Lynch is obsessed with America needing to understand that the pretty image they have of its light has a dark counterpart, one of crime and exploitation. He’s not demanding they accept an intellectualized lesson—they need to connect with it on a subconscious level, little Shadow to big Shadow. He’s not tapping into the zeitgeist; he’s the prophet of an inverted zeitgeist (one he thinks you don’t truly understand and feel) of our guts and our lizard brains.
Blue Velvet is an awkward proclamation. I don’t feel it draws enough of a contrast between the two. For my tastes, it’s too mythopoeic, calling too much on a modern, masculinized interpretation of the Hero’s Journey. It’s so Campbell that it misses the mark when looked at in the rearview mirror. Then it bookends with a sting that tells us the darkness is still there, even if its figurehead is defeated. It tells us that, if we’re from the ordinary world, it doesn’t matter that we step into the secondary world and conquer the dragon—we’ll always see the picket fence and not the festering grubs in the dirt beneath.
I find Twin Perfect’s argument regarding Twin Peaks having this same message very compelling. In this reading, Twin Peaks is, in one meta-layer above the surface narrative, a TV show, in a way that characters on the surface can become aware of. It says that Lynch made Twin Peaks because TV at the time was too comforting and safe. Lynch needed to remind the Shadow in an American’s heart that the Shadow which is the American heart still exists. He did so at the very peak of the crime epidemic of the 90s—you’d think that the American public was already quite aware of its collective Shadow, but apparently they needed to be punished for their TV-based escapism.
Mulholland Drive treads similar territory as the above—the American dream of Hollywood, a literal dream in the film, contrasts with what’s presented as the sad and banal reality of Hollywood.
My problem, the problem of me who lives at the bottom end of midbrow taste, is that I just don’t find this dynamic to be interesting.