The Moray Eels Eat The Space Needle

He sat on the dais at the First Annual Humboldt County David Lynch Symposium, held over the course of two days in a very large conference room at The Best Western Plus in Eureka, California. He was the Chair of the Department of Art + Film at Cal Poly Humboldt, and so he was not surprised to have been invited to be a keynote speaker and read from his still unpublished, extremely brief paper, The Futility of Interpretation, Semantic Indeterminacy, and Non-Meaning in the Films of David Lynch. He was surprised, however, to learn that one of the other keynote speakers would be the actress Charlie Spradling, also known as Irma and Swabbie, from Lynch's Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks, respectively. He had been a huge "fan" of Spradling's during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when she worked regularly, starring in movies such as Ski Patrol, Kiss of the Beast, Mirror Mirror, Puppet Master II, Caged Fear, and The Doors. It would be the first time in his entire life he would be in the same room as an actress he had seen naked on multiple occasions. Also on the dais were two obese film bloggers, the movie reviewer for the dying local newspaper, and a four amateur researchers of varying ages and sexes, all of whom dressed and styled their hair exactly like David Lynch. While he sat and waited for the symposium to begin he read the program. The titles for some of the talks the other keynote speakers would be giving were The Blue Box and the Key: the Secrets of Mulholland Drive as They Relate to the Inconsistency of the Chinese Yuan as a Possible Alternative to the Current Global Hegemony of the U.S. Dollar, Finding the Owl Cave Ring: David Lynch's White Trash Paradise, and I'm There Right Now: The Mystery Man as Robert Blake's Foreshadowed Admission of Guilt. He listened with mounting frustration and acute boredom as the other people spoke, no, explained, every aspect of Lynch's work, decoded every object, and shoe-horned their own ideology into one overdetermined hypothesis after another. He opened a bottle of water and drank from it and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He scratched the back of his head. He could not stop scratching the back of his head. He bit the inside of his cheek. Finally, it was his turn to speak. He was the last person to speak on the second day of the symposium, and as he walked towards the lectern holding his paper in one hand and the bottle of water in the other, he decided to scrap his prepared speech and speak off the cuff and without a filter. "Look, Lynch's films are not supposed to be 'interpreted,'" he said. "They are about the act of interpretation. The characters are the ones who are trying to interpret their surroundings. All you as a viewer are supposed to do is observe this. If Lynch wants his characters befuddled, what makes you think you shouldn't be as well? That's why whenever anyone asked him what his films were 'about' he would shrug the question off or just laugh. His films are about the inabilty to answer questions like 'what is this about?' How do you people still not understand this?" He took a sip of water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He scratched the back of his head. He bit the inside of his cheek. "Why do you people continue to insist that Lynch's films need to be interpreted when the films themselves are about the futility of interpretation? 'The film is the explanation,' is what David Lynch himself said, I forget when and where, but he said this. And he wasn't trying to obfusctae, okay? He was giving it to you straight. And this seems to be a concept that most of you cannot wrap your heads around. Because all of you want answers. And you know why you're so obsessed with answers? Because none of you can live with questions. And that's all life is, you know? One unanswered question after the next. Lynch's films hit so deep because they aren't about women in trouble, or who killed who, or what is happening; they're about life itself, about the inability to make meaning out of existence. David Lynch was quite possibly the most prominent existentialist in American cultural history. He's our Kierkegaard, our Sartre, our Camus. And yet all any of you want from his work is to know what the glowing green ring means, or what the black and white zig-zag pattern on the floor in the Black Lodge means. You know what it means? That none of you understand the difference between shit and shinola. That's what it means. Congratulations. Give yourself a hand." He backed away from the lectern. No one clapped at first, and then there was a short, sloppy burst of sarcastic applause from some inconclusive vector in the back. After the closing remarks he was supposed to attend a group dinner at the Brick & Fire Bistro, but he opted out, choosing to order a cheeseburger and key lime pie from room service instead. He ate his food and watched Inland Empire on his computer. It was the fifteenth or sixteenth time he had seen the film, and he was still perfectly fine with not understanding a single thing that was happening. The next morning, while drinking his coffee and eating his complimentary breakfast in the lobby of the Best Western, he ran into one of the independent researchers (he thought maybe it was the genteleman who read from a paper titled The Gaping Maw: Sadism and the Female Form in Blue Velvet), who told him he had missed quite the time at the Bistro. "During the middle of dinner," said the independent researcher, "Ms. Spradling made her hand talk, you know, like a hand puppet, you know, like Senor Wences. You know Senor Wences?" He confirmed that he did indeed know who Senor Wences was. "Well," said the independent researcher, "she told us a story with her hand. She told us about a car accident. She was in a really bad car accident. She told us all about it. With her hand. In a voice. It wasn't her voice. I don't know whose voice she was doing, but it sounded familiar. I know the voice, I just can't put a name to it. It's on the tip of my tongue. I'll figure it out, though. When she was done we didn't know what to say. I think we were all trying to process it. But it was very moving. I cried. You would've cried too." He nodded in agreement. He bit the inside of his cheek. "You ever see Mirror Mirror? The one with Ms. Spradling? The one with the shower scene?" Again, he nodded in agreement and bit the inside of his cheek. "I swear to God," said the independent researcher, "that movie is an allegory for the end of the Cold War, right?" He nodded in agreement and bit the inside of his cheek, biting it so hard that he drew blood. He did this when he couldn't stand someone but didn't want them to know. He'd been doing this since he was a child. He didn't know why he did this, why he chose to harm himself for how other people made him feel, and he accepted that he never would.