A history of violence
Alice O'Keeffe
Published 12 March 2007
David Lynch's America has always been characterised by darkness and perversion. He tells Alice O'Keeffe that his artistic vision has been vindicated
"They say once the bell has been rung, it's been rung," says David Lynch cryptically, his pale blue eyes staring fixedly past my right shoulder, out over the pristine panorama of Paris visible from the top floor of the Fondation Cartier gallery. He looks like a rugged, kindly old lumberjack, but there is something very odd about his manner. He never makes eye contact, and, as he talks, he holds his hand up to his right ear and wiggles his fingers, as if speaking through an imaginary glove puppet. The effect is disconcerting, to say the least. I feel a chill run down my spine, the same kind of sensation I experienced when Patricia Arquette suddenly turned into a horrible grinning demon in Lost Highway, or when Dennis Hopper appeared clutching his gas mask in Blue Velvet. "That was, you know, a very bad thing. A very bad thing."
Lynch is talking about the Abu Ghraib scandal. That moment when America's perversions were paraded in front of a world audience in some ways fulfilled his personal prophecy. For decades, his films have explored the darkness inherent in American culture, often through the prism of twisted sexuality. Behind gleaming white picket fences, the Lynchian landscape has always been characterised by sexualised violence, from Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer, the schoolgirl who "got off on" being murdered, through Alice, the pros titute dismembered in Lost Highway, to Blue Velvet's sadomasochistic nightclub singer, played by Lynch's then-partner, Isabella Rossellini.
I ask him whether he feels his artistic vision has been vindicated by recent events in America. "That's exactly the way it's been going," he says, nodding sagely. "In the 1950s, everything had a very beautiful façade. There was optimism in the air and a feeling of moving forward in a good way. But, looking back, we realise that all the sicknesses and perversions, distortions, all these things were there. They were just covered over. No one talked about them; no one looked, really. But in the time since then, the sicknesses are being revealed, and everyone says, 'Oh my goodness, oh my goodness' - but it was always there. So it's a good thing. It's there and they examine it, and maybe try and find a way to cure some things."
It is strange to hear Lynch talking about a "cure" for America. There is no sense in his work that any perversions need curing; rather, they are the most fascinating element of small-town life. This is clearer than ever in "The Air is on Fire", an exhibition of artwork spanning his career, which opened at the Fondation Cartier this month. Many of the familiar Lynch motifs are in evidence in the photographs, installations and oil paintings: the ruched curtains that appear obsessively in his films have been used as backdrops for his canvases; a series of black-and-white photos features run-down industrial landscapes similar to those in Eraserhead; sound installations recreate the buzzing, fizzing light bulbs and screeching trains that make his soundtracks so distinctive and uneasy.
The most disturbing images, however, are Bob loves Sally until she is blue in the face (2000) - a puce-coloured painting in which an abstracted male figure seems to be raping, and perhaps kill ing, a female - and the undated Distorted Nudes, a series of 19th- and early 20th-century erotic photos that he has digitally manipulated to create women with stumps for legs and gory, fleshy protrusions where their heads should be.
Though a genius he may be, the thought of Lynch sitting alone in his studio with these images, lopping a leg off here and adding a festering gash there, is not pleasant. "Those distorted nudes thrill me, and I don't know all the reasons why," he admits. "Sometimes when there's a distortion or a rearrangement it makes you see things afresh, and something jumps. I do like fragments of the human form, and then there's all kinds of variations, and that's interesting. It's like jazz: there's the melody - the human form - and then there's all kinds of variants, and that's real interesting."
Would it bother him, I wonder, if someone got off on them? "Oh no, you can't worry about stuff like that, because you would stop working," he insists, but then says: "There must be some responsibility when you make something. They say for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. There could be something coming back from what we do, but I'm not positive."
As a great believer in the power of intuition, Lynch has resisted the temptation to explain or in terpret his work. He has spoken about making his films in a trance-like state induced by large doses of sugar and caffeine. In his book Catching the Big Fish: meditation, consciousness and creativity, published recently in the States, he argues that artists are simply receptacles for ideas, which can be "caught" and reeled in from the outside world. "They say that artists express themselves, but I don't really see it like that," he says. "There are particular ideas I fall in love with because of the way I am. You're the way you are: you don't fall in love with the same ideas. But I do like those ideas, so when they come along, I'm cooked - I go to work."
Anyone who admires his films will appreciate his refusal to diminish them with expla nation. As he says: "The world is as you are, so every viewer is going to get something different." Eraserhead (Lynch's debut breakthrough feature), Mulholland Drive and the forthcoming surreal, three-hour Inland Empire are intense, dreamlike and profoundly unexplainable. Eschewing conventionally linear plots, all three works follow a kind of internal logic that feels oddly familiar even if you have never seen them before.
On a personal level, however, Lynch's reluctance to analyse or take responsibility for his own output becomes much more problematic. When I ask whether the content of his work ever worries him, he counters: "Do I have a problem? Maybe I do. But these things aren't in my head. They come from outside. I have this feeling that for the longest time the idea wasn't there, and then - boom - it is there. I didn't ask for it, I don't know what happened, but there it is."
This is surely disingenuous; to some extent, his work must reflect his own tastes and preoccupations. Yet he insists that art "can have all kinds of horror in it, and you are separate from it. You can be pretty normal and show a lot of abnormality and be separate from it." It feels oddly like listening to a criminal explaining that society made him do it, or a schizophrenic blaming his actions on the voices in his head.
Lynch has said that, despite suffering from depression at the beginning of his career, he resisted going into psychotherapy because he feared it would adversely affect his creativity. Instead, he embarked upon a 33-year association with Transcendental Meditation, a technique copyrighted by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the same guru who taught the Beatles in the Sixties. Lynch meditates twice a day for 20 minutes, and is evangelical about the practice. He has set up the David Lynch Foundation, which, besides its various outlandish aims (raising $7bn for "peace universities"), provides scholarships for young people to study meditation. "You should be doing Transcendental Meditation," he tells me, his face lighting up for the first time. "I know, I know, you're not sure. But it will take you and rapidly, rapidly unfold the thing."
TM claims to offer instant access to the "unified field": a state of pure bliss. Lynch says that, unlike damaging talking cures, it has actually enhanced his creativity, making him more receptive to ideas, more himself. I explain that I would find it difficult not to be cynical about a religion that charges people $2,500 to join. "A lot of people get hung up on that," he says. "But when you pay for something, it means that you value it and you want it, and there's something to that on this journey. At least if people pay, they'll meditate up their $2,500 worth."
It strikes me as a comment that - like Lynch himself - is as American as cherry pie.
"The Air is on Fire" is at the Fondation Cartier, 261 boulevard Raspail, Paris 75014, until 27 May. For further information, log on to:
http://www.fondationcartier.fr. "Inland Empire" is released on 9 March (certificate 15)
1946 David Keith Lynch is born in Missoula, Montana. He studies at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and later graduates from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Aged 21, he marries Peggy Reavey and they have a daughter, Jennifer.
1977 Eraserhead is released, becoming an instant cult hit and a critical success. It establishes the Lynchian world-view and his avant-garde reputation.
1980 The Elephant Man marks Lynch’s acceptance into the Hollywood mainstream, earning eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Director.
1986 After the commercial and critical disaster of Dune, Lynch makes the era-defining Blue Velvet, which earns him his second Oscar nomination for Best Director. He lives with the film's star, Isabella Rossellini, for the next five years.
1990-91 Lynch makes his most commercially successful work, the television series Twin Peaks. Wild at Heart wins the 1990 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival but receives a mixed reception in America. This is as nothing, however, compared to the savaging that his feature film Twin Peaks: fire walk with me receives two years later.
1997 Lynch re-emerges from obscurity with the polarising Lost Highway.
1999 The Straight Story marks a departure from surreal subject matter and a return to critical approval.
2001 Mulholland Drive wins him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Kylie Walker
http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120030
