Status Updates From Una cosa divertente che non...

the search for Laura Palmer’skiller yields postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer = Homecoming Queenby Day & Laura Palmer = Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that mirrored a whole town’smoral schizophrenia.

And in response to mydiscomfort I’m going to do one of two things: I’m either going to find some way to punishthe movie for making me uncomfortable, or I’m going to find a way to interpret the moviethat eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible

We hope fervently thatthis is so because we need to be able to believe that our own hideousnesses and Darknesses are secre

I submit that we also, as an audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalousimmoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and exposed.

I like to judge. I like to be allowed to root forJustice To Be Done without the slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing inreal moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either.

When Frank says “ You’re like me,” Jeffrey’s response is tolunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose—a brutally primalresponse 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 violentrelease; I pretty much just have to sit there and be uncomfortable.

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.

It’s little wonder that Lynch gets accused of voyeurism: critics have to make Lynch avoyeur in order to approve something like Blue Velvet from within a conventional moralframework that has Good on top/outside and Evil below/within.

American critics who like Lynchapplaud his “genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover thestrange, perverse passions beneath” and his movies for providing “the password to aninner sanctum of horror and desire” and “evocations of the malevolent forces at work beneath nostalgic constructs.”

You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or neo-Hegelian, but it’s also Lynchian, because what Lynch’s movies 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.

In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk abouteither 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.

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

, 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.
(Relatable)

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

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.

I’m going to claim that evil is what David Lynch’s movies are essentially about, andthat Lynch’s explorations of human beings’ various relationships to evil are, if idiosyncratic and Expressionistic, nevertheless sensitive and insightful and true

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

“Master of Weird”/”Czar of Bizarre”

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.

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.

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.

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.