The Trap Master
David Lynch
Lynch’s eyes are eyes that don’t perceive things as we do. They are eyes that scan reality beyond its many traps…
David Lynch is a multifaceted personality, not only has he been drawing a cartoon column for the Los Angeles weekly for several years now, his work has also covered many fields of contemporary Art, from full-length Hollywood films, short films, TV series, multimedia shows, major commercials and videos, to even publishing a collection of writing. Who dares walk into his trap?...
“I would have wanted more things happening in my life. I’ve always known that nothing is what it seems, but I haven’t managed to find any proof…” says David Lynch ( born in Montana, USA, 1946). A unique filmmaker, he originally studied Painting, graduating from the University the Arts in Philadelphia, but soon felt a compelling urge to project the impossible pictures in his head onto celluloid. Ever since then, he has advocated cinematography in an experimental fashion, characterized by an obsessive and persuasive use of repetitive detail and lighting.
His works are organic traps, made of disconcerted, repulsive abominations, physical and psychological malformations and, in particular, sexual perversions, somewhat of a Lynchian trademark!
He has often admitted to his ambition of becoming a psychiatrist. Instead he chooses to make often complex narrative films, which are equally loved or loathed by the viewing public. As a largely independent creator, he has fulfilled many of his artistic aims; he worked on his first feature film Eraserhead as director, producer, scriptwriter, cameraman, editor and special effects technician. Lurching from one problem to the next, the film took a total of five years to complete. Eraserhead suffered from numerous financial breakdowns and was resurrected from the ashes several times. Lynch lost his house owing to serious debts, but was so engrossed and obsessed with his work that, unbeknownst to his film crew, he would spend his nights sleeping onset, removing all traces of his nocturnal presence in the morning.
His film style was very much established with this first production and it was seen as unique, in comparison with other contemporaries. The film director has acknowledged that he is largely alien to contemporary film culture…Lynch's work often uses repulsive and distressing imaginary. His films mock social triteness- the more subjects are portrayed as ordinary and stereotypical, the more anguished and unthinkable become the perversions concealed. With very few exceptions, these aspects continue to be common strands in Lynch’s film lexicon.
Eraserhead quickly grew into a staple and relevant classic film and consequently lead to significant offers from Hollywood. As a result, he was approached to direct The Elephant man (1980), produced by Mel Brooks. The film is charged with melodrama and was nominated for 8 Oscars: “it is the story of man who was a monster on the outside, but a normal and most remarkable man on the inside, whom you could fall in love with…” says Lynch. Proficiently shot in black-and-white, it is his only conventional film, perhaps a Hollywood prerequisite?
The immediate and general success received from critics and public alike, allowed Lynch to ret` 11 ``1 urn to filming his obsessions. Although an accessible and a commercial success the roots of the film convey the subjective sensations that would feature heavily in later projects.
Dune (1984) was an unfortunate financial disaster. For the artist however, it represents a return to several of his obsessions and fixations. The result was a ambitiously vast project, in which the director attempted to depict science fiction fantasy. He made in depth characters studies with screenwriter, Anthony Masters (A Space Odyssey, 2001) before casting, in order to construct the vision of a futuristic dystopia. The film took an exhausting year to shoot, using four different teams, over 16 locations, involving over 600 people; with six months of actual shooting followed by six months of special effects editing.
Blue Velvet is notable for Dennis Hopper's violent portrayal of Frank, a disturbed character and fittingly well cast, who acts alongside a harshly criticized Isabella Rossellini, Lynch’s lover at that time. Once again, the director’s themes include mind traps, delirium, monomania and sadistic cruelty! Excluded from the Venice Film Festival on the grounds of unwarranted pornography the film deals with the succumbing of one’s desires. Cinema has often depicted that behind the cheery smiles of small town life there often lies a dark underbelly. The film was among the first in its genre to inform us that we might actually live next door to monsters. The protagonists in Blue Velvet, Jeffrey and Sandy, two young people from the small town of Lumberton, become eager participants in the increasingly disturbing narrative. Intrigued by a beautiful club singer (Rossellini), they play detective and begin observing her private life. What sparks their curiosity is the discovery of a human ear, which, like all moral citizens, they immediately hand over to the police.
Wild at Heart, released in 1990, despite catcalls and barracking at Cannes, scooped the Palme d’Or aided by Bertolucci’s strong influence. The story portrays a series of eccentric and mysterious characters and is perhaps Lynch's most radical and primeval film! A “wild heart” breaks through from the obscure chamber of the unconscious, infused with raging violence; a metaphor as plain as a meteor shower. It remains, however, the work of a moralist, but one toying with the object of his own mortality. Images of splattered blood, blown out brains, horrific street accidents, Lolita-like seedy motels, a running dog with a hand between its teeth, flies swarming above a puke stained sidewalk, a monstrous looking woman with long, stiletto-like nails, powdering her face…
In spite of his reputation as an experimental film maker, Lynch became well-known to the general public through the TV series Twin Peaks, co-written and produced with collaborator Mark Frost, consisting of a pilot-episode and a further thirty episodes. Twin Peaks was a significant production that shook the TV industry. It was a soap-opera of a higher class, realized, supervised and directed by Lynch himself. A groundbreaking TV film…
In 1992 he attempted to offer some kind of explanation to the TV series in the film Twin Peaks - Fire Walk with Me. Lynch's film was a “prequel” to the TV story. The question: who was the real Laura Palmer?
Lost Highway, released in 1998, was generally misunderstood by public and film critics alike. A decipherable film, often complex, but extremely innovative: “My film is made up of nightmares. I am scared of many things and am particularly frightened by people’s mouths and teeth…”
Like a psychotic Ovid, Lynch again leads us over the shifting sands of perpetual metamorphosis. The Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction is now rendered obsolete; the barrier between the self and the non-self takes on the consistency of nightmares. Today we can have a name, Lynch says; a body and a house, but tomorrow we might have another name, another body and another house. The woman I’ve loved and killed is still laughing in her vegetative state…The street I’ve lost for ever is the one we are currently crossing…The film pertains, to a certain extent, to several contemporary physical theories according to which our time is paralleled by an infinity of separate existences of which we have no knowledge, but that already encompass us. Sometimes a dream breaks through; a greeting or a sign, and then, just for a few seconds, our worlds intermingle, revealing our unknown, parallel lives. Like a head-on collision between two trains on the same track in the night. The self is a bottomless glass, Lynch has said…
Mulholland Drive (2001) is a jigsaw puzzle portrayal of the twentieth century phenomenon known as L.A. Taking its title from a street sign that has become a cultural Hollywood landmark. The winding road that leads up from the city becomes host to unfolding series of events, ranging from horrid to bizarre, from hyper-real to surreal and from the comic to tragic. It is a love story set in the city of dreams …The movie depicts mysteries and narratives in typical Hollywood fashion, imbued with Raymond Chandler’s dark romanticism; of a city with palm trees, dangerous corners and dark secrets; a love story with two girls (a blonde and a brunette) caught up in a intricate plot played out in the city of angels.
Lynch refuses to observe the canonical spatial and temporal coordinates of fiction. Like an alchemist, his deliberately subversive films aim to highlight the fact that reality is all but an illusion (precisely in the same way Bunuel evoked liberty), and that any representation remains under the reign of the unconscious (the same lesson that contemporary literature has taught us, in particular from Joyce onwards).
The creator of Twin Peaks is today an older, still energetic film director; a filmmaker attempting to trace the sources of his inspirations with each new project. He remains a well-rounded artist, a postmodern Duchamp, who uses cinematography as a facilitator for various artistic languages.
Lynch now utilizes the digital with the same experimental zealousness that typified his early film works. The fruits of his outstanding evolution are particularly visible in his latest masterpiece, released in Venice last year and currently being screened in Romania, perhaps his Austerlitz- INLAND EMPIRE- another fascinating visionary puzzle, paying heed to the unrestrained power of cinematography. The title bears the name of a residential area on the edge of Los Angeles, buy also hints at our boundless inner world. Depicting the chaos of the human mind with free flowing images, thoughts and feelings, the film focuses on isolated clusters of narrative, making it difficult to follow; our only option is to succumb to the dreamlike narrative flow of the subconscious.
Just like in Mulholland Drive, we find ourselves once more in the urban anonymity of Hollywood, the setting of what can be defined as a true love-story. Here, lovers find themselves lost in a maze of their own frenzied passions.
In typical Lynch fashion, Hollywood tears roll visibly down the cheeks of his protagonists (an ironic reference to melodrama, an obsolete genre, artificially kept alive through layered clichés). Locked in a room, Polish housewife Susan Blue cries as she watches a sort of soap opera with giant rabbits. The other female character, Nikki Grace, a Los Angeles actress, strives to star in a remake of a Polish film, left unfinished due to the actors’ mysterious disappearances.
Laura Dern, recently returned to the Lynchian circle after her intense performances in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, plays both female roles with fine distinctions. Trying to uncover these mysteries without a key (the trap laid by Lynch is that he dares the public not to look for the key!), this Dantean Beatrice, lodged in the very Inferno of a parallel dimension, manages to unlock some intriguing doors…that might have been better left locked!
Nikki is hassled on the street and takes refuge in a darkened room. Lynch also references a section from Jacques Tourneur’s classic horror film, Cat People.
Throughout the many narrative obstacles, the character’s journey unfolds within the boundaries and depths of a dream, in a final, desperate attempt to escape this mind-maze, in an attempt to earn the right to love again…
In this respect, this puzzle can be interpreted as a longing for warmth, for love. It is a film about lost feelings in an America where they cannot be retrieved nor contained in a web of pathos. Like many of Lynch’s films, this is also homage to femininity, situated between a classic tragedy and a musical, even depicting a choir of motherly whores dancing and singing on a Hollywood boulevard…
We must always keep in mind however, that the all-powerful master in INLAND EMPIRE is Evil; the genuine, unfathomable entity that often underlies Lynch’s clouded mysteries. For there is no solution for Evil! And this drama is imprisoned between these walls, very close to the heart and themes in Lost Highway.
Resembling some of Beckett’s writings, the story seems to remain untouched, hinting at interiors and exteriors still unexplored. It is the celebration of the hallucinatory and an absurd awakening of the senses. They burst within the frames of the film and gradually dissolve before our eyes…
Lynch is perhaps autobiographically reflected in Kinglsey Stewart’s character (played by a charismatic Jeremy Irons), who doesn’t refrain from attempting to complete his cursed film.
Nevertheless, characters such as Laura Dern’s husband (played by Justin Theroux), mirror the emotional feebleness of a world that has lost the possibility of true romance. Lynch however, is left with his love for the Cinema; a cinema able to ensnare both the body and the mind of fans and enthusiasts; a cinema that enacts DREAMS and their unfolding truths.
INLAND EMPIRE is a fantastic and fabulous film, the ultimate item of fiction where all things and all identities are trapped with no escape. Mulholland Drive opens with a dance; this time it is a dance the ends the film, set to the music of Nina Simone’s Sinner Man.
By creating a film free from any commercial constraint, Lynch invites us to partake in his studies. The author celebrates the spectral and the traps of a secret sexual desire. He honors characteristics that reach the collective imaginary, that compel us to question the world and its language, as we try to escape the everyday routines that contaminate our minds!
Lynch’s stream of consciousness erases all human hesitation in order to prepare us for a journey with no half- measures, probably seeking the second half of our familiar world, which we can only sense in the films of this ARTIST, whom, no doubt, we will continue to love to the bitter end.
Giulia Ghica Dobre
Published OMAGIU Magazine 
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