a couple things have happened in the last few weeks that it would be prudent for me to think publicly about, if that’s what this blog is for (haven’t posted in a month but whatever). both are about the only things the internet has talked about until two days ago, when I’m given to understand a new old president assumed the office.
first: a huge swath of Los Angeles burned. what that means for your weekend depends a lot on where you are. I’m close enough for it to make me consider what it is I plan to do when a similar catastrophe comes for me; in fact, a similar catastrophe on a smaller scale already came for me, seven years ago, and it’s with some sheepishness that I own up to how little having to flee in the middle of the night from a rapidly advancing wildfire has changed my habits since. maybe it’s the benefit of being close enough to feel the significance without being overwhelmed by it; maybe it’s because this fire already feels to be of, if not world-historical, then at least California-historical, significance. but the Palisades and Eaton fires feel like a wake up call for the crisis-craving insurgent in me.
there’s an essay I was working on that I kind of lost interest in, because I let the idea get stale, or the idea was already stale, or I hadn’t figured out how to actually advance the idea without retreading thought that’s already been examined, affirmed and criticized endlessly. the ideas in question I drew from Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his speech “The American Scholar.” I’m interested in seeing how the cultural situation he was responding to is echoed by the wasteland of 2025’s American society, but I didn’t have a crucial piece necessary for extending and complicating his prescription to would-be artists and intellectuals. what’s become obvious to me is that the distinction between then and now is that it’s not merely a crisis of culture we must grapple with, but a culture of crisis. as we hurtle into the future created by petrocapitalists, technocrats and their spookier brethren, there will be no more valuable skill than disaster preparedness, and not in the narrow sense monopolized by libertarian doomsday psychos, but in an all-encompassing, positive, and communally-oriented manner. more on what that means in the actual essay. all of which is to say, nothing like a world-historical disaster to make you consider how you want to face the future, ie the proper engagement with the present.
the other thing that happened that would be strange for me to not comment on is that David Lynch died. if you’ve followed my blog at all you know Lynch’s work is extremely important to me. there’s no question that his death is a great loss for cinema, and for American art generally. you can have qualms with the worldview that Lynch’s work presents (more on that later) but you’d be hard pressed to say that he didn’t “have the goods” as a filmmaker. the indie theatre near me played Mulholland Dr for free on Saturday; I wasn’t going to go since I had just seen it about two months ago, but my girlfriend’s parents were going, so I opted to join them. the way that Lynch can compress so much significance into a scene, even a single shot; the way his films operate as giant resonance chambers of aesthetic, psychological, intellectual, emotional, spiritual meaning, is truly astounding. a small but important example: Laura Harring’s character tells Betty her name is Rita after seeing a poster of the film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth. Hayworth was married Orson Welles; Rita’s doppelganger Camilla becomes engaged to director Adam Kesher. Rita Hayworth was not her real name; the Mexican actress was born Margarita Carmen Cansino; Laura, also Mexican, is credited in Mulholland Dr as the much more Spanish sounding Laura Elena Harring. so the character—who marries a director and is played by a white-passing Mexican actress—assumes a false name drawn from…the stage name of a white-passing Mexican actress who married a director. that all seems very clever unless you keep in mind that Rita Hayworth confided in Welles that her father had repeatedly raped her as a child.
my current favorite reading of Mulholland Dr is not the fairly common and frankly simplistic one that reads the first 2/3 of the movie as a dream-fantasy conjured by the character Naomi Watts plays in the last 1/3 of the movie to deal with her failures and heartbreak (and perhaps crime). I’ve come to see the movie as a very complex dream-fantasy-repressive apparatus emerging out of the psyche of a woman struggling to come to terms with the abuse she suffered as a child, likely from a family member, and how that abuse has dictated the direction her life went since—the abusive relationships she’s fallen into, the compromises she’s ashamed of, the poverty she exists in either literal or spiritual. my own interpretation has her as a very successful actress who hates what she’s done to become sucessful, possibly having allowed Harvey Weinstein types to take advantage of her in exchange for stardom. or she’s not an actress at all, but a prostitute forced into desperate circumstances after being totally shut out from the industry. or, somewhere in-between (and the most consistent, probably), she’s a waitress (like a lot of wannabe actors) who moonlights as a call-girl for Los Angeles bigwigs to make ends meet in between being cast in bit parts in shitty movies. I’m not really in the layout-all-the-clues-for-how-to-read-a-David-Lynch-movie business, but I recommend, after watching the movie and understanding the most common interpretation of it, that you read this page and then click around the other parts of the website to see just how rich in potential significance a David Lynch movie is.
this reading is supported if we take the movie as being in dialogue with Twin Peaks (initially, Mulholland Dr sprung from the idea of giving Audrey from TP a spinoff series), a show about a teen girl who’s been subjected to sexual abuse by her father (spoiler I guess? we’ve know who killed Laura Palmer for thirty years.) the original series, the film, and the 2017 reboot operate on a similar logic, of being a Freudian repressive apparatus wherein Laura is working out a terrible truth she can’t admit to herself. Inland Empire I’ve only seen once but it also works as a hall of mirrors in which “A Woman In Trouble” struggles to face some terrible truth. point is, clearly this is a fascination of Lynch’s. when I feel most generous, I want to argue that Lynch works very hard to extend true empathy and understanding to women who have been abused by men, often men very close to them. his work is about misogyny. but it would be dishonest, maybe even dangerous, to give him carte blanche on this front without ever pausing to ask: why is he so fascinated by the sexual abuse of young women?
I don’t mean to argue that Lynch’s work is some kind of alibi, a coded confession of terrible deeds. if you want to have a little fun of that variety, check out pd187’s legendary letterboxd review of Lost Highway. but whether or not we should trust a man to be telling these stories is worth pondering. it’s not impossible for a man to tell empathetic and responsible stories about women experiencing abuse at the hands of men; in fact, with enough care, a man willing to be honest about how cultural misogyny has informed his own attitudes towards women would be in a good position to do just that. this is, I think, the generous way of reading Lynch’s work about women in trouble. not being a woman, and not being a woman who’s been abused or the victim of incest, it appears to me that Laura Palmer is a very careful and nuanced presentation of how such trauma shapes a woman’s life. despite her status as a kind of Jesus figure, who dies for the sins of Twin Peaks, she is not idealized by Lynch, only by the town who needs her to be the image of perfect innocence. she is equally cruel and generous, despairing and vivacious; in a word, she is human, all too human.
but on the other hand, the mystical, supernatural, metaphysical world that Twin Peaks conjures also calls into question who exactly Lynch assigns guilt to. many people have argued that by making BOB the manifestation of a cosmic evil, Leland is in some ways absolved of the mundane evil he enacts. and by placing this story of mundane horror, in which regular people do monstrous things, in a world that seems shaped by cosmic, Manichean forces, making the town of Twin Peaks a battleground between Good and Evil, between Fear and Love, Lynch seems to suggest that the violence perpetrated by men on women is the natural order of things. a terrible order that’s to be resisted and rejected, but natural, and therefor possibly inescapable. and if that’s what’s being suggested, it makes Lynch’s depiction of women a little, as the kids say, “sus”.
one could argue that the metaphysical, esoteric streak in Lynch’s work is a metaphor, a representation of how men see the world and how that worldview results in acts of brutality, sexual and otherwise. that’s fine. but the aura conjured by Lynch’s work is so powerful, so hypnotizing, that I can’t help but think, to quote Deleuze & Guattari, “it’s not a metaphor.” all films are a kind of illusion, a magic trick; all stories are dreams dreamt for us by a conjuror. but no films seem so much like genuine acts of magic, full of potentially sinister symbolism and dark energy, as David Lynch’s. I will continue to cherish and study his work, because there’s no doubt in my mind that he was literally a magician: his films have altered the way people see the world at a fundamental level, and have perhaps even changed the substrate of reality itself. whether or not he represents the Black Lodge or the White Lodge, however, will remain a mystery.