Chapters
An Introduction to David Lynch
Blue Velvet and the directorial mysteries of David Lynch
Blue Velvet and Freudian concepts
The dishonesty of David Lynch or the attribution of false ideas by others
The strange world of Twin Peaks and Lynch’s other projects
Lost Highway and the beginning of Lynch’s focus on identity
Explanations in Lost Highway
Lynch’s Straight Story and his ‘poisonous valentine to Hollywood’
Mulholland Drive as the embodiment of the American Dream
Conclusion
Cinematic artistry or artistic fraud? A critical analysis and appraisal of the work of David Lynch.
The divisive nature of David Lynch: A study into the films of David Lynch, a director who remains divisive because of how unique and diverse his work is in comparison to most contemporary American cinema.
An Introduction to David Lynch
David Lynch’s is a director and auteur like no other in modern cinema, his work to many is utterly compelling and beautiful yet frustratingly unattainable and hard to grasp to a multitude of others. The lingering question is how much of David Lynch’s work and ideas are actually meaningful or substantial and how much of it is people on the outside looking in and in effect misinterpreting his work as genius? Defining somebody as a genius is subjective so the debate won’t contextualise itself as ‘Is David Lynch a genius?’ moreover it will focus on whether his works have genuine substance or whether underneath the surface there is not a great deal to assimilate.
Unlike a great number of American film directors, David Lynch can be hard define. What we can say about him is that his work often fluctuates into the dark underbelly of suburban America. His films range from the surrealist and horrifying industrial Philadelphia-influenced Eraserhead to the erroneous and putrefying green lawns and white picket fences in Blue Velvet to the sinister and warping essence of Hollywood in Mulholland Drive and his last feature film Inland Empire. Lynch didn’t grow up as a teenager besotted with films, his dream was to be an artist (Woodward, 1990) and his reluctance to give away much about his films possibly indicates that he sees himself as an artist as well as and possibly above being a film maker. This quality is what sets him apart from many in his field, he sees the world differently and thus he creates differently to so many of his contemporaries. His former partner and star of Blue Velvet, Isabella Rossellini said of Lynch: “Most people have strange thoughts, but they rationalize them. David doesn’t translate his images logically, so they remain raw, emotional. Whenever I ask him where his ideas come from, he says it’s like fishing. He never knows what he’s going to catch.” (Woodward, 1990). David Lynch is a director obsessed and fixated with ideas, these can often be strange, captivating and beautiful but sometimes inaccessible which may be one of the reasons Lynch has never really found a mass audience. Alongside his film-making, Lynch has made a number of music albums, his most recent being The Big Dream in 2013, he continually paints and has also directed a handful of music videos and created an online animated series of shorts. He has also been the poster boy for Transcendental Meditation in America, a practice which has helped him immensely with his creativity and something he passionately promotes worldwide. These have all been Lynch’s forms of expression, ways to exhibit his many ideas, this shows that film-making may just another way of communicating his thoughts and abstractions.
What can undoubtedly be said about Lynch is that he is not a mainstream director, he is not the guy that a studio would want in charge of tens of millions of dollars. This was the case with the 1984 sci-fi flop Dune which Lynch didn’t have full control over and he says “I felt like I had sort of sold myself out” (Gilmore, 1997). However he learnt a sobering lesson, “I would rather not make a film than make one where I don’t have final cut” (Woodward, 1990). This would be the last time Lynch would compromise as his next four films Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway would all subvert any notion that Lynch was in any way a mainstream director. The majority of Hollywood directors are not so enigmatic when it comes to their work, Lynch doesn’t just make films that are open to interpretation, his films are like his paintings, they are so much about audience interpretation and he fully encourages that. Mysteries are what gets Lynch excited: “I love mysteries. To fall into a mystery and its danger…everything becomes so intense in those moments. When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there’s got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going” (Gilmore, 1997).
This offering up of audience interpretation in his films and in a sense washing his hands of his works after they are released can be criticized, after all if a film maker relinquishes his work and won’t give anything away, letting the audience do all the interpretive work then practically anything and everything can be written or said about the possible meanings of that said film maker’s work. In essence the films are then fair game to be defined by scholars, authors and the man on the street in whichever way people see fit. Therefore, when people think of Lynch as a director who inundates his films with ideas, darkness and all sorts of possible Freudian and subversive themes then it has to be clear that Lynch has never really confirmed or denied people’s particular theories or ideas on his films and therefore much of what is written is outside interpretation. This is perfectly acceptable for an academic purpose though, as D.H. Lawrence said “Never trust the artist, trust the tale” (Squires & Cushman, 1990, p162). There has to be an acceptance that the only way of analysing and scrutinizing Lynch’s themes and ideas in his works is by way of compliance with varied opinions which for the majority won’t be that of the man himself.
Viewing Lynch as a director who has a unique vision in terms of American cinema is key to analysing his films, stylistically the films he has made over the course of his career have had more in common with Cocteau and Buñuel than those of his peers (Cousins, 2004, p397) and his artistic eye and ambiguous personality puts him beyond even the industries more unique modern figures like Quentin Tarantino or David Cronenberg. Both of those directors express some of the same darkness and black humour that Lynch has used over the years. Tarantino especially is a director known for playing around with time frames and narrative structure, but Lynch goes deeper, his films can be alluring and cryptic or alternatively frustrating and impenetrable. Some of Lynch’s works i.e. Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart can be viewed on a conscious level as straight narratives with strange elements and obscure visuals thrown in but a number of his films are nothing like any contemporary American director. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are all unique visually but explore similar themes of the loss (or gain) of identity, the characters in these films are in crisis and their own psyches and mental states play key roles in the thematics of the films and often in how the narrative plays out visually and logistically. These issues which arise in these films can be linked to dreams, something which Lynch has explored throughout his career and so its no coincidence that the dreamy feel to many of his films correlate with the thematic elements within the films themselves.
Blue Velvet and the directorial mysteries of David Lynch
On the face of it Blue Velvet is a neo-noir mystery about a young man finding an ear and becoming entangled in a plot of murder and kidnap. Yet if we go beneath the surface plot just as Lynch takes us underneath the picket fences and apparent gleeful American suburbia, and into the film’s layered subtext there is more to the film than simply a mere linear story. Jeffrey Beaumont returns to his home town of Lumberton after his father suffers a stroke, he subsequently finds a severed ear in a field and notifies the police. Jeffrey then becomes embroiled in the case when he meets the local police detective’s daughter Sandy who helps him find out who the ear belonged to, and on the way coming across club singer Dorothy Vallens and a sick, sadistic maniac called Frank Booth. Lynch builds the story around a nostalgic 50’s American backdrop, similar to Twin Peaks and in a sense Wild At Heart and Mulholland Drive. These works appear to be set in the 1950’s or 1960’s but really they are just set in the ‘Lynch universe’ and the nostalgia that envelopes them is Lynch’s way of incorporating his childhood memories of American life into his body of work. This setting is Lynch’s own world where darkness and glee live side by side. The nostalgia shows Lynch as quite the sentimental film maker, not only sentimental about his own past and preconceptions of America and what lies beneath but sentimental of pure and simple love stories from an age gone by. In the majority of his work, love isn’t just a key theme but a central juxtaposition.
Blue Velvet was in essence, the director’s first ‘Lynchian’ film because even though Eraserhead was extremely strange and disturbing, something about Blue Velvet gives the film an ‘other-worldly’ quality, the characters in the film feel like they belong solely in a Lynch universe. The same can be said for Eraserhead, however that particular universe feels somewhat abstract and distant from reality, whereas Blue Velvet takes place in a much more close-to-home setting. Like many of his works, Blue Velvet can have various readings, none of which have come from the director himself but have been discussed and prescribed by others.
When Jeffrey Beaumont finds a severed ear in a field it leads him into a dark world, Lynch calls the ear in the film “an opening” and a “ticket to another world” (www.thecityofabsurdity.com) which “can be a hint towards a true abyss” (www.davidlynch.de), these descriptions of a seemingly incidental orifice demonstrate the subtext and the dark underbelly of the film. This is a director leading us into another world, his world in which characters like the unremittingly evil Frank Booth exist in. One reading of the film suggests that the crux of the film in-between the entering and exiting of the ear is a nightmare, and the opening and ending perfect suburbia along with white picket fences and robins exhibit the real world. The appearance of the robin with an insect in its mouth at the end is a signifier that order has been restored, evil has been defeated, these are typical Lynch images that reveal more than dialogue could. Visually Lynch has used animals throughout his work, in the opening of The Elephant Man, Lynch uses actual Elephants which contrast with a screaming woman who we understand to be the main character John Merrick’s mother. The elephant is seen as demonic and with the use of slow motion visuals and sound, the hysteric woman looks as if she is being attacked or even more disturbingly impregnated by an elephant. In the TV series Twin Peaks, the opening features a imagery of a beautiful robin and that then fades into shots of the Packard saw mills, which is incidentally another trope of Lynch’s. Not only does Lynch use motifs of animals and animalistic behaviour but he has also used themes of industrial factories like in Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. These images come from his background of living in Philadelphia, the city in which Lynch started out as a director and the place he says of the place: “the biggest influence in my whole life was that city. And it happened at the perfect time. I saw things that were frightening, but more than that, thrilling” (Rodley, 2005, p43). Lynch has even brought out a new book which is a collection of factory and industrial photographs he has taken throughout his life, showing just how transfixed he is with industrial settings and the ‘belching of smoke and fire’ (Wood, 2014).
In so much of Lynch’s work there is a contrast between the horrific and disturbing and the profoundly beautiful, whether that be in characters, states of mind or places. What often happens is that these things of beauty and horror stay separate but their worlds crossover and intertwine, this leads to melodrama and fierce binary oppositions between good and evil. Without the opposing forces in Blue Velvet of the naïve and innocence of Jeffrey and Sandy, and the despicable evil of Frank Booth, then the contrasting visuals of white picket fences and sunny gardens against the bleak apartment of Dorothy Vallens would not be as effective. The question is, did Lynch create this world and these opposing forces purposely and is there genuine substance in the film? The answer to both of these questions is yes and Lynch demonstrably created these characters with a ‘world inside a world’ in mind, and in like much of his work there are dreamy visuals and motifs at play. As said, David Lynch doesn’t reveal anything specific about his work because he says it makes him “uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It’s better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it’s a very personal thing and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.” (www.thecityofabsurdity.com). Therefore the only way we can interpret Lynch’s films is through the reading and studying of outside sources and our own ideas to uncover if Lynch’s work is cinematic artistry or artistic fraud.
Blue Velvet and Freudian concepts
The wardrobe scene from Blue Velvet has been talked about more than any other scene in the film, mainly due to the violent and disturbing nature of it but also because of the underlying and unconscious connotations of it. It is often referred to as the film’s ‘primal scene’, a term which is undeniably linked with Sigmund Freud and even more evocatively with Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The term came about through Freud’s analysis of his patient Sergei Pankejeff’s dream of white wolves appearing at his window, the publication would become known as ‘The Wolfman’ and the ‘primal scene’ was the apparent viewing of parental sex ‘a tergo more ferarum’ (intercourse from behind like animals) (Williams, 2008, p225). Freud’s thesis was that the symptoms of the dream was the inability to have intercourse with women other than from behind because of the viewing of the ‘primal scene’ however it is not clear if it is an actual witnessing that is recollected or a constructed fantasy. Freud saw the still gaze and pricked up ears of the wolves from the dream as attributes of the dreamer himself and the boy sees himself watching the primal scene (a scene of passive immobile fascination) (Williams, 2008, p226) which brings us back to Jeffrey in the wardrobe in Blue Velvet.
Jeffrey is hidden in the wardrobe of Dorothy Vallens whilst Frank Booth, an evil and fearsome man enters her apartment. Not only is Jeffrey unable to move during the events that take place but he is also transfixed by what he sees, and as Lynch said in a Canadian news interview promoting the film that it “allows people to become a voyeur” and he talks of finding a “strange sickness” in “things that we don’t know about and are hidden” that “we want to see and watch from a distance” (Canadian TV Interview, 1986). Just as Jeffrey is a voyeur in that wardrobe watching the primal scene take place, the audience is in exactly the same position, unable to stop the events and having to take up the role of voyeur, we are in the same state of motionless acuity as Jeffrey, unable to remove our eyes from what we are seeing (Sheen & Davison, 2004, p52). The common academic reading of Blue Velvet and the film’s primal scene is that Frank and Dorothy are the (symbolic or metaphorical) parents of Jeffrey and that when Jeffrey watches the horrific rape attack take place, he is the son watching his father commit either an act of violence towards his mother or even more disturbingly (and the thing which ties in to ‘The Wolfman’) parental sadomasochistic sex.
Michel Chion argues that Frank behaves like an actor in a show designed to sexually excite the woman and that Dorothy is complicit because she goes on to ask Jeffrey to hit her as though she is sexually gratified from violence (Chion, 1995, p94). We also can’t forget that moments before Jeffrey witnesses his ‘perverse parental surrogates’ have their violent sexual encounter that Jeffrey was threatened with castration by Dorothy wielding a kitchen knife, so Lynch apparently serves up three primal fantasies in quick succession (Williams, 2008, p227), the seduction from the mother, the threat of castration and the viewing of the primal scene between the parents. A reading of the scene prior to the ‘wardrobe scene’ where Jeffrey hides in the wardrobe for the first time refers to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and what he described as the ‘Look’, which suggests that the act of looking and watching objectifies the world around us, and places the one who looks in control (Devlin & Biderman, 2011, p50). The theory is that Jeffrey is actually in control when he watches Dorothy from her wardrobe remove her clothes and wig, he isn’t an innocent bystander as he then moves from spectator to participant when Dorothy threatens him with a knife and under possible castration and the first of the three primal fantasies. The moral questions and ambivalence of Blue Velvet have also been scrutinized in regards to German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘Will’ which is something irrational inside us all that pervades reality and opposing his fellow countryman Immanual Kant philosophy that the inner will is rational and by following our common intuition we are all able to act morally (Devlin & Biderman, 2011, p46). Schopenhauer’s ideas are much more pessimistic, he believed that our ‘Will’ is made up of our worst impulses, the ‘irresistible violent and sexual drives that most of us try to hide behind a veneer of civility’ and we lie to ourselves and believe we won’t be overcome by these impulses. Blue Velvet does seem to be a visual manifestation of this struggle, especially when we think of all the moral questions that our hero Jeffrey deals with in terms of voyeurism, violence and sex. This certainly applies to a number of Lynch’s main protagonists who ‘frequently hide their curiosity for the darker side of life beneath a veneer of wholesomeness’ (Odell, 2007, p8).
One question that remains through all of these academic theories about Blue Velvet’s most controversial scene and all of its Freudian connotations is did David Lynch intend for these readings of the film to seem accurate or is it just academics reading too much into the meanings of the film? That is a question which cannot be answered fully because of Lynch being so introverted when it comes to detailing or giving away any type of meaning of his work. Therefore does that mean his cinematic artistry comes into question because he didn’t intend for these sorts of meanings? No, because his status as a film-maker is not purely based on the academic readings, but it is based on his surrealist style, his artistic pallet that is put before us on screen, and the fact that his films usually offer up something completely different from anything else that is out there in the film industry.
There are so many theories about Blue Velvet alone, and some are more plausible than others. Jeffrey’s sexuality has been called into question because of dialogue like: “I looked for you in my closet tonight” (Frankel, 2003) which seems like a red herring as this line has different connotations to a homosexual innuendo. Frank’s oxygen mask that he inhales from throughout the film has been compared to what Freud called the ‘ceremonial breathing’ of his ‘Wolf Man’ patient (Sheen & Davison, 2004, p49) which does seem more plausible. However this is surely just a meaning garnered from people outside of Lynch’s circle as it would not be surprising if Lynch wasn’t even aware of Freud’s various theories and works while writing and making the film. Also when Frank proclaims his love for Jeffrey and calls him his ‘candy-coloured clown’ this has been described as the homosexual seduction of the son by the father (Chion, 1995, p93) rather than just the ravings of a lunatic which was surely Lynch’s intention instead of a Freudian homosexual undertone. This theory is derailed by the fact that in Lynch’s script for Blue Velvet, the ‘candy-coloured clown’ isn’t anywhere to be seen, so the obvious reason for this line (which opens the Orbison track ‘In Dreams’) is that Lynch simply wanted to use the line from the song in Frank’s dialogue to Jeffrey. It seems as though this dialogue was probably accidental as without the track being used in an earlier scene then the line would not be used. However these sorts of ‘happy accidents’ (Bollen & Danluck, 2014) are common with Lynch’s work, the monstrous and possibly imaginary character of ‘BOB’ in Twin Peaks came about when on the shows pilot episode Lynch’s prop assistant Frank Silva was moving a chest of drawers in a bedroom and Lynch said “Don’t block yourself in there, Frank” (Cousins, 2004, p396) which then lead Lynch to suggest Frank be written into the show and the character emerged. This shows Lynch as someone constantly open to new ideas and changes when in production and a director with an almost guerilla film making ethic.
The dishonesty of David Lynch or the attribution of false ideas by others
The problem is that there could be an academic reading into any scene of the film which may or may not signify one thing or the other, but if we take the film for its artistic merits and see Lynch as a film-maker and visionary then Blue Velvet can surely be seen as a success. Not only is the film disturbing and mysterious but it is also beautifully shot in a way that transposes two worlds and sucks the audience deeper and deeper into the darkness that encumbers the bright and vivid nostalgic America. Lynch succeeds on both levels, he made a thoroughly gorgeous looking film and wrote a enthralling script but also managed to add in his trademark quirks which confuse and entangle academics even more. The film is in essence a noir which is a genre less common in American cinema for the past thirty years, it shocked audiences at the time because of its ‘tonal range’ (Cousins, 2004, p395) something Lynch has gone onto master throughout his filmography with his work often featuring contrasting tones which shift continually.
Take the ‘In Dreams’ scene in Frank’s drug dealer friend Ben’s apartment, this is an important scene in my opinion. We see a man forcefully made to ritualistically perform a lip synced version of the Roy Orbison song in front of Frank, a captive Jeffrey and all Frank’s friends, on the face of it the scene seems to simply be a strange moment in the group’s night, but if we go deeper this is Lynch’s wink to the audience. I think Lynch is using this performance to indulge the audience and let us know exactly how he intended the film to come across. This is all a nightmare and this performance of this particular song is the ‘moment of clarity’ which we will later see reproduced in Mulholland Drive, Lynch isn’t using dialogue to clue the audience in, he is using musical performance. We can read it on one level as just another Lynch quirk, another strange moment where Frank exhorts his power, or we can be more shrewd and read it as Lynch using artistry to give us an idea of what he sees the film as being, which strongly hints towards a dream logic. This ‘moment of clarity’ is an example of Lynch being an honest film-maker rather than a dishonest one, he is giving the audience the clues to unlock the film instead of telling us plainly and in exact terms how he sees the film.
A realistic portrayal of Lynch’s films including Blue Velvet is that they incorporate a type of ‘cosmic lyricism’ which brings the small into contact with the immense and the disgusting with the grandiose (Chion, 1995, p23). This goes back to Lynch’s constant contrasting between the disturbing and the beautiful, this is what he aims for rather than specifically Freudian nightmarish primal fantasies. This is not to say that these things are not in his films, that the primal scene is not there because judging by the evidence, it is. However, Lynch actually intending these things is a different matter as when he was asked about Freudian concepts in Blue Velvet, Lynch said:
“My reasoning mind didn’t ever stop and say ‘What the hell am I doing?’ That’s why I keep saying that making films is a subconscious thing. Words get in the way. Rational thinking gets in the way. It can really stop you cold. But when it comes out in a pure sort of stream, from some other place, film has a great way of giving shape to the subconscious. It’s just a great language for that (Todd, 2012, p69).
This response would not appease Lynch’s critics as he is typically avoiding the actual question, preferring to talk in terms of the unconscious, and therefore it is a personal choice of whether or not one can believe what he is saying and he genuinely makes films this way (as evidence would point at) or that he is being fraudulently vague and refusing to confirm or deny his position because he needs that air of mystery to surround his works. Critics like John Simon of The National Review labelled Blue Velvet as a ‘mindless piece of junk’ which did no more than ‘strive for sexual arousal’. He went on further to say that whereas ‘true pornography, which does not pretend to be anything else, has at least a shred of honesty’, he said Blue Velvet was a ‘dishonest’ film that ‘pretended to be art’ (Todd, 2012, p66). It’s clear that the film was wholly divisive and the fact that the film was described as dishonest shows the animosity some had for the film and its director, the word dishonest lingers in the air over David Lynch because of how different and non-mainstream the rest of his work became.
The strange world of Twin Peaks and Lynch’s other projects
Lynch’s next three films would come either side of the cult television series Twin Peaks and would all be just as divisive as Blue Velvet but none of them would be as critically acclaimed or have the notoriety as the 1986 film. These works were Wild At Heart (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and Lost Highway (1997). Wild At Heart is a disjointed work and one which feels unsatisfactory, certain scenes don’t add up or add anything to the convoluted plot, certain characters feel underdeveloped and false yet the film does still feel ‘Lynchian’. Featuring bizarre musical performances of Nicholas Cage singing Elvis songs, homages to The Wizard of Oz, characters that belong solely in the ‘Lynch universe’ and scenes which hold a real nostalgia to films like West Side Story while the heroine of the film (Laura Dern) conforms to 50’s sentimentality (Chion, 1995, p128).
The series Twin Peaks brought out a trait of Lynch’s that remains as one of his more subtle tropes, the series shows “the absurdity of the mundane” as “in most television and film, the actuality of life with its slow pace and coincidences is often compressed for the sake of narrative convenience” (Odell & Le Blanc, 2007, p9). Just like Blue Velvet, the show resembled and parodied film noir, with the narrative mystery, brooding darkness and a cast of females that were either victims or femme fatales. In Twin Peaks, the parody of film noir isn’t so much defined by that description, rather as Linda Hutcheon’s study into parody as being a form of bitextuality where the ‘source’ and ‘new’ texts can coexist instead of the latter ‘subtracting’ from the former (Sheen & Davison, 2004, p79). Lynch is someone who has continually parodied or used elements of pastiche in his works, this new way of looking at the ‘bitextuality’ of Twin Peaks can be applied to his other works and possibly suggests Lynch is an honest film maker and aware of his influences and influence. The characters that feature in the series are all flawed or downright eccentric, they inhabit a world that only Lynch could have created, a world which “lies on the border between absurdity and reason, where the surreal invades the mundane.” (Odell & Le Blanc, 2007, p9). That absurdity and surrealism was maybe what caused the series to implode, the reluctance of Lynch to reveal who killed Laura Palmer didn’t stop the studio stepping in and unveiling the mystery, prompting the series to turn even more strange and to just drift as the ratings were falling just like the Julee Cruise theme song to the show.
Lost Highway and the beginning of Lynch’s focus on identity
After the critical and commercial failure of Fire Walk With Me, Lynch ventured into TV with Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost with On The Air in 1992 which was cancelled albeit after a much shorter run than Twin Peaks. His next feature film would be Lost Highway, a strange and subversive feature that would be the first of three films that perspectively we can see as dealing with common themes of identity, psychological trauma and multiple personalities. It was the next film in Lynch’s deal with French Film studio CIBY 2000 and the second time he collaborated with Wild At Heart writer Barry Gifford. The film focuses on saxophonist Fred Madison and his wife Renee who begin to receive disturbing parcels of videotapes that show their house being filmed, more and more videotapes begin to turn up and eventually Fred watches one in which he sees himself killing his wife. After being arrested and put on death row, a bizarre and extremely ‘Lynchian’ transformation happens. Soon after, the prison guards discover that the man in the cell isn’t Fred Madison but mechanic Pete Dayton. Not only does our main protagonist seemingly disappear but he seems to become a whole new person.
The story is engrossing, confusing and perfectly shows off the intricacies and complexity of David Lynch’s mind. The cinematography and mise en scene of the film is tremendously dark, just like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks to an extent felt like noir works this film feels perfectly at home in that genre. The film didn’t make a great impact at the box office, with a $15m budget the film only grossed just under $4m and therefore was a commercial failure (www.imdb.com). However Lynch has not really been a hugely bankable director in his career, Eraserhead made just over $7m with a minuscule budget. The Elephant Man made over $26m with a moderate budget of $5m. Lynch’s commercial and critical failure Dune which had a huge budget of $40m lost money and made $30m back. After this he went back to a moderate budget of $6m for Blue Velvet and the film made over $8m. Wild At Heart had a budget of under $10m and made over $14m while after Lost Highway, Lynch’s The Straight Story made a loss as it made just over $6m with a $10m budget (www.imdb.com). Mulholland Drive also made a loss domestically with a $15m budget the film only took just over $11m but worldwide took $20m (the-numbers.com) and his last feature film Inland Empire only made $4m but with a small budget (all figures are estimated/calculated breakdowns). This all shows that Lynch’s films have never really made a huge amount at the box office, there have been plenty of financial losses and the profits he has made have always been quite small.
Much of Lynch’s work has been compared to that of painter Francis Bacon, someone who Lynch certainly had huge admiration for and called him “the number one kinda hero painter” and how “Normally I only like a couple of years of a painter’s work, but I like everything of Bacon’s.” (Sheen & Davison, 2004, p139). The transformation scene in Lost Highway where Fred Madison’s face is disformed can be seen as Bacon-esque as Bacon’s subjects often had their faces blurred in somewhat horrific visual styles and the dimly-lit Madison household gives off a real sense of dread and feels like it has come straight from a Bacon painting. The use of shadows and dark palettes feel comparable to Hitchcock’s use of shadow from his time studying German expressionism, the opening few minutes of the film feel so bleak and glib that you feel like there’s something wrong with your television. This is where Lynch’s visual prowess is shown off, his narrative styles may be questioned and the bizarre elements and characters in his films might not always work but what can’t be criticised is the notion that Lynch is a true cinematic visionary. The film’s opening titles show a speeding highway whilst ‘I’m Deranged’ by David Bowie plays out, that song is already a clue as to what direction the film may take and in what sort of head-space. Fans of David Lynch would say that like much of his work Lost Highway is a film which takes multiple viewings to fully grasp and understand its various narrative and thematic twists, however Lynch sceptics would label it as another surrealist con trick.
The dialogue between Fred and his wife Renee is surreal at best, every line they say to one another is delivered in a sombre and uneasy deadpan tone, there’s a real tension in the air and it only becomes clear why after you’ve seen the film more than once and begin to understand the undertones of what we see on screen. There’s also the appearance of red drapes in Fred and Renee’s apartment early on which suggest a huge amount to David Lynch fans. In Twin Peaks, The Red Room which seemingly inhabits the souls of the dead features red drapes, they feature in The Slow Club in Blue Velvet where Dorothy performs and in other instances in Lynch’s work the drapes signify some sort of darkness or a performance. Along with electricity, animals, smoke and fire (Paiva, 2003), this is just another piece of visual iconography that tells us we are watching a David Lynch film, giving us certain expectations about what the drapes may signify. Another Lynch trope is the extreme close up of characters’ faces, especially their eyes and lips. The strange dialogue continues in the film and as Fred and Renee bring the police in to help with the disturbing video tapes that keep arriving, there’s a line which Fred says that could not be more of a clue to understanding the complex nature of the film and Fred’s mind. One of the detectives asks “Do you own a video camera?” to which Renee replies “No. Fred hates them.” The Detectives both look at Fred. Fred says “I like to remember things my own way.” The detective retorts “What do you mean by that?” Fred then proclaims “How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” (Lynch & Gifford, Lost Highway, 1997).
This bizarre conversation feels like Lynch’s wink to the audience, Fred’s answer is subtle and easy to forget after one viewing of the film but when you understand the film as a whole then this dialogue is extremely clever and pivotal in the grand scheme of the narrative. It’s an interaction which quickly passes and you would not particularly notice it at first but its almost like Lynch intelligently realised that Lost Highway would be a film that needed more than one viewing and so the dialogue actually becomes quite important. The film would also be another chance for Lynch to collaborate with composer Angelo Badalamenti who worked with Lynch on Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild At Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and would subsequently go on to work on The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive. This long term collaboration sees a familiar musical thread throughout most of these works, moody atmosphere is everything and the slow, held chords create a sonic darkness which pervades narrative. Lynch works closely with Badalamenti in creating original soundscapes but they also work together in choosing tracks which marry with the images Lynch creates on screen. Blue Velvet featured music of the 60’s including Roy Orbison, Bobby Vinton and Ketty Lester, Wild At Heart relied heavily on Elvis Presley and blues music, and the Twin Peaks series and film featured everything from laid back jazz to tender love songs. Lost Highway is actually quite a subversive and alternative film in terms of its soundtrack, it includes artists like Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein. This is Lynch modernizing his own work and taste by bringing in these alternative artists but not just for the sake of it as all these songs do add a certain amount of madness to the proceedings in the film.
Explanations in Lost Highway
Music is extremely important to Lynch’s films in terms of setting the mood and his soundtracks are often as important as his cinematography or narratives, its clear that Lynch has a fascination with marrying together image and sound. Lynch even has music playing in his headphones sometimes on set while dialogue is being spoken (Klein, 1990) simply so he can get a feel for the scenes and for his particular audio scope. This indicates how much Lynch thrives off the feeling of his films, he wants to listen to the audio in order to put himself into the scene rather than just watch it as an outside observer, this shows quite a pure love for his art and it makes it difficult to see him as fraudulent when it comes to his work. There are questions about Lost Highway that do remain unanswered, for instance who is ‘The Mystery Man’ who crops up in both Fred and Pete’s stories? Who sent the various videotapes to Fred and Renee? And how can Fred reappear in the ending? However these questions seem irrelevant as the film literally takes us down a lost highway where characters merge and narratives tail off. Lynch has actually gone some way in explaining the story of the film, which is sacrilege for him and something he has always stayed clear of. He has stated how the film is a ‘psychogenic fugue’ which is a form of mental illness where a person “creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything- they forget their past identity” (Swezey, 1997).
This crucial explanation is something Lynch has never done before with any of his works, he doesn’t do explanations or even like to talk in specifics at all when it comes to narrative and so Lost Highway actually becomes one of Lynch’s most simple films even though it seems riddled with complications. Why Lynch felt the need to divulge this information and practically unlock the plot of the film is unknown but in the greater scheme of things I think it indicates that the man is genuine, he makes his films bizarre and labyrinthine in plot and ideas because he wants to and that’s his shtick. He fills his films with oddball characters and stays loyal to the ‘Lynch universe’ because he would not be David Lynch otherwise, he would be mainstream which is something that his career could not have been further from. Nobody can criticise Lynch on a visual basis as his career has been made up of dark, neo-noir, psychological films for the most part which are always visually striking and beautifully shot, but without the mysteries, the strangeness and the discussion that can be had from watching a Lynch film then his oeuvre would not have much importance.
Lost Highway does not work any more or any less because Lynch has gone some way in explaining the film but what Lynch’s disclosure has done is show that Lynch is conning nobody, when a film is abstract then it becomes easy to criticise its honesty or purity. However Lynch will always be a divisive presence, the late renowned film critic Roger Ebert didn’t like the film at all and said that even though Lynch is a talented director he “pulls the rug from under his own films” that the film “plays like a director’s idea book” and “There is no sense to be made of it. To try is to miss the point. What you see is all you get” (Ebert, 1997). This shows that even with a film which is seemingly a more straightforward proposition after Lynch’s part explanation, the familiar criticisms are still there. However you could argue that Lynch should not have to explain anything, the film should be able to stand up in terms of its own logic and if it doesn’t then has the director failed in his efforts to allow us to understand his vision or have we as the viewers failed in not grasping what Lynch wanted us to understand? Not all reviews of the film were negative though, Rolling Stone magazine summed up the film with: “Hilarious, hypnotic and sizzlingly erotic, Lost Highway is low on logic, but Lynch’s zonked, visionary magic makes it fly” (Travers, 1997).
Lynch’s Straight Story and his ‘poisonous valentine to Hollywood’
There is the possibility that after the promise of Lynch after he made The Elephant Man (1980) as a young and exciting talent, the fact that by 1997 he still had not made a great commercial and critical success aside from Blue Velvet was a disappointment to many critics and that his work was more appreciated in Europe than in America. It could be possible that the people who liked Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks are willing to stick by him and soldier through anything he makes no matter how testing narratively or logically but reversely the people who were sceptical in Lynch’s early days will remain dubious. Therefore his work exists in a bubble of itself, Lynch fans will appreciate it and the people who are not so convinced by him will stay like that because he has never compromised his own style, apart from in 1999 when he made The Straight Story. This was the story of Alvin Straight and his journey on a lawnmower to visit his ill brother Lyle in Wisconsin, the film is utterly simplistic in dialogue, narrative and tone. The film couldn’t be further away from a typical Lynch work, the characters are normal and there are no strange events that occur, it was a U certificate film which tells us that there is nothing threatening at all in it and was actually produced by Disney. The fact that Lynch made a film like this where practically nothing happens apart from a sweet man on a lawnmower going from A to B is actually quite a Lynch thing to do, he’s a subversive film-maker so after Lost Highway nobody would have suspected him to make a U certificate Disney picture. This was Lynch’s own straight story, he showed the world that he can make a linear and simplistic narrative, and to the extreme. It may be Lynch’s most honest and humble work as well as what many think is his most sincere because of how endearing the characters are and how the film is Alvin Straight’s journey through his own memories and past. The film shows Lynch once again as a director who is full of sentimentality to eras gone by and beneath the darkness and strangeness of most of his works, there are always simple themes of love, it just so happens that this film is played out completely straight.
Leaving The Straight Story aside, Lynch’s films became increasingly non-narrative and instead of focusing on ‘story’ they began more to emphasize mood, tone, feelings and a highly subjective vision of the world (Sheen & Davison, 2004, p142) which is why we can see Lynch as having more traits of a painter than most of his contemporary film makers. Lynch reveals a modernism in his work that has long been taken for granted in painting and music and he breaks conventional narrative which bypasses the intellect and reaches the viewer on an affective, sensational level (Sheen & Davison, 2004, p142). A perfect example of this style would be his next feature Mulholland Drive (2001) which would become Lynch’s ‘poisonous valentine to Hollywood’ (Hoberman, 2001). The film’s tonal qualities feel somewhat more important than the narrative and there doesn’t feel like a more Lynchian film than Mulholland Drive which is a mystery about a woman who has amnesia (Laura Harring) after a car accident, she stumbles upon a Hollywood apartment which belongs to the auntie of Betty (Naomi Watts) who has moved to Hollywood to pursue her acting career. The film features various storylines and strange sequences which ultimately interconnect and help piece together the mystery of who the woman in the car accident is.
Just as Blue Velvet took us beneath the American suburbia and white picket fences into a dark underbelly of crime and kidnap, Twin Peaks showed us that in every home there are lies that run deep and perfect prom queen Laura Palmer wasn’t who she seemed, Mulholland Drive once again brings out David Lynch’s fixation with the unseen and what lies beneath. The film feels like a culmination of a collective of Lynch’s past ideas, but this time Lynch takes an inward look at Hollywood. In the film Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is a film director who has the control of his film taken away from him by the Italian producers, this is autobiographical and a direct reference to Lynch’s bad experience making Dune in which he wasn’t given final cut by the Italian De Laurentiis family (Olson, 2008, p493). The film is Lynch’s own Sunset Boulevard with hints of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona with his own unique visionary style clearly adhered to. As with many of his past works, the real world and dreams seem to merge into a type of ‘dream reality’ (Devlin & Biderman, 2011, p26) and although in this film there is no fight between the binary oppositions of good and evil, the main conflict is in trying to uncover the identity of our two main lead actresses.
Mulholland Drive as the embodiment of the American Dream
The film was originally supposed to be a pilot for a television series but when it was canned because it was too dark and and too strange for network television, Lynch acquired funding from Studio Canal+ to shoot an additional 45 minutes of material and the film would then go on to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (Odell, 2007, p140). The first section of the film is about Betty helping the woman from the accident (who names herself Rita after Rita Hayworth) uncover her identity and the second section is the bleak realisation that all of what we saw previous was in Naomi Watts’ character’s dream. Lynch contrasts the bright lights and optimism of Hollywood that Betty sees in her dream when she arrives with her real life which is a depressing state of affairs as a failed actress obsessed by the unrequited love of Camilla Rhodes (subsequently played by Laura Harring after the dream has ended). Just like in Lost Highway, characters’ identities are changed and even through the strangeness of things like the blue box (which is either key to unlocking scenes in the film or just a red herring) and the mystery man behind the dumpster who seems to be from another place or dimension which is similar to in Twin Peaks and Lost Highway (Olson, 2008, p494) Lynch treads familiar ground with all of these elements. For one of the most pivotal scenes in the film, Lynch produces another ‘moment of clarity’ through performance, just like in Blue Velvet where a man mimes along to Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ and then is suddenly stopped, as if breaking the illusion of the scene and hinting towards the crux of the film being a dream. In Mulholland Drive Roy Orbison is used once again, albeit a Spanish version of his song ‘Crying’, this performance by Rebekah Del Rio in front of the Lynchian red drapes compels our two main characters to start crying uncontrollably because Naomi Watts’ character knows that just as the theatre MC says, “It is an allusion” and this perfect story of herself and Rita falling in love is all a dream. So is Lynch simply rehashing old ideas making him quite unoriginal or is the film a culmination of ideas from a variety of his past works and put together making something cohesive and better than anything he has done previously? I would argue the latter because Mulholland Drive feels like a complete Lynch film, everything works and slots into place and even though we have seen some of these ideas previously, the film confirms him as an artist in his own league and world, a ‘legend who fledgling film-makers admire and an inspiring example of an artist who is absolutely devoted to his vision’ (Olson, 2008, p497).
Conclusion
The film in which Lynch outstretched himself was his final feature, Inland Empire (2006) which is almost incomprehensible and impossible to understand and although most critics loved the film, there is a huge amount of it that is extremely difficult to grasp. If there is any film that could alienate Lynch’s core fans then Inland Empire is that film. Now David Lynch focuses on his music, meditation and painting and may never make another feature film in his lifetime, I firmly believe that he is one of the most unique visionaries to have ever worked in cinema, his films remain far from flawless and with the bizarreness of his films comes a divisiveness that will live long past the man himself. His films don’t just create debate, they often induce vitriol and hate but at the same time they produce absolute passion and love. He came on top in a Guardian poll of the 40 most internationally important working directors in 2003, beating the likes of Martin Scorsese (Todd, 2012, p154) which shows how highly he is regarded critically. He is the cinematic artist of modern day American cinema, a post-modern surrealist who stands alone. As with many other controversial directors like Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch has managed to continue to do his own thing and make the projects he has wanted for thirty years and has remained on the periphery of the mainstream, a place it seems Lynch thrives upon. Lynch is a director who can easily be accused of artistic fraud because of how strange and alienating his style can be at times, but although his work can be difficult to comprehend there has always been a substance and a visceral nature underneath the constant darkness.
Lynch’s work has often featured contrasts – light and dark, dream and reality, good and evil, and the most fitting contrast is how people view Lynch, there doesn’t seem to be too much middle ground, either he is a genius film-maker or simply a fraud who rehashes old ideas, I firmly believe in the former as there is no other film-maker in the industry like David Lynch. His characters come straight out of that ‘Lynch universe’ and the fraudulent debate falls down somewhat as he has made films like The Elephant Man and The Straight Story that are perfectly linear and ‘normal’ for Lynch but he has chosen to make the majority of his work strange and dark and unlike any other living director. His films were a method of expression for him, unfortunately now he only focuses on music and art but the idea that he may be a fraud can be debunked. A film-maker who works on impulse and the flow of ideas, his films aren’t meant to confuse but rather to challenge our expectations that films have to be linear and to take us to places that we have never ventured in contemporary American cinema and he was successful. David Lynch’s surreal legacy will live on for years to come.
Bibliography
Screenplays:
Lynch, D (1986) ‘Blue Velvet’, Lynch Net www.lynchnet.com/bv/bvscript.html (Accessed on 21st October 2013).
Lynch, D & Gifford, B ‘Lost Highway’, Lynch Net www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhscript.html (Accessed on 9th March 2014).
Websites with author names:
Bollen, C & Danluck, M (2014) ‘The Surreal Careers of David Lynch’ www.interviewmagazine.com/culture Feb (Accessed on 15th February 2014).
Gilmore, M (1997) ‘The Lost Boys’, Rolling Stone Magazine (online) www.rollingstone.com/music/news 6 March (Accessed on 21st October 2013).
Hoberman, J (2001) ‘Village Voice – Points of No Return’ Village Voice Newspaper (online) www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/vvoice.html (Accessed on 22nd March 2014).
Klein, A (1990) ‘Like a Drug…’ The Hollywood Reporter Film & TV Music Special Issue www.thecityofabsurdity.com/intmusic.html (Accessed on 18th March 2014).
Paiva, R (2003) ‘The Lynch Film’, The City of Absurdity (online) www.thecityofabsurdity.com/papers/paiva03.html (Accessed on 9th March 2014).
Swezey, S (1997) ‘911: David Lynch Phone Home’, Filmmaker Magazine (online) www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhfm.html (Accessed on 19th March 2014).
Travers, P (1997) ‘Lost Highway’, Rolling Stone Magazine (online) www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/lost-highway-19970221 (Accessed on 20th March 2014).
Wood, G (2014) ‘David Lynch: photographer of factories and nudes’ The Telegraph (online) www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography 16 Jan (Accessed on 20th January 2014).
Woodward, R (1990) ‘A Dark Lens On America’, New York Times (online) www.nytimes.com 14 Jan (Accessed on 21st October 2013).
Books:
Chion, M (1995) David Lynch, London: British Film Insitute.
Cousins, M (2004) The Story of Film, London: Pavilion Books.
Devlin, W & Biderman, S (2011) Philosophy of Popular Culture: Philosophy of David Lynch, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.
Odell, C & Le Blanc, M (2007) David Lynch, Harpenden: Kamera Books.
Olson, G (2008) David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, Maryland: Scarecrow Press.
Rodley, C (2005) Lynch on Lynch, London: Macmillan.
Sheen, E & Davison, A (2004) The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, London: Wallflower Press.
Squires, M & Cushman, K (1990) The Challenge of D.H. Lawrence, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Todd, A (2012) Authorship and the Films of David Lynch: Aesthetic Reception in Contemporary Hollywood, London: I.B. Tauris.
Williams, L (2008) Screening Sex, London: Duke University Press.
Websites without author names:
Davidlynch.de (no date). ‘Dying on your way to the cigarette-machine’ (online) http://www.davidlynch.de/99focustrans.html (Accessed on 03 Jan 2014).
IMDB (1997) ‘Lost Highway Box Office’ (online) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116922/ (Accessed on 20th March 2014).
The City of Absurdity (no date). ‘David Lynch – Blue Velvet is a love story’ (online) http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/bluevelvet/bvabout.html (Accessed on 03 Jan 2014).
The City of Absurdity (no date). ‘The David Lynch Quote Collection – Meaning” (online) http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/index.html (Accessed on 08 Jan 2014).
The Numbers (no date) ‘Mulholland Drive’ (online) http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2001/MULDR.php (Accessed on 20th March 2014).
Journals:
Frankel, D (2003) ‘David Lynch’s Blue Velvet’, Artforum International journal 41.8 (Apr 2003): 89.
Online videos:
DVDguy2012. 2011. David Lynch Canadian TV Interview 1986 (Blue Velvet). (online). (Accessed on 20th January 2014). Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ziGDFW1fnI