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Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram! , a historical fiction, and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Aks , a supernatural thriller, are far apart in their genres. Yet, a significant portion of both these stories happened inside the heads of the protagonists — Saketh Ram (Kamal Haasan) in the former and ACP Manu Verma (Amitabh Bachchan) in the latter. In Aks, for instance, the good cop Manu Verma, having killed his evil nemesis Raghavan (Manoj Bajpai) in a forced encounter, is possessed by the latter's soul. And with works such as these, Indian cinema took small steps toward the hitherto forbidden territory of cinematic surrealism, or what’s called phantasmagoria.
I still wouldn’t have felt the need to understand cinematic surrealism further if I hadn’t, much later, encountered a film that left many of my friends with loath. That film, Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking , wasn’t something I disliked. But it surely made me uncomfortable.
A major part of the film takes place in K (John Abraham)’s subconscious, whose abstractness is picturised. The movie itself begins as a dream and ends with K coming out of one. He keeps going back to a state of dreaming every now and then, sometimes to escape reality, sometimes to come to grips with it. However, somewhat perplexingly, after a point it becomes difficult to make out where the dream ends and where reality begins.
Now, I was desperate to know more. And my search led me to David Lynch and his most popular film Mulholland Drive. I realised that Lynch's cinema heavily uses the leitmotif of dreams. At last, I had a reference point for No Smoking.
It’s nearly 10 years after Lynch’s last film — the somewhat haphazard Inland Empire , but what’s got me excited is the news that he is writing his memoir.
For a filmmaker, writing a memoir can never be as easy as bringing to life a scene. The exceptions are there, of course, one of them being Satyajit Ray, whose collection of writings on cinema ( Our Film, Their Films and Deep Focus ) would both form an indispensable part of any cinephile’s collection. But they are never the rule. However, as Bollywood director Dibakar Banerjee said, in an interview for the book Brave New Bollywood , when a director does manage to pull it off, it opens up fascinating psychological insights into the filmmaker’s mind.
I wonder if Lynch can pull it off. His films are anything but straightforward.
Out of the 10 films he has directed over a 40-year career span, at least six lack a story in the conventional sense. That is, there is no set climax, the narrative is left open-ended and, at times, the viewer is left disappointed that the script has not reached a possible, logical conclusion. However, the technical elements — camerawork, background music, visualisation — all are top-notch.
Lynch's ability to keep a viewer spellbound is perhaps due to his detailed knowledge of various art forms, including music. His films take liberal cues from the world of painting – another craft he mastered before his film-making days. The presence of disturbing motifs, like doppelgangers and surveillance cameras, adds to the thrill and suspense. Lynch doesn’t believe much in creating a dichotomy – the good vs. evil or innocent vs. guilty framework. And he leaves the viewer free to interpret the end for himself or herself. It is the kind of cinema that makes you want to take a dip into your own subconscious to explore the darker recesses of your personality.
At least four of Lynch’s films — Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire — have the power of dreams as a strong component. When he >brought out his first music album a few years ago, it was named The Big Dream . And, to a musically illiterate person like me, the element that strikes first on listening to it is psychedelia (from a sort of mind-altering surreal sounds).
Lynch’s cinema isn’t one of extreme absurdities, though. That world belongs to Luis Bunuel (he creates art out of nightmares in Un Chef Andalou ) where narratives have little role to play. Watching David Lynch movies, on the other hand, is like dreaming in a state of half-sleep: there is knowledge that this isn’t real but that does not stop us from wanting to proceed further. We want this dream to achieve some kind of logical conclusion, while being perfectly aware of the fact that there is none. And that we will be awakened with a rude jolt.
What, as a Lynch admirer, do I expect from his memoir? Surely, answers to a lot of unanswered questions. Like, where did his dystopian imagery come from? Did Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis have a role to play in that? Or, like, in a fast-paced world, where we prefer movies in the form of 90-minute entertainment capsules or visual spectacles along the lines of Baahubali or The Martian, does Lynch’s cinema matter?
Will his work be another attempt at explaining his romance with transcendental meditation, as his previous book, Catching the Big Fish , did? The optimist in me believes his reflections on cinema will be stimulating.
Lynch’s films, as I imagine them, are a form of antidote to the present world of entertainment where news and even, reality, possess puny lifecycles. His films probe our creativity and urge us to slow down as we move. They are like paintings: you need to observe the full panoply to appreciate it. You know it couldn’t be real, you know it is weird, yet you are fascinated by the sheer surrealism of it all. Would his book live up to his film legacy?
