Lynch and space

On interiors and furniture in the departed director's oeuvre

Milk at the bar…

David Lynch, visionary director, former Philadelphian and master of space died the other week. He lived until 78, smoked something like a pack of cigs (Spirits) a day, for decades, for seven years had a Bob’s Big Boy milkshake every lunch (he said he quit drinking them when he went into the dumpster, read the ingredients and saw they were full of emulsifiers), enjoyed corn syrup red Cokes with alacrity, and was on record for liking and believing in sugar. He also meditated two hours a day and had a severe and normal sense of purpose. He had this pretty clear and unironic approach to art and creativity, some of which is archived in The Art Life documentary on Criterion (which is just OK, but has good access). I like his (very true) thoughts on meditation:

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And food. He knew what he was doing…

His work… was more or less genius. People like different things about it but for for me, whenever I watch his films I am moved by his complete mastery and domination of physical space. I am in awe of it. How his films are presented. Some of this is addressed in a very fine, pleasurable story about his films’ interiors in The Architect’s Newspaper a bit ago. It is worth reading in full.

The good and bad, the morality, the odd, the right and wrong expressed through the interiors/sets in his films might feel less “Lynchian” compared to how this morality… is expressed through character. It’s less weird, for sure—the sets and the locations are so direct and understandable. The Lynch stuff in the characters, the people that drive the movie… is about how light they are. They are occasionally conceptual (Lost Highway or the any of the old freaks in FWWM), or are missing key pieces/motivators, or are confusing in their motivations, or erratic… or simply odd, so much so that they walk the line of irony, or past it. Often these characters express evil—their actions, specifically—in light and curious ways. Hopper’s character with the whippets, Beretta’s weird crap in Lost Highway… these artistic decisions and idiosyncrasies are just things one can expect of Lynch, and don’t seem to be worth intellectually obsessing over. (Lynch himself said multiple times that the ideas just come from somewhere.) That’s not to say they are minor—often these things form the root of his films—and they are to me happily endurable since each one is expressed via the unbelievable, plain and flawless use of space that characterizes every single one of his films.

I love overstatement but Lynch frames his shots and understands space better than any director of the past 50, maybe 80 years. Every shot is plain, simple, classically dramatic and unbelievable. Other directors do this too (Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese) but their cameras move more. A Lynch film might have Michael Cera, or Beretta in makeup, or creamed corn or evil beetles, but it looks like a John Ford movie. Shots, even when done with a crane…

Longbill... you can take the dowde out of Philly

are not showy, and plain. So often otherwise the camera is static, steady, and straight ahead. And the space… is just so correct. Some of Lynch’s mastery over spaced is expressed through design, as the the A.N. piece notes. Spaces in the films are good or evil… sometimes in the middle… sometimes slightly off. Fire Walk With Me’s Black Lodge is a plain dark bar… by the numbers, from a design perspective, it is whatever. It is a little demonic, foreboding… but then what bar is not… and it is naturally so—all wood, people, not very much light… it is more bad than evil. The back room there has no light and is more foul. The red anteroom (with The Arm) is like that place and even more demonic… there are rockabilly chairs, no natural light, isolated floor lamps… red… it depicts an afterlife, maybe, or a purgatory or corridor that is definitely not somewhere good. The floors are crooked… the chairs face into nothing… The Palmers’ house in that film is a regular suburban home, bereft of life, stagnant and demonic… the evil there is expressed in the carpeting and the nasty-ass lamps.

The interiors in so many of these films—this isn’t The Ice Storm… there is no designer furniture here—are plain, and the furniture is furniture everyone else has, and one sometimes can’t tell if the films take place in the 1950s or in current day… though I suppose the exact decade is not the point. We don’t need to a super distilled or granular understanding of design to understand what makes a home home here. We know what makes average suburban furniture twisted and gnarly… what makes a coffee pot point two, three decades back, how a road’s spacing sets a neighborhood as rich or poor, evil or bad… normal or ouroboros.

Amazon lamp

It can act, at times, like a sort of architectural criticism. To me The Return, Lynch’s 2017 sequel of (and improvement on) the Twin Peaks franchise is, along with The Card Counter (Schrader), the best and most incisive look at the architectural and grid changes in suburban America over this past decade. How this country’s aesthetics have changed, how space has changed, how grotesque—sometimes—the new builds have become. The round cars, the open spaces, the giant stores, the harsh lights, the dirt… the change in these spaces, to me, between the ‘17 franchise and the 1990 one are as important as the principal characters’ aging. The nasty cop station didn’t change, and the house and the block at the end didn’t change, but the exurbs (where the other Cooper guy lives with Naomi Watts) have evolved into something… grotesque… plain… new… progress, perhaps, too futuristic, without aesthetic. Something lost. It’s a very YBN* thing to lambaste the suburbs, and so one cannot be blamed for turning away from this aesthetic. But more interesting than this, to me, is that even these styleless, nothing spaces are captured plainly, incisively and aesthetically. It is something else.

*YBN aka Why Be Normal aka like nerd culture and underground culture together, run amok. Think like Rocky Horror Picture Show, THey Might Be Giants, Swans… Primus, Boredoms, Surfers, Milkmen, the Cows, Crispin Glover, Zappa, Ween (maybe), Camper Van Beethoven, B52s and maybe Talking Heads, Soul Coughing, thing OG Silverlake/Williamsburg gentrification… Gen X people in the late 1980s and so on. I don’t know, Lynch is just like a YBN artist who’s a genius if you want it to be explained in one note. In many ways YBN runs the world now.

Since this isn’t a cinematography newsletter, I don’t want to spend too much time about Lynch’s use of space itself, but it has to be mentioned. To me all the aesthetics, all the irony, all the everything about it… is overshadowed by his film’s total domination and awe-inspiring use of space. Lynch’s films, even when they focus on beetles and the suburbs (wow the suburbs suck craaaazy), are so immediately satisfying, enjoyable, seamless… timeless, because these ideas are presented in a formally flawless and minimal way. Breaking this down to the extent Lynch’s work deserves would probably require one of those Ebert shot for shot weekends. But so often it just feels like the shots in Lynch’s films are the only shots he could have possibly used… the most emotionally correct ones, the simplest, the most direct… whatever way our brains (or dreams?) work when someone is describing a story. Sometimes the shots look like nothing; these ones are also correct. Check out this scene here:

Which won’t play in the newsletter but which is the Lil dance scene at the beginning of FWWM, when Gordon Cole (Lynch) explains to Chris Isaak what actually happened at a crime scene. It’s a clinic… never mind the scene itself, which is a woman in an ironic/rockabilly outfit dancing as a way to express FBI protocol… never mind that. It straight up doesn’t matter. It’s the way it’s cut and framed—it is breathtaking. The first 30 seconds. Watch it again and again. The whole movie is like that. That scene, the cut, especially, to Cole, Chet and Sutherland’s character (he’s from Ottawa) reminds me of the early table scene during Stagecoach, analyzed here by Tag Gallagher:

(The above is one of the best pieces of film criticism ever.) Throughout, in FWWM, the camera is plain, not in the way, and just a bit tight... drawing one in… it is not frenetic, but it is there for the viewer, direct. No other movies look like this, and yet, at times, it does not look like anything. What strikes me is how plain these shots are. The stuff on the screen in Lynch’s oeuvre—the sets, the dancing, the demon stuff going on when people break, the beetles, even Michael Cera—is weird, quirky, very YBN, but throughout the camera moves plainly and classically. The lax movement and space, presented on screen, are as retro as the diner… it sometimes felt during FWWM like I was watching How Green Was My Valley. This offsets and supersedes whatever is going on in the movie, all artistic decisions—indeed, it is an artistic decision. It’s rarely remarked upon… and it is so rare, these days to see such domination, such mastery in cinema. Directors (now certainly, and for sure then) don’t shoot with such perfect, plain cinematic spacing. Because Lynch did, all the time, and advanced, and didn’t really repeat himself—the decisions in The Return are to be studied—that I’ll take whatever points, decisions and aesthetics presented within this spacing.

And so questions arise here, like whether the “traditional” (I would just say correct) nature of Lynch’s compositions… allow for the “strangeness” in the films to hit viewers more emotionally. (Since his framing follows such a perfect and consistent film grammar, decisions like having a woman in a red dress and wig dance to explain FBI cues are palatable, understandable to viewers? Probably.) To be sure, there is much, much more to these films, and the camera, throughout, varies, and is not always static or even Fordian. I am It’s just that it feels like one reason why his films are…. universal is that the conceptual and avant garde way his characters sometimes operate… the vagueness of their motivations, their surprising nature… is presented in such a direct, mind to mind way. It’s not all avant garde… it’s just that people behave different.

With Lynch having passed I looked around, long, to read about some of these decisions and whether he went on record about this stuff and did not find much. In general, the nuts and bolts of his filmmaking rarely seem to get discussed as much other stuff does—what a character means, plot points—and even for very open directors, like Scorsese, there are only a handful of interviews where they go deep on craft and the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking process (my favorite is this excellent filmcomment interview Nick Pinkerton did with Scorsese after Silence). And of course the story is that Lynch does not explain his films, but there are instances in which we get insight into how specific things happened… technical decisions... and how that explains his art. I found one, this great American Cinematographer feature from 2000, that gets into the design and space in Lost Highway:

To which I say, true, true. I suppose the dearth of writing and insight here isn’t different from a lot of other aesthetic categories. Maybe a good thing… there must be room given to artists to make gauzy or non-plot driven decisions. We don’t really know why Lynch did these shots, how hard he worked on them, if it was free and easy and natural (like Clint Eastwood) or labored over… there is access, in the documentary, about his life, but scant insight into the nuts and bolts of his filmmaking. But then again there is more in one flick here that can be hinted at by one analysis… it’s a nice combination of freedom and discipline… of rules, grammar… and rolling with it, doing whatever. It is good, on balance, to be this open

And very good also to have rules.

Thanks for reading. Auctions later this week.

Snake