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Friday, January 20, 2006
Happy birthday Mr. Lynch
Yesterday I watched Eraserhead for the first time. I couldn't tell you for sure but perhaps my subconscious knew that I was screening it that day in preparation for this David Lynch birthday post. That would make sense considering that this is a director who creates while tuned in to the subconscious mind, where rational thinking has no home.
Not only did I see Eraserhead (the DVD, before only available at Lynch's website, can now be found through traditional retailers) but I also saw the documentary Mysterious Love about the creation of Blue Velvet including on that film's Special Edition DVD. In the that doc Dennis Hopper describes Lynch's films as "American Surrealism." After attending all three nights of the David Lynch Film Festival at The Castro Theatre (every major Lynch feature but Eraserhead and The Straight Story played) I have to concur with Frank Booth there. Lynch's greatest films exist in a dream world where all kinds of dark images rule. Even his films that stick with a fairly solid narrative make use of the montage of unrelated (or so it seems!) images. There is the flickering candle in Blue Velvet and the stylized opening and closing of The Elephant Man. I must admit to my shame that the only part of Twin Peaks I have ever seen is the brilliant and disturbing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Watching at first it I felt that The Black Lodge was this surreal world that is invading the townspeople's minds. It was when the film was over that I wondered if Bob, The Man From Another Place and the rest of the lodge's inhabitant weren't the realization of the people of Twin Peaks' secret fears and desires. Eraserhead and Mullholland Dr. (not just my favorite Lynch film but my favorite film, hence the picture above) can only be understood if you accept them as dream/nightmares of the characters. If Lost Highway isn't a dream then it might be a story told from the very subjective viewpoint of schizophrenic.
While Lynch's films share a lot in common with what Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau did what separates Lynch's work from other surreal artists is that Lynch is quintessentially American. He shapes his visions from American life. Lynch's personal life started in small Western towns of the 1950's, where he became an Eagle Scout, and then moved to the urban worlds that was Philadelphia in the late-'60s and Los Angeles in the '70s. The contrast between those different sides of the country are explored in Blue Vlevet, Eraserhead and Lynch's unproduced film Ronnie Rocket. Twin Peaks and Eraserhead can be seen as opposite sides of the same coin. The former deals with the anxieties of living in a suburban world and the latter deals the anxieties of living in an urban sprawl, with factories billowing smoke through the heavens.
More elements of Americana can be found in Lynch's film. Wild at Heart is a road trip through the South that includes the songs of Elvis Preseley and New Orleans jazz. Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, Mullholland Dr. and Lost Highway all feature that defining vision of the dark side of America: the endless highway at night, illuminated only by a few feet with a car's headlights. The film noir of Lost Highway, Mullholland Dr. and Blue Velvet is especially important in that Lynch takes a very American genre, although interpreted by European critics, and uses the moral ambiguity and sinister feel of noir to extend his own creative ideas and visions of the surreal.
It's a point of debate, certainly with Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, whether Lynch is condescending to these aspects of American life or if he isn't celebrating them in his own weird way. I think that since Lynch approaches most of his work without the analytic side of his mind for others to try to come up with concrete explanations of what his work means is something of a fool hardy enterprise. When the subject comes up I always go back to The Elephant Man where Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Frederick Treves wonders whether he isn't exploiting John Merrick's condition the same way those at the carnival used to ("Am I a good man? Or a bad man?"). The film seems to come up with a solid enough answer that Merrick leads a far more dignified life with Treves in his life than before, after all he is an artist now!, but when the entire crowd of a British theatre house stands up and cheers Merrick it is hard to dismiss for sure that none of them no longer see Merrick as a "freak." There is no easy answer but that's because there never is with Lynch.
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