Why Trump's tariffs on 'foreign' films should make us ask: After David Lynch, who?

The American film director David Lynch will be missed long after his death in January. AFP

On January 16, in the midst of one of its most profound crises, the American psyche lost its greatest contemporary interrogator when filmmaker and artistic renaissance man David Lynch died at 78. I immediately thought of Lynch and his remarkable films following Donald Trump’s decision this week to impose a 100 per cent tariff on foreign films, supposedly in response to – as the US President put it – “the death of Hollywood”.

Let me explain why.

A typical bemused complaint about Lynch’s films, paintings, music and other art was: “But why is it so weird?” In conventional terms, Lynch’s films indeed seem “weird”, but that’s because life is weird. It’s been particularly weird in the US over the 60 years during which Lynch fixed his deeply penetrating gaze on national culture, mores, facile expectations and, above all, the liminal and subconscious recesses of the American mind.

Lynch, born in Missoula, Montana, had a folksy charm seemingly at odds with the often ferocious and violent dissection with which he excavated the dark spaces lurking behind apparent American normality. One of his early champions, comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks, described him as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”.

The tone for the rest of his career, and its relationship to Americana, was set by the unforgettable opening of his 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet. His camera frames stereotypical US iconography: white picket fences surrounded by flowers, friendly firemen waving from reassuring red fire engines, happy children walking safely across a street protected by crossing guards, all seemingly plucked from the 1950s.

It settles upon a man casually watering his lawn while a woman inside watches a slightly menacing crime drama on television featuring an advancing revolver. But we see his hose tangled against itself, constricting the flow of water. He falls to the ground, clutching his neck. As he gurgles through a stroke, the now freely dancing hose sprays water that is lapped up by a happy and oblivious spaniel, while an equally thought-free toddler staggers forward.

In Mulholland Drive, David Lynch crafted a complex, flexible cinematic structure. Supplied picture

American life has only been getting weirder, and Lynch had been the pre-eminent chronicler of this intensifying weirdness

The camera pans down into the manicured lawn, and descends into the grass, revealing a ferocious battle between apparently monstrous black beetles. Alongside seemingly idyllic perfection is the constant prospect of human pain and death, but more importantly and unexpectedly a usually unseen and unsuspected dark undergrowth of savage, primal violence. These metaphors are hardly subtle, yet deep complexity arises from an unmistakable ambivalence.

The artist genuinely yearns for American pastoral purity, yet he harbours no illusions about the darkness – beyond merely the understood prospect of disease and death – that lurks unsuspected and unseen beneath that illusory perfection. Everywhere in Blue Velvet is an ever-deeper, always more unsettling next narrative layer, typically signalled by Lynch’s extraordinary and unique soundscapes characterised by deep drones and sudden unsettling sonic jolts. Everywhere, a cynical and savage humour is also at work.

In his later masterpieces, beginning with Lost Highway (1997), Lynch frequently depicted characters who may or may not be experiencing psychogenic fugue – a disassociation so profound that new realities can suddenly be imagined, dreamed or even “lived” to escape unbearable trauma. In subsequent films such as Mulholland Drive (2001, often justifiably cited as the greatest film yet of the 21st century) and Inland Empire (2006), the psychological puzzles become increasingly complex, convoluted and difficult to unpack.

The relationship between different characters – who may or may not be contrasting manifestations of each other, or some other, possibly unseen, persona – becomes increasingly oblique. With Inland Empire, one is obliged to simply experience the film’s raw power rather than trying to discover any underlying linear narrative. One may or may not exist, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. The film proceeds thematically, and it must be understood as a series of set pieces that either don’t connect as a standard coherent narrative or, rather, can be reconnected in so many plausible ways that any effort to discover a normative storyline is calculatedly thwarted and, indeed, punished by the complexity and, arguably, deliberate impossibility of the task.

Lynch brought this sensibility to what may ultimately be regarded as his most fully realised work, a third season in 2017 of his hit TV show from the early 1990s, Twin Peaks. This majestic 18-hour film, broken into episodes, interlaces the quirky and humorous, although often mystifying and terrifying, American surrealism of his earlier works with the darker psychogenic fugue-related themes of his later style.

Movie posters at AMC Theatre in Montebello, California. US President Donald Trump is ordering new tariffs on all films made outside America. AFP

Episode eight, in particular, which defies easy description, is almost certainly the most remarkable and surreal hour ever on American television. Its huge influence on later important films such as Oppenheimer (2023), winner of seven Academy Awards, is readily apparent.

Lynch, a dedicated practitioner of transcendental meditation, argued that beneath surface realities lies a transcendent universal consciousness that can be accessed through meditation, imagination and art. His ouvre is informed by a vast benevolence and, although frequently accused of misogyny, he was among America’s leading feminist artists.

American life has only been getting weirder, and Lynch had been the pre-eminent chronicler of this intensifying weirdness. Mr Trump’s effort to impose a 100 per cent tariff on foreign films will intensify the dumbing-down of popular culture with cinemas dominated by imbecilic superhero dross, pointless remakes and predictable spinoffs, and is 70 years too late.

When Mr Trump was a young man, and Lynch was making Eraserhead (1977) – certainly the greatest-ever student film, and probably the only undoubted student masterpiece – Hollywood was already well post-mortem. The demise of the classic studio system to which Mr Trump is apparently referring – when he said Hollywood is dying – was, ironically, precisely what allowed Lynch and other brilliant young directors beginning in the 1960s, like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, to make visionary and original films that resonated powerfully with a mass audience.

Lynch, a passionate proponent of DIY art, was the most prominent director to ardently embrace affordable digital video (Inland Empire was shot by the director himself on a single inexpensive digital video camera). Such affordable technology theoretically makes filmmaking, even on mobile phones, accessible to virtually anyone. Yet in reality, corporate media today has a firm stranglehold on mass cultural production dominated by artistically vapid marketing executives.

With life in America getting ever-weirder, Lynch gone, and the Trump administration trying to limit access to international perspectives, it’s unclear who else, if anyone, might be up to the crucial artistic task of excavating the darkest depths of US culture and society, even as they rise ever-closer to the surface and, indeed, predominance. America has never so desperately needed the likes of David Lynch.