I've been wanting to post some thoughts on what the works of #DavidLynch have meant to me. I think the best place to start is with these two films. I love #TwinPeaks and #MulhollandDrive and come back repeatedly to many of his other films, but these two have had the biggest impact on me.
It feels wrong that it took a male artist to help me see it, but these two films, more than any other pieces of art, brought home to me the pervasive and pernicious nature of entitled toxic masculinity.
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I first watched Inland Empire on a flight to Cape Town to attend a workshop. Despite its 3-hour length, the first thing I did when I got to my hotel was to watch the whole film again. It may have a more unusual structure than some of Lynch's other creations, but the effect of this film on me was like a sledgehammer. Laura Dern's character(s) are all trapped or limited in different ways by men who face no such limits. The whole thing is a kaleidoscope of patriarchal control.
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Even the clips from the Rabbits short films that #DavidLynch included in Inland Empire show this dynamic. When the male rabbit comes through the door, the canned studio audience applauds wildly. Just by being the "man", he seems to be given value above that of the two female rabbits.
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is for me the purest and most distilled entry in the Twin Peaks universe, powered by the utterly amazing central performance from Sheryl Lee. She shows vulnerability, damage, innocence, corruption, humour and abject terror with the ability to switch seamlessly between all of these within a continuous shot. Lee brings to life the tragedy of Laura's destruction following years of abuse.
And the picture she hangs on the wall is the stuff of nightmares.
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I also admire how Blue Velvet reveals the ambiguity at the heart of Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey Beaumont character. He sees himself as a saviour, but his behaviour is driven by his attraction to damage and pain.
The Twin Peaks pilot, season 2 finale and part 8 of the return are three of the greatest TV episodes ever, and many others are none too shabby.
Lynch's use of music was always perfect:
https://youtu.be/jxlGtcW1Qg8
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There are only two of David Lynch's films that I have not found myself wanting to revisit. One was his 1984 Dune. I've never read the books, the special effects have dated horribly, and the plot in the final film was opaque to me. I just rewatched it and (having seen the Villeneuve version) at least could see what was going on, but I don't expect to watch it again. The other is The Elephant Man. I found it too sickly and manipulative, but I'm planning to give it another try.
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@dhobern I remember loving the 1984 Dune but I had read Dune multiple times years before the movie and I knew the universe and story. It was very exciting to me that someone had made a movie of one of my favorite scifi books, and I was pretty much ONLY reading scifi. So it was a big deal for me. But no one I knew understood what was going on, they found it mostly boring and opaque. It was clear to me that unless a person had read (and enjoyed) Dune the book, the 1984 movie was a waste of time, which was sad.
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@Nonya_Bidniss
One thing that did strike me rewatching it was how consistent Lynch's aesthetic was over the years. The sets in Dune would fit right into the sections of Twin Peaks: The Return that take place in otherworldly in-between places (often with the Giant).
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