Dream a little dream of David Lynch
Summary
David Lynch, who left us last week, demonstrated that if you made something fascinating enough, it doesn’t need to be explained, or even understood
The first time I watched Wild at Heart, I couldn’t believe it. I was 13 years old, cable television was new to India, and boys my age would routinely scavenge the then-uncensored Star Movies channel for movies that featured nudity. David Lynch’s 1990 film—a blazing, shrieking road movie that howls at the moon as two lovers passionately fight and dance—had a lot of skin, but, even more strikingly, it had a tremendous, overpowering affection for a film I’d grown up with, The Wizard of Oz.
Electrified by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern’s performances as Sailor and Lula, I gaped at Wild at Heart every chance I could—all the while incredulous that an R-rated film could be so unashamedly smitten by a 1939 children’s film. Cage’s character worships Oz, and Lynch’s film riffs repeatedly on Victor Fleming’s classic: Lula’s mother, Marietta, is an Emerald City-era Wicked Witch, conjuring menace in exaggerated make-up and venomous cackles. Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru is the twisted inverse of a flying monkey, slithering through the film with an evil grin.
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These, however, are references. Movies pay tributes. What (still) leaves my jaw on the floor is the way Lynch finishes off Wild at Heart. The film’s climax is interrupted by an actual appearance of the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz, pointing our quixotic hero toward love. With that, Lynch takes an unhinged road movie and lifts it into something transcendent. He loves us, tender. He makes a bloodied mess shine like a ruby slipper.
The great David Lynch, who left us last week, taught me many things. His films taught me about creative fearlessness, and demonstrated the plain fact that if you made something fascinating enough, it doesn’t need to be explained, or even understood. He taught me that ideas come to us, like fish, and that we need to open ourselves up to them, patiently and quietly, in order to catch them. (He also taught us, by going to the same fast food restaurant every day for seven years in a row, that this contemplation could be done on chocolate shakes and doughnuts.)
Lynch taught me that a substantial artist, even the sort of staggeringly original visionary who defies the boundaries of the medium, doesn’t need to take himself seriously. I’ll never forget his superb three-episode role in the TV series Louie, playing a gruff and demanding expert charged with turning comedians into talk show hosts. I’ll never forget his magnificent and unmistakable hair, his weather reports, just as I won’t forget films like Lost Highway, a baffling and beautiful puzzle piece of a film that borrows from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona before it and lends to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique after it.
Blue Velvet is a perfect film. Perfect. It is immediately intriguing and violent and brutal and unpredictable and sexy and, perhaps most importantly, discomfiting. With that miraculous, irresistible, scary film, Lynch shows how a pop song and a severed ear have more in common than one may expect when it comes to making an audience squirm. To me, Lynch’s films are propelled by a need to take the viewer to that slippery, uncertain, fugue-like state. We are our most receptive at our least canny. In order to take us to a shaky ground, Lynch intends to pull the rug out from under our feet.
The word “Lynchian" is, appropriately, hard to define. The term is often misused as shorthand for “quirky weirdness", but that feels reductive and misses the filmmaker’s elegance. The way Eraserhead transforms parental anxiety into industrial horror, The Elephant Man frames humanity in grotesque dignity, Mulholland Drive pirouettes between Hollywood’s allure and its abyss… this is not merely strange, or surreal. Lynch explores the cracks in reality, uncovering beauty in dissonance and terror in grace. He compromises nothing, creating films that haunt like memories and linger like half-remembered dreams.
For a man whose work is often said to evoke nightmares, Lynch has always encouraged us to sleep soundly, and to dream sweet dreams. Our social media feeds are currently full of Lynch telling us to reflect in silence, Lynch trying to bring audiences around to the transcendental meditation that helped him so much, and asking us to look positively at the future, no matter how bleak it seems. For this macabre surrealist to also be an incurable optimist sounds at odds with itself, but it is that contradiction that is truly Lynchian.
The most important thing David Lynch taught me—going back to that brilliantly unironic appearance of the Good Witch—is that there is no high art or low art. There is only art, and occasionally we can get high on it. Art can confound and it can explain and it can distract and it can mislead and it can, maybe, force us to think of something beyond what it says on the label, or the movie poster. Red roses, a hit song, black coffee, an apple pie—everything can be sublime if you just look at it right.
Lynch himself staunchly refused to explain his creations. In the best Lynch snippet doing the rounds online, the director says, “Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film." “Elaborate on that," asks the interviewer. “No," Lynch smiles.
Thank you, David Lynch, for the work. Thank you for forcing us to look at it for ourselves and to make up our own damn minds. Thank you for being so impossible to define. Thank you for being wild at art.
Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.
