One Less Self-Indulgent Auteur
Goodbye, David Lynch
I still remember the day I sat down to watch Blue Velvet for the first and only time. I was a teenager who was desperate for edgy, experimental cinema and I guess I got it. Unfortunately, not all experiments have positive results.
Centered around a human ear found in the forest, this David Lynch film plunged a still relatively unknown Kyle Mclaughlin into a bizarre, nightmarish world of quirky, overacting characters and violence that shocked Eighties audiences and delighted some critics who were also desperate for a little grit in their movie diets.
The movie’s purpose seemed to be fucking with as many established tropes as necessary while being as obnoxious and offensive as possible. In other words, it should have been something I enjoyed. Unfortunately, the movie was so far up its own ass it couldn’t smell the odor of its own pretentiousness.
Now, I know “pretentious” is a term that gets bandied about a lot nowadays. Many people use it to describe something they failed to comprehend because it automatically places a distance between what is worthwhile and what’s crap. And if that’s what you think I’m doing, you’re well within your rights to be wrong. Why would you know otherwise? So, permit myself to explain…myself.
There’s a lot of talk about merit lately, most of if coming from mediocre bigots using it as a dog whistle for other mediocre bigoted assholes. But regardless of their absconding with the term, artistic merit is still very much a thing and it has nothing to do with Swastika-tatted drunks whose own mothers find them to be unconscionable misogynistic ass-clowns. I mean, it can, but not in this case.
I’m not here to attack the man’s body of work per se. My beef is with his entire esthetic despite the fact that some of his work isn’t all that bad. Blue Velvet may have been pure, unadulterated, unwiped ass but The Lost Highway had its moments. Sadly, most of those moments were ruined by Lynch’s self-indulgence.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Auteur Theory, it posits that the director is the primary author of the final film because they oversaw the visuals, audio and editing of the storyline. This theory often runs into resistance from those who view the screenwriter at the film’s author and the director as the person responsible for translating the words into images. There is credible argument to be made in both cases. Ultimately, it depends on what the moviegoer is looking for when they sit down and watch the film.
Lynch’s fans wanted Lynch’s subconscious to explode all over them and he rarely disappointed in that regard. A quick perusal of Lynch’s surprisingly short filmography shows that he wrote all but one of the films he directed. So, in his case, I’m not convinced Auteur Theory applies. Lynch was the author of his films and, sadly he was entirely too in love with himself to create anything remotely resembling coherent, accessible tales of the human condition.
Weirdness for the sake of weirdness was Lynch’s bailiwick. Unlike David Cronenberg who clearly has something to say despite how fucked up it is, Lynch seemed to merely vomit strange because he thought it was cool. Most of us got over that when we got into out mid-twenties but most of us didn’t make a lucrative career out of it either.
So yes, there’s one less self-indulgent auteur in the world but the man definitely made an indelible mark before he left us. What else can we ask for in our lives?