The Lynch-Cronenberg Continuum: The Subconscious and the Scientist
I once had dreams of being a filmmaker, back when I was a teenager. These ambitions were probably fueled in part by where I was living then, and what was going on there at the time. I was in Memphis, in an apartment around Cooper-Young, one of those funky “transitional” neighborhoods popular with college kids and what used to be called hipsters.
In the neighborhood was a video store called Black Lodge, located in an old white house on a gently sloping hill. The store’s sections were divided by director rather than genre (very auteur-ish) and the staff were certified film buffs. I remember there was a red velour couch in the center of the store, facing a TV on a stand usually playing something black and white. One of the guys who hung around there named Craig had just made his own very low budget movie on digital that was doing the rounds of the local circuit. Craig turned out to be Craig Brewer, who would go on to direct the very Memphian hit film Hustle & Flow.
Sadly, Black Lodge was a casualty of Covid, though my dreams of becoming a filmmaker ended well before they closed their doors. At some point I realized I was frankly too socially withdrawn to engage in a collaborative art like filmmaking. I had enough trouble just communicating my ideas from my fingertips to the keyboard, forget other people.
Back when I had that cinematic ambition, though, I read a bunch of books on the subject. Some of them were helpful, some less so. One series I found fascinating were Faber & Faber’s series of interviews with various directors: Scorsese on Scorsese, Lee on Lee, etc. In the books the filmmakers would talk about their philosophies, their training, the complications and the joys of filmmaking. As with any creative endeavor the complications seemed to outnumber the joys, but the joys were what kept them coming back again and again.
Two of my favorite books in the series were Lynch on Lynch and Cronenberg on Cronenberg. For those not big into movies who can’t guess from the titles, the first book dealt with surrealist master David Lynch, the latter with body horror maestro David Cronenberg.
The men’s oeuvres are both completely original—sui generis in a way, despite their stated influences—and both have stood the test of time. The one thing they have in common (or had, since Lynch is sadly no longer with us) was an unwavering and uncompromising vision.
You could probably tease out some other similarities but the differences are more numerous and starker: David Lynch presents Francis Bacon-like tableaux onscreen, using music and light and off-kilter performances to evoke the muddled logic of a bad dream. Then, at strange and unpredictable moments, light breaks through, letting us see the darkness in a new context. He is interested in fabrics and surfaces, music and images that feel like non sequiturs impinging on our quotidian realm from a much stranger and deeper one.
David Cronenberg’s approach is more conscious and analytical, more that of a vivisector than a magician. He is interested in bodily decay and the vestiges of the reptilian lurking beneath our mammalian facades. Like with William Burroughs (whose “Naked Lunch” he adapted for the screen) there is a piercing intelligence intent on stripping layers away to arrive at a terrible core truth. That intelligence interrogates itself as mercilessly or more mercilessly than those around it. Like Burroughs, Cronenberg seems to believe there is a force at work in every man not working to his advantage, and he wants to root it out. But since this isn’t Scorsese, we’re not talking so much about catharsis as the excision of a cancer.
Both men were aware of their different approaches. Lynch hated interviews—comparing them once to a firing squad which you somehow survive. He also didn’t like to talk about his projects in any kind of detail. Not the ones he had done, because he wanted them to speak for themselves and allow audiences to arrive at their own individual interpretations of his work. Nor the ones he was working on, since, like Norman Mailer, he feared “letting the air out of the tires.” Probing too deeply into his intentions was to potentially spoil whatever was there, operating behind the curtain.
Cronenberg spoke of this tendency—not specifically as it applied to Lynch, but in general. He acknowledged that it worked for some people, but that he wasn’t one of them. He was more like Kubrick in that he constantly examined his intentions, before, during, and even after the process. “Why am I doing this?” “What is the significance of making this choice rather than that one?” “What is my unconscious trying to tell me and how can I make that a more prominent and conscious part of my filmmaking?”
He could no more go in relying on intuition and instinct than could a surgeon with his scalpel, or a chemist playing with highly reactive substances.
I’m sure that anyone reading this has their own preference: either to work from the unconscious without tampering with it or coax the meaning from the depths of the sleeping mind and to examine it under the brights before going forward. There are no doubt strengths and weaknesses to each approach, and the final call on how much to think about the meaning of what one’s doing is each artist’s own call to make.
And there’s no law that says you must stick with one method or the other throughout your entire career. One day you might wake up knowing every beat in a story that came to mind, knowing also its thematic significance. Then you might wake up the next day and put a pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) with a completely blank mind, writing automatically so that it’s almost like pushing a possessed Ouija planchette.
My own style seems to be a blend of both approaches, although I’ve found that as I get older I do tend to think more about what I’m doing (and why) before actually doing it. This is especially true with the novel, if only because it requires such an investment of time and energy. I feel far more fallible these days than I did in my twenties, and I know my time is limited and that I can’t afford to waste it.
Still, I do hold to the idea of not talking (too much) about a project while it’s in progress, but that seems to be more a matter of superstition than aesthetic choice. I can analyze it, but only alone and throughout the day. I talk to myself in the voices of the various characters while in the shower, or while walking the dogs. When out in public doing it, I make sure to mutter under my breath, and barely move my jaws like a ventriloquist. After all, I don’t want to be taken for a crazy man, just a mild eccentric.
I suppose, then, that there is no ultimate answer to which approach is better—letting the unconscious power the work or dredging that submerged impulse and harnessing its power consciously. Instead, there is only a matter of preference and the circumstances surrounding the project in question. No surprise there, since art is not a science.
Unless you take the clinically Cronenbergian approach, in which case sometimes art very much is.
Here we are then, back to square one, the Lynch-Cronenberg Continuum now turned Conundrum.
In the neighborhood was a video store called Black Lodge, located in an old white house on a gently sloping hill. The store’s sections were divided by director rather than genre (very auteur-ish) and the staff were certified film buffs. I remember there was a red velour couch in the center of the store, facing a TV on a stand usually playing something black and white. One of the guys who hung around there named Craig had just made his own very low budget movie on digital that was doing the rounds of the local circuit. Craig turned out to be Craig Brewer, who would go on to direct the very Memphian hit film Hustle & Flow.
Sadly, Black Lodge was a casualty of Covid, though my dreams of becoming a filmmaker ended well before they closed their doors. At some point I realized I was frankly too socially withdrawn to engage in a collaborative art like filmmaking. I had enough trouble just communicating my ideas from my fingertips to the keyboard, forget other people.
Back when I had that cinematic ambition, though, I read a bunch of books on the subject. Some of them were helpful, some less so. One series I found fascinating were Faber & Faber’s series of interviews with various directors: Scorsese on Scorsese, Lee on Lee, etc. In the books the filmmakers would talk about their philosophies, their training, the complications and the joys of filmmaking. As with any creative endeavor the complications seemed to outnumber the joys, but the joys were what kept them coming back again and again.
Two of my favorite books in the series were Lynch on Lynch and Cronenberg on Cronenberg. For those not big into movies who can’t guess from the titles, the first book dealt with surrealist master David Lynch, the latter with body horror maestro David Cronenberg.
The men’s oeuvres are both completely original—sui generis in a way, despite their stated influences—and both have stood the test of time. The one thing they have in common (or had, since Lynch is sadly no longer with us) was an unwavering and uncompromising vision.
You could probably tease out some other similarities but the differences are more numerous and starker: David Lynch presents Francis Bacon-like tableaux onscreen, using music and light and off-kilter performances to evoke the muddled logic of a bad dream. Then, at strange and unpredictable moments, light breaks through, letting us see the darkness in a new context. He is interested in fabrics and surfaces, music and images that feel like non sequiturs impinging on our quotidian realm from a much stranger and deeper one.
David Cronenberg’s approach is more conscious and analytical, more that of a vivisector than a magician. He is interested in bodily decay and the vestiges of the reptilian lurking beneath our mammalian facades. Like with William Burroughs (whose “Naked Lunch” he adapted for the screen) there is a piercing intelligence intent on stripping layers away to arrive at a terrible core truth. That intelligence interrogates itself as mercilessly or more mercilessly than those around it. Like Burroughs, Cronenberg seems to believe there is a force at work in every man not working to his advantage, and he wants to root it out. But since this isn’t Scorsese, we’re not talking so much about catharsis as the excision of a cancer.
Both men were aware of their different approaches. Lynch hated interviews—comparing them once to a firing squad which you somehow survive. He also didn’t like to talk about his projects in any kind of detail. Not the ones he had done, because he wanted them to speak for themselves and allow audiences to arrive at their own individual interpretations of his work. Nor the ones he was working on, since, like Norman Mailer, he feared “letting the air out of the tires.” Probing too deeply into his intentions was to potentially spoil whatever was there, operating behind the curtain.
Cronenberg spoke of this tendency—not specifically as it applied to Lynch, but in general. He acknowledged that it worked for some people, but that he wasn’t one of them. He was more like Kubrick in that he constantly examined his intentions, before, during, and even after the process. “Why am I doing this?” “What is the significance of making this choice rather than that one?” “What is my unconscious trying to tell me and how can I make that a more prominent and conscious part of my filmmaking?”
He could no more go in relying on intuition and instinct than could a surgeon with his scalpel, or a chemist playing with highly reactive substances.
I’m sure that anyone reading this has their own preference: either to work from the unconscious without tampering with it or coax the meaning from the depths of the sleeping mind and to examine it under the brights before going forward. There are no doubt strengths and weaknesses to each approach, and the final call on how much to think about the meaning of what one’s doing is each artist’s own call to make.
And there’s no law that says you must stick with one method or the other throughout your entire career. One day you might wake up knowing every beat in a story that came to mind, knowing also its thematic significance. Then you might wake up the next day and put a pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) with a completely blank mind, writing automatically so that it’s almost like pushing a possessed Ouija planchette.
My own style seems to be a blend of both approaches, although I’ve found that as I get older I do tend to think more about what I’m doing (and why) before actually doing it. This is especially true with the novel, if only because it requires such an investment of time and energy. I feel far more fallible these days than I did in my twenties, and I know my time is limited and that I can’t afford to waste it.
Still, I do hold to the idea of not talking (too much) about a project while it’s in progress, but that seems to be more a matter of superstition than aesthetic choice. I can analyze it, but only alone and throughout the day. I talk to myself in the voices of the various characters while in the shower, or while walking the dogs. When out in public doing it, I make sure to mutter under my breath, and barely move my jaws like a ventriloquist. After all, I don’t want to be taken for a crazy man, just a mild eccentric.
I suppose, then, that there is no ultimate answer to which approach is better—letting the unconscious power the work or dredging that submerged impulse and harnessing its power consciously. Instead, there is only a matter of preference and the circumstances surrounding the project in question. No surprise there, since art is not a science.
Unless you take the clinically Cronenbergian approach, in which case sometimes art very much is.
Here we are then, back to square one, the Lynch-Cronenberg Continuum now turned Conundrum.
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