The Eternal Importance of David Lynch: Our Smile in the Void and the Curtain: David Lynch’s Ontology

I don’t believe that any artist has ever engaged so directly with ontology and subjectivity’s role in it as David Lynch. And the stunning fact is that he did so without the aid of philosophy or psychoanalysis; his preciousness cannot be overstated.

I’ve a book in me about David Lynch. I have no idea what sort of book (how much it’d be art, how much philosophy), but I feel that it’s there. I suspect it’ll be better if the idea of it remains an unwritten void, but there are two things I want to lay out here: how Lynch himself faced death as seen through the film Lucky and what Lynch’s ontological legacy really is—how to sum up the ineffable.

David Lynch

To mourn, I watched Lucky last night, which stars Harry Dean Stanton (one of Lynch’s fellow travelers), a 90-year-old man living in a small desert town who’s forced to confront his own mortality. The film isn’t tragedy: it’s not about dying itself but how to accept death. A minor event changes everything for Lucky: while facing the null void of the blinking, unset clock of his coffee maker, he passes out. There’s no reason, no secret cancer to be revealed. The simple event is only a sign that his body will in fact start shutting down.

Lucky falls into depression but strives to learn how to actually accept that his life is going to end. The film doesn’t end with Lucky’s death, just a simple, uplifting walk in the desert as nature carries on in the form of a tortoise. Stanton himself died shortly after the film’s completion.

David Lynch co-stars as a friend who’s lost this pet tortoise. Lynch goes through a cycle of being distraught, preparing a will for the animal that will outlive him, and finally accepting that the tortoise simply had something else that he had to go do; if they’re meant to meet again they will.

Love further clarifies how Lynch is structured around the tortoise. Another friend at the bar (James Darren, who died last September) insists that he was a nobody, an ungatz, until he met his partner who, through the miracle of love, made him who he is. If it can happen to him it can happen to anybody, even 90-year-old Lucky, who has no family. The film takes this point seriously and sees it through. It gestures towards different romantic connections that do in fact happen for Lucky in the midst of their extreme truncation.

There’s an opening up of the erotic with a friend who’s generations younger (Yvonne Huff Lee), an unsentimental silent acknowledgement, not a saccharine how-life-could-have-been, but that there is a love that can be felt between them right now that’s grounded in their very openness, their mutual exposure to existence. This brief opening, just from two people watching some TV (admiring Liberace, accepting his homosexual love life that Lucky regrets rejecting), allows for Lucky to confide in her his fear of death, which she acknowledges with an empathy that pervades the rest of Lucky.

There’s also a moment of dating where Lucky is matched with a grandmother who only speaks Spanish at a birthday party. Their brief, polite efforts to charm each other shift with a shocking moment where Lucky bursts beautifully into song, singing in Spanish “Volver, Volver”. The serenading’s not for her, of course, but the birthday party community: the love that pushes Lucky to sing outside his mother tongue (he listens to songs in Spanish each morning) amounts to a sort of agape that’s moving and unabashedly a bit ridiculous.

Lucky’s life with his small community is full of love. The people at the diner, corner store, and bar are all delighted to see him, and this love uplifts and opens the space for these little miracles where erotic love can persist as well. Erotic love has an ontological dimension for Lynch, there’s nothing high nor low about it, nor does it need to culminate in a Hollywood couple. Love, with Lynch, is mostly about undoing the couple. Sailor/Lula, Norma/Ed, Henry/Lady in the Radiator are I think the main Lynchian couples who, of course, pass through unique straits.

Lucky lays out its message about existence plainly. There is no self, no persistence of soul that’s held up by divine authority. All that awaits is nothingness, void, the heat death of the universe. And our problem is what do we do with that? Lucky borrows his answer from Buddhism: you look at it and smile.

The differences/parallels between psychoanalysis here and Buddhism are significant but just worth acknowledging; Slavoj Zizek delineates this in Christian Atheism and, of course, elsewhere. The difficulty that both Lucky and Lynch present us with isn’t just that of the smile that faces death but rather the smile that embraces the ultimate conclusion to reality itself. There’s zero refuge in the trite finitude of a cosmic perspective that sagaciously cows us with “This too shall pass.”, Lucky actually accepts the much finer point that reality is grounded on a void. And moreover, how do we reconcile this with the goodness and love that persists, and persists strongly, opens us to what’s actually eternal and undying in the midst of everyday reality?

David Lynch wasn’t simply a charismatic figure with a cult of personality (great hair and weather reports aside). The word surrealism is thrown around to help excuse engagement with his work, a way to codify it without taking it seriously yourself, to leave his popularity to mysticism and ignore your own perplexity or distaste. But there’s nothing of surrealism to him, even when he’s hardest to watch. Surrealism was obscurationism whereas Lynch was a master of the curtain who worked with the very texture of our means of perceiving reality. He would give viewers oddities to puzzle over and hold onto, clues that weren’t clues but ways of exposing our own processing of reality. A master of odd details, some things were there to connect, others complete dead ends, and others still led somewhere, but only to more oddity. The point is the enigma itself, what it’s like to hold it. “Got a light?” Lynch wasn’t Joyce (past tense is painful here); the decoding at work in his mysteries (Twin Peaks, Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway) was strictly there to show how we mystify ourselves. But also because it’s fun...and traumatic…traumatic-fun.

For Lynch, all this comes to a point at his red velvet curtains, primarily Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive and the black and white lodges of Twin Peaks. What Lynch did is show that we ourselves are the ones who put curtains into reality, we’re the ones who hold the curtain up and define/engage reality by cutting arbitrarily into it, putting up an opaqueness that creates a stage. There’s an opacity to human existence that’s inescapable. And what Lynch did absolutely most of all was find ways to confront regular people with this fact and make them wrestle with it.

Lynch’s work embodies the tension between Kant and Hegel. Kant posits an unknowable In-itself that structures our self-experience of reality, a hard thing beyond knowledge that we come up against, and Hegel sees Kant’s point through to include us in the limit: we’re the ones who set it—what’s on the other side of the curtain is simply a continuation of the stage where there’s nothing different. And what Lynch did more than any other artist was to confront the tension between these two sides of the curtain, the Kantian front and the Hegelian back, and find ways to bring audiences along with him.

It is tempting to stick to the Hegelian Lynch, which is clearest with Club Silencio where we’re wrapped up in a performance that we know is fake but are nonetheless shocked and moved when the performer collapses as her recorded song keeps going…and with the conclusion of Agent Cooper’s Herculean effort to alter time and space to save Laura Palmer, only to have her land in even greater ontological destruction at the hands of Judy—that Cooper’s heroism itself (and the viewer’s) actually upholds Laura’s destruction. It’s THIS Lynch who has to also be held up along with the Lynch who listened to the universe itself with screechy sound recordings and experiments with electricity, the Lynch of Eraserhead and Twin Peak’s cosmic journeys, the advocate for transcendental meditation who went fishing for creative ideas as physical things that are part of the fabric of reality itself, the Lynch who characteristically was opaque himself out of a simple desire to only give the thing to puzzle over, to refuse self-analysis, to happily assert that he’s already given all there is to give.

Lynch’s cure for our world was to give us opacity, to make us recognize that we don’t have things figured out the way we don’t just believe but behave/act as though we do: watching Lynch is an action that undoes our ways of continuing on with such belief. The recognition that we set our own curtains doesn’t lead to an abandonment of the curtain but to its fuller embrace. We don’t give up the opacity; there’s still big fish if we search it. The out-of-nothing miracle of love is akin to the miracle of creativity: if we face the void, things do in fact spark there, and we can grab them and work them into ideas, things to be shared.

This is of course the furthest from cynicism and solipsism. Lucky makes clear that while realism is false since our perceptions of reality are subjective (not arbitrary), there is truth toward which to orient ourselves, the truth both of love/friendship and the truth of the heat death of the universe.

Opacity stubbornly insists with Lynch on two special points: the Lynchian beauty and extreme ontological (not mystic, cosmic principles, nor simply subjectively assumed) violence. Sublimity shows through reality in the shining beauty of the Lynchian Hollywood icon/Girl-next-door. And reality comes undone with a violence that cuts into the very ordering of how things are. Lynch roots us to sublime beauty and ontological (not just existential) violence because the opacity of both structures us. They’re enigmas that we don’t escape, ghosts that we carry into reality itself.

And we do have to sit with opacity, the unknown, and it’s the miracle of love persists, opens a space that makes us smile in the midst of finitude. And this is what Lynch achieved.