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Lynch on Lynch
Edited by Chris Rodley. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1997. $24.95.
Lynch on Lynch is a transcript of a series of new interviews with David Lynch conducted by Chris Rodley, himself a filmmaker. The interviews took place over a period of three years, beginning in 1993 and ending in December 1996. They are not unprecedented since, during the same period, I too was interviewing Lynch extensively, but they are the only such interviews to be printed in transcript (my interviews were ultimately integrated into a critical study). For this reason, Lynch on Lynch breaks ground as a source of raw material valuable to both those fascinated by this frequently misperceived filmmaker and those interested in issues concerning cinematic authorship.
For those captivated by Lynch, there has been no dearth of his presence in the media; however, for the most part the familiar composite of hair, mannerisms, and voice is a mask-like caricature and it resonates with the eerie silence the unraised mask promotes. Not that the figure of the masked Lynch is to be despised; it is very much a creation (engineered by the man himself with the perhaps unwitting collaboration of the press), one that challenges the hegemony of words and all that goes with them in ways comparable to Lynch's films. So supplanting that enigmatic self-presentation is not a desiratum, nor will that be the consequence of this book, which creates a complex fusion of the tapdance of the showman (which has been Lynch's only public image) and the unique down-to-earth magus that his intimates know.
Beyond satisfying, in part, curiosity about the man, Lynch on Lynch raises questions about, primarily, the role of the director, since his portrayal of his work methods conflicts markedly with the dominant discourses of those dedicated to historicizing film and those who insist that a film is "always already" generated by cultural constructs, and so not in any meaningful way created by an artist. In opening himself to public scrutiny in these pages, Lynch shows himself to be in irrevocable conflict with the demotion of the director to a function of cultural values, although he certainly does not seek to reinstate the auteur as he/she is commonly understood: theoretician and maker of the personal statement. On the contrary. In these pages, Lynch permits us to plumb the depths of his understanding of the film director as a fisher of the subconscious. He emerges as astonishingly innocent of the pervasive influences of cultural studies as he turns instead to what is on his mind, productively blurting the boundaries between artist and commercial filmmaker by describing his cinematic process in terms which not only peacefully coexist with the concept of the solitary creator, but also extend it into an area with which it is very rarely associated. Any collective belief in the solitary artist presupposes a mysterious process which commences with a joyous fascination that over a period of time metamorphoses into a work of art, for reasons which ultimately escape both the artist and the public, but such a process strikes us collectively as impossible within the collaborative, industrial sphere of mass market, narrative film.
However, in talking with Rodley, Lynch unself-consciously challenges old notions about what can take place within the business sector, the undoubted location of commercial film. If his claims bear no relationship whatsoever to those fashioned currently by sociologically inclined cultural studies critics, they do wind up intersecting with other cutting-edge theories, those of neuroscience, exemplified in Antonio R. Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (G. Putnam & Sons, 1994). This provocative work, and those like it, challenges the prevailing ideals of objectivity that underlie a current tendency in Film Studies to ridicule and/or trivialize Lynch's tenacious championing of the passion of the process, both in dealing with the narrative and in dealing with the tone and texture of his movies. Damasio is not just another skeptic about true belief in objectivity, but part of a new and fiercer challenge, as he charts in meticulous detail the neurological process that accompanies reasoning, concluding thereby that fully formed rational thought cannot take place, is physiologically impossible, unless it emerges out of a formative stage of imaging remarkably similar to the one Lynch describes in many places in Rodley's book. His charting of the pathways of firing neurons threatens to release from marginality the kind of statements made by Einstein, as quoted by Damasio, who (without charts) also insisted on the fusion between intellectual coherence and emotional image production: "The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be `voluntarily' reproduced and combined" (107). Within this framework, the belief that science and art issue from a ratiocination that successfully subordinates the disruptive energies of emotion is a debilitating fiction, and Lynch is not an eccentric but a creator more in touch with reality than the majority who are befuddled by overstated claims for objectivity.
In the interviews, Lynch's statements are more modest. His claims for the emotion and imagery (both aural and visual) that generate his films arise from concrete discussions of particular aspects of his work and are restricted to descriptions of his process. As an art student, Lynch was accustomed to a tacit agreement among his compatriots that questions presupposing a flatly rational basis for artistic choice were inexcusable. As he has said to me, his private response to such questions has historically been, "How dare they?" Publically, Lynch has chosen inscrutability over rudeness. Now, in Rodley's book, Lynch opts for openness in an act of faith that within the prevailing discourse takes on a heroic dimension.
Part of the charm of Lynch's introspection is his unguarded declaration of love for his bursts of visual revelation. Speaking of a scene that didn't make the final cut of Eraserhead, Lynch says, "Yeah. Henry sees into a room [in a next-door apartment] and there's two women tied to a bed, and a man with an electric box. It was a beautiful thing" (84). The other beguiling aspect of Lynch's discussion of his work method is his unexpected capacity to resist. In a turnaround that demonstrates how compatible judgement and fascination are for Lynch, he says of the same image, "The reason I took that out is that it was too disturbing to the film. I didn't want anyone even to think about what's next door [to Henry's apartment]. It just clouded and disturbed it [the film]." This dialogue, to which Lynch returns repeatedly throughout the interviews, builds a breathing image of Lynch at work. Similarly, when Lynch recounts production histories about scenes we have seen, he adds to the magic of the onscreen image the wonder and magic of the balance between openness and control that begot it.
As he responds to his interlocutor, Lynch also pays tribute to those within the industry who support his modus operandi. The most striking of these is Mel Brooks, in his capacity as producer of The Elephant Man. Although it has long been evident that Brooks has a serious side, he has created the persona of a trickster who negotiates the perilous Hollywood undertow by such self-mocking ploys as signing his correspondence "Your obedient Jew." As Lynch presents him, Brooks is a generous, magisterial force, capable of head-on defiance of business as usual; indeed, Lynch credits Brooks with having saved the dreamlike opening and closing shots of The Elephant Man, out of respect and sensibility rather than rationale.