“The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make it look like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, and be the way it was. And it’s weird, because when you veer off, you sort of know it.” Thus reads the beginning of the chapter entitled Ask the Idea in Catching the Big Fish, the short book written by David Lynch about transcendental meditation. The image is something that does not belong to the individual and instead seems to come from far away, to encroach upon him as a kind of alien consciousness. But the idea – the very term used by David Lynch – might be interpreted in at least two different ways. On the one hand, this word points towards something that should be “done”, started, and brought to an end by all means; it might even be said that each idea implies a certain amount of praxis. On the other hand, the word idea refers immediately and naturally to the concept of idea in the thought of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. According to Plato, the idea exists as something external to the subject: it is an eternal, perfect, and changeless entity that gives form to its material manifestations, even though it may not always be clear how the latter and the former relate to each other. For example, the idea of cutting is proper to all sharp objects and especially those used for cutting (from the claw to the lightsaber); however, it is more apparent in a tool able to make a perfect cut, such as a scalpel or a katana, than in a pointed stone or a butter knife.
Surely, this conception of the idea had a remarkable influence on the way in which, in the West, we approach images and art in general, that is, all those disciplines that have something to do with simulacra used to entertain, deceive, or make us think. Plato himself says, in one of his dialogues, that art is able to communicate ideas and truths about the world, albeit in a skewed and imperfect way. In fact, only reason has the ability to lucidly and clearly determine the necessary and universal logical relationships that make the world. Therefore, from an ethical point of view, it is necessary to try to understand the ideas and act accordingly – an insight also put forward in Lynch’s short text.
But what happens when these two different definitions of the idea are put into communication with each other? An answer to this question was already ventured by Plato in one of his many dialogical experimentations: ideas are not something static but rather sets of relations similar to trees or even “families” of abstract concepts that grow side by side (neither above nor behind or below) the material world. All of this suggests that there is a procedural aspect, maybe even a design, in the idea: a historical becoming that necessarily takes place first of all within every single thing and every single individual. Now, it is exactly in Lynch’s words that this becoming is realised by a subject in search of something which he himself cannot define: the idea must be followed, traced, hunted.
An eidetic approach to images is undeniable throughout Lynch’s filmography. Whenever the cinematic continuum is interrupted, torn apart from the inside by a sudden eruption of visions, hallucinations, or revelations, it is the idea that emerges with arrogance from the deep waters of the unconscious. An unconscious that is not only individual but also social, historical, cultural, spectacular, biological, geological, and cosmic. Therefore, the idea seems to be born from an “inside” that is always and intrinsically “outside”, like a Möbius ribbon that criss-crosses and binds everything that exists.
Now, one might ask: What are these images? What do they mean? What do they want from us?
In Lynch’s cinema – as in our everyday life – the idea, coming to the surface as a whale from the flow of our perceptions and thoughts, is the pure and direct experience of an abstract concept, although that does not mean that it is less than material. Roughly speaking, this is what happens in those rare moments of our lives, in which it seems that the “real reality”, the truest and most authentic one, is revealing itself to us in all its beauty, magnificence, cruelty, and indifference. As in the latter case, there is nothing to explain: there are neither symbols, nor analogies or allegories. What is shown to us is the real as such. The idea of cutting gives no suggestion as to how to improve oneself or approach the sacred. Nevertheless, it provides an almost limitless set of correct information as to how to perfect our poor imitations of cutting. Needless to say, the situation is very different when we turn to much more abstract and complex concepts, such as parenthood, friendship, love, time, consciousness, gravity, totality, and so forth. This is where the immediacy of the image comes in – together with the role of the artist and the poet. By means of images, in particular moving images, this complex problem is accessible through a secondary entry which is less repelling and admittedly more attuned to our own consciousness.
In this regard, ideas present themselves to us in the form of ripples on the murky and messy surface of our streams of consciousness, ready to come to the fore and to be grasped. This does not mean that our mind and consciousness are not crossed by illusions all the time. Attachments, brooding, and ruminations feed for the most part (if not absolutely and completely) our stream of consciousness. This is why the idea is so hard to grasp. Mindfulness, as well as any other Eastern school or meditative tradition, aims to “purify”, so to speak, the river of perceptual and mental garbage. Only by making the waters of one’s heart clear one is able to grasp and understand the true essence of thought, perception, emotions, and feelings, as well as the essence of the objects of such mental states.
Now, in Socratic thought, the purification of the soul is the most important ethical aspect among the ones that derive from the theory of ideas. To retrace the genealogy of an idea – starting, for instance, from an old knife and tracing back its most ancestral origin – makes the latter clearer and shinier to our self-consciousness. And so on until, sooner or later, one comes to understand that every idea, in terms of its aesthetic, ethical, and functional perfection, is related to all the others within the conceptual mega-structure of the “Good”. The Good is what we must pursue in all our actions, in all our relationships, and in all things altogether; every facet of our lives, as much interior as exterior, must move towards this absolute limit. However, the great amount of cruelty, resentment, violence, and brutality inherent in the world in which we live makes such a task very, very difficult (not to say impossible).
It is no coincidence that Lynch’s cinema is openly inspired by a classic genre such as noir. In the world of noir – perhaps, the worst of all possible worlds – nothing is irreplaceable and everything is double or, at least, ambiguous; every corner of life and society that is left is plagued by simulacra; in this world, dog eats dog and the big fish eats the small one. In this one-sided perspective of planet Earth as the “landfill of the universe”, no one is delivered from evil and the Good is nothing more than a small innuendo. But here is the point! It is insofar as the Good is only be smelt out, seen from afar between the smoke and the flames of a fire, that it represents the more genuine truth of the never-ending fight between darkness and light.
To paraphrase the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zižek, a movie character like Frank – one of the main villains of Blue Velvet – is set to represent the lavishness and exacerbation of a fearful and psychopathic gangster, with his brutish ways and perverse obsession. In this regard, the irruption into the film frame of the subject of eroticism and sexuality is more than apparent, right from the first meeting between the protagonist, Jeffrey, and Frank. Yet, there could be no poorer misinterpretation than this. If the sexual development of the teenager appears to overlook the whole work, it is not because the director used a special deforming lens; on the contrary, Frank’s representation of perverse masculinity works exactly because it comes across as the most fitting, realistic, and understandable to us. In a single word: normal. Indeed, someone else could say that patriarchal and heteronormative masculinity is perverse in itself, since it organises libidinal flows by fixing psychic energies to roles and objects as specific as they are partial. There is little difference between smelling the feet and shoes of the woman you desire, and simply projecting your desire onto the clothes she wears, her petite body, and her helplessness. In light of this, the exchange between the main character of Wild at Heart and the other great “monster” of Lynch’s cinema – the ruthless hitman Bobby Peru (played by Willem Dafoe) – is more than revealing.
In his extreme and radical manifestations of psychic and erotic disturbance, as well as in his sudden outbursts of violence, Frank is the embodiment of the entire spectrum of patriarchal masculinity. Therefore, it should not be surprising that, at some point, Jeffrey wonders why Frank and people like him exist at all – in reply to which, his girlfriend tells a dream she made, in which the birds chirped in peace in the woods of the trees, immersed in sunlight and silence. It is this image – so naïve and, at the same time, so seemingly foolish – that forms the ethical pivot of the whole plot. Frank’s absurd normality is opposed to the purity and innocence of the two young protagonists. It is something that we do not even need to “understand”; there are no symbols to interpret here, no secret codes to decipher, no stories to reconstruct (unlike what happens, for example, in the cinema of Christopher Nolan or the late Martin Scorsese). Everything is there, at our full disposal. The image speaks for itself, placing the idea of the masculine before us in all its ridiculous sublimity, at once destructive and self-destructive. It is up to us to become aware of what we have just seen. Only when we become cognizant of something that we already know to be within us, or that could even hypothetically be within us, can we finally get rid of it. The act of purification, therefore, passes first of all through a clear vision of the idea.
This pure awareness, not mediated by symbols or concepts, introduces us to a simpler and less murky way of thinking. To become aware through images, sounds, and their juxtapositions, without the aid of the self-conscious mind; in my opinion, this is something that we should thank David Lynch for: he was an absolute master of it.
The original version of this article was published in Mundus.
Claudio Kulesko is a philosopher and independent researcher based in Rome. As a member of Gruppo di Nun, he is one of the authors of Revolutionary Demonology (Urbanomic, 2023).
Blue Labyrinths 