Remembering
Pop: David Lynch and the Sound of the '60s
By Mark Mazullo
For a neorealist . .
. a glass is a glass and nothing more. . . . Contemplated by different
people, the same glass can be a thousand different things, however,
because each man charges what he is looking at with emotion, and nobody
sees it as it is but how his desires and state of mind wish to see it.
I advocate a cinema that makes me see that kind of glass, because such
a cinema will give me an integral vision of reality, augment my knowledge
of things and of people, and open up to me the marvelous world of the
unknown.
—Luis
Buñuel,"The
cinema, instrument of poetry"
Cop: Do
you own a video camera?
[Long pause]
Rení: No. Fred hates
them.
[Long pause]
Fred: I like to remember
things my own way.
[Long pause]
Cop: Whaddaya mean by
that?
[Long pause]
Fred: How I remembered
them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
—David
Lynch and Barry Gifford, Lost Highway
Substitute "pop song" for "glass"
in the above quotation by Luis Buñuel, and you have a succinct
description of one central element in the aesthetic of American artist
and filmmaker David Lynch. Since his first feature, the cult film Eraserhead
(made between 1972 and 1977), Lynch has found creative inspiration in
various repertories of American popular song. In the same way in which
he establishes a cultural and moral topography for his films by setting
them in a variety of American geographical locations—the relaxed,
yet darkly mysterious Pacific Northwest in Twin Peaks; the seethingly
violent South in Wild at Heart; the superficial and corrupt city
of Los Angeles in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive—Lynch
draws upon the diverse catalogue of American popular song to lend each
of his films a unique expressive sound signature.
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