The genre David Lynch called the most boring in cinema: “It’s not exciting to observe”
Many great filmmakers are attracted to making movies about their own art forms, taking a meta approach to decoding the very act of turning life into art, which is, more often than not, a painstaking and chaotic experience.
David Lynch often lent himself to this specific sub-genre of movies about movies, which comes as no surprise considering his all-time favourite was the Old Hollywood classic about a fading silent film star, Sunset Boulevard. Filmmaking became a prominent theme in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, then, with his female characters losing themselves among the hubbub of Hollywood and the innate cruelty it spills.
Filmmaking has defined movies as diverse as François Truffaut’s Day for Night, Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep, Federico Fellini’s 8½, and more recently, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague. Few take such a shatteringly honest approach as Lynch, though, who really puts his actors through the wringer as they face terrifying villains and mental torture against the backdrop of the Hollywood sign, which looms silently in the background.
Whether Jean-Luc Godard, Steven Spielberg or Tim Burton is behind the camera, a film about the act of making a movie is always going to draw our attention, because it shatters the very notion of what we’re watching. You can’t consume a film like Contempt or Sex is Comedy and not be aware of the fact that we, the audience, are watching a movie, too. The boundaries between artificially and reality become blurred.
So, while this worked perfectly for Lynch, who revelled in cinematic explorations of the intersection between reality and fantasy, he couldn’t say he felt the same about creating a movie about his other beloved art form – painting.
Questioned as to whether he would ever shift his attention from movies about cinema to movies about painting, Lynch admitted that he thinks those kinds of films are simply “boring”. There have been various biopics about famous painters over the years, like Basquiat, Pollock, and Frida, but it seems like none of these have particularly resonated with Lynch.
“There have been movies made of painters, and it’s really pretty boring. It’s what happens in the interior of the painter, and that’s interesting. It’s not something that is so exciting to observe,” the director told Artnet.
Painting is a pretty sacred thing for Lynch, an expression of his inner world that existed separately from his work as a filmmaker. He knew that people would go and watch his movies, but when it came to paintings – a solo activity – he was content with the idea that no one had to see them if he didn’t want them to be seen. “In a weird way, I don’t even care so much if people see my paintings, I just like to do it. I just love it, it’s a thing that I have loved since I was little,” Lynch added.
So, Lynch was never going to make a movie about his other love, instead concentrating on the world of cinema, something he knew inside out.
