David Lynch’s Sacramentality of the Strange
In his spiritual exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola invites retreatants to imagine the universe in a state of ongoing war, with the forces of Christ facing those of Lucifer on a battlefield both around us and within us. As a former soldier himself, whose wartime injury led him to reconsider his life, Ignatius’ appeal to a good vs. evil framework makes sense.
The filmmaker David Lynch, who died last week just short of 79th birthday, neither spent any time in the military nor was raised Catholic. And yet his work often seemed built upon a similarly dualistic world view. In his startling 1986 film “Blue Velvet,” shots of a bucolic small town push in to reveal a swarming hive of black beetles deep in the dirt; the film ends with a robin, which has been established as an image of divine grace—“the blinding force of love,” chewing on a beetle, the battle clearly won.
Likewise the murder of a teenage girl in Lynch’s groundbreaking television show “Twin Peaks” would uncover not simply criminal activity and dark family secrets in her small town, but a viscerally frightening, almost incomprehensible alternate dimension. In film after film, Lynch’s characters would find themselves confronting horrors, often at a fundamental, cosmological level.
And yet, for Lynch the journey into darkness was seen as not only necessary, but often in its own way blessed. In “Blue Velvet,” the discovery by a young Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) of a severed ear in the grass draws him into a noir world of crazed villains, sadomasochism, and repressed desires. And yet, at the moment Jeffrey finds himself in deepest danger, he encounters a mysterious lipstick-wearing man (Dean Stockwell) who suddenly begins to lip sync Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.”. It’s undeniably strange and yet also the film’s most stunning moment.
In 1999, Lynch released “The Straight Story,” a G-rated film distributed by Disney about the true story of an infirm elderly Iowa man who rode his lawnmower 300 miles to make amends with his estranged brother. Richard Farnsworth—who was dying of cancer at the time—gives Alvin Straight a heartrending authenticity, often without uttering a single word. While the film seemed a radical departure for Lynch, fundamentally it’s another story of a pilgrim who must undertake a harrowing journey in order to gain redemption. The fact that Alvin’s trip involves a gradual confrontation with the choices of his past rather than entry into some bizarre dream world makes it no less a reckoning for him.
And once again, the gift lies in seeing it through. At the very end of “The Straight Story,” Alvin finally reunites with his brother Lyle. It’s the first time we see Lyle, and somehow the way Lynch shoots the scene, and the way actor Harry Dean Stanton performs, instantaneously change the dynamic of the film. Where we’ve been on Alvin’s side all along, in this moment, we suddenly sympathize with Lyle. And it’s only with that moment in place, Alvin not a hero but fully in the hands of the one he’s hurt, that he (and we) are able to experience true forgiveness.
Fielding questions about the significance of taking on such a straightforward project, Lynch told a reporter, “Every one of us has so many sides, so many different things swimming inside.” Again and again his films suggested the same, often taking us into waters so deep and murky it was hard to know what we were watching. And yet somehow those moments could still generate great swells of emotion. There were many moments in the 2017 “Twin Peaks: The Return” where I wasn’t sure what was going on. And yet I found it profoundly moving.
Likewise in “The Straight Story,” there’s a scene in which a family takes Alvin in. The conversation they have about Alvin’s travels is simple and plainspoken. And yet somehow it’s devastating to watch. Time and again Lynch tried to teach his audiences that discovery and revelation happen not primarily through understanding but surrender.
In “Blue Velvet” Jeffrey and his would-be girlfriend Sandy (a teenage Laura Dern) keep saying “It’s a strange world.” Fundamentally that was the insight that Lynch tried to offer: The universe is far stranger than we might wish. Yes, at times we may find ourselves confronting forces at war far beyond our ability to comprehend. But to fully experience the world’s sacramentality, the way God’s love is revealed in creation we are better off not fleeing those dark roads, as Ignatius might have suggested, but following them. A moment of staggering beauty can happen in the most weird or terrifying of places. Salvation can be found not only in acts of heroic sacrifice, but a small town romance and a damn fine cup of coffee.
