How can nothing be so tiring?

on David Lynch's payoffs

Rather appropriately, watching a David Lynch film is a lot like meditation. Even an enthusiastic viewer of his slow, at times even tedious, films may get bored or sleepy¹. (Jade, who remains sturdily conscious for most movies, is herself a Lynchian lotus-eater.) This isn’t to say that nothing interesting or funny or shocking happens. As any Lynch fan knows, it often does. But whether the outcome is dreadful or comedic, the late director’s pacing—with its glacial dialog, measured tracking shots, and self-referential symbolism (architectural chevrons; Hitchcockian molls; trick mirrors)—tends to make work out of paying attention. How can nothing be so tiring? If you’ve ever tried to meditate, you know what I mean by this.

But then the payoff happens. Suddenly a scene, or a series of them, will transcend its own tedium, creating a vacuum that’s instantly flooded with this electrical, indelible feeling. Like my experience of meditation, whether on a yoga mat or a stretcher sheet, Lynch’s movies are made from an effortful slowness that produces, without warning, pleasureful sensations that “addictive” and “satisfying” don’t adequately describe. As happens when I set out to meditate, I must sometimes force myself to turn on a Lynch film, even one that I have already enjoyed. I hope it goes without saying that I almost never regret attempting either.

Some of the Lynchian payoffs that come to mind are musical: Isabella Rossellini or Dean Stockwell singing in Blue Velvet (1986). Others culminate without language, like what happens behind the diner near the beginning of Mulholland Drive (1999). Still others make use of conflicting affects, like fear and titillation, to deliver the viewer into something reminiscent of catharsis, but ultimately more akin to orgasm: a purgative that’s anything but purifying. I’m thinking of the scene in lost Lost Highway (1997) where Alice (Patricia Arquette) is forced to strip by her trick/boyfriend, Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), in a room full of faceless mobsters. Oh god, I’m gonna panic, I thought when I saw the henchman raise his gun to her temple. The payoff was that I didn’t, and that when Alice shortly after tells her lover, Pete—who accused her of enjoying this terrifying humiliation—that he will never have her, I had the intensely agreeable urge to climb through the screen and join her in laughing in his face.

While revisiting Twin Peaks: The Return this week, another payoff jumped out at me. In episode 6, an absurdly happy child is hit by a truck on the semi-suburbia of Twin Peaks, Washington. The score takes an abrupt minor turn as the child’s mother (Lisa Coronado) runs into the road, seizing her son’s broken body from the asphalt and wailing into the sky.

The swift tonal transition from uncannily saccharine to melodramatically overwrought² is almost embarrassing: this boy’s death looks and sounds and feels like a Lifetime movie. (Remember, this is an episode of what was originally an ABC TV drama infamous for reveling in soapy camp like a pig in a fresh puddle of mud). And there are all these details that take you out of the scene. Could the driver that mistakenly waved the boy through the crosswalk have done something more more authentic, than that “Oh, BROTHER” facepalm? Why are none of the dozens of bystanders rushing to help? Isn’t it cringe, the way that Carl (Harry Dean Stanton) watches the boy’s soul depart his body within, or as, one of Lynch’s characteristically lo-fi special effects: a primitive, piss-yellow cloud?

But then Carl goes to where the mother crouches in the street and puts his arm around her. They look into each other’s eyes. We can still hear her cries as the camera floats back to the bystanders, who weep as she does—clinging to each other, holding themselves—and you realize that they have realized that there is no helping a corpse. Unlike them, the mother doesn’t look away from Carl or cover her face. Nor does he look away from her. He doesn’t even flinch. For a few long moments, she suffers nakedly, and he witnesses. The scene ends when the camera moves to a nearby power line crackling with energy. In this payoff, the electrification is literal, as it so often is with Lynch, son of the atomic era.

What would David Foster Wallace, who wrote about the production of Lost Highway in 1996, and who died two years after the creation of Twitter, think of those split-screen TikToks that pair a front-facing video with ASMR (usually of random items being crushed, sliced, or otherwise reconstituted), I guess because we can no longer stomach 30 seconds of standup comedy without something to distract our eyes along with our ears? Would he find them as watchable as I do? Would he, to ask a related question, agree with me that Lynch’s films can be boring or sleepy? I guess what I’m wondering is, how much do I owe my impression of Lynch—that his work is like meditation—to my internet addiction?

Social media conditions us to seek out the most provocative and upsetting content our phones can dredge up, to the extent that anything less than totally engaging is almost unwatchable (there’s that word again: watchable). Seeking the next dopamine hit while avoiding unanticipated³ depictions of violence, targeted ads, and anything else we’d rather not consume at the moment, we’re forced to remain on both the offensive and the defensive, states of arousal in which it’s impossible to be truly curious, only overstimulated. In this perpetual hypervigilance, our every feeling—from anger to amusement—is corroded by paranoia. (To wit: Oh, you thought this was a rabbit?) Being online reminds me of learning how to high-five as a kid, when the excitement of this coordinated connection was haunted by the possibility of the other child pulling away at the last minute (Too slow!) or worse, slapping you upside the head.

As our attention spans succumb to death by a thousand cuts, I wonder about trust’s relationship to time. Which is, incidentally, the only thing you need to meditate, because it’s the only thing you actually have⁴.

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1. I include all three seasons of Twin Peaks. Cahiers du Cinéma, after all, did refer to the third season as the best film of the decade.

2. Feel free to reverse these adjectives at will.

3. If not unwanted…

4. There are no ideal conditions for meditation, as Lynch confirmed in an anecdote about one of his best sessions, which happened within earshot of a jackhammer.