David Lynch. The Purity of Darkness

Here I am jet- lagged in a Southern city in Japan. I had just watched a huge and alive hairy crab be turned into sushi in front of me. Walking back to my hotel there was a huge tower block with a big neon sign that said Lips. A sex club. Here, where everyone bows to each other, I feel myself to be in a world that is strange but ultra-normal and polite. Then I read David Lynch had died.

I can remember exactly where I was sitting in the cinema when I saw in 1977 Eraserhead. It was that kind of event. I remember thinking it was odd ,when I seemed to be the only person laughing in the audience. But it was funny as well as all the other stuff we now call “Lynchian” : dark, disturbingly erotic , with an undertow of violence that is always just below the surface of the hyper- real normality that the director came to be associated with. A kind of Techni-conventionality that could only ever be a mask.

I always think surreal is the wrong word for this aesthetic , Lynch was not a surrealist, he was doing something else altogether. There is no “underneath” or subtext with Lynch ,they are but one.

If Eraserhead was said to be about his fear of fatherhood, it also tapped into my own fear of motherhood. When the baby is unwrapped from its bandages, there is nothing there. Lynch’s fear is of disintegration, of the abyss, in which there is nothing or rather something so unnameable that we would prefer… nothing .

When Blue Velvet came out, I took part in many discussions about it. I was a nouveau film critic (my favourite job ever) and way too judgey, calling out its cartoony psychoanalysis, it’s sexualization of violence against women or something like that. But who can forget the story of Dennis Hopper calling up Lynch because he wanted the part so badly and breathing heavily down the phone “I am Frank”?

And so he was.

And Isabella Rosellini’s wanton masochism, shocking at the time is now everywhere? Does Sally Rooney, for instance ever write a young female character who at some stage does not want to be hurt by her lover as a sign, a sign of love.