Today would have been author David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday. In honor of that, we humbly offer up this excerpt and link to the greatest thing he ever wrote about film, an essay of sorts on David Lynch’s Lost Highway.
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6. WHAT ‘LYNCHIAN’ MEANS AND WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that’s ultimately definable only ostensively-i.e., we know it when we see it…
…For me, Lynch’s movies’ deconstruction of this weird irony of the banal has affected the way I see and organize the world. I’ve noted since 1986 (when Blue Velvet was released) that a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures-grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances … a class of public-place humans I’ve privately classed, via Lynch, as “insistently fucked up.” Or, e.g. we’ve all seen people assume sudden and grotesque facial expressions-like when receiving shocking news, or biting into something that turns out to be foul, or around small kids for no particular reason other than to be weird-but I’ve determined that a sudden grotesque facial expression won’t qualify as a really Lynchian facial expression unless the expression is held for several moments longer than the circumstances could even possibly warrant, until it starts to signify about seventeen different things at once.
(Premiere Magazine, September 1996)
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