2022-12-25

• I was reading an essay by David Foster Wallace about David Lynch and his movies. It’s interesting because I am not really a movie buff. I’ve never seen a Lynch movie. And yet, I come away from my reading with a real sense of legibility around the greatness/importance of Lynch as a filmmaker. I feel I understand both important things about Lynch and important things about film analysis that I did not understand before. And yet, I still have not seen any of David Lynch’s movies. I don’t really understand anything about them. I have no idea what DFW is really talking about, on an object level. Ok, fine. The most interesting thing here, to me, is the extent to which I ascribe value to the feeling of something that was previously illegible becoming coherently legible, even in the absence of having experienced the thing in question. I cannot assess DFWs analysis for quality, in a serious sense, and yet, after reading it, I feel it is natural to ascribe it very high quality. Why? It made me feel like I understood something opaque and important. Essentially, DFWs writing seduced me into buying whatever he was selling, even though I have no idea what he is really selling. And being seduced is pretty fun and cool. Who cares whether it’s about movies or cars or physics or the character of the human experience. It’s fun to let yourself be seduced, it’s fun to find something so compelling you feel you can’t stop yourself from being seduced by it. This is true even if you have no rational idea what’s going on or if you should care. And, as something of an extension of this idea, it’s interesting to explore the standards you set for being seduced, particularly in areas where you have no a prori depth of knowledge/interest.

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