On doubles, haunted spaces, memory, and grief in Twin Peaks, Possession, and Vertigo
The films of David Lynch are strange creatures, not unlike the strange creatures that often appear within them, but to focus only on the most ungainly of their appendages is to willfully ignore their equally beautiful qualities.
Like the absurdists, David Lynch brings us to the void to remind us it’s there—and to invite us to laugh into it.
Laura Palmer has shifted in essence from a silent dead girl to the distillation of David Lynch’s most operatic revelation: that to harness beauty, with its absolute visibility, is to tell the fables of our world, the horror and the fairy tale.
So prominent is the problem of whether and how to explain Mulholland Drive, that nearly any attempt to interpret the film ends up using the film to debate interpretation.
As a season, Twin Peaks: The Return contains itself; it answers its own questions and then undoes its entirety.
Blue Velvet's darkness and degeneracy and Oedipal weirdness serve a bigger and more beautiful story; a story about love, coming of age, redemption, hope.
Had the lives of these two men gone differently, we would be awash in a stranger, more inexplicable type of American movie.
Lynch is interested not only in story, but in the material aspects of film and their effect on the viewer; in sound, space, and time, and in what happens when these aspects of the cinematic experience assert their materiality rather than subsuming themselves to realism.
The true sense of watching a David Lynch film is a triangulation between Lynch, the work, and you, beams of light passing between the three corners, illuminating something that wasn’t there before and that no one else can see.