2/28/2024 0 Comments David lynch nwwyorker tad friendAnd so his destabilising vision has become a common lens for discerning the truth about the “normal world”: that white picket fence America paints over deviant and sometimes evil obsessions, as in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, or that Hollywood is in fact a nightmare factory, as in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. It will never be a mainstream quality, but it exists explicitly in orientation towards the mainstream, often represented by the discordant versions of 50s Americana that appear so often in his work. Lynchian is the go-to adjective to describe any sniff of the uncanny and esoteric on screen, from Donnie Darko to True Detective. If “Lynchian” – defined by David Foster Wallace in his seminal 1996 essay as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” – was a quantifiable sensibility, it either remained marginal, or people were already tiring of it, or both. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a harrowing, humour-free sojourn with incest, was booed by the press at Cannes in 1992, and five years later Lost Highway wasn’t much more warmly received. This turn of events seems all the more unlikely when you consider his position in the mid-90s. So there is no better time to ask: how did this once-cult artist – whose work is filled with seething psychopaths and funky dwarves and who for the past 20 years has reverted solely to his most experimental and challenging work – become such a cosy cultural presence? So was the Philadelphia office of Gordon Cole, the FBI chief played by the director in Twin Peaks. Dorothy Vallens’s apartment – the nexus of lust, violence and voyeurism in Blue Velvet – was on the seventh floor. A confirmed numerologist, his preferred integer is seven. His other line, perhaps the most overtly Lynchian, is his daily lottery in which – for seemingly no other reason than gratuitous delight and enigma – he draws a random numbered ball. He is the internet’s eccentric grandpa: unfailingly ringing in the day with his daily weather reports, banging the gong for transcendental meditation and crafting miniature farmyard barns for his youngest daughter, Lula. Beyond his holiness Saint Keanu, if there is another universally beloved figure online it is David Lynch.
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