All art work expresses a vision of the creator and the meaning of the art work is then decided by the viewer. Obviously the creators have a specific vision in mind when writing the story which is to provide mysteries for us to solve rather than solving the mystery themselves. David Lynch puts out these visual images and then it is up to the viewer to decide what is going on.
Hi Andrew,
Did Lynch have a meaning in mind when he made The Return, do you think? Or was it all just vision? "I know! Now I'll add a character with a baby blue, Playtex Living Power Glove that I can use later to pulverize BOB with!" ?
If he did have a meaning in mind, why not let us all in on it? 😉
- /< /\ /> -
Damn Garfunkel's, always trying to make everything complicated and "artsy."
It's more like where are the Simons when we need them? 🙂
All art work expresses a vision of the creator and the meaning of the art work is then decided by the viewer. Obviously the creators have a specific vision in mind when writing the story which is to provide mysteries for us to solve rather than solving the mystery themselves. David Lynch puts out these visual images and then it is up to the viewer to decide what is going on.
Hi Andrew,
Did Lynch have a meaning in mind when he made The Return, do you think? Or was it all just vision? "I know! Now I'll add a character with a baby blue, Playtex Living Power Glove that I can use later to pulverize BOB with!" ?
If he did have a meaning in mind, why not let us all in on it? 😉
- /< /\ /> -
Damn Garfunkel's, always trying to make everything complicated and "artsy."
It's more like where are the Simons when we need them? 🙂
Simon = Mark Frost and he became hypnotized by Lynch (and who wouldn't be ?).
Hi Andrew,
Did Lynch have a meaning in mind when he made The Return, do you think? Or was it all just vision? "I know! Now I'll add a character with a baby blue, Playtex Living Power Glove ...
Well, I would say writers don't write something with a "meaning" in mind. They have a narrative, everything is filtered through their own unique minds, but only writers of documentaries, educational pieces etc aim for a specific point or meaning.
Your TV's color settings are unusual, or maybe it's how you process seeing color?--but the glove was green. Your description of it as blue made me do a quick Google search to see if I could confirm my own impression of it being green - it was verified as green. But, green - blue - what's the difference really - what's the meeeeeaning? 😎
Agreed. There's more to art than the encoding/decoding model of communication. That said, it takes critical savvy to articulate how an artwork can be understood differently by different audiences, to make the case for a particular interpretation in a way that accommodates the multiplicity of possible "readings" of something so polysemous as The Return.
Hi Andrew,
Did Lynch have a meaning in mind when he made The Return, do you think? Or was it all just vision? "I know! Now I'll add a character with a baby blue, Playtex Living Power Glove ...
Well, I would say writers don't write something with a "meaning" in mind. They have a narrative, everything is filtered through their own unique minds, but only writers of documentaries, educational pieces etc aim for a specific point or meaning.
Your TV's color settings are unusual, or maybe it's how you process seeing color?--but the glove was green. Your description of it as blue made me do a quick Google search to see if I could confirm my own impression of it being green - it was verified as green. But, green - blue - what's the difference really - what's the meeeeeaning? 😎
Green is a part of being blue. Kinda like Richard/Coop ?.
Green is a part of being blue. Kinda like Richard/Coop ?.
So insightful, so terse. Thanks for this!
Hi Brandy,
I, too, have wondered if it all makes sense to them. I guess it does. But if so, why don't they convey that sense to their audience?
Just to be Art-y? Art for art's sake? (Where's Garfunkel when you really need him?)
😉
- /< /\ /> -
Hi Brandy,
I, too, have wondered if it all makes sense to them. I guess it does. But if so, why don't they convey that sense to their audience?
Just to be Art-y? Art for art's sake? (Where's Garfunkel when you really need him?)
😉
- /< /\ /> -
EDIT: posted this, then it disappeared-- perhaps I inadvertently deleted it. Here goes:
Great thread, Ric! Shows the value of posing an open-ended question to the forum (b/c/w the spate of "Anti-climactic!!!" rants of late... My apologies if this post reads as didactic (or simply making a mountain out of a molehill of a question.... ) but I've long been preoccupied with questions about the sociology of art... so, here goes:
David Lynch, for his part, seems (to me, at any rate) to have absolute reverence for the art traditions that have shaped is creative practice and to find inherent value in working at a remove from what is popular or commercially viable. I suspect, as Brandy suggests, that one can attribute this to residual generational faith in the value of "art for art's sake" (in Lynch's case, equal parts a product of his admiration for the generation that preceded him-- Bacon, Hopper Kafka, French surrealist filmmakers, etc. as well as for his generational cohort-- Kubrick, Godard, Rolling Stone etc.-- perhaps, altogether, the vernacular ideology of individual, self-expressive authenticity sometimes described as "rockism"-- i.e., "Don't sell out, man!")
I surmise Lynch sees his work as a public, outspoken assertion of the importance/value of artistic autonomy in an era in which multinational, monopolistic media conglomerates are more savvy than ever at filling consumer's minds with bad ideas and their bodies with toxic substances (c.f. metaphors in The Return: globally: nuclear residuum, surplus corn, peak oil; locally, cigarettes/alcohol/marijuana/Sparkle, altogether supplant the prominence/putative innocence of coffee and donuts, etc. in the original series) Mass-media critique, such as it is, is something I gather recent generations of scholars have moved away from to cultivate other approaches, so perhaps Lynch construes his work as something carrying a Brechtian promise/potential to infiltrate audiences of cinematic wide-release and broadcast/streaming TV... To do so, of course, Frost and Lynch have to veil this disposition behind an obfuscating cloak (or red curtain, I suppose) of genre subversion.... The suspense/horror/drama cues draw viewers in (call it sugar), then Frost and Lynch subvert these expectations with experimental techniques (a solution of sugar and medicine), and the puzzling we're left do is the medicine (of social commentary/critique, of deeper reflection and critical thinking, so to speak ) such that we're left with, the artist hopes, a new worldview/self-understanding....
The trouble is, Lynch doesn't seem to understand that the notion of artistic autonomy has been critically dissected and resurrected/reinscribed by scholars across the humanities time and time again for its tendency to serve the interests of the class (and type of person, demographically) who tends to benefit from others' faith in this worldview... (perhaps a visual metaphor for this scholarly enterprise might be the Woodsmen's ritual massage/smearing of the viscera onto the face of Mr. C's corpse...the old view just won't die!) In brief, the notion that there is greater "authenticity" in art produced by artists who withdraw from society and assert their distance from mainstream tastes/audiences inevitably favors artists with the greatest social and material advantages to reinforce their status as such, via generational wealth (e.g., boomer, gen x, and millenial 'bohemian artists' have tended to rely on the support of their parents), via canons, via corollary ideologies like that of the auteur filmmaker, and via resulting vernacular fascination with both (e..g, you will not likely find "L.A. Rebellion" filmmakers on, say, BuzzFeed's "100 Greatest Films Lists," but you will find Quentin Tarantino forever making big box-office dollars and still garnering awards after twenty years doing, from what I can tell, the same thing... Johanna Ray will not win accolades as Lynch's virtuoso casting director-- Lynch will instead continue to be recognized as an auteur...
For my part, I think Lynch's artistic worldview is valuable, albeit outmoded. I discovered Lynch as a teenager desperate for anything that would take me out of the ennui of suburban life-- Lynch's critique of white picket fences, of the postwar nuclear family, of cookie-cutter genre archetypes thrilled me.
That said, savvier film and culture critics have pointed out to me that they suspect, for good reason, that people like me are the ideal Lynch audience.... fascinated with his style for 30+ years, but perhaps blinded to the problems engendered by his artistic disposition by our admiration for his principled approach to art. I anticipate, sooner than we might like, there won't be any artists of Lynch's generation left to ask about how they feel their principles have changed (or persisted) after so many decades...
EDIT: posted this, then it disappeared-- perhaps I inadvertently deleted it. Here goes:
Great thread, Ric! Shows the value of posing an open-ended question to the forum (b/c/w the spate of "Anti-climactic!!!" rants of late... My apologies if this post reads as didactic (or simply making a mountain out of a molehill of a question.... ) but I've long been preoccupied with questions about the sociology of art... so, here goes:
David Lynch, for his part, seems (to me, at any rate) to have absolute reverence for the art traditions that have shaped is creative practice and to find inherent value in working at a remove from what is popular or commercially viable. I suspect, as Brandy suggests, that one can attribute this to residual generational faith in the value of "art for art's sake" (in Lynch's case, equal parts a product of his admiration for the generation that preceded him-- Bacon, Hopper Kafka, French surrealist filmmakers, etc. as well as for his generational cohort-- Kubrick, Godard, Rolling Stone etc.-- perhaps, altogether, the vernacular ideology of individual, self-expressive authenticity sometimes described as "rockism"-- i.e., "Don't sell out, man!")
I surmise Lynch sees his work as a public, outspoken assertion of the importance/value of artistic autonomy in an era in which multinational, monopolistic media conglomerates are more savvy than ever at filling consumer's minds with bad ideas and their bodies with toxic substances (c.f. metaphors in The Return: globally: nuclear residuum, surplus corn, peak oil; locally, cigarettes/alcohol/marijuana/Sparkle, altogether supplant the prominence putative innocence of coffee and donuts, etc. in the original series) Mass-media critique, such as it is, is something I gather recent generations of scholars have moved away from to cultivate other approaches, so perhaps Lynch construes his work as something Brechtian promise to infiltrate audiences of cinematic wide-release and broadcast/streaming TV... To do so, of course, Frost and Lynch have to veil this disposition behind an obfuscating cloak (or red curtain, I suppose) of genre subversion.... The suspense/horror/drama cues draw viewers in (call it sugar), then Frost and Lynch subvert these expectations with experimental techniques (a solution of sugar and medicine), and the puzzling we're left do is the medicine (of social commentary/critique, of deeper reflection and critical thinking, so to speak ) we're left with, the artist hopes, a new worldview/self-understanding....
The trouble is, Lynch doesn't seem to understand that the notion of artistic autonomy has been critically dissected by scholars across the humanities time and time again for its tendency to serve the interests of the class (and type of person, demographically) who tends to benefit from others faith in this worldview... (perhaps avisual metaphor for this scholarly enterprise might be the Woodsmen's ritual massage/smearing of the viscera onto the face of Mr. C's corpse...) In brief, the notion that there is greater "authenticity" in art produced by artists who withdraw from society and assert their distance from mainstream tastes/audiences inevitably favors artists with the greatest social and material advantages to reinforce their status as such, via generational wealth (e.g., boomer, gen x, and millenial 'bohemian artists' have tended to rely on the support of their parents), via canons, via corollary ideologies like that of the auteur filmmaker, and via resulting vernacular fascination with both (e..g, you will not likely find "L.A. Rebellion" filmmakers on, say, BuzzFeed's "100 Greatest Films Lists," but you will find Quentin Tarantino forever making big box-office dollars and still garnering awards after twenty years doing, from what I can tell, the same thing... Johanna Ray will not win accolades as Lynch's virtuoso casting director-- Lynch will instead continue to be recognized as an auteur...
For my part, I think it's great. I discovered Lynch as a teenager desperate for anything that would take me out of the ennui of suburban life-- Lynch's critique of white picket fences, of the postwar nuclear family, of cookie-cutter genre archetypes thrilled me.
That said, savvier film and culture critics have pointed out to me that they suspect, for good reason, that people like me are the ideal Lynch audience.... fascinated with his style for 30+ years, but perhaps blinded to the problems engendered by his artistic disposition by our admiration for his principled approach to art. I anticipate, sooner than we might like, there won't be any artists of Lynch's generation left to ask about how they feel their principles have changed (or persisted) after so many decades...
Weird that it disappeared. I read it and went to comment and it was gone. I wondered if it was all a dream......
Now I can't remember my comment or question was. But a great "analysis" (?) and a great read. I'm getting from it that you are not one of the folks saying that Lynch is perfect and infallible. I may need more time to ponder this.
I'd like to look further at the "mainstream vs. bohemian artists" bit, but I will need to read it again. Is Lynch mainstream or not? He sure likes his mainstream music. 😀
I'll probably get my face shot off for this, but not a big Tarantino fan myself. It usually feels to me like he's laughing all the way to the bank. But that's opinion and perhaps just my analysis of what many consider to be art.
However, I do love Reservoir Dogs and have always wanted to find a way to adapt it to the stage. If this has already been done, I hold to "I thought of it first." Because I did. 🙂
I don't buy the whole "there is no answer because it's art" thing. I think that's an excuse to not examine the meaning or the reality of the situation.
There's always an answer for everything. We live in a causal universe, and even at the most macro level there's a cause, however you choose to interpret it. Even an artist produces something for a reason. They may not be able to know where it's heading, but there's a story as to how we got to the destination.
When Frost and Lynch were writing the story before or during the visual storyboard process, they would have had some guidance as to the mythology of where they're going. Some anchor.
I believe there is an answer. I don't think Frost would give up his story (his baby) and just say "yeah, let's ignore the past 25 years and just go all-out weird and piss everyone off - it's art, baby. Nobody has to understand it".
I personally think there are answers to most questions, outside of the whole "it's all a dream" argument.
It might not be obvious, but it'll be there.
However, only if Frost or Lynch confirm it, will it make sense. I'm hoping the Final Dossier hints at those answers for some closure.
Of course this is just my opinion, but I'm sticking with it.
You do know Reservoir Dogs and Alien are the same basic story? Put a bunch of people in a room and kill them one at a time.
So, how about Reservoir Alien? That would be something nifty.
EDIT: posted this, then it disappeared-- perhaps I inadvertently deleted it. Here goes:
Great thread, Ric! Shows the value of posing an open-ended question to the forum (b/c/w the spate of "Anti-climactic!!!" rants of late... My apologies if this post reads as didactic (or simply making a mountain out of a molehill of a question.... ) but I've long been preoccupied with questions about the sociology of art... so, here goes:
David Lynch, for his part, seems (to me, at any rate) to have absolute reverence for the art traditions that have shaped is creative practice and to find inherent value in working at a remove from what is popular or commercially viable. I suspect, as Brandy suggests, that one can attribute this to residual generational faith in the value of "art for art's sake" (in Lynch's case, equal parts a product of his admiration for the generation that preceded him-- Bacon, Hopper Kafka, French surrealist filmmakers, etc. as well as for his generational cohort-- Kubrick, Godard, Rolling Stone etc.-- perhaps, altogether, the vernacular ideology of individual, self-expressive authenticity sometimes described as "rockism"-- i.e., "Don't sell out, man!")
I surmise Lynch sees his work as a public, outspoken assertion of the importance/value of artistic autonomy in an era in which multinational, monopolistic media conglomerates are more savvy than ever at filling consumer's minds with bad ideas and their bodies with toxic substances (c.f. metaphors in The Return: globally: nuclear residuum, surplus corn, peak oil; locally, cigarettes/alcohol/marijuana/Sparkle, altogether supplant the prominence putative innocence of coffee and donuts, etc. in the original series) Mass-media critique, such as it is, is something I gather recent generations of scholars have moved away from to cultivate other approaches, so perhaps Lynch construes his work as something Brechtian promise to infiltrate audiences of cinematic wide-release and broadcast/streaming TV... To do so, of course, Frost and Lynch have to veil this disposition behind an obfuscating cloak (or red curtain, I suppose) of genre subversion.... The suspense/horror/drama cues draw viewers in (call it sugar), then Frost and Lynch subvert these expectations with experimental techniques (a solution of sugar and medicine), and the puzzling we're left do is the medicine (of social commentary/critique, of deeper reflection and critical thinking, so to speak ) we're left with, the artist hopes, a new worldview/self-understanding....
The trouble is, Lynch doesn't seem to understand that the notion of artistic autonomy has been critically dissected by scholars across the humanities time and time again for its tendency to serve the interests of the class (and type of person, demographically) who tends to benefit from others faith in this worldview... (perhaps avisual metaphor for this scholarly enterprise might be the Woodsmen's ritual massage/smearing of the viscera onto the face of Mr. C's corpse...) In brief, the notion that there is greater "authenticity" in art produced by artists who withdraw from society and assert their distance from mainstream tastes/audiences inevitably favors artists with the greatest social and material advantages to reinforce their status as such, via generational wealth (e.g., boomer, gen x, and millenial 'bohemian artists' have tended to rely on the support of their parents), via canons, via corollary ideologies like that of the auteur filmmaker, and via resulting vernacular fascination with both (e..g, you will not likely find "L.A. Rebellion" filmmakers on, say, BuzzFeed's "100 Greatest Films Lists," but you will find Quentin Tarantino forever making big box-office dollars and still garnering awards after twenty years doing, from what I can tell, the same thing... Johanna Ray will not win accolades as Lynch's virtuoso casting director-- Lynch will instead continue to be recognized as an auteur...
For my part, I think it's great. I discovered Lynch as a teenager desperate for anything that would take me out of the ennui of suburban life-- Lynch's critique of white picket fences, of the postwar nuclear family, of cookie-cutter genre archetypes thrilled me.
That said, savvier film and culture critics have pointed out to me that they suspect, for good reason, that people like me are the ideal Lynch audience.... fascinated with his style for 30+ years, but perhaps blinded to the problems engendered by his artistic disposition by our admiration for his principled approach to art. I anticipate, sooner than we might like, there won't be any artists of Lynch's generation left to ask about how they feel their principles have changed (or persisted) after so many decades...
Weird that it disappeared. I read it and went to comment and it was gone. I wondered if it was all a dream......
Now I can't remember my comment or question was. But a great "analysis" (?) and a great read. I'm getting from it that you are not one of the folks saying that Lynch is perfect and infallible. I may need more time to ponder this.
I'd like to look further at the "mainstream vs. bohemian artists" bit, but I will need to read it again. Is Lynch mainstream or not? He sure likes his mainstream music. 😀
I'll probably get my face shot off for this, but not a big Tarantino fan myself. It usually feels to me like he's laughing all the way to the bank. But that's opinion and perhaps just my analysis of what many consider to be art.
However, I do love Reservoir Dogs and have always wanted to find a way to adapt it to the stage. If this has already been done, I hold to "I thought of it first." Because I did. 🙂
I'm not afraid to say that I think Tarantino is so far up his own arse that his work suffers for it. I'm not a Tarantino fan at all. Reservoir dogs was ok. But nothing special IMO. I can take it leave the rest.
Thanks, Brandy, for the kind words and your consistent willingness to read and engage with my unfiltered, lengthy posts! I have lots of thoughts regarding Lynch and Tarantino, mostly unfavorable to both ..... Might open a thread for this very purpose in "Double R Diner" soon, given there's so much to discuss about the "meta" implications of Hutch and Chantal... Lynch is most certainly not perfect or infallible-- I'm just impatient with folks who dismiss Lynch (or me, for that matter) as an "art fart." Happily, it seems like the forum participants have naturally self-sorted here (and I'm trying to keep the same in mind,rather than proselytize!)
For now, however, I'm afraid I've got to crash on some more insurance claims. ; )
More soon!
I don't buy the whole "there is no answer because it's art" thing. I think that's an excuse to not examine the meaning or the reality of the situation.
There's always an answer for everything. We live in a causal universe, and even at the most macro level there's a cause, however you choose to interpret it. Even an artist produces something for a reason. They may not be able to know where it's heading, but there's a story as to how we got to the destination.
When Frost and Lynch were writing the story before or during the visual storyboard process, they would have had some guidance as to the mythology of where they're going. Some anchor.
I believe there is an answer. I don't think Frost would give up his story (his baby) and just say "yeah, let's ignore the past 25 years and just go all-out weird and piss everyone off - it's art, baby. Nobody has to understand it".
I personally think there are answers to most questions, outside of the whole "it's all a dream" argument.
It might not be obvious, but it'll be there.
However, only if Frost or Lynch confirm it, will it make sense. I'm hoping the Final Dossier hints at those answers for some closure.
Of course this is just my opinion, but I'm sticking with it.
All true but...
In this universe, there are some things we will never know. Heisenberg pretty much nailed that, I'm certain. 😉
You do know Reservoir Dogs and Alien are the same basic story? Put a bunch of people in a room and kill them one at a time.
So, how about Reservoir Alien? That would be something nifty.
I think it already got made.... iirc, wasn't it called Snakes on A Plane?
I don't buy the whole "there is no answer because it's art" thing. I think that's an excuse to not examine the meaning or the reality of the situation.
There's always an answer for everything. We live in a causal universe, and even at the most macro level there's a cause, however you choose to interpret it. Even an artist produces something for a reason. They may not be able to know where it's heading, but there's a story as to how we got to the destination.
When Frost and Lynch were writing the story before or during the visual storyboard process, they would have had some guidance as to the mythology of where they're going. Some anchor.
I believe there is an answer. I don't think Frost would give up his story (his baby) and just say "yeah, let's ignore the past 25 years and just go all-out weird and piss everyone off - it's art, baby. Nobody has to understand it".
I personally think there are answers to most questions, outside of the whole "it's all a dream" argument.
It might not be obvious, but it'll be there.
However, only if Frost or Lynch confirm it, will it make sense. I'm hoping the Final Dossier hints at those answers for some closure.
Of course this is just my opinion, but I'm sticking with it.
All true but...
In this universe, there are some things we will never know. Heisenberg pretty much nailed that, I'm certain. 😉
And this is one thing art (and religion, for that matter) can do but science, almost by definition, can't/won't...to engage the world at a level/in a manner beyond knowledge or reason.
Fire walk with