David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me (1992) wasn’t exactly warmly greeted. After a chorus of boos scored the rolling credits in Cannes, the New York Time’s Vincent Carnaby asserted that “it’s not the worst movie ever made, it just seems to be.” I get the criticism for the now reappraised cult classic. The Twin Peaks (1990-91) series had its tongue firmly in cheek, but Fire Walk With Me bit the tongue clean off. The film is a trudge through Laura Palmer’s miserable final days, but amongst the lethally bizarre is what appears to be a Rosetta Stone for Lynch’s art, a perfect doorway for those that have yet to enter the Black Lodge.

Enter the town of Deer Meadow. Gordon Cole (Lynch himself) loudly introduces Special Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) before directing attention to his “mother’s sister’s girl” Lil (Kimberly Ann Cole). Lil, dressed in red, doesn’t stop for a hello but instead performs a bizarre dance. The scene is no more bizarre than many found in Lynch’s art, but what is interesting is what follows.

On the drive into town, Chester deciphers Lil’s dance; each hand gesture, leg twist and facial expression: “A sour look means we’ll have problems with the local authorities [...] Both eyes blinking means trouble higher up.”

I was stunned that the director would flatly deconstruct a scene in the middle of a stubbornly Lynchian experience. Then I realised, this isn’t Lynch doing us a favour, this is an artist sticking his tongue out to a career-spanning grievance with answers. On this front, the director has remained firmly tight-lipped, for example in this interview at the 2007 Baftas:

David Lynch: Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film.

Interviewer: Elaborate on that.

David Lynch: No.

Lynch has also said: “When you finish anything, people want to talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime. [...] A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words.” There is a subtle difference here between spectator and author discussion. Oscar Wilde best summarises this in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey: All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read symbols do so at their own peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” The power of the symbol is relative to the beholder of the symbol. This kind of speculation from the viewer is different to an author permanently fixing a meaning to their work.

Lynch said “A sore can be very beautiful. But as soon as you name it, it stops being beautiful.” An image is a question to the audience, but if it is answered by the author it becomes information or what Wilde disparagingly describes as useful: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.”

Lynch continually avoids usefulness by keeping his meanings elusive. Even Lynch’s approach to making art is like that of a spectator. “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract.”

In this sense, Lynch is watching an interior screen playing abstract images in the “deep water” and choosing the ones that make instinctual sense. The intellectual sense of the images comes as they are placed in a certain context (film, novel, painting) and then released to new spectators. It is important that the artist does not explain why he caught the fish and removes the hook from its mouth so it can swim freely and catch the interest of the spectator.

The Rosetta Stone may not be the right analogy for Lil’s dance. The Rosetta Stone helped decode an entire language; Lil’s scene decodes only a fragment of text while the rest remains mysterious. What it tantalisingly hints at is that Lynch has a method behind his madness, and that everything we puzzle over has or can have a meaning.

Agent Desmond: Did you notice what was pinned to it? (Lil’s Blouse)

Sam Stanley: A Blue Rose

Agent Desmond: Good. I can’t tell you about that.

Sam Stanley: Can’t?

Agent Desmond: No I can’t.

An image can pose a question to stick in the mind indefinitely. Lynch probably laughed himself silly walking out of Cannes knowing that every viewer on their way out of the cinema, on the drive home, brushing their teeth, and twisting and turning to fall asleep, would think of Lil’s dance and wonder... What did the Blue Rose mean?

Jack Wightman is that film nerd who works in a bookshop. He loves writing screenplays and articles, but sweats over the simplest of paragraphs, this bio included. You can read more of his articles at https://www.justonemansopinion.org.uk/