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Out Ahead: The Anti-Convention of David Lynch’s Screenwriting
Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet When I’ve taught screenwriting workshops I’ve been fond of reminding beginning screenwriters that Warner Brothers put David Lynch’s screenplay for Blue Velvet into turnaround in a day by with the terse comment, “The worst script ever submitted to us.” Presumably, the script was read by professionals. What had so offended them? What was so insufferable? Well, I tell my students, according to Robert McKee’s rules about a “well-made” object, the reader’s report was correct: The script is incompetent if you evaluate a script on how carefully and cleverly it adheres to how people expect stories to be told, or how much it adheres to the laudable values of plausibility, recognizability and credibility. By these criteria, Blue Velvet totally fails.
Take, for example, the sequence in a diner at 60:03, the film’s exact midpoint, with Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern. Without interruption, hesitation or qualification, MacLachlan, playing a teenager just out of high school with no training as a detective, assembles every pertinent detail of the narrative’s drug-dealing intrigue. He breezily transmits the data that another, more “regular” thriller, would make thrilling, scary and fun to see gathered. “I can’t believe what you’re finding out,” Dern exclaims/whispers, as if underlining the implausibility. Here, Lynch is advancing the plot, as he was obliged to do, but also sending a very different message with the scene. “Yes, this is a thriller,” he tells us, “but it is something entirely different from that as well. Yes, there is a plot to follow, but I am directing you to be concerned with something other than that. I will give out information so abundantly and with so little inflection that you will have no reason to think about it again. I will exhaust the conventional movie you think this might be and toss it over my shoulder into the trash. You can’t look at this movie that’s about to unfold the way you look at other movies.” Lynch prohibited the viewer from settling into their habitual norms of receiving cinematic information. The condition of entering into his creative world was that the viewer must see, and therefore think and feel, differently
Blue Velvet also violates canonical screenwriting practice with a stylistic habit that is central to Lynch’s work: exaggeration. Frank, the villain played so memorably in a career-reviving performance by Dennis Hopper, doesn’t say the word “fuck” once—he shrieks it a dozen, 20, 30 times. He makes an obsessive-compulsive fetish of the word in a way that has nothing whatever to do with “the way people really talk.” Has Lynch violated the screenwriter’s first duty, to be economical? Absolutely. Has Lynch ineptly lost contact with what even nasty people “in real life” are like? No—rather, he is instructing us that depicting a person in real life is not his purpose. Frank is not a person. He is a splash of color, as close as possible to chaos itself, a gesture, a storm of pain, a swirl of inchoate infantile tension and noise, incidentally and only nominally wrapped in skin and clothing. The exaggeration instructs us that Lynch is excluding the normal way of thinking, seeing and feeling about things. Here and in the rest of his work, Lynch has the audacity to tell us that cinema does not merely or even perhaps principally represent. It expresses; it creates. In the 1980s, a time when Hollywood was dominated by relatively anodyne suburban visions, Blue Velvet was a scorching outlier that kept hope alive for the creative possibilities of American cinema.
I was less interested in the experiments of the next decade, but I was astounded once again by Mulholland Drive, especially the way Justin Theroux’s movie director seemed like an uncanny self-portrait. It was as if Lynch had been to therapy and suddenly had learned to process and gain ironic perspective on his own cinematic fetishes, all the pitfalls of living in Los Angeles and being part of the movie business. He had gained a peculiar and productive kind of self-awareness.
In the last two decades he went even further, surpassing himself with his two greatest visionary works, Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return. Inland Empire connected the heterogeneity of film, TV and video formats to the traumatized fragility of personal identity. It’s a vision we’re only just catching up to. Twin Peaks: The Return expanded the psychosexual family trauma story of the series’ first two seasons, making Laura Palmer’s destiny the portal to political, religious and historical (the plight of the one percent articulated by Naomi Watts; the atomic bomb in episode eight!) concerns of dazzling complexity.
Lynch was always ahead of us, demonstrating what it took to make something serious out of a film career, fusing film noir, the American avant-garde’s trance film and European art film practice in all sorts of unpredictable and unique ways to consistently expand the possibilities of filmed entertainment. As Godard once said of Orson Welles: “All of us will always owe him everything.”
