“Barbelith is epinosic. Pyknotic. Epiphyllous as a placenta.
“We can and should use simpler language. David would.”
Don’t Make Me Say David Lynch
is 969 words Josephine Baker, James Bond, Quentin Tarantino, Maya Deren, John Lennon, Roger Ebert, and sexual familiarity. Lynchian, for as much as it is a common film crit, or film twitter term, is not anything. We don’t know what David Lynch-like is.
It is easy to make a case that much of David Lynch comes from splicing The Wizard of Oz and Douglas Sirk into Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger. Many of the “Lynchian” markers originate from Anger or Deren, but there are arguments to be made that Deren was not the sole author of her work, either, and Anger reused footage, as Lynch will, too.
Dario Argento would say that Lynch owes much to Italian giallo and other European horror, while noting Lynch seems to never say so.
A good portion of the David Lynch fandom will insist Lynch knows hardly any other film or television, is no scholar or student, and his work comes, not even from collaboration with others, but solely from his genius or from recurrent meditation.
Lynch, himself, will mention he hated school, or dropping out of school(s), but less so that he usually immediately went to another school right after, or spent a long time with schools and institutions.
There’s a good mystique around David Lynch which has turned into arbitrating more mystique around his work catalogue than there maybe needs to be. His ardent fans often grumble at his music video or concert work, and barely acknowledge his short films, music, painting, photography, furniture and sculpture, et cetera.
Fans and haters alike will narrow down what parts of obviously collaborative works are Lynch’s contributions based on whether they like it or not.
In a sense, then, Lynchian, really, is whether or not you as a fan or anti-fan like it or not.
The term, “Morrisonian,” by the same measures, pretty much only means if you like it or not.
If you ask an open group what is Lynchian or what is Morrisonian, they are going to give you so many answers.
Long after Lynchian no longer meant, especially, making critics angry, David Lynch still worked in the medium of Anger.
“What is love?” asks the alien.
“What is love?” asks the being who will teach us love.
The films are the talking. The art talks.
But, maybe it talks to other art, and we are the medium in which they work.
And, maybe we ain’t.
Very informative. I knew Lynch was influenced by Italian cinema but not much else about him.