[D66] Donald Trump’s America and the Visions of David Lynch

[A.O.]

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/donald-trumps-america-and-the-visions-of-david-lynch

Donald Trump’s America and the Visions of David Lynch

By Dennis Lim, www.newyorker.com
View Original
June 29th, 2018

It’s not hard to see how David Lynch, the mind behind the horrors of
“Blue Velvet” (starring Kyle MacLachlan and Dennis Hopper), could view
Trump with a detached aesthetic fascination.

Before his brief stint in the social-media shooting gallery this past
week as an alleged Donald Trump supporter, David Lynch was more closely
associated with a different Republican President: Ronald Reagan. The
opening sequence of “Blue Velvet” (1986), the film that came to define
Lynch in the popular imagination, is a heightened, slow-motion vision of
idyllic, picket-fence America, complete with a friendly fireman and
crossing guard. Its imagery almost exactly matches a Reagan campaign
commercial from two years earlier, a soft-focus, feel-good montage that
opens with the promise of a new dawn: “It’s morning again in America.”
“There is sin and evil in this world,” Reagan declared, in one of his
most famous speeches, and “Blue Velvet” emphatically concurs. In one of
the film’s most quotable monologues, its wide-eyed hero, Jeffrey (Kyle
MacLachlan), wonders, “Why is there so much trouble in this world?”

But how do the Lynch and Trump world views align? The recent cycle of
outrage began with a Guardian interview in which Lynch remarked that
Trump “could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history
because he has disrupted the thing so much.” Stripped of context, the
“greatest president” part of the quote landed in a Breitbart headline,
which earned a Presidential retweet and a mortifying shout-out at a
Trump rally in South Carolina. This compelled Lynch to elaborate on his
position in an open letter to Trump. “You are causing suffering and
division,” he wrote, adding, “It’s not too late to turn the ship around.
Point our ship toward a bright future for all. You can unite the
country. Your soul will sing.” (Trump has yet to acknowledge this
clarification.)

This unfortunate episode is yet another reminder, as if we needed one,
that we should not expect our artistic heroes to also be our political
allies, especially if they are as congenitally inarticulate and avowedly
closed to the world as Lynch is. As Lynch himself has stressed, his sole
priorities in life are his art and Transcendental Meditation. The
headline of that Guardian piece, in fact, is a Lynch quote that
reiterates this attitude: “You gotta be selfish. It’s a terrible thing.”
In his personal politics, such as they are, that self-interest takes the
form of a libertarian streak. He voted for Reagan in 1984, drawn to a
Wild West aura bestowed by the movies: “I mostly liked that he carried a
wind of old Hollywood, of a cowboy and a brush-clearer.” In 2000, Lynch
directed a campaign video for John Hagelin, a fellow-meditator who was a
Presidential candidate with the Natural Law Party. He voted for Barack
Obama in 2012, for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, and
(he thinks) for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, in the last
general election.

While Lynch did not vote for Trump, you can see how the mind behind the
grotesque screaming baby of “Eraserhead” and the sociopathic id-monster
that is “Blue Velvet” ’s Frank Booth (“Baby wants to fuck!”) would
regard the President with a detached aesthetic fascination. And therein
lies the problem with Lynch’s comments. They are irksome not because
they endorse Trump—as numerous headlines falsely declared—but because
they represent the privileged position of distance. Lynch, needless to
say, is insulated from, and perhaps oblivious to, the most cruel and
backward of Trump’s policies.

This is not the first time, however, that the Trump Presidency has put
me in mind of the Lynchian world. The primal terror of Lynch’s films is
an existential one, stemming from the ever-present possibility of things
falling apart—the daily state of affairs, in other words, of Trump’s
America. Even though it was written before Trump’s election, and Lynch
is not what you would call a social realist, the eighteen-hour “Twin
Peaks: The Return” played out last year as a summer-long fever dream of
dread and dissociation, seemingly tailor-made for our real-life waking
nightmare of crisis and collapse.

It is perhaps inevitable that Lynch and Trump—both first-wave baby
boomers, born six months apart, in 1946—would somehow intersect in the
cultural imagination. Each, in his way, is a quintessential product of
postwar white America, and trafficks in its myths, icons, and taboos
(not least among them the figure of the abusive patriarch). The bomb
looms large for these children of the atomic age: one brags about his
nuclear button, the other consecrates the Trinity test as the original
sin of the twentieth century. They share an interest in the uses of
fear, a tortured relationship with language, and a vision of America
that is overwhelmingly white, and prone or susceptible to extreme,
sudden violence.

None of which is to suggest an equivalence. For Trump, the threat comes
from outside his sphere, while, in Lynch’s work, both perpetrators and
victims are typically white. In fact, Lynch and Trump engender radically
different, even opposing, effects from the same image banks, one an
Agent Cooper (or a Dougie Jones) to the other’s Evil Coop. It has been
easy to mistake Lynch for a conservative because of his preference for
stories of good and evil. But the films seldom adhere to a strict
Manichean outlook. “Blue Velvet” indulges in the fear of the proximate
other, and sundry horrors await just “behind the neighborhood”—a severed
ear, the psychosexual torture of a (foreign) mother who has been
separated from her child. But it turns out that what Jeffrey fears most
is “so close” that it may already lie within him.

In Lynch’s films, the volatility of the self and of reality as we know
it means that good and evil are rarely fixed coördinates. It’s telling
that Lynch couched his praise of Trump in terms of disruption. Chaos,
for Trump, is a by-product of incompetence, a cover for criminality,
perhaps an end in itself. But, for Lynch, disruption is generative:
trauma, the recurring subject of his films, can rupture the fabric of
reality. His work thrives on destabilization and ambiguity, and in that
regard could hardly be further from the fascist mind-set of Trumpism.

If the original “Twin Peaks” plied its viewers with regressive comforts,
“The Return” acknowledges that this is no time for nostalgia. (The role
of Lynch’s co-writer, Mark Frost, an outspoken social critic, cannot be
discounted here.) Gone are the cozy, retro small-town trappings,
replaced by the nowhere spaces of twenty-first-century America:
nondescript tract houses, anonymous hotel rooms and office towers. The
opioid crisis has reached the Roadhouse, and the residents of the Fat
Trout trailer park are selling their plasma to pay the rent. The aging
boomers, in particular, have lost their minds: Sarah Palmer melting down
over turkey jerky, a stoned Jerry Horne wandering the woods, Dr. Amp
spitting anti-establishment rants into his Webcam. We are very far from
morning in America, and the words of Frank Booth, the most Trumpian of
Lynch’s characters, are more resonant than ever: “Now it’s dark.”