I guess that choosing to attend an ‘international conference’ at the Tate Modern about the work of David Lynch I was always running the risk of a very pretentious day out. About 200 people gathered in the Starr Auditorium on Halloween for a celebration of the man with the bouffant hair, a penchant for coffee ‘black as midnight on a starless night’, and an innate talent at swerving any pat or convoluted explanation of his work.
The day started well enough with Roger Luckhurst, a Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, drawing a line between HP Lovecraft and Lynch – placing him in a line of American weird fiction: 'weird' being a kind of ‘radical sublime backwash’.
The dark grasp of academia was never far from choking the life out of the day’s talks. They were often referred to as ‘papers’ for a start, but the novelist Tom McCarthy’s presentation on The Prosthetic Imagination of David Lynch was engaging and stimulating, illustrating his argument about the cripples, dwarves and marionettes that people Lynch’s films with visuals from the breakthrough ERASERHEAD (processing its protagonist through a machine resembling a projector), the disembodied malevolence of BOB from TWIN PEAKS (read my feelings about that landmark series here) and the digital dislocation of INLAND EMPIRE.
From then on the day took a downward turn. Even though Gregory Crewdson’s display of photographs influenced by BLUE VELVET explored common themes of the uncanny and liminality in both their work, visual artists Daria Martin and Louise Wilson’s talks were tenuously linked to Lynch at best. Martin apologised that she didn’t know many of his films, and Wilson spent much of her allotted time talking about Kubrick.
The nadir of the day was an excruciating double-hander by philosopher Simon Critchley and his psychoanalyst wife Jamieson Webster, an exercise in pompous and over-earnest show-boating that went through INLAND EMPIRE (impenetrable to the point of absurdity) quoting dialogue and making observations ‘in terms of an art of citation’ echoing Walter Benjamin (yawn).
The Q & A that followed, where Critchley gloated they had spent 3 days in bed composing it, only served to confirm that you should keep your love life and professional life separate.
The day was rescued by a recorded appearance by Lynch himself, sat in front of a red curtain speaking in the strange front-to-back diction of The Man From Another Place. He was asked some stupid questions and he answered in a stupid manner, which was remarkably refreshing.
But the real palate cleanser was an appearance by Chris Rodley, editor of LYNCH ON LYNCH and friend of the director whose anecdotes and straight-forward answers confirmed that the director doesn’t know what he’s doing, proving what instinctively is true of the best artists: they are rubbish at explaining their work, and they don’t even realize the power of what they’re creating.
For a really brilliant piece about Lynch track down the late David Foster Wallace’s essay from behind the scenes of LOST HIGHWAY in 1995 in his collection A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN.
Even better, turn off your mind and watch MULHOLLAND DRIVE. Because if the day taught me one thing it was that Lynch’s don’t need to be explained, they need to be experienced.
