David Lynch, Red Zig-Zag (2022), © David Lynch, courtesy Pace Gallery.
I imagine that everyone who came to see David Lynch’s “Big Bongo Night” exhibition at the Pace gallery in New York last autumn was probably already familiar with Lynch’s movies and television. Though he has been making paintings for decades (not to mention sculptures, music, coffee, and daily weather reports), the word “Lynchian” typically applies to films like Eraserhead (1977) and Lost Highway (1997), for which he is far better known. You, too, have come across this article because you are reading a film journal. In this sense, the exhibition did not disappoint. The large-scale paintings featured motifs recognizable from his cinematic worlds: multiplied and sometimes exploded heads, snippets of banal yet unnerving dialogue, dream worlds collapsed into waking ones. Despite the shift in medium to canvas, heavily caked paint, and at least one Band-Aid, these works were familiar and creepy, creepily familiar. Blunt, smudged, and lumpy, all the works appeared deliberately handmade, with the uncanny simplicity of outsider art. I snapped a photo of a tiny clay head, with sunken eyes and delicately poked nostrils, at which a pencil-drawn arrow pointed the words: “what the FUCK?”
Then there were the lamps. Watching a Lynch film teaches you to notice—and fear—the things that don’t fit, because they often come back later. In the gallery, I spent most of my time peering into the paintings, but found myself later unnerved by the lamps. There were eleven in all, and like the paintings, most had been made in 2022 or the past several years. Nine stood in the center of the gallery floor, along two sides of a half-wall. They were arrayed evenly in a row, as if on display in a furniture store. Like many lighting fixtures in Lynch’s films, these spindly ciphers had unusually small, dim heads. One, “Love Light #2,” glowed weakly red from atop a long, hand-chiseled pole. A set of four nearly identical lamps were laid out along one side, their heads made out of different blocks of wood varieties but cut in the same sharp, accordion fold. Each shone in ascending brightness, though never rising above accent wattage. “Red Zig-Zag,” which stood at the fore, featured a long passage up to what resembled a tiny, demonic phone booth.
The works were listed as “sculptures with light components,” but they were undeniably lamps. For one, they had black cables, not altogether drawn tightly, leading back to the half-wall that powered them. They also had switches. These were small, but often centrally and noticeably placed. In “White Table Top Lamp,” the switch protruded like a belly button from the bone-white resin base. The switches indicated that they were furniture. They were functional. If I were bolder I would have tried flicking one off.
David Lynch, Big Bongo Night (installation view), courtesy Pace Gallery.
The lamps posed a riddle: what was their function, here, in this room? Elsewhere in Lynch’s films, interiors are typically dingy and dark, warmed with a vellum shade, like the small red one by Diane’s phone in Mulholland Dr. (2001), or the Tiffany lamp that festoons Isabella Rossellini’s mauve den in Blue Velvet (1986). These are useless, say, for reading. Here, the lamps had the effect of turning the gallery space into a Lynch interior. Though the ambient light from the ceiling was brighter than most of his films, the lamps created a similarly quiet and eerie setting. With the windows additionally covered with heavy gray curtains, it was, as a man recounts of a dream in Mulholland Dr., “not day or night, it’s kind of half night. But it looks just like this. Except for the light.”
Light defines a space, making it knowable and finite. In Lynch’s films, there is another kind of light, one that intrudes on and deranges a space. Violence erupts through this light: bright, blue-white flashes, spotlights, and strobes. These are otherworldly manifestations, like the troupe of Polish prostitutes who inexplicably appear and dance the “Locomotion” before a pulsing glare in Inland Empire (2006). While some lights, like the Big Bongo lamps, have an identifiable electrical source, these lights are unlocatable, annihilating and occasionally sublime. (Tellingly, the fluted floor lamps in Twin Peaks’s mysterious Black Lodge don’t emit any light, nor do they have cables.) They can also suddenly disappear, as when the Palmer house goes dark at the end of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). The known, illuminated place, comes undone. In darkness, it becomes anywhere.
A unique feature of Lynch’s films is the absence of pathology. There is no psychoanalytic key to resolve the disorder; like these otherworldly lights, there is no source. It’s beside the point to explain the motives of the grinning Mystery Man of Lost Highway or Frank Booth’s “baby” persona in Blue Velvet. Though detectives abound in Lynch’s films, the abundant sadism and cruelty of his worlds are not mysteries to be solved. Instead, they are features of the nightmare itself. The lights, too, are not reflections of interior states in any expressionist sense. In a real sense, they are the Manichean forces whose struggle plays out in otherwise unassuming locations: living rooms, bedrooms, bars, diners, gas stations, roads traversed at night. These are familiar to us, “except for the light.”
The lamps of Big Bongo Night had a function, and that was to turn the gallery into an interior open to sudden, shocking disturbances. This is what followed me in the days and weeks after I’d visited the show. Maybe it was the smile on the half-exploded head of someone labeled “Billy???” in “I Call Out Your Name,” the crossed-out words in “He Went and He Did Do That Thing,” or the ominously titled “Car Accident by my House.” The bad thing might have already happened, or was yet to come—in Lynch’s work, both are usually true. But what was more unnerving, what had me looking over my shoulder after I’d left, was the sensation that these forces were not tidily contained in their frames on the walls. The lamps had put me in the space with them, touched by the same, dark glow.
David Lynch, He Went and He Did Do That Thing (n.d.), © David Lynch, courtesy Pace Gallery.