David Lynch - Classic or Dud

from Amy Taubin's Cannes report in the current Film Comment, where the first two eps of TP 2.0 were screened:

"I wish I could be interested in Lynch’s fiddling with CGI, his overworking of his actors’ glottal stops, and his evocation of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the symptomology of Alzheimer’s disease, and, more generally, castration anxiety. But I’m not."

She did like the new Top of the Lake.

her loss, truly

Wow, what a shitty place to stop watching.

With the Lynch documentary The Art Life getting a home video release from Criterion next month, I was really surprised to notice today that it's streaming on Amazon. (It's good.)

I enjoyed it, really liked seeing so much of his art and process. Wished the narrative didn't stop at Eraserhead.

Lynch the normative reactionary?

"Notwithstanding his aesthetic distinction, Lynch’s depictions of queerness, disability, gender, sexuality and race suggest that any deviation from white, heterosexual, middle-class life is not normal. Consistent with his position on trespassing, the director’s films strictly demarcate a place of normalcy that must be aggressively protected from the deviance and obscenity of the outside. Against Waters, who locates the darkest elements of the American experiment in so-called polite society, for Lynch, evil comes from the place we are always told evil comes from—the periphery. In his work, it’s the killers at cheap motels, drug dealers, prostitutes and back-alley perverts that menace the shining city upon a hill. A position profoundly at odds with critics and audiences increasingly attuned to racism and inequality, Lynch’s worldview is an anachronism and worthy of more serious critique."

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/man-behind-glass-trouble-david-lynchs-brand-weird/

evil comes from the place we are always told evil comes from—the periphery

this is bullshit

While Lynch is largely regarded as patron saint of the weird, his nearly ecclesiastical approach to the supposed aberrance of bodies, erotic desires, sexual orientations, abilities and races undermines the supposed weirdness he depicts. For these elements to appear exceptional, there must be a presumptive normal against which the weird is measured. For Lynch, such normalcy ultimately looks a lot like conservative, middle-class American life. To his credit, he often suggests that suburban America is not as innocent as it seems, but he nevertheless continually establishes a dichotomy between good, minimally kooky, salt of the earth folks—Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) in The Straight Story, Sheriff Harry Truman in Twin Peaks (1991)—and deviants. The hostility with which Lynch regards nonconformity, then, ultimately suggests a profound resentment of “the weird”.

his (arguably) most famous work centers around an upstanding upper-middle class pillar of a white community raping and murdering his daughter

or the closing credit sequence in Inland Empire - where all the girls are liberated and together and finally happy - how is this "conservative, middle-class American life"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxG5-MlEurI

hot take reductive nonsense

I do think David Lynch plays off a particular brand of "normal" - specifically the American white nuclear family of the 1950s - in just about everything I've seen of his. He has both a fascination with that period (the conservative ethos, the aesthetics/design) and a love of throwing in gruesome/comedic/surreal/mystical weirdness to see how it screws it up.

This is a dumb essay.

(didnt read essay tho, not necessarily agreeing w it)

an upstanding upper-middle class pillar of a white community raping and murdering his daughter

...while possessed by what appears to be a longhaired grease monkey.

...OR IS HE?!?!?!?

^^^

then there's the Elephant Man, a whole film about how "normal" people are the real monsters etc.

Dune (of course) doesn't fit into this rubric at all either.

there are so many dumb holes in this argument.

Now I know why he called it The Straight Story!

lol

Article speaks of a tendency... you seldom find universals in a filmmaker with a 40-year-career.

the fact that there are significant countervailing tendencies would indicate that the conclusion being drawn is wrong

yes, that essay is dumb: the standard line you usually hear trotted out about david lynch (and especially wrt blue velvet and twin peaks) is that his work pries into the evil that is lurking behind the surface image of white picket fences and all-american small town life. and while that's a bit of a whatever,cliched take it's certainly more on the money than this.

yes, that the Rotary Club types are actually crossdressers and into BDSM...

I knew this wd provoke a firefight from the worshippers.

im not really a worshipper and i think if you wanted to critique lynch on how unwoke he is, how white his films are, or how often the portrayal of women in his films betrays a hairy-handed lechery then you can easily do that. i just don't think this is particularly illuminating

Like many directors his age he's subject to objections that the majority of his protagonists are straight, white men. I don't take this "sin of omission" as anything major, given the overall tenor and focus of his body of work, and the fact that his protagonists are often nuanced, flawed, etc. and not held up as paragons of racial virtue or some shit like that.

I do think it is worth noting that his lone lesbian protagonist (Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive) is ultimately a tragic figure that is portrayed pretty sympathetically, and not as evil or as deserving of punishment for her "deviance".

xxpost No, it just provokes corrections from people who know how to read a text without imprinting bullshit on it that isn't there.

Now, if someone wanted to write an essay about Lynch's questionable handling of women in The Return, I'd be all ears.

I knew this wd provoke a firefight from the worshippers

This is key.

it does raise interesting questions, that's the value i see in it, and I honestly (in mostly staying away from the Return thread) haven't heard/read much other than awestruck praise for DL of late. I am an admirer.

Still, it's something worth wrestling with, the horror genre and human deviance. Signed, a gay horror fan.

'zackly!

xp
One thing that struck me as I skimmed that article (sorry, work) is the notion that more people haven't called out Lynch's version of "normal". I don't agree that it's in need of calling out really, because the white picket fence families in his stuff (Earth based stuff anyway) are kind of archetypes anyway. They don't seem real or normal to me, and it's not like I "relate" to the facade of the Palmer's family life, or Janey & Dougie or whoever. They're almost like blank canvases on which Lynch can paint surreal, nightmarish shadow versions of those peoples' lives.

What's "dated" about this is that hyper-stylized version of an American family really only exists on commercials, or via nostalgia for people who grew up in the 50s and 60s. Haha, or for the kind of suburban white Americans who would probably never watch Twin Peaks.

an upstanding upper-middle class pillar of a white community raping and murdering his daughter

...while possessed by what appears to be a longhaired grease monkey.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, August 31, 2017 11:16 AM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's probably significant here that Fire Walk with Me, which was Lynch's last word on the Twin Peaks universe until very recently, implies that Leland was considerably more abusive and symbiotically linked to BOB than the series lets on.

Yes, obv the TP series' vision of 'normal' directly derives from '50s/early '60s pop culture, even in the casting of actors from the period like Beymer, Tamblyn, Piper Laurie, Chamberlain, Don Murray. (ditto Blue Velvet)

from Amy Taubin's Cannes report in the current Film Comment, where the first two eps of TP 2.0 were screened:

"I wish I could be interested in Lynch’s fiddling with CGI, his overworking of his actors’ glottal stops, and his evocation of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the symptomology of Alzheimer’s disease, and, more generally, castration anxiety. But I’m not."

She did like the new Top of the Lake.

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 12 July 2017 17:19 (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That last sentence is a kicker and a half. New top of the lake is appalling

i think the essay's thesis (that lynch is working from a notion that middle class wasp life is normal and everything outside of it is deviant/horrifying) is easily countered with numerous examples from his films and also his own life. if anything, he often seems to conjure up that perception of normality only to subvert the living hell out of it.

but i also think it's silly to pretend that he doesn't have longstanding "issues" with how he presents people with physical and mental disabilities, and issues with not portraying people of color at all. lynch is really good at offering up visions of the "normal" life and then subverting them, because he often does so in deliberate, drawn out subtle ways (yes, i know it often ends in very unsubtle ways). but he frequently doesn't offer up that same subtlety to his "weird" characters. i think the essay is correct to point out that he often uses disability as a signifier of "otherness". but again...sometimes he does show immense compassion for these characters. as morbs said, he has a long career and there are plenty of counterexamples.

lmao i essentially said what shakey said on morbs' facebook post

New rule. Only allowed to post 'c' or 'd' in these threads.

Posting thinkpieces = ban, the wronger the longer

CDCCDCCD CCDCCCCC CDDCCDCC CDDCDDDD CDDCDDDC CCDCCDDD CDDDCDCC CCDCCCCC CDDDCDCC CDDCDCCC CDDCDCCD CDDCDDDC CDDCDCDD CCDCCCCC CDDDCDCC CDDCDCCC CDDCDCCD CDDDCCDD CCDCCCCC CDDCDCCD CDDDCCDD CCDCCCCC CDDCCCCD CCDCCCCC CDDCCDDD CDDCDDDD CDDCDDDD CDDCCDCC CCDCCCCC CDDCDCCD CDDCCDCC CDDCCDCD CDDCCCCD CCDCDDCC CCDCCCCC CDDCCDCC CDDCDDCD CDDCCCCD CDDCCCDD CCDCDDDC 

that's a real message but it's in binary so get your punch card supercomputers out of the closet

Oh I've no doubt there's already twenty posts in the TP thread about it hey

It's probably significant here that Fire Walk with Me, which was Lynch's last word on the Twin Peaks universe until very recently, implies that Leland was considerably more abusive and symbiotically linked to BOB than the series lets on.

This is true, but on the other hand, FWWM also presents Deer Meadow, which is like a nastier version of Twin Peaks and … at the same time a whole lot lower down the socio-economic scale. Maybe it has a light underbelly we never get to see.

Carl is positively angelic in TP:TR

And I love Lynch, but I'm not sure he's done a lot for the image of hobos.

Carl is positively angelic in TP:TR

But he's moved his trailer park from Deer Meadow to Twin Peaks ha ha.

Recently saw Ellen Page accused of being an imperialist colonialist.

I think David Wants To Fly is probably the worst we'll see of Lynch.

Didn't Lynch's interview with the Palmer family suggest Leland was not guilty of abuse?

Given these elements of Lynch’s work, it is baffling that more people have not critiqued the filmmaker’s normative sensibilities.

I stopped reading the essay here, because I feel like critiques of Lynch's normative sensibilities have been a staple of the Lynch discourse for as long as I can remember. "Is David Lynch sexist/racist/exploitative" is probably the most well-worn corner of Lynch criticism. The essay's argument is a surface argument and it's fine as far as it goes, but plenty of ppl love Lynch who also find him troubling and sometimes indefensible. I mean, if you don't find him troubling I'm not sure what you even get from his work. Of course it's troubling.

Didn't Lynch's interview with the Palmer family suggest Leland was not guilty of abuse?

According to... Leland

Who was created by lynch!

wait a sec, does this refer to Gordon Cole interviewing the Palmers? xp