Lynch’s Logic

Like joy, desire and passion, the moviemaker’s films don’t need a plot or justification.

By Sérgio Augusto de Andrade.

Nobody understands Mulholland Drive. I doubt that understanding Mulholland Drive is of any use.

As everything in life, Mulholland Drive might have no explanation. And, if it does, the explanation can only make Lynch’s film a worse film: less hypnotic, less disturbing and less exciting. Luckily for us, David Lynch films like a sexual maniac – and his only priority is to reestablish, like a generous fetishist, the fortuitous possibility of cinema becoming once again a dangerous art.

David Lynch always mistrusted so much everything that could sound domestic, inoffensive or comfortable that he ended up inventing an America in which the essence of domesticity and comfort – the classic and suburban image of a Midwest that seems depicted in a postcard of the end of the fifties – is like a sinister surprise box. What should look like a forgotten postcard among the pages of a perfumed diary ends up as the secret that someone finds out, by chance, lost among the rubble of a burned upper story.

Everything in his images is as crafty as shock toys: David Lynch’s scenes seem all the time to be on the verge of some terrible revelation that we are not always certain we want to know. The extent of our reluctance makes his cinema’s delights and is the theme of his most refined game.

David Lynch always seemed to me too intelligent to dedicate himself integrally, with an abnegation that would sound suspect, to a vulgar fantasy, empty and redundant as all kinds of dreams usually are: indifferent to the easy pastimes of the unconscious, his movies are fairy tales obsessed by sin. And with his usual good taste, David Lynch always knew that sin should never be depicted simply by the poisoned apple – but by Snow White’s desires. His cinema had the courage to treat Laura Palmer at the same time as Snow White and as the apple. As viewers, we can bite both.

In a world so ferociously personal, the only possible manifestation of order can only be as arbitrary, gratuitous and original as most of his phobias – thus, for David Lynch, the only consistent expression of moral stability seem to come from a basic respect, among all the imaginable options, for the only laws that his films seem to respect: the traffic laws. For David Lynch, the difference between a red light and a green light is an ethical principle.

Therefore, it is more than natural for his films to seem often like musicals staged by characters of very particular taste – characters capable of turning every musical in an erotic comedy whose appeal is invariably visceral. Like a tropical plant in a forgotten swamp, David Lynch’s cinema sprouts from the exact point where cynicism, the quavers and the flesh intercross in a sick fermentation. His style is precise, perverted and lysergic; his cinema is a trance.

And – what is best – instead of turning pornography into art, his films turn art into pornography – which is much more sophisticated. After all, what David Lynch has been proving – with the talent of a mater-of-ceremony presenting suspect numbers in a decadent circus – is that perhaps telling stories isn’t that important.

Joy, desire and passion never needed a plot. David Lynch’s movies don’t need justification.