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Quote by Roberto Bolaño

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Roberto Bolaño

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“In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal [...] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

FilmViolenceCommercialismDavid Foster WallaceDavid LynchQuentin TarantinoMuzak
Author:David Foster Wallace
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“Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV).”

Twin PeaksDavid LynchDavid Lynch Keeps His Head
Book:A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
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“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively-i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not.”

HumorFilmMediaHumorousDavid LynchLynchian
Book:A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
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“I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.”

FilmCinemaTwin PeaksDavid LynchDavid Lynch Keeps His Head
Book:A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
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“And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. ... But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.”

FilmDavid Lynch
Book:A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
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