Why does a David Lynch movie feel more real than a documentary?

There's the surface of mundane reality and then there's all the undercurrents and secrets and desires and emotions and dynamics and attractions and repulsions underneath the surface. David Lynch has characters who directly express what is underneath, or events that symbolically show them, or the mood of a scene (through music and colors and facial expressions) conveys what we actually feel like in many situations (though many don't like to notice those deeper layers. He's heightening the unexpressed, the unconscious, the unspoken stuff. So, it feels very real, if you are willing to notice that in your own life also, at least to some extent. For many people I am sure somethng like Mulholland DRive makes no sense and seems unrealistic. You have be aware of these other levels. Obviously enough are to appreciate this films, though some who appreciate his films may just enjoy the weirdness without really recognizingit or themselves in it.

Lynch is also mocking things that are real but you generally don't get to mock them. So, he is showing how ridiculous some things are, going around the taboos.

Reply to samja

Quoting samja

I’ve been trying to articulate why the movies of David Lynch, speaks more truth to me than many documentaries,

I don’t think that many feel that way, which is why you feel that a Lynch movie expresses more about truth. Nor do I don’t think it’s because he shows reality as illusory or that the illusions are a manifestation of something real.

So much of what we watch or take part in is a commercial venture. And it purports to show us something about ourselves, which it never achieves. In so many films everything is formatted. The dialogue is written to lead us through the film, to string the narrative together. The emotions are revealed at their most basic level: swearing, laughing, crying. There is accompanying music to indicate how we should feel about scenes, and there is always the stereotypical characters. We know life is more complex than that.

Harold Pinter did the same with his plays. The raw emotion, the things said that are rarely said that reveal something about who we are. To me this is what art really is. It’s not there to comfort or instruct, it’s there to cut through our protective egos. Not a lot of people want to do that.

Quoting samja

Is it because documentaries show reality as it is, which is fundamentally illusory, but never points that out? whereas Lynch shows us illusions and then shows us how these illusions are manifestations of something real?

I think of it in terms of the common technique in writing: show don't tell. Like many other artists in their films and novels and poems and so on, Lynch is showing, and he doesn't tell us much at all. Whereas a documentary tells us what happened, and we feel appropriate emotions and gain insights only insofar as the narrative approaches the dramatic techniques of fiction, in fiction itself the artist is free to concentrate on what matters, which aims to be universal, to apply to everyone.

But what matters? I think often what matters to us, which therefore strikes us most forcefully as being more truthful, is some kind of direct representation of what people are like and how they feel; of their love, pain, joy, anger, creation and destruction.

Tolstoy was preoccupied with truth, and he said (something like) that the more he strove for historical accuracy in War and Peace, the further away he got from the truth. The parts of that book that strike one as most truthful are certainly not the parts in which he gives you his high-level, bird's eye account of the war of 1812. Rather, the truth is in his fictional world, in his observations of individual characters and relationships.

Unlike Tolstoy, Lynch is an expressionist, really only interested in character and relationships and mood--and more fundamentally just in feelings--so this kind of truth, the truth of how people like you and me feel, and why they do what they do, is what comes across strongest.

But I think Lynch goes further than most. His films feel truthful, to those who are responsive, because they show you pure emotion, and he dispenses with narrative simplicity or clarity. Often the way that truth is told in film and literature is by telling stories, but Lynch is somewhat different: either he places less importance on storytelling--using it as a convenient background against which to show us emotions and sensations--or he makes you work at making sense of the story (probably both).

But I don't think show don't tell is necessary for maximal artistic truthiness. Proust uses a hell of a lot of words to describe experience in meticulous detail. When I read it in my twenties it blew my mind because I never imagined that any writer could have captured those elements of life that I was familiar with but hadn't thought to explore or to share, and which I had probably come to think of as unique to me. The truth here is in the description more than in the dialogue and the drama (what there is of it).

Which is to say, there are several roads to truth. If you want to see what jealousy or impotence are, i.e., if you want to know the subjective truth of those conditions, then you can watch Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, or Eraserhead. If you want to know how China got from feudalism to Communism, a documentary or a history book is fine. But if you want to know how the Chinese people felt about what was happening, and what its meaning was, go for a story: an autobiography or a historical novel. But that scheme doesn't scratch the surface.

Reply to samja Never heard of David Lynch though his name has a familiar ring to it. Anyway, I have a theory regarding this business about reality being an illusion. Since you mentioned Hinduism perhaps you're referring to Maya and I'll run with that for the moment.

Maya and its other Eastern and Western counterparts render reality into an hierarchy, one level of which is Maya/illusion itself and the other, allegedly deeper, level is true reality. It's not too much of a stretch, in fact it's patently clear, that with this attitude, it's turtles all the way down - one level of reality under another ad infinitum. One could even say, for that matter, that it's all illusion from start to finish assuming there's an end.

My take on reality is slightly different. I look at the world as if it's a cut diamond, sparkling in all its glory, something that happens as light enters it through its many facets. Each facet is real as real can be. As you can see, such a point of view, results in the dissolution of the notion of Maya as there's no illusion we have to dispel in order to get to the truth, just different sides to reality.

David Lynch's movies if they do "...shows us illusions and then shows us how these illusions are manifestations of something real." seem to be precisely what I'm talking about.

There's more that can be said but I'll leave you with that to chew on.

Reply to samja For me David Lynch often makes mainstream 'surrealist' movies full of self indulgent devices and visual non-sequiturs. I have often found his work to be grating, dull and repetitive stuff. Bombastic student movies are made like this all the time. Lynch's great talent is being a minor player in mainstream cinema despite his uncommercial material. How are you determining that Lynch's movie illusions are more real?

Reply to samja
To clarify what you have in mind, you have to be capable of pointing out what you mean by the word "real". It's an honorific term, we speak of the "real deal" or "real truth", this doesn't mean there are two types of deals or two types of truth, we are just emphasizing something.

Having said this, given the way you pose the question, you say that Lynch feels more real than a documentary. A documentary of what kind? Animals, Politics, Sports, etc.? The only sense I can make of your question is that Lynch's work do something to you that documentaries don't.

That makes sense given Lynch's style. But then again, that seems to me to be the purpose of art: to express emotions, feelings and aspects of our conscious lives that are absent in other areas. I like Lynch a lot too, but I don't get the question too well.