In April, Cineplex (Canada’s largest movie theatre chain for those of you reading this in other places) has been showing a handful of David Lynch’s work. Not all, but almost all of the heavy hitters. I guess because he unfortunately passed away earlier this year and they wanted to celebrate him, or maybe because the economy is so bad and most movies suck huge amounts of shit these days, and they’re trying anything they can to get people back in theatres. I’m not sure why, but I went to every one. Well, every one except Dune because Lynch himself disowned that film and I have personally had enough of that whole franchise for a lifetime.
Anyway, something I was thinking about when watching almost all of his work recently is that there is really quite no one like Lynch. He is one of the truest auteurs I can think of. Everyone says that all the time, but after marathoning a bunch of his work I finally got it. And I started thinking about why this is.
One of the main reasons why I think a Lynch film is unlike any other filmmaker’s is that his approach to creation is fundamentally different. He has spoken in several interviews over the years (I won’t link anything in particular, you can just google yourself) about his discovery of ideas and its link with meditation. Additionally, he’s discussed writing by using 6 x 7 cards for individual scenes. Meditation and fishing for ideas, and writing with index cards are great methods for working in film that I don’t think many filmmakers do. Lynch describes the process of searching for ideas as “fishing.” And who knows, maybe Lynch even put the scene cards out of order when shooting simply because it felt right that way.
You get the sense that Lynch isn’t the kind of filmmaker that will force something that isn’t there, he’s really trying to create an experience that feels like it already sort of existed. He’s the director, but not in a dictatorial way. He is attempting to be the one that brought a vision to the surface instead of contriving something that doesn’t want to be seen. Most movies don’t have this feel of someone searching through their consciousness to find stuff, they just feel like straightforward easily understandable things. But dreams and the mind obviously aren’t like this, that’s not really what the experience of being a human is about, it’s a lot more complex than, “this happened, this happened, this happened, the end.” You experience stuff in life all the time that goes completely unexplained, so it doesn’t make any sense why the average movie would be so easy to understand. I mean, think about the average person: most people don’t really have a clue what they’re doing, reality is a blind guess at best. It seems foolish to create art that is almost the exact opposite of the human experience.
The funny thing about my relationship with Lynch films is that, when I was younger, I didn’t really enjoy them that much because they were too dreamy and unexplainable to me. And now that I’m older, I like his work for precisely the same reasons. I like the fact that I had no idea what the fuck I was watching 100% of the time, yet I could not stop watching. You really can’t say that about any movie, even the ones that try to be obscure on purpose. A David Lynch film infuriates, confuses, and intrigues, whereas another film that tries to do the same might forget the “intrigues” part.
Lynch is the type of filmmaker you may be tempted to google “(name of film) explained” when you get home from the theatre. But to me, the beauty of his work comes primarily from not doing that. I enjoyed not knowing what the fuck I was watching some of the time, and then just walking around and thinking about it for days after. Sometimes in our modern culture we tend to forget that art doesn’t necessarily have to exist to explain or entertain us constantly; it can simply be there to ask questions, pose certain things, and then leave us thinking even more than we were before we entered the theatre. This mini-David Lynch retrospective totally blew my mind, and reminded me of what art is truly capable of.