyche. The sex in Lynch can be redemptive or manipulative (Twin Peaks), collaborative (Mulholland Drive) or alienating (the implied impregnation of Eraserhead), uniting (Wild At Heart) or devastating (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). The violence, however, is always putrid, regressive, and earth-shattering.

Lynch asks us to not surrender to cinema, to become its passive victim, but to become lucid in our viewing habits. The great art of the 20th and 21st century must always dangle in front of us the possibility that what we have experienced is not really art at all. We must be left with the perception that perhaps what we've been experiencing all along in every passing phenomenological art piece- cynical or optimistic, abstruse or obvious, is life itself. We live life while art gets to experience us. By its borders and its determinism, art is free to fool us into thinking it is still unpredictable years after it has already been created. If we feel used, it is because we have been. Our life is merely the catalyst for that old parasitic art. It has allowed us, to paraphrase Greil Marcus, to view heaven as hell and vice versa. Lynch, rather than showing the puppet strings, intoxicates you, spins you around in circles, drops you in the middle of the desert, and forces you to examine how you got there.


See also:
Salon's "Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About Mulholland Drive"

Also Recommended:

Both seasons of Twin Peaks. There's no better guide to demystifying David Lynch than this series, which essentially guides you through the process as Cooper, Truman, et al. try to solve a metamystery.