David Lynch, Part 2
On living in the past
My big sister, C, hates littering more than anyone I’ve ever met. Every time she sees a cigarette butt on the pavement, she announces, “Somebody forgot their cigarette!” Then she yells, “Litterbug!” casting her eyes around like that pissing Calvin decal, looking for someone to shame.
So yesterday I took her to pick up trash on the side of the road. “Disgusting,” she hissed as we bagged up the plastic and the broken glass, affronted anew by the monsters who left them behind. She put on a show of being irritated (she’s a libra—total drama queen), but later, when we were back home, she said she wanted to do it again. “That was a fun walk, brother.”
I thought it was fun, too. We birdwatched. We waved to some people building a fence in their yard. There’s no escaping her exhaustive line of questioning (what are we doing after this? when is snack time? 4pm? when is that? mom said I can have tortilla chips and salsa for a snack. is that what mom said? is that ‘yes’? is ‘yeah’ yes? oh sorry brother sorry i asked about the chips and salsa. mom said i can have chips and salsa. can i—), but we had some good conversations, too. We reminisced about our childhoods, a favorite topic of hers. Occasionally she would thrill me with a question, a real one, about the world around her, like what does NOW HIRING mean, or how does one even spell “tortilla”? These questions are thrilling because they exhibit curiosity, not defensiveness; because she genuinely wants an answer that nobody, including me, ever bothered giving her before.
Living with C means living in the past. She balances her fearful obsession with the future, which manifests in an incessant stream of consciousness regarding every imaginable splinter of minutiae, with a dogged grip on the known. The past, for all its downsides, is at least familiar. She watches the same movies on a loop until the remote breaks. She only tells one knock-knock joke. One time our little sister puked all over the table at the Carl’s Jr. by our apartment and C talked about it at every meal for the next two years.
As I mentioned, she loves to talk about our childhood, perhaps because she lives as if it’s still the present, even more than most people with untreated PTSD do. In terms of her habits, her clothes, her activities, and her routines, not much has changed for her since she was a little girl. That includes her pop culture references, which remain a blend of white-washed 50s nostalgia—things that were dated when we were small children and are now just plain old, like I Love Lucy, The Song of the South (!), and Leave It to Beaver—and the Disney Channel. When I’m with her, I find myself regressing to the language of our formative years, a dialect she’s never abandoned. Bathroom becomes potty; the scars a girlfriend left on my back are owies. Every night she wants dessert after dinner, and every night she asks me for permission before she gets it.
Of what use is living in the past? With this question in mind, David Lynch’s signature themes of dream, memory, and time become doubly insistent. For the purposes of this entry into DAVID, I intend for this question to be bigger than metaphor, art, or nostalgia; than developmental disability and the paralysis of trauma, too. I intend for it to encompass them all, and much more, besides.
Of what use is living in the past? But then again, what does its function matter, as long it holds our attention? When I whistle the theme from The Andy Griffith Show, C smiles and laughs, and for a minute or two we don’t have to think about what’s coming next.
The first David Lynch movie I ever saw wasn’t a movie. It was a clip of the infamous lesbian sex scene from Mulholland Drive (2001), the one between the iron-jawed Naomi Watts and a very amiable-looking Laura Harring. I stumbled across it in some torrented porn compilation. I was probably 18. It was the hottest thing I had ever seen in my life—I’m pretty sure I came just watching it.
No surprises there. I didn’t have sexual feelings that I was aware of until I was 17 or 18, after boys started having sex with me, which I didn’t really like. When I began looking at porn, then in its online infancy, I realized right away that I wasn’t very interested in watching men and women have sex with each other in the normal way. Seeing two women kissing felt like an emergency. I had been so willfully sheltered that when my younger sister told me what a pearl necklace was, I needed one handy to clutch in scandal. When I found out about straps, and what women did with them together, I thought I had discovered something on the magnitude of heliocentrism or the smallpox vaccine.
The first person I revealed my horrible secret to was my college boyfriend. It felt like confessing to a murder. He laughed at me, amused by my naïveté and unthreatened by lesbian desire, and why should he have been? He couldn’t have known that in a few years we’d be broken up and I’d be some kind of gay, or that not long after that, his fiancée would attempt to cheat on him with me.
In terms of depictions of lesbian desire in mainstream cinema, the scene itself is forgettable: I remember it because of what it represented, not because of what it was. Wreathed in Angelo Badalamenti’s trademark dark, the pair of women come together both awkwardly and melodramatically; it’s to Lynch’s credit, I suppose, that their grappling isn’t all that different from the florid heterosexual liplocks he’s directed over the decades1. (Okay this is like super mean but Watts moves her lips on Harring’s like a horse angling for a Red Vine. And when she’s sort of panting from being so turned on it sounds like she’s killing a small animal with her hands.)
Upon seeing Mulholland Drive in full a few years later, this time as a gay adult, a different scene stopped me in my tracks. Here was all this brouhaha over the ~lesbian sex~ when the movie’s real lesbian moment is when Watts and Harring, the latter in a blond bobbed wig, her lover’s mirror, watch Rebekah Del Rio sing “Llorando,” the Spanish translation of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”: two beautiful women in an almost-empty theater weep as a third beautiful woman sings a beautiful song about heartbreak, until the singer falls to the ground, seemingly dead, while her voice goes on without her. Does it get any gayer than that?
“Llorando” was recorded at Lynch’s home studio, a fluke that “opened up the disconcerting universe of Mulholland Drive” for the director. Like the quartet of characters portrayed by Watts and Harring (Lynch: “We all have at least two sides.”), the song—a creative supernova—makes me weep.
To be a student of cinema, like Lynch, is to live in the past. It means living in a certain strain of the past, the one most accessible to Lynch and to the rest of us, too, the mythologized blend of white-washed 50s nostalgia, the one institutionalized by the crooked award system and the more subtly crooked deciders of value, the people who determine which merits seeing, sharing, preserving. Mulholland Drive traces itself back to one of the greatest noirs, that dark star, Sunset Boulevard: one filters through the other, like sunbeams around Bill Holden’s floating body. But unlike Sunset’s satisfyingly logical plot, Mulholland’s is almost impenetrable. “Few films operate at the juncture of known information and presumed dreaming like 2001’s Mulholland Drive,” writes Veronica Fitzpatrick.
Lynch is known for that surreality, his way of reconstituting the familiar as wrong, the dream as nightmare. Trying to metabolize his dream-logics feels like coming up. You are led to expect a certain kind of Americana from the Bobby Vinton, the maple-lined streets, the wholesome kids next door, but find beneath them a curious violence, cartoonishly embodied evil and perversity for its own sake. Your expectations are thwarted, to the effect of a recurring nightmare: known but wrong.
These dream-logics are doubly unsettling: not only is the familiar twisted, but the logics themselves aren’t logical. Even in Lynch’s slower feature films—Mulholland chief among them—plot plays a role in the plodding yet explosive momentum, but in a way one can’t always understand. “A smaller but still vocal number of critics take the position of interpretative humility succinctly expressed by Roger Ebert: There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery,” writes Fitzpatrick.
Lynch is divisive for many reasons, with his treatment of nonfictional as well as fictional women arguably at the forefront, but his most controversial quality remains this (lack of) mystery. For some, it comes off as “fake deep,” and Lynch himself as empty, a convenient obscurantist; his work forced or fetishistic. With some of his work—Fire Walk With Me (1992) comes to mind—there’s so much gratuitous violence against women, it hardly seems worth the bother just to decide where you stand.
I get that. Personally, with the exception of Eraserhead (1977), I enjoy Lynch. I enjoy not knowing in the way he causes us to not know, because I somehow don’t feel the need to answer the questions he poses, at least not in certain terms. It probably helps that I’m not the sort of person who cares about spoilers or remembers details. If you point out a film’s internal inconsistency or forgotten Starbucks cup, it won’t affect how I experienced it. I rarely recall even key parts of plots, returning instead to the sensations the film elicited, or to specific moments of ecstatic sensibility, like the “Llorando” scene. Elsewhere for Lynch: bleach-blonde Isabella Rossellini leaning against a windburned doorframe; BOB climbing over a bedroom couch; anything that my sweet baboo, Jack Nance, says or does with his spaniel brows and credulous mouth.
I don’t think my way is better than any other, but when it comes to Lynch, being a fan requires a sense of fatalism as strong as one’s sense of humor. “Whether venerating his work’s genius or lamenting its prevailing nonsense, the decoder-ring approach assumes mastery over something that’s already changed by the time it’s tamed by understanding,” says Fitzpatrick. This, even as Lynch poses big existential questions: “Blue Velvet feels like a noir film where the mystery is life itself, light and dark, the forces of evil, and why evil exists.”
Maybe these questions are better understood over time. One’s first viewing of Lynch is rarely enough for thorough reflection. He invites return viewings, one of the reasons why the Twin Peaks universe is so perfect for streaming culture. This isn’t to say the alternative is bad. How trustworthy is an artpiece in which the lesson, moral, ethics, are immediately deducible? In which good and bad can be taken for granted? (Though asked in the spirit of Gretchen, I feel like this is a bad question. Maybe I’ll live to regret it.)
I’m bad at bar games like darts and pool, but there’s a window of approximately 1.7 drinks where I do alright because I’m relaxed enough to forget my constant fear of public humiliation but not so drunk that my hand-eye coordination has begun to suffer. A certain kind of Lynch fan is freed from the burden of logic (“sense” “reality”) so that other things may be revealed. The contrasts, however confusing, imbue significance: the simplicity of the source material and the opacity of Lynch’s touch.
Made in 1986, one of Blue Velvet’s most memorable scenes was born when Dennis Hopper couldn’t follow the script. “His brain was so fried from drugs he couldn’t remember the lyrics,” to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, reports Lynch. So instead of having Hopper lip sync, Lynch had Dean Stockwell do it instead. The scene feels perfect, meant to be. There’s a lot of Gender going on between the Audrey Hepburn-channeling Stockwell and the sullen, bolo’d Hopper. The last vestiges of Old Hollywood facing off in their final days. Stockwell sings, undulates, emotes. Hopper emotes, too, but against his will. His yearning is a clear, rarified feeling. It’s so hard to write about this scene without typing “FTM.”
In describing Hopper’s Blue Velvet character, Lynch said, “That’s a side of this romantic ’50s rebel thing, where a guy could cry and it was totally OK and cool and then beat the shit out of somebody in the next minute. Macho guys don’t cry now, and it’s false, really, but the ’50s had this poetry swimming through them.” I associate Lynch with soft masculinities like Orbison’s—with singer Chris Isaak and Nance, too—but Lynch himself contrasts them with some of the hardest. And yet, it is the most masculine, and evil—Hopper’s Frank, men like Twin Peaks’ Leo—who yearn, that most lesbian of modes. Lynch’s tender heroes, with their almost effete dedication to law and order, to civility, to sexual jurisprudence, are the ones who yearn the least. Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper desires Audrey Horne, but, knowing that their relationship would be inappropriate, wastes little time on yearning.
Lynch is adept at concealing complexity behind simplicity: his salt-of-the-earth cops, his noble trailer trash, his squeaky clean suburban girls in big bows who love pretty birds. In the bug-riddled soil below the white picket fence is not only evil, but opera and melodrama, both words used to describe Orbison’s oeuvre (now that we’re safely in the 21st c., one might argue that both exhibit camp, as well). “50s music held a happiness, for sure,” Lynch once said, “but Elvis also sings ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ There’s a sweet sadness that could go either way.”
As I began to read and listen to Rob Orbison interviews for this DAVID, I realized it was something I had avoided for a long time, afraid of what I might find. I was struck by his wise levity, the way he could talk about darkness and suffering without self-pity, a quality that reminded me of Lynch and his work. “The tragic life...That one period of it was tragic. But there were a lot of years before and a lot of years after, so that’s very far from the truth,” said Orbison about his reputation for misery. (“The world we live in is a world of opposites. And the trick is to reconcile those opposing things. I’ve always liked both sides. In order to appreciate one you have to know the other,” Lynch is said to have said.)
Even Orbison’s happy songs are melancholic. I think of his candy-colored clown as Pavarotti in face paint (to which Stockwell’s, in Blue Velvet, seems to refer). In studying his interviews from toward the end of his life, it’s impossible to miss out on the joy that Orbison took in his work and, yes, his existence, for all its association with that desperate yearning and terrible tragedy, the surreality of desire itself as the thing that, as it is fulfilled, evaporates.
In Orbison’s last interview, his poetic yet clear-eyed description of his Texas hometown reminded me of Lynch, too.
“If you saw the film Giant, it was filmed eighty miles out of Wink. There’s nothing. No trees, no lakes, no creeks, a few bushes. Between Wink and Odessa, where I used to drive all the time, one of the towns is called Notrees, Texas. And it has trees. But Wink was an oil-boom town. There was one movie theater, two drugstores, one pool hall and one hardware store, and that was about it. In fact, the Sears, what you did was go to this little office and look at the catalog. It’s really hard to describe, but I’ll give you a few more things: it was macho guys working in the oil field, and football, and oil and grease and sand and being a stud and being cool. I got out of there as quick as I could, and I resented having to be there, but it was a great education. It was tough as could be, but no illusions, you know? No mysteries in Wink.”
No illusions, only dreams.
This morning I got to sleep in because my mom got C up early and took her on a long walk. C came back home, triumphant, and hammered on the front door, awakening everyone else and demanding our attention (again, libra). It’s impossible to get enough sleep here. Even on good mornings, C is loud, slamming doors, stomping the halls, knocking to ask if you’re awake yet, and will you please come watch Hannah Montana with her?
When does nostalgia become the toxic impulse? When I write about my corner of our shared childhood, or hash out a bad memory with my therapist, or get fucked by someone I call Daddy or kicked by someone I call Mommy, how is my behavior different from C’s insistence that I put her hair in pigtails (even though I hate to)? We both live in the past, but even though I ask why, how does that make me any different? There are other things to know besides why.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
Re-reading this in 2024, it occurs to me now that this was his intention.
Will have to come back and read this one again. When does nostalgia become a toxic impulse? I don't know, but I think I need to find out for myself. <3