Lynch / Rodley Lynch on Lynch

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-26152-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

Lynch on Lynch describes the career of a cinematic genius who has continued to astonish filmgoers with the lovely and life-affirming The Straight Story and the luxurious dread of the Academy Award-nominated Mulholland Drive, in the words of the Lynch himself. David Lynch erupted onto the cinema landscape with Eraserhead, establishing himself as one of the most original, imaginative, and truly personal directors at work in contemporary film. He is a surrealist, in the tradition of the great Spanish director Luis Bunuel. Over the course of a career that includes such films as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and the seminal TV series Twin Peaks, Lynch has remained true to an artistic vision of innocence lost or adrift in the direst states of darkness and confusion. Nobody else sees the world quite as David Lynch does. Once seen, his films are never forgotten, nor does the world about us seem quite as it did before. In this definitive career-length interview book, Lynch speaks openly about the full breadth of his creative work, which encompasses not only movies but also a lifelong commitment to painting, a continuing exploration of photography, extensive work in television, and musical collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti and singer Julee Cruise.

Chris Rodley

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lynch, David

Rodley, Chris

Leseproben

Introduction to the Revised Edition
The sensation of ‘uncanniness’ was an especially difficult feeling to define. Neither absolute terror nor mild anxiety, the uncanny seemed easier to describe in terms of what it was not, than in any essential sense of its own. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny In recounting the early difficulties in finding a precise definition for ‘uncanniness’ – the sense of ‘unease’ first identified in the late eighteenth century – Vidler could be describing the problems sometimes encountered by critics and audiences when faced with the cinema of David Lynch. If it is not only hard to define the experience of watching a Lynch film, but also to pinpoint exactly what one has actually seen (most recently evident in the delirious responses to his last film Mulholland Drive), it is because the uncanny lies at the very core of Lynch’s work. No other contemporary director works with all the available elements of cinema to the same degree as Lynch does. This is precisely because Lynch has to mobilize every aspect of the film-making process in order to express the elusive quality of the uncanny. His sensitivity to the textures of sound and image, to the rhythms of speech and movement, to space, colour and the intrinsic power of music, mark him as unique in this respect. He is a director working at the very epicentre of the medium. However, the originality and inventiveness of Lynch’s work comes, first and foremost, from an ability to access his own inner life. It is as a consequence of the truthfulness with which he brings that inner life to the screen that Lynch has revitalized the medium. Although his background in painting and avant-garde film-making might explain the striking formal qualities of Lynch’s cinema, it fails to account for the sheer power of his vision. For Lynch, such power occurs only when all the elements of cinema are not only present and but also ‘correct’, producing what he often refers to as a ‘mood’; when everything seen and heard contributes to a certain ‘feeling’. The feelings that excite him most are those that approximate the sensations and emotional traces of dreams: the crucial element of the nightmare that is impossible to communicate simply by describing events. Conventional film narrative, with its demands for logic and legibility, is therefore of little use to Lynch, as is the limitation of working within any one genre at a time. In Lynch’s universe, worlds – both real and imagined – collide. The sense of unease in his movies is partly a product of this cross-generic approach, perceived by the audience as the absence of any rules or conventions that might provide comfort and – crucially – orientation. The mood or feeling that Lynch’s films convey is strongly linked to a form of intellectual uncertainty – what he calls being ‘lost in darkness and confusion’. It is here that the uncanny clearly expresses itself in Lynch’s films. It doesn’t reside in everything that is strange, weird or grotesque, but is the opposite of those things, which – by virtue of their exaggeration – refuse to provoke fear. The uncanny’s attributes, in what Freud termed ‘the field of what is frightening’, are those of dread rather than actual terror, of the haunting rather than the apparition. It transforms the ‘homely’ into the ‘unhomely’, producing a disturbing unfamiliarity in the evidently familiar. In Freud’s words: ‘The uncanny is uncanny because it is secretly all too familiar, which is why it is “repressed”.’ This is the essence of Lynch’s cinema. As Vidler has pointed out, the uncanny was rooted in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Its early aesthetic manifestation was in the depiction of apparently benign and homely interiors disrupted by the fearful invasion of an alien presence. This is the very stuff of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Its psychological expression was in the metaphor of the double, where the threat is perceived as a replica of the self, all the more terrifying because its otherness is apparently the same. In Lynch’s work, this finds its correlation in the director’s abstract spin on the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome: Jeffrey/Frank in Blue Velvet; Leyland Palmer/Killer Bob in Twin Peaks, Fred Madison/Pete Dayton in Lost Highway and – most ambitiously – Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn and Rita/Camilla Rhodes in Mulholland Drive. The uncanny was also born out of the rise of the great cities. As people began to feel cut off from nature and the past, it became a modern anxiety associated with illness and psychological disturbances – particularly spatial fears (agoraphobia and claustrophobia). Lynch’s own early urban panic, and his affection for nature and the idyllic dream past, may have contributed to the spatial fear so evident in his own cinema – often expressed in the use of the CinemaScope frame. Characters such as Fred Madison in Lost Highway are surrounded by empty space – stranded in the uncertain geography of their own lives. Or, as with Henry in Eraserhead, any environment – inside or outside – has to be minutely and carefully negotiated. Insecurity, estrangement and lack of orientation and balance are sometimes so acute in Lynchland that the question becomes one of whether it is possible to ever feel ‘at home’. Both Fred Madison and Diane Selwyn are forced to adopt extreme measures to achieve the illusion of stability and happiness, creating more innocent parallel identities and worlds for themselves – dream scenarios in which events struggle to overcome the reality of mental collapse. The uncanny was renewed as an aesthetic category by the Modernist avant-gardes, who used it as an instrument of ‘defamiliarization’. For the Surrealists, it came to reside in the state between dream and awakening, hence their interest in the cinema. If Lynch is, as film critic Pauline Kael once claimed, ‘the first populist Surrealist – a Frank Capra of Dream logic’, it is precisely because of his interest in this defamiliarization process, and in the waking/dreaming state. Mulholland Drive is entirely built upon Diane Selwyn’s confusion about what is really happening, what may have happened, what could have happened, and what may yet occur. ‘Hey pretty girl, time to wake up,’ says the mysterious Cowboy, but when – precisely – did she fall asleep? Not since Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which Peter Carter is diagnosed as ‘suffering from a series of highly organized hallucinations comparable to an experience of actual life’ has the dreamlike quality of cinema been so ingeniously celebrated. Now that the major American studios have abdicated from so many areas of movie-making, leaving the ‘independents’ to merely occupy the vacant lot, it seems that David Lynch virtually owns the sole American franchise on movie ‘dreamtime’. Lynch has always been the dreamer who finds intellectual analysis of the dream at best woefully reductive or worse – destructive. Critics and audiences are often frustrated by his reluctance to engage in precise textual analysis of his films. New technologies, and the flow of information on which they depend, exacerbate this situation. Nowadays a director’s commentary on a movie’s DVD release is standard issue. For Lynch, this is the very definition of a nightmare situation. He prefers to show, rather than explain, to feel rather than prescribe. His approach to the creation of cinema is, as one might therefore expect, not only highly intuitive, but also open to the operations of luck, fate and accident. His film-making is almost an act of faith – a fragile balancing of mysterious forces. He characterizes himself as a ‘radio’ attempting to tune in to ideas and images, and his divining process has produced some startling results. For Blue Velvet, this meditative approach excavated a classic Freudian tale, despite Lynch’s assertion that he knows nothing of psychoanalytic theory – a claim that those close to him will confirm. The fact that Dorothy Vallens could be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, or that Fred Madison in Lost Highway might be experiencing a psychogenic fugue – both identified mental conditions – seems to have been news to Lynch. Not only is he apparently unaware of textbook explanations of the ‘troubles’ that interest him, he resets restrictions subsequently placed on them by definitions, theories and orthodoxies. His extraordinary success in ‘plugging into’ various emotional states without any apparent need or desire for conventional research has, on occasion, dispensed with the valued refuge of American cinema: subtext. Blue Velvet, for instance, is a film that is not afraid to show its true colours. This, in part, accounts for the film’s ability both to shock and to impress. Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are less obvious in their operations because Lynch now requires more experimental narrative forms and abstract ideas with which to express the increasingly interior worlds his characters are forced to inhabit in response to their own disappointments, fears and extreme actions. It’s worth noting that, after the release of...