I was very busy when David Lynch died, and only had time for a lazy link and a cheap thought on the matter , but his art stands tall in my world, and deserves much more thought.  What bothers me is that I cannot properly verbalize it.

Which is weird for two reasons.  One is that I can usually express my feelings with close to perfect accuracy.  I know myself well.  Whether that’s because I’m wise or because I’m simple-minded is a matter for debate (don’t debate it or I’ll punch you in the kidney).  The other reason is that I “get” David Lynch, where many, many other people do not.

Like when I’m watching Blue Velvet or Eraserhead or Lost Highway or whatever, I am feeling exactly what he intended me to feel.  I’m under his spell.  Yet most people who watch those movies just don’t feel it, and are dismissive about the fact it went by them.  Totally blithe, like, “eh, whatever, too weird, didn’t like, moving on…”

I’m not saying that you can’t have different opinions from me on your enjoyment of those films or interpretations of them.  I can imagine the person that does “get” them the way I do, and doesn’t like what they’re getting.  But I’ve never fucking met that person.  People just tell on themselves and stroll.  That’s fine, but if you didn’t get it, I don’t care to fucking hear about it.

This surreal narrative art is important to me.  I think it deserves to be understood, and if you know that isn’t you, don’t even talk about it.  Fine…  Quick aside, I’m a very self-aware person, and can’t help but think of ways I could be perceived as hypocritical or foolish in my statements.  On this one, the analogy that jumped out at me is of a catholic apologist saying he isn’t interested in atheist arguments because they ignore the splendor and majesty of faith.  Whatever, I’m running with it…

Well, another aside on that:  I just recently said I look at everything critically and stan nothing, and some might see my lack of interest in hearing from haters as stanning.  No, I can see flaws aplenty in David Lynch’s work, and am quite confident he did some dirt in his life.  I’d rather not hear about it, but if one insisted on showing up with receipts, I’d believe them.  Still, at the moment, please don’t.

So as much as I get it, I can’t explain it.  I can talk about some aspects of it, and I will, but the most genuinely important thing about David Lynch’s oeuvre is the hardest to describe.  I can think of reductive clichés and movie review jargon, a little art school lingo, but maybe it’s nonverbal.  In that last article I linked to, I also said that I am “very aware of artifice.”

One track of my brain can play pretend and take things as they are, the other is always seeing the construction of things, both concrete (that’s where they cut between the actor and the stunt double, this is wires, etc.) and abstract (especially writing tropes, but manipulation in general).  David Lynch movies don’t shut that down completely, but they’re better able to turn down the volume on it.  That helps me experience the “magic of cinema” more fully.

I can’t put my finger on what he was doing.  Is it as simple as being earnest?  Alien concept to my jaded ass.  I’ve tried, actually, to isolate the elements, come up with a formula, so that I could try to write something that hits the same.  Looking back on those attempts, they seem so superficial and weak.  Now I’m disadvantaged in making Lynchian narrative art, because I don’t have the medium of cinema.  If I had no other hobbies and obligations eating my time, I could probably make surreal shorts with free video editing software, but it’s a huge time commitment.  But I still believe it should be possible.  The writing of Leonora Carrington is a different flavor of surreal but has similar power.

I can feel it, “get it,” but I can’t explain it.  Can’t understand it?  Maybe the understanding is aspirational.  I move toward it, it moves toward me, sometimes we touch and sometimes we miss.  Another disadvantage I may have is not being autistic enough.  r/evilautism had love for the guy, who met a lot of the criteria, but was able to go through life being himself.  He didn’t “mask” the autism as many do; they called him an “unmasked king.”  He just explained whatever weird shit he was up to matter-of-factly and kept it going to the end.

I’m going to hint at how his movies express that condition, but I don’t want to say anything too declarative, lest I get something wrong.  Far from an expert.  David Lynch movies feature a lot of “humans as monsters” not in some cynical misanthropic way, but just literally “I don’t get some humans and they’re scary.”  Some characters are monster 100% of the time, some are human 100%, some mode switch to express a crucial feeling or theme?  Or does service to the theme emerge from characters following a natural arc, like it’s successful as a byproduct rather than intent?  I don’t know.  Another thing is strongly evoking dissociation, with worlds made out of Edward Hopper-style liminal spaces and overbearing sensations.  To whatever extent I experience these feelings, it doesn’t rise to the level of a diagnosable condition legit way of being.

The entertainment I’m most drawn to in life is basic bitch power fantasies, like action heroes flying through the air and beating what bothers them.  Maybe he just stands as far from that as possible, and the contradistinction elevates him.  Of course, mumblecore movies about hipsters getting divorced is far from Tsui Hark, but that doesn’t hit the same.  There is something of melodrama in his stories, which is why the recurring soap opera bits in the first season of Twin Peaks (“An Invitation to Love”) were so cool.  They were an admission that Twin Peaks is a melodrama, but the contrast with the fakeness of the soapworld suggested the main events were another layer of reality.

One thing a lot of people don’t know is that “surreal” doesn’t mean unreal.  It means “more than real,” which is so apt.  When you’re getting it, it feels profound the way dreams do.  It cuts through the layers of narrative we use to interpret reality, make everything safe enough to proceed in life, as if we know anything.

Maybe it’s all smoke and mirrors; it just worked better on me than caring about whatever The DoD’s Pentagon’s Disney’s M&M Mars’s Marvel’s The Avengers™ were up to.  But it felt real, and still does.  Estoy llorando.

As to what I meant by “you can take David Lynch out of the world, but you can’t make it any less Lynchian” is that the world is a melodrama of monsters and people and people turning into monsters and vice versa, played out chiefly in anxious enclaves of manufactured reality dotting an utterly alien landscape of liminal spaces and broken wilderness.  We’re all smoking cigarettes nervously under the flickering streetlamps of life.

Anyway, not at all satisfied with my efforts on this.  Enjoy a monkey.

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