David Lynch, the film director, ‘the visionary of America’s subconscious’ and a ‘a singular auteur whose films found poetry in the ugly underbelly of American life’ has died. He ‘saw that if the US dreamed of safety and prosperity and the suburban drive and the picket fence, it also dreamed of the opposite: of escape, danger, adventure, sex and death. And the two collided and opened up chasms and sinkholes in the lost highway to happiness.’
Best known for Twin Peaks, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet he was described as ‘a purebred, corn-fed all-American surrealist and a man who insisted that below our manicured lawns and behind our tidy housefronts lay incomprehensible urges and unholy evil. In his work, the sunny American Dream and its nightmare subconscious were conjoined and inseparable, each unimaginable without the other.’
Blue Velvet for example was ‘a subversive coming-of-age tale in which the boyish naïf played by Kyle MacLachlan falls under the spell of a sexually masochistic chanteuse (Isabella Rossellini) and her brutal gangster lover (Dennis Hopper), it was wide-eyed and wondrous one moment, deeply disturbing the next.’
‘The movie haunts like a Freudian spectrograph of the country’s soul.’
According to ADB his first film which won awards was about an abused, bed-wetting boy who grew a kindly grandmother from a seed.
Despite the nightmares permeating his movies and creative subconscious he claimed to have had a happy childhood, albeit constantly moving because of his father’s job as a research scientist in agriculture.
Born 20 January 1946 3am Missoula, Montana, he had a sharp-witted, communicative Capricorn Sun Venus conjunction and Mercury in his 3rd house opposition Mars Saturn in Cancer in his 9th square a 12th house Jupiter.
Mars Saturn can be a destructive energy and juxtaposed with an amplified Jupiter may have given him his sense of a two-tier life/society. Jupiterian success and sunny smiles on the the one hand and ruthless/perverted Saturn Mars on the other. His Uranus in his 8th would also give him a doorway into deeper realities as would his 8th house North Node.
His 10th house Virgo Moon conjunct his Midheaven suited him for a career that brought him into contact with the public But being unaspected would give him a sense of disconnection with his environment initially at home and later with society. It would make him vulnerable and feel unsupported, perhaps one reason he ‘let in’ the horrors that lurked below the surface which most manage to blot out.
The post David Lynch – seeking truth in the darkness first appeared on Astroinform with Marjorie Orr – Star4cast.
