From a Fan who wasn't a fan.

David Lynch is by all possible definitions and Icon of cinema. He has an argument for the most important director of his time (though these kinds of qualifiers and hierarchies I find unnecessary) “Twin Peaks”, “Inland Empire”, “Mulholland Drive”, “Blue Velvet”, “Eraserhead”, “The Straight Story”, “Lost Highway”, “Wild at Heart”, “The Elephant Man”, and “Dune”. That last one is so funny to me, both a man-made cosmic joke, and a measure of a man who was dedicated to his craft with an emphasis on the “his” part. Lynch was a singular artist, especially an American artist, whose impact on cinema as a whole cannot easily be quantified -if it all. But, if you were to want to look for the feeling of it, what that weight may tangibly feel like to your mind, you will hear it in the anecdotes of his devotees and maybe more importantly from people like me, who’s first introduction to Lynch was through that funny outlier called “Dune” and who never really loved his movies like that again. Someone who was always a bit befuddled by the messy abstract nature of storytelling. Who struggled to find not only meaning, but more importantly pleasure from watching his movies. I wasn't raised by cinephiles. I was never in the company of people who mentioned, watched, or talked about it's great contributors and/or it's ultimate meaning. I was made aware of their magic by way of videocassette, and cable, neither of which is the prescribed optimum for film going. We watched what most of the public watched. We went for the bright lights, and big stars. I was mainstream cinema to the bone, John Carpenter was as far outside as I went. I remember seeing Dune for the first time - it was definitely on TV because nobody but me was interested (when you have six other brothers and sisters you're gonna get out voted alot) and it was like Ridley Scott's “Legend”- something instantly appealing to me, despite one not being “Star Wars” and the other not being Conan (or later Willow) . Lynch’s Dune adaptation was frightening, it was ugly, and hideous, lavish, and gorgeous, silly, but powerful. When I was young the silly was the powerful, ( I don't know that that has changed) and the film was the beginning of a forty year awakening I had no idea was going on, because at the time I had no idea why I liked “Dune”. It was everything that most movies I loved on the subject wasn't. I barely understood it, it wasn't a movie star vehicle, it seemed (to a child) to not be very invested in the effects that drove these things, in short there was very little of the kind of candy I had come to know, but there was still candy there. The next film I saw of Lynch’s was “Eraserhead”, some 10 years later as a “much smarter” teen. Beyond confused, I felt betrayed, what happened to my guy? Dune was weird, but it was at least somewhat understandable, perceptible, likeable. It was aesthetically strange and sometimes hideous, but it was also beautiful and ostentatious. Eraserhead by comparison seemed like a student film, and “WHAT WAS THAT THING!” Not only had I never seen anything like Eraserhead, up to that point I had never seen such a vast difference between films in a filmmakers filmography. “Mulholland Drive” would be next, and this was by accident, because I had all but sworn Mr Lynch off, and after so many “WTF’s” so as to form a proverbial conga line, after the last scene, “Silencio”, after tiny people running out of paper bags, billowing smoke, stilted conversations, I was once again not only befuddled, but disoriented. I had no clue this was what film could do, was supposed to do. I felt I was taken out of one place and put into another, and that the shift of time and space had had an effect on my ability to tell up from down, right from left, good from bad. I was in a way frightened, and angry, and I swore him off altogether “for good”. What I didn't know then was that seeds had been sown within me. In a way not too dissimilar from the purpose of vaccines Lynch’s films were preparing me for an entirely new way of viewing cinema. Disorientation is often a consequence of intoxication, too much of a good thing can be a very real thing, or a very unreal thing. There was something that was pulling me towards watching Lynch films, despite my extreme aversion.

“Eraserhead” with its subconscious displays of sexual repugnancy was a reminder of my own normie dysfunctional relationship with sex, considering my upbringing. It was also beginning to sow the seeds of a question, of my aversion to its stiltedness, it's silences, and it's oppressive weirdness, and more completely to my aversions, to me as a spectator. I may have been utterly disgusted and bewildered by it, but I haven't seen it in 30 years and I still recall a great deal of it. Tangent; when I was young on one of our usual trips to Blockbuster video I ran into the unsightly sight of the box cover for “Hellraiser”, it was just a cover and yet I was deeply unsettled by it, by the aesthetics of Pinhead. There was something so viscerally off-putting about the sight of him holding that box, those graph-like crevices across his head each one of them containing a spike, the deprivation of any sense of life in his eyes, that off kilter smile that's not exactly a smile. It took me exactly 30 years to finally get around to watching that film as well, and when I did I wished I had seen it much earlier and then congratulated a younger me on being a good judge of character from a movie box, because I would not have been ready. Even as an adult, something about the concept of Pinhead only further agitated and unthawed that dormant sense of dread and terror. Sometimes all it takes is a look. From the beginning to the ending, “Mulholland Drive” was like the scaling of a rabbit hole. I felt consumed by it, I felt like I was being moved throughout its innards. The style of acting was off putting, the dialogue, the mystery of every beat and it's off beats eluded to a something unsafe, much like the darkened hallway of Bill Pullman's house (which may be his mind, our mind ?) in “Lost Highway”. These films promised something unknowable, something in the pitch of blackness. Even if they landed somewhere far safer (they really didn't) two to three hours of this for me on the regular was impossible, might as well take a claustrophobic person and tell them to hang in the back of a trunk for a couple hours for fun. Safer, kinder, films, not to be confused with safe and kind films (this is relative to Lynch) took the edge off by way of clear implication, linear movement, precise language. In those films being consumed feels good, you feel the divine in the pastoral sense. You can say “Someone is keeping watch over all this”. It is difficult to explain, but even in something like Fincher’s “Seven” there is always comfort somwhere in the viewing. This film has a shepherd, someone is at the helm and they are here. Lynch’s films felt like they were completely free to be anything and do anything to you, like they were protrusions from his bed as he slept, enveloped in his mind -you might feel, I might feel as if I have no ability to control when I want to leave. All this feels terribly exaggerative, and dramatic, I have a remote control. Nonetheless, it is I think an apt dramatic reprentation of the suggestive dreamlike state movies place us in, and that much more with someone whose visions were so distinctively dreamlike. It was Luis Buñuel who said that “among all means of human expression, its (films’) way of functioning is most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep”. When I think on my feelings on “Eraserhead” I think of a dog that jumped out of the screen barking viciously and left some of its spittle on my person as some harboring sense of existential worry was walking by - had nobody thought to put a leash on this thing? I don't mean to suggest that this is all Lynch's films were, I'm no expert here, I've only seen five of his movies. The ones I've seen were about everything anyone else's could be; love, desire, societal angst, femininity, masculinity, but all carried the additional weight of that very particular and vast divine in the same sense it is divine when you are swallowed by a black hole. Lynch wasn't the only American director of his time willing to plunge into that darkness, he wasn't the only one to make me feel strange, he was just the one to explore that level of depth, of its dimensions, and without a rope or tether. He understood the darkness somewhat like the Japanese understand demons. It wasn't something to be ran from, but boy did I run, like so many of his characters did from their own or …

By the time I had seen Pasiolini, Tarkovsky, Parajanov, and later Suzuki, Buñuel, and even Nicolas Winding Refn, I had no clue that my ability to accept, to love, or just respect these filmmakers or films was the result of the seed that watching Lynch had planted so many years ago. Much like in real life with a person you know intimately, or personally, the one who actually did the work doesn't reap the benefits. Sometimes it seems as though the body and mind keep the lesson, but the rebuke the teacher. Lynch's work had caused me to avert my eyes and then ask “why?”, which consequently opened them wider, but not to his films ..they remained closed to them. I would later see Lynch only in interviews, spring had come for Mr Lynch and as the ice slowly began to melt, I began to soften. The man was nothing like what his movies suggested to me, or rather what years of mediocre parodies of the “important filmmaker” in combination with some filmmakers being quite willing to embody this caricature - had told me about a person who makes these kinds of films. Lynch was extremely funny, very straight forward, not only in speech, but manner. When he spoke, he spoke clearly, and without the use of verbose, flowery language to explain his feelings or thoughts on film. He had style, but it was very simple. Casual, comfortable-looking and classic, the most dazzling portion being the size of some of the clothes, and of course his hair. He was what the kids today call a “yapper”, but he was an intent listener in all his interviews. Looking and waiting with eyes that seemed to draw the position of leaning forward in front of him. His story of meeting with George Lucas (who couldn't be more different if he came from Mars) is not only gracious and full of genuine admiration, but it's quite funny because he's so straight forward. The more interviews I would see the more I felt I was coming to the realization that I really loved this man, and more specifically I loved his dedication to being an artist without trying to be an artist, which is to say David Lynch was profoundly himself. “I do what I love and George does what he loves, the difference is what George loves makes billions of dollars.” -while good for a laugh isn't the backhand slight so many of his ilk and who love him are fond of tossing at a mainstream pop director like George Lucas, and it's a representation rather than a presentation of his very unique and undisturbed sense of self.

Most important to the change David Lynch wasn't anywhere near as disorientating and frightening as his films were to me. I no longer saw the provocatuer trying to snatch my soul, but an astute observer of the human condition. I would see these interviews intermittently and somewhere around the middle of that journey I somewhat relaxed in my disposition. Having relaxed, I began to feel “as wrong as I had been about the man, maybe I had been as wrong about his films?”. Maybe I somehow “felt” wrong. I decided finally to see “Blue Velvet” and found that feelings regardless of feelings don't change much. You cannot logic your way out of most of them, no more than turning on the light and explaining to a child that “nothing is there” solves the problem or their fear, or telling me that snakes are largely not a problem to humans makes me any less wary around them. No, not much had changed, but something big had changed. While this was still not a film I could love in that sense of adulation and compliment, it was a film I loved in the sense of pure attraction and feeling. I saw the humor in the arc and performance he wrote and conjured from Dennis Hopper. I connected with the intense feeling of dread as something repelling me, but also something that fascinated me. I (like so many others) was bewitched by thee Dean Stockwell scene; such a distinctive interruption, an emotional tangent, disruption to his own disruption, a love letter to the power of music. I got it, without “getting it”. I don't have poignant explanations and deconstructions for Lynch’s ouvre and career, but it left an indelible mark on me. Childlike an observation as it may have seemed to others, (and to myself) I realized that much like I don't have to understand his films or any film, I don't have to love a movie, or it's creator to be able to see this person has a power, a mastery, a sense of the divine in us and around us, and most especially in our foibles and our weaknesses, most especially in the dark. I began to interrogate myself as a spectator, to ask myself about my own intuitions, feelings, and aim for a better quality of distinction of thought. Respect is one thing, it's indifferent, ambivalent, distant, cool. I respect alot of peoples work, and in film this comes regularly for movies I can appreciate but not connect to, because the emotions they're aiming for are lost on me. That was never the case with Lynch, I always felt a resounding, loud, drum of emotion watching the films I did see. What Lynch has taught me over the years is that “liking” as it pertains to films and as a direct gateway to love is a bit overrated. That being repelled, confused, disoriented is as important a way to love of art as being attracted, understood, assured, or enlightened. I learned that being confused means to have to do work -work to discover whether or not that confusion is the result of ineptitude, or a lack of execution, or the intentional. Work to challenge your own feelings, sometimes to explore parts of yourself you're not ready to explore. That sometimes even when you think you've done the work you haven't. Maybe that was a undercurrent of the point in Eraserhead? I wouldn't know, I haven't seen it in thirty years. Maybe now is a good time to re-explore? Film school should've taught me this, but it's strict adherence to codes and the import of interpretation led me in the opposite direction. They worshipped Lynch there, but they also worshipped interpreting Lynch there. Wasn't much different to me than how you're taught to love God in most churches. You were supposed to love these images mostly because you're supposed to, and then because you can interpret them. Your love was then not really for the love of the movie, but love of your “exceptional” ability to read it. I did not, not in a way that instantaneously drove me to love. It was Lynch’s own voice neither self depreciating nor boastful, first outside of his films, then in, that gave me this. I may never want to hang out with Lynch films or revisit them consistently, but whenever I'm in their company, whenever I decide it's time to see a new one; like “Inland Empire” or “Lost Highway”, it's a reminder of the best qualities of art, of what we seek in art. I don't think many people will understand what I mean, take this as rubbish. Much film discourse either implicitly or explicitly implies a simple view of the love/hate dichotomy, Lynch set me down the path of not giving a f****. His films will never be my favorites and yet he is one of my favorite filmmakers. The abstract will never be as adored as the linear or decipherable to me on any regular basis, but it's ability to resonate with that part of us that may be afraid to speak, or be seen, that part buried underneath the idea of “self”, will always be far more revolutionary and disruptive. Lynch and his movies embodied a truth I strive for, one that may not exist as a possible goal, but acknowledges the striving as a truth in and of itself. In relation to myself they nudged me to interrogate myself, to ask for more, to dig deeper into processing my own thoughts and dreams. They are not the friends I hang out with everytime it would wear me out to do so, they are the friends I visit every once in long while and though they may not be your best or most beloved, their impact is revelatory each time. In the end you wave goodbye, promise it won't be so long, and then of course…it is.