As an avid reader of Kottke.org, I appreciate that he’s added in comments sections for some posts, though I rarely feel called to leave one of my own. One post from earlier today got my goat, though. Here’s Jason Kottke’s brief post and my reaction:
The post
Provocative from Tim Carmody: David Lynch was America’s greatest conservative filmmaker. “There is an assumption that great artists, especially subversive ones, live radical lives and embrace progressive politics. But Lynch…”
My comment
I also found this unsatisfying—less a provocation than a swing and a miss. I think it would have been useful for Carmody to define what “conservative” means to him. Instead he mostly gives definition by subtraction. For instance:
And though he clearly had a great sense of humor, there’s very little that’s insincere or campy about Lynch’s attitudes toward either his country or his films’ subjects.
I think his definition of a liberal/progressive artist is… John Waters? I just don’t see how insincerity and campiness neatly track onto politics. What’s campier than a MAGA hat?
Ultimately, Carmody seems to be arguing that having a strong sense of morality makes you a conservative, which just seems wrong. Here’s his line on this:
For all his comfort with ambiguity and fascination with evil, Lynch turns out to be a profound moralist. In one of Lynch’s last acting roles, his character Gordon Cole in 2017’s revival of “Twin Peaks” half-shouts, “Fix [your] hearts or die.”
This had me tearing out my hair! How can you bring up that line WITHOUT MENTIONING THAT IT’S DIRECTED AT ANTI-TRANS BIGOTRY! That’s not just argumentative malpractice; the elision totally distorts what’s going on here. Gordon Cole’s line is about morality, for sure—but in our society it’s a decidedly progressive take on the moral. Not Reaganite “family values” but a vision of bodily autonomy and freedom of self-expression that would put Lynch to the left of not just today’s Republicans but also many “centrist Democrats.”
The biggest problem with this take, though, is that I just can’t see how it’s useful or expands our understanding of the man or his work.
But where liberals look for solutions and progress, Lynch finds ambiguous fragments of dead futures.
Man, that’s not a difference between liberals and conservatives—that’s the difference between a politician or pundit and an artist. Lynch was always tight-lipped about what his work meant, and he also didn’t go out and get involved in political campaigns. That was a choice he made, and for me at least it’s more than a touch sacrilegious to try to pin him on a 2-d political spectrum when he spent decades exploring territory that was so far beyond such fantasies.
