In the words of your Cowboy from Mulholland Drive, just stop for a little second and think about it. Will ya do that for me? Pretty easy to “enjoy life and enjoy all the diversity in life” when you’re rich, white and a Hollywood celebrity. How easy do you think that is when you’re poor, black and living in Chicago? I’m none of those things but let me tell you I have a strong suspicion that it could be a mite tricky.
If you will forgive me, Mr Lynch, and even if you will not, you’re acting like an asshat. Keep the TM bullshit to yourself and go do something solid for the Chicagoans like contributing financially. Otherwise stick to making movies rather than telling others how to live.
He’s right, though. It may be impractical but meditation has a proven effect on mood equivalent to anti-depressants. It’s free, can be done anywhere, needs no special training, and only takes about ten minutes a day.
Besides, Chicago has basically been a war torn shithole since forever and nothing else has worked so…fuck it. Might as well break out the yoga mats. It can’t very well make things worse.
I was just reading an account about some of the props used in Eraserhead. And it mentioned that one of the props was a dead cat that Lynch had found and preserved in some kind of experimental embalming fluid he had invented. But it also mentioned that Lynch had done this years before he made the movie in which the cat was used.
The account concluded that David Lynch makes movies in order to justify the strange things he would be doing anyway.
It’s been suggested that the reason poor blacks in Chicago turn to drugs is a desire to take their minds off their predicament. Wouldn’t meditation help achieve the same goal? And without the added burden of needing a means to pay for drugs.
Not that I think yoga will replace illegal drugs, but I don’t think his premise is all that flawed.
“Contributing financially” how? Buy a month’s worth of healthy groceries for ten thousand poor black families on the South Side? That would probably wipe out his savings account, and next month they’d all be out of vegetables again.
…purchase 500 Steinway pianos and distribute them among schools in low-income neighborhoods? They say that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. But TM is free.
I think you’re misunderstanding what he’s saying. TM Believers don’t just believe that meditating will have benefits for you mental state, or that Chicago criminals might become more relaxed if only they could somehow be persuaded to meditate. They believe that you meditating in your home will lower violence in Chicago by some sort of magical effect.
David Lynch has believed this for a long time. It’s just a nutty belief he has. It doesn’t detract from the quality of his movies. I can’t imagine getting pissed off about it, any more than I’d get pissed off if a director said he was praying for Chicago. Why would that bother me?
Doesn’t sound that magical to me. People who are meditating are people who are not rioting. Or producing widgets. Or buying widgets. You know, until they stop meditating.
So, if everyone in Chicago WERE to drop everything they were doing, whether it was widget-making, paper-pushing, Big Mac-chomping, rioting, baby diaper-changing, or traffic ticket-writing,* and start meditating, there would be no violence occurring while the meditation was going on.
No, Larry Borgia was right: the TM fantasy is that if a certain percentage of the people engage in TM, then it affects all the other people too.
For shits and grins, look up some of their claims about universal consciousness, quantum physics, and other stuff. They’re really insane about it.
(These are the same guys who claimed that the skies would soon be full of people flying by willpower alone. What did we actually get? A few videos of people bouncing on their butts.)
So, Lynch could put this plan into action and see what happens. Open up a TM center in West Englewood, Chicago’s most crime-ridden neighborhood, and stock it with all sorts of New Age gewgaws and posters and artwork bearing positive intent. Staff it with peaceniks and hippies with flowers in their hair and have sitar music playing in the background. Then see how many times it gets looted and vandalized and make a movie out of it.
Maharishi Mahesh believe(d) in the magical effect of TM. Do we know that Lynch also believes it? I haven’t tried it myself but I can see how someone could find TM useful psychologically without believing yogi magic is involved.
To be fair, I don’t know what Lynch believes. He may practice a stripped-down version of TM, without the Mahesh Yogi strap-on mysticism.
(It’s a little like Buddhism: some people believe in the miracles of the Buddha, and others don’t. If someone says, “I’m a Buddhist,” that alone won’t tell you what their beliefs are.)