by Alex Wells
Yesterday David Lynch announced, while seeming as usual like a chipper grandfather totally incapable of understanding much less making David Lynch’s work, that he had emphysema. We all had to face the idea that David Lynch will die.
When he dies it is hard to feel this will not also represent a certain kind of art leaving with him—an art of savage ambiguity, juxtaposition, and hip weirdness. The opening ceremonies of the Olympics seemed almost a tribute to him—or perhaps the French were always Lynchian and he is our ambassador to them. Either way, they allowed us the opportunity to be reminded of the public’s current attitude toward weirdness. The attitude is that they look for meaning and then immediately argue with each other about the meaning they found there.
Lynch dealt with this early in his career, before he’d found his audience or sculpted it out of the raw stuff of cinema-space. Blue Velvet was attacked by feminists because of the implication that Isabella Rosselini’s character liked to be hit. What innocent times those were—when a woman who liked to be hit during sex was an ontological question mark rather than a pair of boxes to be checked on a dating app.
We understand many things differently now, including weirdness. It is an insult now, and I think it has to do with our evolving attitude toward insanity—or, as we more sympathetically refer to it now—mental illness.
“All real artists are crazy” they used to say. The inventions of our surrealists and those of our insane have always been twins. The difference now is that, leading with empathy, we see any manifestation of madness as primarily a response to trauma. And trauma is more important than word-association, poetry, and telephones that look like lobsters. We see evidence of trauma and want to fix it, find a source for trauma, end trauma. When the dark magic of the impossible erupts from human emotion, we want to cut past it to an actionable, rather than—as all of Lynch’s films do—wallow in it.
The ancients felt otherwise. They made the mad into shamans and oracles, and used them to explore a spirit world. Lynch’s films gambled that some part of that spirit world was real. Something has been lost.
Image: An image of director David Lynch smoking a cigarette using one hand by Megamoneymonster. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.