David Lynch: Changing the Possibility of Imagination
Robin reflects on the death of one of the all time greats
Plastered on a wall in Hemel Hempstead, I was struck by an image that bemused, beguiled and bit. I think it was 1981. I was twelve and my dad was busy buying a turntable to play David Lean soundtracks and albums of fairground music. In my eyes, I saw Jack Nance startled and disturbed face looking pleadingly from the iconic Eraserhead poster.
A screening was imminent for the local film club, this was not a film to fit inside an Odeon. This cinematic image is up there with publicity shot of Divine in Pink Flamingos just after she had exterminated Connie and Raymond Marbles. I would have to wait a while before I would experience either on these movies, but in the interim, I would fill my mind with as much nightmare feed as I could on the stories of both.
I was fortunate to find that an older boy at school owned Danny Peary’s Cult Movies, a book I read cover to cover over and over again. Now with my own copy it sits on the shelf with Waters’s Shock Value, The Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film, and Carol J Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws.
Peary’s book offered lengthy synopses of movies such as Shock Corridor, Caged Heat and The Honeymoon Killers, but for Eraserhead, the story was best summarised as “A dream of dark and troubling things”.
I wish I could remember what I thought I was going to see before I finally saw it. I cannot think of any other filmmaker who has so terrifyingly created the atmosphere of a nightmare, a film that you cannot be sure whether you experienced on a screen or merely in your mind.
It is something quite terrible.
His cartoon strip The Angriest Dog in the World feels like the nearest to further capturing the anger and confusion of EVERYTHING.
I have been fortunate to see two David Lynch exhibitions, one at The Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, the other at Home in Manchester.
I am always drawn to those who need to make, whose creativity is febrile.
The walls of QaGoMA had large oil paintings of grotesque explosive figures that were like Francis Bacons had Bacon not be quite so prim (yes yes Waldemar Januszczak, I am being foolish).
The paintings have titles like Oh…I Said a Bad Thing, Oh Mr Bluebeard with a worm and an apple tree, and I Not Know Gun Was Loaded Sorry.
Then, there is the very small, a wall of matchbooks, each one one with an intense, fine lined inky worlds.
The Brisbane exhibition was enhanced by one of the attendants who would stride through the rooms in performative style. Initially, I was uncertain if this was a curatorial request, but, with a repeated visit, I found if was only if that attendant was there that we would be treated to this disconcertment.
Of all the artists that I love, I find Lynch the hardest to in anyway analyse what it is about his imagination that excites me, particularly his paintings. Not that I care, what a delight it is to turn a page of The Unified Field or There’s Someone in My House and feel an excited uncertainty and delight.
I think I am fortunate in not being bothered by a necessity of singular meaning. I don’t feel it necessary to ask “what’s that all about” or “but what does it MEAN!”, I’m just glad it is. I went to see Mulholland Drive in San Francisco, heavily jet lagged. My friend kept dropping off to sleep and then when she woke up with a start she’d say, “what’s going on?” And I’d reply, “oh, don’t worry about that”. I have read of artists who would sit in a chair holding a metal spoon above a bowl and so every time they fell asleep, they would be woken in that hasty hypnogogic state and see if they could harvest something from their vision. Lynch feels like the filmmaker who has come closest to to replicating that hypnogogic vision, but I don’t think he needed a metal spoon, it seems like there is a purity in his access to our imagination.
The day after he died, I pondered if any filmmaker has been so idiosyncratic in their creativity and achieved such audiences and recognition in the mainstream. There were many answers from others including Cronenberg and Guillermo Del Toro, but even in the delight and horror of their imaginations, I cannot see the level of strangeness and experimentation that Lynch achieved.
Some might not know how necessary Twin Peaks was when it was first televised, the need to have a a blank VHS tape always ready because you knew you would immediately have to watch the episode again that night.
I was confused when I met people who switched off once Laura Palmer’s murderer was revealed, had they really just been watching a whodunnit?
The first Lynch I saw was The Elephant Man.
I believe it is a masterpiece.
Flawless.
The soundtrack of industry that throbs throughout, the relentless of the plumbing, the dampness of the squalor, the monochrome that truly made it feel like a portal to another time. I remember waking up the next day and, as I mentioned earlier, having that uncertainty as to whether I had seen something or imagined it during a night fever.
And then there is the emotion.
Carr Gomm Can you imagine the kind of life he must have had?
Dr. Frederick Treves: Yes, I think I can.
Carr Gomm: I don't think so. No one could possibly imagine it! I don't believe any of us can!
I weep every time.
The possibility of imagination truly seems changed by having had Lynch in the world.
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