A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (30 page)

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.

9
a 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 dominate 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.

Nor are they
seductive
, though, at least in the commercial senses of being comfortable or linear or High-Concept or “feel-good.” You almost never in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to “entertain” you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie
wants
from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it.
¹⁴
The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish (we’re defenseless in our dreams, too).

This may, in fact, be Lynch’s true and only agenda: just to get inside your head.
¹⁵
He sure seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there. Is this “good” art? It’s hard to say. It seems—once again—either ingenious or psychopathic.

 12
one of the relatively picayune
Lost Highway
scenes I got to be on the set of

Given his movies’ penchant for creepy small towns, Los Angeles might seem an unlikely place for Lynch to set
Lost Highway
, and at first I’m thinking its choice might represent either a cost-cutting move or a grim sign of Lynch having finally Gone Hollywood.