Listen to the Sounds

I had a double David double feature last night and watched David Lynch's Wild at Heart followed by David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Just a couple weeks after I said Wild at Heart was the most elusive David Lynch movie, generally not to be found on streaming services, it turned up on The Criterion Channel. I ought to speak up more often. If anyone's listening, I'd like to see some more Aleksandr Ptushko movies.

There's a 4k restoration of Wild at Heart. I'm not sure if that's what's on The Criterion Channel but watching it with the volume way up I was freshly reminded how important it is to watch David Lynch movies in the right sensory circumstances. In a dark room without noise pollution and with as few breaks as possible. I'm really happy books are gaining popularity again but I fear there's a diminished appreciation for less expository artforms. To get Wild at Heart, you got to have the volume way up for Lula's screams and the electric guitar while Sailor beats the crap out of that guy on the hotel steps. Or for Marietta's gulping noises when she drinks down that martini. Or for Harry Dean Stanton spitting out the window when he's being talked about. Or the crinkling sound of Sailor's snack skin jacket when Bobby Peru's talking him into the bank heist. Lynch did a lot of his own sound design and it's absolutely crucial.

"Perception determines reality" as Brian O'Blivion says in Videodrome. In Japan they say, "見つからなければいいや", "it's okay if no-one sees you." The trouble is, most people don't realise all the little sensual details that attend on every word and every action. Artists are generally not good at lying because we're aware of how hopeless it is. The hallucinations experienced by Max in Videodrome are always off, in large and small ways, because the masterminds of the hallucinations lack the imagination to account for every aspect of perceptible reality. People who fail to appreciate sensual reality think all they need to successfully lie to someone is words. The truth always has a ripple effect, like a stone thrown into the pond, and the absence of those ripples is a dead giveaway.

It's eerie how prescient Videodrome is. How much the political battle via the television screen depicted in the film resembles the sinister aspects of social media algorithms on the internet to-day, how they push people into increasingly calcified political realities. But they're thin realities, they're not wholesome sustenance, which most people sense without being able to consciously describe.