David Lynch – Misogynist?

Like any avaricious film monster in the digital age, it is standard procedure when discovering a director/actor/composer that punctures my postmodern nonchalance to spend consecutive nights devouring their back catalogue and consecutive days regurgitating the audiovisual nocturnal nutrition and musing over its sloppy hue.

So this past month has been David Lynch-flavoured. I was overdue my Lynchian education by a good year or two, having heard about Eraserhead in my first uni year. What I was told of subconscious-inspired nonsensical narratives and meticulous sound design ensured I’d have to get round to Lynch’s work eventually. As I expected, it has been a thrill and many of the films have destroyed their way easily into the top whatever of all I’ve ever seen. Lynch is clearly a genius of sorts, although not in the eyes of everybody. Scanning youtube comments – which are highly refined works of art in themselves – you’re as likely to come across praise as you are the following:

The trick to viewing Lynch’s strange stream of images without getting frustrated or losing interest is to not expect anything, to not hang on to things that rationale cannot explain, or give in to offence and desperate piece-puzzling. It’s a similar, if not identical, mindset – or non-mindset – to the meditation that Lynch swears by. The best way to approach his films is to simply observe yourself reacting to the things you see without following up lines of inquiry too rigorously, at least not until a second viewing or after a bad night’s sleep.

Despite this advice, there is one thing that occasionally but repeatedly pangs uncomfortably in my brain now and then during a number of Lynch’s best films. It is the hint of a near-confirmed suspicion that the director is not treating his female characters quite fairly or respectfully or close to nicely.

Just to make something clear at this point, when assessing a filmmaker’s work, “treating characters badly” isn’t a complaint about the amount or severity of violence depicted on screen. Lynch has a demonstrable interest in troubled female characters and many of those he creates suffer extreme emotional and physical trauma – it is uncommon to make it through a Lynchian story without witnessing, or hearing about, rape or murder. But as a filmgoer it would be a downright logical fallacy to be whisked into a hysterical Daily Mail-style spitting rage just because a director deals repeatedly with horrific subject matter. Making films about misogynists doesn’t make you a misogynist.

What might make a filmmaker come across as a misogynist or any other -ist are the ways in which they can let down their characters (and so also the demographics that said characters represent). Examples include:

• Lazy stereotyping
• Stunted development – when a character’s behaviour and reactions suddenly stop following their own arch in order to support that of another character or the overall narrative
• All symbol, no substance – To an extent, all characters in fictional narratives symbolise things but some seem to exist solely as catalyst devices or transcendent ideals with no believable grounding in the grit of the world that the other characters live in believably. Of course this is often done purposefully but some directors rely so heavily on a particular demographic for this role that it borders on typecasting.
• Repeated Negative Characterisations – It would be wrong to ‘positively discriminate’ by making sure there always exists, for example, well-behaving representatives of a group to balance out bad-behaving ones and vice versa. That said, a film (or even filmography) packed with bad/good eggs begins having questions asked of its director’s prejudices. For example, if a film has lots of evil English men in it because it happens to cover a story about evil men and they’re just English – well that seems fair. But if the story is about lots of different nationalities of people on a transcontinental cruise ship and every single English male passenger is evil despite being unrelated or unconnected– that seems a bit strange. Still it might be a coincidence (or done just to make a fun ironic point about stereotyping). But if a whole director’s portfolio consists of films about a whole range of topics and all the male characters who are English are evil – it’s even stranger. Hopefully this is making sense… It’s a difficult one to judge because characters are characters and repeated negative portrayals of a demographic may just be down to chance. But because of the unlikelihood of rolling 10 sixes in a row combined with an audience’s uncanny ability to contextualise, I think you can sense if a director is pushing it a bit too far.

None of these things are exactly criminal by the way; they can arguably be seen as necessary shortcuts much of the time. Some characters naturally take precedence over others and so these others just happen to lose out, just happen to be handed the ‘fall guy’ role. The only concern I have is that David Lynch’s fall guy is suspiciously a fall girl almost every single time…

The moment that I first noticed the trend was during the final act of Blue Velvet (1986). Sandy (Laura Dern) has just discovered that her sweetheart Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) has been sleeping with the mysterious Dorothy Vallans (Isabella Rossellini) who has turned up naked at Sandy’s house. The wide-mouthed gurn of grief that Dern displays at having her innocence shattered is pretty unusual and disgusting. It steals the scene, I suspect, by accident.

Her budding romance with Jeffrey that was set in motion early on in the film has taken a backseat since Jeffrey began investigating Dorothy’s predicament and was drawn deep into the world of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), the drug addled psychopath who has kidnapped Dorothy’s husband and child and is using this as leverage to force her into performing bizarre sexual rituals. While clearly driven by a desire to help Dorothy and somehow stop Frank, Jeffrey has been exploiting Dorothy’s damaged state (she has become twisted into enjoying the abuse she suffers from Frank) by going along with her sadomasochistic seductions.

Sandy’s trauma at this revelation suddenly crosses the barrier between the respectable suburbia in which she is very much based and the utterly corrupt noir-world which Jeffrey has been investigating, two parallel planes of existence that have never confronted each other in such a raw way before. With a jolt, it suddenly becomes clear that Jeffrey and Sandy’s promised romantic union cannot be fulfilled. Even if Jeffrey’s misdemeanours could be forgiven, Sandy belongs embedded in the world of high school dances and pristine green lawns. To forgive him would be an impossible emotional feat because she lacks the experience of Frank Booth’s night time hell-world.

Then in the space of 30 on screen seconds, everything is fixed. The five stages of grief are traversed in record time by way of a single slap to the face and a phone call in which Sandy literally says these sentences back to back: “You lied to me… I forgive you Jeffrey… I love you.” And I’m suddenly making that grimace for her as the love theme introduced earlier plays out its resolution in the background. It feels like a dream as perhaps the most naturally behaving character in the film suddenly loses all credibility by bowing unconvincingly to a love-story subplot that barely seems to justify its existence.

Before moving away from Blue Velvet, it makes sense to take a closer look at Dorothy Vallens. Effectively the film’s centrepiece, the image of her swooning on the stage of a seedy lounge bar whilst crooning the title song with Italian inflection is an enduring one. She is as much a character as a character can be, in that she seems to walk straight out of the song and symbolises everything to everyone. The definitive neo-noir femme fatale, she is all mystery and no grounding. As well as playing the role of the ‘she’ who wears blue velvet, Dorothy is also coerced into playing the parts of ‘mommy’ and ‘baby’ in Frank’s rape role play. Though she is the film’s primary female protagonist, she is so malleable that she cannot push action along or even make any meaningful decisions. Her only skill is in manipulation. She is a willing victim and, as Sandy ends up capitulating to mistreatment too, Blue Velvet is left with something closer to two puffs of smoke than a discernable female presence.

Talking about lack of presence, let’s move on to Twin Peaks (1990-91) and the masterpiece of the Lynchian Absent Female archetype – Laura Palmer. Not only does she achieve the same mythical status as Dorothy Vallens through her notoriety and unfathomable troubles, she also transcends physical space by being dead before the series has even begun. Despite the severe lack of screen time that this leaves her with, one viewing of Twin Peaks’ feature-length pilot and there is no doubt as to who the main character is. The overwhelming cloud of grief that hangs over this 90-minute episode is stunning. Everyone on screen is either crying or about to cry because: A) Everybody knew and loved Laura Palmer and B) Murder just never happens in the quiet logging town of Twin Peaks. Held aloft as the altar of grief and worship is a photograph on the Palmer mantelpiece of Laura, homecoming queen, which is zoomed in on or panned across many many times and also accompanies the credits at the end of each television episode.

The open-mouthed awe and intrigue surrounding Laura Palmer that Lynch generates is so well accomplished that it is difficult to climb back on the feminist bandwagon. If there is a criticism to be mustered, I’d probably go with “all symbol, no substance” although that is kind of the point of the story. I would argue that the gaps in her character do get filled in as the series continues and in the 1992 prequel film Fire Walk With Me, the mysteries behind her troubles are as solved and explained as Lynch can possibly allow. FWWM doesn’t quite live up to the televisions series however (and the series as a whole doesn’t quite live up to the first episode either), thus suggesting that Lynch is most comfortable leaving the enigma of his female characters intact. Conversely, maybe he is in fact uncomfortable delving into the female psyche.

Watch me now as I argue that this perhaps stems from a kind of femme phobia which is based on a fundamental distrust and cynicism regarding women’s supposed nurturing instincts and their integrity as romantic partners. There is certainly evidence stretching back to his early work that supports this. Although all of Lynch’s oeuvre sits comfortably within the ‘surrealism’ tag, his first feature Eraserhead (1977) truly belongs there in the classic sense. Unlike his others, Eraserhead seems to have no grounding in the real world and is loaded with the kind of blatant symbology that Freud toyed with in his theories of the unconscious and ideas about dream interpretation.

As you’ll find when trawling through interview archives, Lynch tends to give away as little as possible away as to the meaning behind his films. However, with the production of Eraserhead sandwiched between the births of two children, the argument that the film arose from his own feelings about becoming a father is a convincing one. Viewing the film, one particular feeling shouts loudest of all: ANXIETY.

Synopsis: After his girlfriend gives birth to a deformed baby, Henry Spencer (above) does his best to care for the mewing little monster in his sorry state of a flat while the sorry state of a post-apocalyptic world outside offers him nothing but an empty landscape and factory-like drones (that’s low humming sounds, not robots). There aren’t many characters in his life to speak of so Henry is a bit lacking in help and support. Those that do live and breathe nearby are women – women who let him down.

Mary X – not the keenest of mothers

The first is Mary X, mother of the little terror, who is presented as a cross between neglectful and simply inept. Constantly weepy and reluctant to tend to her child, she eventually leaves Henry with the words “I can’t stand it, I’m going home. I can’t even sleep. I’m losing my mind. You’re on vacation now, you can take care of it for a night” and remains absent but for a later sequence where she appears unexplained sleeping next to Henry and keeping him awake by fidgeting.

Woman 2 is Mary’s mother, Mrs. X. She only appears in a scene near the beginning when Henry visits the X’s home, but behaves in a striking way, first admonishing Henry for “having sexual intercourse” with her daughter and then rather awkwardly trying to have sexual intercourse with him herself. Her disturbing hypocrisy, the news-report/government-policy way she describes sex and the 19^th century-ness of it all (and for all we know Eraserhead takes place in the 23^rd-ish) when she insists the young parents get married give us the impression of a useless nag. She isn’t forthcoming with any practical help and she judges from a high horse, the combination of which has left her with a knot of repression in old age. She is the stereotype of A Mother Aged 50+, multiplied by 100.

Woman 3 is The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall. Clearly anxious about his chances finding companionship with a little snout-faced ever-ill child in tow (there is a pitiful moment where he tries to mute the baby with his hand and hide it from view), Henry strikes lucky with the girl who lives adjacent in the flat adjacent to his. Due to a baffling sequence of events following this seduction which I won’t attempt to describe, there is a suspicion that this may have been a dream… Suffice to say, when next Henry tries to find the girl, she is unlocking the door to her flat with a new man clinging to her lips. Visualising Henry’s face mutate into that of his baby, she freezes in disgust and Henry is forced to retreat, lamenting his slim chances of ever finding anyone willing to share his burden.

But wait, can the fem-gender redeem itself in the form of Woman 4 – The Lady in the Radiator? She seems sweet, with those grotesque woolly sheep-cheeks and that pretty song she sings about heaven? Maybe. She does at least welcome Henry into the radiator at the film’s close and embrace him in white light. But she also dances her way across her stage, gleefully squishing those sperm-like things with her heel. Wouldn’t Freud say something here about emasculation? Although, she leads the way to a new life free from the traumas of fatherhood, the way she does it seems a little harsh. Stamping those Y-chromosomes into mush mocks Henry’s (in)adequacy as a father and is one of many accumulative female-fired arrows that lead to his feeling that he has to kill the baby.

* * *

Enough. And time to admit that I’ve been playing devil’s advocate all this time. I never really believed David Lynch to be misogynist. Truthfully, it took a short time from being struck with uneasiness about the role of women in his pictures to coming to an explanation that satisfied me. I just thought I should cross-examine some of the evidence because you know… you’ve got to challenge the things you love to see if they hold up… (That isn’t a rule but it works for me).

The key thing regarding Lynchian worlds is that they fall straight out of the director’s unconscious mind. Lynch is always explaining in interviews how ideas just make themselves known to him, often fully formed:

In case it hasn’t been made clear, David Lynch is a dedicated practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (since even before it became really cool), has been doing it for around 40 years and even has a foundation set up to promote access to it. I haven’t had any experience with the Transcendental flavour of meditation (most of its official institutions charge a fee, which baffles me) but from what I have picked up during my own undisciplined time with the Vipassana brand, I can report this:

When learning meditation, you’re told to accept thoughts as they are and watch them unattached. They might last a long time or a short time; they may be scary, nonsensical or beautiful – but you’re encouraged to simply sit and watch as they come, remain focused on not getting involved with the thoughts, then watch as they go. Lynch seems to use the images and ideas that float up from his unconscious mind for material without censoring them or shaping them to fit a logical form. This approach could be likened to waking up from your most bizarre dream and making a film to document its events and imagery as accurately as you can without leaving out any of the bits you might be ashamed of other people seeing.

We don’t have conscious control over what we dream and equally, as a surrealist, Lynch chooses to exert no control over the fishes that bite. So while, it may be true that he does indeed (like everybody else) have complex complexes relating to emotional repression, his past, his desires etc., he doesn’t have any agenda beyond simply sharing these with anyone who wants to spend an hour or two in his mind. Women are somewhat of a mystery to Lynch but as Freud and Jung would say, being confused and intrigued by the opposite sex is a pretty ubiquitous human state of mind. Lynch just plays conduit by pouring his unfiltered dreams directly from brain to film.