EDITORIAL PREVIEW DAVID LYNCH | David Lynch: “Sour or sweet attraction of mystery, what difference does it make?”
David Lynch on the red carpet at the Rome Film Festival in 2017. / EFE/EPA/LUIGI MISTRULLI
It is important to imagine the scene. I am sitting “at the table” in the now empty dining room of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, an open and dim room, enclosed in glass walls because this is how Jean Nouvel wanted to preserve the history of this neoclassical building. in front of the Montparnasse cemetery. On the table, a frugal lunch. In front of me, David Lynch, only diner. Not a single waiter walks through the room: they have left everything ready for the interview to happen in silence. And one there in front of the void, the head full of mysteries that I would like to elucidate. I ask him about fear, about anguish, about violence, about the life of insects and their meaning in the universe. subreal. Only when it comes to insects, which I have always feared to a phobic extreme, do I manage to relax and share a smile with him (*premonition). He insists that he is fascinated by the industriousness of insects.
The rest is an enigma.
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Lynch had been terrorizing my days and nights since my early youth in film clubs and now I had him all to myself, fighting to hold the knife and continue writing, all with the same hand; for swallowing without problems and being able to speak at the same time; look into his eyes, scattered, and believe what I’m hearing: the great creator of the most absurd violence ever in the history of cinema, and therefore the most human, of the most visceral mystery and horroris talking to me about peace and transcendental meditation, unified field, ocean of purity, total knowledge (sic); moving his 10 fingers in time so that they were pressing an invisible keyboard suspended in the air, his gaze half-closed and his arms outstretched with his suit jacket hanging from his elbows in tatters; like an enlightened preacher. Do you see the scene?
Again and again I whisper questions to understand where the perceptions of vertigo that so masterfully infects come from; the claustrophobic atmospheres of its rooms, the madness and lucidity, and the absurdity of its characters. And in response I receive messages of universal peace and Vedic meditation, mystical happiness. I can barely get him to explain to me, between spoonfuls of vichyssoise and bites of melted brie, that as a child he lived in Brooklyn and when his mother dragged him to the big city, New York, he felt a telluric terror, on the subway, in its immense and linear avenues: a landscape that for him configured the image of hell. The same one that I imagined contemplating houses from the outside of their walls, any house and in the light of day, intuiting terrifying stories inside. The story of private lives, and there I managed to merge with their fear.
when now I reread that interviewdedicated myself to the healing practice of meditation (again the mystery of consciousness), I finally manage to understand its messages. But not then, and even less so when at the end of our meeting I ask him why he is wearing a torn and tattered suit, and he tells me the lie that I transcribe: “I have two identical jackets, made of black linen and from this brand, that I loves; one of them is in good condition and the other, well you see, broken. When I packed my suitcase to come, I saw the jacket hanging in front and I said to myself, ah, this is the good one. But I was simply wrong.” And his laughter breaks the spectral silence. End of scene.
But life takes unnoticed turns and soon I am sitting again in a darkened room and this time I have in front of me a woman dressed in the skin of a cat. Is called Isabella Rossellini and she looks a lot like Isabella Rossellini; In fact, she is, daughter of two enormous cinema icons (Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman), ex-wife of Martin Scorsese and ex-partner of David Lynch; icon herself, Isabella Fiorella Elettra Giovanna Rossellini. He speaks with the simplicity of innate elegance sheathed in his animal fur because he has come to Barcelona to represent Link-Link Circus with her dog Pam, and the director of the Teatre Akademia has called me to interview her.
Now, Isabella, with all your encouragement and compassion, is going to answer the enigma that has never been deciphered about the David Lynch cinema and that disconcerting lunch. “Thanks to my father, I understood what an author is: someone who has a very different point of view, and what he is looking for is not a style but rather to express something that no one has said until then. For David (Lynch) that something is mystery, and when they accuse him of not having narrative coherence and that his films are not understood, he answers: And you understand life? One day he explained it to me like this: ‘When you enter a room the atmosphere dictates your behavior, and for me the interesting thing is to capture that mystery.'” Rooms. The beautiful Isabella illustrates it with a passage from the filmmaker’s childhood. He was returning from school David Lynch was a child with his brother and saw a naked woman walking down the street; instead of being attracted, he got very scared, started crying and ran, because he understood that something terrible had happened to her. The intuition of the mystery.
I see the light. I understand the vertigo of his images and I finally understand, yes, that bittersweet emotion that his films infect.
PS. Premonition: Now that I meditate on (un)consciousness, I adore insects and imagine movies about their tiring days.
*This text is part of the collective book ‘American Friends’, which will soon be published by Editorial Bandini
