The Color Green in Lynch's Work
Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2017 10:37 am
Cross posted on Reddit.
I have found green the slipperiest color in Lynch's symbolic system. The woods are green, of course, a deep dark green, but the primary uses are a more "processed" green: the nauseous green of the walls in Inland Empire, Diane Selwyn's blanket and other ill interiors, the formica table (of a similar color to the "laminated" Lynch Lime Green DVD set), and the ring.
The word I've always used to cover this is "nature" in some form. The trees are the dark green of the mysterious natural world, the sick colors a kind of tainted indoor human nature. The formica table is itself natural processed materials mixed with plastic unnatural materials to form a substance where man has created a thing from nature witch is unnatural but appears natural (somewhat). This is the state of man, the world we come from, that nature of society/the mind that develops in that setting. The ring, cut from that cloth (literally... formica is made by processing cloth and paper), is that nature refined and cut into crystallized perfection leaving a space through witch another world can be reached for.
This skirts into broader territory of what the ring and convenience store mean so I'll leave that for now. But that variation - verdant deep, dark nature to degraded human nature and how septic it looks (the color I think he goes for in those interiors is phlegm from someone with pneumonia) to the processed nature of the societal world to the crystalized mastery over nature (in all it's danger) seems like the only way I've ever made that color work.
I feel like the following Lynch quote is like a biblical passage for Lynch's color scheme - there is more to it but "beliefs" kind of have to be reconciled with it as a kind of foundational text:
"My boyhood was 'See Spot Run. Elegant old homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass. cherry trees. It was a dream world -- Middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree, there's this pitch oozing out-some black some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there's always red ants underneath."
In. this, green is the natural world of life seemingly domesticated (another version of this quote used the word "manicured" to refer to the lawns) but obscuring deeper ugly truths.
I honestly want feedback... I'm sure someone out there has a very different idea about this and I'd love to hear it. I have other intuitions about green being related to surfaces that hide (the ring is the only green thing that you can see into, which is the point of the ring - seeing past the surface world) but the tint of which indications something of the mechanism of the obscuration (is it a mystery of existence or the suppression inherent to civilization). But I'm waiting for the "you forgot about X so what about Y" that would make me so happy and make things come together better.
I have found green the slipperiest color in Lynch's symbolic system. The woods are green, of course, a deep dark green, but the primary uses are a more "processed" green: the nauseous green of the walls in Inland Empire, Diane Selwyn's blanket and other ill interiors, the formica table (of a similar color to the "laminated" Lynch Lime Green DVD set), and the ring.
The word I've always used to cover this is "nature" in some form. The trees are the dark green of the mysterious natural world, the sick colors a kind of tainted indoor human nature. The formica table is itself natural processed materials mixed with plastic unnatural materials to form a substance where man has created a thing from nature witch is unnatural but appears natural (somewhat). This is the state of man, the world we come from, that nature of society/the mind that develops in that setting. The ring, cut from that cloth (literally... formica is made by processing cloth and paper), is that nature refined and cut into crystallized perfection leaving a space through witch another world can be reached for.
This skirts into broader territory of what the ring and convenience store mean so I'll leave that for now. But that variation - verdant deep, dark nature to degraded human nature and how septic it looks (the color I think he goes for in those interiors is phlegm from someone with pneumonia) to the processed nature of the societal world to the crystalized mastery over nature (in all it's danger) seems like the only way I've ever made that color work.
I feel like the following Lynch quote is like a biblical passage for Lynch's color scheme - there is more to it but "beliefs" kind of have to be reconciled with it as a kind of foundational text:
"My boyhood was 'See Spot Run. Elegant old homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass. cherry trees. It was a dream world -- Middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree, there's this pitch oozing out-some black some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there's always red ants underneath."
In. this, green is the natural world of life seemingly domesticated (another version of this quote used the word "manicured" to refer to the lawns) but obscuring deeper ugly truths.
I honestly want feedback... I'm sure someone out there has a very different idea about this and I'd love to hear it. I have other intuitions about green being related to surfaces that hide (the ring is the only green thing that you can see into, which is the point of the ring - seeing past the surface world) but the tint of which indications something of the mechanism of the obscuration (is it a mystery of existence or the suppression inherent to civilization). But I'm waiting for the "you forgot about X so what about Y" that would make me so happy and make things come together better.