David Lynch

David Lynch has died, just a few days before his 79th birthday. Although details of his death have not been officially announced, it's not hard to imagine what happened. Only last year he announced he suffered from emphysema from years of smoking. The condition prevented him from leaving his home and he was forced to do that very thing due to the recent catastrophic fires in Los Angeles. You could say simply he was killed by fire but, artistically, throughout his career, he was propelled or sustained by it. He talked about the inspiration he drew from smoking cigarettes and the presence of fire in his films was always remarkable. What filmmaker has more memorably provided shots of fireplaces? There's the sudden blaze in Fred Madison's recollection of a dream in Lost Highway, the shot of Ben Horne spitting into a massive fireplace on the first episode of Twin Peaks. I needn't mention the important place Lynch's work has occupied in my life. Anyone who knows me or has read my blog for a long enough time will know the profound effect his work has had on me. When I was a kid, just figuring out what art is and how it works, Lynch's films were so arresting, so easily evincing of the power of image and sound to communicate thoughts and feelings beyond the scope of language, my capacity for perception couldn't help but be enriched and expanded. Watching Lynch's movies taught me the power of pacing and silence and sequence. Watching his movies was a gateway to appreciating many other filmmakers, from Ingmar Bergman to Jean Cocteau to Alfred Hitchcock to many, many more. It's a consolation to know that Lynch's genius is widely recognised. Not every artist who's passed over for recognition or who garners praise deserves either but in Lynch's case the praise is abundant and abundantly deserved. Already Criterion is showing a playlist of his works and his work in film and television and music can be found on Amazon Prime, Disney+, Netflix, and YouTube. When I think about death, I often thing of "Sycamore Trees", a song from Lynch's Twin Peaks. Lynch wrote the lyrics and the music was by his frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. Here it is performed by one of Lynch's many luminous muses, Chrysta Bell: What else can I say? Only about a billion things. Too many for this space. It's a crime he was never permitted to make another movie after 2017's third season of Twin Peaks but as a final work those eighteen episodes would be hard to top. He directed and co-wrote every episode, he starred in most of them, he designed the sound, he built much of the furniture. Truly, words are insufficient.

Paws and Rooms

I've lately found myself often in coffee shops or parks between jobs so I've had plenty of time to read. Mainly still from H.P. Lovecraft Selects and I've recently read two more stories from the compilation; "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells and "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs. The latter is of course the more famous story but I also consider it to be much more effective, as much as I did like "The Red Room".

"The Red Room" is another example, like "The Dead Valley", of accomplishing a lot with very little, of creating the sensation of horror from a few subtle suggestions. A man agrees to stay in a haunted room and his courage is shaken by minor but truly inexplicable occurrences. Simply the mental image conjured by a "red room" accomplishes a lot. I found myself thinking of the interiors from Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers.

I don't think I'd ever read "The Monkey's Paw". Though it's quite possible I did but forgot. Sometimes when I look through my blog entries from fifteen years ago I discover even good movies or stories I'd forgotten all about having seen or read. In any case, I was certainly familiar with the concept even before the first airing of The Simpsons episode that parodied it in 1991. I was pleased by the actual story's psychological subtlety, the tormenting ambiguity about the guilt the main character bears for the death that resulted from his use of the paw--and the more fascinatingly murky subject of whether it was a good idea to resurrect the dead man.

The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. "He has been dead ten days, and besides he - I would not tell you else, but - I could only recognize him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?"

The knocking at the door at the end of the story reminded me a bit of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Body" which concludes with Buffy's sister nearly resurrecting their dead mother. The end of "The Monkey's Paw" is better, though, because it's not as clear that the resurrected person is a zombie or just plain and simply alive again. The man and wife in the story, assuming the wife doesn't get her hands on the paw, will always have that wedge between them because one expected a zombie and the other expected their normal, happy, living son. There will always be the unanswered question and the husband will always have to stand by a position that can never be proved. That's one sinister paw.