The 18th Best Director of All-Time: David Lynch

I finally saw Blue Velvet recently, still in my mind and I easily agree it is Lynch’s best work (at least not until I see Twin Peaks and Mulholland).

Really sad to see the news earlier….. his top 3 movies are some of my favorites ever. One of the most unique artists ever, sad that hes no longer here

Rest in peace to a legend. I will play the Lost Highway soundtrack and Trent Reznor songs to mourn his passing.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

RIP, lost one of the real greats today.

I’ve been following the discussion around James’ fantastic Lynch study. I’m someone who thinks very highly of Inland Empire, and I wanted to chime in with my two cents about the grainy early-digital look. I agree that it’s a downside when it comes to pure visual beauty (which is something I give a lot of weight to), but I also think that is significantly compensated by how aesthetically and thematically well-suited that look is to this film.

No doubt convenience and freedom played a large role in the choice to use digital, as Lynch has said, but he also seems to be motivated by a fascination with the particular aesthetic qualities of grainy digital video, which he uses artfully here to visually convey what I take to be a central theme of the film, a blurring or perhaps even erasing of the representation/reality distinction. Here are three specific examples I notice:

1. The lamps and lights in darkish rooms (a Lynch staple) are a near-constant presence in Inland Empire, and create an especially eerie effect in the grainy digital. It makes the quality of the light ambiguous — is the strange artificiality just due to the low-quality digital, or is the lamp in the room really casting a weird light? Lynch plays on this ambiguity by repeatedly using both candles and candle-shaped electric light fixtures.

2. The several washed-out daylight scenes feel especially unreal and dreamlike in the digital. Lynch likes to show green of plants and trees together with the bright sunlight and it looks half-unnatural. Even the daylight alleyway scene at 1hr has a lot of green and Dern is wearing a leafy plant pattern.

3. Lynch often seems to be exploiting the graininess (in combination with lighting choices) to create an ambiguous visual impression regarding the emotive look in a character’s eyes, especially in extreme closeup shots. Sometimes the characters’ expressions in the closeups suggest they might be inhuman—monsters, robots, or characters in a dream—but the graininess makes their true expression ambiguous.

And the overall effect of the (consistently maintained) very conspicuous digital-video look is that the viewer is constantly presented with events onscreen as coloured by a tacit, aesthetically-coded signal that what we are seeing may not be ‘reality’ (that “this is all a tape recording”). Usually when we see grainy-looking visuals in cinema, it’s only briefly and serves as a cue that, for the moment, we are not seeing the reality of the film, but something that will turn out to be a TV the character is watching (panning out), a memory, a dream, etc. I think Lynch is self-consciously evoking that language-of-cinema association, but using it a prolonged way (for the entire film’s duration) to create a hypnotic sense of unreality that emerges right out of the aesthetics.

So in short, I think the cheap digital look is absolutely right for Inland Empire. I see it as a deliberate formal choice that unifies the aesthetic and thematic dimensions of the film in a way that’s brilliant and beautiful and satisfying. I don’t think Inland Empire would work nearly as well, as the piece of cinema it is, without that element.

All that being said, I still think pure visual beauty counts for a lot, and so I do agree that Inland Empire is at an overall disadvantage compared to, say, Lost Highway (which I see as the high point of Lynch’s visual artistry).