A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

Author:David Foster Wallace [WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780316090520
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

15 addendum to (14) re Lynch and race

Except now for Richard Pryor, has there ever been even like one black person in a David Lynch movie? 35 There’ve been plenty of dwarves and amputees and spastics and psychotics, but have there been any other, more shall we say culturally significant minorities? Latins? Hasidim? Gay people? 36 Asian-Americans?… There was that sultry oriental sawmill owner in Twin Peaks, but her ethnicity was, to say the least, overshadowed by her sultriness. 37

I.e. why are Lynch’s movies all so white?

The likely answer involves the fact that Lynch’s movies are essentially apolitical. Let’s face it: get white people and black people together on the screen and there’s going to be an automatic political voltage. Ethnic and cultural and political tensions. And Lynch’s films are in no way about ethnic or cultural or political tensions. The films are all about tensions, but these tensions are always in and between individuals. There are, in Lynch’s movies, no real groups or associations. There are sometimes alliances, but these are alliances based on shared obsessions. Lynch’s characters are essentially alone (Alone): they’re alienated from pretty much everything except the particular obsessions they’ve developed to help ease their alienation (… or is their alienation in fact a consequence of their obsessions? and does Lynch really hold an obsession or fantasy or fetish to be any kind of true anodyne for human alienation? does the average fetishist have any kind of actual relationship with the fetish?) Anyway, this kind of stuff is Lynch’s movies’ only real politics, viz. the primal politics of Self/Exterior and Id/Object. It’s a politics all about religions, darknesses, but for Lynch these have nothing to do with testaments or skin.

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