Prefatory note

David Lynch:
Mainstream Subterranean



David Lynch created perhaps the most disturbing dinner setting in the history of film for his "Eraserhead" in 1977. Yet it's hard to imagine a more uneasy setting than when David Lynch took his place at the table of America's highest-profile directors in the late eighties. There hasn't been a more unwelcome guest among Hollywood's dealmakers and trend-setters since Roman Polanski was forced to flee town ahead of an indictment on charges of statutory rape.



Today there are really only two prominent independent filmmakers in the entire United States of America. It's true that as late as the early nineties there were still films being made by borrowing money from a rich uncle in the dry cleaning business. But films like Kevin Smith's "Clerks" (1994) and Robert Rodriguez' "El Mariachi" (1992) are relics today. In 1999, so-called "independent" films are mainly those funded by the "independent" divisions of major studios. Once a showcase for new and untested talent, Robert Redford's Sundance Festival, established in 1983, has been so co-opted by major money, that a second festival, Slamdance, was established in 1995 in protest. In 1996 another festival, the vitriolically named Slumdance, made the claim that even Slamdance was little more than an establishment front. Later that year a Soul Dance festival was created to showcase minority talent. Near the Park City, Utah location of Sun-, Slam-, Slum- and Soul Dance, there is presently a man operating a projector out of his van, and calling his "truly independent festival" Son Of Sam Dance. The dances go on, but the message is clear: truly independent American filmmaking is in a state very much like death. Mention of Brakhage, Baillie, Frampton, Mekas and the American Independent film movement that flourished through the late seventies, a movement that sought to build epic art based upon film's pure musicality, method and structure, comes out as little more than mourning for a moment lost.

But there are indeed two truly independent filmmakers in America. Two men whose work is inspired by their personal obsessions, and who, unrestrained by studio demands, retain the ability to administer the final cut and put the work into the world as they see fit. And, most importantly, who are permitted to make films that don't make money. Those men are Woody Allen and David Lynch. There could hardly be two more different filmmakers, but this they have in common. Another feature they share is that if you were to ask passersby on the streets of Paris, Copenhagen or Kinshasa to name an American filmmaker other than George Lucas or Steven Speilberg, it is very likely that either Allen or Lynch's name would be raised. The same, oddly, could not be said of residents stopped on the streets of Cincinnati or Memphis. One could argue that the state of the American film is at the nadir of its once glorious history. Of filmmakers like Speilberg and Lucas, who have their own powerful studios, it might correctly be said they answer to no one in the Hollywood business community. But they are engaged in a different practice altogether from filmmaking. They are in the business of manufacturing money, and they happen to do it with exceptional ingenuity and skill. It could be argued that Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese certainly retain a good deal of autonomy from studio pressures. But Coppola, while crafting handsome and polished work, has failed to surprise anyone in nearly a decade. Scorsese makes brilliant, personal and affecting films, but his intention has always been to expand the purview of the mainstream movie. He's had laudable success in doing this, and the devotion paid to him is well-deserved. Still, Allen and Lynch represent independent success of a whole other order.

Woody Allen's attainment of independence can be summed up by invoking the single title, "Annie Hall". This landmark 1976 film gave a brash and brilliant comedian the opportunity to prove that he could slip people through laughter to tears and back, again and again, by forcing them to endure painful identification with his obsessive self-consciousness; and he did so by shredding and revising many of the conventions of traditional narrative comedy. The film won the four top Academy Awards for that year, but Allen did not attend the ceremony.



For David Lynch, the road to independence - if not a lost highway, a very lonely one - took more complicated turns. Along the way, Lynch has not only achieved fame, notoriety and and unusual measure of artistic independence, but he occupies a singular position among American filmmakers. He has become the director that mainstream America has adopted as its leading artiste. I would suggest that the means by which he's done this can be attributed to a combination of outstanding events in the near history of cinema, and a sense of cultural inferiority that has plagued American society since its inception.



Lynch has remained perhaps the most orthodox proponent of the Surrealist aesthetic working in film. We're not talking here about the sort of pop-absurdism found in films as diverse as Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (1985) or Robert Downey's 1969 masterpiece "Putney Swope". Nor should the term be used to describe the overwrought symbolism of a work that no doubt sent a million filmmakers up the same mountain that David Lynch has effectively conquered: Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1971 "El Topo".

Indeed, the term "surreal" is used improperly as an adjective about 90% of the times it is uttered. The strict tenets of Surrealism were outlined in the first decade after World War I by Andre Breton and his compatriots, Eluard, Aragón, Tsara and others. This is the Surrealism of Dali and Bunuel, Appolinaire, Man Ray and Duchamp. It is the seminal artistic and philosophical sentiment of our anxious century, and David Lynch has never wavered appreciably from its fundamental method.

By managing to travel always within a very narrow portal of the American sensibility, by remaining in the "subterranean mainstream", by staying true to an artistic vision that must now bear the oddly inappropriate designation "classic Surrealism", Lynch has been able to achieve his unique independent status.

There have been more rigorous artists along the way, and more compelling storytellers who have tried to enter the products of their personal vision into the mainstream of the moviemaking industry. But the American filmgoer seems not to be able to tolerate more than one major filmmaker practicing in the "subterranean mainstream". To trace the course of America's widespread adoption of Lynch as its sole purveyor of the homegrown "European Art House Film" we must go back thirty years, to the beginning of Lynch's career.

In 1970, advanced high school and first year college film courses featured at least one class on the "Avant-Garde" film. (The commonly used phrase of the day was "Experimental Film", an unvarnished put-down that implied that these films were rather like undeveloped embryos of the "real thing"). The presentation was an interchangeable "road show" of films made in the U.S. and Canada, though it was pretty much the same work shown everywhere. The essential roster included the following entries:



"Meshes of the Afternoon" by Maya Deren (1943)

"La Jetée" by Chris Marker (1962)

"Two Men and a Wardrobe" by Roman Polanski (1958)



And to bring students up to the present day, "The Grandmother" by David Lynch (1968)



Several others were included in the presentation as well. They were mostly innocuous exercises, like the work of Scottish pre-Pop designer Norman McLaren, who had been making simple cut-out animations with blithe titles like "Hippity Pop" and Blinkety Blank" since the 1930's. "The Dream of Wild Horses" (1962) by Albert Lamorisse, who had previously made the children's favorite "The Red Balloon" (1956) was a lavishly photographed display of wild horses running through a fire set at the ocean's shore (Kodak was one of the film's corporate benefactors). The imagery was essentially a stylish, technically proficient skin, stretched over a framework of run-of-the-mill Late Romantic dream symbology.

Even these latter films have some importance in tracing the trajectory of David Lynch's acceptance by Hollywood. But at this point it is instructive to look at the state of film culture in America since the late 1960's.



The men who built Hollywood were mainly Jewish haberdashers and other tradesmen from New York, out to make a fortune in a popular new medium. Those who pursued careers in filmmaking might have come from any profession, but until the late sixties, when David Lynch was attending art school in Philadelphia, the notion of "artistic" filmmaking in the mainstream was considered strictly European. The closest the United States came to subsidizing aesthetically rigorous filmmaking by persons trained in fine arts was California's American Film Institute, which offered courses, grants and equipment to budding filmmakers unconnected to the financial side of the industry. AFI was created in 1967 when president Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act . In a ceremonial speech he declared, "We will create an American Film Institute that will bring together leading artists of the film industry, outstanding educators, and young men and women who wish to pursue this 20th century art form as their life's work." The declaration recalled his predecessor, John Kennedy's, similarly sweeping declaration about landing a man on the moon before the end of the century. But for Americans, achieving technological superiority over the "Old World" was a far more attainable vision than achieving cultural parity with it. New York City might be a viable artistic center, but Hollywood?

A look at the top-grossing films of 1963 causes one to wonder if we are even the same species inhabiting the planet today. All three of the most seen films in the world were European. One was a James Bond adventure, the other two were Jean-Luc Godard's "Le Mépris" ("Contempt") and Federico Fellini's "8 ½" (compare this to 1998's list which includes "There's Something About Mary" and "The Waterboy", an Adam Sandler vehicle).

Naturally, David Lynch, who was studying painting in Philadelphia and had a deep interest in sculpture and music, made a direct dash for the AFI, where he worked to put all of his artistic explorations together in the form of collage and live model stop-action animations with wildly dissonant and imaginative soundtracks. He produced several short films while there, including "The Grandmother" and "The Alphabet" (1968). And all the while he struggled with an ambitious extended work called "Eraserhead" that utilized all of his various talents.

By the watershed year 1970, American film was just beginning to set foot in the arena of cultural legitimacy that its European counterpart had ruled from the beginning. There began to be seen the aforementioned advanced high school and first year college film courses. Generally these were taught through English Literature departments, as full-fledged film departments barely existed. The University of Southern California established one as a separate school. It later graduated George Lucas but rejected Steven Spielberg. New York University established two film departments, first the Department of Film and Television, which taught actual film technique and later graduated both Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee; then the Department of Cinema Studies, which was devoted to critical analysis and graduated legions of professors of French philosophy. At the end of the seventies the U.S. had literally hundreds of undergraduate and doctoral film studies programs, and thousands of diplomates in the field of film.

To return to the classroom of 1970, and the introduction of the "Avant-Garde film": Those essential films in the presentation had certain common elements. But their specific chronology is notable: The Deren film dates from 1943; Polanski's, 1958; Marker's, 1962. By 1968, when Lynch made "The Grandmother", he had already absorbed these other films. It's not hard, in fact, to think of the ambitious young artist as having seen himself as part of this group from the very beginning. A look at the films themselves shows that David Lynch partook of a narrow lineage, borne of both direct European influence and an American urge to achieve a cultural legitimacy that only Europe then enjoyed, in order to establish himself as the American successor to the European "Art Film" director.



Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" is often called the progenitor of American Avant-Garde filmmaking. Deren, in whose name AFI established an annual award to recognize "independent" filmmaking in 1986, was born Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev, Ukraine. Her family emigrated to the United States to escape Jewish persecution in 1922. However, she continued to refer to herself, culturally, as Russian throughout her life, despite her American citizenship and central place in the American avant-garde. After all, the foundations of film had been laid in Russia by sweeping artists and thinkers such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Kirsanov. During the same era Hollywood was mostly pumping out income-producing cowboy movies. Deren was an ingenious dancer and choreographer. Her films (in many of which she was featured as dancer and actress) were filled with both deep psychological insights and rich mythological references. With their invocations of primal rituals and shamanic trance states they were highly evolved humanistic and aesthetic statements on the essential condition of civilization. She was a scholar, a poet, a photographer. She wrote of "Meshes..." "This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the sub-conscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident...". This is precisely the sentiment expressed by the "Lost Highway' character "Fred Madison" (Bill Pullman) when he explains his disdain for videotape saying "...I prefer things the way I remember them, rather than as they actually happened." In fact, "Lost Highway", one of Lynch's latest and most challenging films, is filled with many explicit references to "Meshes...". The hilly California architecture is the same in both films. There are the depictions of trance states that have actually become a Lynch trademark. In both films houses stand as direct references to consciousness. In both films there is a bloody slashing murder viewed through the prism of undependable, contradictory recollection. The Deren film, like all of Lynch's films, seems to come alive through plain shock. The sudden appearance of the unexpected is a venerable tactic of horror film directors. But in the Surrealist lexicon used by Lynch and Deren - the system of signifiers that wound it's way from Paris in the twenties through Deren's influential films to all of Lynch's work - the unexpected element must possess an additional characteristic of dominance and inevitability, not just as something that suddenly appears, but as something eternal that is suddenly recognized, to the character's (and viewer's) dismay. Thus in the Deren film the female protagonist, a stand-in for the artist, pursues a shadowy figure shrouded in black. When she finally catches up to the figure, it turns suddenly to reveal that in place of its face there is a mirror. That shocking image is repeated early on in "Lost Highway", when, alone in bed with his wife, Fred Madison gazes at the black silhouette of her figure facing him in the darkness. Suddenly a face appears in the shroud of her hair. It is the craggy, ugly, obdurate face of the "Mystery Man" (Robert Blake). Later we will come to understand that the Mystery Man is actually an inhabitant of Fred's consciousness, the part that seeks vengeful, violent, mortal justice. In other words, Fred sees his own image. The shrouded figure's face is a mirror.

Apart from Maya Deren's immortal work, the other films on the roster of avant-garde exemplars that Lynch shared in 1970 have a similar and fascinating legacy. It isn't farfetched to say that these small, earnest works served to set off their own tidal wave of independent film activity simply by being positioned to thoughtful young film acolytes of the day as defiant alternatives to the Hollywood blockbuster. It is noteworthy that of the four filmmakers on the list, Marker, Deren, Polanski and Lynch, three are short term or permanent émigrés to the U.S. from Europe.



Chris Marker's "La Jetée" was to become his best-known work. It is experimental in the sense that it is a motion picture composed, except for a brief, lyrical sequence of a woman waking up, of grainy monochromatic stills accompanied by a voice-over narration. Surreal in many of its strategies, it also shared with orthodox Surrealism its anti-authoritarian social message, its examination of the primacy of internal consciousness and dream states and its self-conscious exploration of the philosophical implications of understanding the world via the film medium. It's easy to see how this woozy, dramatic parable of time travel could get so under the skin of a student in Minnesota named Terry Gilliam that it would be regurgitated over thirty years later as "Twelve Monkeys" (1995), starring Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis.

Even the lesser films being shown to students eager for "experimental" work in 1970 had an influence that would pay off over the succeeding decades. "The Dream of Wild Horses" might have been a pastiche of hackneyed symbolism, but it might just as well have revealed to a young theology student in Louisiana named Godfrey Reggio that people will sit through its 20 minutes of transfigured natural imagery in support of a spiritual manifesto. Just as they would sit through the 1½ hours of Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi" in 1983.



It could be said that to pinpoint this group of films or any single set of influences is a contrivance. But it's worthwhile at this point to mention a film, regarded as the seminal work of European avant-garde cinema, "Un Chien Andalou" ("The Andalusian Dog") (1929) by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. A "purely" Surrealist work, this film's influence has never waned, but signs of it echo with a particular deliberateness in the work of Lynch and several of his contemporaries. This isn't surprising. Though not always included in those earliest exposures to the Avant-Garde film - the film remains too challenging even for audiences today - most Americans, even if they've never seen the film, are somewhere in their cultural hemisphere aware of its notoriety (particularly its notorious "eye-slitting" opening).

"Blue Velvet's" explicit references to this avant-garde masterpiece are, perhaps most obvious in its central image of the disembodied ear covered with ants, a thoughtful reiteration of the disembodied ant-covered hand that is at the center of "Un Chien...". In both films the ants seem to emerge from a hole in the flesh. In Blue Velvet, it is the auricular hole of the ear. In "Wild At Heart", "Lula's" (Laura Dern) vomit from morning sickness hardens into a dark spot on the motel floor from which hundreds of flies seem to emerge when Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) returns later.

In Roman Polanski's fifteen minute fable "Two Men and a Wardrobe", shot while he was still a film school student in Lodz, Poland, the men drag around this enormous, casket-like closet, with an unvoiced understanding that their fate is bound to it. The image is almost as one, at times, with the image of the priests in "Un Chien..." straining to move forward while tethered to the piano and dead donkeys they drag behind them. The 1968 Polanski film, in its transmutation of a furnishing into an object inextricably tied to an individual's destiny, prefigures "Eraserhead", wherein "Henry Spencer" (Jack Nance) finds "heaven" behind his apartment radiator.



In Polanski's film the two men and furnishing of the title emerge from the sea. The sea, which also serves as the final setting of "Un Chien Andalou", was a favorite setting for the Surrealists, as it signaled Freud's "oceanic" view of consciousness that gives rise to religious ecstacy, as outlined in his "Civilization and Its Discontents".

Here is where Lynch, in the end, distinguishes himself from the lexicon, if not the theoretical underpinnings of orthodox European Surrealism. David Lynch is an American in every possible sense. His culture, his spirituality, temperament, symbology, imagery, timing and references are all distinctly American. Specifically it is the dominant America of the 50's in which Lynch grew up. There are so many references to this period in all of Lynch's work that it's ludicrous to single any of them out. The American viewer has an innate understanding not just of the obvious - the classic '50's American look of the diners, the cars, the people and their manners, most of it highly anachronistic, as if preserved in a jar in the basement of Lynch's consciousness - but of a more subtle connection to the essential experience of living in this culture.

While the Surrealists use the ocean to signify a collective consciousness, there are, to the best of this writer's knowledge, absolutely no scenes of the ocean in any Lynch-directed film. Instead, the "oceanic" impulse is transmitted through trees. Lynch's universe is suffused with trees. The references are obsessive in "Blue Velvet" - it takes place in "Lumberton" (lumber town), where the radio announces each hour with the sound of a tree falling. In the Twin Peaks series the town is also a lumber-industry center. The town's most powerful resident has made his fortune cutting trees down (symbolically severing his connection to human nature), and the town's resident madwoman insists that the log she carries communicates with her. All contact with the mystical alternate universe begins and ends in a stand of trees, and in the movie version, "Fire Walk With Me" (1992), contact with the "other side" extends to wooden telephone poles. In the Twin Peaks stories the dichotomy is clear: trees are our reckoning, our connection to the moral center of the universe. At the end of "Fire Walk With Me", after committing his horrifying crimes against human nature, Leland Palmer simply walks out among the trees and he is transported to a place where the evil is extracted from his soul and claimed by the demon Bob.

Lynch's father was a tree scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and this was surely an influence. But the impact of the vast forests and lack of shoreline is not lost on American viewers. Just three hundred years ago the landscape of this nation was almost entirely trees. Most Americans living across the vast midwest never travel the 1500 miles in almost any direction that will take them to the ocean's edge. It is simply not as familiar an archetype in the American consciousness as it is in the European. For Americans, gazing off toward the fabled "distant shore" simply doesn't figure prominently in the imagination. We are the distant shore.

Trees removed in the name of progress to make room for highways. The web of highways imposed on the face of this nation represent something fixed in Lynch's epistemology. America invented the automobile, and then used it to reinvent its own mythology, the mythology of "manifest destiny": The notion that the ownership of this land mass belongs in every sense to those who landed on it. If houses are the living embodiment of consciousness, a notion again derived from Freudian analysis and rendered artistically through Surrealist imagery, Lynch introduces automobiles as the embodiment of motives. The "joy ride" that is talked about in "Blue Velvet" is a singularly American pastime. Big fast cars and cheap gasoline have given a sense of fulfillment to Americans since the mid-century era that Lynch seems eternally stuck in (one of the "great American novels" of Lynch's student days was Kerouac's "On the Road"). Despite a perversity that would prevent any normal human from identifying with him, when "Frank Booth" (Dennis Hopper) screams "Let's hit the fuckin' road!" in "Blue Velvet", the American audience hears its own voice in its ears. Highway travel almost always foreshadows the characters' break from their core values, the introduction of violence and the deterioration of their personalities. The same, exact image of speeding down an unlit highway in the dead of night is repeated in "Blue Velvet", "Wild at Heart" and of course, "Lost Highway", where it bookends the entire film. This image of endless road passing madly beneath the glare of an automobile's headlights is as intimately American as blue jeans and barbecues on the Fourth of July. Motels, hotels, motor homes and lodges are analogous to ordinary homes in the sense that one inhabits them temporarily and they are not identified with one's life and character in the way that one's house is. Thus, good characters go to inns, hotels, motels and trailer parks to do evil things, to succumb to base passions, throughout Lynch's work in the nineties (e.g.: "The Fat Trout"of "Fire Walk With Me"; "The motel in "Big Tuna, Texas" of "Wild at Heart"; "The Lost Highway Hotel" of "Lost Highway"; and the list goes on).

America was founded by Christians seeking freedom to follow their faith, and from the first, Lynch declares that he is a Christian. Though his interpretation of Christianity may be bizarre at times - with elements of Blavatsky's Theosophy (as in the black and white lodges of the "Twin Peaks" series), Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary spiritualism thrown into the mix - it is, in that way, very much an American interpretation. America is, after all, a land of some 200 denominations of Protestantism. In "Blue Velvet" the characters played by Laura Dern and MacLachlan sit in a car and wonder about human nature. Dern offers a disjointed dream vision of her utopia, in which evil is symbolically vanquished by a common American bird, the Red-Breasted Robin. While she's going on with her goofy dream, church music seems to appear out of nowhere, but then it is revealed that they have parked in front of one of the ubiquitous white, wooden churches that are found in abundance in every small town in America. The robin, the same mechanical bird seen destroying a black bug at the end of the movie, is sometimes said to symbolize Christ. A standard 19th century depiction of Christ has his red heart exposed in front of his chest, like the robin's red breast. Giving a sense of the traditional American conflict between personal responsibility and religious faith, Lynch lets us know that the film's final representation of good and evil, and the American sense of justice as it is depicted again and again in our popular literature, is our cultural obsession and not a universal truth. This is intimated by the fact that the robin seen at the end is so clearly artificial - a mechanism controlled by a human, not a divine, director.

Lynch's personal theology reflects the Christian belief in power of salvation. Evidence of this appears again and again in his work. Though he is not named Satan, but "Bob" - the most prosaic name in the English language - the evildoer of the Twin Peaks series is most certainly Lynch's evocation of the devil. As a combination one-armed man and dwarf (who has previously announced himself as "the arm", and thus signifies evil's grasp on the world) in "Fire Walk With Me", the spirit of evil announces "I want all of my pain and suffering", whereupon "Bob" wrenches a red mass from the suspended body of "Leland Palmer" (Ray Wise), whom we have just seen committing an act of unspeakable horror upon his own daughter, and tosses it on the floor in the form of spilled blood. We then see a close-up of the dwarf ingesting a repulsive spoonful of gruel. Christians easily see this as a perversion of transubstantiation, the act by which the body and blood of Christ the Savior become present in the substance of the sacramental wine and wafer of the Catholic mass, when the priest, acting on Jesus' behalf, speaks the words "this is my blood, this is my body" over them. Leland Palmer hangs suspended in the air as Jesus did on the cross. And his "sin" appears as a red mass before his body, just as Jesus is depicted with his heart exposed (and thus often symbolized by the robin, as in "Blue Velvet). Just as Jesus died for the sins of mankind, this Dark Lord exacts his measure of pain and suffering through the sinful acts of men. On the other hand, angels abound in Lynch's work as well. In "Eraserhead", the "Lady in the Radiator" sings a song that goes "In heaven, everything is fine...". Literal angels ascend in the scenes of salvation that end both "Fire Walk With Me" and "Wild at Heart" (in the latter it is the "Good Witch" of "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) substituting for a Christian angel).

Deren, Polanski and Marker were all Socialists who rejected the authority of the church. The Surrealists actually considered it their mission to ridicule Christianity. Whether Lynch believes in the tenets of any established religion is questionable, but there is no question that he believes that the struggle between good and evil is a real event that is taking place on both a material and spiritual plane at every moment. He believes that there is an authority that hovers over our thoughts, a pure justice. In "Lost Highway" officers of the law pay a visit to the Madisons to investigate the odd goings-on they've been experiencing. As part of their investigation they walk up to the roof and look down upon Fred Madison. A few scenes later Fred Madison sits in a jail cell for the murder of his wife, and oddly, the cell has bars at the top as well, from which "the law" once again looks down at him. Though at times he is pantheistic, as when the trees "communicate" with their human agents on earth, this is Lynch's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upbringing, including a vengeful god who rules from "on-high" showing through.

These stylistic considerations are inextricable from the fabric of Lynch's work as a whole, and that is often the ground on which his films are criticized. But that still leaves us far from understanding why he has come to be revered as the sole exemplar of what the typical American moviegoer adds to his cultural diet for "avant-garde film".



Another American obsession that Lynch has employed effectively is the fear of isolation. It is the isolation suggested by huge stretches of forest and highway, but it is also the isolation of a society that has gone out of touch with its cultural heritage. Isolation in Lynch's work is generated by physical deformity, as in "Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man", as well as by mistaken or confused identity in films like "Wild at Heart" and most strikingly "Lost Highway", where the names, identities and appearances of the lovers are constantly changing. The European sense of existential isolation was an intellectual one, the American experience of social and physical isolation is palpable, and Lynch captures it. And this ability led to the most important step in bringing Lynch's career into the mainstream of American culture.

There is a Jewish word, chutzpa. It is kind of arrogance tinged with righteousness, a brazenness that is both insolent and courageous. It is the quality of the individual who kills his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court, claiming he is an orphan.

Mel Brooks, who's humor often revolves around the Jewish appreciation of chutzpa, produced the film that brought David Lynch to mainstream America, 1982's "The Elephant Man". Though best-known for a series of goofy, low-brow farces, Brooks is highly regarded in the United States as a comic master behind the scenes. Some hail him as a genius, and his talents are only minimally on display in his best feature films, such as "The Producers" (1968) and "Young Frankenstein" (1974). Like Woody Allen, his is an assimilated Jewish sensibility, and his background is as a comedian. It's hard to imagine what in particular about Lynch's work would appeal to Brooks as producer, or anything about the man that would appeal to Brooks personally. But in the documentary about Lynch entitled "Pretty As A Picture: The Art of David Lynch" (1997) Brooks put his finger on it. In Lynch, Brooks found a kindred chutzpanik - a cohort. Brooks had sat through "Eraserhead". He found the film interesting, certainly, but not terribly appealing. What he saw, however, was a film that asserted its maker's chutzpa. It was a film that tried to be taken seriously as art by making the case that if there were any other level it could appeal on, it certainly wasn't making any effort to do so. Brooks admired this, and he admired Lynch's facility for conveying humanity and vitality through the use of blatant artifice such as masks and models. The decision to give Lynch a chance to reproduce the eerie Victorian atmosphere with an uncanny reality as well as a powerful sense of menace, the chance to touch viewer's heart with a story of grace that could transcend the hideousness of its hero's flesh, was a monumental one for Lynch and for the state of American cinema. Whether they saw "The Grandmother" in their freshman film classes or not, the generation of young adults that comprised the American movie-going public in the early eighties was the first American generation raised on films made by people who studied film. In "The Elephant Man" they saw old world tradition and new world aggressiveness; the blank generation's hard-edged cynicism tempered with their parent's affection for dramatic pathos. This was the apotheosis of the "avant-garde" film that they'd been expecting for more than a decade.

The "Twin Peaks" television series cemented Lynch's relationship with his audience eight years later. How that came to pass goes back to Americans' acceptance of a very orthodox form of Surrealism as the ultimate artistic statement about our uncertain century. Surrealism offers cues to a narrative structure in the same way that Renaissance perspective gives cues to the eye about distances between objects. But in a Renaissance painting the cues are combined logically, so that when two lines meet at a horizon, the viewer has a physical perception of distance. Surrealism does everything possible to disrupt the logic of the cues and their consequences. Lynch was interested in putting those cues before the viewer in the form of a standard TV model - the soap opera - and then manipulating them from week to week, much as he did the models in his early animations. Yet the publicity for the program focused on the crime story- "Who killed Laura Palmer?" For Lynch, of course, that didn't matter one bit. In his universe characters are killed by succumbing to evil, whatever the details. What matters is how many ways that evil can be described - and love, and hell, and paradise. But all the American audience needed was the bait of a crime, a relationship, and the desire to seek justice. To those who were in on Lynch's method it was simply amusing that huge audiences expected the series to build to a structured conclusion. Lynch himself lost interest in it long before the series had a chance to do that (but he did come in at the end to bring the narrative to a graceful halt). I remember being appalled that Japanese viewers were watching a videotape of a pilot [zero issue of a TV show] that Lynch had tacked an ending onto simply to fool sponsors into thinking there was one.

There were film artists in America who took as a given that we suffered from deep isolation. They sought to translate that isolation, that inability of one mind to actually contact the essence of another, into a vocabulary of purely visual terms. They transcended the need to tell a theatrical story in their work, going directly to the film medium, often manipulating the film's surface directly to arrive at a "purer" form of filmic expression (Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow). There were other film artists who tried to give the narrative form a more profound resonance by letting their personal experiences and emotions wash freely through the story and determine the course of the character's development (John Cassavetes, Nicholas Ray). Though their explorations took them deeper and more rigorously into the realms of pure art and narrative story-telling, none of these transcendent artists managed to capture America's attention and affection to the degree that Lynch has.



David Lynch was willing to suffer being called pedestrian for using comic-simple characters to draw the viewer in. He was willing to be called a provocateur for using aggressive images of anecdotal violence to signal profound emotional imbalance. He was willing to be called pretentious for applying a grab bag of visual and aural techniques perfected by the gallery-centric avant-garde without referring to their being part of the artifice of the medium, as his high-art counterparts did. He's been willing to accept the labels of oddball, misogynist, racist, charlatan, as long as people continued to look at the work. His reward is to occupy the American cultural consciousness as its singular, most successful practitioner of the "Subterranean Mainstream" film.



Copyright 1999, David G. Imber
This essay was published in The Kinema Junpo Filmmakers Series: David Lynch
Kinema Junpo Publishing, Tokyo Japan, September, 1999. Edited by Takimoto Makoto.