Meeting David Lynch on the Dreaming Plane - by Noah Millman
Modern Age has kindly allowed me to republish here today my appreciation for David Lynch, which appeared on their website yesterday. I encourage my readers to return the favor, check out their website more generally and, if you like what you see, subscribe. Under the leadership of editor Daniel McCarthy, I’ve found it a consistently congenial place for which to write, in large part because he has always been more interested in whether a piece of writing propels discussion in an interesting direction than whether it advances a particular ideological agenda—or a particular aesthetic. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lynch, whose political views were highly idiosyncratic, were revealed to have been a subscriber himself.
A Lynch anecdote. It’s 1988, and I’m a senior in high school. I make my first college visit, on my own, planning to stay with a sophomore who was an alumnus of my high school, whom I knew from the debate team. My first night there, I go to the student film society screening of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet.
It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. I like movies, and have gone readily to Hollywood’s mainstream offerings of the 1980s, from Back to the Future to Platoon, and laughed and cried as intended. This is something else, operating on a wholly different level. The film is in part about becoming aware of those different levels, about exposing the dark currents coursing under American suburbia. But I don’t receive it in terms of theme, much less message. I receive it as I would a dream, a dream of ant-infested severed ears and naked women hiding in the bushes.
