Let's talk about David Lynch
 

Got any favorites? As far as movies are concerned, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and the Twin Peaks prequel were all really good. I don't like Eraserhead even if it's pretty cool. I thought inland empire was pretty poopy and i couldn't get through the second half. Blue Velvet was great, Dune pretty good. Twin Peaks to me is clearly one of the best series of all time, the more recent 3rd season didn't dissapoint but the soap opera feel of the first two is totally awesome and unforgettable.


So, David Lynch: The Greatest Surrealist and Art Film creator? What else? Can anyone do surrealism as presistently well as he does?

Re: Let's talk about David Lynch
 

I admire his ability to terrify his audience without giving it a reason to be scared. Just with style. The very wrong atmosphere, the very wrong reaction delay, the very wrong camera angle, background sound, background silence, and you're just pinned through your seat without knowing what. He's a master of the abstract, and he'd probably be the only one to do justice to Lovecraft on an audiovisual medium, if he didn't already have his own personal universe to display.

Also, strangely efficient at humor. Maybe it's more linked than we'd think. Another angle on his fascination for awkward dissonances.

He's also bat**** insane and oddly endearing. And today's number is seven.

speaking of which, in season 3 of twin peaks, laura palmers scream is the most terrifying thing i've ever seen on television. It's the same feeling as when an unknown dog starts barking/growling and coming towards you, HORRIFYING.

I just looked at David Lynch's directorial filmography, he doesn't really have that many feature length films that he's done if you don't count documentaries. I'm impressed with this auteur film making style, but not always onboard with the more far out stuff.

This what I seen:

Mulholland Drive...I was totally into this except I felt it went too far afield into Lynican territory. I prefer my films a bit more restrained in execution. CR's review of Mulholland Drive.

The Straight Story...A wonderfully conventional and humanistic story proving Lynch really can master various styles of film making. I didn't review it but I was impressed.

Blue Velvet...I seen this so long ago I don't remember a thing about it.

Dune...I don't care what Lynch says about his movie, I am a fan of his Dune...CR's review of Dune

The Elephant Man...A triumph of film making and story telling...CR's review of The Elephant Man

Eraserhead...A master piece and I do believe I'm the only person who understood it:p Seriously and I didn't even read any online interruptions. Read my review and decide for yourself...CR's review of Eraserhead

I think your review of Mulholland is a little vapid, because it's basically just a long condemnation of the surrealist/abstract film style, but overall i think eraserhead is visually appealing and i do intend to watch that again. You are a very good writer by the way, and I wish that folks on the internet would put as much effort into the things they write as you do.

Agreed.

I got into Lynch when I was about 12 years old and we have been having a passionate one-sided emotional affair ever since. :lol: Which is not to say I love every single film/project of his equally (or even at all), but I do think there is a greatness to everything he does.

I don’t think he is a better/greater surrealist than Buñuel. I have rewatched the Lynch filmography a bunch of times but don’t think anything comes close to the in-your-face surrealism seen in The Exterminating Angel. That might be why none of the Lynch films have made their way into my favourites and The Exterminating Angel did the day I first saw it.

I agree that Twin Peaks is the most consistently fantastic project of his. I controversially prefer season 3 to the other two, but love the show to death, mostly because it manages to be all-out weird but also excel at the small town detail and human psychology aspect (I think that human element is not as prominent in Mulholland Drive or his other work).

On a separate note, I’m never quite sure if it’s even helpful to classify anything as “surreal” at this stage. We’re obviously past the period and lots of filmmakers have come to embed light surrealist notes into their work (Villeneuve off the top of my head and whatnot). So the word seems almost… irrelevant?

I don’t think I’ll feel as consistently at home with anything as I do with Lynch.

On a personal level, I think Eraserhead is very brave because it shows the father staying out of necessity with his emotion towards the baby being mainly revulsion. The subject is close to my heart for personal reasons & I don’t think anyone these days or in future will dare explore that male resentment towards an unwell and/or unwanted offspring in quite as much detail.

Also still find the scene in Inland Empire where Nikki gets confused as to whether what she’s saying is her or part of the script to be the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. There are more films exploring that loss of distinction between life/art which is something I personally find terrifying (Black Swan, which imo doesn’t succeed at it, and Black Bear which to me does), but none of them come close.

Something like that on my end.

Ah, thanks for saying I'm a good writer, that's a solid Christmas present, I'll keep it! I wish I was good with spelling/grammar but I struggle with that. Good thing my browser has spell check:p

What I like about Lynch is he's never boring and almost always has made me have a reaction one way or another to his films...Usually it's a positive reaction too. I should see more of his stuff.

I think Lynch's films are an acquired taste. I liked Twin Peaks, but I was not sold on Mulholland Drive. He's one of a cadre of auteurs who get credit for being incoherent and hip, fodder for endless intellectualization. He does certainly have good looking productions. For example, here is my commentary on Mulholland Drive:

I finally sat down to watch this picture after avoiding it for 20 years. There were several enjoyable elements, chiefly the superb acting of Naomi Watts in a role that demanded the use of a wide range of her acting chops; but also the production’s obvious technical achievements, such as Lynch’s use of Crayola type colors in his sets, and also the first rate cinematography by Peter Deming. The art and production designers certainly had a work out as well.

The film is basically a lesbian fantasy wrapped in an abstract and often incoherent neo-noir mystery. At times the primitive scenes are morphed into something entirely new with no explanation. The actors played against a dream-like but pretentiously incongruous or muddled narrative made it seem like someone’s graduate film school project. During other passages the action and suspense were very Hitchcockian. Yet at no time did I feel as if I were watching a great motion picture.

Some of the film is very comparable to abstract painting, as it is in other segments of Lynch’s movies: make of it what you will. There is no “right” answer, which allows endless speculation and intellectualization. The story starts as a mystery with the common noir trope of amnesia, and ends with a disquieting thud, followed by a mysterious uttered coda. The film has dream-like quality for sure, but it’s not surrealism. Some find the picture endlessly hip, while others might consider it artsy bunco. I lean toward the latter. It’s likely that Lynch has not revealed its meaning simply because it has no meaning.

The cast was enjoyable, from the brief cameos by Robert Forester and Dan Hedaya, to the smoldering sensuality of Laura Harring (in her best Rita Hayworth impersonation). Naomi Watts, who puts me in mind of a 20th Century Teresa Wright (Shadow of a Doubt), is the keystone of the movie, and she came through in spades. Justin Theroux as the director Adam Kesher was put through the hoops, and provided some of the minimal comedy. It was delightful to see the great Ann Miller as Coco, the landlady, in her last film screen role.

In the final analysis I experienced the film much the same as when listening to a great jazz solo. I enjoy it, notice several outstanding portions, but resist analyzing it any further.

Doc’s rating: 6/10

For me, Lost Highway is the best, most perfectly Lynchian+Coherent combo. But Mulholland Drive is a very close second.

It's Inland Empire that loses me a bit, going a bit too far into lynch's lynchic lynchism. But, because of that, I wish to re-watch it one of these days.

Re: Let's talk about David Lynch
 

Gotta go with the boring choice of Mulholland Drive as #1 but Inland Empire is a close second.

Thanks for the review, I read all of it...I'm curious about how something can be non-sensical and dream-like without being surrealist. To me David Lynch is/was a modern surrealist, as everything I've seen by him has those qualities except Dune.

No, I don't think so. As others have pointed out - greatest modern surrealist maybe (Dune and The Straight Story excepted), though Charlie Kaufman is up there too maybe also Shinya Tsukamoto. Bunel was an early master of surrealism and with later film-makers like Jodorowsky picking up the baton. There are a fair few others too - Nobuhiko Obayashi ?

As for art film creator, I don't feel like Lynch makes art films in the slightest.

Things can probably be nonsensical without being surrealist (for instance absurdist comedy). But indeed, dreamlike is surrealist. Surrealism is all about letting things connect by other laws than rationality : poetic association or subconscious mechanisms. And that's exactly what Lynch does. His movies follow dream logic, they make sense at a general 'feel' level that cannot be rationalized. Lynch operates exactly as surrealists did, following intuitions, impressions, and aiming for a "truth", a "meaningfulness", and a beauty (or ugliness) below the reach of cognition.

I'm not certain David Lynch himself would frame his work as surrealist, but Breton-era surrealists certainly would.

you haven't watched his college-aged short films then, they were definitely what anyone would call an "art film", arguably that's what Eraserhead is, lots of raw aesthetics....

He's certainly not the greatest art film creator, which was what the opening post asked. He's one of the greatest modern surrealists in film for sure,

at least the most popular, i was just asking because i don't know much about the people who make films, and for me typically the most repeated names just tend to stick overtime. Lynch's season 3 of twin peaks had some really awesome art film elements as well, i can't see how anyone would dismiss that part of his repertoire.

How are you measuring that?

Well for a start, that's not a film. Secondly, many directors have artistic elements to their work. But Lynch is not an art-house film director. At least not in my opinion.

We're going into "this not that" territory, which i never find to be particularly helpful...i just think it's important to know that TV series, films, movies, are all very similar things. I never said that David Lynch was art "house", that's left over from an inception that probably originated in the general movie discussion forum [ i'm not referring to the movie inception, but the activity ;) ]. I have no idea wtf art house is, and it personally sounds horrendous.

Then I have no idea what you mean by an 'art film creator', sorry.

Yes, I think that some of Lynch's films contain surrealistic segments, but I don't think of Lynch as a surrealist film maker. I haven't seen his Eraserhead (1977), which may be a surrealist film.

IMO the work I've seen of Lynch's is better classed as "magic realism"-- a style which is basically realism but containing instances of unreality or fantasy: oftentimes illusory or bizarre, but not dream-like.

I don't have knowledge of any contemporary surrealist filmmakers, although there may be some. In the heyday of the surrealist movement there were films by Bunuel, Cocteau, and Dali. L'Age d'Or by Bunuel/Dali is evidently a prime example, although I've not seen it.

Arguably these two styles can overlap, but to me surrealism is more dream like, as in film sequences in Spellbound (1945), Rosemary's Baby (1968), and 8 1/2 (1963).