10 Theories That Help Explain The Works Of David Lynch
6. Technology Vs. Fantasy
Lynch's love of cinema as a distinct medium has inspired the constant references to technology, industry and filmmaking apparatus in his films. There are so many examples of this: the industrial hum of Eraserhead's soundtrack; the video cameras that dominate Lost Highway's narrative and visual style; the revelatory shots of movie cameras in Inland Empire; the tape recordings in Mulholland Drive's Club Silencio; Cooper's dictaphone in Twin Peaks; the flashing and faltering lights, references to electricity and shots of factories that appear throughout his oeuvre.... One interpretation of this is that the director is playing on the well-worn phrase "the medium is the message", coined by Marshall MacLuhan to refer to the fact that an audience comes to understand what is happening in a medium (say, a film, a song, a TV show, a novel) through the stylistic devices of the medium itself. Effectively, the only way that a film makes sense is because of its own technologies - sounds, cinematography, editing, acting, post-production. In Lynch's films, he does not want the audience to forget this, so he consistently reminds them of the presence of technology in the film, as in the examples listed above. In Lynch's mind, the narratives and images of films are fantasy places that audiences can escape into when "the lights go down the curtains start to open". They can lose themselves in a beautiful world that they can't experience elsewhere. But it is important to Lynch that viewers do not forget that this fantasy world has been carefully created by technology. The film's universe isn't an actual fantasy, like a dream - it is a carefully designed and constructed film. Everything shown on screen has been made with the use of cameras, microphones, lighting, etc. It is impossible to forget this while watching Lynch's films. He reminds the audience constantly, as with the grainy video footage in Lost Highway, the unclear shifts between "film" and "filming" in Inland Empire, and Bondar's reminder that everything being shown is "an illusion" in Mulholland Drive.
