I guess you could say David Lynch was one of the first “weird” personalities I encountered in high school/early college. As I imagine he is for a lot of people of my generation, nursed on Harlan Ellison’s “glass teat” from infancy onwards, led, in cases such as mine, toward the Strange in a floundering attempt to make sense of cultural fragmentation, existential confusion, and the revelation of parental imperfection.
David Lynch makes art films, but he’s married his art house sensibility with an Old Hollywood nostalgia that has contributed to a wider viewership.
Eraserhead was a lightening bolt that tore through my boyfriend’s darkened Atlanta apartment when he first moved in, when the living room was furnished with only a loveseat, a chair, and the television on a small stand. It was an experience—the emptiness of the room, the darkness with the television screen floating in front of us. Wild at Heart made me feel sick and enormously entertained at once in John Waters fashion. The Elephant Man I saw in a high school biology class, and INLAND EMPIRE I saw in Athens and understood none of it. I can remember my brother letting a friend of the family borrow Mulholland Drive since she liked Blue Velvet and was generally open-minded about film. She put it on when my parents next stayed a weekend with her, and, when talking about it later, my dad said he especially liked the masturbation scene (This instance, I imagine, was an early watermark in a series of failures as parents to raise wholesome and pretty children.).
I like David Lynch. I wouldn’t say he is in my top five favorites of anything, but I still admire and enjoy his movies a great deal. Dune, not so much. I’m fond of the very distinct atmospheres he creates in his movies. I like the elements of the grotesque that seem to lie beneath plastic exteriors, whether the artificiality of suburban manners and pretenses or shiny Hollywood facades. I like David Lynch, and I like his movies, but my picking up this book was really a fluke. I remember hearing about it when it was first published, but even then I didn’t give it much thought. I found a hardback copy for a few dollars in a used bookstore when I was visiting Columbia this past weekend and picked it up on a whim.
It’s not necessarily that I thought David Lynch as a writer would suck or anything like that. I guess in part I worried that he would be pretentious, something that can completely ruin my taste for anyone, whether they are a friend or a cultural figure I admire from afar. I did not, however, find this to be the case at all. Catching the Big Fish is a slender volume—I read it all in about an hour or two. A couple hours isn’t long, but for that entire duration I was constantly finding myself in awe of how warm David Lynch can be. A completely nice guy, really. That voice drew me in from page one, but I found plenty of other reasons to keep reading. Every short chapter was engaging and interesting. The main thrust of the book is Lynch’s work in Transcendental Meditation, and how years of continuous practice have affected his creativity. He says that while meditation itself does not draw in ideas, it expands the consciousness to such a degree that the artist is able to go deeper and deeper “fishing for ideas.” The Big Fish lurk in depths that most people are unaware they even have access to.
And there are other insights into Lynch’s creative process. He describes the ways in which ideas present themselves to him and how he builds on them piece by piece. He talks about setting, sound, music, and lighting and how they all contribute to a singular world in each of his films. Though he remains frustratingly general, he does lend the reader a glimpse into certain of the core ideas at the heart of particular films. Biographical details of Lynch’s life come up throughout the book as he embellishes on the development of his artistic vision. I don’t know if these facts are readily available to the general public, but even if they are, it was enjoyable to read his own descriptions of a surprisingly humble upbringing. Finally, in addition to remarking on meditation, creativity, his films, and his personal background, Lynch gives advice to the budding artist—be she involved in film or painting or sculpture or writing or whatever. And he seems to genuinely care when he is directing himself to the struggling artist. He went through his own struggles and transitions, and he allows for the authentic greatness of any work of art done by someone from their heart, whether their art receives any recognition or remains a personal lifelong venture.
Warm, interesting, insightful, and surprisingly void of the perverse and the dark, I’m completely happy with this out-of-the-blue purchase.
No comments:
Post a Comment