By that “no offense,” I mainly mean, “no disrespect to the recently departed.” But I also mean, “no offense to you if you like his stuff.”
People I know and respect and even love like his work. My daughter is a “Twin Peaks” fan, and she’s smart and creative and I love her with all my heart.
But I just don’t get the appeal. I’ve tried, in these recent days with streaming services going out of their way to offer me Lynch works (that’s Max that you see above), to give him one more chance — you know, outta respect.
But I never get farther in than a few minutes, before I make a firm decision not to spend any more of time I have left in life at the age of 71 on this.
What’s the problem? Take your pick. There’s the acting — if you want to call that “acting.” There’s the direction — which I think consists mostly of telling actors to “be as bad as you can possibly be, like you’re doing a comedy skit about bad acting, only without the humor.” There’s the editing, the weird pacing, the odd lighting, the special efforts made to make sure people think, “something’s not right here.”
Yeah, I get that he’s trying to make us uncomfortable. But isn’t there enough of that in real life? And if he’s trying to comment on all the awkwardness in real life, couldn’t he represent the real awkwardness more recognizably? This is like the diet Pepsi of awkwardness — something of a cola flavoring, but with a terrible artificial aftertaste.
I’ll admit that a lot of my dislike arises from his having shafted a generation of sci-fi fans by getting their hopes up, and presenting them with the worst major motion picture in history, his “Dune.” Yes, I’ve mentioned that before, but I’ll add a new twist: It is so bad that it makes a new “Dune” look great, despite it starring Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides. I mean, weirding modules? Where the hell did that come from?
Not to mention those pustules on Baron Harkonnen’s face. Why are we looking at those? Do you really think we wouldn’t get the idea that the Baron is a really gross guy whom you would cross a galaxy to avoid without lingering on those pustules?
Of course, I’ve learned something — or been reminded of something — by those films Max has offered. In watching a bit of “Fire Walk With Me,” and even less of “Blue Velvet,” I realized that’s a trademark move of his — finding something gross to zoom in on, sometimes microscopically, and linger upon, for no particular reason.
(I had never seen “Blue Velvet,” but had always meant to, thinking anything with Isabella Rosselini and Dennis Hopper’s got to be good. Well, no it doesn’t, it turns out. I had probably forgotten that Kyle McLachlan’s in it, too.)
Hey, I can take looking at gross things. I watch a lot of murder mysteries, and sometimes those bodies have had some pretty nasty things done to them, and the camera doesn’t shy away (how could they, after the expense of creating the effect?). I consider “Saving Private Ryan” to be a masterpiece, and the first 20 minutes of that can really test your ability to stomach blood and guts. But there’s a reason for it. This is one film that refuses to shy away from the horrors of war.
Lynch’s grossness seems to be there just because he wants it there, just as Tim Burton wants to see a lot of prison stripes on the screen. (And no, I don’t like him much, either.)
And yet… a lot of folks like it. Or they like something that’s eluding me. In a way, it feels a lot like the way I reacted to Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” I saw it as part of the American Film Theatre series back in the ’70s (my wife and I had season tickets to that, largely because they were really cheap for college students), and thought it one of the most offputtingly pointless things I’d ever seen. I mentioned that to my good friend, the late Dan Henderson, who was very much the aesthete. Dan said, “You just don’t get absurdism.” I allowed as how he was probably right about that, given all I’ve seen and read of the Theater of the Absurd.
Because of that similar feeling, I considered Lynch as an absurdist. No, it’s not that. Pinter is that, but Lynch isn’t quite. And even if it he was, it wouldn’t make me feel better. Tagging a label on somebody doesn’t really ring my bell.
But enough of my rant. Some of you like this stuff, and I want to ask you, why?
Also, how about giving me your list of Top Five Movies (or TV shows) by David Lynch.
Maybe there’ll be something there I will like. After all, I have a faint memory of having mildly enjoyed “Wild at Heart.” But that was a long time ago now, and I can’t be sure…
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A commenter on WAPO summed it up and expressed my view also: I have no idea what it was about, but Mulholland Drive was one of the best movies I’ve seen.
One of my personal all-time favorites — an altogether lovely film:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166896/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_straight%2520story
You know, I’d forgotten that was done by Lynch. It doesn’t have the feel of it.
And of course, it has the advantage of starring Richard Farnsworth…
Lynch is like that weird artist friend who never makes it, because their work isn’t marketable and they don’t want to be marketable, but once you kinda see the work through their eyes, you can’t not see it and you feel compelled to go along with them on the journey and it kinda breaks your heart that others can’t see it.
He had a deep love-hate-love relationship with the 1950s. It’s like a Vietnam vet trying to explain the significance of the smell of rotting vegetation in the Mekong Delta. No amount of explanation is really going to get you there. It’s reality + trauma + youth. The 50s was that inescapable, traumatic love that he spent his entire career trying to reconcile. You get the feeling that he was one of those guys who easily fell in love, but he intensely fell in love, warts and all, and his first love was the 50s. Other than Dune, The Straight Story and the Elephant Man, it’s all tackling that (and even the Elephant Man still has 1950s propriety in the back of its head).
He loved Kyle MacLachlan, because he stepped right out of the 1950s. His actresses all could have come out of central casting. The acting is bad, 1950s wooden acting (back to the repression of the era). The lighting comes straight out of 50s noir. It’s all conscious. All of his shorthand comes out of the 50s. So why linger on the grossness? It’s an impropriety and in real life you are going to stare or try to stop yourself from staring.
If you like Lynch, your first Lynch is probably your favorite. For me it’s Lost Highway. Everyone hates it, but I love it. I couldn’t get into Mulholland Drive. Not sure why. I’ve seen it multiple times and it just doesn’t stick in my head, other than the weird lady neighbor. Maybe it’s because it the one “Lynch” movie that works. It feels like the same movie as Inland Empire, but it didn’t hammer the Satoshi Kon influence as hard. To this day the part of Inland Empire that sticks out in my head is the bus to Pamona bit, which had me laughing pretty hard, because that’s exactly the kind of conversation you’d have to endue while the universe is telling you that it’s time to leave.
So I guess it’s Lost Highway, Blue Velvet and Elephant Man. I’ll have to confess that I’ve never seen all of Twin Peaks (along with Fire Walk With Me and The Return). I’m saving it for my death bed or another case of Lyme disease.
Art is subjective. This we know. I can’t talk you into liking something, and that’s fine, but I do like David Lynch. I once spent a considerable amount of time in the lobby after seeing “Mulholland Drive” for the second time, discussing what it might mean with my friends. When’s the last time you discussed any movie at length?
It’s hard to impart how amazing it was to see “Twin Peaks” on network TV. Shows that weird just weren’t getting greenlit. It was probably also a product of its time, and I’m glad I saw it then instead of now. It was, at heart, a mystery, so you had to watch if you ever wanted to find out who the killer was. And it’s hard to remember just how much the show was in the popular culture at the time.
It’s been a long time since I thought about any of this, but my quick theory is that maybe he just wants to unsettle you sometimes, and what’s wrong with that? I love any time a piece of art elicits a genuine reaction, and it doesn’t happen that much, I can tell you.
I also loved “Blue Velvet” and “Eraserhead”, but I will confess that I hadn’t seen anything new of his since “Mulholland”, but maybe I will now. I do know that my life is richer for having known Dale Cooper & Harry Truman, Frank Booth, and, yes, Radiator Lady.
Thanks, Will! Good to hear from you.
For my part, I’m SURE “he just wants to unsettle you sometimes.”
Sometimes, that’s a needful thing, if you’re trying to draw people’s attention to something important. But I don’t see that. I see a guy who likes to unsettle people for the hell of it. And people who like to do that are irritating.
Perhaps he’s communicating something of value, and the failure is with me. But it would be nice if he’d made his worthwhile messages just a tad more readable… All I got was the irritation…
Can’t help you. Twin Peaks was entertaining but at a certain point enough was enough. You are spot on about Dune. I always thought his obsession with grossness was a bit disturbed.