David Lynch is Happy

David Lynch was in Boston's Cutler Majestic Theatre Saturday night talking to a crowd of mostly college students on the subject of "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain." One might expect from such a talk an attempt to delineate and describe these weighty concepts, and, from an artist as preeminent as Lynch, some anecdotal narratives giving insight into his creative process. Instead, the evening did little but to further mire these concepts in a web of vague abstractions.

Taking my seat in the theater, I felt an inkling of the disappointment that would follow. The very setting spoke to the lack of interactive, and hence dialectic, possibilities. I've become accustomed over the past several weeks to academic colloquia which encourage audience engagement. These have been held in utilitarian, some might say "ugly," lecture halls with limited capacity and shortened distance between speaker and listeners. The Majestic, true to its name, rises vertically hundreds of feet to provided immense capacity. From my seat in the balcony, the speakers were but fuzzy, acutely foreshortened forms. The proscenium, encrusted with gold paint and bands of sculptural fruit, framed the ensuing event as performance rather than dialog. Which is not to say that the audience wasn't ostensibly encouraged to ask questions. Though I couldn't see them from my vantage point, microphones had been deployed, and after some introductory comments Lynch accepted questions from the audience. But was it coincidence that the questions asked were slight and/or sycophantic?

I'm willing to accept that the theater setting was a necessary evil to allow as many people as possible to see a very popular but typically reclusive filmmaker. And I certainly appreciate Lynch's willingness to participate in a public forum on his life and works. However, it became clear by the end of the opening statements that this would not be a free-form discussion of art and creativity, or even a formal lecture on those topics, but a biased and scientifically specious presentation (or, as a colleague of mine correctly pegged it, an "infomercial") on the benefits of Transcendental Meditation.

Supporting Lynch's impassioned but ultimately unhelpful ruminations were John Hagelin, the director of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, and Dr. Fred Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management, who put on the full-court press for legitimizing the foundations of TM. Hagelin made baldly controversial claims like (and I'm paraphrasing) "science has proven that consciousness is the unified field of Unified Field Theory," without any hint of acknowledgement to their contentiousness. And I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the audience was filled with plants, but consider these ostensibly spontaneous questions from the Q&A period:

"I'm a film teacher and filmmaker. Can you share how has Transcendental Meditation helped you be a better filmmaker?"
"What would you say to those who are skeptical about Transcendental Meditation?"

Listen, it's great that David Lynch is a happy, positive person who has found inner peace through TM. And, certainly, one who has found happiness has the right, if not the duty, to share his methodology with the rest of us. But that doesn't make it interesting.