Zack Vasquez for CrookedMarquee - "What Is It That Makes David Lynch Movies 'Lynchian'?"

https://crookedmarquee.com/what-is-it-that-makes-david-lynch-movies-lynchian/


When we think of the term "Lynchian," the agreed-upon definition is the one composed by David Foster Wallace in his famous essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head." Wallace's "Academic definition" of the eponym describes it as "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter."



Wallace does get closer to an accurate appraisal of the Lynchian aesthetic in that same section of the essay, when he breaks down the comparison between Lynch and Tarantino further: "Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching someone's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear."
While this statement once more misses the mark in regards to Tarantino (go look again at that scene in Reservoir Dogs: we don't actually watch the ear getting cut off, and the mise-en-scène makes it clear that Tarantino is interested in everything but the physical violence), he is on to something in regards to Lynch's obsession with tactile objects.



This blue-collar aesthetic is the true central aspect to the Lynch brand of strangeness, one that is present in all but one of his films. It's there in the urban blight of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man; in the white picket fences, suburban front lawns, lumber yards, and roadside diners of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks; in the long, open roads of Wild at Heart and The Straight Story and Lost Highway; and in the crumbling facade of old-school Hollywood glitz and glamour in Mulhulland Drive and Inland Empire. It is there in the anachronistic way his characters style themselves (Brandoesque leather jackets, lumberjack flannel, hair slicked back with goops of pomade for the men; tight wool sweaters, slinky film-noir nightgowns, platinum blonde dye jobs for the women), and in the seedy alleyways, lonesome desert motels, banal apartment complexes, and run down trailer parks where they wander.



The blue-collar surrealism that Lynch deals in extends beyond his country of origin. It is just as at home in the Victorian London of The Elephant Man, or in the Polish sections that are strewn throughout Inland Empire. David Lynch the man (or character, depending on how much credence you give to his public persona) may be as American as the apple pie his characters scarf down, but as an artist he comes from a long line of European surrealists. What separates him, however, from an early surrealist director like Buñuel, or the New Wave auteurs like Godard and Resnais that bridged the period between them, is that Lynch's films are not interested in the politics of class. That may seem contradictory to the notion of "blue-collar surrealism," but it all comes back to those tactile objects. It is in them that Lynch discovers the uncanny, not in the semiotics of class divisions that those other filmmakers use their fractured narratives to satirize and condemn. (Which is not to say that Lynch takes his working-class heroes for granted, it's just that he doesn't present their struggles as reating purely to their station. When representatives of a ruling power structure do make their presence known, as do the Castigliani brothers in Mulholland Drive or the residents of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, their origins and motivations seem to be otherworldly.)