Just watched this for the first time. That is my third David Lynch movie, along with perhaps the last five episodes of the original Twin Peaks series. My verdict? I hate all the violence, but I find him useful. He is struggling in his own way to make sense of the world.
Note that the robin was eating an insect. This is the world we live in. I am very sure he did that very, very consciously, to show that not all the evil in the world had been rectified, even if those watching were too naive to see what was in front of their faces. This was his point, in my view.
Couple thoughts.
First, it occurred to me early on that much of what we think of when we think of the 1950’s–and by we I mean people born in the mid-60’s and later, who did not touch any part of the 1950’s in America–is black and white shows like Leave it to Beaver, and the Andy Griffith Show, and the Dick van Dyke Show, and I Love Lucy.
And what needs to be said about those shows is they were under tight editorial control. We have in our own country back then what amounted to social propaganda which was intended to counter and undermine Soviet propaganda, which even then was oozing in through every intellectual pore in our country.
And realistically, how DOES one counter something that so many people agree to willingly? You can’t tell them “just say no”. The only way forward is with a better vision, and as Thomas Sowell commented–and keep in mind he was a Marxist until he actually worked for the Federal government–the Left truly has a better vision, a better brochure (to use Sheryl Crow’s phrase) than we do. We want more of the same. But the world is filled with flaws, with cracks, with evil, with injustice, with pain. Why would one embrace that when someone else is hawking a world free of misery, distress, inequality, loneliness, war, poverty, and all other forms of injustice?
As Sowell points out, only with facts. And facts have short legs. They can’t fly like disingenuous fairy tales.
But to conclude this point, I don’t think the people who actually lived through the fifties lived in a fairy tale world. I think they were all very aware of how bad the world can be, and no small number of them contributed to it.
This myth of the happy, carefree, simple world of the 1950’s has all the validity to it that Communist utopias do. Were we to “return” to that era somehow, we would all be sorely, sorely disappointed. This form of nostalgia is its own form of Utopianism.
And I might even argue that that is another difference in myth between Fascism and Communism. For Fascists the past is what we need to look to for our myths. For Communists, the future. Both lie. Both terrorize and kill to either recreate or create something which never was, and which never can be following the methods they apply.
Secondly, his intent, obviously, was to point to the awfulness of the world, and specifically to do it within the heart of a “happy town”. To “deconstruct” Happy Town USA, where there are flowers and birds and bees, and everyone is peaceful and happy.
It is small wonder that this film did so well in the mid-1980’s, among the Leftist intelligentsia, which was only to eager to throw mud and shit at any notions of American purity and innocence.
And to be sure, most of us really don’t know, even now, how much blood our troops have shed overseas, sometimes for very morally ambiguous or arguably even evil reasons. They are on solid ground pointing all that out.
But they leave solid ground and float back into fairy tales when the ignore other, worse evils in the world, the ubiquity of injustice and violence all over the world for all of human history, and declare the American Project defunct because imperfect. None of them could survive in their personal lives moral demands of the sort they place on our nation. None of them could defend the atrocities committed by regimes they supported openly or by proxy.
It was not then and is not now inappropriate to compare evils. To compare the good in one nation with that of another; and to then compare the evil. America fares very, very well in that analysis. No nation with our power has EVER used it with such restraint. I study history. This is clearly true.
But I would suggest that for most of these intellectuals “America” was not represented by Kyle MacLachlan, who with his gee-whiz Boy Scoutish vibe might have been one of the Hardy Boys, and who worked with persistence, daring and considerable intelligence to stop a patent evil.
No, I think for the America hating Left Dennis Hopper stood in for our ugly underbelly, for Pinochet helicopter rides, and My Lai, and Savak. Never mind that Pinochet voluntarily relinquished power and held elections, or that the NVA perpetrated dozens of My Lai’s under orders from Hanoi, or that the Revolutionary Guard was and remains vastly more violent, and in many cases literally repurposed the same torture chambers for their own political opponents. We are not supposed to add that context.
It is not understating the case, in my view, to see in Dennis Hopper a prototype of the White Supremacist, which haunts us today. Never mind that literally every act of “racism” I personally have read about was a false flag conducted by an impatient Leftist.
No: he is the simple evil that simple people using grade school emotionality can direct their weak emotional energies on, and make stand in for 90 million Americans. I really think this is true.
Thirdly, I have to wonder if Lynch was not tempted to make this a de facto horror movie, which I had some anxiety he might. I thought the guy coming up the stairs was Detective Williams. What if he had walked in, shot Kyle MacLachlan, and his daughter walked in, and said OH DADDY. He just then hits her and says, “that’s enough of that. Now we are going home, and Mike is better for you anyway.” She then says “Yes, Father”, and follows him out. Cue the curtain.
It had to have crossed his mind. Someone who spends as much time in darkness as him obviously has conflicting impulses. Such an ending would not have SOLD well. That may be the only thing that restrained him: he needed the money.
But would that not have been a beautiful thing for the anti-American intelligentsia? They could say SEE WE TOLD YOU SO. That is the kind of ending these self loathing and hateful people would have celebrated.
Oh, it is tiring being me. But I had put off watching that movie for a long time. I can move that over to the Complete pile.