When I was growing up, the American filmmakers that were probably the most intriguing to many were Tod Browning, Stanley Kubrick, and David Lynch (who passed away a few weeks ago). Kubrick was actually one of the first to acknowledge Lynch’s talent. In fact, he considered Lynch’s first ever movie, Eraserhead, released in 1976, to be one of his all-time favorites.

Lynching Americana’s Founding Mythologies

What is said to have made Lynch stand out was the unique cinematography of his movies, characterized by a play on the duality of light and darkness, dream-like camera movements and angles, static long takes and close-ups. The audio design, on the other hand, contains some mechanistic elements. One of the most famous series of horror videogames, Silent Hill, would also appear to be grounded in these very same aesthetics.

But beyond Lynch’s filmmaking style, there was also an assault against the idealized “American dream,” i.e., that of 1950s America, with its suburbs or small towns (Lynch himself had grown up in a similar environment), ostensibly happy families, and Hollywood glamour.

Both his movies and his television series, such as Twin Peaks (1990–1991), present an idyllic picture behind which lies murders and horror which end up reshaping the mindset of the main character, for instance, an idealistic FBI agent.

In one of his most famous movies, Blue Velvet (1986), the protagonist is an innocent college student who, after he returns to his suburban hometown, finds himself spiraling into a display of gratuitous violence. In Mulholland Drive (2001), also a neo-noir mystery but with additional surrealist elements, the lead woman is led to the brink of insanity (shattered identity) at her encounter with the “real” Hollywood.

Both movies also contain some subversive sexual dynamics (sadomasochism in Blue Velvet and lesbianism in Mulholland Drive). It is as though the viewer is being told that the “fulfillment of the American dream” impacts not only one’s psychology but also radically alters one’s most elementary bodily needs, i.e., those of a sexual nature, inevitably corrupting them with liberal approaches to “experimentation and innovation.”

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Lynch’s deconstruction of 1950s America—an America that is viewed by both the left-liberals and the right-liberals (“conservatives”) as idyllic—thus becomes a sort of cinematic social commentary.

Still Too Secular…?

Yet Lynch aimed to provide a critique of secular civilization from a secular perspective, while he himself was anchored into secularism, as can be demonstrated by his ambiguous views of “spirituality.”

Lynch was a lifelong practitioner of the so-called Transcendental Meditation, which was developed by a Hindu yogi and popularized in the West during the 1960s by groups such as the famous pop band, The Beatles. This occurred within the wider context of the “counter-culture,” when the Western youth resorted to aping anything “exotic” as long as it meant they were able to escape from Christianity.

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As is the case with most postmodernist Westerners who had embraced such forms of “Eastern spirituality,” Lynch was just trying to redeem himself. He attempted to give his existence a sense of pseudo-religiosity in order to demarcate himself from the average Westerner, perceived as too irreligious, while ultimately just masking what was, in practical terms, a form of aesthetic agnosticism.

Such a contradiction can be seen in his 2006 book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, an autobiographical self-help guide consisting of short chapters that are essays or, as if often the case, mere aphorisms.

Many of these chapters commence with quotes from Hindu scriptures, such as the Upanishads.

Here is how he describes “consciousness”:

Little fish swim on the surface, but the big ones swim down below. If you can expand the container you’re fishing in—your consciousness—you can catch bigger fish.

 

Here’s how it works: Inside every human being is an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness. When you “transcend” in Transcendental Meditation, you dive down into that ocean of pure consciousness. You splash into it. And it’s bliss. You can vibrate with this bliss. Experiencing pure consciousness enlivens it, expands it. It starts to unfold and grow.

 

If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book, you’ll have a golf-ball-sized understanding; when you look out a window, a golf-ball-sized awareness; when you wake up in the morning, a golf-ball-sized wakefulness; and as you go about your day, a golf-ball-sized inner happiness.

 

But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read that book, you’ll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; and as you go about your day, more inner happiness.

 

You can catch ideas at a deeper level. And creativity really flows. It makes life more like a fantastic game.

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Behind the supposed subtlety, this doesn’t differ very much at all from Sam Harris. Despite being a militant Jewish atheist activist, Harris is able to “appreciate” (some forms of) Buddhism simply because it can be considered to be in alignment with his secular philosophy of mind and the latest research in the neurosciences regarding meditation (for example, see his 2020 book, Making Sense).

Lynch, Harris, and the various other pseudo-spiritual Westerners thus maintain a noticeably secular approach to religion. Plainly, they use it as an aesthetic tool to rationalize what are fundamentally their personal ego trips.

It is thus no wonder that Lynch considers all religions to be fundamentally the same. In his view, they’re all fundamentally meaningless. For instance, he writes in another chapter of the aforementioned book:

I was raised Presbyterian. I respect people who are religious, and I think they find something there that’s beautiful, just beautiful. There’s truth there. Because these religions are old, though, and they’ve been fiddled with, possibly, I feel some of the original keys from the masters have been lost. But we’re all going to the same beautiful goal; that’s the way I see it.

 

All religions flow ultimately to the one ocean. Transcendental Meditation is a technique to experience that ocean, and it’s a technique practiced by people from all religions. Transcendental Meditation itself is not a religion—it’s not against any religion; it’s not against anything.

In conclusion, we could thus say that Lynch was still dreaming the American dream, because he had never really completely woken up.

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