“We are all Icelanders!”
So proclaimed Jerry (David Patrick Kelly) in the “Cooper’s Dream” episode of the original “Twin Peaks” back in 1990. Like much in writer/director David Lynch’s life and art, it was both exaggeration and truth.
Exhibit A: At Reykjavik’s vibrant Stockfish Film Festival on April 10, a panel titled “David Lynch and Surrealism in Film and Shorts” celebrated the work and worldview of the late auteur, who died January 16 at age 78. The nonprofit Stockfish fest focused its dynamic 11th edition on filmmaking issues relevant to the always-cool city at the top of the world, Reykjavik, as well as highlights of global cinema, and, in a centerpiece of the 10-day festival, a Lynch-a-thon that brought out Icelandic cineastes.
The celebration at Reykjavik’s cozy arthouse theater BioParadis — translated from Icelandic as “Cinema Paradise” — was, to use a phrase the “Mulholland Drive” director loved, a gas. The event began with a showing of the doc “David Lynch: The Art Life” (2016), followed by screenings of his proto-stylistic shorts from the late 1960s and early ’70s, from “The Alphabet” (1968) starring Lynch’s first wife, Peggy, to “The Amputee” (1974), show by “Blue Velvet” and “Eraserhead” DP Frederick Elmes and starring Catherine E. Coulson, later the “Twin Peaks” Log Lady.
A panel discussion followed, as did an unveiling of an in-memoriam bust (complete with dramatic swoop of well-coiffed hair) by Icelandic artist Klaudia Karolina Kaczmarek.
Panelists included longtime producing veteran Sigurjón Sighvatsson (“Basquiat,” “Brothers”), an executive producer of “Wild at Heart”; Stockfish guest of honor Floria Sigismondi, an esteemed music video director (for David Bowie, The White Stripes, and Björk; the film “The Runaways”); and Icelandic screenwriter and poet Sjon.
“David made the surreal real, and that’s why he appeals to so many people — what we normally wouldn’t see because it’s too surreal, he made relatable,” said Sighvatsson. “His trajectories, unique as they were, somehow always fell away and put us all on his wavelength.”
Said Sjon, “When I first saw ‘Eraserhead,’ I remember coming out of the theater with some friends and saying, ‘Seeing this film will change us.’ The most recent time I saw it, I showed it to my teenagers because I wanted something artistic to happen to them. Maybe because I was watching it with my family, I realized that ‘Eraserhead’ is a story about a family — it’s about a man not ready to be a father, his complicated relationship with his in-laws, his terror at having a child, his horrible job in a horrible industrial place. There is something about the simplicity of Lynch’s plots that’s so compelling. He sort of tricks us into joining him.”
“And after seeing ‘Eraserhead,’ the kids are doing OK, don’t worry!” Sjon added.
Sigismondi noted that she felt Lynch’s audiences and characters share a sense of knowing full well the strange terrain they’re in, and then reacting to it as if the strangeness were perfectly normal.
“In ‘Wild at Heart,’ when Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern’s characters are driving at night and see a car crash, they stop with a kind of eerie feeling between them, but in the way that Lynch does, the scene also has a bit of humor,” said Sigismondi. “Then, Sherilyn Fenn’s character comes out of the wreck scratching her head, all confused, and Lynch lingers on this moment — and in that mixture of dark comedy and strangeness, we get the sense that the characters know there’s something going on, maybe even knowing it before it happens. That’s one way Lynch guides us through this foreboding that we, and his characters, know is imminent.”
“That was one of his many strengths — if you think about how incredibly odd or uncomfortable or surreal the things he brought to the screen were, he packaged it in a way that it kind of popped for so many people,” added Sigismondi.
But Lynch’s stories’ mysteries — going back to his work at art schools in Washington, D.C., Boston, and finally the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where his paintings, multimedia artworks, and short films began — have an inevitability that Sjon described as an anchor in Lynch’s work.
“It was interesting to watch his short films before this panel, because in these works we saw that the mystery of things, whatever it is, is already there — the possibility of it is always at the ready,” said Sjon. “One of my favorite scenes in a Lynch film is the ‘Lost Highway’ party scene when the mystery man [played by Robert Blake] starts talking to the main character [played by Bill Pullman] and asks him to call his own house, where the mystery man somehow also is. We witness at that moment the breaking down of time and space, the blurring of reality and dreaming, in a very simple context. Everything’s normal up to the point when the man says, ‘Call this number.’ We realize the mystery was there in the reality, always ready to happen.”
Sigismondi made the connection between that inevitability aspect to Lynch’s stories and his practice of Transcendental Meditation, which she discovered through his 2006 book “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.” (Lynch had been a devotee of the technique since the early 1970s and started the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005.)
“Lynch never liked to explain what he was doing, in any of his artistic expressions,” said Sigismondi. “His films were simultaneously plot-driven and also, of course, deeply dreamlike — such a great melding. In his meditation advice, he would often talk about going deep within yourself, then going into the ‘unified field’ to bring ideas back, and how when we’re all in that mental space, it’s like the collective consciousness. ‘Bringing things back’ could mean something different to everyone; we all have our own interpretations. It didn’t necessarily mean creativity. He never felt a need to lay it all out.”
Afterward, appreciating the Lynch bust in the lobby of the BioParadis, the panelists noted that for all of Lynch’s surrealist non sequiturs, opaque dark visions, explosions of violence, and deadpan moments that warp Americana norms, what stood out most for them was the director’s humanity, and endless curiosity about his fellow humans.
“‘The Straight Story,’ from 1999, is an important Lynch film in that regard,” said Sjon. “There, he allowed us to really see his human heart absolutely naked and beating, and this is the heart that is at the center of all of his films, no matter how dark they may become. Angelo Badalamenti’s lush scores were also vital for him in that way, too, … [helping to] underline that humanity as much as it does the mystery.”
“People often miss the humanity in David’s work — they jump to the surrealism,” said Sighvatsson. “But one of my favorite scenes of his is the final scene in ‘Wild at Heart,’ when Sailor is running after Lulu. Talk about romantic! You hardly ever hear the words ‘David Lynch’ and ‘romantic’ together, but even the short films shown here had that in them to a degree.”
“In his meditation videos and social media posts, and in life, Lynch was so articulate about very complicated things, and so willing to share his insights,” said Sigismondi.
Lynch — who visited Reykjavik in 2009 at the invitation of Sighvatsson and the Icelandic TM Foundation to teach a (very well-attended) meditation class for free — may have riffed on Iceland in “Twin Peaks,” but he and the Land of Fire and Ice had a special connection.
When asked by an audience member at the end of the panel what advice they had for Icelandic filmmakers, Sighvatsson’s was as straightforward as a serving of pie and coffee: “Be more like Lynch.”
