Evil obsesses David Lynch. The director circles it like a quester, confronting dragons only the pure of heart can see. Sometimes he avoids its terrible essence by conjuring cartoon devils -- a maniac huffing gas, a weird stranger posing unanswerable questions. To warn of evil's eternal lurk, he enthrones it in shadows and behind ordinary doors. To explore its ambiguity, he distorts beauty, sniffing out the rot within.
Throughout Lynch's filmic quest, music has remained a reliable lance. A connoisseur of sound, he has located the corruption in a Roy Orbison ballad and the lyricism in Nine Inch Nails' industrial noise. And as his interest in visual abstraction has grown over the years, Lynch has realized that one composer, the 20th-century avant-gardist Krzysztof Penderecki, is the closest aural match for his extreme aesthetic of color, shape, morality and mood. Not surprisingly, similar forces shaped these two creators.
As a child, Penderecki witnessed the Nazi roundup of Jewish neighbors in his hometown of Debica, Poland. Mirroring the trauma of a pre-conversion Saint Paul, who as a young Pharisee guarded the cloaks of his anti-Christian elders while they stoned Saint Stephen, the Nazi experience launched Penderecki's lifelong concern with the abuse of power. Lynch too can connect with such submerged guilt, having grown up in a postwar American prosperity purchased by history's first and only use of the atomic bomb, which occurred five months before he was born. You could call him one of the first radioactive mutants of the sci-fi 1950s.
In Part Eight of his 2017 television series, Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch uses Penderecki's most famous piece, "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima," to enhance a brilliant passage of abstract imagery revolving around the horror and beauty of nuclear fission. Scored for 52 string instruments and completed in 1960, "Threnody" exemplifies Penderecki's groundbreaking "sonorist" work of the '60s and '70s. Communicating his ideas to puzzled musicians via non-standard notation, Penderecki demanded novel effects -- striking the strings percussively, or bowing below the violin's bridge. He added typewriters and hacksaws to the orchestra, and delivered hyperdense harmonies that stretched beyond mere dissonance. Conceived in emotion and drama, his music pitilessly avoids cheer -- you can't imagine a less celebratory celebration of Poland's history, or a glummer Christmas symphony, than his. Although labeled an avant-gardist, he has often criticized European forebears such as Boulez and Stockhausen for worrying too much about theories and failing to make a human impact. "They were interested in dots, whereas I was interested in lines," said Penderecki, who declared his goal to be "liberating sound beyond all tradition."
Penderecki had little to lose by choosing the outsider path. A Pole who hailed from a provincial town rather than Warsaw or Krakow, he was unlikely to crack the inner circles of Paris or Vienna. In this he resembles Lynch, whose father, a Department of Agriculture scientist, moved his family from Idaho to Washington to Montana to Virginia over the course of his career. Like Penderecki, who rode the metaphorical turnip truck to Krakow for his music studies, Lynch experienced little major urban life until his art-school years in Boston and Philadelphia. Both thinkers were driven not by academic structure, but by the desire to tell stories in multiple dimensions of image, meaning and myth. The young Penderecki wanted to be a painter or an architect. Lynch began as a painter and remains one; his work in movies and television is an extension of his brush. And for both Lynch and Penderecki, color holds primary importance.
Titles such as "De Natura Sonoris" and "Polymorphia" -- both of which Lynch used in his least literal film, Inland Empire -- hold clues to how Penderecki approaches composing. Tones breathe and shift in masses of strings, producing enormous depth and a sense of concentrated, often oppressive focus. After the concentration is broken by silence or a sudden event, the release of energy produces a chaotic freedom that's both exhilarating and frightening. Lynch, too, conveys feeling through layers of elements, especially in his later work. Image superimposes over image, color bleeds into color; the viewer's absorption into a face, a landscape or a completely nonfigurative presence can carry more emotional weight than an act of violence. Sailor Ripley's savage beating of an assassin on a marble staircase in the 1990 film Wild at Heart is a case in point; Lynch takes the sting out of brutality by making it gratuitous and imbuing it with humor, and the deed rings less real than the always elusive motivation, which Lynch explores through narrative contradiction and visual instability.
Penderecki subverts expectations too, often through religion. Although he has described his youth as religious, with a mother who attended church twice daily, his focus was scattered among the faiths of different family members including Catholics and various Protestant sectarians. The confusion led him to de-emphasize dogma while internalizing the broader Christian myth. Penderecki's mature music implied that faith could not triumph over Nazi tanks and Communist overlords, and the brow of his "Credo" is knitted with burdensome doubt. His "Psalm 27" -- "The Lord is my light and my salvation / Whom shall I fear?" -- virtually trembles and flees. Mary's "Magnificat" -- "All generations will call me blessed" -- resonates with ignorance and horror. It's no accident that religion gets a more direct treatment from Penderecki when the subject is "Dies Irae," the day of God's wrath.
When it comes to faith, hope and love, Lynch shows comparable ambivalence. Having abandoned the Presbyterian Church of his childhood to become an advocate of Transcendental Meditation, he takes an outsider's view of Christian redemption. His movie naifs - the young lovers Jeffrey and Sandy in Blue Velvet, the hopeful ingenue Betty in Mulholland Drive - ultimately become corrupted, and the prospects for their souls look bleak. For both Lynch and Penderecki, the only escape lies in some instinctive transcendence through beauty. This transcendence marks the path of the sensitive mind, but it can be maintained only through difficult practice. The resulting tension between man's earthly nature and his desire for divine union produces a Sartrean nausea that saturates Penderecki's beautifully disturbing anti-harmonies. Yet somewhere in their depths lies a mysterious peace.
Lynch represents the conflicted, sensitive soul through an even deeper churning of the gut. His first student film, the 1966 short Six Men Getting Sick, is tethered to images of oral expulsion that have continued to appear in his work. In the 1997 film Lost Highway, baffled changeling Fred Madison vomits in his jail cell as he morphs into a teenage car mechanic named Pete. An accused murderer, Madison is an avant-garde saxophonist whose chaotic squeals on his instrument express alienation and agony that put one in mind of revolutionary black 1960s jazzmen Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp; this mode of distorted jazz is an ideal vehicle for Lynch's queasy aesthetic.
Lynch first employed Penderecki in Wild at Heart, which includes a passage from the composer's 1970 "Kosmogonia." Lynch's most vomit-filled film, Wild at Heart ties the nausea to family as mother and daughter Lula and Marietta Fortune -- played by real-life mother and daughter Diane Ladd and Laura Dern -- both have the opportunity to spew. Lula's morning sick, which continues to reek throughout the movie's latter half, portends the malaise of future generations, and suggests the radiation sickness that hides behind the film's bright post-WWII backdrop of cars, clothes and Elvis.
To support a more existential nausea, Penderecki compositions appear most extensively in Inland Empire, where Dern, always valued for her ability to portray extremes of innocence and pain, plays the schizoid actress Nikki Grace. Lynch goes all the way here with the theme of mental displacement aggravated by fictive violence, and Dern vomits stage blood. Identities, time periods and continents switch without warning, and the narrative frequently shifts to Poland; Lynch's fracturing strategies evoke Penderecki's characteristic juxtaposition of traditional grandeur and unsettled modernity.
Inland Empire also incorporates music by Polish composers Witold Lutoslawski and Boguslaw Schaeffer, as well as that of Marek Zebrowski, who collaborated with Lynch on the minimalist 2007 recording Polish Night Music. Lynch has an abiding interest in the Eastern European nation, and purchased a 24-acre parcel of land there in 2007. The intercontinental relationship soured a bit in 2012 when the city of Lodz reneged on an agreement to build a Lynch-backed arts center, but revived in late 2017 when Torun's Center of Contemporary Art staged a multidisciplinary exhibit of 400 Lynch works.
Poland is a border nation, and Lynch is a border crosser. The alliance feels especially natural in recent decades, as Lynch has edged away from the exaggerated freak-innocent, devil-caricature symbols of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and the early seasons of Twin Peaks, and begun engaging evil on the more human, shaded plane where Penderecki dwells.
This evolution perpetuates the involving ways Lynch has always incorporated music into his stories. Not many directors can claim to have amplified their darkness with the goth-metal of Marilyn Manson and the mock-Nazi techno-stomp of Rammstein; forced us to examine presuppositions about moral purity by re-contextualizing Bobby Vee and Carole King; or exposed multiple meanings in the blues of Etta James and Them. Few have used electronic drones and rumbles -- some created by Lynch himself -- as effectively. And of course, Lynch deserves special commendation for making Angelo Badalamenti a household name. The composer's ability to summon sweet, foggy dream soundscapes that support Lynch's nightmarish visions with a just few strokes on a cheap electronic keyboard has given Lynch's work a signature sound. Lynch's use of Penderecki, however, is a special case.
Lynch wasn't the first to discover Penderecki's adaptability to film - credit for that goes to William Friedkin, who introduced the composer to the moviegoing public in 1973 with The Exorcist. Penderecki turned up again in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 The Shining, Peter Weir's 1993 Fearless and Andrzej Wajda's 2007 Katyn, then Martin Scorsese tapped him for Shutter Island in 2010. Those films approached horror as genre, as psychology or as history. It took David Lynch to grasp Penderecki's sympathy with a worldview that expresses human experience on top of scary entertainment, transcendent artistry on top of novelty, myth on top of cartoon. You can have it both ways.
At his estate in Luslawice, Poland, Penderecki surrounded his house with lawns, trees and gardens, as well as a labyrinth that he believes symbolizes life. Surrounding it all is a high wall built, he explained, to "strengthen the inner powers that grow there." Penderecki wasn't talking about the powers of dominion and commerce; for him, and for Lynch, individuality and imagination rule.
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Santa meets Satan: Penderecki's Christmas Symphony No. 2.
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Thanks to editor Kristine McKenna for assigning me this piece, which was intended to be part of the Lynch-themed first issue of a film magazine that never saw print.