If there is ever a core idea behind our modern-day celebration of Halloween it is the need to escape. We run from ourselves into masks and costumes, for one night becoming that which we wish we had been. Sometimes we choose the face of a monster, only because we as mere humans are the most monstrous creations of all. Fear of oneself is essentially fear of your seed, of your origins. No filmmaker has captured the very psychology of America like David Lynch, and even in his early student and short film work, one finds an artist digging into the depths of his psychic plane, and our own. [Read more…]
David Lynch’s Room To Dream, A Bio-Memoir
Room to Dream
by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
Random House, 592 pp., $32.00
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
— Edgar Allan Poe
For the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making. [Read more…]
The Grandmother
If there is ever a core idea behind our modern-day celebration of Halloween it is the need to escape. We run from ourselves into masks and costumes, for one night becoming that which we wish we had been. Sometimes we choose the face of a monster, only because we as mere humans are the most monstrous creations of all. Fear of oneself is essentially fear of your seed, of your origins. No filmmaker has captured the very psychology of America like David Lynch, and even in his early student and short film work, one finds an artist digging into the depths of his psychic plane, and our own. [Read more…]