- Hello my friends! My name is Natxo Medina, and I welcome you to Ghost Mutations,
this channel, where we talk about cinema, cities, and garmonbozia.
- Garmonbozia, my friends.
That enigmatic word that Agent Dale Cooper learns when he enters the mysteries of Black Lodge,
and means something like pain and sorrow,
or at least that's the interpretation that some experts on Lynch universe make.
The universe that's been resisting 
interpretation for 40 years,
melting brains of fans, critics, and all these 
naive watchers
that within the first ten minutes of watching 
"Lost Highway" say:
"Why don't you turn off this shit, and play 
something that make sense?"
David Lynch, that guy of silver toupee, and 
ever lip-hanging cigarrette.
A person that seems to feed on oil black coffee, tacky music, and cosmic darkness.
For those not familiar with the filmmaker, a really quick introduction.
He was born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana.
In the late 60's he studies arts, with the goal 
of becoming a painter,
but movies cross his path almost by chance.
In 1977 he premieres his first movie, "Eraserhead",
an industrial nightmare, shot on super-low budget, that turns into a cult classic.
Since then he's directed 9 films, several short films, commercials and music videos.
In 1990 he gave the world "Twin Peaks", 
a true cultural phenomenon,
In recent years he's been doing music, 
and released two records.
Lynch's visual work is very complex and diverse,
and despite he is one of most respected filmmakers alive, and he has won lots of awards,
his work remains very hermetic.
As if it was obeying some rules 
that only his author knows,
and the rest of regular people can't grasp.
To the point that, with the years, some generic adjectives like dreamlike, or surrealist, have run short,
and we've been forced to create the very diffuse and vague term "lynchian".
One thing that hardly ever relates with "lynchian",
is the city.
When we hear about his work, we think about the rural atmospheres of "Twin Peaks" or "Blue Velvet",
we think about the archetypical use of female figure,
noire films codes, or lost highways.
But we almost never think about Lynch as a urban filmmaker, the way it happens with other creators.
Nevertheless, the urban condition, with its unpredictability, its complexity, diversity and darkness,
is fundamental to understand the way Lynch make movies, specially in his early years.
And on the other hand, Lynch movies, even if he doesn't want to,
gives us a lot of clues to understand, reelaborate, and finally transform,
the wild and unfocused experience of living between buildings of contemporary cities.
Clues like these seven that we are about 
to analyze right away.
There we go.
1. HALF SLEEP
In Lynch movies, action takes place between dreams and reality.
The frontier between what actually happens and what takes place in character's imagination, are unclear.
Time limits are abolished.
For instance, in what historical time 
do Lynch movies happen?
"Blue Velvet" seems like a contemporary story, but it's filled with references to American Way of Life.
"Eraserhead" happens in a limbo city, 
out of time and space.
We know that "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive" happen on present LA,
but in spite of that, places, atmosphere, music and clothes take us to another time.
But, doesn't exactly this happens in our cities?
Increasingly a melting pot of times and identities,
of cultural rescues, and reappropiation of old stuff to revitalize and usually, sell it.
Fake neighborhoods like Barcelona's "Gotic",
businesses obsessed with offering some kind of more "genuine" experience,
rebuilt as a zombie reality.
Everything happening at the same time, in the same layer of reality... or fiction.
2. REVERSE
For every bucolic scene, there's a sinister reflection.
For every blonde, a brunette.
For every pure love moment, a fall into the depths of perversion.
This relationship of opposites coliding, define most of Lynch stories.
Laura Palmer was model student, with red cheeks, and blonde pony hair,
but also a hardcore drug addict, craving the most brutal sex.
The naive and smiling Betty in "Mulholland Drive", has its dark side on Diane, the frustrated and suicidal waitress.
Hollywood is the city of dreams and also of nightmares.
And that same thing over and over again.
Under an apparent reality, hide a bunch of characters that play with other rules.
Secret societies, mysterious men that know more than we may ever know,
and characters that remain impotent in front of universe random powers.
On an era of competition among global cities, in which all of us are more or less tourists,
our cities have more and more two sides: one public, and free of conflicts,
and its reverse, dark, complex, dangerous and real.
And both sides live intertwined, on permanent tension.
3. ARTIFICE
The fact that this tension hardly ever explodes, and our urban life maintains some precarious balance,
is because, in great measure, the official narration is ever present in our lives.
A fiction that builds a collective imaginary of the city, in which we settle.
That same trick, but applied to cinema, rests at the core of many Lynch movies,
who, among other things, talk a lot about narrative mechanisms.
Their twisted logic doesn't crumble because they think about the lines that separates reality from fiction,
because they know they are a fiction, and ask themselves why a movie can't break truth conventions.
With time, we get the ever growing impression that Lynch is trying to create a "pure" fiction,
that doesn't look for realism outside the screen.
The iconic scene of Silencio Club in "Mulholland Drive" is the perfect example of that.
The abyss that opens in front of the main characters, is the same that the watcher faces.
Everything we thought we were watching and understanding, has no equivalent beyond itself.
What we watch is a movie, you can stuff your rules up your ass.
We, nevertheless, as neighbours, or visitors, buy into this artifice often,
and we get sucked into its charms.
We seem to be eager of being fooled.
And so it happens that we convince ourselves of that city being X, when instead is Z,
and we start to think that we live in the best of possible worlds,
and "well, there are problems everywhere, but that's nothing we can't solve
with a little cautious governance, and a bit of social management of capitalism".
Which in reality, my friends, is f**king sh*t
When in fact, we should face right now the possibility of official urban narratives,
this is, the hegemonic story,
being nothing more than that: a story.
And the fact of us living all this time, confortably numb inside of a fiction crafted carefully by others.
4.VIOLENCE
This omnipresence of certain urban narrative,
the superiority of a fictional city above the city we actually experience,
not only masks a lot of violences and inequalities,
that are inherent to cities grown from financial capitalism,
but also creates others.
For instance, the paranoid feeling of us not having any capacity of intervene our more direct environment.
A feeling that more or less define our daily experience
the same way that happens to Henry, in "Eraserhead", overwhelmed by a fatherhood that seems alien.
Or the one lived by Adam Kesher, who overnight loses everything, because someone moves the right chords.
For instance, the different pressures exercised by the institutional-police-financial apparatus,
over the inhabitants/workers of the city,
who are at the same time protagonists and victims of a social engineering model,
which remains out of reach.
Maybe, within these violences, one of the most devastating ones,
is the one that turns the city into a a consumption object for visitors,
erasing the common identity generated by years of spontaneous activities,
and with it, a common symbolic ground.
A huge collective loss of consequences that remain unpredictable.
- Jesus Christ, Mr. Lynch, what a darkness!
Don't you see how the world is going? We are on the brink of a major fuck up!
When we go to the movies we want to turn it off for a while.
Don't you have in your movies anything pleasant to tell?
Something light, or romantic or funny?
No... And yes.
Lynch movies don't shine as shelter for peace.
As we have already seen, his universe is often dark and incomprehensible,
and leaves almost no room for hope, and when it does, is often a charade.
But that doesn't mean that we can't find anything to guide ourselves towards light.
Even moments of real hope and balls out comedy.
In fact, I'd say that in most part of Lynch's work, lies a great sense of humor.
Twisted, but humor after all.
Same way, our cities may offer us some answers to those that are willing to look beyond appearances.
Watch out, then, to last three keys.
5. OPACITY
David Lynch is about to be 71.
You can imagine how fed up he must be with people always asking same questions about his movies,
even though everybody knows he never tells a thing.
When they ask him to analyze one of his scenes or the sense of a story,
he always evades recurring to trascendental meditation and the power of ideas.
But in this apparent void of sense, is where his stories shine,
because it allows the watchers to fill the void with their interpretations and emotional approach to the movie.
As ve've seen, we have a problem with the narrative of our cities.
With the dominance of a canned fiction, that crushes the real city we experience daily.
To counteract this fake lightness,
it may be useful to understand that cities don't fit in one, nor ten, nor a thousand stories.
That it is, in many ways, indecipherable.
6. PASSION
As indecipherable as it's passion,
excessive love, brutal hate.
The fire that burns inside you when you find something or someone to adore or loath to the fullest.
That excessive passion that Lynch tends to set on stage in the most kitsch and twisted way.
The vertigo that Jeffrey feels in front of the secret and perverted world of Dorothy Vallens.
The siamese and fiery connection of Sailor and Lula in "Wild at Heart",
Or the jealousy that turn Fred Madison mad, 
in "Lost Highway".
Lynch movies are, deep down, movies of universal love.
A love that can push you to do crazy things, such as defending your neighborhood of institutional attacks,
even if it's in a violent way.
That may lead you to confront with the whole world if necessary,
because between your neighbors and you, there's a love that no bulldozer can tear down.
It's time to claim that our cities need more passion, and less Academia.
7. BEAUTY
This music video is not filmed by Lynch, but by Romain Gavras, son of Costa Gavras.
His creations have a tone close to documentary,
but always introduce themes and characters that give a dystopic and mind-bending turn to them.
His work is distressing and disturbing, but above all, in this case it seems beautiful to me.
It's an strange beauty, for sure.
All those hundreds of children that look the same,
going down those stairs that reproduce a Versailles garden,
but are in the middle of China, in Hangzhou,
an almost ghost town, that is half parisian boulevard, with its own Eiffel Tower, half dorm buildings.
Those albinos that seem to know things we don't know.
This weird child cult that forms around one of them.
And Jamie XX's music, beating our brains.
If somebody asked me what beauty looks like, in the beginning of XXI century,
and if we understand that beauty has a lot to do with the spirit of every historical period,
I couldn't think of a more accurate description that the one Gavras offers here.
Same way that happened with his idea of love, in Lynch's work we find a very personal approach to beauty.
A very strange beauty that in my opinion is very urban.
Industrial, dark, decadent, complex, corny, kitsch, sublime...
It doesn't just create a world, but it's also inheritor of social circumstances of the world it was created in.
It describes the reality beyond the screen, even if he does it with distorted lines or wild brushes.
City will never have a unique interpretation,
the same way that beauty is always going to be a negotiation between who creates, who looks,
and the social predominant ideas of each historical moment.
It depends on us to educate the eye, the mind, and the feet to walk,
along the streets of this jungle that, happily, still hides a lot of secrets...
