A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (34 page)

Dear Mom I keep having my fish dream. They bite my face! Tell dad I dont take naps. The fishes are skinny an mad I miss you.
His wife makes me eat trouts and anchovys The fishes make nosis they blow bubbels. How are you [unreadable] you fine? don’t
forget to lock the doors the fishes [unreadable] me they hate me.

Love form

DANA

In the painting, what’s moving is that the text of the note is superimposed such that parts of the mother’s head obscure the
words—those are the “[unreadable]” parts. I do not know whether Lynch has a child named Dana, but considering who the artist
is, plus the painting’s child’s evident situation and pain, it seems both deeply moving and sort of sick that Lynch would
display this piece on a wall in his movie. Anyway, now you know the text of one of Bill Pullman’s
objets
, and you can get the same kind of chill I got if you squint hard enough in the movie’s early interior scenes to make the
picture out. And you’ll be even more chilled in a later interior scene in Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s house, a post-murder
scene, in which the same three paintings hang above the sofa but are now, without any discernible reason or explanation, upside
down. The whole thing’s not just creepy but
personally
creepy.

When
Eraserhead
was a surprise hit at festivals and got a distributor, David Lynch rewrote the cast and crew’s contracts so they would all
get a share of the money, which they still do, every fiscal quarter, in perpetuity. Lynch’s A.D. and P.A. and everything else
on
Eraserhead
was Catherine Coulson, who was later the Log Lady on
Twin Peaks
. Plus Coulson’s son, Thomas, played the little boy who brings Henry’s ablated head into the pencil factory. Lynch’s loyalty
to actors and his homemade, co-op-style productions make his oeuvre a veritable pomo-anthill of interfilm connections.

It is very hard for a hot director to avoid what Hollywood mental-health specialists term “Tarantino’s Disorder,” which involves
the sustained delusion that being a good movie director entails that you will also be a good movie actor. In 1988 Lynch actually
starred, with Ms. Isabella Rossellini, in Tina Rathbone’s
Zelly and Me
, which if you’ve never heard of it you can probably figure out why.

It has been said that the admirers of
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
are usually painters, or people who think and remember graphically. This is a mistaken conception.

—Paul Rotha, “The German Film”

Since Lynch was originally trained as a painter (an Ab-Exp painter at that), it seems curious that no film critics or scholars
⁴²
have ever treated of his movies’ clear relation to the classical Expressionist cinema tradition of Wiene, Kobe, early Lang,
etc. And I am talking here about the very simplest and most straightforward sort of definition of
Expressionist
, viz. “Using objects and characters not as representations but as transmitters for the director’s own internal impressions
and moods.”

Certainly plenty of critics have observed, with Kael, that in Lynch’s movies “There’s very little art between you and the
filmmaker’s psyche… because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.” They’ve noted the preponderance of fetishes
and fixations in Lynch’s work, his characters’ lack of conventional introspection (an introspection which in film equals “subjectivity”),
his sexualization of everything from an amputated limb to a bathrobe’s sash, from a skull to a “heart plug,”
⁴³
from split lockets to length-cut timber. They’ve noted the elaboration of Freudian motifs that tremble on the edge of parodie
cliché—the way Marietta’s invitation to Sailor to “fuck Mommy” takes place in a bathroom and produces a rage that’s then displaced
onto Bob Ray Lemon; the way Merrick’s opening dream-fantasy of his mother supine before a rampaging elephant has her face
working in what’s interpretable as either terror or orgasm; the way Lynch structures
Dunes
labrynthian plot to highlight Paul Eutrades’s “escape” with his “witch-mother” after Paul’s father’s “death” by “betrayal.”
They have noted with particular emphasis what’s pretty much Lynch’s most famous scene,
Blue Velvet
’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through a closet’s slats as Frank Booth rapes Dorothy while referring to himself as “Daddy” and
to her as “Mommy” and promising dire punishments for “looking at me” and breathing through an unexplained gas mask that’s
overtly similar to the O
₂
-mask we’d just seen Jeffrey’s own dying Dad breathing through.

They’ve noted all this, critics have, and they’ve noted how, despite its heaviness, the Freudian stuff tends to give Lynch’s
movies an enormous psychological power; and yet they don’t seem to make the obvious point that these very heavy Freudian riffs
are powerful instead of ridiculous because they’re deployed Expressionistically, which among other things means they’re deployed
in an old-fashioned, pre-postmodern way, i.e. nakedly,
sincerely
, without postmodernism’s abstraction or irony. Jeffrey Beaumont’s interslat voyeurism may be a sick parody of the Primal
Scene, but neither he (a “college boy”) nor anybody else in the movie ever shows any inclination to say anything like “Gee,
this is sort of like a sick parody of the good old Primal Scene” or even betrays any awareness that a lot of what’s going
on is—both symbolically and psychoanalytically—heavy as hell. Lynch’s movies, for all their unsubtle archetypes and symbols
and intertextual references and c, have about them the remarkable unself-consciousness that’s kind of the hallmark of Expressionist
art—nobody in Lynch’s movies analyzes or metacriticizes or hermeneuticizes or anything,
⁴⁴
including Lynch himself. This set of restrictions makes Lynch’s movies fundamentally unironic, and I submit that Lynch’s
lack of irony is the real reason some cinéastes—in this age when ironic self-consciousness is the one and only universally
recognized badge of sophistication—see him as a naïf or a buffoon. In fact, Lynch is neither—though nor is he any kind of
genius of visual coding or tertiary symbolism or anything. What he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and
contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own “internal impressions and moods” are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic
predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography—in other words, Lynch is sort of
G. W. Pabst with an Elvis ducktail.

This kind of contemporary Expressionist art, in order to be any good, seems like it needs to avoid two pitfalls. The first
is a self-consciousness of form where everything gets very mannered and refers cutely to itself.
⁴⁵
The second pitfall, more complicated, might be called “terminal idiosyncrasy” or “antiempathetic solipsism” or something:
here the artist’s own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come off as just too particular to him alone. Art,
after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and “personal expression” is cinematically interesting only to the extent
that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as
communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching
that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic
Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.

It’s the second pitfall that’s especially bottomless and dreadful, and Lynch’s best movie,
Blue Velvet
, avoided it so spectacularly that seeing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me. It was such a
big deal that ten years later I remember the date—30 March 1986, a Wednesday night—and what the whole group of us M FA Program
⁴⁶
students did after we left the theater, which was to go to a coffeehouse and talk about how the movie was a revelation. Our
Graduate M FA Program had been pretty much of a downer so far: most of us wanted to see ourselves as avant-garde writers,
and our professors were all traditional commercial Realists of the
New Yorker
school, and while we loathed these teachers and resented the chilly reception our “experimental” writing received from them,
we were also starting to recognize that most of our own avant-garde stuff really was solipsistic and pretentious and self-conscious
and masturbatory and bad, and so that year we went around hating ourselves and everyone else and with no clue about how to
get experimentally better without caving in to loathsome commercial-Realistic pressure, etc. This was the context in which
Blue Velvet made
such an impression on us. The movie’s obvious “themes”—the evil flip side to picket-fence respectability, the conjunctions
of sadism and sexuality and parental authority and voyeurism and cheesy ’50s pop and Coming of Age, etc.—were for us less
revelatory than the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic
felt
: they felt
true, real
. And the couple things just slightly but marvelously off in every shot—the Yellow Man literally dead on his feet, Frank’s
unexplained gas mask, the eerie industrial thrum on the stairway outside Dorothy’s apartment, the weird dentate-vagina sculpture
⁴⁷
hanging on an otherwise bare wall over Jeffrey’s bed at home, the dog drinking from the hose in the stricken dad’s hand—it
wasn’t just that these touches seemed eccentrically cool or experimental or arty, but that they communicated things that felt
true. Blue Velvet
captured something crucial about the way the U.S. present acted on our nerve endings, something crucial that couldn’t be
analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic principles or workshop techniques.

This was what was epiphanic for us about
Blue Velvet
in grad school, when we saw it: the movie helped us realize that first-rate experimentalism was a way not to “transcend”
or “rebel against” the truth but actually to
honor
it. It brought home to us—via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of—that the very most important artistic
communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but wasn’t even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s
true medium wasn’t verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern or Expressionistic or Surreal
or what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they
felt true
, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.

I don’t know whether any of this makes sense. But it’s basically why David Lynch the filmmaker is important to me. I felt
like he showed me something genuine and important on 3/30/86. And he couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been thoroughly, nakedly,
unpretentiously, unsophisticatedly himself, a self that communicates primarily itself—an Expressionist. Whether he is an Expressionist
naively or pathologically or ultra-pomo-sophisticatedly is of little importance to me. What is important is that
Blue Velvet
rang cherries, and it remains for me an example of contemporary artistic heroism.

All of Lynch’s work can be described as emotionally infantile…. Lynch likes to ride his camera into orifices (a burlap hood’s
eyehole or a severed ear), to plumb the blackness beyond. There, id-deep, he fans out his deck of dirty pictures…

—Kathleen Murphy of
Film Comment

One reason it’s sort of heroic to be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don’t like your art
to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist. A fair number of critics
⁴⁸
object to David Lynch’s movies on the grounds that they are “sick” or “dirty” or “infantile,” then proceed to claim that
the movies are themselves revelatory of various deficiencies in Lynch’s own character,
⁴⁹
troubles that range from developmental arrest to misogyny to sadism. It’s not just the fact that twisted people do hideous
things to one another in Lynch’s films, these critics will argue, but rather the “moral attitude” implied by the way Lynch’s
camera records hideous behavior. In a way, his detractors have a point. Moral atrocities in Lynch movies are never staged
to elicit outrage or even disapproval. The directorial attitude when hideousness occurs seems to range between clinical neutrality
and an almost voyeuristic ogling. It’s not an accident that Frank Booth, Bobby Peru, and Leland /”Bob” steal the show in Lynch’s
last three films, that there is almost a tropism about our pull toward these characters, because Lynch’s camera is obsessed
with them, loves them; they are his movies’ heart.

Some of the ad hominem criticism is harmless, and the director himself has to a certain extent dined out on his “Master of
Weird”/”Czar of Bizarre” image, see for example Lynch making his eyes go in two different directions for the cover of
Time
. The claim, though, that because Lynch’s movies pass no overt “judgment” on hideousness/evil/sickness and in fact make the
stuff riveting to watch, the movies are themselves a- or immoral, even evil—this is bullshit of the rankest vintage, and not
just because it’s sloppy logic but because it’s symptomatic of the impoverished moral assumptions we seem now to bring to
the movies we watch.

I’m going to claim that evil is what David Lynch’s movies are essentially about, and that Lynch’s explorations of human beings’
various relationships to evil are, if idiosyncratic and Expressionistic, nevertheless sensitive and insightful and true. I’m
going to submit that the
real
“moral problem” a lot of us cinéastes have with Lynch is that we find his truths morally uncomfortable, and that we do not
like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort is used to set up some kind of commercial
catharsis—the retribution, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood heroine, etc.—i.e. unless the discomfort
serves a conclusion that flatters the same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.)