The Books of My Life: David Lynch

I have never really been a fan of the art of David Lynch. After all, I am a 64 year old who has been watching films and television shows since I was in my early teens and I have seen much of the schtick of Lynch before. So why am a reading a book on someone I am not much of a fan of? The answer, deer reader, is simple. It was there, in my library.

Unlike me, Kenneth Kaleta, the author of David Lynch (David Lynch, Twayne Filmmakers Series, New York: Twayne, 1993) is a fan, if a sometimes critical one, of David Lynch's films, TV shows, and art. As Max Weber noted years ago we think about and write about that which we value for whatever reason. Kaleta's book confirms once again, the value of Weber's contention.

Kaleta's excellent and informative monograph puts Lynch's work in its broader intellectual contexts. Kaleta notes that Lynch’s work is of a piece with or directly influenced by the work of William Blake, surrealism, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, John Waters, Oscar Kokoschka, Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Henri, and Billy Wilder, particularly Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. He explores Lynch’s emphasis on the aural and the visual, something befitting an artist and photographer.

Kaleta's book also puts Lynch and his work into its broader fin de siècle contexts. In Kaleta's book Lynch comes off as the ultimate postmodernist artist. There is, as Kaleta notes, Lynch's postmodernist fin de siècle genre blending of noir, comedy, horror, drama, and melodrama. There is his blending of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and wonder and terror. There is his blending of tone, of black comedy, satire, parody, brutality, the disgusting, the disturbing, the absurd, and the grotesque. There is Lynch's celebrity, whose fifteen minutes of fame seems to ebb and flow with the release of each new Lynch film, each new Lynch TV show, or each new Lynch art exhibit, though it seems to me to be more of the ebbing variety as I type.

Kaleta’s book does have several problems, at least in my mind. Like any book on a filmmaker who is still making movies, Kaleta's work is limited by the fact that it was published in 1992. Lynch has made four more films since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which Kaleta only briefly touches on. Additionally, I was mystified by the fact that Kaleta didn’t explore the similarities and possible influence of filmmaker Dušan Makavejev and his films WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974), with their collage techniques, their mixture of genre, tone, and theme, on Lynch. It is because I saw Makavejev's films almost forty years ago, which are similar in may ways to those of Lynch, that I never, I think, really "got into" Lynch. WR, in fact, remains one of my favourite films along with Celine et Julie vont en bateau and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. It is a pity that Makavejev remains far too little known compared to Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard because I find his work far more interesting, far more seriously funny, far less voyeuristically distant than Lynch's (or Kubrick's for that matter), and far more politically radical than Lynch's and Godard's.

Recommended.