Deafness as fearlessness – Weekend
[ad_1]
The word “absurd” comes from the Latin “ab surdus”, “from the deaf.” We saw this deaf man in Twin Peaks, played by David Lynch.
To explore the impact of the absurd on the psyche, participants in one psychological experiment were shown David Lynch’s short web series Rabbits, which is familiar to viewers of Inland Empire (2006). There are three characters with rabbit heads sitting in the living room, talking, doing household chores. Most of the time passes in silence. When rabbits say absurd, unrelated phrases, it becomes even more uncomfortable.
Volunteers were given painkillers or a placebo before watching Rabbits. It turned out that at a neural level, the discomfort caused by the absurd is perceived as physical pain and can be relieved by pills: those who received a placebo experienced about the same anxiety after the “Rabbits” as after writing an essay about death. Those who received painkillers were far less worried.
Watching any Lynch movie, from anywhere, is like writing an essay about death. How to see a dream, knowing for sure that you won’t remember it when you wake up and you won’t be able to understand what it is about. How to feel unaccountable anxiety, looking out the window.
Lynch is commonly called a dreamer, surrealist, visionary, hypnotist, absurdist. He is obsessed with sound: film after film puts the soundtrack to his own subconscious. He is an artist: he paints uncomfortability in bright colors. He promotes transcendental meditation: over and over again he invites the viewer to experience first shock, then bewilderment, then dumbness, then pure happiness. It gives you the opportunity to interpret what you see as you like – and never find an explanation for what you saw. The chaos of interpretations is built into a meaningless and beautiful pattern, and Lynch loves everything that is meaningless and beautiful. More precisely, he loves riddles and secrets.
A storyteller, Ole Lukoye, who brings nightmares to those who behave badly (and who behaved well here? There are no such things), Lynch is perhaps one of the few genuine surrealists in this world. He builds his works around some image or idea, without thinking about how to connect the plot threads, or at least grope for them. He takes the genre – road movie (“A Simple Story”, 1999), comedy (“Wild at Heart”, 1990), detective story (“Twin Peaks”, 1990-2017), a fairy tale about a girl who decided to conquer Hollywood (“Mulholland Drive”). ”, 1999) — and meditates on this genre until the genre and Lynch himself are left with a radiant void. He filmed it, each time in a different way.
And every time it is filled with something absurd, something that should not be there. In the short film An Absurd Encounter with Fear (1967, another translation of the title is Absurd Meets Fear), the hero, a blue-faced youth, approaches a girl sitting in the middle of a field, unbuttons his pants, and begins to pull out of his fly, slowly and hesitantly, some hay, crushed dandelions, one by one; it’s almost as scary as the black man in Mulholland Drive. Why? Because none of that should be there. There should be no flower corpses in a fly, a monster behind garbage cans, growths on a dancer’s face, polite rabbits in the living room, letters under the nails. Each time, Lynch creates a new universe in which its own laws operate, which are categorically incomprehensible in our world. In order to understand them, one must give up understanding.
What is the Lynchian absurdity? The language of his films, the way he thinks, the space in which his too violent, too innocent, too depraved, too confused, too deaf characters roam? A way of colliding different lines, which, crashing into each other, do not always die, but always change? A new orchestration of the fears of Kafka and Gogol, the expectations of Camus and Beckett, the entertainments of Carroll and Vvedensky? Lynchian absurdity is the markings on the lost highway, the speed limiter, the warning, the words “Have you seen this man?” on a milk carton. Something disturbing in the most familiar place.
Lynch orchestrates all his films skillfully and harshly: he always makes anxiety a little louder than necessary, and familiarity a little more blatant than in reality. He heightens the contrast between unconditional horror and conditional happiness, and sometimes even confuses them in the same character – for example, the beautiful dancer from Eraserhead (1977) evokes a feeling of euphoria, but looks like a character from a nightmare. He unfolds several plots that exclude each other, pass into each other, get confused, torn.
Even Lynch’s most “non-strange” film, A Simple Story, tells more than one simple story. There is a plot based on real events: an old man rides a lawnmower across America to visit his sick brother. There is space here: provincial America with its simple people and simple desires. There is a history of dying here, a history of ordeals. And there’s background noise, unsettling and haunting, like we’re watching a horror movie and the ground is about to boil under a lawnmower. The hero rides through Hopper and Wyatt, through memories of war and peace, manages not to fall into rabbit holes – but these holes are there, they are close, they give some kind of signs – for example, they count downed deer – and Lynch’s America willingly turns into boundless, serene expanse of absurdity.
Even filming real stories, even talking about the weather (he also had such a daily project), Lynch never filmed “comments on what is happening” as a matter of principle. Writer David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, believed that Lynch’s only task was to get into the viewer’s head, and what he would do there was not important to him. About the weather – so about the weather. Lynch is not manipulative, it does not interest him at all.
Absurdity for him is a repetitive, meaningless action. “When you see a man running up and down again and again and banging his head against the wall until his head turns into a bloody mess, you can’t help laughing because the action becomes absurd. But misfortune as such does not seem funny to me – in the way people, despite moments of despair, continue to move on, I see high heroism, ”says Lynch.
All of his films are a bit of The Wizard of Oz, a bit of Alice Through the Looking-Glass, definitely The Metamorphosis, and a bit of Interpretation of Dreams. But his characters live in a world where sleep is sometimes not as bad as waking up. It’s not always possible to tell which line of the film is retelling the dream and which unashamedly calls itself reality. In Blue Velvet (1986), for example, both the sunny blooming Americana of a provincial town and the sadistic euphoria of the main villain are equally (un)real.
Lynch calmly and respectfully shows a world filled with wild creatures. You can call them freaks, you can call them nightmares, you can call them professionals at a loss, innocent souls in the presence of evil, dwarfs, giants – and you never know what words you can talk about the structure of alien universes. “A film has to live its own life,” says Lynch. “It’s absurd if a director has to use words to explain what his picture is about.”
Its audience begins to live the life of the film. They become accomplices in some crime (who killed Laura Palmer?), Witnesses, victims. But even feeling that evil is already very close, they continue to look at the screen. And there is no absurdity in this, but there is high heroism.
What does humanity find in his films? Psychologists, the same people who equated Rabbits and the essay on death, believe that absurd movies and books train the human brain to find meaning. The untrained brain, faced with the absurdity of today’s world, tends to reinforce its beliefs about how the world should be as quickly as possible. In other words, find something to hold on to.
Lynch’s films are a simulator for those who understand that they are holding on to the void.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
