Dualist Dreamer
Night descends on a roadside dive bar as its resident singer clocks in for her shift. Her croons placate the room with an angelic aura, nearly vacant while the rest of suburbia sleeps. The witching hour is swiftly encroaching, marked by the moon’s pallor rising off in the distance. It radiates a faint phosphorescence, concealed under cover of spindly pine. Like roaches out of the woodwork, anonymous men in suits pull in from reaches near and far to conduct business in light of the chanteuse’s mesmeric swan song, having bored their way down winding roads, abetted by the tunnel vision of headlamps. For the darkness at ground level is absolute; near nothing can deter its hold on the overpass, nor on the agents that operate under its fall. These characters exude prestige, yet, beneath a suave exterior, lies idyll’s seedy underbelly. They, as society’s unknowables, congregate with its deplorables—junkies, bikers, and trailer park stopouts—in a trade of secrets and counterfeit goods, each party mutually assuring the other’s downfall should any misdeed be divulged come daytime. There is a twang of normalcy to the scene, bordering on comedy, as criminality rears its well-measured face in upper and lower echelons alike—a point of commonality between the two—as if a circadian occurrence. However, this eve, a solemn overtone hangs above the heads of all, unparalleled, neonatal to the worlds of dream and wake. It arrives in response to a freak aberration: a subconscious recognition that a grave transgression against life itself has come to pass. Gut-wrenching, real, and raw, it manifests as abstract symbolism in the fleeting impression of the dreamscape, remade anew each twilight, ablated from the local consciousness. Still, an undercurrent lingers in the precognitive veil—a sort of wave of nonsensicality—that perturbs all, including the shape of reality itself. Rendered chopped-up and staccato, there is a semblance that things are not quite right, and that grand consequences are looming, ripe for one precocious sleuth to piece together...
Elsewhere, a place beyond reality, confined between the White and Black Lodges ofTwin Peaks. The ‘Waiting Room’; spirits reside here, puppeteering evil from above–the thinnest veil has the strongest grip. Twin Peaks. Created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, Lynch/Frost Productions, 1990-1991. Available via Public Transportation Snob.
This passage of prose evokes just some quintessential trappings of the Lynchian archetype, with many more found diffusely across the director’s extensive and highly eclectic forty-year-spanning filmography—but you hopefully get the main ideas. From the lo-fi charm of his first outing, 1977’s Eraserhead (a paradox if there ever were to be one had in the maelstrom of Lynch’s cosmos; the infant creature now morbidly endearing against a crass backdrop of what can only be described as a shrill, abject foray into the industrial), to the sprawling 18-hour CGI-atrophied flex-of-the-undying-creative-muscle, 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, each undertaking in David Lynch’s career has added new hints to the cherry pie flavoured kookiness of his straight-talking, offbeat child-of-the-50s character. Whether Herculean or minute, as the lengthy latticed pelt of Inland Empire is to the perplexing simian scene at the heart of Netflix short What Did Jack Do? (both, somehow, brimming with equivalent amounts of dead air proportional to their runtime), his feats in film have never fluctuated in the care wrought in advancing utter, guttural absurdity, his defining directorial characteristic.
That is, Lynch pushes signatures in genre—comedy, horror, action, and sci-fi—to the edge as new maxims, relishing in a lurid blend of off-kilter idiosyncrasy as his surefire baseline for operation. There is a familiarity to his nonlinearity; for all that changes in the face of his projects, much stays the same. In retaliation, one might suppose that there has been stagnation in his corpus of fantastical pretensions, tropes bloated and retread like the corpses that occupy the central mysteries of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet for their duration, rather than the refinement of a highly stylised yet cohesive artistic vision. Such a position mimics the seething cynicism met by his most lambasted works, as publicly received at their time of release (Twin Peaks’ second season, its prequel Fire Walk with Me, and, of course, the deviant Dune—still reprimanded for its awkward, cheesy stiltedness, albeit not in the lauded Lynchian static humdrum kind of way) in decomposition of his seizured scenery. Yet, this mimics just one duality that Lynch has skirted over his career: success and failure, rebound as a formerly misunderstood, since cult contemporary status.
The auteur, however, has long seemed to straddle two worlds, consistently striking fine dichotomies in front of and behind the aperture while, time and again, defying their bounds, ultimately landing in some other interstitial zone between. For one, Lynch was born in rural Missoula, Montana, in the midst of the 1940s, but was predominantly raised in the rapidly expansive cityscape of Spokane, Washington, with developmentally critical time also spent in Boise, Idaho, as well as Alexandria, Virginia. Informed by his nomadic upbringing, as one inevitably is despite it being largely happenstance, his art has often conjured a pristine veneer of Americana, reminiscent of both the nation’s and his most transitory phases, hopping wherever familial work demands took him. Diners, cigarettes, and soap opera, these things are palpably of a bygone era, yet somehow proliferate the Lynchian paradigm—of a sort of formulaic urge for experimentation and innovation—without the bat of an eyelid (ironically, his work has been most successful abroad, a French company even financing Lost Highway following disaster in domestic territories; Lynch either has a European flair, or Europeans have a flair for exercises in U.S. artifice—or, most probably, there is a middle ground where both are true).
Although Lynch has expressed that this time was like liberation for him in his memoir Room to Dream, without need for curfew because everybody knew one another more profoundly (and from that well trust blossoms), his bias toward this period of his life most definitely warps his audiovisual affinity with it. For just as much as Lynch is the farmstead and forest of his paternal side (most marked in Walt Disney Productions’ The Straight Story; the provocateur at his most family friendly), he is also the slight kaleidoscopic city boy, frequenting Manhattan on behalf of his maternal side (less jaded by modernity though than, say, FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield, who disparages the beloved inhabitants of Twin Peaks at every turn for their traditionalism). I say slight because Lynch always observed a despot lurking in metropolis and, while in later years he would recognize the aforementioned borough for its avant-garde appeal, he veered far from it in keeping to his own oil-based art practices, not so easily swayed by trends or hubs. Thus, on another level, I guess it is more that Lynch embodies the industrious renaissance-man drive that comes with urban living, of autonomous aspiration, idealism, and an instinct to see his mind’s eye through to fruition—especially at a time when his peers were being chartered and deployed into warfare (lock, stock, and loaded into Vietnam like planes, the droning of which Lynch has expressed an ominous nostalgic penchant for, himself evading conscription; similar sounds tinge his works at their most esoteric).
In spite of his patriotic Eagle Scout standing, Lynch evidently then isn’t so naive as to be in ignorance of man’s atrocities in the twentieth century, positioning atomics as the inception of evil incarnate in Twin Peaks: The Return’s seminal eighth part—an intermission in regular affairs, which up until that point (and after) had appeared to be “confound viewers”, intricately evading comprehensibility. In fact, through a timeless sheen, while Lynch admittedly reinforces rigid gender roles, transfixed by a nuclear home structure, often placing women as psychosexual mystique and the objects of male affectations, he most literally transplants men as paragons of evil (e.g., Blue Velvet’s Frank, Mulholland Drive’s Mr Roque, Wild at Heart’s Mr Reindeer and Bobby Peru, and Twin Peaks’ BOB, The Arm and MIKE). Some of these figures meet an untimely karmic end, motivated by plot occurrences that suggest the events we witness would deviate from the timeline’s typical flow had no intervention occurred in the malevolent harbingers’ reverb-cloaked, dastardly schemes, while others are destined to ebb on in obscurity in realms beyond our understanding. Regardless, the biggest distinctiveness they harbor is within themselves—a cumbersome eccentricity that elicits all manner of goosebump-inducing dread, soundtracked by a flip in musicality from the “Dance of the Dream Man” to downtempo cocktail jazz to the dark, soul-crushing ambience of composer Angelo Badalamenti’s scores.
Most recently, Lynch too has lent his vision to audio offerings with his latest LP, 2024’s Cellophane Memories, a collaboration with Agent Tammy Preston herself, Chrystabell. It continues his heel-turn from director to producer and lyricist, but, beyond this, Lynch’s dualities are truly listless. The freeform arthouse of Eraserhead versus the regimented administration nightmare of the commercial gig it landed him (Dune), the nothing matters transience of deeds in comparison to the everything matters permanence they sow in Twin Peaks (essentially, a snowballing mass of cause and effect in structure), the manic free-spiritedness of being Wild at Heart in tandem with the compromises that have to be struck in yielding to reality—and so on—I would say that the opposites he invokes are more intertwined than polarized. Each cannot exist without the other and, in carving a grey area, Lynch thrives. However, any attempt to distill his impenetrable essence as such proves sort of unbecoming, defeating the point when there practically is none, down to the delightfully irksome irrationality of his scripts—but we sure can try.
