rushthatspeaks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks) wrote2025-01-16 04:31 pm
rushthatspeaks) wrote2025-01-16 04:31 pm
David Lynch
The unseen pillars of the world do sometimes crumble, and the secret knots untie--
Well. He had a long life, and an endlessly fascinating one.
I did not start with Eraserhead (1977). In fact I have still not seen it, because everyone kept telling me it was So Weird, A Genuinely Weird Movie, which is a reliable way to get me not to watch something, if everyone says it. Probably I should; I have no faith that most or even many people are watching the same films I am when I watch something by David Lynch. I have little faith that they are watching the same films as each other.
Mulholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006), Lost Highway (1997), the original Twin Peaks: landscapes of the interior of the heart. Like the island in the Narnian ocean where dreams come true, but not daydreams, real dreams, and everything that goes with that. People complain about plots not resolving, loose ends not tying, characters not making sense, but I have never had any problem understanding David Lynch, because none of that stuff was ever the point.
The point is the darkness at the edge of town. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), Lynch's masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made, is about that darkness in two different directions, which have nothing to do with one another except that they are both part of that darkness. Fire Walk With Me is the great American film about Faerie, or possibly simply the great film about Faerie, in a very old sense, a sense irreducible to anything so simple as lore or magic, the realm just over there that is the realm of the truly alien, unnameable, inescapable, incomprehensible and yet just on the thresholds of comprehension. Not a dark mirror: they do not have to have anything to do with us. If there is a they. They are affiliated with the dead, and owls, and night, and deep woods, or are those things. There are rules, which will never be explained, and you will never know what happens if they are broken, or kept. It is the abyss Hope Mirrlees leaps into in the astonishing final chapters of Lud-in-the-Mist, as it sits on the edge of every small American town, quietly, unaware of the concept of waiting.
Fire Walk With Me is also a rage-filled scream about the brutality of sexual violence, the ways that simple physical strength can allow a man to destroy a woman worth twenty of him, the world that sexualizes and then grinds up teenage girls in ways that go beyond melodrama into sordid exhaustion. The darkness on the edge of town: in every woods I ever wandered through as a child, or that my agemate acquaintances did, we would not infrequently find pornography, magazines in hollows, torn paperbacks and broadsheets tucked behind trees. Woods porn is a common American experience, and far too common a method of children learning about sex-- or it was. Is there still woods porn now? I mean, I'm sure some of it is left where it lies, ten, twenty, thirty years onward, but is there new woods porn? To know would mean having to understand something none of us kids could ever hypothesize, try as we might to put together clues, stumble into conjectures: who the hell was out there leaving that stuff anyway? These were the quietest suburban woods in creation. The area didn't have an unhoused population living in it. This left the unspeakable, unthinkable conclusion that it must have been our own neighbors and families who abandoned it there, a concept you could watch kids mentally shy away from on a physical level, like a shying horse. It was all too ludicrous and nasty to have anything to do with our own adults, who anyway would never sneak out late at night. The unlucky/lucky ones, as teens, would later find the same porn in their houses' nooks and crannies, avoid or scavenge from their grownups' sock drawers. But woods porn was before all that. Fire Walk With Me is about girls who are still children falling through reality, into the space where they (the worst they, the real, concrete they) don't just leave the porn in the woods, they make it, in the darkness at the edge of town.
There is no sense in which one darkness helps against the other. They are, honestly, unrelated. It's amazing how thoroughly Lynch expresses them and how little they have to do with each other. Faerie does not stop rape or murder or grief or even things that are supernatural yet somewhat more comprehensible. It exists. That is sufficient. Weighed against everything else, it remains sufficient.
Anyway. When I think of David Lynch, what I return to over and over again is his 2019 collaboration with Flying Lotus, 'Fire Is Coming'. Lynch, famous for visuals, is auditory here-- Flying Lotus heard him tell the story he tells in it at a party and asked him to put it in a video. They didn't change a thing. The visuals, the tense, unspecified post-apocalyptic oddity which feels somehow to me like a dark, sideways return to the world of Barbarella, the moving taxidermy like something out of Jan Svankmajer, that's all Flying Lotus, as can be seen from looking at his other visual work. The way it's impossible to make the sounds resolve into something resembling music no matter how many times you listen to it, the way it blends anticipation and confusion, dread and wonder, and intentionally leaves you hanging, the sheer amount it packs into three minutes-- that's both of them.
My partner B. once went to see Lynch's first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967). I asked him afterward what he thought of it.
He shrugged. "It was pretty much like you'd expect," he said, "except that the men were also on fire."
Well. He had a long life, and an endlessly fascinating one.
I did not start with Eraserhead (1977). In fact I have still not seen it, because everyone kept telling me it was So Weird, A Genuinely Weird Movie, which is a reliable way to get me not to watch something, if everyone says it. Probably I should; I have no faith that most or even many people are watching the same films I am when I watch something by David Lynch. I have little faith that they are watching the same films as each other.
Mulholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006), Lost Highway (1997), the original Twin Peaks: landscapes of the interior of the heart. Like the island in the Narnian ocean where dreams come true, but not daydreams, real dreams, and everything that goes with that. People complain about plots not resolving, loose ends not tying, characters not making sense, but I have never had any problem understanding David Lynch, because none of that stuff was ever the point.
The point is the darkness at the edge of town. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), Lynch's masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made, is about that darkness in two different directions, which have nothing to do with one another except that they are both part of that darkness. Fire Walk With Me is the great American film about Faerie, or possibly simply the great film about Faerie, in a very old sense, a sense irreducible to anything so simple as lore or magic, the realm just over there that is the realm of the truly alien, unnameable, inescapable, incomprehensible and yet just on the thresholds of comprehension. Not a dark mirror: they do not have to have anything to do with us. If there is a they. They are affiliated with the dead, and owls, and night, and deep woods, or are those things. There are rules, which will never be explained, and you will never know what happens if they are broken, or kept. It is the abyss Hope Mirrlees leaps into in the astonishing final chapters of Lud-in-the-Mist, as it sits on the edge of every small American town, quietly, unaware of the concept of waiting.
Fire Walk With Me is also a rage-filled scream about the brutality of sexual violence, the ways that simple physical strength can allow a man to destroy a woman worth twenty of him, the world that sexualizes and then grinds up teenage girls in ways that go beyond melodrama into sordid exhaustion. The darkness on the edge of town: in every woods I ever wandered through as a child, or that my agemate acquaintances did, we would not infrequently find pornography, magazines in hollows, torn paperbacks and broadsheets tucked behind trees. Woods porn is a common American experience, and far too common a method of children learning about sex-- or it was. Is there still woods porn now? I mean, I'm sure some of it is left where it lies, ten, twenty, thirty years onward, but is there new woods porn? To know would mean having to understand something none of us kids could ever hypothesize, try as we might to put together clues, stumble into conjectures: who the hell was out there leaving that stuff anyway? These were the quietest suburban woods in creation. The area didn't have an unhoused population living in it. This left the unspeakable, unthinkable conclusion that it must have been our own neighbors and families who abandoned it there, a concept you could watch kids mentally shy away from on a physical level, like a shying horse. It was all too ludicrous and nasty to have anything to do with our own adults, who anyway would never sneak out late at night. The unlucky/lucky ones, as teens, would later find the same porn in their houses' nooks and crannies, avoid or scavenge from their grownups' sock drawers. But woods porn was before all that. Fire Walk With Me is about girls who are still children falling through reality, into the space where they (the worst they, the real, concrete they) don't just leave the porn in the woods, they make it, in the darkness at the edge of town.
There is no sense in which one darkness helps against the other. They are, honestly, unrelated. It's amazing how thoroughly Lynch expresses them and how little they have to do with each other. Faerie does not stop rape or murder or grief or even things that are supernatural yet somewhat more comprehensible. It exists. That is sufficient. Weighed against everything else, it remains sufficient.
Anyway. When I think of David Lynch, what I return to over and over again is his 2019 collaboration with Flying Lotus, 'Fire Is Coming'. Lynch, famous for visuals, is auditory here-- Flying Lotus heard him tell the story he tells in it at a party and asked him to put it in a video. They didn't change a thing. The visuals, the tense, unspecified post-apocalyptic oddity which feels somehow to me like a dark, sideways return to the world of Barbarella, the moving taxidermy like something out of Jan Svankmajer, that's all Flying Lotus, as can be seen from looking at his other visual work. The way it's impossible to make the sounds resolve into something resembling music no matter how many times you listen to it, the way it blends anticipation and confusion, dread and wonder, and intentionally leaves you hanging, the sheer amount it packs into three minutes-- that's both of them.
My partner B. once went to see Lynch's first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967). I asked him afterward what he thought of it.
He shrugged. "It was pretty much like you'd expect," he said, "except that the men were also on fire."
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this is a beautiful and fitting eulogy.
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(here via the Network page)
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Nine
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Amazing.
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I had previously known Fire Walk With Me only as ‘The bit of Twin Peaks my flatmate doesn’t like’, and now I am going to watch it as soon as possible.
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(Anonymous) 2025-02-14 10:58 am (UTC)(link)