David Lynch Knows Us Better Than We Know Ourselves
Home comforts are not in David Lynch’s vocabulary. Anyone who has encountered the work of this notorious director knows his habit of serving up suburbia with a side order of discomfort. In Lynch’s detective tale Blue Velvet the mundane and the sinister jostle together behind a white picket fence, in an ironic twist on a suburban idyll. Whilst the boundaries of the screen protect us from Lynch’s fantasy corruptions, the analogue threats of pandemic, prejudice and ecological collapse are a little closer to home.
In Blue Velvet, hero Jeffrey’s detective journey brings him to the underbelly of Lumberton, as his investigations are signposted by increasingly unfamiliar clues. Severed body parts, lips that don’t speak and gangster policemen corrupt his home as everyday objects and places turn hostile. Lynch’s mastery of discomfort taps into the domestic uncanny, where something repressed emerges to disturb the peace. The uncanny, a corruption of the comfortable, is a signpost to something that is amiss. Like those strange noises in the basement that we try to ignore, it reminds us that something is rotten in the foundations.
Whilst Lynch was still an art student in Philadelphia, a city where he felt the discomfort of ‘sickness, corruption’ and ‘racial hatred’, the Windrush generation was arriving in the UK to similar sentiments. Invited by the British government to replenish a post-war workforce, many Caribbean nationals arrived to a climate of hostility. Despite a colonial education that had cultivated affection for England as a ‘mother country’ amongst Commonwealth citizens, the homecoming of the Windrush generation was soured by racism. The prejudice, poor working conditions and police brutality they faced is widely documented.
Seventy years later, echoes of this racial hostility compounded into the Windrush Scandal, which saw Commonwealth nationals and their families threatened with deportation from their homes. From 2012, new laws required citizens to hold records of continuous residency, as immigration rules became more complex and their misinterpretations more costly. This Home Office ‘hostile environment’ policy empowered landlords to carry out discriminatory immigration checks on prospective tenants, restricted access to legal aid for migrants and fostered a ‘deport first, ask questions later’ mentality.
The Windrush scandal and hostile environment policy belong to a wider tapestry of racism and xenophobia in the UK, which has seen racial and religious hate crime increase by 111.8% since 2011, peaking after the announcement of the EU referendum result. For the Windrush generation and other migrants, home is complicated by feelings of unbelonging.
Notions of a hostile environment acquire another dimension when our understanding of home is extended to the natural world. As reporting on the environment now overwhelmingly favours the term ‘climate crisis’, new words emerge to describe our worry about the ecological destiny of the planet. These feelings of agitation and despair, accompanied by sleepless nights lost to thoughts of thawing glaciers and rampaging wildfires, have been dubbed ‘eco anxiety’. Not a clinical diagnosis but a zeitgeist, eco anxiety is the Millennial reboot of solastalgia, a state of sorrow and nostalgia triggered by the desolation of a home environment. Coined by philosopher Glen Albrecht, solastalgia describes the homesickness we feel when we are still at home.
From resurfacing xenophobia to the emerging environmental consequences of human carelessness, the uncanny insists on reminding us what we’d rather forget. Just as David Lynch’s ironisation of the white picket fence shows the falsity of the suburban dream, prejudice and climate change speak to the impossibility of living comfortably in our world.
The uncanny isn’t just an aesthetic quality but the feeling of a fundamental disruption to our sense of home, the projection of forgotten fears onto a reminder that is too close for comfort. The solace that home provides is more important than ever as the Coronavirus pandemic looms, forcing us to stay inside and contemplate concepts of home, future and belonging. Closed pubs, empty streets and masked drivers feel like fragments of a Lynchian fever dream, flipping homeliness on its head as we adjust to a new normal.
Home is an extension of who we are, marking the meeting place between our environment and ourselves. It is no surprise then that the uncanny feels like an existential threat; when homeliness slips into obscurity, it takes us with it. Lynch describes home as the ‘treasury within’, recognising its essential riches and its roots in our sense of self. Home may be where the heart is, but that means the uncanny is there, too.
In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey talks about his unsettling discoveries as seeing something that has always been there, just “hidden” beneath the surface. From the insidious history of British racism to the more recent threats of climate crisis and viral pandemic, uncanny aspects of our world expose home truths that demand our attention. Like Jeffrey, if we allow our curiosity and virtue to drive us, we can find the rot in the foundations and start to rebuild our sense of sanctuary. There’s no place like home, at least, not yet.
