Title: Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch
Abstract: Jeff Johnson. Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch. McFarland, 2004. 186 pages; $32.00. Cinematic Messiah It all began with love affair. In 1986, when Jeff Johnson was university teacher in Melbourne, Florida, he became fascinated by David Lynch's latest film, Blue Velvet, so much so that, in order to see it every day for week, he was prepared to take the two hour round trip to Orlando, the nearest place where the feature was playing. At the time, the young critic believed that Lynch was a new cinematic messiah, blessed with challenging and quirky vision of existence: seemed like kinky phenomenologist, as appalled at the everydayness of reality as Heidegger, tuned to having been thrown into the world, clueless as to the source of our angst yet intrigued by the mystery of things, what appearances promise and hide .... I was seduced - and that is the only word to describe the desire Blue Velvet inspired in me. Unfortunately, as with so many overheated nights of passion, disillusion came with the morning. This book is the result, and it has all the vehemence of lover left abandoned among the dirty dishes. After Blue Velvet, Johnson found that Lynch's subsequent films had become merely tired re-treading of earlier motifs and images. He found Wild at Heart (1990) embarrassing, the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91) predictable, and, though he saw some saving graces in Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), they were still, in essence, the same old, way out thing. One suspects, however, that The Straight Story (1999) was the final straw; Johnson does not say so, but his disgust at the film rumbles in every sentence. Certainly, his portrait of this hokey tale of mid-Western virtue, with its sentimentality and patriarchal complacency, is persuasive case for seeing Lynch not as some counter-cultural wizard, but rather as a puritanical, hyper-patriotic, idealistic conservative ...embracing wholeheartedly Reagan's reification of the fifties. In short, Lynch's surface dazzle is deceptive. He is really Po-Mo Puritan, where the po-mo hides view of America that George W. Bush would not find unsympathetic. This neoconservative tendency has been concealed, Johnson believes, by previous critics who have been too beholden to the aesthetics of Lynch's work, and to fashionable theories that deny inherent meanings within film. In no holds barred chapter, he attacks his predecessors for being little more than apologists, in love with the director's pyrotechnics, but blind to the structural and moral implications of his work. Those implications are Manichean and Calvinist. Lynch's America is stage on which good and evil wage their wars in the souls of men and women who are torn by their dualistic nature; their literary equivalents are the tortured characters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, battling with sin and groping for redemption. …
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 17
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