Lynch Telling off his crew

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IcedOver
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by IcedOver »

I haven't read his book yet, but the license plate thing sounds like classic OCD. I also recall reading something about him not wanting to get out of bed until the clock digits add to seven, or something like that. Also OCD.
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Mr. Reindeer
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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IcedOver wrote:I haven't read his book yet, but the license plate thing sounds like classic OCD. I also recall reading something about him not wanting to get out of bed until the clock digits add to seven, or something like that. Also OCD.
That’s certainly a plausible armchair diagnosis. In terms of mental illness, Lynch has admitted to “a hair” of agoraphobia. But any conjecture outside a proper psychiatric evaluation is completely speculative, and unnecessarily intrusive. To be perfectly frank, who the hell cares? If he does indeed have a mental disorder, I don’t see it as a character flaw. Quite the opposite, I applaud him for being much more successful in life than most of us “healthy” people in spite of his supposed handicap. His films positively burst at the seams with attention to detail, and if that is, as you theorize, a symptom of an obsessive-compulsive personality channeling his impulses for productive ends, I say good for him.
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Soolsma
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by Soolsma »

If you ask me, the term ''disorder" or "mental illness" were never very good terms, as they sound a bit too pejorative. In the end, being diagnosed with one mostly means a person doesn't fit the exact regular systems of society, education or workflow. Hell, one in four of all people is estimated to be diagnosable with one according to the DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) standards. It's likely that a lot of the interesting and boundary breaking people we've all come to love fall in to that category. It's also well known that a great deal of people who are highly intelligent or creative, are "impaired" in some other way (e.g. social skills, attention span, mood regulation)
A whole lot of artists fall in to some category or the other, I wouldn't be surprised if the average avid Lynch fan is prone to either, as are most Twin Peaks residents.
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yaxomoxay
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by yaxomoxay »

Andromedeaux wrote:No problem for me at all. I am the same, brother! But it doesn't help your credibility when advertising for TM.
I have been meditating quite consistently for the past 1+ year, twice a day whenever possible. Not TM but very similar (mantra based etc.).
Meditation doesn't make you not human, and it's not supposed to the same way that going to church will not make one a saint. Meditation will redirect you to a better understanding of the moment, even if the moment has passed, to take control of the future.
The beauty of meditation, among other things, is not that it removes all anger (anger IS a human feeling) but that it prevents negative emotions for becoming the focus before they become seriously damaging. I notice it as a father and a fairly good worker. If something upset me, I used to keep it with me even for hours or days. At times it was debilitating from a work perspective. If my kids did something unacceptable, I held a grudge for hours at a time. Now? Yeah, I might have an outburst and yell at my kids, I might have five minutes of frustration at work, but then it's back to business, and my focus goes back completely on what is productive. If someone cuts in front of me while I drive, I might be upset for a total of four seconds, but that's it. It's over, I already wasted four precious seconds of my life with negative emotions, no need for further self-inflicted pain. I personally know many individuals that when upset they can't go back to work with the same efficiency and motivation.
In the past couple of months, I was under a lot of stress due to some events at work; a LOT of stress. Without going into the details, sometimes I had my few seconds of f-words and cussing, but the whole negativity never lasted more than a minute. THAT is what was important. The result? Not only my boss congratulated me for the amazing work done, but my boss's boss's boss congratulated me for both the work done and for the amazing job I did with the team itself and the interactions between people and groups. Is this only due to meditation? No. However, meditation allowed me to manage my human feelings in a much different way. Even my wife noticed a huge difference in the past year.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by pinballmars »

I spent way too many of my formative years serving in busy upscale restaurants, where the chef was always screaming at somebody (including me sometimes) and where any mistake you made led to you being treated like you were the stupidest person in the world.

High-pressure jobs tend to work that way. Everyone's working quickly. You're trying to climb a seemingly insurmountable mountain in much less time than you'd like. Maybe that means delivering several hundred perfect plates of food out to diners in as little time as possible. Maybe that means making an 18-hour epic on a strict budget. Tensions flare up. Sometimes people yell at each other. If you're dedicated to working in this industry, you develop a thick skin.

So me, when I saw Lynch blow up at his crew sometimes in the Blu-ray special features, it just reminded me of restaurant work. Sometimes the chef really lays into you.

It happens. It happens to everyone in this line of work. If you want a job where everyone is polite to each other all of the time, you picked the wrong one if you chose the restaurant path. Or the filmmaking path, I guess.
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bob_wooler
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by bob_wooler »

Albie scares me.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by albie »

bob_wooler wrote:Albie scares me.
Albie scares me too.
4815162342
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by 4815162342 »

I don't want to fall all over myself making excuses for Lynch's behavior as some do, I think what is shown in the BTS is pretty disappointing. At the same time, on the spectrum of "directors behaving badly", it's not really that serious.
Last edited by 4815162342 on Wed Aug 05, 2020 5:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
LateReg
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by LateReg »

4815162342 wrote:I don't want to fall all over myself making excuses for Lynch's behavior as some do, I think what is shown in the BTS is pretty disappointing. At the same time, on the spectrum of "director's behaving badly", it's not really that serious.
As you said, it's not really all that serious, but to me it's not disappointing at all. It's not a "making excuses for Lynch" thing for me either. I'd do it for anyone because I think it's human to have the occasional freakout, especially when under pressure, or even when you've just had enough, or when people around you just aren't getting it. It would be nice if we could all just be nice all the time, but that's not reality, and I get it, and it comes along with the territory of being either in-charge of a large operation or passionate or creative or etc. I love it, personally, and I can relate to both being on the receiving and giving ends. And I love that those moments were included in the documentary, which is otherwise full of easygoing warmth and humor amidst the creative process. Dark emotions like impatience, fear, anger and the inability to communicate very personal ideas are also part of that process.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by Metamorphia »

One thing that's clear about Lynch is that he has very specific ideas about how he wants to do things and doesn't like to deviate from them. You see this as the basis of most of his BTS frustrations with other crew members (which I don't think are very bad at all and are mostly few and far between - although I haven't seen the footage on the A-Z box set).
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Mr. Reindeer
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

Metamorphia wrote:One thing that's clear about Lynch is that he has very specific ideas about how he wants to do things and doesn't like to deviate from them. You see this as the basis of most of his BTS frustrations with other crew members (which I don't think are very bad at all and are mostly few and far between - although I haven't seen the footage on the A-Z box set).
Notably, I don’t believe there are any of these moments on the A to Z set footage. It seems Jason S. cherry-picked the few juicy bits for the original documentaries.
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NormoftheAndes
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by NormoftheAndes »

albie wrote:
bob_wooler wrote:Albie scares me.
Albie scares me too.
Thanks Albie for this discussion. Of course it has been mentioned plenty of times in Peaks groups online before but you're making larger observations regarding possible mental illnesses.

If Lynch was working very long hours on The Return then I really see that as his own choice. I think he really should have set specific working days for himself and a long night to rest and enjoy himself.

One thing I wonder about is, does Lynch ever take time out to just go around the Twin Peaks locations with anyone and enjoy them? I hope he did for sure back in 2016. One guy recently said to me that the video of Lynch on his channel where he was glueing up his trousers during lockdown indicated mental illness! :lol:

Just now on Youtube I read some guy saying that The Return basically felt like a lot of deleted scenes put together - he was arguing that it was just not up to the standard he hoped for. In my view, the dischoate and disorganised, incoherent nature of The Return and before it INLAND EMPIRE lends itself to people saying that Lynch's own psychology is represented in the work. I don't think many would argue that Season 3 of TP was definitely showing an unsettled, distressing and troubled world - in the town of Twin Peaks too. Whilst the town was always with its troubles, it had run out of control and become pervasive. That warm glow (not just talking about the change in photography) had very much gone.

That then has filtered through to people wondering what exactly goes on with Lynch himself, since he is not someone who talks about his feelings day to day. He may produce a video on his YT channel, but not one discussing emotional outpourings. (I somewhat wish he would honestly) ...
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AXX°N N.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by AXX°N N. »

This topic is something that bugs me personally. So I'm not exactly ranting against anyone in particular.

--

The discussion of an artist's psychology in a clinical sense has too much of a tendency in my mind to end up somewhere adjacent to the Nazis, deeming whatever they didn't like as degenerate, and throwing artists who didn't do anything but propagandic 'realism' into mental wards, where they often died. Or how the Soviet film boards stopped funding anyone going too abstract and that, again, wasn't doing enough to tow the party line. Or how McCarthyism treated sympathy for the merely theoretically wrongly accused as its own admission of treason.

James Joyce was widely speculated to 'suffer' from schizophrenia, but the eagerness with which that diagnosis was made by those in the armchairs, when stripped of its self-stated intentions, was merely the attempt to thwart him from being able to be himself and from being allowed to make or to sell his work, as was the case when America banned his books. As was the case when America banned any books, or when the international twittersphere decides someone is guilty of theoretical crimes. Joyce was advised to get psychoanalyzed, with the implicit motivation being that it would be corrective, and he resisted. The point that mental illness begins to exist in a certain sense is, after all, the moment of compliance. Lynch has told the story before of only ever nearly getting pschoanalyzed, and how at the acknowledgment by the therapist that it might affect his work or change his understanding of his own creativity, he vamoosed never to be seen in a clinical setting again.

Who's going to do it, and how is it that they determine whether an artist is aware, if at all, of the clinical significance of their work? Isn't the basic premise of mental illness the idea that the sufferer's mind is not in control of itself? That being the case, how do you deal with the problem of it being near impossible to presume what the artist knows, or is in control of, not to mention the arrogance of assuming you have a clearer hold of it than the artist themselves? Merely by token of not being the supposedly deranged artist, not inflicted with the malady? How is that a convincing premise, and isn't the attempt to wrest that privelege of self-assuredness away from the individual, in the end, the definition of authoritarianism? The moral outrage against Blue Velvet was not separable from a desire for Lynch to merely disappear. It's just the age old battle between freedom and wrongthink, and Lynch is wise to not engage at all, because it's not a logical arena anyway, not when the opposition has as their premise your undoing, and little of the discussion is actually in good faith.

This narrative sort of writes itself into a corner where it never reflexively looks back at and questions its basic premise. Because even if Lynch were mentally ill, shouldn't the mentally ill be allowed the right to exist however they want, including creating whatever art they want? That's the point of what they call art therapy, so long as it's in a government facility. But it's not like liberty and justice or moral or philosophical discussion is the deciding factor, anyway. Regardless of the groupthink, Lynch's clout is either profitable or attractive as a cultural investment to those funding his work, and that's the real deciding factor.
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NormoftheAndes
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by NormoftheAndes »

AXX°N N. wrote:This topic is something that bugs me personally. So I'm not exactly ranting against anyone in particular.

--

The discussion of an artist's psychology in a clinical sense has too much of a tendency in my mind to end up somewhere adjacent to the Nazis, deeming whatever they didn't like as degenerate, and throwing artists who didn't do anything but propagandic 'realism' into mental wards, where they often died. Or how the Soviet film boards stopped funding anyone going too abstract and that, again, wasn't doing enough to tow the party line. Or how McCarthyism treated sympathy for the merely theoretically wrongly accused as its own admission of treason.

James Joyce was widely speculated to 'suffer' from schizophrenia, but the eagerness with which that diagnosis was made by those in the armchairs, when stripped of its self-stated intentions, was merely the attempt to thwart him from being able to be himself and from being allowed to make or to sell his work, as was the case when America banned his books. As was the case when America banned any books, or when the international twittersphere decides someone is guilty of theoretical crimes. Joyce was advised to get psychoanalyzed, with the implicit motivation being that it would be corrective, and he resisted. The point that mental illness begins to exist in a certain sense is, after all, the moment of compliance. Lynch has told the story before of only ever nearly getting pschoanalyzed, and how at the acknowledgment by the therapist that it might affect his work or change his understanding of his own creativity, he vamoosed never to be seen in a clinical setting again.

Who's going to do it, and how is it that they determine whether an artist is aware, if at all, of the clinical significance of their work? Isn't the basic premise of mental illness the idea that the sufferer's mind is not in control of itself? That being the case, how do you deal with the problem of it being near impossible to presume what the artist knows, or is in control of, not to mention the arrogance of assuming you have a clearer hold of it than the artist themselves? Merely by token of not being the supposedly deranged artist, not inflicted with the malady? How is that a convincing premise, and isn't the attempt to wrest that privelege of self-assuredness away from the individual, in the end, the definition of authoritarianism? The moral outrage against Blue Velvet was not separable from a desire for Lynch to merely disappear. It's just the age old battle between freedom and wrongthink, and Lynch is wise to not engage at all, because it's not a logical arena anyway, not when the opposition has as their premise your undoing, and little of the discussion is actually in good faith.

This narrative sort of writes itself into a corner where it never reflexively looks back at and questions its basic premise. Because even if Lynch were mentally ill, shouldn't the mentally ill be allowed the right to exist however they want, including creating whatever art they want? That's the point of what they call art therapy, so long as it's in a government facility. But it's not like liberty and justice or moral or philosophical discussion is the deciding factor, anyway. Regardless of the groupthink, Lynch's clout is either profitable or attractive as a cultural investment to those funding his work, and that's the real deciding factor.
I don't think that what you've posted is highly relevant to discussion - its more like an excerpt from a PhD thesis! :lol:
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Mr. Reindeer
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

NormoftheAndes wrote:
I don't think that what you've posted is highly relevant to discussion - its more like an excerpt from a PhD thesis! :lol:
I don’t think questioning Lynch’s mental state is highly relevant, or germane, or productive to discussion. None of us knows him, and so far as I know, none of us is a psychologist (maybe you are; but even then, you still have never actually examined him). He’s been doing fine for decades doing his own weird thing. Seems pretty happy and fulfilled, there’s zero evidence that he poses harm to himself or anyone else, and he’s produced some of the most incredible art of the last several decades. Would that we were all so lucky. I just don’t see how calling someone’s mental health into question with no data is a productive direction to take a discussion, and I think that’s at least part of what Axxon N. was getting at.
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