After his last long film, inland empire (2006), until his death, which arrived at his daughter’s house a few days ago, David Lynch signed two anthologies made with the discarded scenes of inland empire (More things that happened2007) and the Twin Peaks saga (Twin Peaks: The missing piecesfrom 2014), disturbing pieces of grouting that produce tremors in the depths of the “finished” films from which they come.
Perhaps we should talk about a new cinema of autocartoneo, inaugurated under the appearance of disdain for the great excursionist of the dark side of things, things being understood as all things: from the entire universe to the quarks that compose it, passing -or more well stopping – in the inner darkness of humans.
This artistic message of Lynch, which again insists in a different way on the same thing as always, which is the massive presence of the unknown (even the unknown of known films), was distancing him from industrial classicism dominated by codes of duration, and inclining him to an increasingly growing interest in the fragment, that is, in the scene and in the idea.
In fact, since inland empire To date, he has filmed seventeen short films, of which What Did Jack Do? (2017), which can still be seen on Netflix, is the most notable. It lasts little more than a quarter of an hour, in which David Lynch interrogates a capuchin monkey named Jack for the crime of a chicken. He does it in a mixed noir idiom: half police, half ontological. At the end (but the whole scene is an end and, of course, a beginning), the chicken that the monkey says he went crazy over after touching her breasts passes through the interrogation booth and Jack goes crazy with passion, drive and test. of crime.
Before singing in music hall circumstances the song “True love flame”, composed by Lynch and Dean Harley: “She and I lit the flame of love./ The flame of true love/ burns so intensely…/ It is the delight of love. /A long time ago we danced./A long time ago we took risks,/and so we fell in love./A long time ago./Now I long to see the shine./I really wish I could be with her/and see the shine again/of the flame of the true love.”
What happens during that long scene is that the loving monkey who sings it is not a monkey but – surely – the inside of a man. The gag seems to lean towards that main revelation; and, also, towards a secondary revelation: love is the fascination of a monkey for a chicken that operates the miracle of the profound encounter between different species, in this case apes and birds. And in the background, a new and well-deserved attack by Lynch on phenomenological perception, that trap throws goals that makes us believe that we understand because we see, as if it were possible to understand the facts with the naked eye.
Lynch’s laboratory informs us that inside all things there is a mystery. The chances of accessing any kind of knowledge that deserves trust are more or less zero. But if nothing makes sense, it could well be invented through channels of poetic expression (or impression).
This postulation of mystery in terms of an exclusive issue in his work, which Lynch gave a thousand thoughts, considering it within people, has an ordinary name called desire, a dark and often secret force of life, often condemned to containment by locals and strangers.
For Lynch, desire is to his bestial characters what the atom is to matter. It is the element of what they are made of and which, by principle of survival, is obliged to hide from the catastrophes of contemplation and judgment. It is, to put it in the worst health sense, a “deformation.”
As Lord ByronDavid Lynch had a club foot. Therefore, although the map of influences and artistic brotherhoods that guided his work can be recreated with good arguments (which competes head to head with Luis Buñuel in whom of the two he filmed more dreams located at the same material level of waking life), it can also be Consider that that foot was his first cinema, what he kept seeing, or what he avoided seeing, which is the supernumerary way of looking.
In Lynch’s characters, the mark is the flaw. Baby’s Examples Eraserhead (1977) and the recreation of Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980), are enough to give some weight to the suspicion that that foot had something to tell him about the hidden mysteries of life.
The mystery of things, called desire in people, both black lights of nature that awaken the unhealthy curiosity of those who are not able to conform to the superficial image of phenomena, is what leads Lynch to move along alternative paths. to reason. And the paradox is not that the distrust in the image comes from a filmmaker, but that this distrust has not proliferated among his colleagues.
His way of suspecting the dazzle that superficiality produces, and that populates the world with knowing language (millions of words and arguments discharged behind the “I saw it”), was based on the rather intimate stories of his first films, later taken up in his masterpiece, Mulhollan drive (2001), towards the visual novel Twin Peaks (1991), that amplified those models of mystery to the scale of a town.
“Spinning” may be a delicate word to describe a rollover. Because having amplified the scale of the stories with Twin Peaksmakes us think that mystery in the sense of the concealment of desire (desire is people’s shame) is a social product, covered by a cloak of silence that only gossip can pierce.
The society with Mark Frost partly explains the boom of the series. But it is best explained by Lynch’s relationship with the social fabric of Missoula, the small Montana town where he was born. It has mountains, valleys, rivers, an industrial past based on wood and its location is close to Canada, twin characteristics of Twin Peaks, which apparently does not seem to have been so invented.
Twin Peaks It was a growing television success as the branches of its mystery grew, emerging from the trunk in which two questions were simultaneously inscribed: who killed Laura Palmer? And, above all, who No Did he kill Laura Palmer?
In terms of how things are told without observing them too much, Twin Peaks It is a detective of the “who did it?” subgenre, but that identification is of relative importance. The key, the element that Lynch introduces without the background having been clearly seen at that moment, can be deduced by contrast with other great series.
If, for example, you submit to The Sopranos (1999) already The Wire (2002) to a microscopic reading of its composition, we will see that the dramatic quality of its characters – let’s say the oxen of the plot – arises from an extraordinary emulation of human behaviors. His way of capturing that “truth” is naturalism in a state of maximum refinement. With the exception that these are human behaviors deployed in a society accustomed to imposing very defined behavioral regimes, even when they are behaviors expressed in depth. And these regimes are so defined that leaving them implies also ascribing to well-defined regimes (even to commit a crime you have to have a behavior).
In Twin PeaksInstead, we see through Lynch’s interior view of his characters what human beings could be, or what they are. in the background if you know how to see them. He is helped by his decision to become the director who filmed the most free acts in the history of cinema. Drained of a fixed personality, melted like the portraits of George Dyer of Francis BaconLynch’s characters are shapeless through the proliferation of identities. Each one is two, ten, a thousand. And nobody knows anything about anyone.
But it is a lack of knowledge that connects with the whole, which can be seen to the mutual madness of director and spectators, in Twin Peaks: the return (2017), especially in the scene in which Agent Cooper plugs an appliance into the outlet and that ordinary act of everyday life leads to a direct trip into the blackness of the universe.
Lynch left. But it was and continues to be available to the world that wants to see it the way he saw the world: as a mystery that, luckily, no one will be able to fully understand no matter how far they go. It is that, at the heart of things, as the capuchin monkey Jack would say, “uncertainty lives.”
