Weird on Top: Lynch and His Precursors

 

“The world is weird on top and wild at heart”

In an essay titled Kafka and His Precursors Borges argues that what is termed Kafkaesque has always existed, “but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.” 

The same should be said of David Lynch; there are unique and singular experiences in this world that, were it not for him would have otherwise gone unnamed; when a stranger mistakes you for a friend, or the sound of a record skipping, the eerie feeling of absolutely nothing being out of place, the feeling of pulling back a curtain and not knowing what you would find; this is what we can now call Lynchian. If we follow Borges' argument then “each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” So it is not just that a precursor is an influence, but something that is read in an entirely different way. Roy Orbison is Lynchian and so is Bobby Vinton, but also Beach House, Nine Inch Nails, The Chromatics, Moby, Sunset Blvd, certain episodes of The Twilight Zone, early JG Ballard stories, the suburban aesthetic of the 50s in general.

What is Lynchian is not limited by time, place or even medium, the Lynchian is anything that could appear in his work: small towns, audio-visual glitches, witches, demons, atomic bombs, cherry pie, non-sequiturs. Lynch leaves a legacy that encompasses the morphology of film and TV entirely and also permeates almost every aspect of American culture and its collective unconscious. A recurring motif in Lynch’s work is the linking of the scene’s ontology to cinematic technique. In The Black Lodge characters talk “backwards,” in the famous Club Silencio scene from Mulholland Dr a character announces that “this is all a recording,” and a scene from the third season of Twin Peaks uses a stuttering frame rate as Cooper becomes closer to an eyeless woman.

Aesthetically Lynch’s work oscillates between Hollwood classicism and experimental abstraction rarely is it both at the same time. Often these modes are employed counter to the placement of their ‘normalcy’ within cultural readings. In other words; the straight forward continuity system is employed in the beginning of Mullholland Dr. and Blue Velvet, but rather than presenting these worlds as normal (as a classic hollywood sensibility would imply) the effect is quite the opposite; the normal starts to feel strange, the wholesome feels unclean. The same can be said of his tendency towards abstraction when Lynch is at his weirdest it is also the closest his films get to expressing a true nature of the work’s ontology. It is the hallucinogenic expressions that feel the most real in Lynch and the most straight forward scenes that appear as weird.

Mark Fisher in The Weird and The Eerie devotes a whole chapter to the last two Lynch films writing about Mulholland Dr. he says:

The Hollywood setting proliferates embedded worlds — films within-films (and possibly films-           within-films within-films), screen tests, performed roles, fantasies. Each embedding contains the possibility of a disembedding, as something that was at a supposedly inferior ontological level threatens to climb up out of its subordinated position and claim equal status with the level above: figments from dreams cross over into waking life; screen tests appear at least as convincing as the exchanges in the supposedly real-world scenes that surround them. In Mulholland Drive, however — rendered in the onscreen title as Mulholland Dr, with its suggestion of Mulholland Dream — the overwhelming tendency appears to move in the opposite direction: it is not so much that dreams become taken for reality, as that any apparent reality subsides into a dream. But whose dream is it anyway?

One of Lynch’s commitments was never to share his own interpretation of his own work, I doubt that he even had one. It is because of his refusal to share the meaning of his films that the viewer is able to develop a personal relationship to the work. The importance of weirdness in film, music or any other form of media is that it allows us to think from not just a different perspective, but from a perspective of a completely different scale; the inhuman, the cosmic, the illogical. Because of Lynch’s play with the veil of dream and reality I believe that for most of his fans the interpretation of his work was not just limited to his films, but to an attempt at grasping the vastness of life. Anyone who has ever felt like an outsider would find themselves at home in Lynch’s work. From the mystical detective, Dale Cooper, to Nicolas Cage’s role in Wild at Heart as an outcast who declares “this is a snakeskin jacket and for me it is a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom” the characters in Lynch’s world are all and only weirdos.

For an artist to die does not only entail the fact that they will not complete any new work, but also that in their death their work, having become complete, enters a new dimension.