The Logic of Lynch
This week some friends and I went to a screening of Lost Highway (1997) as part of Angelika’s “Lynchian: A David Lynch Retrospective.” When the house lights went on, we were still lost in the world of the movie. As we trailed out of the theater, we got busy theorizing, but any attempt to ascribe chronology or cause and effect to the movie left us with more questions than answers. But one thing was undeniable: Lynch brought me to a world of feeling. Some of the feelings I couldn’t even describe or assign a name to; I didn’t “understand” or follow the story, but I felt it from beginning to end. Like many of Lynch’s great works, Lost Highway deliberately dismisses narrative logic in favor of more pre-verbal, pre-rational emotions, the feelings of childhood, of a dream, or of the subconscious.
This is the year I’m diving head first into the weird world of Lynch. I watched Eraserhead (1977) with my shocked dad in the middle of the night as we went through all stages of laughter, disturbance, and perplexity at the worm baby. I watched Blue Velvet (1986) with my roommate, who’s not much of a movie person to begin with, and yet he and I both came away thinking the bug in the beak of the robin was strangely brilliant. I even made a deal with my Lynch-obsessed friend that I’d watch the first few episodes of Twin Peaks after he’d been incessantly urging me to do so since high school.
I was never a Lynch guy. I always preferred his contemporaries like David Cronenberg and Peter Greenaway, but when he died, a part of me wanted to revisit his body of work. I first “got” Lynch when I watched Blue Velvet. If I had to summarize it in a sentence, I’d say the movie is a psychosexual coming-of-age story set in a Norman Rockwell painting animated by “dream logic” (we’ll get to this term later). Film critic Pauline Kael’s label of “pop surrealism” gets at what makes this movie’s use of surrealist elements unique: it’s the sinister and strange by way of the hyper-normal, a bug in the beak of a robin.
As opposed to taking us to an alien landscape, like say Antonioni, to disturb, Lynch takes down-home scenes of everyday suburban Americana and makes them sinister. He gives us line readings that are so mundane and “normal” that they sound eerie like Laura Dern saying she’ll honk the horn four times and Jeffrey’s family socializing with Sandy’s family at the end of the film in saccharine platitudes.
Lynch says he got the idea for this kind of strait-laced middle class domesticity gone wrong from The Hardy Boys mysteries. Looking at the covers of those books you can begin to understand the world of Blue Velvet.
Then I watched Eraserhead and thought I was going to be sick. In that film Lynch creates creatures so otherworldly and disturbing that my dad asked what drugs he must’ve been on to come up with it. After reading up on Lynch, I discovered it wasn’t a drug that propelled this feeling into Lynch’s mind: it was the anxiety of fatherhood and the decay, fear, crime and industrial gloom of a particularly rough time in the late 60s when he was studying in Philadelphia.
While in school, Lynch lived in the Callowhill neighborhood of Philly, now dubbed “Eraserhood” after his film. In the movie, Lynch imagines this rough neighborhood as an alien wasteland rife with mechanized hissing sounds and claustrophobic polluted factories. If someone were to ask me “what happens” in Eraserhead, I’d skip plot summary and point them instead to this feeling or period in Lynch’s life.
Then most recently I experienced Lost Highway. Here I felt Lynch got closest to the genre trappings which have defined other directors. The movie is at certain points film noir, a pulpy crime thriller with a femme fatale who brings sexy erotic thriller elements. But just when the stamp of genre is about to be firmly placed on the story, when the good guy is going to get attacked by the evil henchman (as would happen in this kind of movie had Lynch not been the director), the movie shifts out of its genre and into a new register: a kind of spacey art film. Lynch withholds the genre thrills at the moment they are about to become too literal and formulaic; at these moments he retreats to the “dream logic” or lack of logic and leaves the viewer puzzled and uneasy as opposed to narratively satisfied and entertained.
Critic Clement Greenberg once discussed Russian realist painter Ilya Repin and said “Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him the effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.” In this analogy, Lynch is my Picasso and so many genre directors are Repin.
Some people say Lynch’s movies like Lost Highway have “dream logic” but I’d go further and say his movies obfuscate logic of any kind. Logic to Lynch is the ruin of his project; it would undermine the feeling he has created and make those emotions subservient to the all-powerful Aristotelian “narrative.” Since Aristotle published his Poetics, writers of drama have been taught to follow the formulaic rising action —> climax and resolution story structure. Many filmmakers try to make movies a kind of formulaic stream of narrative tension and try to be as psychological as a novelist. But film can do things that a novel can’t and directors shouldn’t aspire to be clever novelists, they should follow Lynch and aspire to use images and feelings to tell fully-realized stories.
At the end of the day, my tastes are more literal than Lynch. My favorite movies are Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA and Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Scorsese’s Goodfellas: movies which are defined by their genre labels of “epic” or “gangster film.” And as a writer with a background in novel writing, I like my stories with structure and I like my characters with arcs. That’s why Lynch can be even more valuable to me; Lynch reminds me that movies can transcend these structures and offer an experience not found in any other medium or art form. So go see Angelika’s retrospective on Lynch before it ends on July 24th. Maybe you’ll be disturbed or disinterested in what Lynch is trying to do, or maybe like me, you’ll see movies in a new light.
Disagree with my take? Let me know at mvs2132@columbia.edu
Originally published on Substack.
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