David Lynch’s Puzzles and Abstractions - Not Everyone’s Cup of Joe

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LOS ANGELES (TNA) – In a whiffle-ball popular culture with an unwritten mandate that all things be glaringly obvious, base and literal, it doesn't get much naughtier than daring to be abstract.

And that’s why David Lynch is a very, very naughty American – his films, including “Blue Velvet,” “Wild At Heart,” “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and the newest, “Inland Empire,” are Byzantine, hallucinatory and primal, requiring a viewer crack open his own deep, dark places to root out meaning.

Which means, Lynch is well aware, that his films are not everyone’s cup of Joe.

David Lynch's latest movie, 'Inland Empire,' drew mixed reviews.

“People have a right to hate my stuff, and I can either take that as a negative or go crying in a corner, or I can see it as a blessing,” says the 61-year old filmmaker. “I think my movies are linear stories, just snipped apart and maybe rearranged a hair. They’re logical, let’s put it that way.”

Audiences were largely confounded and perplexed by Lynch’s “Inland Empire” upon its theatrical release last fall. Ostensibly the tale of an actress suffering a nervous breakdown, but shuffled together with dreams, hallucinations and scenes from the film in which the actress – played to devastating perfection by Laura Dern – stars, “Empire” is a grand head-trip firmly within the Lynch tradition.

“There is a story in ‘Inland Empire.’ For me,” he laughs. “There’s a story, and then there’s a part of the story told through these abstractions. When I get an idea that’s a story that can hold these abstractions, that’s beautiful to me. It’s not all abstract. There’s a concrete thing going on on the surface, but there are also these things swimming below it.”

Audiences now have another shot at deciphering “Inland Empire.” The film was recently released on DVD.

Lynch maintains he is not intentionally obscure in his creative expression. (He jokes that “The Straight Story,” his 1999 family film about an octogenarian’s cross-country trek on a tractor, is “very, very straight.”) It’s just that he follows his creative instincts wherever they may take him, and those impulses and urges are frequently abstract. 

“Some stories are very straight-ahead and some stories hold abstractions," he says. "But they’re not, like, alien abstractions. They’re human abstractions that exist everywhere.

"Many strange things happen in this world that you really only know by sensing them. Film can show these abstractions,” Lynch continues. “What’s beautiful about my films, I think, is people don’t really have to work to get them; they just have to use their intuition.”

If Lynch seems relatively placid about his status in the film world, less the archetypal auteur – traditionally, either thin-skinned or garishly combative – then it may have something to do with transcendental meditation, which he has practiced twice-daily for more than 30 years.

Lynch credits TM, which reportedly employs a specific mantra in 20-minute meditation sessions to unleash unimaginable peace and bliss, with relieving the “anxiety, depression and anger” that yoked him as a young man.

“These things just started to evaporate with meditation," he says, "and the creativity just exploded, buster!”

Lynch describes his experiences with TM, as well as his creative process, in “Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, And Creativity,” a book publishied last winter by Penguin Group.

Three decades ago, before “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” or “Twin Peaks,” Lynch aspired to be a painter. But he often found his creativity “virtually paralyzed” by his own bouts of darkness, he says.

Then a friend turned him on to TM, a Vedic science introduced to the world in 1958 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and a filmmaker was born. (Mia Farrow, Mike Love, Clint Eastwood, Howard Stern and Andy Kaufman are also reportedly disciples of TM.)

“I knew zip about film, and had never even thought about making a film. But this one day I saw something move in one of my paintings, and I heard a wind,” Lynch says. “That got me thinking about moving my paintings, and sound.”

That first cinematic effort, a one-minute loop, was not surprisingly “far away from a normal film,” he says. But Lynch enrolled in the American Film Institute, and hatched the basic premise for 1977’s “Eraserhead,” his outlandish cult film about a mutant baby. From there, “I just kept getting green lights,” he recalls. “Don’t ask me how. Fate plays such a role in our lives.”

Despite brief forays into more mainstream filmmaking (see the early-career, Oscar-nominated “The Elephant Man” or the much-derided “Dune”), as an artist, Lynch has always followed his bliss, the results being a heady brew of the surreal, the mundane and the divine. Severed ears, white picket fences, a pie fetish, midgets and the occult have all popped up in his cinematic world.

Lynch, who has been described as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” for his clean-cut appearance and affinity for Eisenhower-era aphorisms, says he hopes his films possess dream logic.

“The way dreams feel is really beautiful,” he says. “I believe that people know a lot more than they give themselves credit for. I love the idea that people can walk out of one of my films and think they have no idea what they’ve just seen, and then find themselves talking about it with their friends and then, an hour later, in that talk, they’re riddling out something they didn’t know they knew, but now it’s flowing.

“With things that are abstract, the interpretations vary wildly,” Lynch adds. “And each one is valid.”

Just don’t expect the filmmaker, who next spring will launch a signature line of coffee in art-house cinemas across the country, to stamp his approval on different readings of his work.

“I’m not that good with words,” he admits. “It would be a real shame to work three years in the language of cinema and then be told, ‘Please, turn it all back into words for us.’”

The only key Lynch offers film-goers still puzzling after the endless enigmas of his film oeuvre is an expression he's grown fond of: “Keep your eye on the donut, not on the hole,” he laughs. “That’s the best I’ve got, buster!”

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