Austin Morgan
amorga14@uwyo.edu
With provocative films such as “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” director David Lynch has rocked the American imaginary and left a permanent mark on the film industry. Indeed, other famous directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese have all been called “Lynchian” at some point in their careers. But what exactly does this term mean? Renowned writer David Foster Wallace, attempting to pinpoint what it means for a film to be “Lynchian” wrote in an essay, “[the word] is ultimately definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it.” By Wallace’s definition, then, it’s not quite possible to define what makes a Lynch film; nevertheless, this article will venture a guess.
To get one thing straight, David Lynch does not make films that “make sense”—at least, not in the everyday sense of the phrase. The meanings of Lynch’s films are not readily discernable, nor is it apparent that any meaning exists at all. Even in terms of the progression of the story, things remain uncanny and at times, wholly incoherent—that is to say, one is not immediately aware of what is happening. This absurdist quality owes to Lynch’s orientation in the tradition of the avant-garde, also known as postmodernism’s infiltration into American film (if not in terms of time period, then at least in terms of epistemology). Within the broad umbrella of the unconventional, Lynch takes up the artistic style of surrealism, which is focused on communicating the irrational, unconscious human drives through the visual image.
Taking the obscurity of Lynch’s films as my launching point, I query the following: what about Lynch’s films so fascinates the mind? After all, if Lynch’s films—surreal as they are—don’t appear to “say” anything to the viewer, shouldn’t Lynch be flat broke instead of living in his mansion in Hollywood? I argue, instead, that it’s precisely the lack of a readily discernable meaning in his films that attracts Lynch’s cult following.
We have all, at one time or another, experienced the weird—that which evokes a response originating from the unconscious mind, which is a combination of both fear and curiosity. We have all walked home late at night and had a streetlight turn off as we pass by, found that lost object in the place we checked hundreds of times or taken some interest in the supernatural.
In themselves these events are quite normal and are likely coincidences; yet, they contain something in their happenings that causes us to stop momentarily, reflect on the significance of what’s just occurred and warily continue our lives. You could say that these events reveal the weird randomness at work in the mundane atmosphere of the everyday. This “making the familiar strange” is right at the heart of what it means to be Lynchian. As David Foster Wallace writes later in his essay, “[Lynchian describes] a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” Everyday uncanny events signify to us some kind of meaning, and although that meaning is not immediately clear, we are aware that something exciting and strange is at work—and it is exactly this strangeness which makes these events inherently Lynchian.
Now, you could have read this and been intrigued, hastening to fill your Netflix queue with Lynch’s best. I hope that’s what happened. The more likely possibility, however, is that, at the introduction of the word “surrealism” (or perhaps even earlier), you thought “oh no, not that artsy bullshit.” Well, you would be wrong—wrong in the sense that although it is exactly “that artsy bullshit,” you are not justified in demeaning an art form simply because it does not align with your worldview. In other words, just because an art form is foreign to the cultural oasis of Laramie, Wyoming (with its one movie theater) doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. My bourgeois notions of taste aside, I have advice for those of you who haven’t ever seen a film by David Lynch: go Netflix (or torrent) one; you don’t know what you’re missing!
