Dune might be my personal favorite David Lynch film. I've watched it many times over the years. It is a fascinating, flawed, crazy ambitious mess that suggests new and intriguing ways of doing science fiction and fantasy cinema. It uses voice overs in a subtle fashion somewhat reminiscent of how they are used in a couple of those Lone Wolf and Cub movies. It goes to some wild places in its depictions of mutated far future human societies. The music, sound design, set design, visual effects, and costumes all make a cohesive whole even if the script falls a bit short.
My main criticism would be that it waters down the moral ambiguity of Frank Herbert's novel. The book is a conspiracy thriller told from the perspectives of warring conspiracies. It has a mood and tone which reminds me of The Godfather and The Godfather part II, or that episode of The X-Files depicting the Cigarette Smoking Man's backstory. I get a similar vibe playing the original Syndicate PC game or the Illuminati New World Order trading card game, which are both games that simulate what it's like to mastermind global organized criminal and terrorist operations using mind control, propaganda, and brute force. Lynch's film comes nowhere near this darkness opting instead to have the House Atreides be the super good guys and the House Harkonnen be the super bad guys with no real shades of gray between them. It's a missed opportunity.
But as a work of visual invention Dune is spectacular. And it has a vastly overqualified cast who don't get nearly enough to do, but a few moments stand out here and there. The script includes many memorable scenes, but one cannot help but feel that much has been neglected, leaving out key logical steps in the story, and gutting vital character development. In some respects, Lynch's Dune is a great unfinished symphony similar to Alejandro Jodorowsky's meticulously designed and plotted adaptation of the same source material. When I first got into this film I was playing immersive role playing video games like Final Fantasy VII, Suikoden, Phantasy Star IV, Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and Final Fantasy VI, which were full of long stretches of gameplay punctuated by non-interactive cut scenes of high literary quality giving these games a cinematic feel. Lynch's Dune sort of reminds me of a highlights reel of evocative cut scenes without the gameplay. The throughline of the story is there, but the substance is severely diminished. Even the extended three hour version assembled for broadcast television doesn't quite overcome these shortcomings, but is a fascinating alternate cut all the same.
Dune is my personal favorite, but I can understand why many people don't care for it. Objectively, I would say that Mulholland Dr. is Lynch's singular cinematic masterpiece, the Official No. 1. But Dune is my favorite misbegotten freak baby. I love it for both its flaws and its flashes of brilliance.
Showing posts with label January 2018. Show all posts
Showing posts with label January 2018. Show all posts
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Sunday, January 21, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -6
"Based on a true story."
I take these words as a warning,
that a life in all its complexity, contradiction, and paradox
is about to be rendered down into a trite, Hollywood stroke-job;
to please as many people as possible
with absurdly simplistic life lessons and bogus uplift
cynically calculated and implemented.
Especially when it comes to the biopic-short for biographical picture-which usually presumes to tell the life story of some famous and noteworthy person from history.
How do you make a human life fit within the artificial confines of the dogma of three-act structure?
The film I've seen that did this thing best was Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman, and that was a totally fictional film that felt like an authentic biopic. Right at the two-hour mark, it managed to make you feel as though you've experienced decades of a woman's life in Japan from the end of World War II through to the early 1960s. I have no idea how Imamura did it. I tried to figure it out years ago, and all I could do was profess my admiration for it, note its unusual qualities, and move on with my life.
The Elephant Man is one of two movies David Lynch has directed-so far-"based on a true story"-with the other one being The Straight Story, and I would place them in second and third place behind The Insect Woman as far as conventional biopics are concerned . . . even though The Insect Woman isn't even a biopic, technically speaking. Sometimes good cinema screws up the usual categories of things. And if you don't like that, or you don't agree, well, um, it's my blog, I determine the reality 'round here, bub!
I take these words as a warning,
that a life in all its complexity, contradiction, and paradox
is about to be rendered down into a trite, Hollywood stroke-job;
to please as many people as possible
with absurdly simplistic life lessons and bogus uplift
cynically calculated and implemented.
Especially when it comes to the biopic-short for biographical picture-which usually presumes to tell the life story of some famous and noteworthy person from history.
How do you make a human life fit within the artificial confines of the dogma of three-act structure?
The film I've seen that did this thing best was Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman, and that was a totally fictional film that felt like an authentic biopic. Right at the two-hour mark, it managed to make you feel as though you've experienced decades of a woman's life in Japan from the end of World War II through to the early 1960s. I have no idea how Imamura did it. I tried to figure it out years ago, and all I could do was profess my admiration for it, note its unusual qualities, and move on with my life.
The Elephant Man is one of two movies David Lynch has directed-so far-"based on a true story"-with the other one being The Straight Story, and I would place them in second and third place behind The Insect Woman as far as conventional biopics are concerned . . . even though The Insect Woman isn't even a biopic, technically speaking. Sometimes good cinema screws up the usual categories of things. And if you don't like that, or you don't agree, well, um, it's my blog, I determine the reality 'round here, bub!
Saturday, January 20, 2018
COMICS REVIEW: APOCALYPTIGIRL: AN ARIA FOR THE END TIMES (2015)
Script and Art by Andrew MacLean
...
"You know, for an apocalypse . . . it ain't all bad."
...
"You know, for an apocalypse . . . it ain't all bad."
...
Review by William D. Tucker.
A woman named Aria wanders a post-apocalyptic world with her sword, her guns, and her twitchy tomcat, Jelly Beans, singing French opera, and not having such a bad time of it, really. The scenery is nice. Lots of trees and other plants reclaiming the abandoned office buildings, vehicles, and ruined infrastructure. Aria lives underground inside an abandoned subway car wired up to a power source, hooked up to clean water, and she's able to harvest all-organic fruits and nuts from the trees all over the surface world. Aria has a motorcycle, and a broken down mech she has all but given up on repairing for the moment. Fresh air, clean water, healthy food, exercise-Aria's seemingly got the run of the planet.
Except for the muscle dudes in blue warpaint wielding Kalashnikov assault rifles. Oh, and the killer hordes of mutant attack dogs. And the blue-skinned lunatics, those dudes are heavy. And then there's the soldiers of the One . . . but you'll just have to check that crew out yourself.
Aria's life is in danger, but she is not scared. She's armed, she has survival skills, combat training, and a mission to find an ultra-tech power source to give her life meaning, since she is completely isolated from meaningful human contact during her time on this planet, aside from her skirmishes with the blue warpaint dudes and the blue-skinned dudes and the soldiers of the One. Only the soldiers of the One seem to speak Aria's language, and so we can perhaps assume that the lack of an ability to communicate only contributes to the tension and hostility that regularly boils over into lethal violence.
During one of Aria's battles with the blue warpaint dudes, she encounters a teenage boy who can't quite pull the trigger on his Kalashnikov. Aria spares his life, and she comes to be haunted by his intense eyes. Later, one of these eyes sheds a tear over a comrade-in-arms slain by Aria in battle.
At eighty-eight pages, Apocalyptigirl keeps things simple and to the point, telling an action-packed story of a post-apocalyptic wanderer contending with a dangerous world in the vein of A Boy and His Dog, The Omega Man, or the first Fallout game. The art is charming, colorful, slightly cartoony, and brutally violent where necessary. Bodies are blown apart in shootouts. Limbs get hacked off. Aria is not to be fucked with despite her sunny, borderline twee demeanor. The thing which Aria is trying to find is cool looking, but is basically a MacGuffin, just a device to give some semblance of a structure to the plot. I would've preferred a more interesting object for her to quest after, but it doesn't ruin anything. I was particularly pleased with the ending, which I did not expect. There is an intriguing subtext of a society divided along gender lines, with the apocalypse implied to be the outcome of militaristic hypermasculinity gone berserk, but the emphasis is on the action, and the details of Aria's solitary existence. Apocalyptigirl isn't preachy, but it does have more on its mind than is obvious on a first reading.
Overall, Apocalyptigirl gets by almost entirely on the charm and dynamism of its visuals, which is no mean feat. I read it several times over an evening, and I have since ruminated over its visuals, thinking, "What a cozy apocalypse! I would buy the RPG sourcebook. I want to wander this wasteland myself." There's a lot to enjoy within this slim volume. A lot of comics go on and on, to diminishing returns over time. I like it when everything you need is in one volume, between two covers, no bullshit, just the thing itself.
A woman named Aria wanders a post-apocalyptic world with her sword, her guns, and her twitchy tomcat, Jelly Beans, singing French opera, and not having such a bad time of it, really. The scenery is nice. Lots of trees and other plants reclaiming the abandoned office buildings, vehicles, and ruined infrastructure. Aria lives underground inside an abandoned subway car wired up to a power source, hooked up to clean water, and she's able to harvest all-organic fruits and nuts from the trees all over the surface world. Aria has a motorcycle, and a broken down mech she has all but given up on repairing for the moment. Fresh air, clean water, healthy food, exercise-Aria's seemingly got the run of the planet.
Except for the muscle dudes in blue warpaint wielding Kalashnikov assault rifles. Oh, and the killer hordes of mutant attack dogs. And the blue-skinned lunatics, those dudes are heavy. And then there's the soldiers of the One . . . but you'll just have to check that crew out yourself.
Aria's life is in danger, but she is not scared. She's armed, she has survival skills, combat training, and a mission to find an ultra-tech power source to give her life meaning, since she is completely isolated from meaningful human contact during her time on this planet, aside from her skirmishes with the blue warpaint dudes and the blue-skinned dudes and the soldiers of the One. Only the soldiers of the One seem to speak Aria's language, and so we can perhaps assume that the lack of an ability to communicate only contributes to the tension and hostility that regularly boils over into lethal violence.
During one of Aria's battles with the blue warpaint dudes, she encounters a teenage boy who can't quite pull the trigger on his Kalashnikov. Aria spares his life, and she comes to be haunted by his intense eyes. Later, one of these eyes sheds a tear over a comrade-in-arms slain by Aria in battle.
At eighty-eight pages, Apocalyptigirl keeps things simple and to the point, telling an action-packed story of a post-apocalyptic wanderer contending with a dangerous world in the vein of A Boy and His Dog, The Omega Man, or the first Fallout game. The art is charming, colorful, slightly cartoony, and brutally violent where necessary. Bodies are blown apart in shootouts. Limbs get hacked off. Aria is not to be fucked with despite her sunny, borderline twee demeanor. The thing which Aria is trying to find is cool looking, but is basically a MacGuffin, just a device to give some semblance of a structure to the plot. I would've preferred a more interesting object for her to quest after, but it doesn't ruin anything. I was particularly pleased with the ending, which I did not expect. There is an intriguing subtext of a society divided along gender lines, with the apocalypse implied to be the outcome of militaristic hypermasculinity gone berserk, but the emphasis is on the action, and the details of Aria's solitary existence. Apocalyptigirl isn't preachy, but it does have more on its mind than is obvious on a first reading.
Overall, Apocalyptigirl gets by almost entirely on the charm and dynamism of its visuals, which is no mean feat. I read it several times over an evening, and I have since ruminated over its visuals, thinking, "What a cozy apocalypse! I would buy the RPG sourcebook. I want to wander this wasteland myself." There's a lot to enjoy within this slim volume. A lot of comics go on and on, to diminishing returns over time. I like it when everything you need is in one volume, between two covers, no bullshit, just the thing itself.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -5
A man sitting on the edge of a bed gets up to walk through a door
a year and a half later
the man walks through the door
well,
that was the shooting schedule,
how it worked out.
Two years into the shoot, the original cinematographer died of some unspecified illness.
Leading man Jack Nance kept his hair all crazy teased-up like that during the entire shoot.
Money ran out, no one knew if it would ever be finished,
everyone involved gave whatever they had: time, money, labor,
with no real profit motive or hope of breaking in to the Hollywood scene,
Five years of filming
Eraserhead's the result.
It's some weird shit.
...
I saw Eraserhead for the first time sometime in 2002 on VHS with a couple of friends in a dingy, collegiate apartment. We watched it in mostly rapt silence, all Lynch fans, a perfect screening.
None of us knew anything about the making of the film. I assumed it was a movie made like any other movie. Maybe I thought of it being something like Night of the Living Dead, shot on weekends by a dedicated group of people over five or six months.
After Eraserhead, I recall us watching Tetsuo the Iron Man but I'm not sure. That would've been a terrific double feature.
David Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard for the cast and crew of Eraserhead to put them in the mood of a black and white reality. I guess we should've watched Sunset Boulevard with Eraserhead back in 2002. Well, we didn't know any better at that time.
Maybe I'll watch Sunset Boulevard first before watching Eraserhead this time around.
a year and a half later
the man walks through the door
well,
that was the shooting schedule,
how it worked out.
Two years into the shoot, the original cinematographer died of some unspecified illness.
Leading man Jack Nance kept his hair all crazy teased-up like that during the entire shoot.
Money ran out, no one knew if it would ever be finished,
everyone involved gave whatever they had: time, money, labor,
with no real profit motive or hope of breaking in to the Hollywood scene,
Five years of filming
Eraserhead's the result.
It's some weird shit.
...
I saw Eraserhead for the first time sometime in 2002 on VHS with a couple of friends in a dingy, collegiate apartment. We watched it in mostly rapt silence, all Lynch fans, a perfect screening.
None of us knew anything about the making of the film. I assumed it was a movie made like any other movie. Maybe I thought of it being something like Night of the Living Dead, shot on weekends by a dedicated group of people over five or six months.
After Eraserhead, I recall us watching Tetsuo the Iron Man but I'm not sure. That would've been a terrific double feature.
David Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard for the cast and crew of Eraserhead to put them in the mood of a black and white reality. I guess we should've watched Sunset Boulevard with Eraserhead back in 2002. Well, we didn't know any better at that time.
Maybe I'll watch Sunset Boulevard first before watching Eraserhead this time around.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 4: The Amputee Version One and Version Two (1974)
A woman (Catherine Coulson) writes a letter or maybe a script for a daytime soap opera as a nurse (David Lynch) tends to the stump of her freshly amputated left leg. The right leg has also been amputated. The woman jots down a series of jealous accusations and insinuations exchanged between a group of close friends as the nurse tries to staunch the bleeding stump. The blood continues to flow. The letter or soap opera script or outline of a turgid novel of love and betrayal a la Peyton Place just goes on and on and on narrated in voice over by the woman who does not even seem aware of her amputated legs, the eternally bleeding stump, or the nurse who seems to be incapable of staunching the flow of blood.
Petty soap opera conflicts obscure the larger truth, the larger wound.
This short little flick-available in a five minute and in a four minute version-seems to encapsulate in miniature all three seasons of Twin Peaks + Fire Walk With Me.
The two versions were each shot on a different kind of videotape that the American Film Institute was looking to purchase presumably to cut costs. So this is early video work from Lynch, who would shoot web videos and the labyrinthine epic INLAND EMPIRE on digital video farther on down the line.
The video is a rough looking black and white that enhances the dreamy surrealism of the scene that plays out in one continuous take in both versions.
The scene has no real ending. I was left with the feeling that it just goes on and on, cyclically, a warped soap opera playing out inside the amputee's mind,
while the nurse tends the wound he cannot close,
the wound that will never stop squirting blood.
NEXT: 1/15/18 The Lynch Meditations 5: Eraserhead (1977)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
Petty soap opera conflicts obscure the larger truth, the larger wound.
This short little flick-available in a five minute and in a four minute version-seems to encapsulate in miniature all three seasons of Twin Peaks + Fire Walk With Me.
The two versions were each shot on a different kind of videotape that the American Film Institute was looking to purchase presumably to cut costs. So this is early video work from Lynch, who would shoot web videos and the labyrinthine epic INLAND EMPIRE on digital video farther on down the line.
The video is a rough looking black and white that enhances the dreamy surrealism of the scene that plays out in one continuous take in both versions.
The scene has no real ending. I was left with the feeling that it just goes on and on, cyclically, a warped soap opera playing out inside the amputee's mind,
while the nurse tends the wound he cannot close,
the wound that will never stop squirting blood.
NEXT: 1/15/18 The Lynch Meditations 5: Eraserhead (1977)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -4
The Amputee exists because the years long production of Eraserhead-David Lynch's first feature length film-ran out of money and had to shut down. The American Film Institute-which was helping to produce Eraserhead-was looking to test two kinds of film stock. David Lynch and his collaborator Catherine Coulson (known in later years for playing The Log Lady on Twin Peaks) wrote a script overnight, and had Frederick Elmes-the director of photography on Eraserhead-shoot it as one scene, all in one take for each version, shot on the two different film stocks.
So, The Amputee was created to scratch an itch: the desire to create, even in circumstances where there's no money, no real crew, and a script conjured from thin air.
What's possible?
How much something can you get from nothing?
So, The Amputee was created to scratch an itch: the desire to create, even in circumstances where there's no money, no real crew, and a script conjured from thin air.
What's possible?
How much something can you get from nothing?
Sunday, January 7, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -3
The Grandmother is my least favorite David Lynch film. I've watched it all the way through only once, and I clenched my teeth and wanted to get up and leave for about twenty-five of its thirty or so minutes. I found it to be incomprehensible.
Which isn't the worst thing a film can be-I mean I don't really understand Lynch's Lost Highway, but I enjoy watching it. The same goes for films like Olivier Assayas's Demonlover and Clouds of Sils Maria; or Hideaki Anno's Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo.
Why did I hate The Grandmother so much? Will I hate it as much on my next viewing?
This feels like an impending long-overdue, awkward, and painful conversation with someone I've purposefully avoided for years.
Fuck me running . . .
Which isn't the worst thing a film can be-I mean I don't really understand Lynch's Lost Highway, but I enjoy watching it. The same goes for films like Olivier Assayas's Demonlover and Clouds of Sils Maria; or Hideaki Anno's Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo.
Why did I hate The Grandmother so much? Will I hate it as much on my next viewing?
This feels like an impending long-overdue, awkward, and painful conversation with someone I've purposefully avoided for years.
Fuck me running . . .
Saturday, January 6, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 2: The Alphabet (1968)
"Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken."
-Duke Leto Atreides (played by Jurgen Prochnow) in David Lynch's film Dune (1984)
Mixture of animation and live action derived from a real life incident in which the niece of David Lynch's then wife Peggy was having a nightmare of repeating the alphabet over and over again. Lynch has stated that he was attempting to imagine what the nightmare was like for the little girl.
Much like a nightmare, The Alphabet consists of jarring juxtapositions, refined and stylized into a cohesive visual and sonic four minute 16mm film short.
Chaos is created out of animation of schematic lines, letters, basic shapes, and messy organic clouds juxtaposed with live action footage of a girl in ghostly pale makeup (played by Peggy Lynch) writhing on a bed and vomiting blood from her mouth. There is a precise order to these images, but I find that they shuffle together in my mind and seem to take place more chaotically than they actually do in the film itself. The movie is short and exact-as animation and low budget films in general need to be in order to work-and yet my memory is one of nightmarish chaos.
It's also a film that goes from sounds of children chanting ABC and an adult male voice singing a corny educational song to a bizarre insect/human moaning noise to baby mewling noises to the relative quiet of wind whistling.
As in a dream, mundane proportions of human faces and bodies are scrambled, distorted, mutated as the mind processes the day's inputs . . . or whatever the hell goes on when we dream.
A distorted human figure has their head filled with letters and knowledge 'til their head melts down into flowing blood.
A live action mouth speaks from behind bars, begging, "Please remember you are dealing with the human form."
The climax, I suppose, is the girl vomiting blood all over the bed sheets.
Language, logic, the rigorous drills of a standard education cannot contain the irrationality of existence. Language, words are a kind of prison for the essence of being, forcing the Alphabet down a girl’s throat causes her to vomit blood . . . but this agony is unavoidable. Language is a necessity, and change-transformation-is often painful.
-Duke Leto Atreides (played by Jurgen Prochnow) in David Lynch's film Dune (1984)
Mixture of animation and live action derived from a real life incident in which the niece of David Lynch's then wife Peggy was having a nightmare of repeating the alphabet over and over again. Lynch has stated that he was attempting to imagine what the nightmare was like for the little girl.
Much like a nightmare, The Alphabet consists of jarring juxtapositions, refined and stylized into a cohesive visual and sonic four minute 16mm film short.
Chaos is created out of animation of schematic lines, letters, basic shapes, and messy organic clouds juxtaposed with live action footage of a girl in ghostly pale makeup (played by Peggy Lynch) writhing on a bed and vomiting blood from her mouth. There is a precise order to these images, but I find that they shuffle together in my mind and seem to take place more chaotically than they actually do in the film itself. The movie is short and exact-as animation and low budget films in general need to be in order to work-and yet my memory is one of nightmarish chaos.
It's also a film that goes from sounds of children chanting ABC and an adult male voice singing a corny educational song to a bizarre insect/human moaning noise to baby mewling noises to the relative quiet of wind whistling.
As in a dream, mundane proportions of human faces and bodies are scrambled, distorted, mutated as the mind processes the day's inputs . . . or whatever the hell goes on when we dream.
A distorted human figure has their head filled with letters and knowledge 'til their head melts down into flowing blood.
A live action mouth speaks from behind bars, begging, "Please remember you are dealing with the human form."
The climax, I suppose, is the girl vomiting blood all over the bed sheets.
Language, logic, the rigorous drills of a standard education cannot contain the irrationality of existence. Language, words are a kind of prison for the essence of being, forcing the Alphabet down a girl’s throat causes her to vomit blood . . . but this agony is unavoidable. Language is a necessity, and change-transformation-is often painful.
“Please remember you are dealing with the human form.”
This cryptic line comes across as a warning
or maybe a plea for compassion.
“Please remember you are dealing with the human form.”
because it is delicate, irrational, and resists all forms of imposed rationality
even if that resistance goes unnoticed or even outright suppressed.
Mouth/tongue/teeth-all behind bars. Language painfully sets them free,
but language can also entrap us when we can’t get it to work how we want it to,
but we must continually drill,
'til we have fluency,
the capacity for communication, listening, and understanding,
no matter how frightful the prospect of change,
potential failure,
our desire to remain asleep, safe, divorced from reality.
but we must continually drill,
'til we have fluency,
the capacity for communication, listening, and understanding,
no matter how frightful the prospect of change,
potential failure,
our desire to remain asleep, safe, divorced from reality.
NEXT: 1/8/18: The Lynch Meditations 3: The Grandmother (1970)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
Friday, January 5, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -2
Abraham Lincoln speaks us into greater union, invokes the better angels, no matter the cost
Susan B. Anthony speaks us beyond white male supremacy, towards greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the cost, even to herself
Adolf Hitler speaks white supremacy, genocide, the abyss
Churchill speaks us to the defense of what's left of democracy, no matter the cost
JFK speaks us to the stars, no matter the cost
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks us into greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the long history of slavery, no matter the hardwired injustice and inequality of white supremacist America, no matter the cost, even to himself.
Post World War II, evil was supposedly vanquished
of course
this was just a story we told ourselves
the evil went invisible, parallel compartmentalized soul chamber
verily, it became entwined with our free market American soul, if there can be said to be such a thing
some words get us to a higher place
some words advocate genocide and white supremacy, cutthroat capitalism, slavery
words mislead people who might've otherwise done the right thing
words, long abused, lose all meaning,
and our faith in communication
as opposed to force
dies.
Language
spoken, written, signed, tapped, felt, touched
is a massive part of the human experience
for all the wreckage
for all the lies
of a voice yoked to this or that rubblemind
we can also speak visions of compassion, liberty, equality, justice,
speak a vision that can take us beyond the boundaries
of family, tribe, village, town, country, city, nation, planet
speak us into a union with cosmos
unless that's just another lie
or a tantalizingly compelling fantasy construction
perfectly internally consistent, logical, full of dramatic reversals and payoffs
yet wholly divorced from reality
it's just a movie.
Which reality are we speaking ourselves into, and what voices are being suppressed?
which voices have we yet to hear?
which voices are we prepared to hear?
Susan B. Anthony speaks us beyond white male supremacy, towards greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the cost, even to herself
Adolf Hitler speaks white supremacy, genocide, the abyss
Churchill speaks us to the defense of what's left of democracy, no matter the cost
JFK speaks us to the stars, no matter the cost
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks us into greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the long history of slavery, no matter the hardwired injustice and inequality of white supremacist America, no matter the cost, even to himself.
Post World War II, evil was supposedly vanquished
of course
this was just a story we told ourselves
the evil went invisible, parallel compartmentalized soul chamber
verily, it became entwined with our free market American soul, if there can be said to be such a thing
some words get us to a higher place
some words advocate genocide and white supremacy, cutthroat capitalism, slavery
words mislead people who might've otherwise done the right thing
words, long abused, lose all meaning,
and our faith in communication
as opposed to force
dies.
Language
spoken, written, signed, tapped, felt, touched
is a massive part of the human experience
for all the wreckage
for all the lies
of a voice yoked to this or that rubblemind
we can also speak visions of compassion, liberty, equality, justice,
speak a vision that can take us beyond the boundaries
of family, tribe, village, town, country, city, nation, planet
speak us into a union with cosmos
unless that's just another lie
or a tantalizingly compelling fantasy construction
perfectly internally consistent, logical, full of dramatic reversals and payoffs
yet wholly divorced from reality
it's just a movie.
Which reality are we speaking ourselves into, and what voices are being suppressed?
which voices have we yet to hear?
which voices are we prepared to hear?
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 0
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)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle E-book here.
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)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle E-book here.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)