Pathetic: I fell asleep while watching David Lynch's most recent film last night.
The excuses: 1) it's nearly a 3hr film, 2) I got through over two hours of it so it's not like I flaked twenty minutes in or something, and 3) I generally go to sleep around 12:30am every night, and the shameful act took place at approx 12:30am last night.
Even if I would have completed it last night, I would still not be writing about it to you now. You see, a Lynch film is not something that you watch and then make judgments about; you experience it, you dive in headfirst and then you wade around and soak in it for a while. You've got to give it time to fully marinate into you.
Anyway, I was thinking about this and it occurred to me that I never mentioned that I finally finished Lynch's short film collection a couple weeks ago. While there's not really much to say other than that if you like the man's work, you'll like his shorts. It's all about what you'd expect, including a good one called "The Grandmother" that is stylistically very reminiscent of Eraserhead. (Here's a question: do you italicize the names of short films, or do they only get quotes? I answer my own question in the previous sentence--I think shorts only get quotes--but by no means am I certain of this.)
In my opinion, there is one short in the small collection specifically worth mentioning, though: "The Amputee." This consists of a woman with both legs amputated above the knee sitting and writing while a nurse changes her dressings. There is a voice-over that we are to assume is the woman reading what she's written. As the nurse fumbles with the bandages, one of the stumps starts to more or less erupt with blood; it's a characteristically Lynchian disturbing image. But it interests me, as a sometime writer, in the way that it combines two separately disturbing sensory experiences: seeing the stump spew blood, and hearing the woman's letter-reading (the content of the letter is very spiteful, regretful, angry, accusatory, and basically any other kind of uncomfortable kind of human interactive state that you can think of). It takes these independent emotions and multiplies their intensity in a way that two more related emotions might not. Hearing the woman's pitiful letter is uncomfortable enough, but when complemented by the nurse's futile attempts, it becomes a very intense experience.
This personally interests me because when I write, or--more often--when I think about writing something, my seeming default mode of storytelling is to have a story intercut with sometimes disjointed or topically unrelated bits of story. So thanks, Mr Lynch, for helping to show my dense self the proper way to use multiple overlapping emotive triggers to escalate the overall feeling of a story.
And sorry both for failing to finish your film in one sitting and for failing to get myself to a theater to see it in the first place, even though it was playing for probably three months just three blocks from my apartment.
The excuses: 1) it's nearly a 3hr film, 2) I got through over two hours of it so it's not like I flaked twenty minutes in or something, and 3) I generally go to sleep around 12:30am every night, and the shameful act took place at approx 12:30am last night.
Even if I would have completed it last night, I would still not be writing about it to you now. You see, a Lynch film is not something that you watch and then make judgments about; you experience it, you dive in headfirst and then you wade around and soak in it for a while. You've got to give it time to fully marinate into you.
Anyway, I was thinking about this and it occurred to me that I never mentioned that I finally finished Lynch's short film collection a couple weeks ago. While there's not really much to say other than that if you like the man's work, you'll like his shorts. It's all about what you'd expect, including a good one called "The Grandmother" that is stylistically very reminiscent of Eraserhead. (Here's a question: do you italicize the names of short films, or do they only get quotes? I answer my own question in the previous sentence--I think shorts only get quotes--but by no means am I certain of this.)
In my opinion, there is one short in the small collection specifically worth mentioning, though: "The Amputee." This consists of a woman with both legs amputated above the knee sitting and writing while a nurse changes her dressings. There is a voice-over that we are to assume is the woman reading what she's written. As the nurse fumbles with the bandages, one of the stumps starts to more or less erupt with blood; it's a characteristically Lynchian disturbing image. But it interests me, as a sometime writer, in the way that it combines two separately disturbing sensory experiences: seeing the stump spew blood, and hearing the woman's letter-reading (the content of the letter is very spiteful, regretful, angry, accusatory, and basically any other kind of uncomfortable kind of human interactive state that you can think of). It takes these independent emotions and multiplies their intensity in a way that two more related emotions might not. Hearing the woman's pitiful letter is uncomfortable enough, but when complemented by the nurse's futile attempts, it becomes a very intense experience.
This personally interests me because when I write, or--more often--when I think about writing something, my seeming default mode of storytelling is to have a story intercut with sometimes disjointed or topically unrelated bits of story. So thanks, Mr Lynch, for helping to show my dense self the proper way to use multiple overlapping emotive triggers to escalate the overall feeling of a story.
And sorry both for failing to finish your film in one sitting and for failing to get myself to a theater to see it in the first place, even though it was playing for probably three months just three blocks from my apartment.
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