Comment by jonhohle
2 days ago
During Covid I started watching his daily weather update, even though I didn’t live in LA. Virtually every day was the same. Very clear. Very still.
I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative. He always left so much unsaid and open to interpretation, just like life. They are movies designed to make the viewer feel a certain way, rather than literally what’s in the screen. He was one of the few directors that I thought of as making weird things that I would enjoy (most of the time), but how could anyone else?
“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”
It took me a little while to be convinced that he was actually reporting the weather as it was like at his home rather than saying the same thing every day. But, no, he was really reporting the weather and the weather is really just always like that in LA.
"Los Angeles, every day, hot and sunny, today, hot and sunny, tomorrow, hot and, for the rest of the… hot and sunny, every single day, hot and sunny. And they love it. 'Isn’t great, every day, hot and sunny?' What are you, a @$%^& lizard?"
- Bill Hicks
I've been in LA for 14 years, and I always say LA has great weather in the same way a mall has good weather. It's never unpleasant and is always "perfect", but at some point you miss the feeling of breeze and slight variations and it feels like you're breathing air from a can.
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That is funny, when I see David I see Bill and vice versa.
LA weather is either "coastal low clouds will burn off by late morning, it'll be a lovely day", StormWatch(TM), or Santa Ana winds.
There's no other options :P
I was also under the impression that sometimes his weather report was more like a him stating how he was feeling that morning
> I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative.
The plots of his movies are often more concrete than people expect. I'm not saying a movie like Mulholland Drive is easy to follow, but it does have a legible plot. Feel free to read the wiki or something if you are not sure who some character is or what they are doing.
If you are just letting the experience wash over you, you may be missing some plot points that are not meant to be mysterious.
Obviously his movies are weird and not entirely legible, but don't assume everything in them is meant to be inscrutable.
I wasn’t implying that there was no narrative, just that his movies were so much more than just the narrative. And often things that seemed perplexing were just things he thought were interesting or beautiful so he put them there for no other reason.
That’s, in my opinion, where some of the intractability comes from: is this bug buzzing around a ceiling light meaningful to the plot or just something he saw one day and wanted others to experience as well. Every once in a while he’d give a tell, often unintentionally, while talking about something else. But most of the time he let things into the world without explanation.
All of the comments about how hard Mullholland Drive was to follow are making me wonder if I missed something. I watched it a couple of times when it was in the theater and enjoyed it, but I don't remember being all that confused. Certainly not like Twin Peaks confused. I guess now is as good a time as any to rewatch it.
in my experience, this is just a very individual thing, warying from person to person. i watch a lot of movies on my own, and when i watch movies with others, i'm sometimes very surprised how much troube some people have understanding a movie.
i mean, Inception is one of those movies which is a tiny bit more difficult to understand, but i've watched it with people who had zero clue what was going on.
enough trashing other people - i loved watching Memento, but i must confess that i should watch it again, as i didn't really understand the full story while watching it.
then there are movies like tenet which just feel complicated as a gimmick, reminding me of the rick&morty copypasta, "To Be Fair, You Have To Have a Very High IQ to Understand X"
in summary, some people are good with abstract thinking and understanding, others are not.
Mulholland drives plot isn’t even that hard to follow once you figure out the twist. You can definitely go crazy deep with the symbolism though
> I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative.
I actually found "Mulholland Drive" to be incredibly accessible for a Lynch movie. Twin Peaks remains an absolute (and highly fascinating) enigma to me, especially the third season, but "Mulholland Drive" always felt like an enigma with a satisfying solution.
> I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative.
His movies are not supposed to be "got" completely. They are surrealist. They have the logic of dreams. Or nightmares. There are things in them that won't ever make literal sense.
Any film school graduate can string together some random images and call it "surreal", and mostly those would be boring. but Lynch was a master: in his films, all too often, just as your conscious mind was going "wait, what?" some subconscious voice would be nodding "yes, that fits".
Yes! I tell people to focus on the emotions that come up when they watch his stuff, and to focus less on trying to piece everything together.
I want to push back on the surreal end slightly. It's true that his movies are extremely resistant to analysis, and it's true that much of his imagery is de-facto surreal. But his movies still have narratives assembled from humans in concrete situations with concrete problems and easily understandable actions and reactions. In other words, you can enjoy his movies as an experience at relative face-value in a way many other forms of surreal art resist.
Some more than others, perhaps—the man produced Dune and Eraserhead pretty damn close together, and Eraserhead is not generally considered an easy movie to watch. But the man was never afraid or dismissive of giving us straightforwardly enjoyable cinema, even if we can't easily articulate why!
Sort of. The plot is not always clear, but what is always clear is how you are supposed to feel in each scene.
Reminds me of his comic strip. Same pictures every time, just different words.
His work isn't for everyone, but I feel like for those who connect with it, it feels intensely personal
He used to do those on the LA radio station Indie 103. He would call into Joe Escalante’s morning show and do the weather.
Eraserhead is about the fear of being a new father.
Perhaps more to the point, the fear that parenthood will destroy "the art life".
As a father that was much more obvious than when I saw it for the first time at 16 ;-)