by William D. Tucker
Filmmaker David Lynch-director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive, Dune, Lost Highway-refuses to discuss what his films mean. He'll talk about how they're made. He might speak about the roots, the inspirations of a given work, but he doesn't want to tell critics or interviewers or audience members what deeper significance-if any-his work contains, suggests, or embodies. Lynch prefers not to state the theme of a given work directly. This may be because he doesn't consciously construct his films to deliver a singular meaning. It might be that his films are meant to be engaged with in a state of uncertainty, with no definite answers within reach. Lynch has a background as a visual artist, so maybe he approaches his films as visual works first and foremost, and everything else is meant to support the visuals.
Lynch is also a proponent of Transcendental Meditation. He has a foundation-the David Lynch Foundation-which promotes TM as a discipline for achieving personal happiness and world peace. TM involves-as do many meditative techniques-sitting quietly, eyes closed, staying in the moment, taking note of your thoughts and feelings as they occur, all while trying to exist in a wholly non-judgmental moment . . . something like that?
To be perfectly honest, I've never seriously practiced meditation. Maybe I tried to meditate once. I fell asleep. I think that's what happened. I don't claim to understand TM or any other mindfulness discipline. What puts me in a thoughtful, focused state of mind is cinema. Sitting, staring into a screen, ideally in the dark, but sometimes with the lights on, and giving myself over to a fantasy, a gritty neo-realist drama, a progressive documentary trying to throw a wrench into the works of the war machine, a hallucinogenic anime dystopia, a Hong Kong heroic bloodshed shoot-em-up-whatever kind of movie, cinema puts me in an altered state of mind. Maybe I'm just a compulsive fantasist, but cinema is my drug, my therapy, my meditation. It's to the point where I find it hard to articulate, to even want to put it down in words, yet I have this nagging feeling that I should. I don't know why. There's absolutely nothing special about me. I don't see more films per year than other people. I don't have any special expertise or metaphysical insight. But that's what I feel compelled to do every now and again when I have the time and the willpower to put down my thoughts about movies I find interesting.
Although I do not practice any form of mindfulness or meditation, I wanted to try to approach the cinema of David Lynch in a more personal, philosophical fashion, integrating my own feelings, thoughts, and musings from my own experience into the viewing experience. In a way, that's what every film reviewer or critic does, but I wanted to go a bit more loopy with this one.
I've come to view cinema as a kind of secular church, as a spiritual experience that affects me internally in important ways. I don't know who first came up with the term 'The Church of Cinema,'( I think I first came across it reading an interview with Quentin Tarantino who referred to him and fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese as worshiping at different churches as a metaphor for their different styles of filmmaking) but I like it. So these reviews of Lynch's films aren't exactly meant to be sermons-I have no desire to preach definitive visions-but meditations on possibility, interpretation, and feelings. Lynch's films strike me as unusually inviting of interpretation, rumination, and meditation because they can be very weird, abstract, surreal, and grotesque. Lynch's cinema can also be shocking in moments of violence and transformation; and disorienting in their transitions into different realms of existence, perception, and consciousness. Lynch's movies can also be frustratingly obscure, opaque even, and this by design, thus demanding multiple viewings to figure out what, precisely, the hell is going on in a given film. Or maybe this opacity is meant to short circuit rational thought and encourage a shift into more intuitive forms of feeling and knowing, as opposed to rationally dissecting a work into its various parts, and assigning meaning, form, and function to all those parts.
I don't know. But I'm going to take a close look at the cinema of David Lynch, and see what I find.
NEXT: 1/4/18:The Lynch Meditations 1: Six Men Getting Sick (1967)
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