The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies todayâbetter and also differently. His movies arenât anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and heâs not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, heâs interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynchâs movies, always wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvetâs Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and âthe Well-Dressed Man.â How Eraserhead's whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil⊠yet how itâs âpoorâ Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TVâs Twin Peaks and cinemaâs Fire Walk with Me, âBobâ is also Leland Palmer, how they are, âspiritually,â both two and one. The Elephant Manâs sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treevesâand Lynch very carefully has Treeves admit this aloud. And if Wild at Heartâs coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically the same thing, i.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch moviesâevil wears them.
This point is worth emphasizing. Lynchâs movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynchâs constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his moviesâ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynchâs villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopperâs exultant âIâLL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVESâ in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until itâs devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of Bobâs look of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired: they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, itâs not because Lynch is âendorsingâ or âromanticizingâ evil but because heâs diagnosing itâdiagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that itâs hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.
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