david foster wallace

Of the first essays we read out of Supposedly Fun Thing for last Wednesday, we didn’t talk hardly at all about my favorite, “David Lynch keeps his head,” and here I’ll examine why I actually liked it so much. I’ve never been a fan of horror films or creepy films or, I would guess, anything David Lynch has ever made. I can only guess at that last, because the only movie I have seen by Lynch is Dune. As DFW says, “The overall result is a movie that’s funny while it’s trying to be deadly serious, which is as good a definition of a flop as there is, and Dune was indeed a huge, pretentious, incoherent flop” (152). So I don’t think Dune gave me a very good idea of a Lynchian movie (not to mention it’s been a long time since I watched it). I think my fascination with this essay is actually because I’m not a fan of such movies. I feel like DFW explains to me exactly why creepy movies exist, why they draw so many audiences, and why Lynch’s films are better than almost any body else’s in the genre of creepiness.

As a broad description, DFW writes:

“A kind way to put it is that Lynch seems to be one of those people with unusual access to their own unconscious. A less kind way to put it would be that Lynch’s movies seem to be expressions of certain anxious, obsessive, fetishistic, Oedipally arrested, borderlinish parts of the director’s psyche, expressions presented with very little inhibition or semiotic layering, i.e. presented with something like a child’s ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness” (166).

In other words, Lynch presents his audience with that side of himself that is mirrored in everybody else but no one else will address. It is not a side that is “beneath” or “hidden” as people wish were true (205), but a side that we push aside and ignore. Lynch exposes the audience’s naiveté for believing this part of humanity is somehow gone by exploring how that part affects what we think of as “normal” life or human interaction. Wallace, constantly reminding us that he dislikes what irony has done in fiction, is obviously particularly intent on Lynch’s lack of self-consciousness in his films. He argues, and I believe him, that if the films did make fun of themselves in the usual postmodern way, they would not be anywhere near as effective.

But effective at what? What exactly is the point of creating a creepy movie? “The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films . . . strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. . . . This may, in fact, be Lynch’s true and only agenda: just to get inside your head” (171). We’ve discussed the idea that all writing and, by extension, art is used as a means of communication between creator and audience, so it’s understandable that Lynch’s sole purpose could be to completely cross that barrier that obviously exists. Artists are constantly trying to cross the barrier, though, and not succeeding; DFW is arguing that Lynch can actually do it. We, the reader, understand that “‘personal expression’ is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer” (199), so the trick is that Lynch knows how to make his personal universal. Because in all story-telling, identification with character is what draws us in, “we’re way more easily disturbed when a disturbing movie has characters in whom we can see parts of ourselves” (167). If we identify with a character that then goes on to do terrible things that we can’t imagine ourselves doing, we are forced to realize that we are fully capable of doing those terrible things. DFW argues, “His best movies tend to be his sickest, and they tend to derive a lot of their emotional power from their ability to make us feel complicit in their sickness” (168). So, then, the way to get inside my head is to startle me into realizing parts of myself that I have pushed aside—which makes sense: if it’s a happy love story, I will fully enjoy myself, but the creator obviously has not taught me anything new about myself. The communication there is really just a reaffirmation of what I already believe about life. Lynch’s movies, on the other hand, completely shatter his watchers’ beliefs in the world, because he has the ability to get inside their heads.

I guess I’d better go rent a Lynch film.