David Lynch

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Mar 2 09:24:45 PST 2002



>Yoshie Furuhashi:
>> Isn't David Lynch a cliche who does things with cliches? He did so
>> well in _Eraserhead_ and _Blue Velvet_, but the rest of his works are
>> tedious.
>
>I found _MD_ anything but tedious. However, it's full of
>clichés, (which are given the clichéed Lynchian undershadowing
>of evil, naturally). Clichés can be fun. But are the Demiurge
>and the other that is oneself clichés in the 21st century? The
>absorption of one dream in another? Doesn't feel that way to me
>although such things have been frequent in the movies lately
>(_Waking_Life_, good, _Vanilla_Sky_, bad).
>
>-- Gordon

The theme of absorption of one dream into another was already cinematically explored by Luis Buñuel, especially in _Un Chien Andalou_ (1929) and _L'Age d'Or_ (1930). Surely finer films (both aesthetically and politically) than even the best works by Lunch, not to mention the fact that they were truly shocking and scandalous in their days. Lynch's films can at best only play with the idea of the scandalous (e.g., the underside of sexual horrors underneath "suburban innocence," which is itself revealed to be sickening sweetness, in _Blue Velvet_), whereas Surrealists thought that "Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny -- in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed" (Bunuel _My Last Sigh_, p. 107) and occasionally made works that lived up to their intention (at least for their times).

Among recent films, David Cronenberg's _eXistenZ_ (1999) made a better use of the dream theme than _Mulholland Drive_. -- Yoshie

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