Colin Marshall

Lynch the Luminary: on not thinking about reception

Nude photography — male and female — is now so overdone it's almost bankrupt imagery. Did you want to do something different with it?

That's the wrong way to think. The only good way is to get a thrill with an idea and then go out and do it. If you start thinking about how it's going to be received, or if you're going to be able to do something new, you're worrying about the wrong thing.

I'm reminded of the sound writing advice David Sedaris gave in a New Yorker Q&A:

I started writing one afternoon when I was twenty, and ever since then I have written every day. At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my identity, and I did it without thinking. It helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk.

Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won’t get beyond the first sentence. It’s better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I’ll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you’re writing humor.

This is actually sound advice not just for writing but for stuff-doing in general: (a) form a habit so that the thing you want to do becomes part of what you are and (b) expect nothing. The moment I try to create anything under the burden of expectations of what it must turn out to be, the "this isn't that" reflex kicks in, and hard.

As a side note, the notion that one must "force" oneself to do stuff has gained currency, but I'm unsure how I feel about it. On one hand, great excitement about work has a way of showing up, positively, in the work itself. On the other hand, high intrinsic motivation, a fickle, unpredictable beast, must never be relied upon. I might suggest doing whatever you're just thrilled enough about to be consistently sort of interested — as opposed to occasionally overwhelmingly interested — in pursuing. I once read a blog-commenter somewhere ask an established writer, "What do I do when I know I should write but I donwanna [sic] ?" My own response: you donwanna be a writer.

Lynch the Luminary: on thematic emergence

[Lost Highway] gets pretty crazy with two themes churning, finding a way to separate and then coming back again. [ ... ] Certain things happen, ideas come along and they string themselves together and they form a whole and then a theme, or something becomes apparent — if you wanna look for it. But if you're true to these ideas you don't need to know. If you start off with a theme and say, "We're gonna amplify this theme," and do a story about teenage rape, that to me is completely backwards. Then you've gotta force things to fit. The other way, you don't know what it is. It just comes together and then later you find out. But meanwhile you're falling in love with it. You just know somewhere that it's right for you.

I have many rules of thumb concerning how to tell if a movie sucks, the most useful being that if you can watch the filmmakers' efforts while you watch what's supposedly the end product of those efforts, it sucks. If a sequence prompts me to envision the succession of scriptwriters' meetings that produced it, GAME OVER. I try not to Hollywood-bash, but it must be said that this sort of thing rises by sheer prominence to the prime failing of blockbusters or intended blockbusters. Dialogue emanates from the speakers, but I only hear stuff like this: "So when she loses the cat, we set up the false crisis that precedes the real crisis." "We're hitting the theme of youthful courage under pressure too hard. Let's spread it out over three football game montages, not one." "We showed the gun in act one; we're going to have to fire it in act three." (The only reasonable explanation is that these guys all came up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and thus want to make dreck.)

This is not so promote the viewing mode of uncritical absorption, either. Everything I watch, read and listen to, I experience as a wrought object, and I've found that level of analysis by far the richest. (There's only so much advice one can shout to characters onscreen, after all.) Nor would I suggest that movies are only cool when their creators don't seem to be trying; I respect hard labor in creativity more than almost anything else. But when the hands pull the strings so deliberately and set up domino lines of contrivance so rigidly, paying no heed to the organic, the accidental and the ambiguous, the labor's lost.

Lynch the Luminary: on interpretation

I love the idea that one thing can be different for different people. Everything's that way. Like the O.J. Simpson trial. Everybody hears the same words, they see the same faces, the same expressions, the same anger or frustration or evidence, and they come away with absolutely different verdicts in their minds. Even with a standard spoonfed film, people see it differently. It's just the way it is.

And then there are films or writings that you could read once and the then years later read again and get way more from. You've changed; the work stays the same. But suddenly it's got way more meaning for you, depending on where you are. I like things that have a kernel of something in they. They have to be abstract. The more concrete they are, the less likely that this thing will happen. The maker has to feel it and know it in a certain way and be honest to it. Every single decision passes through this one person, and if they judge it and do it correctly, then the work holds together for that one person, and they feel it's honest and it's right. And then it's released, and from that point n there's not one thing you can do about it. You can talk about it — try to defend it or try to do this or that. It doesn't work for them. And you've lost them. You're not going to get them back. Maybe twenty years later they'll say, "My god! I was wrong." Or maybe, twenty years later, they'll hate it when at first they loved it. Who knows? It's out of your control.

The more I ponder the issue, the closer I come to the conclusion that the artist's task consists primarily in maximizing the number of possible interesting interpretations of their work.

Lynch the Luminary: on abstraction

Discussing the period when he began to tentatively introduce narrative into his films, Lynch says this:

The ideas started stringing together. I wasn't thinking about a story really. And the way they came about was, suddenly, there was a bit of a beginning, middle and end. And it surprised me, sort of. But there it was. But I didn't set out to do it. And how it came about I can't even remember. I don't know why I thought that story up.

That was the first time I ever submitted something, and someone was going to read it, and judge it, and decide whether they were going to pay for it. And you realize that, in Hollywood, a person writes a script and then they give it over to somebody and a certain process starts happening where the person that you give it to wants to understand it. And so a lot of stories get clarified to death. And now there's, like, ten people reading this thing. And they all need to understand it. And by the time all of them understand it, there's no abstractions left, it's not what the person originally wanted, there's fifty million compromises already on this thing. And not one of the ten, maybe, is happy. Certainly the person that wrote it's not happy. It's already in trouble. It's not good.

I've come to something of a "too many cooks spoil the broth" view of cinema — and of creative effort in general — but it's not quite as simple as that; the interactions between a few select collaborators are too unpredictable and potentially rich to forfeit. The key words, though, are "few" and "select". As I wrote before, high financial stakes bring herds of investors looking to provide their "input", and Lynch's vivid phrase of a project being "clarified to death" is just the perfect way to express the dire consequence. If bigtime films tend to show up dead on arrival, they're almost always killed by some type of overclarification or another.

This also ties in with the need for the perfect balance between meaning and meaninglessness. A film devoid of abstraction and ambiguity is worthless; a film with nothing but abstraction and ambiguity is nonsense. By the same token, a life without randomness is unlivable; just as unlivable, in fact, as a completely random life. There's an ideal amount to be had of randomness, of ambiguity, of abstraction, of unpredictability, but damned if I know what it is.

Lynch the Luminary: on ideas

Ideas are the best thing going. Somewhere there's all the ideas, and they're sitting there and once in a while one will bob up and the idea is made known suddenly. Something is seen and known and felt all at once, and along with it comes a burst of enthusiasm and you fall in love with it. It's unbelievable that you could get ideas and that someone could give you money to make a film from them.

And you've gotta be true to them because they're bigger than you first think they are. They're almost like gifts, and even if you don't understand them a hundred per cent, if you're true to them, they'll ring true at different levels. But if you alter them too much they won't even ring; they'll just sort of clank. I really believe it's like The Beach Boys said: "Be true to your school." Later on someone might tell you, "That's a very uncommercial idea", or "That's going to make a hundred million dollars." But if you're thinking about that up front, for me you're thinking about the wrong things.

The sharpest point here, I think, comes at the very end: if you're hell-bent on getting a certain specific result from an idea rather than developing and executing the idea itself, you're doing it wrong. How could way priorities that disordered not bear damagingly on the final product? Get concerned about the financial returns and you trip over your own feet. As I've long maintained, money, alongside love and fame, proves elusive when pursued directly.

Lynch the Luminary: on removing yourself

Having had such fun reading Paul Cronin's Herzog on Herzog, I've picked up another in the series. Chris Rodley's Lynch on Lynch follows the format pretty closely, being more or less a book-length interview with the titular David carved up chronologically and thematically. Though I'm less familiar with Lynch's oeuvre than I am with Herzog's (intimately), I'm just as interested in the two men as individuals, as creators, as human beings, as surfers of the zeitgeist.

So far, I've found that Lynch has just as much incisive stuff to say as Herzog did. Early on, in a discussion of painting — Lynch's first craft, and what probably still considers his primary one — he says the following about allowing external forces to enter your work:

It's sort of like, if you could take bits of writing that you did sometime, or even somebody else did sometime, and just chop them up and arrange them at random, and just throw them, you know, like people have done, and then read that, it could be fantastic. It could spark a whole other thing. And you always have to leave an opening for other forces, you know, to do their thing. When you're on your own, just writing these things down, it's so limited, and you wanna somehow open it up and throw it out and let other things intervene. More ideas some out of that, and it becomes really unbelievable. By trying to remove yourself you can see some fantastic things sometimes.

Lynch being Lynch, I look forward to the no doubt fascinating claims he'll have to make about controlled ambiguity and creative improvisation.