"there are immaturities, but there are immensities" - Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be" - Airport Through The Trees
Sunday, January 19, 2025
RIP David Lynch
Never got to speak to Mr. Lynch for these features on Julee Cruise but chatted with the lovely Ms. Cruise and the very pleasant Mr. Badalamenti. They're all RIP now.
Even for early '90s cinema, the division into "cool" and "uncool" seems a bit schematic. I think Lynch's films and TV shows really do care about humanity and take the concept of evil seriously; much of his originality was expressing it in such a postmodern form that this was hard to see at first.
Also, "uncool" is now just Oscar bait, but they're trapped in much the same small space as every other movie that even pretends to have artistic ambition. (Would the modern form of "cool" be A24 horror films?)
I dunno - right now I am watching Twin Peaks again and deep into the second series (we actually started a few weeks before his death) where it gets wackier and wackier and the plot is more and more like a structure in which visually arresting weirdnesses are arranged. For sureThere is an interest in human evil but it so stylized. So for instance the pure evil character who is pursuing Agent Cooper using the chessboard as his means of communication, he kills one of his victims by encasing him inside a giant chess piece made of papier mache and then shooting him with a crossbow. And then leaving this in a box on a bandstand in a public par;. The sequence of scene works as pure image (like the extravagant deaths pursued by Dr Phibes in those campy Vincent Price movies). It has nothing to do with an artistic interest in evil or cruelty or man's capacity for violence, which is everywhere, quite banal and brutish (and messy) on the whole. There's a plenty of ways someone could address these themes without such eye-candy tableaux. I would say, given that it is retinally titillating, that is amoral in itself. (The person killed is a real chump in a shit metal band, a stereotype - not an actual human being that we're meant to recognise as a loss, a victim). In a weird way, through his arrangement of this scene for our boggled amusement, you might say that Lynch is closer to the evil dastardly character who organizes a series of outlandish-looking deaths.
So you might say that yes there is a "hot" element in Lynch that is the evil, the lust for violence (presenting as a force of Nature), or sexual desire, but it is so bound up with the perversity of vision, that it is flattened out by coolness and detachment.
That is not even to go into the question of Lynch's politics, his conceptions of good versus evil, his uncritical admiration for law enforcement.
Useful contrast with Twin Peaks might be with Paul Scrader's Affliction, whose central character is a small town cop... there's similar stuff about local businessmen involved in dodgy real estate schemes... even a sense of male violence as this congenital force... but it's a lot more serious (and harrowing) as an exploration of evil, with little in the way of stylized scene-making
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Even for early '90s cinema, the division into "cool" and "uncool" seems a bit schematic. I think Lynch's films and TV shows really do care about humanity and take the concept of evil seriously; much of his originality was expressing it in such a postmodern form that this was hard to see at first.
Also, "uncool" is now just Oscar bait, but they're trapped in much the same small space as every other movie that even pretends to have artistic ambition. (Would the modern form of "cool" be A24 horror films?)
I dunno - right now I am watching Twin Peaks again and deep into the second series (we actually started a few weeks before his death) where it gets wackier and wackier and the plot is more and more like a structure in which visually arresting weirdnesses are arranged. For sureThere is an interest in human evil but it so stylized. So for instance the pure evil character who is pursuing Agent Cooper using the chessboard as his means of communication, he kills one of his victims by encasing him inside a giant chess piece made of papier mache and then shooting him with a crossbow. And then leaving this in a box on a bandstand in a public par;. The sequence of scene works as pure image (like the extravagant deaths pursued by Dr Phibes in those campy Vincent Price movies). It has nothing to do with an artistic interest in evil or cruelty or man's capacity for violence, which is everywhere, quite banal and brutish (and messy) on the whole. There's a plenty of ways someone could address these themes without such eye-candy tableaux. I would say, given that it is retinally titillating, that is amoral in itself. (The person killed is a real chump in a shit metal band, a stereotype - not an actual human being that we're meant to recognise as a loss, a victim). In a weird way, through his arrangement of this scene for our boggled amusement, you might say that Lynch is closer to the evil dastardly character who organizes a series of outlandish-looking deaths.
So you might say that yes there is a "hot" element in Lynch that is the evil, the lust for violence (presenting as a force of Nature), or sexual desire, but it is so bound up with the perversity of vision, that it is flattened out by coolness and detachment.
That is not even to go into the question of Lynch's politics, his conceptions of good versus evil, his uncritical admiration for law enforcement.
Useful contrast with Twin Peaks might be with Paul Scrader's Affliction, whose central character is a small town cop... there's similar stuff about local businessmen involved in dodgy real estate schemes... even a sense of male violence as this congenital force... but it's a lot more serious (and harrowing) as an exploration of evil, with little in the way of stylized scene-making
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