There is nothing more to say about The Invisibles
5.03
Don’t make me say David Lynch
by Travis Hedge Coke
The concept of a “contemporary pop character” must be detached from the moment of its creation, be it the conception of a flesh-and-blood person, their codification as a celebrity, their breakthrough in the form of a work or performance, the syncretization of a fictional being with pen on paper or a tirade on the telephone.
Celebrate the day. Celebrate the course.
Maya Deren was perhaps not the most important author of Stitches of the afternoonbut they made the film. The keys, the wood, the visits, the imagination, the images and the hauntings from David Lynch’s film move in every transverse wave of Deren’s body and work.
Hercules was a contemporary American pop character of the 1990s. Hercules appeared in television series, major motion pictures, toy lines, collector’s plates, comic books, bedspreads, and T-shirts.
The John Lennon before Jack Dane McGowan, whom he sees and hears in 1994, may seem like the ghost of a young man from Liverpool, while the ghost that King Mob summons in a ritual, as Grant Morrison did outside the comic, is a more platonic but also more mature John Lennon. Perhaps before his death and after his life, but probably before his life as a celebrity and during his death as a celebrity.
Why shouldn’t John Lennon get out?
When intuition invades our framework and our work, we need to know how not to interfere. In Chinese, this is called: Wu Weiand in Japanese, mushinBut Mushin and Wu-Wei are not identical. All states of meditation are different, and this also applies to all attentions.
David Lynch’s first feature film was hailed as “the best home movie ever made,” and much has been said about Lynch as an idiot savant, a lucky guy, and a genius in his own way, who created outsider art and stood out from the academy of film fraternity and literary critics and my friends, my good friends. David Lynch has been in or involved with schools his entire life. Without the American Film Institute, its services, training, promotion, and facilities, there would be no “David Lynch’s first feature film,” and no what we know as David Lynch or the Lynch film.
Whether it’s good for marketing or not to portray Lynch as a fool who knows nothing but does great things anyway, this unreflective, unconsidered, uneducated outburst of natural genius is as silly as our claim that birds migrate instinctively and that abandoned baby birds still need to be taught where and how to migrate. Fans and critics like to pretend that David Lynch has never seen other people’s films or that he is uneducated because it rewards them for their reluctance to address their own ignorance or influences.
The naive in naive art, the outsider in outsider art, the market in the marketplace.
Or did I just make this up because it fits the fairy tale I’m selling to you and myself?
When King Mob says, “David Lynch is directing!” he is presenting us with a David Lynch of the late 1990s who is not the David Lynch of today and will not be the David Lynch of tomorrow. It was not the David Lynch of 1982.
Do you remember when David Lynch films could make a critic or other filmmaker so angry in the early 1990s? Quentin Tarantino was annoyed by Come with me to the fire or Roger Ebert says, Wild at heart“I was angry, as if a clever con artist had tried to trick me”?
The naive in naive art. The outsider in outsider art. The market in the marketplace.
Somewhere between The true story And Mulholland Drivethat kind of anger just became too silly to sustain. Nobody gets angry anymore. David Lynch makes a freely accessible weather report available online. David Lynch made a short film with lots of audio editing in which a spider attacks a bee in his backyard workshop. He uses a power tool to draw attention to Black Lives Matter, and his one time failure to show a film at Cannes (which he would never have said he would) made more headlines in some circles than any other film that played at Cannes that year.
If King Mob says so, then we still live in an era when David Lynch’s direction made people angry. Or confused. Or made them feel cool.
King Mob, as you and I know, likes to feel cool.
“Everything is fine
In heaven
Everything is OK”
Barbelite is epinosic. Pyknotic. Epiphyllous like a placenta.
We can and should use simpler language. David would do that.
It’s good to feel smart and cool. The David Lynch statement comes quickly, like the Mason Lang quote they pull out about James Bond and all the sex scenes. It’s unprovable, it’s tenable because it’s an untenable claim, and it’s undeniable because it’s an incomplete, exciting position. And that goes for “David Lynch directs” too.
“We are in the position of a colorblind person in a beautiful flower garden… this limitation in us is known in theology as the ‘fall of man’… to see God is to grasp the truth as it really is.”
Similarly, Edith manages to use Josephine Baker to defuse a threatening situation in the 1920s by suggesting a sexual intimacy with Baker to someone who admires her. Our Josephine was a spy, a messenger, a bearer of secrets. Our Josephine Baker, as an audience at the time of publication or today, is not the Baker of Edith in the 1920s or Papa Skat, with whom she speaks and who points a gun at her. Our cups overflow with an assemblage of powers and facets, play and invocation—all Josephine Baker.
It is beautiful that Barbelith, Epinnoia, breaks as soon as you touch it. And when we are touched by Barbelith, we break. It is not a real mirror when you touch yourself.
In heaven you will see me twice. But is it only once?
Fame saves the day. Fame sets the course.
*******
Nothing in There is nothing left to say (About the Invisibles) Factual accuracy, either in part or in whole, is not guaranteed, nor is it suggested or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound. The same goes for the following recommendations, which we hope will nonetheless be insightful to you, our extremely discerning audience.
It is done. Nina Simone.
Living under cedars. Connilyn Cossette.
The attic. Mary Lambert.
We are dissolving. Christabel.
