But so it is, at this point, probably impossible to tell whether Lost Highway is going to be a Dune-level turkey or a Blue Velvet-caliber masterpiece or something in-between or what. The one thing I feel I can say with total confidence is that the movie will be: Lynchian.
8 what Lynchian means and why it’s important
An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s definable only ostensively—i.e. we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, where the deacon of a South Shore church gave chase to a vehicle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a high-powered crossbow, was borderline-Lynchian.
A domestic-type homicide, on the other hand, could fall on various points along the continuum of Lynchianism. Some guy killing his wife in and of itself doesn’t have much of a Lynchian tang to it, though if it turns out the guy killed his wife over something like a persistent failure to refill the ice-cube tray after taking the last ice cube or an obdurate refusal to buy the particular brand of peanut butter the guy was devoted to, the homicide could be described as having Lynchian elements. And if the guy, sitting over the mutilated corpse of his wife (whose retrograde ’50s bouffant is, however, weirdly unmussed) with the first cops on the scene as they all wait for the boys from Homicide and the M.E.’s office, begins defending his actions by giving an involved analysis of the comparative merits of Jif and Skippy, and if the beat cops, however repelled by the carnage on the floor, have to admit that the guy’s got a point, that if you’ve developed a sophisticated peanut-butter palate and that palate prefers Jif there’s simply no way Skippy’s going to be anything like an acceptable facsimile, and that a wife who fails repeatedly to grasp the importance of Jif is making some very significant and troubling statements about her empathy for and commitment to the sacrament of marriage as a bond between two bodies, minds, spirits, and palates… you get the idea.
For me, Lynch’s movies’ deconstruction of this weird “irony of the banal” has affected the way I see and organize the world. I’ve noted since 1986 that a good 65% of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6:00 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures—flamboyantly unattractive, enfeebled, grotesque, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances. Or we’ve all seen people assume sudden and grotesque facial expressions—e.g. like when receiving shocking news, or biting into something that turns out to be foul, or around small kids for no particular reason other than to be weird—but I’ve determined that a sudden grotesque facial expression won’t qualify as a really Lynchian facial expression unless the expression is held for several moments longer than the circumstances could even possibly warrant, is just held there, fixed and grotesque, until it starts to signify about seventeen different things at once. 11
trivia tidbit
Bill Pullman’s distended and long-held expression of torment as he screams over Patricia Arquette’s body in Lost Highway is nearly identical to the scream-face Jack Nance wears during Eraserhead’s opening’s conception montage.
9 Lynchianism’s ambit in contemporary movies
In 1995, PBS ran a lavish ten-part documentary called American Cinema whose final episode was devoted to “The Edge of Hollywood” and the increasing influence of young independent filmmakers—the Coens, Jim Jarmusch, Carl Franklin, Q. Tarantino et al. It was not just unfair but bizarre that David Lynch’s name was never once mentioned in the episode, because his influence is all over these directors. The Band-Aid on the neck of Pulp Fictions Marcellus Wallace—unexplained, visually incongruous, and featured prominently in three separate set-ups—is textbook Lynch. So are the long, self-consciously mundane dialogues on pork, foot massages, TV pilots, etc. that punctuate Pulp Fiction’s violence, a violence whose creepy/comic stylization is also resoundingly Lynchian. The peculiar narrative tone of Tarantino’s films—the thing that makes them seem at once strident and obscure, not-quite-clear in a haunting way—is Lynch’s tone; Lynch invented this tone. It seems to me fair to say that the commercial Hollywood phenomenon that is Mr. Quentin Tarantino would not exist without David Lynch as a touchstone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewer’s deep-brain core. In a way, what Tarantino’s done with the French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with Little Richard and Fats Domino: he’s found (rather ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it’s smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch-chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is Lynch made commercial, i.e. faster, linearer, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e. “hiply”) surreal.
In Carl Franklin’s powerful One False Move, the director’s crucial decision to focus only on the faces of witnesses during violent scenes—i.e. to have the violence played out on watching faces, to render its effect as affect—is thoroughgoingly Lynchian. So is the relentless, noir-parodie use of chiaroscuro lighting in the Coens’ Blood Simple and The Hudsucker Proxy and in all Jim Jarmusch’s films, especially Jarmusch’s 1984 Stranger Than Paradise, which, in terms of cinematography, blighted setting, wet-fuse pace, heavy dissolves between scenes, and a Bressonian style of acting that is at once manic and wooden, is all but an homage to Lynch’s early work. Other homages you’ve maybe seen include Gus Van Sant’s use of a quirky superstition about hats on beds as an ironic plot engine in Drugstore Cowboy, Mike Leigh’s use of incongruous parallel plots in Naked, Todd Haynes’s use of a creepy ambient industrial-thrum score in Safe, and Van Sant’s use of surreal dream scenes to develop River Phoenix’s character in My Own Private Idaho. In this same M.O.P Idaho, the German John’s creepy Expressionist lip-synch number, where he uses a hand-held lamp as a microphone, is a more or less explicit reference to Dean Stockwell’s unforgettable lamp-synch scene in Blue Velvet.
Or take the granddaddy of in-your-ribs Blue Velvet references: the scene in Reservoir Dogs where Michael Madsen, dancing to a cheesy ’70s tune, cuts off a hostages ear. This just isn’t subtle at all.
None of this is to say that Lynch himself doesn’t owe debts—to Hitchcock, to Cassavetes, to Bresson and Deren and Wiene. But it is to say that Lynch has in many ways cleared and made arable the contemporary “anti-Hollywood” territory that Tarantino et al. are cash-cropping right now. 12 Recall that both The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet came out in the 1980s, that metastatic decade of cable, VCRs, merchandising tie-ins and multinational blockbusters, all the big-money stuff that threatened to empty the American film industry of everything that wasn’t High Concept. Lynch’s moody, creepy, obsessive, unmistakeably personal movies were to High Concept what the first great ’40s noir films were to toothy musicals: unforeseen critical and commercial successes that struck a nerve with audiences and expanded studios’ and distributors’ idea of what would sell. It is to say that we owe Lynch a lot.
And it is also to say that David Lynch, at age 50, is a better, more complex, more interesting director than any of the hip young “rebels” making violently ironic films for New Line and Miramax today. It is particularly to say that—even without considering recent cringers like Four Rooms or From Dusk to Dawn—D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. This is why violence in Lynch’s films, grotesque and coldly stylized
and symbolically heavy as it may be, is qualitatively different from Hollywood’s or even anti-Hollywood’s hip cartoon-violence. Lynch’s violence always tries to mean something.
9a a better way to put what i just tried to say
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.
10 re the issue of whether and in what way David Lynch’s movies are “sick”
Pauline Kael has a famous epigram to her 1986 New Yorker review of Blue Velvet she quotes somebody she left the theater behind as saying to a friend “Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see that again.” And Lynch’s movies are indeed—in all sorts of ways, some more interesting than others—“sick.” Some of them are brilliant and unforgettable; others are jejune and incoherent and bad. It’s no wonder that Lynch’s critical reputation over the last decade has looked like an E KG: it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the director’s a genius or an idiot. This is part of his fascination.
If the word sick seems excessive to you, simply substitute the word creepy. Lynch’s movies are inarguably creepy, and a big part of their creepiness is that they seem so personal A kind way to put it is that Lynch seems to be one of these people with unusual access to their own unconscious. A less kind way to put it would be that Lynch’s movies seem to be expressions of certain anxious, obsessive, fetishistic, Oedipally arrested, borderlinish parts of the director’s psyche, expressions presented with very little inhibition or semiotic layering, i.e. presented with something like a child’s ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness. It’s the psychic intimacy of the work that makes it hard to sort out what you are feeling about one of David Lynch’s movies and what you are feeling about David Lynch. The ad hominem impression one tends to carry away from a Blue Velvet or a Fire Walk with Me is that they’re really powerful movies but that David Lynch is the sort of person you really hope you don’t get stuck next to on a long flight or in line at the DMV or something. In other words a creepy person.
Depending on whom you talk to, Lynch’s creepiness is either enhanced or diluted by the odd distance that seems to separate his movies from the audience. Lynch’s movies tend to be both extremely personal and extremely remote. The absence of linearity and narrative logic, the heavy multivalence of the symbolism, the glazed opacity of the characters’ faces, the weird ponderous quality of the dialogue, the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterly way scenes are staged and lit, and the overlush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted—these all give Lynch’s movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cinéastes view as more like cold and clinical.
Here’s something that’s unsettling but true: Lynch’s best movies are also his creepiest/sickest. This is probably because his best movies, however surreal, tend to be anchored by strongly developed main characters—Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont, Fire Walk with Mes Laura, The Elephant Mans Merrick and Treeves. When his characters are sufficiently developed and human to evoke our empathy, it tends to cut the distance and detachment that can keep Lynch’s films at arm’s length, and at the same time it makes the movies creepier—we’re way more easily disturbed when a disturbing movie has characters in whom we can see parts of ourselves. For example, there’s way more general icki-ness in Wild at Heart than there is in Blue Velvet, and yet Blue Velvet is a far creepier/sicker/nastier film, simply because Jeffrey Beaumont is a sufficiently 3-D character for us to feel about/for/with. Since the really disturbing stuff in Blue Velvet isn’t about Frank Booth or anything Jeffrey discovers about Lumberton but about the fact that a part of Jeffrey himself gets off on voyeurism and primal violence and degeneracy, and since Lynch carefully sets up his film both so that we feel a/f/w Jeffrey and so that we (I, anyway) find some parts of the sadism and degeneracy he witnesses compelling and somehow erotic, it’s little wonder that I find Lynch’s movie “sick”—nothing sickens me like seeing on-screen some of the very parts of myself I’ve gone to the movies to try to forget about.
Wild at Heart’s characters, on the other hand, aren’t “round” or 3-D. (This was apparently by design.) Sailor and Lula are inflated parodies of Faulknerian passion; Santo and Marietta and Bobby Peru are cartoon ghouls, collections of wicked grins and Kabuki hysterics. The movie itself is incredibly violent (horrible beatings, bloody auto wrecks, dogs stealing amputated limbs, Willem DaFoe’s head blown off by a shotgun and flying around the set like a pricked balloon), but the violence comes off less as sick than as empty, a stream of stylized gestures. And empty not because the violence is gratuitous or excessive but because none of it involves a living character through whom our capacities for horror or shock could be accessed. Wild at Hearty though it won at Cannes, didn’t get very good reviews in the U.S., and it wasn’t an accident that the most savage attacks came from female critics, nor that they particularly disliked the film’s coldness and emotional poverty. See for just one example Film Comment’s Kathleen Murphy, who saw Wild at Heart as little more than “a litter of quotation marks. As voyeurs, we’re encouraged to twitch and giggle at a bracketed reality: well-known detritus from pop-culture memory, a kind of cinematic vogue-ing that passes for the play of human emotions.” (This was not the only pan-job along these lines, and to be honest most of them had a point.)
The thing is that Lynch’s uneven oeuvre presents a whole bunch of paradoxes. His best movies tend to be his sickest, and they tend to derive a lot of their emotional power from their ability to make us feel complicit in their sickness. And this ability in turn depends on Lynch’s defying a historical convention that has often served to distinguish avant-garde, “nonlinear” art film from commercial narrative film. Nonlinear movies, i.e. ones without a conventional plot, usually reject the idea of strong individual characterization as well. Only one of Lynch’s movies, The Elephant Man, has had a conventional linear narrative. 13 But most of them (the best) have devoted quite a lot of energy to character. I.e. they’ve had human beings in them. It maybe that Jeffrey, Merrick, Laura et al. function for Lynch as they do for audiences, as nodes of identification and engines of emotional pain. The extent (large) to which Lynch seems to identify with his movies’ main characters is one more thing that makes the films so disturbingly “personal.” The fact that he doesn’t seem to identify much with his audience is what makes the movies “cold,” though the detachment has some advantages as well.
trivia tidbit w/ respect to (10)
Wild at Heart, starring Laura Dern as Lula and Nicolas Cage as Sailor, also features Diane Ladd as Lula’s mother. The actress Diane Ladd happens to be the actress Laura Dern’s real mother. Wild at Heart itself, for all its heavy references to The Wizard of Oz, is actually a pomo-ish remake of Sidney Lumet’s 1959 The Fugitive Kind, which starred Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando. The fact that Cage’s performance in Wild at Heart strongly suggests either Brando doing an Elvis imitation or vice versa is not an accident, nor is the fact that both Wild at Heart and The Fugitive Kind use fire as a key image, nor is the fact that Sailor’s beloved snakeskin jacket—“a symbol of my belief in freedom and individual choice”—is just like the snakeskin jacket Brando wore in The Fugitive Kind. The Fugitive Kind happens to be the film version of Tennessee Williams’s little-known Orpheus Descending, a play which in 1960, enjoying a new vogue in the wake of Lumet’s film adaptation, ran Off-Broadway in NYC and featured Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Laura Dern’s parents, who met and married while starring in this play.
The extent to which David Lynch could expect a regular civilian viewer of Wild at Heart to know about any of these textual and organic connections is: 0; the extent to which he cares whether anybody got it or not is apparently: also 0.
11 last bit of (10) used as a segue into the issue of what exactly David Lynch seems to want from you
Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dom
inate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the tranced distance from the screen, the being able to see the people on the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people on the screen being so much bigger than you, prettier than you, more compelling than you, etc. Film’s overwhelming power isn’t news. But different kinds of movies use this power in different ways. Art film is essentially ideological: it tries in various ways to “wake the audience up” or render us more “conscious.” (This kind of agenda can easily degenerate into pretentiousness and self-righteousness and condescending horsetwaddle, but the agenda itself is large-hearted and fine.) Commercial film doesn’t seem like it cares very much about an audience’s instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film’s goal is to “entertain,” which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the moviegoer to pretend he’s somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than a moviegoer’s life really is. You could say that a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it—this seduction, a fantasy-for-money transaction, is a commercial movie’s basic point. An art film’s point is usually more intellectual or aesthetic, and you usually have to do some interpretive work to get it, so that when you pay to see an art film you’re actually paying to do work (whereas the only work you have to do w/r/t most commercial films is whatever work you did to afford the price of the ticket).
David Lynch’s movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third different kind of territory. Most of Lynch’s best films don’t really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretive process by which movies’ (certainly avant-garde movies’) central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch’s movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.” Lynch’s movies are indeed susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretations, but it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies’ point is “film-interpretation is necessarily multivalent” or something—they’re just not that kind of movie.
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