david lynch: art as conversation
In David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, there is a sequence in which a woman in a red dress performs a cryptic dance, and two detectives are able to piece together a frankly comical amount of information from information such as the fact that her dress had been re-tailored to fit her body and that she had a blue rose. Maggie Mae Fish says in her excellent two-part series on Twin Peaks that this scene is meant, in part, to poke fun at the cryptic clues in Silence of the Lambs, and I agree with that reading, but to me, it also reads as poking fun at the very notion of a mystery with a single correct answer that can be gleaned by scouring through cryptic clues scattered throughout the story.
Kyle MacLachlan, a long-time friend and collaborator of David Lynch, wrote, in a New York Times essay commemorating Lynch's passing, that Lynch "never wanted to explain his work. He wasn’t trying to be surly or obtuse. That was never David’s way. He loved connecting with people, meeting them where they were, sharing time or space or consciousness. It’s just that explaining his art after the fact seemed antithetical to the very point of making it. . . . He was drawn to mystery because he understood mystery as a conversation — a collision of differences, interpretations, perspectives. Not a message sent down from an all-knowing source. A mystery leaves room for other people to get in there. It is two-way communication." For David Lynch, in other words, art is conversation, and conversation is collaborative.
Lynch's style of direction, as MacLachlan describes it, sounds on some level like a parody of a cryptic director--"He’d give me direction like "more wind" or "think Elvis"--but every time I have heard an actor talk about working with Lynch, it isn't about being frustrated with obtuse directions but about feeling a bond of trust with the director. MacLachlan describes it as sharing secret language. It feels, with this information, somehow wrong to describe Lynch as an auteur director. "Auteur" brings to mind a work which is singularly driven by one great creative mind, and it's clear that for Lynch, the actors' process of interpreting, of creating, was absolutely integral to the work.
But also, and just as important, is what the audience brings to the finished work. Asking "can you explain this" is, on some level, missing the entire point. We bring a piece of ourselves to every film we watch, every book we read, every game we play, and we use that piece to unlock something beautiful and unique, something that the artist could never have envisioned on their own. Lynch understood that, in a way that I think few artists do, and that, to me, is the magic and beauty of his works. His films are crafted from empathy, for the characters, for the actors, for the audience, and that is what allows them to truly come alive.