David Lynch and Women (and All That Ails Them)

In his first film. Rubber headDavid Lynch paints a portrait of a young man who could have been him, and whose life unfolds like a dream, or rather a nightmare. Watching this film again, we see the doubts expressed by a generation about masculinity, masculinity and the ability to question things, to question reality; in this case, Lynch is the filmmaker who best suits the American punk youth of the 1970s. .

Like them, he questions reality, messing with the material used to build the case. His peers are groups like Talking Heads or cartoonists like Charles Burns. Above all, questioning Lynch, starting with this film identity of its main character, pits him against a female character who chases a radiator and sings a giddy song, In heavenwhich the Pixies, the leading American indie rock band of the 1980s, would perform in their spare time.

For him, femininity often rhymes with music, and the two always run away from reality together, as if to redefine it. Elephant manor the strongest Sand dunethings are settled in the future, lasting from blue velvet the female characters become the center of the plots, while the men always seem to pass through the film, like the audience or the reporter, what they see. Lynch depicts the women first, seeking to capture something of what torments them, compels them to act, compels them. is their existence in the world.

Basically, in Blue velvetMen are either passive or aggressors, while the complexity comes from the feminine, just as women sing; Blue velvet A 1950s love song that became a hit for several singers, including Tony Bennett and Bobby Vinton, Lynch would say that it was his favorite song of the 1950s, and in his film Isabelle Rossellini performs it as if it were a symbol of creativity. transfer to the executor’s wife.

In the next movie. Sailor and LulaPalme d’Or at Cannes in 1990, the director once again deals with the male-female duality by filming a couple on the run from the girl’s mother. Their passionate love story involves violence and imbalance, but is resolved when the man eventually accepts the woman’s place. key, essential in his life.

Little by little Lynch seems to change his views and interest in the feminine, the masculine becoming more and more monolithic, violent and less dimensional. Twin Peaks and movies Lost highway And Mulholland Drive. In Twin Peakshe is interested in the murder of a young girl, and the whole series, under the guise of detective intrigue, gradually turning into metaphysical mysteries, seems to open many questions about the character, the definition of her femininity, her mechanics. life. The series’ resolution, ahead of its relaunch for a new season in the early 2020s, involves an incest metaphor; Lynch portrays violence against women in familiar contexts and reveals herself, in retrospect, as a pioneer of what would come next in the 2010s in how to show these issues.

What also stands out Twin Peaksit’s the music. it carries the melancholy of the entire series and seems to subliminally paint the state of Laura Palmer, the victim and the central, albeit ghostly, character of the series.Somehow femininity in Lynch, and especially there, is directly related to the harmonies of sound, noise, and the world. Lost highway And Mulholland Drive all are visual and narrative questions about desire and the interaction between female characters; What does Lynch say about the women he films? At first he seems to want to show them as lost. But this is only to deceive the viewer.

What he’s saying is that he doesn’t understand what’s going on in them, and the way he shoots, the abstraction and mixing of roles, the way he keeps losing the audience are all ways of expressing his lack of understanding. Basically he shows what he doesn’t understand.Rubber head has Twin Peaks And Mulhollad DriveFrom the self-portrait of a young man who does not understand himself, he went to the shot of what he saw without understanding it. In it, there is nothing of the classic male gaze, but the whole constant questioning, the desire not to understand at all costs. He is not be the big film producer of the question?

As if to show that he only touched what he could not limit, he gradually abandoned cinema for music. to see him play in Paris, Olympia, under the name Blue Bob in 2002, was to understand the fragility in him. Unlike the rock supporters to whom Olympia is accustomed, David Lynch stood back on stage, as if surrounded. with his music and the questions he raised.His view of all this, of the world, of others, of art, of artistic practice, was so unique that its absence suddenly will make his work appear again as it is essential; a deep and continuous questioning of what it means to be in the world and to look at what is not itself.