Lynch on Lynch

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Last thing: Transcendental Meditation. Oh man. Lynch says that "the worst part of France is this certain smugness, and it says so much, those smiles. I got a lot of that in the early days talking about meditation. Journalists loved to talk to me about film, but once I brought up meditation, here come those smiles." Point taken... but practitioners are guaranteed to brandish their own smile of imperturbable, magnanimous serenity (after all, they've Transcended!) and wield their indifference like a divine cudgel in the face of any critique of the vacuous doggerel of their creed. Now is neither the time nor place to go into it; I don't doubt that TM has had salubrious effects for plenty of people, but that doesn't change its ultimate falsity. To be clear: TM is bogus. I'm willing to fight about that, too. Lynch closes one chapter with the myopic mantra of the woefully out of touch: David Lynch’s memoir illuminates the origins of his art...the humour and eccentricity of Mr Lynch’s own reminiscences and observations are the book’s main pleasure.’ How does meditation get rid of negativity? Picture it this way: You are the Empire State Building. You've got hundreds of rooms. And in those rooms, there's a lot of junk. And you put all that junk there. Now you take this elevator, which is going to be the dive within. And you go down below the building; you go to the Unified Field beneath the building - pure consciousness. And it's like electric gold. You experience that. And that electric gold activates these little cleaning robots. They start going, and they start cleaning the rooms. They put in gold where the dirt and junk and garbage were. These stresses aht were in there like coils of barbed wire can unwind. They evaporate, they come out. You're cleaning and infusing simultaneously. You're on the road to a beautiful state of enlightenment." David Lynch: Paintings and Drawings, Touko Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, January 12–27, 1991. (Catalogue)

Sheets, Hilarie. “David Lynch, Who Began as a Visual Artist, Gets a Museum Show.” The New York Times, 28 August 2014. Newspaper. Web. Ng, David. “David Lynch to exhibit latest paintings, sculptures in gallery show.” Los Angeles Times, 8 March 2011: 1. Elloway, Andi. “David Lynch ‘Naming’ Opening at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles.” Purple Diary, November 2013. Blouin Artinfo. “Playboy Marfa Does Dallas, David Lynch Lands Philly Retro, and More.” Artinfo, 15 November 2013

David Lynch ‘Big Bongo Night’ at Pace Gallery, New York” (Pace Gallery exhibition review). Mousse Magazine, 28 November 2022. https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/david-lynch-pace-gallery-new-york-2022/ Max Ernst Museum Presents 150 Works of Art by US Filmaker David Lynch.” artdaily.org, 1 December 2009: 1–2. Edquist, Grace. “The Expanded Consciousness of David Lynch’s ‘Squeaky Flies in the Mud’.” Vogue, 8 November 2019. Web. Are you still wondering about that awful-looking stuffed robin at the end of Blue Velvet, or the way certain characters disappear into thin air on screen for no apparent reason, or the dancing midget, or the girl in the radiator, or the life-size bunnies, or the 1001 other anomalies? You are not alone. The hallmarks of Lynch's work are so memorable because they are so ridiculous. He talks about a few of those quirks in this book, but not all of them.

Lynch’s hard stand against interpretation has, of course, done little to dissuade his legion interpreters. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) his own reticence, a cottage industry of Lynch studies has proliferated, from the casual yet obsessive efforts of cultists to the more strenuous heavy lifting of scholars. Rich in contradiction and mysterious in its effects, with a plot that vividly and literally dramatizes such Freudian concepts as the primal scene and the Oedipus complex, “Blue Velvet,” when it arrived in 1986, opened the floodgates of academic analysis. The first book-length studies of Lynch emerged in the early nineties, and dozens more have surfaced since. (Last week, Lynch announced that he's writing a memoir, titled “Life and Work,” which he promises will counter all the “bullshit out there about me.”) Any number of Lynchian tics and tropes have been pored over for clues, from the prevalence of disability and prosthetic limbs in his films to his evident fondness for midcentury design. Conferences have been convened and countless papers published, applying myriad analytical prisms, from quantum physics to psychoanalytic theory. (The first time I met Lynch, in 2001, I gave him a copy of Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian monograph “The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway”—probably to his great horror.) Ciullo, Giovanni. “Senti questa: LO SNOB EL’ULTIMO EROE POSTMODERNO.” La Repubblica velvet, March 2007: 125–126.

David Lynch, Couvent des Jacobins, Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France, September 28–October 14, 2001. A large canvas standing in the middle of the studio, an unfinished work, depicts a tree with children. Closer scrutiny reveals that the boy standing at the base is holding a knife. A girl on the branch above is cowering. Another girl is dangling from a noose. Neither look like candidates for good, long, happy lives. Adelson, Fred B. “David Lynch: ‘Philadelphia is Percolating in Me’.” Courier Post, 23 October 2014. Web. The idea of meditation never appealed to me. First, I had doubts I would be able to meditate at all since I am ‘hyper' 99% of the time. Second, I was afraid to, since I was thinking it could cool me down to the extend I will not be able to return to my ‘hyper’ state (that makes me super productive, coming up with ideas all the time, and I do like being like this). But, reading this book made me seriously reconsider my attitude towards meditation. Lynch, who is infamous about not talking about his work (he thinks DVD director commentaries on DVD are sacrilegious) opens up like never before. He talks about his ideas, his creative process, and most intimately, his experience with Transcendental Meditation.

The reason I don’t actually feel sad for him is that he has made some choices that I don’t respect at all. In his pursuit of the art life and, ironically, “finding the transcendent within” and world peace through transcendental meditation, he has left behind three wives and one partner, and his current wife is not very connected to him anymore (when she wanted to have children, he told her, “Why do you want children? Am I not enough for you? Well, if you want a child, then that’s up to you, but don’t expect me to be very involved with any of it.” She had a child and, true to his word, he disappeared into his work and pulled far away from the family.). His exes seem extraordinarily gracious toward him (and since all of them after the first one were the woman he left the previous one for, they certainly had some idea what they were getting into), but that doesn’t change the fact—unstated in the book, of course—that Lynch is a self-centered, immature person. Fetish: David Lynch, Photographies; Christian Louboutin, Souliers (exhibition catalogue). Paris: Regard, 2007. David Lynch - I See Myself: Machines, Abstraction and Women, Galerie des Galeries, Paris, September 8–October 3, 2009.Lynch famously met George Lucas to discuss directing ‘Return of the Jedi’, which he turned down. Lord, we probably would have ended up with Ewok orgies if Lynch had gone anywhere near the ‘Star Wars’ franchise. Despite the disaster that was ‘Dune’, producer Dino De Laurentiis was good to his word and allowed Lynch to make ‘Blue Velvet’, selected by the American Film Institute in 2008 as one of the greatest mystery films ever made. Gander, Brecht Wright. “Eruptions of the Strange: On David Lynch’s Lamps” (Pace Gallery exhibition review). Pin-Up Magazine, 8 May 2023. https://www.pinupmagazine.org/articles/eruptions-of-the-strange-david-lynch-lamps