The term 'Lynchian' by David Foster Wallace

I was not that interested in David Lynch. Mainly because I had only seen three of his films and some of his short films: (1) Mulholland Drive, which I saw in my early twenties and was the first movie I enjoyed watching (maybe enjoying is not the best word to describe this, as the movie is quite unsettling) despite having absolutely no idea what the whole thing was about; (2) Dune, which is so bad that I immediately assumed Lynch was an artist who had tried and failed catastrophically to be a filmmaker; (3) Blue Velvet, which again I thought it was a good movie but also immensely unsettling, creepy and pretty much without a point; (4) a collection of his short films, which confirmed my suspicion that David Lynch was an artist and certainly not a filmmaker or anything close.

My friend, who is one of those rare kind of people with enough sense and wits in his brain as to suffer from all the world's incongruences, recommended me to read David Foster Wallace's 'A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again', a collection of essays on different matter subjects. One of the essays is about David Lynch, and on one particular instance he explains what the term 'Lynchian' means. Here is his first definition ("academic") of the term: "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." I, being Spanish and naturally a slow reader, had to read it three times to get the full meaning of the concept, but once assimilated it opened a new door to understanding David Lynch's movies and his strong influence on a generation of filmmakers that includes Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers and Carl Franklin.

This essay (and the book once you are there!) is a key piece that I strongly recommend to anyone interested in filmmaking, whether you love, hate or, like myself was, are indifferent about David Lynch. For my part, I am currently watching the entire Twin Peaks collection (I was the only kid in my class, probably in the school even, who never watched the series... and I hated Laura Palmer for that), including the series, movies, documentaries and anything really that falls into my hands about it, and have a pile of David Lynch movies to watch and re-watch. I'll let you know when I get to the end.