Seduction Cinema: DAVID LYNCH

It was a while coming before I'd post here on David Lynch. I think Lynch is just one of those artists who must mean so much to so many that it's hard to say anything new about him, or to articulate exactly what he means if you're really passionate about him. Thankfully, this weekend I came across David Foster Wallace's brilliant Lynch essay in his collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He basically gets at exactly what I think is brilliant about Lynch. He places him in a context of contemporary cinema, where it's easy to underestimate Lynch's broad influence. And he says some very important things about Lynch’s work and irony.

You can find the essay HERE. I am going to start posting what I think are really hot, non-academic, speculative and personal essays on film here on the blog. You can find those in the Links section, and I’ll usually notify you when I put one up.


A few words about that Foster Wallace essay. The most important part of the essay comes when Foster Wallace says that Lynch is a filmmaker who wants to give the viewer an experience, not deliver a point with his cinema. He calls him a "contemporary Expressionist", going on to say that his movies "brought home to us--via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of--that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious, that the unconscious's true medium wasn't verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern or Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true." I thought this was very interesting. Lynch's attention to color, speech rhythms, space, patterns and opposites, light, volume and pitch, sound, and contradictions of character create dissheveled, jarring experiences that aren't always pleasant. His movies seem deliberately intuitive. They're not hard to follow, really. Like any dream--you get swept up and go along for the ride. Lynch's ability to manufacture a world is embedded distinctly in the distinction of his personality. He is so distinctly himself, like so many auteurs, that his cinema seems to be an almost direct translation. When describing INLAND EMPIRE to the press, he said it was about “a woman in trouble”. Sometimes I think that filmmakers should just over-simplify everything and just say, plotwise, what their work is about at the most kindergarten level. It’s a brilliant approach.

Because Lynch notoriously doesn't like to describe his work. He prefers that you just experience it. You can see, for example, in this "Mashed In Plastic" youtube trailer (an upcoming release of his soundtracks, genius collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti), that words can speculate or be signs placed on top of Lynch's work, but can't possibly get at the heart of the idea. Lynch's work takes you into a world. Often his worlds are full of trouble. Lynch's worlds aren't moralistic. They really don't judge. He puts spectators into a position of seduction. Evil is a constant presence and we see why it seduces. Getting into trouble is intoxicating. We see that theme over and over again, with Laura Palmer, Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, and Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive. It's not an Aleister Crowley notion--it's not evil is better, or more true. I think with Lynch, in the simplest sense possible, it's that bad things are intoxicating, rapturous, exciting, and seductive. In a sensuous way. Color and sound seduce. Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive—all follow an unexplained, mysterious bad idea. But the confusion of the idea, it’s good and bad components is necessary. I don’t think Lynch wants to confuse. He wants you to see how good and bad co-exist, how they’re both necessary in cinema. How thrilling they can be. Evil is an important aspect of the imagination. It allows us room to dream.