David Lynch Thread

[mixed_biscuits]

he was saying surrealism for lynch is just pulling stuff out your arse and its the easiest and cheapest option. it doesn't digsuise any great mystery, its just incoherent images, theres no depth there, no necessity. what 'themes' he does have are cheap and trite and have been done to death before. lynch encourages the sense that there is a mysteery there becasue hes a charlatan. thats the craner view of it.

So cheap and trite that they are unlike any other films in the history of cinema. In economics things become less cheap and less trite the more expensive they are, so I can tell Craner is no economist.

In fact, all his bellyaching is because he doesn't respond to the films on the gut level - it's this effect that makes him so beloved.

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[mixed_biscuits]

lynch at his worst and where i really sympathise with wicked, bad, mean craner is episode 8. that is Guinness advert surrealism at its tritest and most gawky.

What's trite about it?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

I remember that interview with him about outtakes and he was talking about a scene featuring a girl with her nipples on fire - and when asked why it hadn't made the cut he didn't say "oh it didn't fit in the context" or "it disrupted the story" or whatever, he said "that scene was just too good, I couldn't let anybody see it" or words to that effect. I wonder if that was true, I've certainly never heard any other director claim that they took a scene out for that reason.

You can't have people's minds go blank for the next half hour because nipples on fire is imprinted on their brain.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

If you want 'cynical lynch', Donnie Darko's your film.

 

[Benny Bunter]

why should there be something behind it though? for me his movies works best by just enjoying each consecutive scene, i feel there's always something that stands out. honestly don't really care about some complicated plot or puzzle you have to solve.

Definitely. He may be a 'fraud' by some standards, but there are loads of individual scenes that are off the scale brilliant - the audition scene in Mulholland Drive is incredible, need to see that again.

 

[Benny Bunter]

"This is the girl."

 

[shakahislop]

you just make the films and dont interfere with peoples assumptions about them. you dont shatter their illusions and say
no, you dont understand, i pulled it out my arse, there's nothing behind it. but that is not cynical in my opinion.

like autechre

 

[mixed_biscuits]

what would you say were the defining themes of his movies?

Weirdness, strangeness, and the bizarre.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

What his films communicate is that reality is a lot stranger than we consciously acknowledge; parts of our subconscious know this and that's why his work hits so hard.

Zizek praises Lynch with reference to Lacan and the Real.

Lots of Lynch's weird ideas seem to have been culled from the woo-woo metaphysical stuff that's out there, so they are thereby corroborated.

 

[sus]

We ate glazed donuts and watched Nightmare On Elm Street on the projector last night. Brilliant film. Clearly such a template for Lynch.

 

[0bleak]

hrm, i would have never put the two together
then again, I haven't seen Nightmare since way back in the day

 

[maxi]

I realised all of lynch's films have big, classic, human condition-type themes once you unravel them

eraserhead - parenthood
the elephant man - beauty
blue velvet - innocence and experience
wild at heart - romantic love
twin peaks - sexual abuse
lost highway - jealousy (also guilt)
the straight story - familial love
mulholland drive - unrequited love
inland empire - infidelity

 

[version]

I realised all of lynch's films have big, classic, human condition-type themes once you unravel them

eraserhead - parenthood
the elephant man - beauty
blue velvet - innocence and experience
wild at heart - romantic love
twin peaks - sexual abuse
lost highway - jealousy (also guilt)
the straight story - familial love
mulholland drive - unrequited love
inland empire - infidelity

You can chuck in friendship for The Elephant Man too.

 

[version]

 

[luka]

 

[mixed_biscuits]

If Twin Peaks had been weird and normie-shocking and taboo-violating and ugly or anti-aesthetic, there would never have been "Peaks mania".