The Dreamcatcher – poetic memories of David Lynch
Poet and author John Kinsella pays tribute to the late great American filmmaker and artist David Lynch.
David Lynch was a poet’s film director. As auteur, he shaped his film and televisual (which were films in themselves) language to the extent that he made new language. This new language was of the dream-nightmare world we both fear and desire, that we enter to understand the conflicts and tensions of our waking lives.
From a poet’s perspective, he made a visual language — he was a visual artist and composer, who made films out of a fragmented, often spontaneous foretelling. For those of us who got through the lockdowns of the pandemic (in part) by watching Lynch’s surreally simple online “weather report”, with its sunny beautiful day in LA promises – its sameness – it belied the trauma we weren’t hiding from but were necessarily hidden from. There’s such a grim and sad irony that after a life of smoking and dealing with the resulting emphysema, it was probably the smoke from the LA bushfires that brought on his final collapse.
Many of us have form with Lynch. Mine goes back to seeing Eraserhead as a 19-year-old and having my sense of narrative challenged and rewritten. This experience extends to my partner, Tracy Ryan, who likely saw it at the same time and in the same theatre in Perth, the Kimberley, unbeknown to each other. It seemed an open-form poem to me. Then later, in personally troubled times, Blue Velvet arrived. I watched it, I kid you not, 13 times in a row – not sleeping but memorising the script, which also became a poem. The fake-looking robin became a herald for dystopia in the world of pseudo-manners. Some years later, still obsessed with the merging of artifice and a grim reality, of nightmare and concrete images, I wrote to Dennis Hopper in his bunker surrounded by art treasures (it was said) via fax and got a few lines in response.
This is what Lynch did with my head — he made me look to act as artist against the neat stanzas of expectation (I hope). When Twin Peaks arrived, it led me on a quest to use its symbols as part of my campaign against the logging of native forests. Seriously. The Log Lady took on a different kind of mantra, and the series’ darkness was the result of a damaged and threatened world.
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While there were the indelible instabilities of films that altered perception, such as Lost Highway, there were also absurdist attempts to make a blockbuster that came unstuck. I admired that. I had read the Dune novels before Dune the movie made its appearance, but I didn’t want to see the books imitated on screen. They weren’t. Something hyper-trashy and odd came of it all — a necessary failure. That’s what poets do — try something, no matter the risk.
I had been disturbed by Elephant Man at a time when I felt like my “best friend” was the only friend I had in the world — we saw it in the cinema together and it made him tear up. I couldn’t tear up, not ever, and maybe that was part of my problem, my distress. And when later came Straight Story, a favourite – realism made hyper-real so it became micro-mythical – I thought about on-the-road poems and how they are less to do with protagonists than what they pass (slowly) through. A lawnmower rather than a fast car. Yeah!
But the real Lynchian dystopia has come into focus for me through our son Tim’s obsession with all things Lynch. He reviews Lynch. He tracks down the obscurities within obscurities. He writes poems about “dust bunnies” and Lynch. He makes sense of the world through Lynch. He also watched the weather report and felt assured. And season three of Twin Peaks: The Return was a liberation — he got into the final episode whereas I was disappointed after so loving it all, especially Dougie. I should say it was an acceptable disappointment. If it had finished neatly, a balance between the visionary and reality would have been restored, and delusion set in.
Without the uncertainty, without the nightmare, without the exposing of the most disturbing aspects of the human condition, we become complacent and too willing to let the cruelty of humans go unscrutinised. Lynch never allowed that to happen. Lynch is a poet’s liberation.
John Kinsella’s most recent short story collection is Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024). His new collection of poetry, Ghost of Myself (UQP) will be out in July.