Cinema we love not understanding
DAVID LYNCH
by Charlotte Menut - September 2019
What is so special about David Lynch's films ?
David Lynch's filmography (and more broadly art production, since the director is also a painter and a music composer) is often described as obscure, challenging, convention-breaking, and even dreamlike. It is strange, something you have never seen before and something disturbing. It is an experience and one you're most likely not going to fully grasp at first (or at all). The peculiarity of his work has led to the creation of the adjective "lynchian", as an effort to characterize something that has no point of comparison, but the meaning of Lynch's cinema is still up to debate and that's the beauty of it. Writer David F. Wallace defined lynchian as 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." He refers to a recurring theme of David Lynch's cinema: the darkness behind the ordinary. But David Lynch's movies go beyond darkness, they go beyond what is understandable and this appears to be what is so important about it: the experience and not necessarily the perfect and linear narrative.
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This description, I concede, can be dissuasive to those not familiar with his work. These films are demanding. Lynch's filmography often feels more like a path towards maturity and open-mindedness than an entertainment. You will discover different levels of strangeness, from Blue Velvet (1986) to Eraserhead (1977). The website 'Taste in cinema' even dedicated an entire article to all the questions we might found ourselves asking while viewing Lynch's films. From "is it the future or is it the past?" to "what is the power of the green ring?", you never really get an answer. As challenging as it seems, in the end understanding doesn't really matter here.
"The more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is." (David Lynch)
Not giving away direct answers has to do with the fact that David Lynch values the possibility of finding different interpretations for a film or a work of art. He once explained in an interview with Patti Smith: "I get ideas in fragments, it’s as if in the other room, there’s a puzzle… and the first piece I get is just a fragment of the whole puzzle, but I fall in love with this fragment, and it holds a promise for more". He creates one fragment of an idea after another and what we viewers see, is the whole puzzle except we are given the opportunity to assemble the fragments in our own way, to give our own meaning to what we see.
This idea is best illustrated with Mullholland Drive (2001). The film, which won a mise-en-scène award at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best director, doesn't have a straightforward narrative. There's Betty Elms, an aspiring actress who just arrived in Hollywood, but also an amnesiac woman named Rita, a blackmailed director, and an enigmatic blue box. We are only given fragments of what seems to be, at first, different stories but what we make of it depends largely on us. Hence, the flourishing theories and articles about the meaning of Mullholand Drive and the "dreams and alternative realities" section in the film's Wikipedia article. This diversity of interpretations is reciprocally both what makes a movie interesting and the result of what is interesting about this movie. This is what fuels animated debates between film-lovers but also what allows artworks to take a life of their own through the meaning you give them.
The heightened experience of cinema.
Diane Ladd as Marietta Fortune in Wild at heart (1990)
This impossibility to understand everything that is shown on screen is thus an important parameter of the viewing of a David Lynch movie. It allows us to experience something beyond reason, which in my opinion is what cinema is truly about. Whatever film you’re watching, you agree to experience a more or less distorted reality: a reality where the continuity of time is altered, where you can go from a place to another in a second or even hear one’s thoughts when this is completely impossible in real life. But the tacit contract between the director and the viewer makes it possible for us to participate in this experience rather than rejecting it because of its unreality. And because we are forced to only rely on our emotions, we can fully embrace them and thus take part in the movie.
David Lynch thus confronts us with images and sounds that are closer to what we experience in dreams, some things unseen in real life (or at least what we’ve seen of it), and this is why his films are so disturbing and maybe intimidating at first. Seeing a dwarf talking backwards in a red room in Twin Peaks is strange. A freaked-out Diane Ladd with face and hands covered in lipstick in Wild at heart (Palme d'or in 1990) is close to terrifying. But it forces us to push our limits. Not understanding what is happening makes us go beyond reason to let our emotions and intuitions prevail and allows us to fully take part in a film.
When Blue Velvet was released in 1986, many walked out of theaters and even demanded refunds. But the film instantly became a classic, maybe even because of its subversiveness. The main character is Jeffrey Baumont, a college student investigating on some strange events occurring in the small town of Lumberton, North Carolina. I won’t reveal anything else about the plot but by following the story of Jeffrey Baumont, David Lynch manages to show how striking something dreamlike but filmed like reality, can become. Midway through the film for example, Jeffrey Baumont is brought to a criminal's home and we witness one of the best scenes of David Lynch's filmography.
Frank Booth & Ben in Blue Velvet (1986)
Everything in this scene is worthy of a dream: the eccentric looks of the characters, the pastel colors of the room, and the incongruity of two men singing while a woman is visiting her held-hostage child. Frank Booth and Ben, the two criminal associates, are even singing along to In dreams by Roy Orbison. Yet, since nothing in the film has been shown as supernatural so far and since no special effects are used to inform us this is a dream (like it was done in Wild at heart for example), we see this as the continuity of the story, as the unveiling of the darkness that lies behind the apparent tranquility of Lumberton. And this ends up multiplying the horror of the scene because we believe it could be happening right now. Once we have let our guard down, the impact the film has on us is heightened. And this works for every movie. Over-analyzing movies can go against the very goal of cinema sometimes, against the direct beauty and emotion a scene can create. You can't always be very articulate about why you liked a film or why you didn't. You have to accept what you don't understand and let the magic of cinema operate.
There are countless articles about what is great about David Lynch’s cinema and many aspects to explore. There is the influence of painting in his films for example, since Lynch first turned to cinema feeling limited by the lack of movement in paintings and then got inspiration from other painters like Francis Bacon. There is also his magnificent work on music, with his collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti for many of his soundtracks and the place given to various musicians in each episode of the third season of Twin Peaks. We could also talk about by his favorite actors, who progressively became part of the director's very specific universe. But what matters is that you just have to be ready to discover something new and different, to not be afraid of incomprehension. And if you're not sure of the meaning of what you just saw you can always watch the film again later. This works for any kind of film. I would say getting to know the work of David Lynch is a great introduction to a kind of cinema you might be less inclined to watch, a way to broaden your knowledge of cinema and learn to know what you like.
David Lynch summed up in Family Guy.