Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
In The New Wave 2.0 series, The Pen in Hand Blog will be examining the work of today’s most provocative and influential filmmakers, artists whose singular visual styles and visionary senses have stretched the boundaries of cinema. Drawing upon Francois Truffaut’s definition of an auteur, these pieces will be looking at writer/directors whose movies have transcended the art of filmmaking and transcended it into the realm of genius. David Lynch, whose career has spanned over thirty years, will be the next auteur analyzed in this series.
David Lynch: Living the Dream
Watching a David Lynch film is not unlike driving by an accident. Unexpected horrors, strange visions, and sinister apparitions populate his films, acting in counterpoint to a slyly ironic vision of a reality that is too disagreeably decent to be real. A vengeful mother appears as a dreamlike vision of the Wicked Witch of the West. A rampaging elephant tramples the psyche of a pregnant woman. A tiny woman dances inside a radiator. David Lynch’s films portray realities that are simultaneously within and beyond us; his dream sequences herald otherworld realities without reflecting them. And when you want to look away, you can’t.
Back in 1986, I went with a group of friends to see David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, which turned out to be one of the most resonant and disturbing (yet enjoyable) experiences I ever had in a movie theater. From the terrifyingly bizarre and erratic behavior of its psychopathic antagonist Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) to the weirdly surreal shots of a pristine American town (the fire truck in the last sequence of the film), this film is simultaneously hauntingly surreal yet strangely reassuring—especially in its shiny suburban banality.
The protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan), is the pivot point between these two worlds. The contrast between his home Lumberton, a seemingly idyllic suburban town, and the seamy underworld, drug kingpin Frank Booth’s world—is one of Lynch’s favorite recurring themes. When Jeff discovers a severed human ear in a vacant lot and helps police track down its source, he finds himself sliding into a darker disjointed reality. He sneaks into the apartment of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a singer connected to the crime, and while hiding in a closet, witnesses Frank beat and assault her. It is a harrowing scene, and the dreamlike atmosphere make it even spookier. Jeff watches the crime, removed and unable to stop it—not unlike a person having a nightmare—as the monstrous Frank, clad in a weird robotic gasmask, gibbers and sobs at the terrified Dorothy.
As Jeff flips back and forth between the idyllic world of Sandy (Laura Dern) the cute girl and the dark and dangerous Dorothy, the sleepy town of Lumberton, and Frank’s wild car ride with his friend Ben (he’s so fucking suave), Lynch’s vision of the dangerous and slippery dream landscape lying just beneath the surface of the plastic suburban reality is harrowingly obvious. Near the end of the film in one of the final shots, the camera zooms into a manicured lawn to reveal hordes of insects attacking and devouring everything in their path.
In Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks, detective Dale Cooper (McLachlan again) investigates the murder of high school senior and homecoming queen, Laura Palmer, who is revealed to have been leading a double life—high school sweetheart by day and prostitute by night. Populated by a host of eccentric characters, Cooper, a paragon of integrity and goodwill, finds this cheerful façade eroding beneath the constant swirl of hidden corruption. As he delves more deeply into the hidden lives of the townspeople, Cooper has a dream in which a monstrous one-armed entity gives him a series of clues to solve the murder.
While Lynch’s depictions of the nether side of human consciousness is harrowing, the everyday small-town worlds which he plays in counterpoint to it is reassuringly normal, yet slyly tongue-in-cheek. The homes in Blue Velvet seem a little too normal, like a fifties sitcom, and while the everyday world in Twin Peaks is much quirkier, the normality is still not quite normal.
This linked schism between dream and reality, and echoed in the subconscious and conscious self, the id and the ego, is visited again in The Elephant Man. Shot in black and white, the cinematography depicts 19th century London in all its grimy detail while lending Merrick’s dream sequences, in which he imagines an elephant frightening his mother during pregnancy, an otherworldly quality. The Elephant Man is arguably Lynch’s most conventional film (other than Dune, whose conventionality was studio-based), this film tells the true story of John Merrick (John Hurt), a hideously deformed Englishman who is rescued by Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) to be displayed as a freak anew in the medical lecture halls of his hospital. When Mr. Bytes (Freddie Jones), Merrick’s exhibitor wants his freak returned, Treves declines. Bytes leaves shouting that Treves is no better than him, that they are both taking advantage of John. The Elephant Man himself is a cipher. Unlike Treves and Bytes, who appear normal on the outside, Merrick is outwardly hideous but inwardly kind and generous—everything his two mentors are not.
Lynch’s doubling of characters is another example of his complex cinematic vision of surrealism and varnished reality. Treves and Bytes are two sides of the same coin, although Treves proves to be the more redeemable of the two. In his quirky mystery Mulholland Drive, the two main characters Betty Elm (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Elena Harring), in the course of trying to find Rita’s true identity, encounter characters that are doubles of themselves, initiating a convolution of encounters, memories, and coincidences that mimic the logic of a dream.
There are few directors who dive as deeply into the existential abyss as deeply, or as often, as Lynch. His dwarves, giants, one-armed men, girls living in the radiator, and other dream apparitions reach into the real world, grab us, and will not let go. By walking the tightrope between these worlds, these conscious and unconscious selves, Lynch forces his audience into the darkness of the most hidden of desires. His heroes are voyeurs peeking into the underbelly of society, and this is Lynch’s genius: to give us that microscopic–or telescopic–view into ourselves.Â