David Lynch: Catching the Big Fish
November 16th, 2006
I lucked into an advance copy of David Lynch’s book about “meditation, consciousness, and creativity,” and it’s splendid. Composed of short sections, the book is equal parts inspirational guide to using your creativity, anecdotal autobiography, and advocacy for Transcendental Meditation. In simple, direct language, Lynch graciously shares what he has learned about living “the art life” and his techniques for “catching” and developing ideas. There are brief sections on all of his major films (including INLAND EMPIRE) and proud stories about meeting Fellini and hearing that Stanley Kubrick considered Eraserhead his favorite movie. I ripped through this in a day but I’m looking forward to savor individual bits again and again–a generous and inspiring little book.
November 27th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Some links about Transcendental Meditation:
Official: http://www.tm.org/
David Lynch Foundation: http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_meditation
“Natural Stress Relief” — unbranded version, much cheaper to learn:
http://www.naturalstressreliefusa.org/
NSR Forums: http://www.network54.com/Forum/254541/
December 1st, 2006 at 8:03 pm
FWIW, I’ve been doing the “Natural Stress Relief” method for two weeks now, with very good results. If you’re interested in TM at all, the $25 they charge for a downloadable instruction manual and audio file (instead of $2,500 for official instruction) are well-spent, it seems to me. Possible side effects include: putting the director’s cut of Dune on your Netflix queue.
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:47 pm
I posted about Catching the Big Fish and Natural Stress Relief/TM on Metafilter.
December 7th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Salon has a great interview with David Lynch.
December 9th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
[…] A woman in trouble. The tagline suggests an entire narrative, and it’s there. Inland Empire is structurally sound; once again, you can map a hero’s journey onto the film–with hookers doing the locomotion and talking bunnies, but still a hero’s journey. Scene by scene, it’s extraordinarily compelling and loaded with clues, cross-references, and payoffs to reward and further confuse the viewer. In Catching the Big Fish, Lynch likens ideas to fish, and he says he likes to dive deep: “Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” Because of its many disparate parts, and its length, Inland Empire is difficult to contain in words, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to grasp it. And indeed, it’s huge and abstract, and very beautiful. It’s also very, very funny. […]
December 14th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
[…] Here’s what Lynch says about Eraserhead in Catching the Big Fish: Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understand when I say that, but it is. […]
December 15th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
[…] And since I’m still consulting it daily, here’s what Lynch says about Dune in Catching the Big Fish: When I made Dune, I didn’t have final cut. It was a huge, huge sadness, because I felt I had sold out and the film was a failure at the box office on top of that. If you do what you believe in, and you have a failure, that’s one thing: you can still live with yourself. But if you don’t, it’s dying twice. It’s very, very painful. […] The filmmaker should decide on every single element, every single world, every single sound, every single thing going down that highway through time. Otherwise, it won’t hold together. The film may suck, but at least you made it suck on your own. So to me, Dune was a huge failure. I knew I was getting into trouble when I agreed not to have final cut. I was hoping it would work out, but it didn’t. The end result is not what I wanted, and that’s a sadness. […]
December 27th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
[…] Perhaps it’s too literal-minded, and maybe there are already a few dissertations about this, but especially in the light of Catching the Big Fish and my own limited experimentation, it seems useful to compare the experience of watching Inland Empire to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, of which Lynch is a adamant proponent. For anybody with any familiarity with TM, the parallels are right there on the surface: there is a lot of sitting and “diving within” in Inland Empire (see how that syllable just repeated three times?) and, more specifically, I see a similar technique at work. […]
December 31st, 2006 at 1:54 pm
The New York Times on “David Lynch’s shockingly peaceful inner life.”
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:42 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGwr92LVges
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYlks8Zfv7M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgox4G0OoSo
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:54 pm
It is inspiring to see the effects of the books content, however I will say that it is a slightly misled assumption to compare NSR to the teaching of the Transcendental Meditation Program. It is not the same and does not, long term especially, give the same depth of understanding and experience that the “official training” and proper follow up with Maharishi certified TM teachers can offer.
As with any serious practice or skill, it’s important to have the complete package and not just one morsel. The motive to improve one’s Self are more often than not pure and genuine, but there is a TREMENDOUS amount of misunderstanding of what the TM Program is and what it offers (as is frequently seen online and in some of the discussion threads on metafilter and beyond).
Positive results from TM usually start from the first sitting of meditation after the instruction, but unfortunately even some people have gone through the instruction and have never done follow up with their teachers or have completely missed the point of it all together and have strived to give the program a bad name. Which is even more unfortunate because it is a beautiful and beneficial thing.
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:12 pm
[…] Catching the Big Fish […]
October 18th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
[…] My review of the new David Lynch self-portrait Lynch, opening next Friday at the IFC Center, just went up on About.com. In the meantime, I thought I’d use the opportunity to say a word or two about my experiences with Transcendental Meditation (TM), which Lynch has been promoting with his foundation and last year’s book, Catching the Big Fish. […]