Watching David Lynch

David Lynch is in the air. Though it’s been nearly a decade since his last film, thanks to the new Twin Peaks box and the upcoming Criterion of Eraserhead, the cinematic zeitgeist seems to be abuzz with all things Lynch. Like many cinema-lovers out there, I took this as an opportunity to re-immerse myself in David Lynch’s filmography, cherry-picking a few favorites here and there. But what began as an exercise in nostalgia, ended up yielding some interesting insights into Lynch’s filmography as a whole.

While watching the glorious new bluray transfer of Fire Walk With Me, I was struck by the scene where poor Laura Palmer is having an emotional experience listening to Julee Cruise in a roadhouse. It felt like déjà vu. Where had I seen this before? The music, the lighting and the setting were all so damn familiar. And then it came to me...

Having recently re-watched a majority of Twin Peaks the series after the box-set was announced a few months back, my mind instantly leapt to an important night in the life of Laura’s cousin Maddy Ferguson which was also accompanied by a Julee Cruise performance. I’m sure Lynch was merely trying to play up the parallels between the two girls, but having also recently re-watched Blue Velvet at a cemetery screening, I couldn't help but also think of the various moments in that film where a character is observing another singing. And of course who can forget Mulholland Drive’s club Silencio and Rebekah Del Rio’s heart-wrenching rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”? Even as far back as Eraserhead there’s the Woman in the Radiator singing about how, “In heaven everything is fine.”

When films are viewed years apart, parallels often go unnoticed. But when viewed in relatively rapid succession, they are hard to miss. Five instances of something in a director’s work has to constitute a recurring theme, right? But what does it mean?

The cryptic liner notes of the Mulholland Drive DVD ask, “What is felt, realized and gathered at the club Silencio?” Though I have seen the film more than a handful of times, I couldn't really tell you. It’s something I can’t even put into words. It’s something abstract, something you just have to feel. Like going to an opera when you don’t speak Italian, the emotions are just so intense that you can’t help but be moved. We can assume that Betty and Rita don’t speak Spanish, yet they are able to understand and find relevance to their own lives and situations. And isn't that cinema in a nutshell?

Lynch himself described it perfectly in his book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity: 

People sometimes say that they have trouble understanding a film, but I think they understand much more than they realize. Because we’re all blessed with intuition – we really have the gift of intuiting things…Someone might say, I don’t understand music; but most people experience music emotionally and would agree that music is an abstraction. You don’t need to put music into words right away – you just listen…Cinema is a lot like music. It can be very abstract, but people have a yearning to make intellectual sense of it, to put it right into words. And when they can’t do that, it feels frustrating. But they can come up with an explanation from within, if they just allow it. (Pg. 15 – 19) 

What is any David Lynch film about? That depends on you. Like the scarecrow's brain, the tinman's heart and the cowardly lion's courage - the answer is there inside of us. It's been there all along. In film after film David Lynch is figuratively singing his heart out to us, yearning for connection. He is Julee, Dorothy and Rebekah. We are the audience. Lynch desperately wants us to understand and to feel - but we have to meet him half way. It's up to us to take the key and open the box. But are we ready to deal with what we have inside ourselves?