This macabre desire is what the movie’s about: the yearning to watch (from the safety of our closets) others’ bizarre tumbling into bad language; untranslated, these others remain isolated, frozen, somehow satisfying us by their proximity.
(Once, in a museum in Washington, D.C. I literally bumped into the actor Gene Hackman, who was in the midst of a whirlwind visit to the gallery. I shuddered when I recognized him, inches away: not out of star-struck awe, but because I had watched him act so menacingly in No Way Out the prior evening; I wanted to get the hell out of there).

I was a credulous viewer, not a studious critic: I don’t mull over what was troubling with the film on an artistic or aesthetic level, but that it simply troubled my sense of personal safety and moral certainty. I remember the textures in myself, rubbed the wrong way, more then I recall the textures of the film. Specific scenes continue to goad, however: the infamous closet incident; Dean Stockwell crooning Roy Orbison, a cad singing to his rubber sex-toy doll; the decomposing ear in the field; the final, Darwin-perfected image of the postcard songbird masticating the insect against the backdrop of suburbia. What I remember most is my violently beating heart, the capricious fear that someone might walk into the room while I was watching and I’d feel compelled to quickly switch to another station.
It felt like discovering porn when I was younger: but the dirty magazine stuffed giddily behind a tree in the woods becomes the family TV nestled in the comfort of one’s home. Camille Paglia argues that the television set has become the modern-day hearth fire: gather around and let Katie Couric’s shadows flick across your face in the new eternity. That which we tuck safely away in the dark of woods becomes exposed in the harsh glare of the room of recreation. Welcome to the Twenty-first century.
Image of David Lynch courtesy of _tiki and Flickr Creative Commons
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