jürgen fauth’s muckworld

One afternoon last week, I found myself explaining the benefits of transcendental meditation — and its much cheaper, guru-free alternative Natural Stress Relief — to a junkie at an East Village pizza joint. (He asked.) You see, I was predisposed to love The Dhamma Brothers, a documentary about inmates of an Alabama high security prison who take up Vipassana meditation. Despite its fascinating subject, the film turned out to be a disappointment. Read my review on About.com to find out why.

I also saw Redbelt, David Mamet’s latest. It’s an entirely enjoyable fight movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as noble jiu-jitsu teacher that’s perched somewhat uncomfortably between Mamet’s usual snappiness and a few very tired genre conventions. In typical Mamet style, Redbelt is thick with cons, counter-cons, and strange coincidences, but this time, it’s nearly impossible to tell which is which. Opens on May 9.

Tonight, I’m excited to see Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, and on TV, we’re enjoying the continuing adventures of Liz Lemon and Kara Thrace. In the mobile department, Peeping Tom and Paths of Glory have proven themselves eminently watchable on a packed subway — just don’t tell Messrs. Powell and Kubrick.

The Dhamma Brothers. Andrew Kukura, Jenny Phillips, Anne Marie Stein, 2007. **
Redbelt. David Mamet, 2008. ***
Peeping Tom. Michael Powell, 1960. ***
Paths of Glory. Stanley Kubrick, 1957. ****

The Redbelt trailer:

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.

TM had always intrigued me, and after I got hold of Catching the Big Fish, my curiosity was seriously stoked. But two things kept me from trying it out: the slightly cultish vibe of the official web site, and the prohibitive cost. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi charges $2,500 for learning the “simple method” to a better life, and I wasn’t about to plunk down that kind of money for what may or may not have been a bunch of hokum.

Wikipedia to the rescue: at the bottom of the article on TM, I found a reference to a low-cost alternative called Natural Stress Relief. Founded by renegade TM teachers, NSR can be learned for $25, which pays for a manual in pdf format and an mp3 file. (According to the Maharishi, TM can only be learned through personal instruction.) NSR also sheds a lot of the mystical trappings of TM — it’s advertised as a no-nonsense method for relaxation rather than a way to gain cosmic consciousness and bring about world peace.

A year later, I haven’t missed any of the twice-daily meditation sessions and can corroborate all of the claims Lynch makes for TM. Natural Stress Relief is a very effective way to drop the mind into a state that’s neither sleeping, dreaming, or waking. In this state, the nervous system begins to heal itself and release stresses that have accumulated over the years: anxiety, anger, pain — Yoda’s entire litany of everything that leads to the Dark Side. Since I started NSR, I’ve been feeling more optimistic, creative, outgoing, and productive. Of all the supposedly consciousness-expanding experiments I inflicted on my poor head over the years, NSR has been the most effortless, the most useful, and the most joyful. If you’re curious, take a look at the NSR home page and the forums, where former TM teachers discuss the method and give helpful advice.

Now, who’s got my one-legged sixteen-year-old and that pet monkey ?

Lynch. blackANDwhite, 2007. ****

• All posts tagged with David Lynch

“Inland Empire makes perfect sense,” I wrote the last time, thinking I had the existential mysteries of Lynch’s film if not solved then at least sufficiently unpacked and domesticated. Happy to have found a sturdy story arc, I assumed I understood the film. Not so. We saw it again on Christmas, in a misguided attempt at hipster holiday cheer, and boy did it mess with me. The third time around, Inland Empire flummoxed and confused me, and I was overwhelmed worse than the first time. It also gave me a raging headache. Surely, this must be the year’s best film! Ow.

At the IFC Center, a short clip now precedes the movie, in which Justin Theroux reads a note from David Lynch: a quote from the Upanishads to the effect that all the world is a dream, and then he wishes us “a good experience.” And indeed, the film felt completely different every time I’ve seen it. My original review tried to approach it in terms of David Lynch’s oeuvre; the second time around, I looked for structure and began collecting clues that may or may not form a coherent story. This time, I saw shots, hints, cross-references, and entire scenes that somehow hadn’t registered before, and it made me reconsider Inland Empire as subjective experience.

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.

The “transcending” in “transcendental meditation” refers to a particular kind of mental yoga that shuttles the mind back and forth between a completely relaxed state of pure consciousness and a more analytical day-to-day awareness. In TM, transcending is achieved through the repetition of a mantra. Inland Empire achieves a comparable effect through the back-and-forth between apparently disconnected shots–what Manohla and Marcy call the art-installation aspect of the movie. For long stretches of time, Inland Empire is just stuff on a screen, and you drift off toward a weird state between waking and dreaming, just letting it wash over you. The transcending pull back to a more conscious state of mind is achieved by the millions of clues Lynch litters all over the landscape, from “high on blue tomorrows,” “vier-sieben” to “it has something to do with the telling of time” and “the man in the green shirt.” (I began cataloging some of these in a previous entry, and hopefully somebody will soon set up a proper place for it online, much like the excellent site for Mulholland Drive–a wiki perhaps?)

But “figuring it out” is only half the point. The real purpose of the clues is to keep your mind engaged, suggest that there is a graspable story here (and indeed Inland Empire has a solid three act structure.) At the same time, the film continuously frustrates all attempts at “solving” it. The viewer constantly goes back and forth between “Eureka!” and “WTF?” This back and forth is very similar to transcending, an activity that takes the meditator to a unique place between waking and dreaming, a twilight region were identities, memory and imagination merge, and strange images arise from within. (Lynch describes it as a room with red curtains and black-and-white tile floor.)

Transcending is supposed to release deep-seated stress in the form of damage done to the nervous system in the past. In this between-state, old emotions are dredged up from the icky bottom of the subconscious. In the movie, these things include guilt over adultery, shame at selling one’s body or soul, grief over the loss of a child–perhaps even Polish carnies who can hypnotize people into murder by screwdriver. A transcending meditator who is unstressing will often weep, much like the woman watching mysterious images flutter by in a hotel room “in the Baltic region.” When the dive within is completed and another layer of past damage has been healed, there is a feeling of bliss and newfound peace, perhaps even a sense of a blessed light as if facing the beam of a movie projector, and one might sit, with a smile, just like Laura Dern on the other side of the room in the film’s last shot: “Sweet.”

Inland Empire. David Lynch, 2006. *****

• Inland Empire Reviews and Resources

[tags]inland empire, transcendental meditation, david lynch, justin theroux, christmas, ifc, nyc, laura dern, sweet, film, 5 stars, adultery, screwdrivers, upanishads, consciousness[/tags]