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+--- Thread: Why are David Lynch films so weird? (/thread-15272.html)
Why are David Lynch films so weird? - Magical Realist - Jan 15, 2024
We watched this last night and came away with what David Lynch means if anything by the surreal films he creates. Is plot part of reality? Does pure atmosphere express subconcious tropes?
Viewed as art, do his films really have to say anything to us? Is being disturbed not part of the function of some art? The unsettling nature of evil and the macabre insidiously underlying the facade of our everyday sunny lives?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0T2aE7QQSs
RE: Why are David Lynch films so weird? - C C - Jan 15, 2024
He explains how as the film was growing, he didn't know exactly what it meant. He didn't understand how all the individual sequences came together as a whole. So he started reading his Bible, and "One day I read a sentence and that was it. I saw the thing as a whole." Somewhere in the Bible is a sentence that for David Lynch fulfills the vision of Eraserhead.
I can actually relate to that method. And it resonates a bit with how the band Garbage originally wrote their songs. Members would contribute scraps of ideas or sentences (a pile of "garbage") and then Shirley would patchwork them together into a sensible or half-sensible lyric.
Apart from adaptations like Dune and maybe a TV show like Twin Peaks, that might often be it. Where Lynch is akin to a sculptor who looks at a pile of miscellaneous junk collected in the backyard and wonders what sort of coherency could be concocted from it. Accordingly, the significance rarely revolves around a trendy social or psychological enlightenment that the typical art film molds its metaphors around. But instead whatever discovery/principle he finally comes across that will unite and organize the loosely associated scenes.
The first part of "Mulholland Drive" started out as a failed pilot for a television series, and he completely changed what it concerned in order to turn it into a movie (granting that the former itself had even had a pre-planned destination).
This haphazard approach might even have longer legs than -- again -- an intellectual flick symbolizing a moral or political message. Since the latter can potentially become dated if it pertains to a specific angst or fixation of an era, rather than a more eternal or timeless issue.
RE: Why are David Lynch films so weird? - Magical Realist - Jan 16, 2024
To this day Lynch has not revealed what Bible verse it was that summarized Eraserhead for him. That's fine. I am ok with interpreting that film in terms outside of the domain of established religion.
RE: Why are David Lynch films so weird? - Yazata - Jan 16, 2024
I have to admit that Eraserhead really spoke to me. It used to play at the Midnight Movies at the Roxy in San Francisco when I was in college and my friends and I went to see it over and over. Some people thought it was terrible, one of the worst movies they had ever seen, others thought it was an amazing masterpiece. (I was one of the latter.)
I still consider it absolutely the most horrifying horror movie that I've ever seen. A movie to give you the creeps long after you left the theater. It wasn't monsters (despite the "baby"... at least the doctors think it's a baby...) or the supernatural or slashers, it was entirely psychological to the point you never know what is real and what is Henry's tortured imagination. A psychiatric horror movie, depicting life (if you can call it that) as Henry experienced it. A look inside a tortured mind at things most people would rather not see.
If I had to sum up the movie's meaning in one sentence, I'd say that it's about depression, and where that rabbit-hole ultimately leads.
RE: Why are David Lynch films so weird? - C C - Jan 16, 2024
(Jan 16, 2024 03:42 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: To this day Lynch has not revealed what Bible verse it was that summarized Eraserhead for him. That's fine. I am ok with interpreting that film in terms outside of the domain of established religion.
When birth is given to a giant spermatozoa, and there's a scene with a woman who has a scrotum-like or testicular face, I can guess what the Biblical passage might have generally concerned.
https://youtu.be/s7AnyNuHaQ4