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Black Smoke: David Lynch, L. Frank Baum and California
Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive On day two of January’s Los Angeles fires, I took a picture looking east from the hills where I live. The zoomed-in, abstracted shape in the frame resembles a reverse hourglass; the dark plume rising from the center, Altadena, seems drawn up from the ashen ground to fully conceal the sky. The color of that central plume isn’t the rusty brown of wildfire smoke but an artificial black, like burning tires or the “SURRENDER DOROTHY” message the Wicked Witch writes across the sky with her broom—one of the great practical effects in The Wizard of Oz. I’ve read that David Lynch wanted to use black smoke in his Oz-homage Wild at Heart, but the chemicals used in the 1930s to create the effect had been made illegal due to their toxicity. He lamented there was no longer a way to create a deep black smoke effect. A week after the fire, a friend texted me: “RIP David Lynch, a true Oz fan.”
“We grow accustomed to the Dark,” wrote Emily Dickinson in her pre-electric poem about finding one’s way at night. After the candle has been extinguished, we may bump our heads at first, but then—we “fit our Vision to the Dark.” Dickinson refers to those starless and moonless nights on empty roads as “Evenings of the Brain.” In high school, in the nondescript apartment I shared with my dad, I used to watch Blue Velvet over and over. It was one of the first movies I effectively owned, a VHS from Blockbuster that I never returned. Unlike Jeffrey Beaumont, I didn’t need initiation into the darker frequencies of suburban life—I was already there. But how to fit one’s vision to the dark? How to calibrate and walk amid what scares you and fucks you over without turning to cynicism or worse?
The outpouring of public love and grieving for Lynch following his death suggests to me that his work, beyond its mastery of craft, helped others in the way it helped me then: mapping out, affectionately, some of the horrors that lay not only out there, but within. Of course, at the time, I would have simply said it was funny. Lynch knew there is humor in what compromises us, in the extreme poses we find ourselves taking, but also that it is very serious business for our souls. His films lower us into those subterranean spaces as if to say, “You’ll need to know about this place,” offering his characters what the films offer us—the possibility of learning to see in the dark while keeping a kernel of sweetness intact for oneself (and for love). The films don’t reject or withdraw from depravity; they explore its shape. When I recall the image of Frank Booth rubbing a piece of blue velvet while watching Dorothy Vallens sing, I think of Lynch describing him in an interview as “filled with love.”
Ten years after my Blue Velvet–binging days, I was in my last year at the American Film Institute. Lynch was showing new paintings at a gallery across the city, and a Polish friend and I wanted to sneak into the opening. Inland Empire was out, and my friend said, “He loves Poland,” so we pretended to be Polish journalists, and they let us in. I found myself gushing to a guy who had been a producer on Inland Empire—something about the screen erotics of blondes and brunettes (I was blonde at the time). “You gotta tell David!” he said, then led me across the room to Lynch, proclaiming “Inland Empire taught this girl everything she knows about blonde sexuality!” Lynch smiled and patted me on the shoulder. A fittingly inane encounter with an artistic hero. When I graduated a few months later and needed work, that producer ended up hiring me to PA on dozens of commercials and music videos, allowing me to stay in Los Angeles—and proving that David Lynch really is the city’s patron saint.
Both Lynch and L. Frank Baum filled their fables with American motifs. Unlike the sylvan fairytales of seventeenth-century Europe, we visit otherworlds comprised of bricks and curtains, light bulbs and diners, scams, money—suggesting that in these strange lands, with their unnatural laws, one is somehow made more oneself-in-the-real-world. Away, then, is only an angle of incidence here—and here, for Lynch, was often Los Angeles. Baum, too, eventually settled in southern California, and in the later books, Oz starts to resemble the state. In the movie version, flames and smoke frame the Wizard’s spectacular illusion, the foreboding green godhead later revealed to be an electric trick. But unlike Los Angeles, in Oz fire and smoke can’t hurt people because no one can die there. For Lynch, electricity is a conduit and manifestation of supernatural forces, a trick that is also a threshold between what we understand and control and the ferocity that wild fortune visits upon us—that sends fires sweeping across cities.
Lynch died of emphysema, hastened, reportedly, by having to evacuate from the Sunset fire a week before he died. That he should go out in the wake of such an apocalyptic tableau, intensified by the inauguration, seems to fit into his fascination with malevolent forces—the parts of us they harm, and the parts of us they can never touch. The smoke plumes shoot up in the Wizard’s hall, shifting from white and red to an angry green-black in a synesthetic show of passions. “Not so fast!” he shouts, just before the illusion is revealed.
Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.
— Emily Dickinson
