David Lynch on ideas, abstractions, and meaning
During one of those click-through-endless-links modes last night, I stumbled on this Q&A with David Lynch. The video is super-amateur, shot shaking worse than Blair Witch on uppers, so I almost stopped watching. But what Lynch was saying grabbed me. Here’s a transcript of the question from a woman in the audience and Lynch’s response:
Q: I’m a former English teacher, and we saw Mulholland Drive, my son and I, recently. And I just wondered, is there a specific message or theme? Because we just were completely confused.
[audience laughter]
[Lynch talks about his English teacher]
A: I was saying, the idea tells you everything. Lots of times I get ideas, I fall in love with them. Those ones you fall in love with are really special ideas. And in some ways, I always say, when something’s abstract, the abstractions are hard to put into words — unless you’re a poet.
But these ideas, you somehow know. And cinema is a language that can say abstractions. I love stories, but I love stories that can hold abstractions, and cinema can say these to difficult-to-say-in-words things.
A lot of times, I don’t know the meaning of the idea — and it drives me crazy. I should know the meaning of the ideas, and I think about them. And I tell the story about my first feature Eraserhead, I did not know what things meant to me. And in that particular film, I started reading the Bible. And I’m reading the Bible going along. And suddenly, there was a sentence [in the Bible]. And I said, ‘Forget it. That’s this thing.’
I should know the meaning for me. But when things get abstract, it does no good for me to say what it is. All viewers, on the surface, we’re all different. And we see something — and that’s another place where intuition kicks in. You see the thing, you think about it, you feel it. And you go and you sort of know something inside. You can bring your light on that.
And another thing I say is, if you go after a film with abstractions to a coffee place, and you’re having coffee with your friends, someone will say something, and immediately you’ll say, ‘No, no, no, that’s not what that was about.’ So many things come out, it’s surprising.
So you do know, you do know. For yourself. And what you know is valid.
Lynch wanders around in his response, but one thing he seems to be saying is that “cinema” is a multivalent medium — that is, a movie, the particular combination of visuals, audio, characters, dialogue, action, scenes, themes, and so on, is capable of ‘holding’ multiple values or meanings.
He also is saying that each one of us brings our own unique life-history to the movie-viewing experience — therefore, we will pick up on this image, that line of dialogue, this emotional undercurrent, that theme, etc.
I think that’s not only right, that’s one of the reasons those of us who love movies, love them so much. I am passionate writing, music, art, poetry — but nothing can capture me so wholly as a movie, in part because they work on so many different levels of consciousness and even subconsciousness.
From a screenwriting perspective, what I take away from Lynch’s comments is that we, as writers, need to free ourselves up to go with our intuition, to immerse ourselves in our story ideas in a non-rational as well as rational way — because that’s when movie magic can happen. We can ‘know’ something of the ideas about we which write, but if we give ourselves over to our ideas and the creative process in an intuitive way, the story can end up taking on all sorts of shades of meaning and multiple layers of interpretation.
Take all those little grace notes you find when analyzing a movie closely. For instance, in The Shawshank Redemption, one of my students in a class a few years back noted this connection. During Andy’s (Tim Robbins) final conversation with Red (Morgan Freeman), where Andy is talking about how he’d go to Mexico if he ever got out of prison, Red responds with this side of dialogue:
RED
Goddamn it, Andy, stop! Don't do
that to yourself! Talking shitty
pipedreams! Mexico's down there,
and you're in here, and that's the
way it is!
“Talking shitty pipedreams!” Now think about how Andy escaped. What did he break open and crawl through 500 yards? The sewage line. “Shitty pipes”. In other words, Red’s dialogue is symbolically prophetic because, in fact, Andy was talking about “shitty pipedreams.”
You may say, “Coincidence.” But I say, “Synchronicity.” Was screenwriter-director Frank Darabont conscious of that symbolic connection when he wrote that line? Perhaps the line derives from Stephen King’s story upon which the movie was based. Then the same question: Was it a conscious act on the part of the writer? Or is this one of those moments where a tiny bit of magic occurred, an unconscious creative inspiration resulting from going so deeply into the story ideas?
Another example. In my class at UNC yesterday, we analyzed Juno written by Diablo Cody, a movie I thoroughly enjoyed when I first saw it, but have come to appreciate even more as I’ve taught it. On P. 64–65 of the final draft of the script, there is a small scene with Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) Loring. They are in the room they are turning into the nursery. The couple is staring at a wall, two swatches of yellow painted there. Vanessa, who has said she was born to be a mother, is consumed with the prospect of adopting the baby that Juno is carrying. Her nesting instincts have kicked in. It’s important to her to choose the right color for the walls. So the scene starts with her line, “What do you think? Mustard or cheesecake?” After much hemming and hawing, Mark says, “I just think it’s too early to paint.” Vanessa answers, “I disagree.” They turn around to the other wall and Vanessa says, “That wall is going to need something.” Then turning to Mark, “Can you see it?” He doesn’t respond. And we’re out.
The point of the scene would appear to be showing Mark in his process of developing cold feet about the adoption, reflected in subtext re his comments about painting — “I just think it’s too early” — his clearly unenthusiastic body language, and his lack of any response at the end. “Can you see it?” The answer is either, no, he can’t, or yes, he can, but doesn’t like what he sees (i.e., his future as a father).
But there’s that other line from Vanessa, “That wall is going to need something.” Go to P. 100 of the script — the ending sequence of the movie after Juno has given birth to the baby and Vanessa is home with the infant — for this scene description:
We pan past the wall Vanessa has said “needed something.” There’s a framed note on the wall. It looks like it was handwritten on the back of a Jiffy Lube bill. We see that it says:
“Vanessa — if you’re still in, I’m still in. Juno.”
Of course, that is the note that Juno penned, directly after she drove away from the Lorings — post Mark’s confession that he didn’t want to be a father. She then drives back, puts the note outside their front door, rings the doorbell, then screeches away. Vanessa takes the note and one look at her face says it all — yes, she’s still in.
The shot of the framed note on the wall, recalling the earlier line of dialogue, is a beautiful grace note, a tiny little thing, but imbued with great meaning — a pact between these two women, utterly different people, but bound together by their respective connection to ‘motherhood.’
So here’s a case where the writer — Cody — made a conscious connection when writing the script (the same reference is in an earlier draft of the script), and represents precisely the type of magic that can happen when we trust our instincts and fully embrace our story ideas.
Circling back to Lynch, one of the very first “How They Write A Script” posts I did here was with him — here. Check out how Lynch used to come up with ideas:
‘’For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee — with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.’’
Sugar and chocolate! Hey, whatever works.
I don’t really know the point of this post other than to remind us that writing, like our stories, is a multivalent thing: We’re not just writing from a rational place, but also spiritual, emotional, psychological, symbolic, unconscious, subconscious, and so on. If our writing can envelope us and pull us deeply into our Stories, our Self, and our Ideas, then magic can happen on the printed page.
Here’s Lynch in the Q&A transcribed above: