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From "Bravo!" magazine, no. 6, may 2002 |
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Lynch’s Logic
Like joy, desire and passion, the moviemaker’s films don’t need a plot or justification. By Sérgio Augusto de Andrade. Nobody understands Mulholland Drive. I doubt that understanding Mulholland Drive is of any use. As everything in life, Mulholland Drive might have no explanation. And, if it does, the explanation can only make Lynch’s film a worse film: less hypnotic, less disturbing and less exciting. Luckily for us, David Lynch films like a sexual maniac - and his only priority is to reestablish, like a generous fetishist, the fortuitous possibility of cinema becoming once again a dangerous art. David Lynch always mistrusted so much everything that could sound domestic, inoffensive or comfortable that he ended up inventing an America in which the essence of domesticity and comfort - the classic and suburban image of a Midwest that seems depicted in a postcard of the end of the fifties - is like a sinister surprise box. What should look like a forgotten postcard among the pages of a perfumed diary ends up as the secret that someone finds out, by chance, lost among the rubble of a burned upper story. Arson is David Lynch’s favourite theatre: it is his passion for fire that can explain both the beginning of Wild At Heart, with its cigarette lighting up in a dark background like the fuse of some macabre attempt, and the suggestions of Fire Walk With Me - a film that seems animated by spontaneous combustion. Fire has always waked side by side with David Lynch’s cinema. Everything in his images is as crafty as shock toys: David Lynch’s scenes seem all the time to be on the verge of some terrible revelation that we are not always certain we want to know. The extent of our reluctance makes his cinema’s delights and is the theme of his most refined game. And the best of it all is that what makes his aesthetics one of the most well-finished heirs of Surrealism’s inventions is not its apparent incongruence; nor its discreet - and so talented - formal affection for Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, maya Deren and Joseph Cornell; not even it hypothetic, compulsive obsession for the representation of dreams: it’s its humour. David Lynch’s humour is much more important than most critics were ever capable of describing unless as infinite variations of a vocation - which, if real, would only be tiring - for a continuous oniric delirium. It only takes putting a David Lynch movie opposite a film critic to start listening, nonstop, the word "dream" - or "nightmare". That’s not critique; that’s conditioned reflex. David Lynch always seemed to me too intelligent to dedicate himself integrally, with an abnegation that would sound suspect, to a vulgar fantasy, empty and redundant as all kinds of dreams usually are: indifferent to the easy pastimes of the unconscious, his movies are fairy tales obsessed by sin. And with his usual good taste, David Lynch always knew that sin should never be depicted simply by the poisoned apple - but by Snow White’s desires. His cinema had the courage to treat Laura Palmer at the same time as Snow White and as the apple. As viewers, we can bite both. His world obeys a very particular form of logics - logics that never exclude frenzy, and that seem to delegate to music the always stimulating task of safekeeping its secrets and summarizing its intentions: from the slightly hallucinated organ of Eraserhead to Rebekah Del Rio singing her version in Spanish of Roy Orbison in Mulholland Drive (including, evidently, Isabella Rossellini’s Blue Velvet), David Lynch has never lost the chance to prove that, in his movies, the conquest of sound in cinema was much more than an arguable historic feat - and that, besides rethinking noise and voice, his films manage to rethink in a memorable way, like few others, the relation between narrative and music. Just like many of his tales unfold with a grave, suggestive deaf noise in the background - as if everyone in the movie had entered by mistake, alone, a huge and dark echo chamber -, the poisoned moment in which any of his characters begins to sing - usually in night clubs always a little scary - is the almost enchanted moment of a gothic epiphany that lights its intrigue with the nervous light of a flickering torch in a closed cave. All David Lynch’s characters seem to be always illuminated by that light. Besides that, the rhythm of his movies’ songs run through the rhythm of his stories with the sinuous languidness of a serpent crawling under the neon sign of a desert motel; rocked by this languidness, his movies always oscillate between the neon and the torch. David Lynch loves to combine both. Therefore, it is more than natural for his films to seem often like musicals staged by characters of very particular taste - characters capable of turning every musical in an erotic comedy whose appeal is invariably visceral. Like a tropical plant in a forgotten swamp, David Lynch’s cinema sprouts from the exact point where cynicism, the quavers and the flesh intercross in a sick fermentation. His style is precise, perverted and lysergic; his cinema is a trance. In a world so ferociously personal, the only possible manifestation of order can only be as arbitrary, gratuitous and original as most of his phobias - thus, for David Lynch, the only consistent expression of moral stability seem to come from a basic respect, among all the imaginable options, for the only laws that his films seem to respect: the traffic laws. Traveling the roads of America in Straight Story, Richard Farnsworth could be easily elected the most righteous model of driver in the whole history of cinema; In Lost Highway, the punishment imposed by Robert Loggia to the disrespect to certain speed limits reaches proportions of delightful dementia; in Mulholland Drive, a good part of the plot originates from an accident caused by a classic, adolescent form of recklessness behind the wheel - all his work, thus, ends up stating more than clearly that obeying fundamental traffic laws means the only essential form of respect that his characters may indulge in obeying. It’s a gloriously pop universe - even in its most fundamental rules. For David Lynch, the difference between a red light and a green light is an ethical principle. "Why are pornographic movies labeled X?", asks a character from Détective, a forgotten and marvelous film by Jean-Luc Godard. "Why?" - she insists - "isn’t X only used in mathematics?" "Exactly for that", someone answers. "Ah", she sighs, seeming suddenly clarified; and finishes - "the unknown factor". David Lynch’s cinema seems radical even at the moments in which his experimentalism accepts to flert with the most orthodox conventions of commercial cinema - as in The Elephant Men, Dune or Twin Peaks -; but its essence is always as dangerous, outraging and tasty as the great classics of the pornographic tradition - the tradition of Debbie Does Dallas, Le Parfum de Mathilde, Rêves de Cuir or Viva Tabatha!. As in the pornographic cinema, the act of telling or not stories is part of a strategy of desire, not of the author; as in the pornographic cinema, his images seem to have fever; as in the pornographic cinema, everything, after a certain moment, gives the impression of structuring itself like a delirium; as in the pornographic cinema, his themes repeat themselves with the obsession of a mania; as in the pornographic cinema, everything seems planned to excite. The great difference between David Lynch’s cinema and the imagination of pornography is that David Lynch’s movies have always been much more explicit. But it is Jean-Luc Godard, once more - whom David Lynch, by the way, resembles in a way often unsuspected -, that can explain in a definitive way the hypothetical mysteries of his cinema. I doubt that Godard ever thought of David Lynch with any attention, but that is not important: when defining the unknown factor as the secret center of pornographic cinema, his logic, again, seems to light everything - in this case everything, at least, that Lynch created. Finally, like David Lynch’s films, every equation also has its method - but it is the unknown factor that represents the only erotic possibility among the laws of its rigour. Because of this, I would prefer to believe that that which most people describe as his dreams are simply, in the end, the erotic irruption of the unfathomable under the modern mask of a narrative in crisis. Unwittingly - and probably unknowingly -, David Lynch has been showing new ways for pornography. And - what is best - instead of turning pornography into art, his films turn art into pornography - which is much more sophisticated. After all, still as in the pornographic cinema, what David Lynch has been proving - with the talent of a mater-of-ceremony presenting suspect numbers in a decadent circus - is that perhaps telling stories isn’t that important. Joy, desire and passion never needed a plot. David Lynch’s movies don’t need justification.
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