David Lynch is not a weird guy. Despite the pompadour and the smirking (see photo), I think he seems like a normal, baseball-cap wearing, regular joe. Also I feel that he is someone who thrives in the sequestered space where (un)reason and immobile (il)logic intersect. In embracing the vast and inchoate, Lynch shifts our focus: it is not he, the filmmaker, the man, the artist, that is weird -- rather it is human desire, sex, that is intrinsically disconnected from appreciable narrative, from neat causality, from sense. David Lynch is just an average guy telling us sex and violence are what don't make a lick of sense.
That, of course, is bullshit. David Lynch is the wierdest celebrity we have. Bjork's weirdness, at least, is tied into her foreignness. Lynch, on the other hand, is the sun-lit embodiment of Americana -- Midwestern, tall, single-syllabic. Lynch. I knew a Kevin Lynch once. He was fat and good at math.
"Jimmy Stuart from Mars" but more than that too. Never an apologist and stubbornly tactiturn, when asked about Inland Empire he responds: "its a long movie that no one understands." And that's it. Its a long movie that no one understands. I think that is basically the best description of an artist's own work that I've ever heard. That is exactly what I.E. is.
Compare to, say, The Fountain. Aronofsky, Lynch, Cronenberg -- these are my favorite directors. These are the type of movies movie-people know, but for some reason most of my friends, who are mostly movie people, hate. The Fountain also "suffers" from schizophrenaform narrative structure, from the weight of nonrepresentational expression, from the box-office killer: abstraction. But The Fountain was bad. Aronofsky, compelled to be the auteur and the Hollywood maverick who gets his multi-million dollar cakes and eats it too, won't make a movie that's "weird." Frenetic, dark, morbid, engrossing -- sure, these are all there. But these are marketable. These are things you can take to the bank.
And this is why I loved Inland Empire, didn't like the Fountain, and will ultimately defend David Lynch to all the backlash-to-the-backlash-to the backlash haters I know. I hear the arguments. I hear the frustration. But I won't accept that The Fountain -- while brilliantly shot and carefully colored -- has anything interesting in it. In short, Aronofsky never succumbs to losing control -- he wants to show how graceful he is.
David Lynch, on the other hand, stumbles rather than pirouettes -- but he films the stumbling in slow-motion and scores it with uneasy effects. We stumble too, and so it is a far more visceral experience. I.E. leaves you confused, of course, but my brain felt great afterwards. So did my body. I felt that I had experienced something, like closing your eyes and rubbing them: there is a dimly-lit rabbit hole you are constantly falling down and it keeps changing as you do. You don't learn anything, you don't know what it means, but falling for a while -- just letting the subconscious contend with the images and sounds and silences -- is part of being human. A large part. It forces you into existential anxiety, but then rips that away too. There are no words for where you go after that, though David Lynch has been there.
I really recommend this movie; but not to anyone I know.
-MSN
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