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Take Dark City. I believe the studio forced a new opening that more or less explained everything rather than letting you puzzle it all out. I didn't find the
by at_a_remove 5y ago
Take Dark City. I believe the studio forced a new opening that more or less explained everything rather than letting you puzzle it all out. I didn't find the movie too hard to work through, but I think Hollywood execs have a fairly low estimation of the audience's intellect.
Lynch is a bit harder. Lynch is atypical in two ways that play off of one another. First and most obviously, he has been developing as a film-maker (as one would hope over the decades), but he expects that his audience would have kept up with him, introducing a kind of filmic vocabulary. I would say that Mulholland Drive is much, much more comprehensible once you have understood what Lost Highway is on about. In turn, Lost Highway is an extended riff off of the dualism you would see in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me. As to the second factor, Lynch is very heavy into TM and he would like to present images, sounds, and such to the viewer, and then find out what the viewer thinks of them. Not in a "this is up to you to puzzle out," rather he is pitching rocks and skipping stones off of what he likely believes is to be a collective unconscious or a shared cultural experience, then being excited about what might pop up. It's a genuine interest, I think.
- LarrySellers 5y ago“I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.” -- David Lynch
- psychomugs 5y agoI've been on a mini Lynch binge recently (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and a lot of his interviews on Linda Faludi's excellent channel [1]) and I feel like this quote sums him up. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVdYdogQM2xd29HUOED4EbQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVdYdogQM2xd29HUOED4EbQ
- newsbinator 5y ago> They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. Most people, in most cultures, don't accept it as fact that life doesn't make sense. What % of people would agree with the statement "everything happens for a reason"? Or even "because God did it". Of those who don't think everything happens for a reason (i.e. life makes sense... to someone), the vast majority nevertheless believe we live in a universe of physical rules. We accept we could get wiped out by an asteroid or a deadly plague, sure. That makes sense. We don't accept we could get wiped out by a Lynchian fever dream. That doesn't make sense.
- troutwine 5y agoWhat sense does getting wiped out by a plague make?
- newsbinator 5y agoYou could look at it a dozen different ways, depending on your sense-making framework: * God did it (makes sense- God does cataclysmic stuff) * Nature did it (makes sense- biology is a jerk and we haven't mastered it yet) * Humans did it by mistake (makes sense- we make huge errors all the time) * etc
- troutwine 5y agoSure. In the context of Lynch's work things that happen without sense are often intra-textual in his work or hint at some interior sense that is obscure to the characters, audience. Why do characters (dead!) from Twin Peaks show up in Mulholland Drive? Well, that _might_ be touched on in Twin Peaks season 3 or maybe it isn't. Kinda up to you. Seems to me that's Lynch's point. In daily life we're all willing to accept on some level that we need to make sense of things ourselves so why should we expect art to be direct?
- FeepingCreature 5y agoIn daily life, we have faith that there is some sense out there to be made of things. This is generally justified by the lawful nature of nature. In comparison, Lynch can do whatever he likes. In other words, I disagree with Mark Twain: Reality has to make sense, whereas fiction can be made arbitrarily nonsensical. (However, doing so may make it bad fiction, whereas reality is not subject to any such appeal.)
- gambiting 5y agoA lot of religious people I know would just say that god had his reasons and that's good enough. You don't need to understand why, the very core of religion is to believe that god "acts in misterious ways" and if something happened then it's because god wanted it to happen. Maybe those people have sinned. Maybe that's god's way to teach people a lesson. Or maybe it's something entirely else and we just don't know yet - you just need to trust that god knows what they are doing. Really, it's as deep/shallow as this, not much else to it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- RobertoG 5y agoThat's great insight about Lynch. I was totally puzzled by Mulholland Drive, then I read an explanation in a IMDB review, watch it again, and I was amazed that everything made sense. It was encrypted and somebody gave me the keys. That's really an artistic experience.
- earleybird 5y agoGreat artists are often misunderstood, many who are misunderstood are not great artists - The Sphinx :-)
- dhosek 5y agoWe are Number One. All others are Number Two. Or lower. —The Sphinx.
- LaundroMat 5y agoDo you still have that link somewhere?
- kubanczyk 5y agohttps://www.imdb.com/review/rw1902343/?ref_=tt_urv https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1902343/?ref_=tt_urv for example
- RobertoG 5y agoSorry, I can't find the one I read, but there are several good "explanations" in the IMDB review section. Actually, the story is pretty straightforward. I suppose that if you are a Lynch scholar already, the effect is not so great. The magic for me happened when I didn't get it in the first view and everything made sense in the second. One big thing, that I realized later (and the GP comments on this too) is that Lynch has his owns symbols and language that clue the audience about what's going on (the red velvet curtain for the subconscious/dream world, for instance). If you are not aware of that, it's easy to get lost.
- hmsshagatsea 5y agoDark City’s changes, like most of the time a studio interferes with a creator’s vision, is all about profitability. It’s too risky financially to make a film that does not have wide appeal. It’s nothing personal, just business. And when they test these films they take any criticism rather harshly. They simply don’t have the time or the foresight to find out if people will like it after a little bit.
- slim 5y agoThe corollary is one should start David Lynch from Eraser head :) Which in a way is his easiest film because you can't read it in a superficial level, there's simply no superficial level. You go straight to the cipher.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoYeah, that intro to Dark City was a crime against the audience. And honestly I think it was really shortsighted/cowardly of the studio. If you look at two movies that came just a year later, The Matrix and Sixth Sense, a big surprise reveal was central to both of their appeal. And this shouldn't have been a surprise to the studios... the twist in The Usual Suspects came half a decade earlier, not to mention Empire Strikes Back. My second least favorite thing studios do is cut the trailer in a way that makes the movie seem totally different or even a totally different genre. Aside: a friend gave me the Sixth Sense dvd as a birthday gift one year, which I had yet to see, and my idiot roommate at that time was in the room couldn't restrain himself from trying to cleverly address my friend in a way that communicated he knew the twist. Except he'd never touched on clever in his life and gave it away instantly. Nice one Paul. Nice one.
- gfxgirl 5y agoI must have been lucky. I saw Dark City opening week and there was no explainer. I bought the DVD as soon as it came out, no explainer there either. I bought the Bluray later, no explainer there. On the other hand I did see Blade Runner when it had the narration the first time I saw it. Luckily I've seen it without many times since.