Wednesday: Lynch and Cronenberg

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While Cronenberg’s films, for instance, often spiral out of control into surreal and violent landscapes, at their center is an attempt to work through incredibly intimate themes, such as the relationship between the individual and the human body. His films, particularly in the period that we look at in this series, work toward understanding corporeality in the technological age. The narrative of Videodrome hinges on the effects of television on society, specifically in the way it affects society’s relationship to violence. In Cronenberg’s hands, however, this is not simply a topic of discussion on televised news panels, but an issue we see fully fleshed out in hallucinations created by television-powered brain tumors. When we see the protagonist use a fleshy handgun fused to his own hand, we can understand the violent effects of television in the most direct way. His other films, such as eXistenZ and Crash, address the anxiety of the influence of technology on the individual in a similar way, as it concerns video games and automobile fetishism, respectively.

Similarly, while Lynch is often spoken about solely in the context of outrageous fantasy, his films are deeply personal, drawn extensively from his own experiences. His movies, with the obvious exception of Dune, do not exist in a remote alien world. Rather, his filmic worlds are deliberately American, grounded in a very specific, historical moment: Hollywood in the 1950s, at the pinnacle of its success as a national dream factory. His obsession with American pop iconography from the period permeates his work. Naomi Watts begins Mulholland Dr. as a wide-eyed caricature of Doris Day, naively stepping through the Technicolor screen into a Los Angeles brimming with evil. The characters in INLAND EMPIRE, as well, are in a very literal sense haunted by the ghosts of classic Hollywood. In Blue Velvet, Lynch reckons Hollywood’s idyllic representation of suburban America in the 1950s against his own upbringing in small town America. He most explicitly addresses his obsession with American pop iconography in Wild at Heart, pitting the screen personas of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in a battle against the Wicked Witch on the modern American highway system, as if part of some bizarre experiment. Lynch’s project, then, can be considered Hitchcockian; while Hitchcock, most notably in Shadow of a Doubt, was fascinated with the rather sadistic idea of introducing menace into comfortable American settings, Lynch reverses the process, taking the familiar American characters out of their homes and placing them in a contemporary world dominated by menace. Increasingly, with films such as Mulholland Dr. and INLAND EMPIRE, he has dwelled on the industrial conditions that are behind the production of the iconography he has focused on so extensively, inspired by his own frustrations working with Hollywood studios.

While Lynch and Cronenberg certainly employ highly individual styles in order to create worlds that are at once surreal and intimate, it is clear their films should not be looked at from within a vacuum, incomparable to other works. Both Lynch and Cronenberg take cues from popular genre convention, and owe a debt to Hollywood genre cinema. Cronenberg’s The Fly, a remake of the 1958 sci-fi classic, trades the Atomic Age fear of technology’s potential for the fear of the body’s vulnerability in the wake of the AIDS crisis. Similarly, the obscure narratives of Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. are not simply a product of Lynch’s unique procedures of storytelling, but rather a part of a tradition of sprawling Los Angeles noirs that eschew coherent plot for emotional resonance and style. The Big Sleep, for example, was famously so convoluted that not even Raymond Chandler could explain what happened in his own story. While Lynch and Cronenberg have emerged as singular voices within the world of contemporary cinema, this series would like to highlight the way in which these films are influenced by and respond to genre cinema.

Cronenberg and Lynch can be regarded as very human and ethical directors, committed to the idea that film is an apt medium for meditating on experiences and situations that we often find difficult to grasp. Their gift for creating disorienting and sensational moments allows them to work out highly personal concerns. Evan Chung & Hannah Airriess