2008-09-15 17:38:35

TWO DAVIDS

Filed under: Books, David Foster Wallace, David Lynch, Inland Empire, Movies
Posted by: John

On Sunday, before I received the terrible news that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide, I happened to walk into a bookstore and buy a paperback on meditation, consciousness and creativity by my favorite living movie director David Lynch. I have never been interested in yoga or meditation as a practice, but I revere Lynch, and I had read about the book, and there it was on a shelf in Williamstown, Massachusetts, beckoning to me.

“When I first heard about meditation, I had zero interest in it,” Lynch writes in the first chapter. “I wasn’t even curious. It sounded like a waste of time. What got me interested, though, was the phrase ‘true happiness lies within’. At first, I thought it sounded kind of mean, because it doesn’t tell you where the ‘within’ is, or how to get there. But still it had a ring of truth. And I began to think that maybe meditation was a way to go within.”

My favorite work of writing by David Foster Wallace, the one I remember best anyway, is the piece he wrote about David Lynch for Premiere magazine in 1996, in which he grappled like a theologically stunned priest with the work of one of the most mysterious and elusive filmmakers in the world:

“David Lynch’s movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third kind of territory. Most of Lynch’s best films don’t really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretative process by which movies’ (certainly avant-garde movies’) central points are understood. [...]

You almost never from a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to “entertain” you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We’re defenseless in our dreams too.)

This may in fact be Lynch’s true and only agenda – just to get inside your head. He seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there. Is this good art? It’s hard to say. It seems – once again – either ingenuous or psychopathic. It sure is different, anyway.”

In light of David Foster Wallace’s suicide, the final result of a long struggle against depression, I thought again about this essay. You can read it here in its entirety and make up your own mind about the writing and the point. For me, in hindsight, the essay is one of the few pieces of critical analysis that rise to the mystery and poignancy of the work under assessment. David Foster Wallace had found something in David Lynch that he couldn’t find in himself, an artistic point of view that was neither ironicaly detached and mocking nor emotionally and intellectually sentimental to the point of bankruptcy. For Foster Wallace, finding that point had been a kind of holy grail.

Listen to this Terry Gross nterview with Foster Wallace on Fresh Air, and you’ll see what I mean. The exchange is heartbreaking, but it is also ennobling.Reading David Lynch on meditation and art is inspiring, but it raises all of the questions that tormented Foster Wallace. Is this too cute, this little book? Too easy? Has Lynch basically gone the way of a lot of Americans who find the world too hard to fathom and embraced a faux faith? Is the secret to the mystery in his cinema an intrinsic shallowness that can only end in some fuzzy notion of the divine?

I don’t believe it, but I wonder what Foster Wallace made of this book. Did he ever read it? For anyone interested, it’s called Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity. I mourn the loss of David Foster Wallace. I really do. Listening to him on the radio reminded me that I must go back now and read his magnum opus Infinite Jest. It will no doubt be one of the perversities of this tragedy that his best known novel, unread by most, will now find a real public.

In the meantime, I hope and pray that meditation is still working for David Lynch. His movies plumb great darkness, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that he struggles with many of the same demons that drove David Foster Wallace.

“It’s a strange world, Sandy,” as one of his characters says in that masterpiece of American cinema Blue Velvet.

Strange and sad and terrifying. We need our deep sea divers in art. Whether their depressions are chemical or existential or both, they are compelled to descend into blackness, and as much as we may need for them to go down into the abyss, even more we need them to return. David Foster Wallace got lost somewhere in the deep. May David Lynch find a safe harbor.

Comments (4)

4 Comments »

1. [...] newsgalleries.com – a News Aggregator wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptTWO DAVIDS Filed under: David Foster Wallace, Inland Empire, Movies, Books, David Lynch — John @ 5:38 pm On Sunday, before I received the terrible news that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide, I happened to walk into a bookstore and buy a paperback on meditation, consciousness and creativity by my favorite living movie director David Lynch. I have never been interested in yoga or meditation as a practice, but I revere Lynch, and I had read about the book, and there it was on a she [...]

   Pingback by Chemical Engineering » Blog Archive » TWO DAVIDS — September 15, 2008 @ 5:49 pm

2. [...] partner on the Purple State of Mind project, John Marks, is a far more astute observer of all things literary. But through one thousand pages and 388 [...]

   Pingback by Purple State of Mind — September 15, 2008 @ 7:45 pm

3. Great insights, John. My brother used to joke with people when he and I were in college – that the romantic comedies in our movie collection belonged to him, and the movies in which people commit suicide belonged to me. I agree with you: we need our deep-sea divers – in ways and for reasons we may not even be able to articulate. Just this summer I’ve read a whole crop of novels that have unsettled me profoundly – Chandra’s Sacred Games, Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (for the book club), Saramago’s Blindness – and I’m so grateful for these writers having taken me to those places. It’s as though their words are the hand guiding me in the dark. Or, even more accurate for me, as though God has blessed me with and through their words – as though He guides me through the shadows, in part, via the books and films that function as prayers as much as anything else. A film like Mulholland Dr – my favorite of Lynch’s – maps the contours of those places where we’re most fearful, as do the novels I’ve mentioned. Art leaves us with horrors made more navigable and less horrific, perhaps, because more palpably horrific.

   Comment by Jason — September 19, 2008 @ 7:56 am

4. John,

   Hi, I am looking for You !!! Will be in New york city from november 7th to 11th, need a place to stay on the 10th and would love to see you and your family and maybe Doug Wright…
   Should be staying in Manhattan over the week end. Please get in touch with me.

   my e-mail addresses : frederic.bonnin1@free.fr
   frederic.bonnin@rd.com
   my phone number : +33608623930

   Would love to hear from you,
   Warm regards.

   Frederic( HPHS 81 )

   Comment by frederic bonnin — October 19, 2008 @ 7:05 am

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