A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (35 page)

The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and
also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world
is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians
or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments
of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness.
And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies,
always wears more than one face
. Recall, for example, how
Blue Velvet
’s Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and “the Well-Dressed Man.” How
Eraserhead
’s whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil… yet how it’s
“poor” Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV’s
Twin Peaks
and cinema’s
Fire Walk with Me
, “Bob” is also Leland Palmer, how they are, “spiritually,” both two and one.
The Elephant Man
’s sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treeves—and Lynch very carefully
has Treeves admit this aloud. And if
Wild at Heart
’s coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically
the same thing, i.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch
movies—evil wears them.

This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about
monsters
(i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about
hauntings
, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of
noirish
lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs
just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally,
possessed
. Think here of Dennis Hopper’s exultant “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” in
Blue Velvet
, or of the incredible scene in
Wild at Heart
when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it’s devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of “Bob”’s
look of total demonic ebullience in
Fire Walk with
Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies
are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only
actuated by evil but literally
inspired
⁵⁰
: they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than anyone person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments,
riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s
diagnosing
it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason
why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply
are
. And forces are—at least potentially—everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts,
⁵¹
pervades
; Darkness is in everything, all the time—not “lurking below” or “lying in wait” or “hovering on the horizon”: evil is
here
, right now. And so are Light, love, redemption (since these phenomena are also, in Lynch’s work, forces and spirits), etc.
In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in isolation from
its opposite. It’s not just that evil is “implied by” good or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained
within the good stuff,
encoded
in it.

You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or neo-Hegelian, but it’s also Lynchian, because what Lynch’s movies
⁵²
are all about is creating a narrative space where this idea can be worked out in its fullest detail and to its most uncomfortable
consequences.

And Lynch pays a heavy price—both critically and financially—for trying to explore worlds like this. Because we Americans
like our art’s moral world to be cleanly limned and clearly demarcated, neat and tidy. In many respects it seems we
need
our art to be morally comfortable, and the intellectual gymnastics we’ll go through to extract a black-and-white ethics from
a piece of art we like are shocking if you stop and look closely at them. For example, the supposed ethical structure Lynch
is most applauded for is the “Seamy Underside” structure, the idea that dark forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green
lawns and PTA potlucks of Anytown, USA.
⁵³
American critics who like Lynch applaud his “genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the
strange, perverse passions beneath” and his movies for providing “the password to an inner sanctum of horror and desire” and
“evocations of the malevolent forces at work beneath nostalgic constructs.”

It’s little wonder that Lynch gets accused of voyeurism: critics have to make Lynch a voyeur in order to approve something
like
Blue Velvet
from within a conventional moral framework that has Good on top/outside and Evil below/within. The fact is that critics grotesquely
misread Lynch when they see this idea of perversity “
beneath
” and horror “
hidden
” as central to his movies’ moral structure.

Interpreting
Blue Velvet
, for example, as a film centrally concerned with “a boy discovering corruption in the heart of a town”
⁵⁴
is about as obtuse as looking at the robin perched on the Beaumonts’ window-sill at the movie’s end and ignoring the writhing
beetle the robin’s got in its beak.
⁵⁵
The fact is that
Blue Velvet
is basically a coming-of-age movie, and, while the brutal rape Jeffrey watches from Dorothy’s closet might be the movie’s
most horrifying scene, the
real
horror in the movie surrounds discoveries that Jeffrey makes about himself—for example, the discovery that a part of him
is excited by what he sees Frank Booth do to Dorothy Vallens.
⁵⁶
Frank’s use, during the rape, of the words “Mommy” and “Daddy,” the similarity between the gas mask Frank breathes through
in extremis and the oxygen mask we’ve just seen Jeffrey’s dad wearing in the hospital—this kind of stuff isn’t there just
to reinforce the Primal Scene aspect of the rape. The stuff’s also there clearly to suggest that Frank Booth is, in a certain
deep way, Jeffrey’s “father,” that the Darkness inside Frank is also encoded in Jeffrey. Gee-whiz Jeffrey’s discovery not
of dark Frank but of his own dark affinities with Frank is the engine of the movie’s anxiety. Note for example that the long
and somewhat heavy angst-dream Jeffrey suffers in the film’s second act occurs not after he has watched Frank brutalize Dorothy
but after he, Jeffrey, has consented to hit Dorothy during sex.

There are enough heavy clues like this to set up, for any marginally attentive viewer, what is
Blue Velvet
’s real climax, and its point. The climax comes unusually early,
⁵⁷
near the end of the film’s second act. It’s the moment when Frank turns around to look at Jeffrey in the back seat of the
car and says
“You’re like me
.” This moment is shot from Jeffrey’s visual perspective, so that when Frank turns around in the seat he speaks both to Jeffrey
and to us. And here Jeffrey—who’s whacked Dorothy and liked it—is made exceedingly uncomfortable indeed; and so—if we recall
that we too peeked through those closet-vents at Frank’s feast of sexual fascism, and regarded, with critics, this scene as
the film’s most riveting—are we. When Frank says “
You’re like
me,” Jeffrey’s response is to lunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose—a brutally primal response
that seems rather more typical of Frank than of Jeffrey, notice. In the film’s audience, I, to whom Frank has also just claimed
kinship, have no such luxury of violent release; I pretty much just have to sit there and be uncomfortable.
⁵⁸

And I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go to see a movie. I like my heroes virtuous and my victims
pathetic and my villains’ villainy clearly established and primly disapproved by both plot and camera. When I go to movies
that have various kinds of hideousness in them, I like to have my own fundamental
difference
from sadists and fascists and voyeurs and psychos and Bad People unambiguously confirmed and assured by those movies. I like
to judge. I like to be allowed to root for Justice To Be Done without the slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing
in real moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of
my
character, either.

I dont know whether you are like me in these regards or not… though from the characterizations and moral structures in the
U.S. movies that do well at the box-office I deduce that there must be rather a lot of Americans who are exactly like me.

I submit that we also, as an audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into
the light and exposed. We like this stuff because secrets’ exposure in a movie creates in us impressions of epistemological
privilege, of “penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath.” This
isn’t surprising: knowledge is power, and we (I, anyway) like to feel powerful. But we also like the idea of “secrets,” “of
malevolent forces at work
beneath
… ” so much because we like to see confirmed our fervent hope that most bad and seamy stuff really
is
secret, “locked away” or “under the surface.” We hope fervently that this is so because we need to be able to believe that
our own hideousnesses and Darknesses are secret. Otherwise we get uncomfortable. And, as part of an audience, if a movie is
structured in such a way that the distinction between surface/Light/good and secret/Dark/evil is messed with—in other words,
not a structure whereby Dark Secrets are winched
ex machina
up to the Lit Surface to be purified by my judgment, but rather a structure in which Respectable Surfaces and Seamy Undersides
are mingled, integrated, literally
mixed up
—I am going to be made acutely uncomfortable. And in response to my discomfort I’m going to do one of two things: I’m either
going to find some way to punish the movie for making me uncomfortable, or I’m going to find a way to interpret the movie
that eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible. From my survey of published work on Lynch’s films, I can assure you
that just about every established professional reviewer and critic has chosen one or the other of these responses.

I know this all looks kind of abstract and general. Consider the specific example of
Twin Peaks
’s career. Its basic structure was the good old murder-whose-investigation-opens-a-can-of-worms formula that’s right out of
Noir
101—the search for Laura Palmer’s killer yields postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer = Homecoming Queen
by Day & Laura Palmer = Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that mirrored a whole town’s moral schizophrenia. The show’s first
season, in which the plot movement consisted mostly of more and more subsurface hideousnesses being uncovered and exposed,
was a huge smash. By the second season, though, the mystery-and-investigation structure’s own logic began to compel the show
to start getting more focused and explicit about who or what was actually responsible for Laura’s murder. And the more explicit
Twin Peaks
tried to get, the less popular the series became. The mystery’s final “resolution,” in particular, was felt by critics and
audiences alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was. The “Bob”/Leland/Evil Owl stuff was fuzzy and not very well rendered,
⁵⁹
but the really deep dissatisfaction—the one that made audiences feel screwed and betrayed and fueled the critical backlash
against the idea of Lynch as Genius Auteur—was, I submit, a moral one. I submit that Laura Palmer’s exhaustively revealed
“sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally
related to those sins. We as an audience have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these certainties need
to be affirmed and massaged.
⁶⁰
When they were not, and as it became increasingly clear that they were not going to be,
Twin Peaks
’s ratings fell off the shelf, and critics began to bemoan this once “daring” and “imaginative” series’ decline into “self-reference”
and “mannered incoherence.”

And then
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
, Lynch’s theatrical “prequel” to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since
Dune
, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead
person, Laura’s existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid
black/white construct—Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie, in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more
or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas—plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse
slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter—as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all,
the movie tried to claim, the same person. In
Fire Walk with Me
, Laura was no longer “an enigma” or “the password to an inner sanctum of horror.” She now embodied, in full view, all the
Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers.