It was a work day and I delayed it by listening to a podcast on the way in. Work days without management figures are treasures -- And Cut!
That was the beginning of my fourth attempt at this. I get to the point where I describe my work day, delaying my reaction and I'd use the phrase, "and then I felt it". And then I'd dry up. One of my life's most profound influences dies and I had no idea of how to describe what I felt about it.
This was easier with Bowie, a few years back. His brilliance and achievement, even if mostly stuffed into one decade, capped with one last gesture as a kind of gift and bird-flip at once and then off the mortal coil he went. Tears of joy and sadness all at once. The decade before, it was Syd Barrett going. I was wrong about this but my impression was that he had a few good years in his youth before he mentally exploded and shuffled around in decreasing circles until Death just remembered to take him one afternoon. It made me cry. (His post-fame story is a lot warmer than that but that's not for this blog.) But these examples are easy ones. Why didn't I cry or feel desolate at David Lynch's passing?
It's not that I've fallen out of love for his work, I'm devoted to it, still.
I'm too old to be an obsessive fan of anyone or thing anymore and that's only right. But I have been. In my teens, plundering the previous decade's rock music my hair was a Beatlesque mop. That got chopped during punk and neatly shorn on the back and sides for post-punk. At Uni I smoked fat French cigarettes because I was a Jean Luc Godard fan. I'd been fastening the collars of my shirts for years but felt a big endorphin rush as soon as I found out that that's how David Lynch dressed, too.
As a Lynch fan I could get embarrassing. Someone mentioned the name or a title and I became the bloke at the party with the acoustic guitar. I understood that then but didn't care that much. True cool is icy and passionless and I never want to be either. I'm not like that now and I don't mourn the passing of my cloying enthusiasm. So, is it just age? Have I traded a personal-boundary-pushing youth for a quiet and boring pre-retirement?
What I'm going to do is list the main titles and write something short in celebration and see if I can touch the wonder again.
Eraserhead
This is a world that didn't exist outside its creator's head and, as ugly and horrifying as it got, is a place I felt a longing for. I saw this many times at the Richmond Valhalla, panicking as the title came up but I wanted to live there. It remains the weirdest sense of home I've ever had from a work of fiction.
The Elephant Man
I saw this before Eraserhead and before I knew who Lynch was. I was zapped by the grayscale Victorian London, a city of elegant drawing rooms and thick black smoke and the story of dignity at the centre.
Dune
Ok, so this one embarrassed me. I saw it with my brother in law who neither knew nor cared who Lynch was and both of us shrank into our seats. Arresting visually but deflatingly tacky. I thought Lynch had hit a wall and was probably settling into his bed somewhere in a tip.
Blue Velvet
I took my erstwhile to see this at Hoyts. When Frank comes in and violates Dorothy I was sweating bullets. After, we walked through the foyer in silence and it was on the street in the bright still-morning sunlight that she looked at me and said, "that was fantastic". It felt recognisably conventional and interstellar and the bizarrely comforting nausea I'd felt all through Eraserhead played through it like a music score.
Wild at Heart
This had a big lead up and I was dreading what it might confront me with. The brutality starts right away and there's worse to come along with some dazzling spectacles. But my estimation of it began draining quickly. I can see the obvious chemistry between Dern and Cage but I just can't like them. When it's a love story, that's a problem.
(Time out. Around the late '80s/early '90s I dreamed I was at a dimly lit cocktail party, standing by the fireplace, talking to David Lynch. A woman came up to me and said, "David, they've put the food out." I smiled and gestured toward Lynch and told her, "Oh, no, I'm Peter. This is David." That's the kind of person I was, even in my dreams.)
Twin Peaks
Arresting and haunting and deliriously quirky until it runs off the rails and starts consuming itself. Still one of my favourite shows, though and a rewatch kept me going through lockdown. I loved the sense of community among the people I knew who were into it. Blue Velvet has started the Lynch brand as de rigeur, and the late '80s /early '90s is when the term Lynchian entered the parlance. The second season of Twin Peaks is where the new fans got off the boat, leaving us true fans to sail alone. That's going to come up more, here.
Fire Walk With Me
The Twin Peaks prequel was not what the show's fans wanted and this was the one that had them earnestly telling all who'd listen that it was meaningless rubbish. It's where I started questioning why I troubled to find offence in contrary opinions about the things I loved. Haters really only tell you about their own limitations rather than the thing they're hating. Genuine criticism is welcome, but no criticism is genuine if it's given in spite. FWWM gives us another strange world, a real-world troubling issue, and an extraordinary central performance from Sheryl Lee. I don't watch it often but am moved by it when I do.
Lost Highway
This took a lot of views before I felt it. To quote someone from an antique Usenet post, it's a cold film about a bad man. It's a challenge to feel empathy for either incarnation of the protagonist but the film is more about our observation of him. The moments I came to see as entry points were the Mystery Man/phone scene and, later, when the lighting creates what looks like one shadow of Fred chasing another. Both are deeply eerie and resonate in ways new to Lynch films. I love it now. Two different acquaintances at the time approached me, The Lynch Fan, to tell me gleefully that they almost chose this one at the video shop but went, "naaah", rounding off this Wildean display with grins of earnest self-congratulation.
The Straight Story
In which Lynch does Disney. Mary Sweeny, editor and wife, gave Lynch this one to do as a project to address his waning profile. The irony of the title is that there is a very dark undercurrent of neglect in the main character's life that is only vaguely suggested. The surface, reconciliation between two aging brothers, can be easily enjoyed in its own right. Undersung but moving.
Mulholland Drive
Lynch salvaged a tv pilot after cancellation (no, not that kind) and added an ending that went further than a simple knotting of loose ends and suggested a similar circularity to Lost Highway but one, this time, that engenders a heart rend. This won Lynch back his audience, if only temporarily but it did appeal to a younger demographic, as well. I adored this with its intense performances and rendition of Hollywood as a smouldering nightmare.
Inland Empire
And then he lost even a few of the rusted on. This epic sprawl hops around storylines like a body-jumper horror movie and you need to keep track of a number of iterations of the central character. If Lost Highway made it easy by limiting this to two, Inland Empire loosens its belt and charges into the shadows. Old fans were actually disgusted by what they saw as a weird for its own sake pile of debris but it isn't all that hard. The subtitle does a lot of work: A woman in trouble. This refers to an unwanted pregnancy/abortion and the kind of fugue state of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive but offered as way out of control as the woman attempts to evade her guilt. People who didn't have trouble with things like Eternal Sunshine or Primer seemed to find this unworthy of the same effort. To be fair to them, Lynch offers few signposts (and fewer still that work) and the film is ugly, shot on consumer grade digital video of the early 2000s.
I waited half an hour in a queue with a filling bladder and sat through its three hours in an uncomfortable grind. Maybe that was method watching, though, as I enjoyed the whole thing. But that's a point I make often about Lynch. His movies are not intellectually deep but deeply emotional. I still sigh to witness the whiteboard lectures of YouTubers with different coloured markers drawing a lot of little arrows between points. This was Lynch final feature film.
Twin Peaks: The Return
This was shown in Australia on the streamer Stan and doled out weekly (so no bingeing until it was all there). I found it wondrous, irritating, exasperating, angering, joyous and, finally, when the end formed from the rest of the run, poignant and heart rending. It racked its viewers and many gave up (especially with the Duggie episodes). I can report that a second viewing removes all the anxieties about certain subplots and helps you ride to the finale. There was no word on Lynch's health at this stage but it did feel like a farewell.
So, there's a lot of "let the art flow over you" in all that, trust this artist because it's good for you. That's not really my intent, though, it's more what I feel. And that's from the movies, the sights and sounds but also the stories and the cathartic bursts through darkness toward hope and brilliant light. David Lynch was an artist who transferred his dreams and passing thoughts onto surfaces like canvas or cinema screens without translation but with such deliberate conviction and pursuit of detail that the most sickening scenes could feel beautiful. His name made it into the dictionary because of his uniqueness and into my heart with the courage of his art.
So how do I feel now that he's dead?
Too much and it's all blurry. But maybe that's it. Maybe I should just stop wasting my time trying to define it when the lesson is telling me to embrace the undefined. I'm not feeling nothing. It's a few things but they're all vague. So that's what I'm feeling, the uncertain, the perplexing, the warm and the weird, the sadness and the joy. The colours and the atmospheres are all still with us, the testaments of positivity beyond the voids and violence. The man is gone and I'm sorry for that. And all that he did to keep the cinema an interesting place to go is still with us. My atheism doesn't admit of the concept of a spirit but the motion of ideas from a screen to an audience, from one film maker to generations of them to come, a spreading evangel of creativity is a tangible alternative.
No comments:
Post a Comment