Pain amplifiers

about David Lynch's movies

In the wake of David Lynch’s death yesterday I feel tempted to exaggerate his influence on my life (as if that made me special) and dredge up a host of possibly falsified memories of my encounters with his work. For example, I’m pretty sure The Elephant Man, which I saw at home on a cable channel when I was 11, was the first time a movie made me cry by myself. I think I started watching it because I thought it was an old monster movie. Until then I wouldn’t have suspected myself of having any special empathy for outsiders and I spent a lot of my time trying to figure out how to be as normal and unexceptional as possible so kids at school would accept me. My experience with this movie became another secret I felt I had to keep.

A few years later I saw Dune in the theater, probably at the Barn Cinema in Doylestown, which is now being torn down. I had no idea Dune was in any way connected to The Elephant Man, but I remember saving for a long time afterward this glossary that the ushers were obliged to pass out. Not that I thought it explained anything, but I wished all movies were weird enough to require a study guide that made them only more confusing. By that point I had read the Dune books, but they did nothing to prepare me for what “folding space” would look like in the film, with giant gurgling blobs floating in a vast ether emitting shafts of light from their vaginal orifices, or for the casual body horror in its depiction of some of the peripheral characters, like this Space Guild diplomat:

As an unexplained alarm continues to bleat, he speaks into some sort of translation device (a kind of metaphoric pain amplifier) that makes booming stentorian pronouncements out of what seem to be his animalistic grunts and whines, though they might also be guttural noises made by the factotum with the (also unexplained) kazoo-like object in his mouth. It’s hard to tell because nothing appears to correspond with the diplomat’s moving lips, which makes it all increasingly unsettling — a typical example of Lynch’s uncanny sound design. I didn’t know what to make of any of it, but I knew I liked it a lot more than Return of the Jedi.

When Blue Velvet came out, I was working at a second-run cinema in my hometown, and I was allowed to go in to watch the movies once I closed the concession counter. I remember coming in during the scene where Jeffrey Beaumont is out walking at night with Sandy, and he points to a house and says, “I used to know a kid who lived there who had the biggest tongue in the world.” A moment later he asks her if she knows the “chicken walk” and then performs it for her, lowering his shoulders and strutting in a goofy circle without moving his upper torso.

There are, of course, many indelible scenes in that movie that are far more bizarre and troubling. I am especially bothered by the faint wobbling of this man:

But the walking scene at night is what I usually think of as my first self-conscious experience of the “Lynchian,” which J. Hoberman, in his obit of Lynch for the New York Times, describes as a matter of “troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs, and eroticized derangement of the commonplace.” I couldn’t have told you who directed Dune or The Elephant Man when I saw them, though it was easy enough to spot the Lynchian touches in them in retrospect. But I knew going in to Blue Velvet that it was supposed to be a weird and great movie by a director whose name I had by that time learned. When Kyle MacLachlan did the chicken walk, I felt Lynch’s specific idiosyncrasy.

The first two seasons of Twin Peaks would be full of similar quirkiness, random “fish in the percolator” moments that evoke a low-stakes sense of corrupted innocence to balance out the weightier examinations of the theme. And there was lots more straightforward surrealism, ponderous dream sequences and improvised resonances. In his book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch recounts the story about how he cast set dresser and nonactor Frank Silva as Bob, a murderous demon and personification of evil, after his reflection was accidentally caught in a mirror. (I always wonder how that must have made Silva feel to be singled out like that, to be more or less informed that you represent the essence of darkness in some stranger’s subconscious.) “Ideas come along in the strangest way when you just pay attention,” Lynch writes. “And sometimes things happen on the set that make you start dreaming.” Similarly, he describes coming up with the show’s purgatorial “Red Room”:

It was around six-thirty in the evening and we had gone outside. There were cars in the parking lot. I leaned my hands on the roof of one car, and it was very, very warm — not hot, but nicely warm. I was leaning there and — ssssst! — the Red Room appeared. And the backward thing appeared, and then some of the dialogue ... So I had this idea, these fragments. And I fell in love with them … And you start to remember the idea more. You try some things and you make mistakes, but you rearrange, add other stuff, and then it feels the way that idea felt.

When Twin Peaks was airing, I was a creative writing major, and I wanted so much to be able to write with that kind of impulsiveness, to have hunches I couldn’t explain to myself and to be completely confident about them, but I just didn’t have it. I didn’t feel any of my own ideas; everything I came up with was a contrivance. I couldn’t pay attention like Lynch writes about no matter how much I paid attention to his work, which I watched over and over again on VHS tapes. It seemed so frustrating that I could recognize those impulses and flashes in someone else’s work, could be enchanted by the atmosphere they created and find myself walking around dazed and intoxicated by them, suddenly seeing hidden layers and secret correspondences in everything, only to realize that it was all vicarious, and I couldn’t produce them myself but could only consume them.

For a while this turned me against Lynch’s films. I couldn’t even appreciate Wild at Heart or Fire Walk With Me when I first saw them, though I came to love them later. When I saw Wild at Heart in the theater, I thought it was too whimsical, too corny, that Nicolas Cage was too aware of himself. I didn’t get the Wizard of Oz stuff. I couldn’t forgive moments like when the dog runs off with the severed hand after the bank robbery scene.

The hallmarks of Lynch’s style had been copied by too many bad music videos by then, and they had started to pollute their source. But now when I think of that movie, I think of the sequence when Sailor and Lula are driving at night and come upon a upside-down car wrecked by the side of the road. They find a bleeding Sherilynn Fenn wandering in the light cast by the headlamps, reciting lines from an anxiety dream, alternating between rage and confusion.

Here the trademark non sequiturs have become gruesome and baroque, marking the cruel arbitrariness of death with trivialities. “Where’s my hairbrush!”

There’s a scene in Fire Walk With Me that has a similar ambiance, a night scene in the woods, lit by bobbing flashlight beams and marked by pointedly flat dialogue and vertiginous mood shifts. A drug deal goes bad and Bobby Briggs, an arrogant teenager who had up to this point been playing at being a badass, shoots a man in self-defense. Laura Palmer, who at first seems drunk, stares at the blasted head of the corpse with a chilling blankness and then suddenly bursts out laughing. She starts toying with Bobby and mocking him, undermining his grip on reality while he pathetically tries to cover the body with scoops of dirt from his hands. It feels unbelievably cruel, the mirthless bravado of the damned.

On the level of plot, this scene (like many others) only makes the film more confusing and implausible, but none of that matters. The sense of impending crisis is made more real and more unbearable with every incongruity. The entire film feels like being stuck in an over-vivid nightmare made up of private symbols and codes, way too personal, and nearly every scene is filled with an unrelenting dread that can’t be rationalized away. None is more upsetting then when Laura is sitting in a convertible with her father at an intersection while an old man with a walker is crossing the street, moving so slowly that he seems to be sinking into the ground. He is crossing in front of a tractor-trailer carrying a stack of logs, whose presence seems deeply wrong somehow despite being entirely explicable given the Northwestern setting. Engines begin revving loudly, and horns start going off, building to a deafening cacophony. A dog that may or may not be present on the scene begins to bark malevolently. A pickup truck with a camper on the back, which had been careening maniacally behind them a few moments before, wheels around the rig to pull up alongside Laura and her father, and the driver starts yelling cryptic riddles at them: “There was a stillness!”

This is all to dramatize Laura’s coming to awareness of the abuse she has been subjected to and it is appropriately devastating even though all the feeling in it has been translated into Lynch’s impenetrable and seemingly haphazard arcana of canned corn and Formica tabletops. Here his surreality is completely drained of whimsey; instead it intimates a world of total violation in which all the resonances of the ordinary are revealed as sinister and foreboding. It’s as though the veneer of the normal world dissolves before your eyes.

These days I don’t have the stamina to watch films like that. I tend to want movies that reinforce the veneer and reassure me that it won’t start to peel away without warning. Even The Straight Story, the G-rated film Lynch made for Disney in 1999, is a little too intense for me now. As you can probably tell, I don’t have anything especially profound to say about him, especially right now, but I couldn’t think about anything else today and I thought I may as well acknowledge that.