XII - Lynch on Lynch

I understand when people say that the things in the films are strange or grotesque, but the world is strange and grotesque. They say that truth is stranger than fiction. All the strange things in the films are triggered by this world, so it can't be all that strange. The thing I love most is absurdity. I find real humour in struggling with ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd. But I don't just find humour in unhappiness - I find it extremely heroic the way people forge on despite the despair they often feel.

David Lynch has always polarised audiences. Some find him a unique and hugely talented auteur of television and cinema, other see him as extreme, obtuse, unecessarily dense. I'm most certainly in the former camp, but I can understand the opinions of the latter. He constantly challenges audience expectations by making them work for greater answers and meaning within his work. Lynch on Lynch is by all accounts essential reading for any fans of his work, and even recommended for those yet to be won over. Lynch comes across at all times within the book as warm, open and with a homey, innocent sense of humour. The book covers everything up until Mulholland Drive, so anyone yearning for an explanation of Inland Empire will probably have to wait for the next edition. The book's set out in an interview format between editor Chris Rodley and Lynch, and some really interesting avenues are explored, from film trivia and interpretations, to reflections on transcendal meditation and music.

I originally read Lynch on Lynch while on tour in Finland, but left the book on the plane home like a tit, but went out and rebought it because I knew it would be a book I would return to time and time again. Only the other day I re-read The Elephant Man chapter after watching it on Christmas Day, and was rewarded with this exquisite interpretation of Joseph Merrick, the titular character of the film:

...you see pictures of explosions - big explosions - they always reminded me of these papillomatous growths on John Merrick's body. They were like slow explosions. And they started erupting from the bone. I'm not sure what started the explosion, but even the bones were exploding, getting the same texture, and it would come out through the skin and make these growths that were slow explosions. So the idea of these smokestacks and soot and industry next to this flesh was also a thing that got me. Human beings are like little factories. They turn out so many little products. The idea of something growing inside, and all these fluids, and timings and changes, and all these chemicals somehow capturing life, and coming out and splitting off and turning into another thing... it's unbelievable.

The book is literally bursting with such quotes that cannot help but enrich the viewing experience. I've never been a fan of director's commentaries because I feel it requires a lot of patience to sit through many films with people talking over the bits you actually want to see, so books like Lynch on Lynch really appeal to me. Some of my favourite films are by Lynch: Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet to name but two, and Twin Peaks is probably my all time favourite TV programme, so I get one hell of a kick out of flicking through this and picking up new gems every time. Who'd have thought, as a final example, that Lynch and his film crews would be 'freaking out', blasting Rammstein tapes all day on the set of Lost Highway?

To finish, a short quote that succincly lays out Lynch's attitudes to his films. I hope those of you who are still scratching your head at Lost Highway or Mullholland Drive can perhaps take some comfort from this.

Chris: The movie is full of obvious clues, but there are many other things that are important visual and audio indicators that are not obvious. So at times it does seem as if you're delighting in teasing or mystifying the viewer.
Lynch: No, you never do that to an audience. An idea comes and you make it the way the idea says it wants to be, and you just stay true to that. Clues are beautiful because I believe we're all detectives. We mull things over and we figure things out. We're always working this way. People's minds hold things and form conclusions with indications. It's like music. Music starts. A theme comes in, it goes away and when it comes back it's so much greater because of what's gone before.

But audiences have struggled with trying to work the movie out and, at a certain point, they just want you to tell them what it all means - to you.
Yeah, and I always say the same thing: I think they really know for themselves what it's about. I think that intuition - the detective in us - puts things together in a way that makes sense for us. They say intuition you an inner knowing, but the weird thing about inner knowing is that it's really hard to communicate that to someone else. As soon as you try, you realise that you don't have the words, or the ability to say that inner knowing to your friend. But you still know it! It's really frustrating. I think you
can't communicate it because the knowing is too beautifully abstract. And yet poets can catch an abstraction in words and give you a feeling that you can't get any other way.
I think people know what Mulholland Drive is to them but they don't trust it. They want to have someone else tell them. I love people analysing it but they don't need me to help them out. That's the beautiful thing, to figure things out as a detective. Telling them robs them of the joy of thinking it through and feeling it through and coming to a conclusion... The frames are always the same on the film - it's always the same length and the same soundtrack is always running along it. But the experience in the room changes depending on the audience. That's another reason why people shouldn't be told too much, because 'knowing' putrefies that experience.

on King David and Butlins

Good Day Today by threeminutesthirtyseconds

Above is a brand new song by David Lynch. It's a bit pants, but just the thought of him producing this while sitting in a dark room drinking strong coffee and eating pastries makes me feel all warm inside.

David has a strong musical history, just look at his many collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Industrial Symphony No.1, Julee Cruise, etc. Some of the best soundtracks of the 20th century in my humble opinion. Then you've got last years collaboration with Dangermouse and the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, which is a troubling but utterly vast work of arthouse pop music. I want to like that track so much, it just has something in it that reminds me of Crystal Castles thus making me want to tear my brain out. Here's hoping he can get on the blower, give Badalamenti a call and come up with Industrial Symphony 2

Taking stock of all this, I would kill to see him curate an All Tomorrow's Parties. That shit writes itself. This Mortal Coil, Julee Cruise, Dark Night of the Soul performance with each collaborator also performing with their own band separately, Cocteau Twins, Roy Orbison (if he's still alive), Re-enactment of Industrial Symphony No.1 as the headlining act! Then you can have every episode of twin peaks getting played back to back in the cinema, a Kyle Macloughlin meet and greet, and amongst it all, Lynch strolling around with a coffee in one hand and a DV camera in the other, triumphantly filming some warped pop music/existential nightmare tale that he creates on the cuff over the weekend, culminating in the whole Butlins turning into the Black Lodge and Bob fucking up hipsters left right and centre while Werner Herzog flies over in a blimp and drops feathers from a treasure chest.

To finish, musical perfection.

XI - The Drowned World

Reflecting these intermittent flares, the deep bowl of the water shone in a diffused opalescent blur, the discharged light of myriads of phosphorescing animalcula, congregating in dense shoals like a succession of submerged haloes. Between them the water was thick with thousands of entwined snakes and eels, writhing together in frantic tangles that tore the surface of the lagoon.

As the great sun drummed nearer, almost filling the sky itself, the dense vegetation along the limestone cliffs was flung back abruptly, to reveal the black and stone-grey heads of enourmous Triassic lizards. Strutting forward to the edge of the cliffs, they began to roar together at the sun, the noise gradually mounting until it became indistinguishable from the volcanic pounding of the solar flares. Kerans felt, beating within him like his own pulse, the powerful mesmiric pull of the baying reptiles, and stepped out into the lake, whose waters now seemed an extension of his own blood-stream. As the dull pounding rose, he felt the barriers which divided his own cells from the surrounding medium dissolving, and he swam forwards, spreading outwards across the black thudding water....

It's bloody cold at the minute, isn't it? My car's breaks were frozen the other day, totally fused together. Then a few days after the snow was so high my car couldn't get off my own driveway. Overpriced trains are getting cancelled left right and centre, the panicked masses are staying at home behind bolts and wood-burning stoves, gritting firms have switched into overdrive, and Tesco is out of stock of everything but pitta breads. Like every year, this winter seems like the 'worst winter ever', but who's tallying any more? Everything is getting worse. If we didn't already have snow storms and frostbite to contend with, we've got to live with the knowledge that we also had the hottest summer 'since time began'. Going by what misery the lefty-press is chucking around, we've basically got a summer that's going to burn the eyes out of our sockets and a winter that will kill every elderly person north of Watford to look forward to next year.

In an attempt to warm my cockles, I finally got round to finishing JG Ballard's The Drowned World, which I started earlier this year. Being a fickle fucker, I tend to have at least 8 books on the go at once, one for the toilet, one for bed, one for buses and trains, one small enough to keep in my back pocket and whip out when I want to feel superior to the world-at-large, etc. The Drowned World was my 'read in the garden' book but I only got a few weeks decent weather in my garden before my stupid house blocked all the sunlight. So it gathered dust on a window sill until one of my other books got finished (appalling english, I do apologise).

Anyway, The Drowned World is a sort of Sci-fi Heart of Darkness, replete with all the colonial Conrad-style racism ofwhich we are so fond. The story follows a scientist, Kerans, living out the end times in the rooftops and penthouse suites of a now-underwater earth, the sun now so bright that it has become near-impossible to spend any length of time out of shade. Originally accompanied by soldiers assisting him with his biological research, it doesn't take long for Kerans and a couple of his associates to become stranded with only the lizards and the hellish, oppressive heat for company. Such incessant temperatures take their toll on those left behind, who find themselves going a little crazy. Part of the charm of The Drowned World is in its exploration of madness. There's no Jack Nicholson cackles or Dennis Hopper cocaine fits here, it's instead a quiet, considered descent into nincompoopia. The beauty of the book is its grasping of the inevitable early on. By page 50, Kerans is undoubtedly fucked, but it's the exploration and journey into madness that holds court.

The introduction of Strangman's gang act as an agent of change in the same way the bikers/soldiers of the Living Dead series. Before their entrance, you see equilibrium, between the survivors and the living dead, or or Kerans and the drowned world. This calm will undoubtedly resolve in death or failure, but at least the particular failure could be measured and anticipated. The outside force in Strangman however creates an unknown chaos to both the protagonist and the world around them. The drowned world itself literally ceases to be such, as Strangman serves his motives. Similarly, Kerans and Beatrice's acceptance of their fate and reunion with the new wild and untamed landscape cut short by the presence of Strangman. This particular plot development gives a unique insight into a different kind of protagonist. Heroes that exist for illogical interests, or in another sense heroes who live in a world that no longer has a need for them.

I have no idea whatsoever if the passage below makes any scientific sense, but there's no denying its eloquence. archaopsychic past, yes Mr.Ballard, that is top form use of the queens! What a lovely way to write 'loads of sunlight is making us go loopy'. Roll on summer 2011

These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories - from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organisation of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis restructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old at the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.