Part of the reason overtly “Lynchian” films feel hollow is that they tend only to affect the general tone of Lynch’s work, conflating style and meaning and forgetting, crucially, that the ambient qualities of his films are simply byproducts of the psychology which informs them-and of course it’s their psychological dimension, more so than their eerie idiosyncrasies, that makes his stuff endure.īut then every so often an album or film will come around that sells its atmospherics so convincingly that I’m willing to overlook its superficiality.
As a general rule, atmosphere is a weak stand-in for substance, and one ought to be leery of any art that privileges a vague suggestion of something over the thing itself.
