At the start of 2022, I finally coughed up the [large sum of money] needed to take a four-day course on Transcendental Meditation™. I'd been debating doing this for close to fifteen years, yet it still felt uncomfortable—maybe even unethical—to me. TM™ has been criticized for being, not just overpriced, but cultish: maybe even predatorily so. And there were plenty of claims that TM™ was total pseudoscientific woo, akin to Scientology with more of an Eastern Philosophy flavor to it.
I'll totally admit that my main interest in TM™ was that David Lynch is its loudest advocate, and that I am a cultish devotee of David Lynch. But I was also struck, as I did my research into it, by how many laypeople's experiences of it seemed so powerfully positive. Many skeptics walked out converted, and even long-time meditation practitioners seemed to get something meaningful out of studying TM™. At the end of the day, I figured, I've got a fairly low tolerance for woo bullshit, I know enough about marketing to spot when I'm being campaigned at, and the worst that could happen would be my walking away with a fun new horror story about a wacky little cult.
I've been practicing using Transcendental Meditation™'s techniques for sixteen months now. I've stuck to it longer than I've stuck to any other meditation practice I've taken up. And I'm glad that I put the money into it that I did, though I haven't walked away a True Believer or any such.
In short, I think that Transcendental Meditation™ has constructed a very effective introduction to its techniques, frames meditation in a different and more useful way than I'm familiar with, and also offers a terrific content library that I've gotten a lot out of post-course. It strikes me as less of a cult than a very well-polished Meditation Product, one that nicely balances the deeper spiritual or psychedelic pursuits of meditation with an accessible, engaging polish. And while it's a little more predatory with the way it markets its "next-level" pricey classes, and while its articulations of What Meditation Does veer from "unnecessarily jargon-y" to "sounds kinda delusional," my experience of TM™ so far has been that it's gross in the sense that a decently-large company is gross, rather than gross in the sense that Scientology is.
Now, there is a huge argument to be made that the spiritual practices from which meditation is derived run in strict opposition to commercialization, marketing, and capitalism itself. Some people are fundamentally offended by the entwinement of the two. That part squicks me out too! And I think that a good meditation instructor could probably have taught me all the things that TM™ did, and with less bullshit, and far more cheaply to boot. But I've explored meditation in enough ways to know that quality instruction is rare. TM™'s accomplishment has been to standardize the teaching process strictly enough that it can mass-produce meditation instructors who are good enough to get people who aren't particularly self-attuned to work out the basics, and develop a practice of their own. I can appreciate that—especially since TM™ has done a good job of leaving me alone to incorporate what I've learned from it into my own personal pursuits, without pushing any ideology on me along the way.
That said, I'd love to share what I've taken away from TM™ here, For Free, to the extent that I feel like I can do so without plagiarizing TM™ or giving away anything that's not mine to give away. This is less an introduction to Transcendental Meditation™ as a system, and more a series of observations that I, personally, found salient—by which I mean they're things that I didn't quite pick up on through any other meditative approaches that I've tried.
At its heart, Transcendental Meditation™ is mantra-based. Rather than emphasizing breathing, or counting, or attempting to eliminate thought, TM™ provides each practitioner with an individualized meaningless two-syllable sound. I'm told that instructors are given intensive training that teaches them how to pair each individual to their perfect mantra, and I like the sound of my own mantra a lot, but I suspect that the sound matters less than the lack of meaning: the fact that your mantra isn't just disconnected from all other definitions and associations, but in a sense serves as an explicit rejection of meaning and connection. It's a thought-decoupler, rather than a new train of thought in and of itself.
Meditations take place twice a day, for 20 minutes at a time, typically before breakfast and dinner. While I've been somewhat inconsistent in that twice-a-day practice, I find that the 20-minute length—which is quite long by meditation purposes—has been significant. It allows me to go through multiple waves of "clearing out" my head, each of which leaves me briefly feeling enlightened and unattached before I realize that there's a thicker, damper set of things on my mind that are starting to flutter loose.
The goal is not to avoid thoughts. Transcendental Meditation™ stresses this. (It generally emphasizes the easiness of its meditative form: that, if you think you're struggling, you're doing it wrong, because nothing that you are doing should require struggle, or even allow for it.) Instead, the goal is simply to keep reciting the mantra: to think it to yourself, and to return to it every time you notice that you've strayed. In other words, it's okay not to recite the mantra, but when you notice that you've stopped, you start again—until the next train of thought gradually pulls you away.
One of the metaphors that TM™ uses that I love is that thoughts are a kind of mental stress, akin to physical bruising. "Stress," here, is less a matter of conflict or anxiety, and more a simple matter of presence: when something's on your mind, it takes up space, and it takes a little energy from you to consider it (or to push yourself back to whatever else you were thinking). Some people are bad at pushing individual thoughts from their mind, and wind up distracted and overwhelmed; even people who are particularly good at suppressing or compartmentalizing thoughts, though, still have to exert effort to keep those other thoughts at bay. That effort might be slight, but it builds up over time, leading both to less mindfulness at present and to mental exhaustion in general. TM™ posits meditation as, essentially, the process of taking that mental weight off your shoulders, like removing items from a heavy backpack one-by-one.
I should note, here, that TM™'s articulation of this "thoughts as mental stress" attempts to posit it as scientific fact, which is one of those pseudoscience-y things that gets it slammed for being cultlike and mystical. I think that TM™ likes to say "scientific" the way a lot of people say "literally:" it's more a kind of hyperbolic emphasis than anything, a nervous tic that annoys some people and offends others. It feels fairly clear to me that TM™ articulates ideas like this as metaphor: they're a useful way of thinking about something abstract. Leaning into that metaphor makes it far easier to understand what you should be doing, which in turn makes it far easier to refine your practice. And perhaps there is some kernel of neuroscientific truth to it: maybe it's the kind of metaphor that can be interpreted in one scientifically accurate (and fascinating!) way, even if all of its other interpretations are, in fact, wishful gobbledigook. But I tend to think that most of the ways people talk about the science of brains are pseudoscientific themselves—I tend to tune most people out when they start to talk about "dopamine" like they know what they're saying—and I'm far less interested in "brain truth," here, and whether or not the metaphorical truth leads me somewhere worthwhile.
That said, Transcendental Meditation™ also claims that you can learn to hover by bouncing on your butt or something, so it's not like the organization itself doesn't get a little gobbledigooky at times. (I have not personally paid the $75,000,000 needed to take the butt-bounce course, though, so who knows. Maybe there's a kernel of truth there too.)
Back to the original point! The goal of meditating with an empty mantra is to give your thoughts room to surface, one by one. And as your thoughts arise, your tendency is to attach yourself to them: to follow them, to process them, to see where they go. That processing is explicitly called out as what TM™ wants you to help avoid. Thinking through a thought, after all, means thinking it even more into existence. The more you process a thought, the bigger and heavier it becomes, and the more energy and focus you devote to it. So the goal with TM™ is essentially to lure all your thoughts out of hiding, and to steer each one back towards your mantra, towards emptiness, towards detachment and unthinking. You can't just "turn off" a thought. But you can, by repeatedly refusing to engage with it when it arises, make it less sticky. It's like rubbing away the residue left behind when you pull a sticker off of something: bit by bit, the stickiness just goes away. The thought shrinks down, back to a seed that hasn't quite been planted yet.
Something about the way that TM™ went about articulating this, in between having me practice according to its instructions, felt like a real lightbulb moment for me. Buddhism, of course, is rooted in the idea that attachment leads to suffering; I've believed that for years, and found it an enlightening lens with which to view the world. But it wasn't until TM™ that I viscerally realized that suffering can be thought of as synonymous with stress, and that thought and attachment are more linked than I realized. A lot of meditative practices encourage you to try to still your emotions, letting go of feelings. What I realized through TM™ is that feeling matters less than sheer sensation—and that thought and emotion are both sensations, and exactly the sort of "attachment" that leads to suffering. (It's not that attachment leads to stress so much as it's that attachment is itself a kind of stress. Suffering is merely what happens when those stresses possess you demon-style and take over your mind, body, and life.)
Hence the repeated declaration that Transcendental Meditation™ is, above all else, easy—the "easiest thing in the world." There is no trying involved: "trying" means conceiving of a goal, working out the actions necessary to achieve it, and evaluating your own progress relative to your benchmark for "accomplishment." You don't need to try to stick to your mantra—in fact, it's perfectly okay of you to forget about it altogether. But when you remember it, you return to it—and because your mantra is impossible to attach to, being completely devoid of any meaning, it is an easier and less stressful thought than whichever other one is on your mind.
The paradox there, of course, is that if you're thinking about meditating, if you're interrogating whether or not it works, if you're asking yourself whether you're meditating "enough," if you're trying to process and articulate your present state of mind, then you're not meditating. Those, too, are thoughts to let go of. And perversely, realizing that truly does make meditating easy—because those are the thoughts that structure meditation as something profound, something necessary, something you need to do right.
Nowadays, I consistently find the "hardest" part of meditating to be how many good ideas it stirs up. I don't quite have the discipline to resist the urge, when it arises, to clean my kitchen and start two rounds of laundry and spend an hour writing and another hour reading. Those feel so transparently like the life I want to live, the state of being that I meditate to "reach," that, when I snap into that mode, I find it hard not to break off my meditation on the spot. But I do my best to stick with my session anyway. Because meditation should not feel like a means to an end, in my opinion. It should not be something you pop like a pill. The goal of meditation is to find a permanent state of detachment—not in the sense that you never do anything again, but in the sense that you are free to choose exactly which thought or action you attach to, immerse yourself in that activity wholly, and then pull away again, shrink that back down to a seed, and choose a new thought to let bloom.
While I admire and value Buddhism, my heart most deeply resides in Taoism. And the notion of the Tao, shapeless and unnameable, the thing that births all shapes and forms, most clearly strikes me as the state of mind that meditation encourages. The hope is to find the essence—the pulse, as Fiona Apple calls it—that exists before specificity. From there, you can take on specific form knowingly and even lustily, celebrating the shape of your thought and action and being, before releasing again, finding that profoundly generous emptiness within you, and facing your next moment with freedom and relish.
That profoundly generous emptiness is central to what I've found through TM™. If all sensation is stress, and thought and feeling are both kinds of sensation, then a corollary is that, just as we distract ourselves from thoughts with other thoughts, we also distract ourselves from the senses when we think and feel too much. Other forms of meditation I've tried have encouraged "check-ins," or even "full-body scans," where you let your mind wander through your body, feeling all the sensations that you typically let fade into the background. With Transcendental Meditation™, those check-ins have felt less necessary; instead, I simply recognize how beholden I am to the comforts of my flesh, the aches of my bones, the heats and chills, the little buzzing sound of my refrigerator. I realize how much information I take in before I realize that I'm taking it in. And I realize how much of that information I lose, when I'm overly distracted. How much of that information is important. How much of it is engaging, in ways that I could occupy myself with, were I not so overloaded by other kinds of information, so molded by other stresses.
One of the themes of the Tao Te Ching that I most struggle with is that sensation is an addiction, of sorts, or a distraction:
I'll totally admit that my main interest in TM™ was that David Lynch is its loudest advocate, and that I am a cultish devotee of David Lynch. But I was also struck, as I did my research into it, by how many laypeople's experiences of it seemed so powerfully positive. Many skeptics walked out converted, and even long-time meditation practitioners seemed to get something meaningful out of studying TM™. At the end of the day, I figured, I've got a fairly low tolerance for woo bullshit, I know enough about marketing to spot when I'm being campaigned at, and the worst that could happen would be my walking away with a fun new horror story about a wacky little cult.
I've been practicing using Transcendental Meditation™'s techniques for sixteen months now. I've stuck to it longer than I've stuck to any other meditation practice I've taken up. And I'm glad that I put the money into it that I did, though I haven't walked away a True Believer or any such.
In short, I think that Transcendental Meditation™ has constructed a very effective introduction to its techniques, frames meditation in a different and more useful way than I'm familiar with, and also offers a terrific content library that I've gotten a lot out of post-course. It strikes me as less of a cult than a very well-polished Meditation Product, one that nicely balances the deeper spiritual or psychedelic pursuits of meditation with an accessible, engaging polish. And while it's a little more predatory with the way it markets its "next-level" pricey classes, and while its articulations of What Meditation Does veer from "unnecessarily jargon-y" to "sounds kinda delusional," my experience of TM™ so far has been that it's gross in the sense that a decently-large company is gross, rather than gross in the sense that Scientology is.
Now, there is a huge argument to be made that the spiritual practices from which meditation is derived run in strict opposition to commercialization, marketing, and capitalism itself. Some people are fundamentally offended by the entwinement of the two. That part squicks me out too! And I think that a good meditation instructor could probably have taught me all the things that TM™ did, and with less bullshit, and far more cheaply to boot. But I've explored meditation in enough ways to know that quality instruction is rare. TM™'s accomplishment has been to standardize the teaching process strictly enough that it can mass-produce meditation instructors who are good enough to get people who aren't particularly self-attuned to work out the basics, and develop a practice of their own. I can appreciate that—especially since TM™ has done a good job of leaving me alone to incorporate what I've learned from it into my own personal pursuits, without pushing any ideology on me along the way.
That said, I'd love to share what I've taken away from TM™ here, For Free, to the extent that I feel like I can do so without plagiarizing TM™ or giving away anything that's not mine to give away. This is less an introduction to Transcendental Meditation™ as a system, and more a series of observations that I, personally, found salient—by which I mean they're things that I didn't quite pick up on through any other meditative approaches that I've tried.
At its heart, Transcendental Meditation™ is mantra-based. Rather than emphasizing breathing, or counting, or attempting to eliminate thought, TM™ provides each practitioner with an individualized meaningless two-syllable sound. I'm told that instructors are given intensive training that teaches them how to pair each individual to their perfect mantra, and I like the sound of my own mantra a lot, but I suspect that the sound matters less than the lack of meaning: the fact that your mantra isn't just disconnected from all other definitions and associations, but in a sense serves as an explicit rejection of meaning and connection. It's a thought-decoupler, rather than a new train of thought in and of itself.
Meditations take place twice a day, for 20 minutes at a time, typically before breakfast and dinner. While I've been somewhat inconsistent in that twice-a-day practice, I find that the 20-minute length—which is quite long by meditation purposes—has been significant. It allows me to go through multiple waves of "clearing out" my head, each of which leaves me briefly feeling enlightened and unattached before I realize that there's a thicker, damper set of things on my mind that are starting to flutter loose.
The goal is not to avoid thoughts. Transcendental Meditation™ stresses this. (It generally emphasizes the easiness of its meditative form: that, if you think you're struggling, you're doing it wrong, because nothing that you are doing should require struggle, or even allow for it.) Instead, the goal is simply to keep reciting the mantra: to think it to yourself, and to return to it every time you notice that you've strayed. In other words, it's okay not to recite the mantra, but when you notice that you've stopped, you start again—until the next train of thought gradually pulls you away.
One of the metaphors that TM™ uses that I love is that thoughts are a kind of mental stress, akin to physical bruising. "Stress," here, is less a matter of conflict or anxiety, and more a simple matter of presence: when something's on your mind, it takes up space, and it takes a little energy from you to consider it (or to push yourself back to whatever else you were thinking). Some people are bad at pushing individual thoughts from their mind, and wind up distracted and overwhelmed; even people who are particularly good at suppressing or compartmentalizing thoughts, though, still have to exert effort to keep those other thoughts at bay. That effort might be slight, but it builds up over time, leading both to less mindfulness at present and to mental exhaustion in general. TM™ posits meditation as, essentially, the process of taking that mental weight off your shoulders, like removing items from a heavy backpack one-by-one.
I should note, here, that TM™'s articulation of this "thoughts as mental stress" attempts to posit it as scientific fact, which is one of those pseudoscience-y things that gets it slammed for being cultlike and mystical. I think that TM™ likes to say "scientific" the way a lot of people say "literally:" it's more a kind of hyperbolic emphasis than anything, a nervous tic that annoys some people and offends others. It feels fairly clear to me that TM™ articulates ideas like this as metaphor: they're a useful way of thinking about something abstract. Leaning into that metaphor makes it far easier to understand what you should be doing, which in turn makes it far easier to refine your practice. And perhaps there is some kernel of neuroscientific truth to it: maybe it's the kind of metaphor that can be interpreted in one scientifically accurate (and fascinating!) way, even if all of its other interpretations are, in fact, wishful gobbledigook. But I tend to think that most of the ways people talk about the science of brains are pseudoscientific themselves—I tend to tune most people out when they start to talk about "dopamine" like they know what they're saying—and I'm far less interested in "brain truth," here, and whether or not the metaphorical truth leads me somewhere worthwhile.
That said, Transcendental Meditation™ also claims that you can learn to hover by bouncing on your butt or something, so it's not like the organization itself doesn't get a little gobbledigooky at times. (I have not personally paid the $75,000,000 needed to take the butt-bounce course, though, so who knows. Maybe there's a kernel of truth there too.)
Back to the original point! The goal of meditating with an empty mantra is to give your thoughts room to surface, one by one. And as your thoughts arise, your tendency is to attach yourself to them: to follow them, to process them, to see where they go. That processing is explicitly called out as what TM™ wants you to help avoid. Thinking through a thought, after all, means thinking it even more into existence. The more you process a thought, the bigger and heavier it becomes, and the more energy and focus you devote to it. So the goal with TM™ is essentially to lure all your thoughts out of hiding, and to steer each one back towards your mantra, towards emptiness, towards detachment and unthinking. You can't just "turn off" a thought. But you can, by repeatedly refusing to engage with it when it arises, make it less sticky. It's like rubbing away the residue left behind when you pull a sticker off of something: bit by bit, the stickiness just goes away. The thought shrinks down, back to a seed that hasn't quite been planted yet.
Something about the way that TM™ went about articulating this, in between having me practice according to its instructions, felt like a real lightbulb moment for me. Buddhism, of course, is rooted in the idea that attachment leads to suffering; I've believed that for years, and found it an enlightening lens with which to view the world. But it wasn't until TM™ that I viscerally realized that suffering can be thought of as synonymous with stress, and that thought and attachment are more linked than I realized. A lot of meditative practices encourage you to try to still your emotions, letting go of feelings. What I realized through TM™ is that feeling matters less than sheer sensation—and that thought and emotion are both sensations, and exactly the sort of "attachment" that leads to suffering. (It's not that attachment leads to stress so much as it's that attachment is itself a kind of stress. Suffering is merely what happens when those stresses possess you demon-style and take over your mind, body, and life.)
Hence the repeated declaration that Transcendental Meditation™ is, above all else, easy—the "easiest thing in the world." There is no trying involved: "trying" means conceiving of a goal, working out the actions necessary to achieve it, and evaluating your own progress relative to your benchmark for "accomplishment." You don't need to try to stick to your mantra—in fact, it's perfectly okay of you to forget about it altogether. But when you remember it, you return to it—and because your mantra is impossible to attach to, being completely devoid of any meaning, it is an easier and less stressful thought than whichever other one is on your mind.
The paradox there, of course, is that if you're thinking about meditating, if you're interrogating whether or not it works, if you're asking yourself whether you're meditating "enough," if you're trying to process and articulate your present state of mind, then you're not meditating. Those, too, are thoughts to let go of. And perversely, realizing that truly does make meditating easy—because those are the thoughts that structure meditation as something profound, something necessary, something you need to do right.
Nowadays, I consistently find the "hardest" part of meditating to be how many good ideas it stirs up. I don't quite have the discipline to resist the urge, when it arises, to clean my kitchen and start two rounds of laundry and spend an hour writing and another hour reading. Those feel so transparently like the life I want to live, the state of being that I meditate to "reach," that, when I snap into that mode, I find it hard not to break off my meditation on the spot. But I do my best to stick with my session anyway. Because meditation should not feel like a means to an end, in my opinion. It should not be something you pop like a pill. The goal of meditation is to find a permanent state of detachment—not in the sense that you never do anything again, but in the sense that you are free to choose exactly which thought or action you attach to, immerse yourself in that activity wholly, and then pull away again, shrink that back down to a seed, and choose a new thought to let bloom.
While I admire and value Buddhism, my heart most deeply resides in Taoism. And the notion of the Tao, shapeless and unnameable, the thing that births all shapes and forms, most clearly strikes me as the state of mind that meditation encourages. The hope is to find the essence—the pulse, as Fiona Apple calls it—that exists before specificity. From there, you can take on specific form knowingly and even lustily, celebrating the shape of your thought and action and being, before releasing again, finding that profoundly generous emptiness within you, and facing your next moment with freedom and relish.
That profoundly generous emptiness is central to what I've found through TM™. If all sensation is stress, and thought and feeling are both kinds of sensation, then a corollary is that, just as we distract ourselves from thoughts with other thoughts, we also distract ourselves from the senses when we think and feel too much. Other forms of meditation I've tried have encouraged "check-ins," or even "full-body scans," where you let your mind wander through your body, feeling all the sensations that you typically let fade into the background. With Transcendental Meditation™, those check-ins have felt less necessary; instead, I simply recognize how beholden I am to the comforts of my flesh, the aches of my bones, the heats and chills, the little buzzing sound of my refrigerator. I realize how much information I take in before I realize that I'm taking it in. And I realize how much of that information I lose, when I'm overly distracted. How much of that information is important. How much of it is engaging, in ways that I could occupy myself with, were I not so overloaded by other kinds of information, so molded by other stresses.
One of the themes of the Tao Te Ching that I most struggle with is that sensation is an addiction, of sorts, or a distraction:
The five colors
blind our eyes.
The five notes
deafen our ears.
The five flavors
dull our taste.
It disturbs me as a lover of music, art, and food—sensation in general, really. And it worries me, not because I disagree with it, but because I think it's true on some level. At times I wonder just what consequences I unknowingly suffer through when I reject austerity.
But I don't think that austerity is the intent (just as I think people—or at least my fellow Americans—tend to interpret Buddhism far more austerely than they ought to). Each sensation is a distraction from other sensations. It's not that sensation is evil, just as thinking and acting aren't evil. It's that each is a presence—and the presence of each impacts the others, creating diminishment or discord. That's not to say that harmony isn't possible, or that there isn't a time and a place for all the other things. It's just a note that everything we fill our heads with has a cost, often in ways that we don't realize.
As I write this, I realize I can no longer hear my refrigerator. It's still making the same sound, but I'm no longer able to register it. Something else has filled my head, if not my ears, and now that sound is lost to me. But it's still present, it's still impressing itself upon me, whether or not I notice in this instant.
Is Transcendental Meditation™ the only way to go about realizing all this, or reckoning with it? Not in the slightest. While I'd never had good experiences with mantra-based meditation before this, it's possible that mantras are simply a better technique for me personally than breath-based or guided meditations were. And while I greatly value the epiphanies I've found through Transcendental Meditation™—some of which came about simply due to practice, but some of which came from the library of content they offer you once you've paid, no other strings attached—this was certainly not the only way I could have found them. At the end of the day, TM™ feels like a particularly well-designed system, not an exclusive outlet to the truth.
For me, that's enough. And my experiences with the grodier, cultier parts of it have thus far been that they're well-meaning but kind of stupid—unintentionally grody rather than grody-by-design. I don't feel comfortable blanket-recommending it, but my suggestion is that if you, like me, feel drawn to it but uncertain, you should go for it if and only if what you're looking for is a well-structured and insightful approach to what you've already tried doing, rather than a genuine reality-shattering epiphany. (If you've never meditated before, TM™ might feel reality-shattering, but I'd recommend you try at least a couple other approaches to it before biting the bullet.)
It's possible that my explanation here has given you all of the pieces of TM™ that I personally found valuable. It's fairly simple, after all—and that's a good thing. Unnecessary complexity is where the cults all get you.
David Lynch sidebar
I'll keep this brief, but: practicing Transcendental Meditation™, and knowing that Lynch has practiced it religiously for nearly all his life, has helped make sense of quite a lot about Lynch as an artist, in ways that I find extremely gratifying.
For one thing, Lynch's emphasis on sound design, particular ambient whooshes and electronic buzzes, seems to be a direct byproduct of this recognition that we don't notice sounds. Lynch, more than maybe any other director, seems attuned to the idea that our spaces are shaped more by sound than we recognize, and constructs worlds in which every space is keyed into a particular sound.
More broadly, Lynch seems to have a particular appreciation for stress. An empathy for it, really. He has a profound ability to construct psychological layers to his characters, and to capture their reactions to the world around them with an almost microscopic detail. And I think it's possible to understand Lynch's characters—at least, when Lynch himself directs them—as layered constructs of stresses. He knows what their awarenesses are tangled up in: he knows what feelings most grab them, what sensations most envelop them, and he knows that which thoughts they're capable of are in many ways a byproduct of these stresses, these attachment, these very-literal possessions. (It makes sense that BOB, in Twin Peaks, is a demon who possesses bodies and an embodiment of electricity all at once—he is the manifestation of those attachments which distort us and even change our faces.)
It helps me draw a distinction between Lynch and many other "smart" directors. Plenty of writers essentially think in terms of ideology: each of their characters has a worldview, which may be reckoned with and challenged, and while that worldview might respond to cathartic, consciousness-rupturing experience, the fundamental shift in character is nonetheless didactic. I thought about the world one way, and now I think about it in another.
Lynch, meanwhile, seems to approach "character" as an almost physical sensation. People form personalities the way that rivers form banks: the world erodes them, creating certain receptivenesses and rigidities, and they never stop acting on sensation. That sensation might include more-typical intelligence—and Lynch does marvelous work with Mark Frost's most cerebral elements in Twin Peaks—but even those knotty tangles of words are, in a sense, a sensual and physical phenomenon.
This helps to explain the sheer magnetism of Lynch's scenes, too. At the end of the day, Lynch is far and away my favorite director despite how many other brilliant directors there are because every scene of his has an almost-haunting pull to it: it provokes sensations in me that no other artist does. And while I can't process exactly how he does that without deconstructing every last one of his scenes frame-by-frame, I think it's genuinely fair to say that Lynch treats film as a sensual composition, and his scenes and conflicts as an interplay between stresses. Where those conflicts happen depends on the composition of the space they're in: they're lighter, gentler conflicts in cozier and less conflicted environments, and they dip into more savage and primitive territories as the worlds grow darker, and genuine stakes arise.
The famous hallucinatory quality of Lynch movies, where the shifts in tone feel disorienting and almost impossible to resist, comes about precisely because of those shifts in composition, I think. I've long said that Lynch is severely underrated for how well he does wholesome: one of his defining scenes, I think, is the one in Blue Velvet where Jeffrey shows Sandy his "chicken walk," which is adolescent and awkward and far-too-transparent an attempt to make a girl laugh with something lame; he also, in passing, mentions that one house used to have a kid with "the biggest tongue in the world." Lynch is able to identify exactly the realm of interplay between these two shy, awkward kids, and fills that realm with lurid and fascinating details that are simultaneously inventive and amazingly banal. (There aren't a lot of children's shows that could've captured as much about these characters as succinctly, or as wholesomely, as that one passage in Blue Velvet does.) But he also knows exactly when the dynamics between characters need to change, and how deep and multilayered those changes have to be, and the result is a film that captures tension more meticulously and evocatively than we can easily resist.
This is far too engrossing a subject for me to go any deeper into here—not without completely losing the plot—but I've long held that Lynch's specific approach to filmmaking is a profoundly important one for artists to understand in general, because of what it says about both people and art. And Transcendental Meditation™ as a practice goes a long way towards explaining both what exactly Lynch is saying and doing, and how exactly Lynch derived his approach in the first place.
Sidebar over!
For one thing, Lynch's emphasis on sound design, particular ambient whooshes and electronic buzzes, seems to be a direct byproduct of this recognition that we don't notice sounds. Lynch, more than maybe any other director, seems attuned to the idea that our spaces are shaped more by sound than we recognize, and constructs worlds in which every space is keyed into a particular sound.
More broadly, Lynch seems to have a particular appreciation for stress. An empathy for it, really. He has a profound ability to construct psychological layers to his characters, and to capture their reactions to the world around them with an almost microscopic detail. And I think it's possible to understand Lynch's characters—at least, when Lynch himself directs them—as layered constructs of stresses. He knows what their awarenesses are tangled up in: he knows what feelings most grab them, what sensations most envelop them, and he knows that which thoughts they're capable of are in many ways a byproduct of these stresses, these attachment, these very-literal possessions. (It makes sense that BOB, in Twin Peaks, is a demon who possesses bodies and an embodiment of electricity all at once—he is the manifestation of those attachments which distort us and even change our faces.)
It helps me draw a distinction between Lynch and many other "smart" directors. Plenty of writers essentially think in terms of ideology: each of their characters has a worldview, which may be reckoned with and challenged, and while that worldview might respond to cathartic, consciousness-rupturing experience, the fundamental shift in character is nonetheless didactic. I thought about the world one way, and now I think about it in another.
Lynch, meanwhile, seems to approach "character" as an almost physical sensation. People form personalities the way that rivers form banks: the world erodes them, creating certain receptivenesses and rigidities, and they never stop acting on sensation. That sensation might include more-typical intelligence—and Lynch does marvelous work with Mark Frost's most cerebral elements in Twin Peaks—but even those knotty tangles of words are, in a sense, a sensual and physical phenomenon.
This helps to explain the sheer magnetism of Lynch's scenes, too. At the end of the day, Lynch is far and away my favorite director despite how many other brilliant directors there are because every scene of his has an almost-haunting pull to it: it provokes sensations in me that no other artist does. And while I can't process exactly how he does that without deconstructing every last one of his scenes frame-by-frame, I think it's genuinely fair to say that Lynch treats film as a sensual composition, and his scenes and conflicts as an interplay between stresses. Where those conflicts happen depends on the composition of the space they're in: they're lighter, gentler conflicts in cozier and less conflicted environments, and they dip into more savage and primitive territories as the worlds grow darker, and genuine stakes arise.
The famous hallucinatory quality of Lynch movies, where the shifts in tone feel disorienting and almost impossible to resist, comes about precisely because of those shifts in composition, I think. I've long said that Lynch is severely underrated for how well he does wholesome: one of his defining scenes, I think, is the one in Blue Velvet where Jeffrey shows Sandy his "chicken walk," which is adolescent and awkward and far-too-transparent an attempt to make a girl laugh with something lame; he also, in passing, mentions that one house used to have a kid with "the biggest tongue in the world." Lynch is able to identify exactly the realm of interplay between these two shy, awkward kids, and fills that realm with lurid and fascinating details that are simultaneously inventive and amazingly banal. (There aren't a lot of children's shows that could've captured as much about these characters as succinctly, or as wholesomely, as that one passage in Blue Velvet does.) But he also knows exactly when the dynamics between characters need to change, and how deep and multilayered those changes have to be, and the result is a film that captures tension more meticulously and evocatively than we can easily resist.
This is far too engrossing a subject for me to go any deeper into here—not without completely losing the plot—but I've long held that Lynch's specific approach to filmmaking is a profoundly important one for artists to understand in general, because of what it says about both people and art. And Transcendental Meditation™ as a practice goes a long way towards explaining both what exactly Lynch is saying and doing, and how exactly Lynch derived his approach in the first place.
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