Customer Reviews

The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book shows how clueless some of Lynch's interpreters have been (and still are!). If you want to "decode" Twin Peaks or Lost Highway, this book will hold your hand as you let go to 'get it'. The book is as much a corrective lens on the critique of Lynch as the author points out Lynch being towards Hollywood. Hitchcock:Bach::Lynch:Brahms -- not for casual "listening". This book may seem a bit wordy, but it does have a multitude of "points" (another reviewer must have skimmed this book!) : e.g. communities based on masculine control, disallowing feminine influence. The notes themselves offer much needed background.

This is one of my favorites. Again, not nearly as personal and spiritually engaging as "Lynch on Lynch", but near the top of the heap. Martha's adoration for Lynch, and her grounding in the worlds of both academic and personal art make for perfect doorways into the dialogue she shares with David. He's the man, and this a unique way to enter the center... As the drapes peel back, and the Francis Bacon book closes, Angelo's music blows saliva bubbles into the air, and a bunch of really nice people smoking American Spirits come ambling up the crooked walkway. They're talking 'bout coffee... They're talking about trees... They're talkin' 'bout art!

David Lynch's brilliance as a film-maker lies in his ability to transmit meaning through images rather than dialogue. Consequently, much of the body of his work is very hard to decode conventionally. Nochimson, however, gets around this brilliantly - by incorporating its linguistic indecipherability in her thesis. What she advocates when watching a Lynch movie, then, is a letting go of any hope of finding conventional meaning. Further, she defines such a conceit as inherently masculine - a phallic will-to-control that Lynch decries. Remarkably, this thesis is as equally applicable to Lynch's more mainstream work (e.g. The Elephant Man) as it is to his radical later output (e.g. Wild At Heart). If you want to view David Lynch's films in a radically innovative new light, buy this book today!

This is the best Lynch book, more penetrating than Lynch's own interviews. Nochimson boldly charts the universe of Lynch and gives it both mythological plausability and a solid, coherent locale: the world of visual and audio pop-culture chunks, romantically deteriorated and as intense, wispy, and spectral as cotton candy. One of the best, and most well-documented, works on an auteur since Bogdanovich's work on Hitchcock.

While Chion's book 'David Lynch' is overly concerned with biography as is noted, it does avoid the quasi new-age readings of this work which is flawed for that reason.
As Slavoj Zizek points out (directly referring to Nochimson's book), in 'The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch?s Lost Highway,' Nochimson is "focused on the flow of Life Energy that allegedly connects all events and runs through all scenes and persons, turning Lynch into the poet of a Jungian universal subconscious spiritualized libido," which is too easy a path to take in reference to Lynch's work.
Unfortunately, the best work on David Lynch has yet to be written.

Boring. Pointless. Weak.

The author struggles to make some kind of point in this book, unfortunately, neither she nor the reader can figure out what it is. She tries to "get" what Lynch is about, and fails miserably, as is evident in her interviews with him.

This is a poor choice for academics, an even poorer choice for fans.