|
I can understand why people make excuses for Lynch, I really can.
Eraserhead is an artistic achievement. The passion of which Lynch is not likely not be able to duplicate ever again. It changed fillmmaking in some ways, (the launching of the midnight movie at a theater, for instance)...ways aside from the obvious broadening of the filmmaker's palette. His new work in the immediate digital medium with handheld Sonys is an attempt to revisit artistic territory that free. He even aims to establish his own experimental company to keep those juices and an influx of ideas flowing. Guess what? He can't. If he tries to go back to it, it's already a contrivance. Weird-for-weird's sake isn't art. Never has been, never will be. There simply has to be some kind of narrative content with tendrils to some at least some notion of linear consciousness in film, or, at the very least, there has to be resonant unconscious non-linearity that is relevant to unconscious archetypes that in their own way give content to the piece*. If these forces of motion are not present, then a film turns into a big turd that just sits there.
If Lynch wants non-objectivity, then he should make video art, short experimental films, or return more to abstract expressionist painting, because the motion picture is, like it or not, an objective medium. Lynch knows this himself. The bringing-in of the complimentary coffee at showings of Inland Empire is an attempt to make the 3-hour experimental movie a happening of sorts and not just a "normal" moviegoing experience. If you like to read about films as much as (or more) than you like to watch them, then maybe Inland Empire will be a "good" "Joycean" movie experience for you.
A running time of nearly three hours is a slap in the face to the "short" form that this content is better suited for, and it is a deliberate "fuck you" to the audience. David Lynch is not John Coltrane, sorry. It's also safe to (more relevantly*) remark that he's no Andy Warhol either.
Go ahead and find fault with my expectations, but since Lynch certainly does have the potential to be uncompromisingly brilliant, it renders the later work disappointing in comparison.
His exemplary work on The Elephant Man garnered him enough critical buzz to be annointed to make Dune.
Take Blue Velvet. He wrote it himself, he directed it on a shoestring with a group of highly talented actors that basically did the film for free. It's a labor of love. It's a meditation on what would happen if he did something with the unconscious heart of Eraserhead, but with a bit more, just the right smidgen more, of a palpable plausible reality for the presumed audience to relate to and invest their senses. Blue Velvet is archetypal in its complex simplicity and answers that artistic muse with more connections to a conventional plot in a way that redefined, or at least enhanced, the cinematic language. The leap is accomplished by the filmmaker's art. It's one of the best if not the best film of the eighties, and many people, like myself, esteem it extremely highly.
Yeah, it's really tempting to make excuses for Lynch, for a guy that meticulously makes sure the dust bunnies under the radiator in Dorothy Vallen's womb-like apartment "look right" for the shot even if they happen to not get included in the frame.
Lynch's current philosophy (more like methodology) of filmmaking is the devil-may-care "everything fits" opposite.
|