The David Lynch Enigma

IMDB: David Lynch

The David Lynch Enigma

The David Lynch Enigma is a riddle which is presented repeatedly to modern day consumers of cinematic entertainment at various stages of their worldly experience. Both the questions and the answers change throughout the maturation process of the typical human.

Kid

Back when your mind was young and malleable,
before you’d ever even considered hallucinogens of any kind,
you received a natural psychedelic substitute injected directly into the corpus callosum.

That was your first DLE,
or David Lynch Experience.

You most likely suffered an involuntarily buffet of emotions
culminating in any combination of the following reactions:

awe, worship, excitement,
curiosity, wonder, dumbstruck confusion,
heightened awareness, monochromatic vision, anger,
rejection, arousal, spiritual enlightenment,
telepathy, spontaneous combustion, rickets,
rapid mind expansion, petit mal seizure, uncomfortable silence,
mortification, chronic rewind syndrome, bloodlust,
lockjaw night vision, a fondness for midgets, numbness,
or your first awakening desires for coffee and cigarettes.

This is perfectly normal.

After the initial reactions have passed, if your first stage was anything like mine,
you then conclude without a doubt that:

Answer:
1. David Lynch is a god amongst men.
2. The film stock contains far deeper meanings that what you walked away with because your level of comprehension is so small that you utterly failed to grasp them upon first viewing.
3. You must watch these films over and over to comprehend said meanings.
4. David Lynch knows exactly what he is doing.
5. Everything is planned in advance.
6. He knows exactly how he is manipulating his audience.
7. He knows exactly what each item represents symbolically and how it contributes to the overarching message of the picture.
8. There is a cadence and a meaning to the audio as a separate entity, and there is a cadence and a meaning to the video as a separate entity, and these two intact shapes are blended together to create a harmonic resonance effect upon the mind.

–

I used to watch Dune over and over again trying to understand what it meant. I felt like there was something true and big there, I could feel it in my gut, but I had no idea what was happening. The version that got released with the animated explanation in the beginning helped. Reading the books eventually helped even more. I would snort cinammon, the spice melange, so I could smell it for hours and I knew all the dialog and sounds by heart. I recorded the “45 minutes of never before seen footage!” version that was shown on USA network onto video tape and edited out the commercials in realtime by hand (pause, unpause…) I ended up with all the intro and outtro bits, “(haunting music) Dune!… with Max Von Sydow!” “and now back to… Dune! with Patrick Stewart!”

I’m sure I had seen Elephant Man before that, but I don’t remember how much I knew the name Lynch at the time. I was actually a very late bloomer to Eraserhead, but I had always seen the cover and wondered what it was about. When I started absorbing Twin Peaks I took note of the name Lynch for sure. Then each Lynch production was a vehicle to better understand his mind and his message rather than an artistic piece unto itself.

The Mentat Mantra (film ver. only)
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

Young Adult

In the conspiracy world it is generally agreed that 9/11 was an inside job and that something besides planes caused the collapse of the buildings.

But if you ask your favorite conspiracists who done the deed you will get differing opinions. There are two dominant theories about who done 9/11: The MIHOP theory proposes that the government made it happen on purpose. The LIHOP theory lets the government off the hook a bit, and says that they knew the attacks were coming but turned off the defenses (i.e. NORAD). So, letting it happen, but not actually ordering the hit themselves.

In young adulthood, I was still under the impression that
Lynch made it all happen on purpose. That everything in his
movies was a planned, substantial, symbolic gesture
that I had yet to figure it.

Then I found out…
the
truth
about
BOB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_(Twin_Peaks)

Killer BOB (or simply Bob) (played by Frank Silva), is a fictional character from the television series Twin Peaks and the show’s primary antagonist. He is a demonic entity who feeds on human pain and suffering. He possesses human beings and then commits acts of rape and murder in order to feast upon the fear and suffering of his victims.

The impetus for the series Twin Peaks was the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer. When production began on the pilot, series creators David Lynch and Mark Frost had decided that the murderer would be revealed as Leland Palmer, Laura’s father. During the filming of a scene in the pilot taking place in Laura’s room, Frank Silva, a set dresser, accidentally trapped himself in the room prior to filming by inadvertently moving a dresser in front of the door. Lynch had an image of Silva stuck in the room and thought that it could fit into the series somewhere, and told Silva that he would like for him to be in the series. Lynch had Silva crouch at the foot of Laura’s bed and look through the bars of the footboard, as if he were “trapped” behind them, and filmed it, then had Silva leave the room and filmed the empty room; after reviewing the footage, Lynch liked the presence that Silva brought to the scene and decided that he would put him somewhere in the series.

Later that day, a scene was being filmed in which Laura Palmer’s mother experiences a vision which frightens her; at the time, the script did not indicate what Mrs Palmer had seen to frighten her. Lynch was pleased with how the scene turned out, but a crew member informed him that it would have to be re-shot, because a mirror in the scene had inadvertently picked up someone’s reflection. When Lynch asked who it was, the crew member replied that it had been Silva. Lynch considered this a “happy accident,” and decided at that point that the unnamed character to be played by Silva would be revealed as Laura Palmer’s true killer.

Wha… whaaat?

You mean Lynch just made it up on the spot?
He hadn’t planned for Bob to be Bob at all?
You mean the whole black lodge, evil, owl,
demonic spirit thing was just a toss off?

Oh.
I see.

You know the feeling you got when you realized that the set designers and script supervisors (continuity) on the show LOST actually f*cked up quite often and that the show wasn’t nearly the airtight mystery that you thought it was?

You went digging for perfect easter eggs and came back with egg shells (zemblanity!) when you found out that the producers didn’t really have everything planned out as far ahead as you thought they did, they adapted here and there when cast members needed to move on or had problems they’d adjust the script again, they kept to a basic skeleton of an idea, but … eventually it dawned on you that they were on a very rushed schedule and that, rather than being the pre-planned mystery of the ages, they were slapping that monkey together piecemeal as fast as they could.

In a very quality way, I might add, but still, come on…

So, back to Bob.
The revelation changed us.
We wanted to rebel.
We felt we had been tricked.

We would actually tell people, in bar room conversations, that Lynch was bullshit.
How rude!

“Oh, I used to think that those movies had meaning, then I realized that he’s just making it up as he goes along. I mean, he’s awesome, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think those movies really have one meaning. It’s more like a painting or something. Say, did you hear the thing about Bob in Twin Peaks?”

—

Then, one day, we became a little more spiritual then we used to be.
We weren’t rebelling anymore. We didn’t feel tricked anymore.
Contrary to that, we almost felt like everything had a purpose.

We started living as if everything had a purpose and stuff started to fall into place.
We started going with mistakes instead of combating them and found that we would end up with a quality on a level far better than we had originally intended and far better than we could originally intend. In other words, the mistakes created a level of quality beyond that which we could have achieved by pulling the idea straight out of our heads and laying it fully constructed as imagined on the table.

Was this act of going with the flow the same thing as being a more receptive conduit for consciousness to act through us? Is consciousness the artist and is it our physical mind that just gets in the way most of the time? It almost seemed to be.

And because we were more spiritual,
and traveled in those kind of circles,
we came across a video called:

Consciousness Drives the Universe

(David Lynch: From 0:00 to 1:00)

So, it seems David understands these concepts too.
I think he always did.
It was me that didn’t understand.
I was looking out a golfball.

Lynch let it happen on purpose.
Or rather, he let consciousness happen through him.