Introduction: The Ironic Religion of David Lynch
Chapter One: Eraserhead and the Ironic Gnosis
Chapter Two: Blue Velvet and Paradoxical Chastity
Chapter Three: Sacred Sensuality in Wild at Heart
Chapter Four: Positive Negation in Lost Highway
Chapter Five: Real Dreams in Mulholland Dr.
Conclusion: David Lynch's
Nihilism
What do Lynch's films have to do with religion? Wilson attempts to answer that question in his book.
Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. His publications include Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film (2006), The Strange World of David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr (2007). His writing has featured in Psychology Today, L.A. Times, The New York Times and Huffington Post.
Eric G. Wilson quotes Rosselini's remark in The Strange World of
David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to Mullholand
Drive, which locates a wealth of spiritual meanings, connotations,
and implications in five Lynch films. Wilson isn't the first
scholar to look at Lynch in religious terms but he may be the most
thoroughgoing and inventive. Nobody is suggesting that the pictures
at hand—all utterly original, hugely audacious, and fearlessly
bizarre—are Methodist Allegories, evangelical screeds, or coded
Rosicrucian messages. What they do add up to, Wilson argues, is a
body of "sacred "secular cinema" informed by a radical religiosity
that enables Lynch to avoid two common philosophical mistakes:
dualism, which divides the world into opposites like good-evil and
order-chaos, and monism, which reduces the cosmos to some
undifferentiated unity- all is material, all is spiritual, all is
whatever. Lynch has pursued an open- ended journey into what Wilson
calls transcendental irony, appearance and reality, creation and
destruction, desire and fulfillment, nature and artifice, conscious
and unconscious, form and formlessness, and all the multifaceted
"antinomies of existence" of which a sensitively attunes spirit is
exhilaratingly aware. ...Wilson throws in Transcendental
Meditation, which Lynch learned from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the
mantra-chanting guru who enlightened the Beatles a few decades ago.
Lynch inconveniently insists that his films have nothing to do with
religion, but this doesn't slow Wilson down for a second. It's just
a neat example of the "earnest playfulness" that makes Lynch so,
well, Lynchian. ‘I don't mean to be facetious but if I do sound
that way, chalk it up to the persuasive power of Wilson's own
arguments, which are too serious to take themselves too seriously.
A critic who admires Lynch for dodging the traps of monistic and
dualistic thinking can't afford to fall into those very pitfalls,
and since cinema scholarship spends a good deal of its time down
there, Wilson wisely staves off error by deploying a
film-theoretical version of earnest playfulness. In the
introduction to his book, for instance, he lays out the ideas I've
outlined and plausible applies them to scenes in Lynch movies.
Whatever you think of Wilson's overall approach, you have to be
charmed by his good-natured candor and respect for ambiguity, which
lend wonder and surprise to his analyses of enigmas, aporias, and
impossibilities in Lynch's films. Wilson's book was finished before
Lynch completed Inland Empire, that may well stand as his very
greatest work. Unfazed as always by empirical "reality," Wilson
writes about the picture anyway, predicting that it will explore
"the imperial interiors that stay forever unmapped," sounding "the
abmysal insides of the heart" to their profoundest depths. You read
it right, folks: Wilson has written one of that film's most astute
descriptions without seeing a single frame. It seems his ridiculous
hermeneutics are just what's needed for opening our eyed to a
mystical "third term" surpassing the divide " between many and one
, chaos and order—a barely possible thing as lurid and gorgeous as
Blue Velvet wavering in the muted light."
*popmatters.com*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
