WILD AT HEART
The progressive coarsening of David Lynch’s talent over the 13 years since Eraserhead, combined with his equally steady rise in popularity, says a lot about the relationship of certain artists with their audiences. A painter-turned-filmmaker, Lynch started out with a highly developed sense of mood, texture, rhythm, and composition; a dark and rather private sense of humor; and a curious combination of awe, fear, fascination, and disgust in relation to sex, violence, industrial decay, and urban entrapment. He also appeared to have practically no storytelling ability at all, and in the case of Eraserhead, this deficiency was actually more of a boon than a handicap. Like certain experimental films, the movie simply took you somewhere and invited you to discover it for yourself. The minimal sense of story made it possible for you to take your own sweet time to find your bearings, and Lynch’s rich imagination guaranteed that there was more than enough to keep you busy.
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In the development of Lynch’s career so far, the thing that has pushed him further and further into strategies of shock (as opposed to moments of contemplation and drift, which are much more prevalent in his earlier work) has been the preferences of his audience, many critics included. The acceptance of these shock tactics as merely the “kicks” offered by an eccentric, surrealist imagination with no ideological significance of their own, coupled with understandable fears about recent inroads made by censors in limiting our choices, has discouraged many people from examining Lynch’s films too closely.
The pleasure of being shocked, which currently counts for a great deal in movies, is jeopardized if the implications of these shocks are looked at too closely. As George Orwell once observed while expressing his dislike for Salvador Dali, “Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals”; this holds true for depictions of violence as well as sex. As a result of this difficulty, Lynch has been encouraged to intensify his shock effects, regardless of the aesthetic or ideological consequences this might have on the rest of his work.
The limiting and self-conscious side of the novel is its postmodernist reliance on noir references. I’m not thinking so much of the book’s dedication (“to the memory of Charles Willeford”) and opening epigram (“You need a man to go to hell with”–Tuesday Weld) as I am of the fact that Gifford’s imagination, unlike his mentor Willeford’s, seems determined at times more by other noir novels and movies than by life. Lynch, who appears to know little about noir as a genre, has sensibly jettisoned all of Gifford’s obvious references; not so sensibly, he has retained most of the less obvious ones that are built into the plot. And even less sensibly–given the plot he has to work with–he has substituted for Gifford’s obvious noir references his own extended references to Elvis Presley (in relation to Sailor) and the movie of The Wizard of Oz (mainly, but not exclusively, in relation to Lula), and used them as camp touchstones that not only facetiously comment on the plot, but, in the film’s concluding sequence, become part of it. Moreover, while he has tried to retain some of the novel’s mosaic effect, largely with his own inventions, his attempts to unify the diverse narrative clusters with visual motifs (e.g., lots of fire imagery) and frenetic crosscutting are willful and laborious, more like hiccups than like poetry.
Lynch makes the character a black man, and offers us the “treat” of watching Sailor graphically bash his brains out at great length, on a bannister and then against a marble floor, in public. This is the opening scene in the film, and it happens just after the character leers at Lula, baits Sailor about Marietta’s advances to him in the men’s room, calls Lula a cunt, announces that Marietta has paid him to make this assault, and draws a knife. To top it off, Lynch concludes the scene with a couple of campy gags: Sailor melodramatically lights a cigarette over the corpse and then points, Elvis-style, at Marietta–two gestures that got their expected laughs from the audience both times I saw the movie. For Lynch’s purposes, the implausibility of Bob Ray Lemon’s behavior–he makes his assault in a public place and immediately reveals that he’s been paid by Marietta, simply in order to serve the clunky plot exposition–matters not at all. The only thing that matters is the shock and audacity of the scene, which the audience is invited to enjoy even more because the recipient of the violence is a black man who leers at the movie’s heroine.
Splitting up the world between the holy and the profane, the elect and the scum, also yields some puritanical notions about sex that become the primary colors in Lynch’s paintbox. Sex between Lula and Sailor is great and pure, and sex between Lula and Bobby Peru is exciting (if dangerous), but sex for older folks like Marietta and Mr. Reindeer, the generation of Lynch’s parents, is filthy and literally associated with toilets. (For whatever it’s worth, the fearful notion of the holy hero being sexually assaulted by his girlfriend’s mother cropped up in Eraserhead as well, though without the excremental subtext.) More generally, there’s the view that the world is fundamentally a malevolent place, teeming with predators, disasters, and “bad ideas” but also populated–and justified–by a few holy fools.
