Before his brief stint in the social-media shooting gallery this past week as an alleged Donald Trump supporter, David Lynch was more closely associated with a different Republican President: Ronald Reagan. The opening sequence of “Blue Velvet” (1986), the film that came to define Lynch in the popular imagination, is a heightened, slow-motion vision of idyllic, picket-fence America, complete with a friendly fireman and crossing guard. Its imagery almost exactly matches a Reagan campaign commercial from two years earlier, a soft-focus, feel-good montage that opens with the promise of a new dawn: “It’s morning again in America.” “There is sin and evil in this world,” Reagan declared, in one of his most famous speeches, and “Blue Velvet” emphatically concurs. In one of the film’s most quotable monologues, its wide-eyed hero, Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), wonders, “Why is there so much trouble in this world?”
But how do the Lynch and Trump world views align? The recent cycle of outrage began with a Guardian interview in which Lynch remarked that Trump “could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much.” Stripped of context, the “greatest president” part of the quote landed in a Breitbart headline, which earned a Presidential retweet and a mortifying shout-out at a Trump rally in South Carolina. This compelled Lynch to elaborate on his position in an open letter to Trump. “You are causing suffering and division,” he wrote, adding, “It’s not too late to turn the ship around. Point our ship toward a bright future for all. You can unite the country. Your soul will sing.” (Trump has yet to acknowledge this clarification.)
This unfortunate episode is yet another reminder, as if we needed one, that we should not expect our artistic heroes to also be our political allies, especially if they are as congenitally inarticulate and avowedly closed to the world as Lynch is. As Lynch himself has stressed, his sole priorities in life are his art and Transcendental Meditation. The headline of that Guardian piece, in fact, is a Lynch quote that reiterates this attitude: “You gotta be selfish. It’s a terrible thing.” In his personal politics, such as they are, that self-interest takes the form of a libertarian streak. He voted for Reagan in 1984, drawn to a Wild West aura bestowed by the movies: “I mostly liked that he carried a wind of old Hollywood, of a cowboy and a brush-clearer.” In 2000, Lynch directed a campaign video for John Hagelin, a fellow-meditator who was a Presidential candidate with the Natural Law Party. He voted for Barack Obama in 2012, for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, and (he thinks) for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, in the last general election.
While Lynch did not vote for Trump, you can see how the mind behind the grotesque screaming baby of “Eraserhead” and the sociopathic id-monster that is “Blue Velvet” ’s Frank Booth (“Baby wants to fuck!”) would regard the President with a detached aesthetic fascination. And therein lies the problem with Lynch’s comments. They are irksome not because they endorse Trump—as numerous headlines falsely declared—but because they represent the privileged position of distance. Lynch, needless to say, is insulated from, and perhaps oblivious to, the most cruel and backward of Trump’s policies.
This is not the first time, however, that the Trump Presidency has put me in mind of the Lynchian world. The primal terror of Lynch’s films is an existential one, stemming from the ever-present possibility of things falling apart—the daily state of affairs, in other words, of Trump’s America. Even though it was written before Trump’s election, and Lynch is not what you would call a social realist, the eighteen-hour “Twin Peaks: The Return” played out last year as a summer-long fever dream of dread and dissociation, seemingly tailor-made for our real-life waking nightmare of crisis and collapse.
It is perhaps inevitable that Lynch and Trump—both first-wave baby boomers, born six months apart, in 1946—would somehow intersect in the cultural imagination. Each, in his way, is a quintessential product of postwar white America, and trafficks in its myths, icons, and taboos (not least among them the figure of the abusive patriarch). The bomb looms large for these children of the atomic age: one brags about his nuclear button, the other consecrates the Trinity test as the original sin of the twentieth century. They share an interest in the uses of fear, a tortured relationship with language, and a vision of America that is overwhelmingly white, and prone or susceptible to extreme, sudden violence.
None of which is to suggest an equivalence. For Trump, the threat comes from outside his sphere, while, in Lynch’s work, both perpetrators and victims are typically white. In fact, Lynch and Trump engender radically different, even opposing, effects from the same image banks, one an Agent Cooper (or a Dougie Jones) to the other’s Evil Coop. It has been easy to mistake Lynch for a conservative because of his preference for stories of good and evil. But the films seldom adhere to a strict Manichean outlook. “Blue Velvet” indulges in the fear of the proximate other, and sundry horrors await just “behind the neighborhood”—a severed ear, the psychosexual torture of a (foreign) mother who has been separated from her child. But it turns out that what Jeffrey fears most is “so close” that it may already lie within him.
In Lynch’s films, the volatility of the self and of reality as we know it means that good and evil are rarely fixed coördinates. It’s telling that Lynch couched his praise of Trump in terms of disruption. Chaos, for Trump, is a by-product of incompetence, a cover for criminality, perhaps an end in itself. But, for Lynch, disruption is generative: trauma, the recurring subject of his films, can rupture the fabric of reality. His work thrives on destabilization and ambiguity, and in that regard could hardly be further from the fascist mind-set of Trumpism.
If the original “Twin Peaks” plied its viewers with regressive comforts, “The Return” acknowledges that this is no time for nostalgia. (The role of Lynch’s co-writer, Mark Frost, an outspoken social critic, cannot be discounted here.) Gone are the cozy, retro small-town trappings, replaced by the nowhere spaces of twenty-first-century America: nondescript tract houses, anonymous hotel rooms and office towers. The opioid crisis has reached the Roadhouse, and the residents of the Fat Trout trailer park are selling their plasma to pay the rent. The aging boomers, in particular, have lost their minds: Sarah Palmer melting down over turkey jerky, a stoned Jerry Horne wandering the woods, Dr. Amp spitting anti-establishment rants into his Webcam. We are very far from morning in America, and the words of Frank Booth, the most Trumpian of Lynch’s characters, are more resonant than ever: “Now it’s dark.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
