David Lynch: weird just happens
Some thoughts on how the creative process can trip up the audience
There was a lovely response to this piece I wrote on The Traitors about how understanding the editing process is essential to grasping how the magic trick is done, where a character-led narrative appears to develop from natural interactions of players within a game. It’s how Ludo becomes Cluedo, basically. Suddenly the named pieces have (however illusory) motive, story and intent and action, rather than simply being winners and losers.
Lots of quiz and game shows do this. It’s why we ‘get to know’ the contestants, so we can impose narrative on them. When an edit allows this naturally as part of the game, it feels integral to the experience. The random selection of potential winners and losers in The Wheel, for example, is great, getting a big mainstream audience to root for the best stories, against the whims of fate. Conversely, the addition of ‘get to know you’ sections for the contestants at the end of recent episode of Mastermind feels clunky, because we are being asked to bolt a narrative over the top of one we made ourself, when we merely prejudged their cardigans and choices of specialist subject. Story should be a shared endeavour.
This interests me because the relationship between creator and audience is all about a blend of manipulation and collaboration. We make stories together.
I was thinking about this when I was watching a load of David Lynch films the night I heard he’d died. The weirdness of Lynch’s bold storytelling seemed to spring from the exploitation of that disjoint; the awareness that two people were making the story, that one of us would keep doing the unexpected, and the other wouldn’t mind. Partly since he’d promised that sort of a wild rulebreaking game with every fibre of his public persona. He was playing with our expectations, and we relished being invited to play along.
If we didn’t enjoy his films – and plenty of people dismissed them as wilfully confusing – that was because we weren’t enjoying the sort of Simon Says game where suddenly the organiser might shout ‘reverse rules now!’ or ‘everybody has to do it on one leg!’. If we did love it, however, it was because the familiar story game played under Lynch’s arbitrary Calvinball rules was crazy fun, but also taught us plenty about how we play story games under normal cinematic conditions. Sometimes it’s fun to pick up the football and run with it under your arm.
Stories unfold at the speed and in the order that the creator decides. That’s what a director or an author is doing. And they have a huge advantage, in that the audience members are in linear time, but the creator is outside it. The maker of any real time entertainment is a powerful god.
As I explained in the Traitors piece, the writer of a mystery novel is a time traveller. Just like the editor of a TV ‘reality’ show can seed a narratively satisfying denouement by cutting together the scenes that lead there, and cutting out the scenes that didn’t, someone like Agatha Christie can trick us, and delight us, by going back in time and planting clues. By insterting the elements which she discovered she needed when she reached the end of her own book, she made the climax feel inevitable, satisfying, controlled, earned, neat, complete… a story.
Being outside time is how the magic is done. And, it struck me, it’s the process that allows this.
If the writer were improvising a story in real time, this trick would be way harder to do. The fact that a book has drafts, is written several times, or at least written in advance of consumption, is a glitch in our culture’s previously oral storytelling system that allows humans to develop whodunnit fiction. The control of the material imposes order on chaos, and we like that.
A disadvantage – writing takes ages, and is iterative, compared to speaking a story aloud while making it up – is turned to a unique benefit of the process, and creates a signature art form, by creators learning to hijack it, turning a bug into a feature.
Directors and writers who love and understand process are the ones who are best able to delight us by using it cleverly. A reality show director who insisted on only using authentic fly-on-the-wall observation, or solely realtime coverage, would, sadly, tell less engaging stories.
It’s why cheesy reality TV and sensational true crime gets bigger audiences than arthouse documentary. Storytelling that tries to minimise the distorting, manipulative, ‘fake’ effects of process becomes more ‘honest’, but often at the cost of being less immediately ‘narrative’ and therefore less entertaining for a mass audience. I love directors who aim for this sort of reality, but there is no Platonic ideal of total authenticity in any filmmaking; even the CCTV cameras in corner shops are pointed in certain directions. The process directs the story, no matter what we do.
What David Lynch does is to use his own joyful abuse of creative artifice to create a feeling of unease. We don’t know what’s coming next, because he’s warned us he might not play fair. Things might look real. They might look like another thing, say, detective fiction. But he’s in complete control. And he can decide to put anything he likes in this story. He might just drop any old crazy crap in, or switch to another story. Because, like Agatha Christie, he’s a time travelling god. He’s not holding a mirror up to reality, and we don’t want him to. We want him to surprise and unsettle and delight us, with weird stuff.
And weird stuff is (whisper it) pretty easy to add.
Because all you have to do is have the brass balls, and creative vision, to type it, film it, and get it a bit wrong. I’m not saying the man wasn’t a maverick genius, but the stuff that marked his work out was taking advantage of a process that’s incredibly easy to do. The key is that it’s also easy to do very badly indeed.
I used to work for a vanity publisher, and new wannabe authors write chaotic batshit sub-Lynchian stuff all the time, because they don’t know how to control narrative. And it’s rubbish. Writing like that is confusing, annoying, and occasionally hilarious. Most of my first drafts are not as far from that as I’d like. It’s what happens when you don’t quite know what you’re doing, before you impose order and craft.
But that’s where the genius comes in. Because artists like Lynch are able to embrace juxtaposition and disjoint and chaos – things that ruin clear storytelling in the hands of amateurs – and make it clear to an audience that it is not accidental, that the wrong element is deliberate, just like comedians do.
Like a great joke magician, they meant for the trick to go ‘wrong’.
And like a great comedian, the first thing they have to do is to show that they are masters of their craft. Win us over. Show that ‘they’re good at this’. That this will be entertaining. That we’re in safe hands.
Lynch’s films are beautifully, confidently, artfully made. So we know he knows what he’s doing. It’s why we laugh at Plan 9 From Outer Space or The Room having sudden tonal jumps and cheesy pulp dialogue, but love David Lynch films when they do the same thing. He’s not playing the wrong notes because he doesn’t know the right ones. He’s just leaping into different keys, flattening notes, to try some mad stuff out.
We agree to a simple condition of entry with any masterful storyteller: we will watch their story forwards. But the artist can go wherever you like. And when we slip over, we will know that was what the maker intended us to do, because slipping over was interesting.
Take the biggest twist in a couple of Lynch’s classic films (I won’t say which ones, cos spoilers) where characters swap places. That’s a stroke of the typewriter. It’s easy to do. It’s Find / Replace in Final Draft. It’s even got a menu for it. You can do it by mistake, as a writer, where you lose grip on your characters and have one speaking like another, or both characters talking like you.
But if you do it deliberately, you’re saying something artistic and interesting about identity, and storytelling. It’s as easy as putting a gun in act one that is going to go off in act three. But if the audience agree to watch your story in story order, forwards, it will disorientate them just as much, baffle them, make them think. It’s one of those writing tricks that is easy technically to do. But incredibly clever to think of doing, and fiendishly challenging to set up so that an audience will join in and try and make sense of the ‘glitch’ you’ve deliberately introduced, without storming out, or pressing STOP and looking at their phones instead.
When this bravura moment of identity swapping is a load of text on a screen where you’re putting a script together, it’s no problem at all. Simply flip two names – but it’s dazzlingly clever and challenging when watched on screen as a depiction of reality.
How did that happen? Those characters swapped souls! That’s impossible! (They didn’t. They swapped labels. It’s quite Barthesian.)
It’s just as easy to, say, have a character be in two places at once. Or answer an impossible phone call. Or to put the actual Devil in a real place, by the bins. Or to have a fairy godmother swoop down. Or for there to be a world inside a radiator. You just have to think of it. And write it. And make some arrangements to book those assets for when you arrive on set. And it happens. It breaks all the rules of understood narrative, or physics, or time. But you’re a creator. You’re not in time.
You can do what the hell you like, as long as you sell it hard to the audience who’ve agreed to be happy watching it in order.
Nic Roeg, in Don’t Look Know, plays with notions of linear time to incredible thematic effect. But when he splices in a scene from much later in the film, all he’s doing is picking up a strip of film from further over on the cutting table. It’s harder to cut the scenes in order, really. Montage allows disjointed time. For most films, it’s how the cans arrive at the suite. You don’t shoot in order. Backbreaking work has to be done to make events happen on a projector screen in a linear fashion, to resemble ‘reality’.
Ditto the shock inserts in The Shining, or the moments where the timelines within the Overlook Hotel start to mix themselves up. That’s just splicing and montage. Or changing the stage directions on the script. To the audience, the impossible has happened. But the miracle is that most of the film happens, in front of the audience’s eyes, in sequential order, without sudden cuts to wherever you fancy.
What a creator is exploiting is the process itself. That everything, even the ‘realistic’ bits was written, directed, edited, assembled, artificially strung into an illusion of consequential action. Even when you’re simulating strict gritty life and holding up a mirror to reality, you’re making it all up. So loosen the rules that attach the clunky artificiality of the process to the desired ‘authenticity’ of the result, and you make something delightful, surprising and weird…
But it’s not hard. It’s a trick that’s inherent in the process.
In fact it’s easier than making things make sense. Which is nuts.
I was told something wonderful by a curator at the Brogdale National Fruit Collection once, when on a research trip. Making cider is easy, apparently. You just leave apples and they react with ambient yeasts and fungi, things that the world’s full of, and start fermenting of their own accord. Booze is inevitable. You have to actively add chemical agents to stop it, and make apple juice. The hard thing is stopping the combined elements making the fun stuff.
Story is like that. People naturally follow it, and make it, out of whatever you give them. To make a non-boozy non-woozy narrative, that feels ‘real’ is harder, and involves more intervention, than just letting all sorts of mad things be depicted happening in a row. It’s harder to keep two characters as two characters than it is to have them all speak in the same voice, or swap identities. It’s harder to have an edit create the illusion of linear time than it is to make a crazy montage of stuff in whatever order.
Good creators know that imposing order to create ‘normality’ is harder than letting all your ideas ferment wildly. And so they work out how to present a combination of apparent reality, while mastering their own freedom to splice in the most unexpected elements, at the stroke of a typewriter key.
One of the lovely things about challenging, experimental, wild directors like David Lynch, is that by letting themselves off the hook about faking strict reality, they have us, the audience, as collaborators to try and straighten out their kinks, to understand the promised detective story as an actual detective story, the love story as a love story, the thriller as a thriller, and that’s the game. It’s fun.
David Lynch was always making things that were wild at heart. Our pattern-seeking brains were always turning them into a straight story.
And the stubborn magic that came out of that was something we made together.