The most misunderstood David Lynch

David Lynch (born, 1946), who died on Thursday, was without doubt one of the greatest American filmmakers — although there is no clear agreement on what his films mean. Pauline Kael described him as the first popular surrealist working in cinema since his films are so dreamlike (or nightmarish). They have been decoded by his fans in the way puzzles are solved with the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ clearly segregated. The film that most people are enamoured with is ‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001), often held to be the greatest film of the century. Lynch was a surrealist but people forget that surrealism (Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali) was essentially a kind of covert debunking; Lynch’s first film ‘Eraserhead’ (1977) is perhaps the best illustration of his nasty methods. The cult film that has perplexed millions of viewers.

In this film, Henry, who lives in a one-roomed apartment located in a nondescript industrial wasteland, learns from his girlfriend Mary X that she has given birth to his baby. Mary’s mother insists that they marry. The two look after the child, a grotesque rabbit-like creature wailing much of the time and, except for its shiny hairless face, swathed in bandages. Unable to cope with the baby, Mary leaves. Henry tends to it through an illness when its face erupts in tiny boils and it refuses to eat, but he tries to care for it. After many twists, Henry cuts the bandages with a pair of scissors and discovers that the bandages have held its vital organs together. He cannot reassemble the creature and he stabs one of its organs with the scissors and kills it, also seeing it flooded with a light-coloured excretion. 

Lynch had become a father at 22 and the film is a deeply felt personal horror at such early parenthood, but it can be understood differently in the American context. For instance, the very first image (a dream) is of a sperm-like object issuing forth from Henry’s mouth and can be understood as a horror of fertility; there is also a ‘Man on the Planet’ (god) who facilitates Mary’s pregnancy. Once we make the associations, the film becomes political since ‘life’ and ‘god’ divide America and turn abortion into a highly contested issue. If the film had not been so grotesque, it might have caused intense disquiet for portraying infanticide. ‘Eraserhead’ refers to a dream where erasers are made of Henry’s head, an ironic reference to his first mistake — Mary’s pregnancy and child — that cannot be erased.  

After a more seemingly ‘humanist’ project ‘The Elephant Man’ (1980) obtained through the good offices of Mel Brooks, Lynch made ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986). It is set in an idyllic small town with a nightmarish undercurrent of evil. Jeffrey’s father has had a heart attack. After visiting him in hospital, Jeffrey takes a shortcut across a vacant lot and discovers a severed human ear covered with ants. It is somehow connected to a nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens, her husband and child being kidnapped and held by an unspeakable villain named Frank Booth who is forcing her into sex slavery. Much of this is over-the-top but it can be read as Lynch’s nasty personal response to the myth of the innocent small town as in Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1946). In ‘Wild at Heart’ (1990), Lynch lampoons the cult of individuality in Hollywood using Nicholas Cage, perhaps the most over-the-top lead actor in Hollywood.      

As we scrutinise Lynch’s films, we gradually understand that he spent his whole career subverting comfortable myths from Hollywood perpetuated in genres like that of the small town or that of the individuality through disquietingly horrific stories. In ‘Wild at Heart’, Sailor smashes someone’s head against a stone wall to assert his ‘sense of personal freedom’. Taking all these films into consideration ‘Mulholland Drive’ actually emerges as a nasty satire on Hollywood’s ways — the mob control over its productions (also suggested in ‘The Godfather’) but it can be read as the erasure of identity between two aspiring actresses struggling to get a role in a new production. One girl (we don’t know who) has the other murdered but I interpret it as posing a crucial question: If every professional placed in a certain standard situation acts identically and equally immorally to serve his or her interests, can individual identity be morally significant? One suspects that David Lynch made his films deliberately mysterious because his targets were Hollywood and the mythologies it perpetuates; if he had been fully understood, he might not have been appreciated as much.

(The author is a well-known film critic)