Categorising Lynch
Exploring the relationship between Lynch and an audience intent upon labelling him in abstractions.
Perhaps one of David Lynch's most quotable lines, at once emblematic of his approach to film-making as it is a refusal of the call to clinically dissect his every work, wrapped in his trademark droll affectation. Over the years, David Lynch has refused to explain his films with that definitive declarative “no” but that doesn't mean that his films are inexplicable.
The very interview that the above quote comes from provides us, in no uncertain terms with Lynch's approach to film-making, and yet we collectively choose to remember the “no, I won't”. Further, we take his “no'” and apply it to his entire body of work, as though he is intentionally oblique when everything needed to understand them, he says, is in the film:
This is a pattern throughout his interactions with an audience who want concrete answers in a medium that hybridises visual, audial, and moving mediums.
As an audience, we look endlessly for contexts and reasons with which to categorise and box in, and in doing so we fundamentally misunderstand Lynch. The answers he gives, simply put, are ones we do not want to hear.
His career is filled with quotes such as these, which lay out his approach as clear as day. It is this refusal to engage with his work on his terms that leads us down the recursive rabbit hole which leaves us no closer to answers.
Despite Lynch's refusal to saddle us with his concrete intent there remains this enduring necessity to take him apart and lay him out piece by piece, to vivisect, log and categorise the man. We gave his body of works a genre of its own -”Lynchian”-, synonymous with other. Like a human puzzle, we start at the edges of the very man himself and seek to build an understanding from without. Countless blog posts, videos, articles and biographies -both official and un- exist trying to get to the heart of a man who has already, through his art, laid it bare. Talking about the biography Room To Dream, Alex Brookes came away with the impression that:
“Room to Dream provides contours and edges, brief splashes of insight and teasing tugs on the line. But the man at the centre remains a beautiful mystery.”
And yet, within that very book, we have answers. His creativity was allowed to flourish because of a nurturing home life, alongside the art scene of the 1960s and a slew of supportive partnerships. We get stories of darkness within his childhood, and glimpses of his philosophy and inspiration.
“[...] and out of the darkness – it was so incredible – came this nude woman with white skin. Maybe it was something about the light and the way she came out of the darkness, but it seemed to me that her skin was the color of milk, and she had a bloodied mouth.”
It is not a leap to connect this to his portrayal of beautiful, bloodied women within the suburbia of Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Twin Peaks. To the hidden worlds of white picket fence Lynch inhabited as a child, and represents through his works. But it is not laid out bare. Lynch has merely shone a torch and it is down to us to find the answers, blindly feeling in the dark.
The answer to interpreting his work is deceptively simple. We, as the audience, choose to focus upon his strangeness because, in doing so, we can quantify Lynch in absolutes. Absolutes his work does not play to: “other” is as much a category as it is a constriction. It is easier to label him strange than engage with his work on his terms or to admit the innate weirdness of being human, one which Lynch himself comments upon.
“I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”
It is human nature to seek order out of chaos, but Lynch's output is far from chaotic, or at least it is no more or less chaotic than life itself. People and their emotions, reactive as we are, are not neat: we are not quantifiable and measurable and easily defined. Grief, love, horror, boredom, and happiness all exist in constant, messy flux. These feelings have names and contexts and are broad enough that everyone has felt them at some point or another. Sometimes, there are no words, there are just feelings and this is the core of Lynch's work. When Angelo Badalamenti died, Lynch's poetical daily weather report went:
There was no need to state the obvious, we knew, at that moment, what he meant and what he felt. At its core that is Lynch at his most Lynchian: when he understands and feels and is so very human, and when we collectively feel and understand with him.
“I felt Eraserhead. I didn't think it”.
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