One of the best memes on the Internet is the one where David Lynch says “Believe it or not, ‘Eraserhead’ is my most spiritual movie”, the interviewer replies “Work that out” and Lynch ends with a “No”. The work of a director like this is vast, impossible to understand, so full of ramifications and abstract scenes that you need a guide to understand everything that is happening on screen.
Kyle MacLachlan, one of his fetish actors, has said what many of us think: that you don’t need to understand David Lynch to enjoy his cinema.
Sensational! I have no idea what’s going on
In an interview with AVClub, MacLachlan has stated that when he made his first two films, ‘Dune’ and ‘Blue Velvet’, he was very young and did not know what was happening when he suddenly found himself working with one of the world’s most famous filmmakers heads-up: “I don’t pretend to understand much of what David does, but I recognize that I am his conduit through those worlds, and that’s a challenge. And besides, I feel really good about it.“.
There are still huge chunks of data that I don’t understand and honestly don’t need to understand. His films are experiential and ask a lot of questions, but don’t give many answers.
But MacLachlan is sure (like most) that Lynch has a plan in each film, he wants to tell something and is not just trying to be strange for the sake of being strange: “I think he knows exactly what he is doing and what he wants to create, but I don’t think always understand why.” And it is that, after all, a Lynch film is something that goes far beyond a film. We all know it.
During the filming there is not much discussion. There is not much intellectual conversation. It’s a feeling, it’s a state of mind, it’s a kind of energy.