Lynch, Daily Life

I originally commenced this essay with a sentence that later became a lie due to its claim that I was not going to write a long piece about David Lynch’s audiovisual ouevre.

Even after writing 100s of 1000s of words of argumentative writing over my life, I still don’t know how to do introductions and would prefer not to except that I typically perceive that I need one because starting without is too abrupt or something.

That was my introduction.

I have recently been really, really enjoying - or, more accurately, finding very psychically stimulating and compulsive – the works of David Lynch. I have just a few days ago finished the third season – The Return - of Twin Peaks (all 18 hours of which I completed in only a week and a half), directly after rapidly watching the first two seasons of Twin Peaks for the first time (before that, I rewatched Mulholland Drive, appreciating it much more than the first viewing, and then rewatched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which I regarded as one of the best movies I had ever seen the first time I watched it (and in my case I think it actually helped a lot that had never seen Twin Peaks)), and then two nights ago I watched Lost Highway and then last night I watched Blue Velvet for the second time.

The first time I watched Blue Velvet, I wasn't hugely taken by it, but I felt much more psychologically affected by it last night, and it felt much more real to me this time also. By real, I mean realistic, and by realistic I mean psychologically realistic, as in, it spoke to me: I felt the feelings of Jeffrey and Frank and Dorothy, and was very affected by certain scenes (but which I cannot describe because what is the point, this is a movie to be experienced not described in detail); I very much enjoyed the colour symbolism - the persistent, limited colour palette of blue, red, black, white with a dash of green and yellow every now and then - and the painterly beauty of so many of the shots; the brilliant soundtrack (one great aspect – the most obvious, to be sure - is the strange (but wonderful) decision to include snippets from the song “Blue Velvet” in different renditions at least 5 times, throughout multiple scenes, both Bobby Vinton’s euphonious chart-topping 1963 version and also Dorothy’s more husky, ominous rendition (which she performs in two different scenes)); and I really enjoyed the insect motif.

When I summarise it like so, my experience sounds banal and inane. "I enjoyed the insect motif" - what a stupid thing to say. The autism of that sentence compared to the emotional intensity of some of the shots carrying the insect motif in the movie... One of the things I think I like about Lynch the dude - a datum about him that I remember being described to me by a good friend in high school before I had actually watched any of his movies - is that he largely refuses to talk about his films in interviews and especially bristles at questions like, "What are the themes?" or “What were you getting at?” His art, especially (but probably a lot of art in general), is debased by the mere attempt to impose this analytic framework, because of the implication that the work is some kind of vehicle designed to induce a certain sentence or set of sentences into our mind like "Dark primal forces exist beneath the surface of American suburbia" or "A Freudian deep-dive into the sordid underworld of the unconscious refracted through the sinister banality of urban Los Angeles" or "Trauma ramifies through communities and through the years like the decaying soundwaves of some ungodly scream" or "Fire represents evil in the Lynchian canon" or some other bullshit sentence that someone actually trying to write something in-depth about one of these movies would be forced to write. What would be the point of art if it was designed merely as a machine to generate some subset of a set of similar sentences in sophisticated viewer's heads? No, art has to be ineffable, because intense emotions are ineffable - you can't capture what it was like to have a particular intense feeling or emotional episode in words (I mean in general not just from an artwork)… Actually, when it comes to movies as an art form in particular, the more trivial and determinative obstacle is that you cannot describe even a single shot to a person in even a rough approximation of its vividness.¹

Roughly speaking, I think this necessary ineffability of the aesthetic qualities and ‘meaning’ (emotional resonance) of good movies is one reason why people who do try to analyse in depth the ‘thematic’ structure of high-art films have no linguistic recourse but the polysyllabic cant of Continental philosophers and psychoanalytic Marxist philosophers and such like, fancy words seeming to match the gravity of powerful feelings. Personally, this is a style of talking I strongly disprefer to silence. Hence I honestly prefer silence, for the most part, which is, again, another reason why I would never try to actually write an in-depth 'analysis' - vivisection, as the 16 year old version of the first person who will read this used to say, which is honestly such a good word for it but feels intensely pretentious (then again, what am I if not pretentious, so I should have just used it unironically except I couldn’t waste the opportunity for yet another horribly distracting digression).

Anyhow, despite generally preferring silence to thematic analysis, I have noticed that I can’t help but seek out a different sort of analysis of some of Lynch’s works, namely, semiotic or hermeneutic² theories where some of the deliberately arranged 'puzzle pieces' seeded in his works are put together into partial order by people more obsessive or attentive than me. To be clear, by ‘puzzle pieces’, I don’t mean, like, ‘thematic puzzle pieces’ (not contradicting myself). What I primarily am referring to are those clues contributing to the logical structure of his works, as in, what we are meant to think really happened, or which events we are meant to see (or rather, would be most logically satisfying to see) as having a prior metaphysical status to others.

This has proved an especially ‘fruitful’ (maybe partly necessary) exercise with regards to Twin Peaks. Watching some of these hermeneutic analyses of Twin Peaks on Youtube has led me to the discovery that a lot of the puzzle pieces in this work fit together, even if there are some totally bizarre inconsistencies that seem unresolvable or at least so bizarre that it’s hard to fit them into some overall structure (some examples: Chet Desmond and Sam Stanley disappear completely into the memory hole of everyone; there’s a total lack of consistency across the TP canon about exactly how many missing pages of Laura’s diary there are and where they were found (see Youtube for more); I personally don’t have a clue about all the stuff relating to arms and why the tree capped by a disembodied brain is “the evolution of the arm” in The Return (leaving aside the tree, maybe the generic significance of arms in TP is that arms can do both good or evil, which is why there’s a good and bad arm and maybe the one-armed man is completely good because he’s chopped off his capacity to do bad???); why didn’t we hear or see a single thing relating to Annie in The Return?; and if “Judy”/”Jowdy” inhabits Laura’s mother, Sara (as several internet analysts claim, with very good evidence), then it must have inhabited her even from the beginning, which there doesn’t seem clear evidence of). In some ways, it has proved very fruitful indeed because there were a lot of things about Season 3 that were completely, completely beyond my comprehension when I watched it that do seem to have a logic in the Twin Peaks universe (which, incidentally, by the end, is a very complicated universe indeed, encompassing multiple ‘planes’ within at least two separate ‘base-level’ timelines). This partly had to do with the fact that there were crucial things I forgot due to the weaknesses of my mind, although I think that I would still struggle to grasp the logic even if I remembered all the crucial details and drew the connections that people on Youtube have done (the Youtube analysts have probably drawn these connections via collaboration on forums with lots of other people who together can slowly build up the puzzle by each placing pieces within sub-sections). One of the things that we are supposed to learn in the last few episodes of The Return (via a bunch of cryptic dialogue and imagery) is that the true Big Bad Boss was never Bob but instead some demonic being called Judy discovered by Phillip Jeffries (a M.I.A. FBI agent played by David Bowie in Fire Walk with Me who turns up (in FWWM) in truly the most insane and nonsensical cinematic scene I’ve ever watched). It was only through Youtube that I discovered that an association was meant to be triggered in my mind as we were hearing about Judy for the first time, namely, a scene set in 1945 from one of the earlier episodes where this weird, disgusting, supernaturally large salamander-like creature (an entity/organism mutated or produced by a nuclear explosion that has occurred not so far away) enters the mouth of a young, sleeping girl. Now, people on Youtube reckon that this girl is probably Sara, Laura’s mother, and that the salamander is Judy in one form - and, therefore, because the salamander entered Sara, Sara as we know her is inhabited by Judy. This seems like a weird theory in some ways, and it just didn’t occur to me at all when I watched the final episodes, but it’s probably ‘true’, at least in the sense that that is what Lynch and Frost were ‘thinking’… (The main evidence is that when Sara kills a man in a bar in Season 3 and then ‘pulls off’ her face (don’t ask), we see this black, smoky void where her face was (i.e. inside her head), which is like the opposite of what happens when Laura pulls off her face in the White Lodge (white smoky void)… but I didn’t know what the fuck to think when I actually saw this scene involving Sara; in fact, I thought that Sara’s violent actions (before she pulls off her face) were meant to be interpreted as almost defensible (if disturbing), because she killed the guy pretty much in self-defence (he seemed to desire to rape her).) Anyhow, this Judy entity then is also meant to be the being who appears in the glass cube exhibit at the end of the first episode – I also did not make that connection, and in fact did not even think to try to tie up the fucked up first episode with the end.

As you might imagine, before I watched these Youtube videos, I was at an almost total loss to explain the logical structure of the events depicted. I finished the final episode of Twin Peaks completely puzzled, and did not find particularly moving the last half an hour. Even before the last episode, I enjoyed the visuals of, but was utterly befuddled by, the scenes involving the fireman and the disembodied head of Garland Briggs, and actually pretty much everything that took place in another realm. Nevertheless, one of the things that makes me, I think, a person very well-suited to enjoying Lynch, is that I still loved the series even while I languished in a state of confusion about how to render coherent a structure which, at the moment that I finished the final episode, actually felt more to me like a completely shattered glass vase than a puzzle. Overall, I loved season 3 not because I solved parts of the puzzle (I barely put anything together myself) but because it was intensely emotionally affecting with very powerful images and scenes and moments, and a typically effective soundtrack and surprisingly some stunning special effects (the nuclear explosion episode was a sensational, wordless, psychadelic experience). It was a series with an excellent amount of stylistic and mood variation, too, maintaing engagement - the scenes involving Dougie were highly entertaining and skilfully executed slapstick comedy, in total contrast to the kind of intense thriller energy of Bad Cooper’s evil escapades. There were some things I didn’t love about it – basically, everything that happens within the Sheriff’s Office except the very final scene lacked drive and intensity and was weird in a way that didn’t even feel Lynchian but just kind of forced and sometimes even embarrassing (Lucy and Andy felt pretty much like real people in the first two series (even if possessing absurd comic qualities) but this time they felt like complete joke characters, without being funny). Anyway, the more important point is that I don’t think this ‘understanding’ particularly improved my appreciation for the aesthetics of Twin Peaks because I found that I typically appreciated/enjoyed the well-executed most surreal and absurd moments, even when I didn’t understand their logical/causal role.

Whilst I think I saw Blue Velvet for the first time before Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, that latter one was the first Lynch work that I loved (I saw it for the first time probably two years ago now). Upon watching FWWM, I immediately placed it in the top-tier of movies that I had ever seeen. The funny thing is that I had basically no context whatever to understand the surreal stuff in that movie, or really anything in that movie – I went into it completely ignorant, having not even watched an episode of the TV show, not knowing that TV viewers had been introduced to these places called the White and Black Lodges where the dwarf was dancing, not knowing that Leland/Bob was the murderer, not knowing that there was a being called Bob at all, not knowing who Donna or Bobby were, not knowing who Cooper was, not understanding in the slightest what the “blue rose” symbol at the beginning was about. It was actually probably key to the intensity of my enjoyment of that movie that I basically assumed that all of the completely bizarre, totally inexplicable shit that I witnessed, from the very beginning of this utterly strange experience, was just some kind of amazingly creative, dadaist nonsense. In summary, I didn’t realise that rather than beglonging to the category of dadaism, most of the strange stuff in FWWM mostly falls under the banner of (very peculiar) magical realism. Anyway, point is, I loved the nonsense so much; I was so hooked by it, from the beginning of the movie. It thrilled me that this Gordon guy was shouting into the phone for apparently no reason, pissing everyone off³; I loved the bizarre interactions, the overlong silences, Laura’s weird expressions, the demon in the trailer park. I loved the total bizarreness of the clue under the nail which seeemed (at the time) to be contextless and to mean nothing at all. I loved the fact that the same three seconds of footage occurs twice in the diner. The most bizarre scene of the whole movie – the aforementioned Phillip Jeffries scene – of course weirded me out (and entertained me) but there was something very powerfully spooky about it too.

And that’s the thing: the reason that I immediately classified it as one of the best movies I had ever seen when the credits rolled is that it was a film of profound emotional intensity in addition to a film of profound strangeness. In my opinion, it is actually a very skilfully plotted movie, executing brilliantly a very intense narrative of a teenager spiralling out of control in the context of horrifying abuse, undergirded by a performance by Sheryl Lee that ranks among the best I’ve ever seen in a movie. In fact, the movie wouldn’t have been effective if every scene seemed dadaist to me; it’s mostly driven by a naturalistic base-reality plot (completely coherent, if involving a surreal entity known as Bob) involving several richly drawn characters in Laura, Donna, Bobby, James and Leland. And when I say, emotional intensity, I mean emotional intensity; the reveal of the Bob/Leland connection was undoutbedly one of the most intense single experiences I’ve had in film or in life (the crucial thing was, I wasn’t expecting it at all!!!).

Unfortunately, I think understanding more about the logical structure of the Twin Peaks universe/s has actually made me unable to enjoy Fire Walk with Me quite as much as I did the first time, though I still rate it as one of my favourite movies without a doubt.

Lost Highway I found to be very perplexing from a logical point of view, and I also didn’t love that movie (though I think I very much like it – again, I found it very emotionally intense, like all Lynch stuff I’ve seen⁴). (I think that Lost Highway really can be described as an expressionistic movie; it is intensely abstract.) In contrast to the fruitfulness of the interpretive theories I encountered about Twin Peaks, the interpretive analyses⁵ that I came across about Lost Highway posited a theory that was counter to how I perceived the film in a fairly fundamental way, even if it made more sense than anything I could come up with (and also seems to be strongly supported, for reasons you’ll see, by the detail that Lynch was apparently inspired in the making of this movie by the OJ Simpson case). Basically, the predominant metaphysical theory of Lost Highway posits that only a few minutes of the entire movie is ‘real’ - a couple of scenes which take place in the middle of the film where we see Bill Pullman’s character in jail and about to be executed for allegedly having killed his wife - between ‘two phases’, the first more akin to ‘recollection’ or possibly a partly fabricated narrative being told to detectives – and the second (longer), a kind of fantasy that Fred (Pullman’s character) concocts in his cell. I did not intuitively interpret the film this way and I think it would have been strange to do so, not only because the prison scenes seem kind of weird and potentially dreamlike themselves (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96aiVUK_6zg)⁶ but more significantly because Pete the mechanic (the protagonist in the second phase of the film) is probably a more vividly drawn character than Fred Maddison (the supposedly real guy) and may even take up more screen time. To actually independently develop this theory while watching the movie would have been almost hostile to complete immersion – I preferred to think of the brief prison scenes as a parallel reality (ultimately, this led me to total bafflement and I was not able to recalibrate at the end). But even when I reflect on it, I think that with this movie it’s probably a mistake to try to impose completely a realist logic upon it because, as I say, I think it’s genuinely expressionist. It’s about broad strokes and colours, it’s Francis Bacon – it’s unfiltered emotions, primal terrors, the endless maw of the unconscious, the gremlins under the bed, a bad dream. The more I think about it, the more I conclude that, at a deep level, it’s mysterious, because, even assuming the plausible metaphysical theory, if the Mystery Man is a construct of Fred’s mind (and if we’re assuming a realist lens, then this guy, by virtue of his insane weirdness and supernatural powers, seems a candidate for a construct who does not even have a close real-world analogue like probably the other characters in the film, then, if we take seriously the strange hint that Renee has some psychic connection to the Mystery Man (Fred sees the Mystery Man’s face superimposed over her face in the bed before he meets the Mystery Man at a party) and then also note that Alice disappears to be replaced by the Mystery Man who tells him that Alice is actually Renee at the cabin near the end (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ51hXDvxns) (and note the cabin seems to represent a repository for Fred’s dark secret/s), then this suggests perhaps that all the characters collapse into Fred’s consciousness so that ultimately we don’t even get to know who he killed – as in, maybe we don’t know anything about his real wife at all, Renee as we see her is just a person who is a vessel for his psychosexual insecurities and furies at infidelity - so that ultimately everyone is a construct excepting Fred himself. And maybe the whole film barring the prison scenes can be thought of as the equivalent of an avant-garde freeform jazz sax solo produced by the mind (a solo much like Fred’s near the beginning of the film!). Look, I’ll admit, I should have had the thought that the prison scenes were the true base reality when I watched the movie, because it definitely is the best overall theory – plus there’s something about the quality of the very last moments of the film (during a car chase) that is suggestive of a dude being cooked by an electric chair, which further lends support (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvdGaThomDY) – but I guess I was too invested in what I thought was the reality up until that point to take that seriously.

The more I think about the movie the more I’m beginning to elevate it in my mind, even though I only gave it 3.5 stars on Letterboxd two nights ago, and 3.5 stars is my most common rating of films I’ve reviewed, which I also gave, e.g., to The Joker.

Speaking of – and if you’ll permit me a longer digression here - it’s funny how your perceptions of movies change over time. I think that usually my perception of movies after I’ve viewed them is quite complex; to me, every star rating except maybe 5 stars feels like a very arbitrary act, almost like an act of invention rather than categorisation. In general, I think a big problem with rating movies is just in the inherent sillyness of the implicit notion of one-dimensional film ‘quality’, the implicit notion that movies ought to admit of a precise ordinal ranking, even across genres. How can I sensibly compare the kind of visceral pleasures I got from watching the chase scene at the start of Casino Royale to the feeling of disquiet derived from the ominous atmosphere in the first 10 minutes of Lost Highway? Can I really say that one experience was better? What is the genre-independent notion of betterness and from what epistemically prior principles is it derived? In my view, if we have to have a quantitative ranking of movies, we’d do better either to actually take this quantitative asssessment process more seriously, using a more rigorously defined measure generated from multiple dimensions- perhaps breaking up movies into component parts, like soundtrack, cinematography, plot, acting, emotional intensity, whatever (maybe some of these parts ought to be unique to genre), and generating a ranking by appropriately weighting each of these aspects - or to give up the pretense of precision altogether by rating films on a cruder scale than the 10-point 5 star scale, like an 8 point one (like Ebert used) or maybe even a 6 point scale.

Best of all in my view would be to abandon any quantitative measures of film quality, i.e. to abandon the whole linear ranking enterprise. I take this radical view in light not only of the problem I raised in the last paragraph but for other reasons too, which basically all fall under the banner of the innumerable subjectivities of the process. In my view, opinions on art are inherently protean – they can so easily shift and change, strongly affected by mood and other very arbitrary personal factors, such as the tenor of the particular words or phrases that came to mind the first time you gave your opinion to someone. One of the things I’ve personally noticed, in trying to come up with reviews and ratings for movies I watched a while ago (i.e. several months ago to years ago) on the app Letterboxd is that I often remember little other than a few images/partial scenes and a couple of basic propositions summarising my attitude towards the film, such that I could briefly give my opinion about it in a shallow conversation. I obviously remember which films I thought were really great or really awful,⁷ but my perception is that many of my subtler or more ambivalent movie assessments have a tendency either to mellow, to intensify or just to kind of disappear into nothingness (“What was my opinion on that movie again?”). Most films I’ve ever watched, the way I tend to rate movies, sit somewhere in the 2-3.5 star zone, but typically it feels to me almost completely arbitrary where I should place them within this grey zone.

But, in fact, the problem is worse than just fuzziness. The truth is that there are just so many silly things that can enter into a rating. For example, consider how is how easy it is to fall into the trap of using different and unjustified reference points for movies within different groupings or genre-categories. To use a personal example again, I rated Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 4 stars on Letterboxd simply because I had this vague sort of feeling – and maybe I remembered reading critical opinion that held this view also – that it was one of the better made and more engaging Potter movies. But did it deserve 4 stars really? I mean, I’m not actually interested in answering that question – sure it deserves 4 stars for A, B, C reasons, much as it deserves 1 star for C,D,E reasons, and deserves 5 stars for F,G,H reasons... It deserves any and all ratings given to it by passionate people with valid human emotions! My point, though, is that my decision to rate it 4 stars was generated by some wholly arbitrary vague criterion which can’t readily be reconciled with different, wholly arbitrary, vague criteria I had used in other cases - and I think that this sort of thing must happen all the time, to everyone (including professional critics).

In short, the whole exercise is silly! We each have our own tastes and there are lots of possible reasons we each might have for liking or disliking a given movie (or saying we like or dislike a given movie), including facts about our personal history, the way we process different emotions, the extent to which we are given to obsessing over what is the ‘cool’/high-status opinion and so on. So our opinions on movies are essentially just statements about ourselves, giving information about our dispositions, personality traits, past events in our lives (for example, people will often find a movie really moving because it has a strong connection to stuff that happened in their life!), and sometimes giving information mostly about our transitory moods. Assigning quantities to self-descriptions is an odd and unjustifiable ritual. Abolish cinematic numerology.⁸

…

There’s actually another type of Lynchian ‘puzzle piece’ whose proper position in the overall puzzle of given Lynch works I’ve sought help with, and that is the proper Lynchian meaning of certain symbols and motifs. Partly due to the influence of the online analysts I have sought out, I have come to think that Lynch definitely has his own visual/iconographic dictionary. This is not to say that this dictionary is completely precise nor that we as an audience must swallow this dictionary - but I think that understanding certain entries in the dictionary has helped me understand some aspects of his works better in general.

Happily, my discussion of this type of Lynchian puzzle piece brings us full circle, back to a discussion of Blue Velvet. In the case of Blue Velvet, I didn’t have any problem with its logical structure (this is one of the few Lynch works which is ‘metaphysically straight’ – obviously you could choose to interpret some events as a dream if you wanted, but that would be really counterintuitive, even if a couple of scenes seem highly improbable (e.g. near the end, we see, through Jeffrey’s eyes, that the corrupt cop Gordon has been trepanned (had his skull gouged) in such a way that he has been rendered apparently brain-dead in terms of higher functions – mute and zombielike - but is still standing in Dorothy’s apartment, as if the parts of his brain dedicated to motor control are unable to shift from their last instruction, so to speak)). On the other hand, it did occur to me last night to look up if anyone had a logically satisfying theory about the meaning of “red” and the meaning of “blue” in this movie, because it seemed like a vast number of shots in the movie, and Dorothy’s makeup, played off the interaction between “red” or “blue”, but in a way that I could not make sense of beyond “This is a form of symbolic duality mirroring the obvious duality of the two worlds depicted by the movie” (the world of convention-based suburban tranquility and the sordid underworld of animalistic sadism). What I subsequently came to see, and am seeing more and more now as I write this essay and re-watch some clips is that, for Lynch, red and blue are crucial colours in basically everything he makes, though with blue occurring more rarely and meant to have a special resonance (in the links I’ve posted, we have Lil from Fire Walk with Me dressed in all red with the blue rose, and we have the blue and red of the police lights mirroring the split of Fred Maddison’s psyche as we races down the neverending road).⁹ Unfortunately, nothing I could find really did explain a special meaning of “red” versus “blue” in this particular movie to me.

In general, here is the dictionary I’ve built up: black-and-white for Lynch represents neutrality and truth (Cooper wears a black and white suit, but Bad Cooper wears all black), black represents evil, white represents good, red represents all kinds of things and is like the default colour of all kinds of emotions, including passion and love, and blue is the special colour, which attaches to the important things, maybe things that are intensely good or bad or just intensely important. I think that pretty much sums up the main body of the Lynchian colour dictionary. Red, blue, black and white are his main colours. (Green sometimes seems important also but I’m not sure it has a dictionary entry.)

Perhaps Lynch’s most striking recurring motif, occurring across his ouevre, is red curtains. I’m not exactly sure why Lynch ever came to love the sight of red curtains so much but I suppose there’s certain properties that readily lend themselves to plausible semiotic analysis, such as the fact that curtains have folds and creases (suggests: shadowy unseen regions, complexity, hiddenness (truths/evils etc)) and also given that curtains separate the world of performance from the private reality? Undertaking this kind of analysis is a silly exercise for foolish people (I realise that I am an overly critical and supercilious person prone to overuse of words like “foolish” and “silly”). One thing I will say about the red curtain leitmotif in Lynch is that I was never personally that mesmerised or seduced by it; it’s just kind of a weird detail in all his movies that there has to be red curtains. Overall, not particularly a fan.

…

A whimsical thought that occurred to me as I was brewing this bizarre soup of an essay was that it would be cool if somehow this essay itself was infused with some of the qualities of some of Lynch’s works. It’s always fun when art instantiates its THEMES in its style/technical process (don’t take this to mean that I think that I have made art in writing this). Sadly, it was and is not clear how I would do this in a systematic way. I was kind of hoping that the weird digressions might be thought to be Lynchian in some way, even though they’re fairly typical in my writing in general – but I think not. I have considered some innovations I could perhaps make to render this essay stylistically Lynchian, but nothing very interesting (my main thought is just the pretty lame idea of putting in blue font some of the key stuff in footnote 9 and maybe putting in red font every use of the phrase emotionally intense). Maybe the very fact that my footnotes contain some of my most interesting thoughts is Lynchian. Not really.

A thought that occurred to me when I was writing the above paragraph is that there’s probably very little sense to be made of ‘Lynchian writing’, because, obviously, most of the things that distinguish Lynch from other filmmakers are inherent to the filmmaking medium itself (inherent to the modalities of vision and audition), such as colour palette, casting, makeup, cinematography, soundtracks (and so on). Whilst you might, at a stretch, try to map some of these to writing techniques, I still think that, insofar as the concept of ‘Lynchian’ writing makes any sense at all, any such writing would still necessarily bleed into the genre ‘[generic weird director]-ian writing’ for any generic weird director. (Do you know what I mean? It’s a trivial point; you can’t write in a Picassan style either, or paint like Shostakovich. There are analogies to be made between works in different media but it’s kind of childish to do it at the granularity level of declaring an equivalence between an individual’s style in one medium to an individual’s in another.)

If you’ll permit me yet another bizarre digression, there’s something about Lynch himself that I feel adds a certain irony to the concept of writing non-fiction (in particular) in a Lynchian style. From what I’ve seen of him, Lynch seems to me to be a pretty loopy and disassociated guy. My sense is that someone as intensely and obsessively creative as he is would most likely struggle with sustained, abstract, analytical thought. That might seem like a long bow to draw and a bit unfair, but my thinking is this: Lynch is probably every day devoting a huge amount of computing power to extremely wacky magical thoughts about strange universes and probably vivid imaginations of complicated scenes and such. I think that people inclined towards thinking analytically about complicated intellectual topics do not do such things and probably could not do such things. I suspect that you have to be kind of aloof from practical reality to be like that (perhaps that is why Lynch is not a ‘political person’, by his own admission; he is not interested in understanding the world as it is but lost in his own daydreams and mental creations). One consideration that slightly bolsters this theory is that I personally feel that just watching a lot of Lynch recently has corroded my sanity to some small extent. I caught myself thinking about the meaning of the redness of a tail-light for a split second driving to my fustal game an hour and a half ago [written last night]. I’ve also experienced transitory moments of magical thinking directly after finishing Lynch works, e.g. finding myself more scared of walking into my pitch-black room (a loft above the garage) because of inchoate, reptillian fears of strange predatory entities lurking beyond sight.

As for Lynch himself, I suspect that in general this kind of intense creativity has a tendency to accompany a kind of psychic condition that isn’t all that different from psychosis or schizophrenia. Watching his stuff, I really feel that a guy like Lynch must have a very powerful ability to imagine vividly very strange hypothetical events in his head, such that he knows exactly how he needs to set up his shots to bring that vision to life. And it seems like the very vivid imagination of very strange hypothetical events would naturally go along with general cognitive overactivity in perceptions of phenomena in the real world…

…

I feel that now is as appropriate a moment as any to randomly insert my view that auditory, visual, audiovisual and audiovisualtactile forms of entertainment or art can affect your mind beyond the immediate present (i.e. longer term) in ways both good and bad. Some people actually deny this, when it comes to issues relating to video games and pornography. What happens is that they mix up this obviously true point with a different contention, viz. whether people become criminals as a result of such sensational media (a contention on which psychology research seems to say “No”). But the thing is, evil can exist without manifesting in criminality.

As David Lynch said:

The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing.

• As quoted in "Dark Lens on America" in The New York Times Magazine (14 January 1990)

Actually, if you’ll permit me an even more left-field digression, I have for a while perceived an epistemic connection in my mind between the debate over this issue and the superficially very different issue of the role of laptops in our education system. The similarity in both cases, from my point of view, is how people are not able to see the truths that can be contained in deliberate, careful thought, and too often think only studies can give us insights (if no studies, agnosticism must reign). My own view on the laptops issue is that the mass introduction of laptops in Australian high schools was a really dumb idea, and for reasons that could be discerned by anyone who actually thought about it. Just by reflecting on the properties of laptops and the properties of teenage humans, it becomes extremely obvious that laptops were always more likely to be a source of distraction than a useful tool in a classroom context, because in a classroom teachers are typically trying to teach a specific thing whereas laptops allow you to do many different things, many of which are vastly more pleasurable than giving full attention to the teacher (and, what’s more, to do it under the cover of an opaque wall). Yes, a teacher may sometimes want everyone to co-operate in using a given software package to assist their learning, but most learning, even in this day and age, can be achieved (and is achieved) without fancy software packages. Until and unless the education system becomes open-ended and people are allowed to develop their own learning, pursuing their own curiosity under looser guidance from pedagogical authorities (and I don’t mean to imply that I think such a policy would work for the majority of children/teenagers), the laptops-in-classrooms policy makes no sense.

The real problem here is that careful and deliberate thoughts are hard to recognise. Numbers we can see, graphs we can see, tables we can see. But accurate, precise and logical thinking? That is fucking invisible; it doesn’t leave a trace.

…

David Foster Wallace’s article about Lynch (http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html, ostensibly an account of his experience on the set of Lost Highway but typically Wallacian in its broad, digressive scope) is worth reading. For me, the best paragraph in it is the following:

“But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately 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 victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not. A hideously bloody street fight over an insult would be a Lynchian street fight if and only if the insultee punctuates every kick and blow with an injunction not to say fucking anything if you can't say something fucking nice.

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 (when Blue Velvet was released) that a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures-grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances ... a class of public-place humans I've privately classed, via Lynch, as "insistently fucked up." Or, e.g. we've all seen people assume sudden and grotesque facial expressions-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, until it starts to signify about seventeen different things at once.”

I relate to the second part of this passage quite a lot. Actually, I would extend it a bit further than Wallace does, as I think that his conception of what is “Lynchian” is a bit narrow (even if I, also, am not going to attempt to define what I mean by the word). “Lynchian” has become very recently the adjective that most frequently comes to mind in a lot of contexts, to potentially describe a huge number of things, not all of them sinister or extreme (after all, Lynch has produced a hell of a lot of depictions of stuff that isn’t extreme or sinister, especially within Twin Peaks). Awkward conversations are often super Lynchian, as are overearnest people saying absurd things, or the hauntingly sad expressions of some homeless beggars, or P platers tailgating you for no reason whatever, or very outwardly happy people or very outwardly angry people – so many things reminds me of things I’ve seen in Lynch. (I just saw a fat guy dramatically vault a lounge in the library before striding purposefully into the toilet. That was Lynchian as fuck.) My honest-to-goodness opinion is that Lynch actually does often depict human reality in a way that the vast majority of other directors just neglect. Movies generally depict to us a world of beautiful people having relatively fluid conversations where each person is expressing clear and coherent thoughts; movies depict people who are well-dressed with ironed shirts; movies depict carefully applied makeup and well-groomed facial hair; movies depict conventional body language; movies depict purposive, highly motivated people with clear goals, desires and ambitions; movies depict stereotyped behaviours in extreme situations. By no means are all these things typical to life, and so in refusing to depict some of these things so relentlessly Lynch often captures the real world quite well.

Another Lynch quote:

“I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.”

1The visual system processes and constructs a representation of a buge amount of electromagnetic radiation-information every split-second. Spoken or even written language can convey only a tiny fraction of the information (probably a fraction of 1 percent) in the same time interval. Further, even supposing one wanted to actually describe in exhaustive detail just a single ‘frame’ of human vision perceived by a single person in a relatively simple scene, there are two facts which render this impossible:

(i) human language does not even contain the resources to even begin to describe the fine-grained details. For example, suppose you wanted to describe to someone something so simple as what this very sentence actually looks like as you are perceiving it, to the level of precision where, if they could somehow store all this information in their head at once and had superhuman powers of mental-imagery-generation, your imaginary listener could actually experience the identical percept – as in, the exact shape of the letters and their precise arrangement, the hue and brightness of the screen, the precise, blended mix of colours the letters are swimming in, what’s in your peripheral view, and so on and so on and so on. Well, you obviously couldn’t do this, because we don’t even have the words to approach that level of precision. Just to take a couple of indicative examples of the problem, we have a very small, finite number of words for colours, as if colour were massively discrete, which it is certainly not; we do not have the ability to encode exactly (as in, quantify) the resolution with which we are perceiving things; we do not have the ability to immediately determine the exact scale of variations in the sizes of objects; we have words like “curvy” and “sinusoidal” or “wavy” but, to achieve something resembling precision, we would have to specify a polynomial equation to describe things we perceive as continuously undulating (though often our perception would probably pick up tiny saw-tooth imperfections too, like those that appear in the letters if you zoom in close enough (because of course, ultimately, these letters have rough edges because they are constructed from pixels)).

(ii) We, as humans, have a short-term memory which is stupendously inadequate for this kind of task, which would require storing gigabytes of inefficient language in your memory all at once, even supposing you could the superhuman mental-imagery-generating abilities.

2Ok, I’ll admit that I have no idea what “hermeneutic” means, but it seems vaguely like an appropriate word to use here?

3 I didn’t realise the character was meant to be deaf - it looked like he was just wearing ear buds to simulate deafness - and overall I assumed his character was basically there for some strange fourth-wall purpose (arguably he is partly there for that), a thought reinforced not only by the fact that the actor was David Lynch but more significantly by the scene where he shows Chet Desmond his cousin Lil who explains Chet’s mission wordlessly through the symbolism of her gesture, expression and her clothing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dNwFVk68PI). It does still seem to me like this scene is a kind of fourth-wall joke about the silliness of the symbolism in Twin Peaks or maybe about artistic symbolism in general – certainly a fourth-wall joke intepretable in some way or another, and one I found funny.

4“Emotionally intense” is kind of a weasely phrase. But that only connects up to what I was saying near the beginning: emotions are to be experienced not to be read about, so know only that if you enter the Lynchian bargain with an open mind and heart, you should feel and feel deeply. Let us say that it will be emotionally intense.

5Yeah, I decided “hermeneutic” was a dumb word after all.

6“Which one? Hahaha.” A clever line.

7Even then, I don’t ever really feel like my opinions reflect anything other than details about my own character (cultural base, personal attributes, etc), and, actually, my most extreme opinions are probably often my most ostenatiously idiosyncratic. Like, for me, a really negative opinion on a movie especially is just a way of saying two things at once, to two different audiences: (I) “Fuck anyone who likes this! You should feel bad” and (II) “Btw, I’m the kind of guy who has really negative opinions on movies like that, so you know”. I mean, not always. I think that I also just find it kind of funny in some cases to give really low ratings to movies that some people really like but I didn’t much like or had like philosophical gripes with. For example, on Letterboxd, I have given every Tarantino movie I’ve seen a 0.5 star rating because I generally don’t like the style and content of Tarantino movies, most of all, the mixing of comedy with violence and the celebration of violence (not only for kind of vaguely sort of ethical or you might even say spiritual reasons, but, at a more base level, just because I am revolted and often unable to watch his depictions of violence and could not even imagine enjoying watching them as his biggest fans no doubt do). I probably wouldn’t do this if Tarantino wasn’t super popular among millions of people (I mean, I’d stil give the same films a low rating if they were directed by some less well-known guy, but not 0.5 stars for all of them).

8Sometimes critiques like this can forget that it can be satisfying or pleasurable to undertake rituals like these, even if they’re silly. Well, let this footnote be proof that I have not forgotten this... In fact, I do not even feel any passion about this critique and will probably go on rating movies using the 5 star system on Letterboxd. Or maybe not. Perhaps what I’ll start doing is only giving 5 star ratings, and therefore refraining from rating the vast majority of the time.

9Sorry to seem like a hypocrite regarding my repudiation of thematic analysis as applied to Lynch, but this talk of duality makes me want to make a ‘thematic generalisation’ about Lynch’s art that relates to concept of “duality”, as follows: Lynch seems generally very attracted to a binary or “naive” view of good and evil as competing forces in the worlds he creates, as opposed to showing the blending of good and evil in morally ambiguous characters and events like more conventional, high-concept artists who seek to show us that the “human condition” is one of moral weakness and ambiguity or whatever the fuck I used to have to write about when I did English in high school. In contrast to this “sophisticated” vision, Lynch seems to depict his worlds as entrapped in a war or neverending battle between unalloyed good and unalloyed evil. Lynchian characters do not manifest a complicated set of desires pushing in both directions typically but rather switch between the two. Further, the two forces are reified; evil in particular is almost made physical, not only in the not entirely unconventional way of being embodied in a character or phantasm, but even sometimes taking on the status of substance, almost like it is a gas floating in the air at all times that could infect anyone without a shield of sufficient strength (of course, I’m mostly thinking of Twin Peaks here, but even in Blue Velvet, we note that at the moment that Jeffrey decides to succumb to Doroth’s pleas to “hit [her]”, the soundtrack abruptly transitions to this dark, brooding sonic ‘marsh’ and time slows down – something very significant has happened, i.e. evil has taken over – and I think we see at this point one of the oddly intercut shots of a candle with a flame burning brightly (signifying the takeover of evil)). I think that, while overall this very binary moral universe often plays a part in the unrealism of his works, there’s something really profoundly realistic about it, too. For me, the key thing to observe is that, for Lynch, evil manifests in terms of violence and in terms of violent sexual fantasies and desires (sex is not always sinister in Lynch (Dougie in Twin Peaks series 3 has very joyful sex with Jane, and Betty and Rita have very romantic and passionate sex in Mulholland Drive)) but it often is, and Lynch clearly has an interest in sadomasochistic sexual fantasies which he views, I think, as entirely negative (for example, Laura’s darker sexual desires are seen (I think) to be the manifestation of Bob trying to invade her and take over, and obviously the portrait of sadistic sexual desires in Blue Velvet is intensely negative) . Why is this the key thing to observe? Well, the way I think about it is that there is a mapping between the takeover of characters by evil in Lynchian worlds and the takeover of people’s minds by their ‘reptile brain’ in our world. This speaks to me because of my own phenomenological perception of literally having a reptile brain which is completely deaf to higher thoughts. For example, I find sex and some of my own desires disgusting overall but there’s a part of my mind that does not – but when I’m finished being aroused, suddenly I find sex disgusting again. (I know that the mind is modular because I can perceive the modularity of my own.) Violence, too, in the real world often occurs in fits of intense, passionate rage which one might perceive as a kind of reptile-dominated fugue state (given how the violence is often intensely regretted when horrible consequences are perceived). So, anyway, Lynch captures this aspect of real-world psychology in a deeply disturbing and effective way. I think the literalisation really intensifies the power of this kind of ‘observation’ about human behaviour. 

 

While I’m in this business of making thematic generalisations, another kind of ‘thematic’ interest of Lynch’s that seems to run through all of the films is event-circularity – loops. Or, to be more precise and banal, I should just say that he really enjoys finishing things the way they started, or at least a lot like they started: in Blue Velvet, just before the end, he literally repeats the opening shots with the same soundtrack (the roses and the tulips and the happy man waving from the firetruck, etc, all to the tune of Bobby Vincent’s rendition of the titular song), although the short scenes that follow then seem to show a world healed, at least for the moment, of its hidden traumas and troubles, in contrast to the heart-attack scene that follows the same shots in the opening; in Lost Highway, Dick Laurent is dead at the start and the end of the film, and “Deranged” by David Bowie plays to the same shots of broken yellow lines forever racing behind us in a fast moving car; Twin Peaks, if we include The Return, now begins and ends with Laura Palmer (more or less), either interpretable as a kind of resolution or entrapment; Mulholland Drive might be seen as an exception but the end features a lot of recapitulation of images and events. I’ve noticed that pretentious art folk who have never studied topology prefer to describe this circularity as “Mobius strip”-likeness, even though the important property seems just plain-old circularity rather than non-orientability (look, I guess one could argue that the fucked up journeys that Lynch’s characters undergo are better captured by the non-orientable fucked up mess that is a Mobius strip – the characters end up where they started but different (reflected) - but, like, the truth is that it obviously just seems way cooler to compare a plot to a Mobius strip than to a mere circle or Nascar track or whatever).

Plot loops speak to me because life does have a lot of loops in it. The seasons, relationships, politics, TV shows – a lot of things repeat with subtle variations. What we see in Blue Velvet feels something akin to early winter transitioning into winter then a return to spring – loops like this can be very powerful, because the credits roll and you really get the feeling as if the world you just stepped into has its own rhythms, and could go on without you.