It came off as the ramblings of a midwit reddit fanboy who thinks too highly of his own intellect. It was hardly insightful and sometimes downright silly.
Idk, makes me less interested in hearing about anything else he has to say or read his book.
 Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
 |
Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
>no quotes from the text
pointless thread.
Here. I found this part particularly amusing because it really showcases his ignorance of cinema which when contrasted with how confidently he speaks about this stuff.
> IN 1995, PBS ran a lavish ten-part documentary called American Cinema whose final episode was devoted to "The Edge of Hollywood" and the increasing influence of young independent filmmakers-the Coens, Carl Franklin, Q. Tarantino, et al. It was not just unfair, but bizarre, that David Lynch's name was never once mentioned in the episode, because his influence is all over these directors like white on rice. The Band-Aid on the neck of Pulp Fiction's Marcellus Wallace-unexplained, visually incongruous, and featured prominently in three separate setups-is textbook Lynch. As are the long, self-consciously mundane dialogues on foot massages, pork bellies, TV pilots, etc. that punctuate Pulp Fiction's violence, a violence whose creepy-comic stylization is also Lynchian. The peculiar narrative tone of Tarantino's films-the thing that makes them seem at once strident and obscure, not-quite-clear in a haunting way-is Lynch's; Lynch invented this tone. It seems to me fair to say that the commercial Hollywood phenomenon that is Mr. Quentin Tarantino would not exist without David Lynch as a touchstone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewers midbrain. In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal.
>In Carl Franklin's powerful One False Move, his crucial decision to focus only on the faces of witnesses during violent scenes seems resoundingly Lynchian. So does the relentless, noir-parodic use of chiaroscuro lighting used in the Coens' Blood Simple and in all Jim Jarmusch's films ... especially Jarmusch's 1984 Stranger Than Paradise, which, in terms of cinematography, blighted setting, wet-fuse pace, heavy dissolves between scenes, and a Bressonian style of acting that is at once manic and wooden, all but echoes Lynch's early work. One homage you've probably seen is Gus Van Sant's use of surreal dream scenes to develop River Phoenix's character in My Own Private Idaho. In the movie, the German john's creepy, expressionistic lip-sync number, using a handheld lamp as a microphone, comes off as a more or less explicit reference to Dean Stockwell's unforgettable lamp-sync scene in Blue Velvet. Or consider the granddaddy of inyour-ribs Blue Velvet references: the scene in Reservoir Dogs in which Michael Madsen, dancing to a cheesy '70s Top 40 tune, cuts off a hostage's ear-I mean, think about it.
>None of this is to say that Lynch himself doesn't owe debts-to Hitchwiener, to Cassavetes, to Robert Bresson and Maya Deren and Robert Wiene. But it is to say that Lynch has in many ways cleared and made arable the contemporary "anti"-Hollywood territory that Tarantino et al. are cash-cropping right now.
>with how confidently he speaks about this stuff
makes it really hard to deny what his detractors say about him*.
okay, but where's your rebuttal?
What the frick is supposed to be “pretentious” about this? All he said is these directors were influenced by Lynch. Are you so dumb you can’t parse this incredibly simple vocabulary so you think he’s being “pretentious”
>What the frick is supposed to be “pretentious” about this?
I never used the word pretentious moron. If you're going to act smart, at least fricking learn to read properly. But that's not the most duplicitous thing you've said in this comment.
>All he said is these directors were influenced by Lynch.
Lol, The charge here isn't just accusations of being inspired, it's that they took supposedly unique about Lynch films chopped them, diluted it and fed it to thr mass audience gaining fame that supposedly should've been Lynch's.
But it ignores the fact Jarmusch is Lynch's contemporary. He made his first film a mere three years after Lynch and you can see his style from the very first film itself. Not just that, none of Tarantino's violence is Lynchian. I don't even like Tarantino but his brand of stylised violence can be traced back to various B-films, Japanese flicks, etc...That type of violence is hardly "Lynchian". It reeks of someone who doesn't watch cinema outside of those that make the sight and sound poll.
Are you moronic? Serious question.
I don't know if it is from this essay but there's a popular DFW quote about Tarantino/Lynch that gets passed around a lot.
>Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.
This is in reference to the famous scene in Reservoir dogs where a cop gets his ear cut off. The thing is, Tarantino doesn't show the ear getting cut off... It's entirely offscreen and does show the ear afterwards.
Yet, it's endlessly passed around as a smart "gotcha!" by so many people. It's such a minor thing but it shows people scrutinize stuff when it comes from people marketed as "genius".
>but it shows people scrutinize stuff
how little people scrutinize* oops.
Lmao.
Yep. Not even a Cormac fanboy but he towers over DFW.
it wasn't a literal concept. But one of Tarentino's first films was about a hotel clerk cutting off someone's finger.
Ironic how your gotcha falls apart under scrutiny.
Haha yeah right b***h you wanna know the real truth? All of you are pseuds. The only film that has any artistic merit is Dolomite. Every film in American cinema was influenced by Dolomite, even the ones that came before it were influenced through quantum retrocausality and the frickin saltine ass crackers in 1940s Hollywood wouldn't even look a black man in his eye for fear of being anally raped through telekinesis but they were still copying Dolomite. Carebears? Dolomite. Once Upon a Time in America? Dolomite. Legally Blonde? Dolomite. When David Foster Wah-Wah was crying and jerking himself off smoking Virginia Slims writing Infinite Jest he was watching Dolomite and ripping it off and thats why he wound up killing himself. Fricking honkey fricks
This is all pretty much true though.
Lynch can be considered something of a pioneer of what you might call surreal Americana.
And people like Tarantino and the Coen brothers absolutely do that in their own style and it's a simple fact they do it to more popularity and mainstream success. Because it's more palatable to a general audience.
You can look at Americana as a spectrum the same as any genre or culture if you want but the fact is Lynch changed and evolved it in a big way at a time when it was falling out of favor just as a pioneer does. Naturally the people who came after could only be riding the upswing.
Most of Tarantinos movies are grotesque trash. Ironically, Pulp Fiction is one of the only ones I like.
I mean yeah that's his whole style. It's about making the trash bigger and bolder. Don't elevate the trash to something beyond trash make it more memorable make it stick out more as trash. Make it so that the trash is what people want to keep not get rid of.
I think this video does a good job of explaining Tarantino
while lynch do eraserhead, elephant man and dune. jarmusch do permanent vacation and stranger than paradise.
and they do down by law and blue velvet in the same year.
i dont think the lynchian surrealism is the same as the hip surrealism of jarmuch that really permates the entire 90s zeitgeist.
tarantino, (his own filmography unfolds it) have more interest in b movies and old hollywood than anything really surreal.
there is nothing surreal about tarantino. he is not making more palatable nothing.
You simply don't get Lynch or Tarantino.
Lynch is as obsessed with old Hollywood as Tarantino, moreso even.
And Tarantino is plenty surreal in his own way. Just like Lynch he forms something surreal from what was once standard fare. This is the thing that permeates all their films. And it stems from that same obsession with classic Americana that cinema is inexorably fused with. They're drawing from the same well but putting it through a different lens pun intended. But Lynch did it first by a long shot and with more impact and strength behind it.
>Lynch can be considered something of a pioneer of what you might call surreal Americana.
Tarantino is not attempting surrealism nor is Jarmusch copying Lynch
.
Jarmusch released his first film a mere 2 years after Lynch made eraserhead.
Coen Bros made Blood simple in 1984 when Lynch had only released 2 films prior(Dune was released in 1984).
You could see their signature styles in their first flick. If you take Coens the only film they could've copied for Blood Simple and Raising Arizona is Eraser head(By the time Blue Velvet was released Raising Arizona was already in production). Can you tell me which part of Eraserhead(the only "surreal americana" lynch flick they could've emulated) is similar to Blood Simple and Raising Arizona?
I had already talked about Tarantino in the previous comment. You need to read the whole thread before responding.
If you actually look at the films that Lynch had made when these directors started making films you would not be able to say which flicks these directors are supposedly emulating from Lynch.
>fact they do it to more popularity and mainstream success.
Jim Jarmusch is a less mainstream filmmaker than Lynch. By the time Coen bros reached "mainstream status" Lynch was also mainstream.
>Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal.
No it isn't.
with things like this you see how manipulative and persuasive he can really be if you dont know what is he talking about at first hand.
>uses "Lynchian" unironically
I can't believe DFW enacted a IQfy meme
Not OP but the very obvious rebuttal from everyone who is not American is that this is an absolutely provincial and limited view on what constitute insightful or good cinema. These are ramblings from someone who has barely seen (or barely considers relevant) directors like Bergman or Tarkowsky, to name just the first two non-american that come to mind.
The main problem I have with american literature is that it seems completely unaware of the rest of the world.
Dfw had vast intellectual insecurity and everything he wrote is basically just
>"See guys, I am smart, I am insightful
.. R-right guys?"
This, these kind of writers that are so desperate to prove to everyone how intelligent they are so fricking cringe. I noticed it a lot with DFW, Pynchon, and sometimes McCarthy. Also Lynch is just fricking bad, liking Lynch is a sure sign of pseudness
Pynchon and McCarthy completely dwarf DFW. They should not even be mentioned in the same paragraph.
David Lynch is pretty cool I think, basically the only movies I enjoy. They are full of surprises and thought provoking weirdness.
and you're desperate to prove something about yourself with all this posturing about what's "pseudness" and what's "cringe." you're way more stuck on the level of social signaling than any of the people you mentioned, who at least possess craft
LYNCHED
i think you're just a frustrated midwit. keep that chin up, maybe you'll roll a higer IQ in the next life!
Pynchon is so desperate to prove to everyone how intelligent he is that he never appears in public. You're not very bright but I'm sure you can still see the contradiction.
>missed the point
It is not an academic paper about film and Lynch, he is attempting to convey what Lynch is to him and better understand that relation. It is the basic underpinning of his essay writing, personalize and humanize what is generally seen as academic or niche or mundane and do it in a way that will offer insights for everyone whether neophyte or academic or scoffer, assuming they have comprehension above the 8th grade level. It is his contribution to the field of essay writing and why his most celebrated essays tend to be the ones on topics which were deeply personal to himself, he did not need to reach for that passion, it is right there.
Might want to stick to sitcoms and the Sunday funnies.
>missed the point
Lmao, why are DFW fanboys so fricking moronic? Since when did something need to be an academic paper to be "insightful".
>he is attempting to convey what Lynch is to him.
He isn't attempting to do just that. He claims that some of the more popular filmmakers are copying Lynch and diluting his style for commercialisation
. He whines about other filmmakers (especially Tarantino) as much as he praises Lynch.
>Might want to stick to sitcoms and the Sunday funnies.
Lmao, intellectual arrogance of DFW is only matched by his midwit fanbase.
You want to excuse the vapid nature of this essay and the outright dumb/wrong shit in it by saying "he's just writing about his passion waaaah". That applies to thousands of people who writes about the topics he writes about. That does not shield you or your writing from criticism. Frick, Film criticism is a much maligned profession but his homosexual essay has less insight in it than a short Roger Ebert review who even does his "huminized writer appealing to everyone" schtick better than him.
You need to go back to r/DavidFosterWallace and stay there.
I just remember enjoying reading it. But I retain nothing from it, that holds for most of his essays.
Film analysis or whatever you want to call it is usually completely useless anyway.
Something Mr. Lynch understands very well, which is why he retains ambiguity. Kubrick too for that matter. The movies speak for themselves.
>It came off as the ramblings of a midwit reddit fanboy who thinks too highly of his own intellect
Yep, that was Davey boy alright.
I found it kind of interesting in that him and Lynch might just be total polar opposites. DFW had an insecurity that permeated him into a kind of neurotic academic mindset, whereas Lynch is basically uncomfortable with that kind of pontificating and doesn't view himself as intellectual. Just compare interviews--DFW's were often painful, whereas Lynch can just moonwalk through any question asked.
Unlike other subjects DFW has tackled, I don't feel he gave me a unique perspective on Lynch. In fact, coming off the coat-tails of reading any other work on Lynch, I get the feeling that something integral about Lynch was withheld or absent from DFW's estimation.
I was left with the feeling that DFW lacked some kind of basic artistic impulse that Lynch clearly operates on, and I already sort of felt this because there seems to be something in DFW's non-fiction that works for me way better than his fiction. I think it may be spiritual--there's something abstract an artist needs to approach fiction in an all-encompassing way, and I always feel when reading DFW's fiction that it's less fiction and more a contorted form of non-fiction.
For all the reverence DFW levies at Lynch, he also seems to kind of not get a great part of what makes Lynch's artwork interesting. I disagree entirely with his take on FWWM, for instance, to the point that I can't even begin to get where he's coming from. I also disagree that Lynch's visual work (as in, paintings) is devoid of value.
I get the feeling he's more enamoured by the idea Lynch represents. An exceptionally unique, sincere, "genius" artist working within a highly commercialises industry. He wanted to be one of the folk championing him while the industry and critics maligned him(this wasn't really the case).
Like with everything else. It's all about DFW than the subject he's talking about.
>pontificating
He won.
There's an interview with DFW where the male interviewer says he's "pontificating" at one point and Dave remarks how that's not a very good word, and the interviewer claims he didn't mean it "that way." Then David stares down at his shoes and looks sad. It always made me sad. The guy was very smart and really, really hated everything about himself.
started IJest, made it through maybe 100 pages and then, "this guy thinks he's a genius" and returned it to the library
P.S.
Frick Tennis, uppity homosexual sport
he looks really gay and kinda sexy
admit it - everyone has a friend who looks almost exactly like him (except perhaps clean-shaven) and who's the most insufferable person you have ever known. it's one of those instances when physiognomy tells the whole story
I thought he explained Lynchian pretty well. no one else attempted it and I bet if you asked Lynch himself he wouldn't be able to articulate it.
just imagine lynch saying lost highway is about domestic abuse. its part of the appeal the child-genius-who-dont-know-of-his-magic. if he explain himself in plain words the accusations of hack would be over the top.
i always interpret lynch non-linear-narrative films as nightmares and sensations of repressed or spiritually repressed people, as lynch himself, i think, is. in fact the dfw essay explain it in that way, dfw is a reprresed man himself.
its all about the fakeness for people who are fake and think their fakeness is some deep layer of reality.
To me, I haven't read that DFW essay for years but there's the micro and macro Lynch. Macro Lynch is what you're getting at. Its as if Lynch has taken a Kafka-ish approach to his movies asking himself what he's afraid of and building a narrative around it. Being cucked, murdering his wife, becoming a bum, his unborn baby being deformed, all personal fears of Lynch that his movies figuratively explore. Its a personal horror. Then there's micro Lynch where DFW describes a scene like a bleeding guys head on tv. Its that it's shown blandly, no one reacting to it, and the bloody guy doesn't even seem to be effected by it, also its colourful, he's in a suit, and cartoonish, that's Lynch. I haven't been to IQfy for a while so I'm sure many will object to what I'm saying.
to me, that scene is still macro lynch. and i think it only have effect when you yourself have the same fears or same view of reality. or to better put it, without the macro lynch, that scene would be a good scene of a film but without pretense of some hidden deepness in it. there is not micro without macro, he is good making this kind of scenes, but i think the deepness of it only appeal to entangled in fakes lifes people.
>and Tarantino is plenty surreal in his own way
explain this, because i just dont agree or dont know where you are going. propositions of tarantino as surreal is almost an open gate to call surreal almost everything, so try to stay on topic. what is surreal in hateful eight.
Honestly it's hard to describe exactly how Tarantino is surreal but I just know it when I see it. To put it vaguely it's in the way he sort of emphasizes the elements of the scene. The Kill Bill movies make it more obvious I feel but all his movies do it.
It's sort of as if nothing is really "played straight" if you know what I mean. It's not like he's just taking an archetypal scene out of an older movie and placing it with the same feeling. He adds this sort of rough edge that makes the scene more self aware. Nothing in Tarantino's movies feels quite real. It feels like a set. It feels like a movie. In that sense it becomes surreal. And isn't that more or less the definition of surreal.
The other thing is that I feel that when Lynch does something there is a purer sense of reverence there despite the fact that Lynch often feels darker. The thing I think people miss about Tarantino is that he has this sense of battle between reverence and contempt that is a little confusing maybe deliberately. It's not just that he purely reveres Hollywood to me he has both reverence and contempt and it plays out in his work. I think this is maybe just his personality. Lynch has a sense of pure love whereas Tarantino has a sort of emotional violence.
I know probably none of this makes sense because it's just a feeling but I think if people watch these movies closely they can maybe get some sense of what I'm talking about.
Look at Tarantinos facial structure and the way he speaks about any topic.
It's not "surreal" the guy is just a fricking freak.
Well who would I expect to make something surreal if not a freak
>It feels like a set. It feels like a movie.
That's Brechtian not surreal.
>Nothing in Tarantino's movies feels quite real. It feels like a set. It feels like a movie
that is why he is ususally considered a post-modern director even when his movies are pretty straigh forward. but anyone (as i know) goes as far as you as call it surrealist.
anyway is a pedantic clasification. but i think you misinterpret surrealism. to put it very very succintly, surrealism is some kind of exploration of the subconscious. lynch is defintively surrealist in almost all his work.
but there isnt many as openly surrealist as him.
i think the self-awareness of a movie as a movie is not enough. definitively tarantitno dont have much lynch influence as you wanted to instill before.
Pulp Fiction is good but I wouldn't call it surrealist
Every other Tarantino film goes like this
>hey champ I'm frickin READY TO KILL THESE FRICKERS MANNNNNNN
>*blood and guts*
>y'know...*smokes a cigar* Hemingway once said "every man is a man in the eyes of GOD" *shoots random guy standing in the back*
>some b***h with her titles out in a bar at noon: "hey now Jack this ain't Kansas, and I ain't no Dorothy. You couldn't handle this much pussy *pulls a gun out of her pussy and shoots random guy standing in the back*
>corny ass dance scene that's supposed to be funny and "cool" but is ruined by how it's supposed to be funny and "cool"
Shit sucks
i think tarantino and lynch are both influenced by postmodern ideas of the medium as a medium and not as a reality. and that is why you unite them. not for their shared surrealism.
>im the same anon of the other post just think its better explained like this
I love the Los Angeles of '90s Tarantino, such a weird place.
>this shitty author probably knows more about somebody's craft than the man who actually practices it
Go to bed Franzen
What I'm saying is Lynch knows what his taste is and what he likes but articulating it is different isn't it. That's what writers and critics are for.
No, not really
ya, yes really
https://languagehat.com/david-foster-wallace-demolished/