EVERYTHING IS CHANGING AND NOTHING IS STILL

Imagine you are a hyper-educated avant-gardist in grad school learning to write. The screen gets all fuzzy now as the viewer’s invited to imagine this. Coming out of an avant-garde tradition, I get to this grad school and the grad school, it turns out all the teachers are realists. They are not at all interested in postmodern avant-garde stuff. Now, there is an interesting delusion going on here. So they don’t like my stuff. I believe that it’s not because my stuff isn’t good, but because just they just don’t happen to like this kind of esthetic.
In fact, known to them but unknown to me, the stuff was bad, was indeed bad. So in the middle of all this, hating the teachers, but hating them for exactly the wrong reason — this was Spring of 1986 — I remember — I remember who I went to see the movie with — Blue Velvet comes out.
Blue Velvet is a type of surrealism, it may have some — it may have debts. There is a debt to Hitchcock somewhere, but it is an entirely new and original kind of surrealism. It no more comes out of a previous tradition, or the postmodern thing. It is completely David Lynch. And I don’t know how well you or your viewers would remember the film, but there are some very odd — there is a moment where a guy named the Yellow Man in shot in an apartment and then Jeffrey, the main character, runs through the apartment, and the guy is dead but he is still standing there. There is no explanation. He is just standing there. It is almost classically Francophilistically surreal, and yet it seemed absolutely true, and absolutely appropriate.
And there was this way in which I all of the sudden realized that the point of being postmodern or being avant-garde, or whatever, wasn’t to follow in a certain kind of tradition, that all that stuff is B.S. imposed by critics and camp followers afterwards…What the really great artists do is they are entirely themselves. They are entirely themselves. They’ve got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic, and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings. And this is what Blue Velvet did for me.
I’m not suggesting it would do that for any other viewer, but I — Lynch very much helped me snap out of a kind of adolescent delusion that I was in about what sort of avant-garde art could be. And it’s very odd because film and books are very different media, but I remember going with two poets and one student fiction writer to go see this and all of us going to the coffee shop afterwards and just slapping ourselves on the forehead. It was this truly epiphanic experience.

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