Trail of blood and tears
where does it lead?
"You are the least sunny person I have ever known" (a co-worker's observation, circa 1995)
Yeah, I’m a congenital brooder.
The problem with my lifelong proclivity for all things Dark is that it has become such a natural psychic appendage that I forget most people, lacking this sensibility, are keenly affected. My tendency to respond with gallows humor to most unfortunate situations can be off-putting. I suspect it makes people shy away.
Those of us with a bleak sense of humor are best left expressing it in the right community (ie, context) when it's validation we seek.
Stay away from normies with all your depressing shit. Dark humor is an integral part of my personality. It seeps everywhere I go, like bodily fluids overflowing their containment.
My obsession with the dark side consumes me. My perspective is so colored by it that I know no other way.
I think it's a Mexican thing. I've always felt Mexican culture tends to be morbid and nihilistic, a legacy of the Aztec tradition of death that has left its mark on our ethnic culture. This is embodied in some of the slasher movie motifs directed by today's drug cartels.
Mexicans love a good laugh, but don't ever think that we stop laughing if things turn to shit; it is our nature to pivot, then laugh in defiance of said shit, a one-two Mexican idiosyncratic punch. In the typical Mexican household, you’re not likely to find Trump Derangement so much as a slow-burn resigned despair punctuated by a sound dose of humor.
Due to this cultural legacy, I don’t waste time battling the devouring bleakness that pervades human affairs. Instead, I channel spiteful acceptance into dark, self-denigrating humor, "between the lines," so to speak. It's the only way to express my nature in the mainstream world.
When David Lynch died last week, there was an outpouring of tributes and remembrances honoring the not-so-mainstream filmmaker and his twisted artistic vision. He was a trailblazer who splashed into the Hollywood pool when that pool was more accommodating to original creators. Today’s Disneyfied Hollywood has no room for Lynchian experimentalists. It’s the truest measure of his unique contribution that Lynchian has winnowed into the cinematic lexicon.
Though I didn’t join in the Lynchian navel glazing we saw after his passing, I’ve long been a devotee of his work. I ran a text string search of “Lynchian” on old blogs I’ve archived and found one such usage from 4 years ago. I wrote about this untimely incident that resulted in the death of Australian TV director, John Clabburn, of "The Wiggles” fame.
Clabburn was trimming hedges with a new power saw at his home when he cut his hand. He fell ten feet from his ladder and was soon discovered by his wife. He had just bought the chainsaw that day.
His death was attributed to cardiac arrest from the blood loss from his slashed hand.
“When I went out to the back garden, he was crawling on the ground on his stomach, said Clabburn’s wife, Melissa, speaking to the Daily Telegraph. “There was so much blood, he was clutching his torso.
“I kept getting towels to stem the flow, but the blood wouldn’t stop.”
I am really leery of ladders, especially after scaling the 3rd or 4th rung. You will not find me beyond that lofty height, especially with a running power saw.
Melissa Clabburn painted a strangely Lynchian scene where her husband's death gruesomely unfolded against the idyllic stage of a lush landscape.
The punchline is subtle and possesses your discomfort.
“All he said was, ‘Call an ambulance now,’” she said. “One minute we were admiring how straight the hedge was looking and what a great job he had done — he was so meticulous, he had a great eye for detail — the next, John was in an ambulance. He kept it together for me, but I know he would have been in incredible pain.”
The Lynchian scene that came to mind was the opening in “Blue Velvet.” The movie opens in an idyllic residential backyard that reeks of pure, unadulterated Americana, down to the white picket fence. An archetypal stage presents itself, the gentle flowing rush from a garden hose’s sprinkler setting the beautifully predictable pace of this Utopian expectation, a scene dependably embracing, until it’s not.
When David Lynch enters, the interesting times begin.
David Lynch’s scenic absurdities mimic the Mexican sense of gallows humor. I would go a step further and call it “gallows irony,” since it is so utterly fatalistic that, painted into the existential corner, our attempt at control is solely accomplished through humor. In such a context, humor can only echo the hopelessness from which it spawned.
What on Earth is absurd but the recognition that the fate befalling us cannot be thwarted and attempts to fend it off with logic or a sense of empowerment is a humorless endeavor that lands you in the same boat as someone who mocked it all and said “fuck it” while going over the cliff.
As the Japanese say, “shōganai,” which translates roughly, and insufficiently, to “it can’t be helped” or “there is no other way.”
David Lynch was attuned to that vain of fatalism Mexicans revel in darkly and it is not surprising that he conjured a weepy Spanishified cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in a very eerie and ghastly rendition performed in the fictional Club Silencio from “Mulholland Drive.”
Roy Orbison, one of the more unfortunate and cursed American musical artists, created a body of work marked by dreary torment. This performance (by Rebekah Del Rio) was a fitting soundtrack piece for David Lynch’s gallows irony. The infernal dark cloud that followed Roy Orbison blots the cheeriness of any sunny day that presumes to rescue his characters before it is snatched away like a vicious cosmic joke.
David Lynch, echoing the Mexican temperament, found release and succor in flaunting the overriding gravity of a life’s punitive sentence. The ethnic curse brought another promising life to an abrupt end in 1995 with a healthy dose of Lynchian tropes trailing behind for almost 400 feet.
At 11:48 a.m. (CST), Saldívar got a gun from her purse and pointed it at Selena. As Selena attempted to flee, Saldívar shot her once on the right lower shoulder, severing the subclavian artery and causing a severe loss of blood. Critically wounded, Selena ran towards the lobby, leaving a 392-foot (119 m) trail of blood. She collapsed on the floor as the clerk called the emergency services, with Saldívar still chasing after her and calling her a "bitch".
Imagine the cinematic potential! Visualize the bloody trail of crimson drops and streams and the camera’s one-minute floor-level panning from the beginning (where a bloody knife lays) to its endpoint where Selena lies, dying.
Lynch could have done this.
This song, covered by Selena in the ‘90s, dates back to the 1950s but captures the fatalism that lives vividly in despondent ranchera musicianship.
The literal translation of one of the choruses fails because the English language lacks the character to capture such deeply pessimistic helplessness in such poetic colors.
Only your fatal shadow
Shadow of evil
Following me wherever I go
With obstinacy
I’m not very ethnic and pretty white-washed (called derogatorily a “coconut”), but I have a good glimpse and understanding of the Mexican mindset. At the risk of romanticizing our cultural fatalism, it’s only fair to point out its less savory effects.
Such fatalism is nearly the antithesis of the pro-active Western “can-do ambition” that propels material and economic progress. Such fatalism results in a passivity that leads us to a state of resignation to what little life offers. Whereas the predominant American ambition fiercely seeks economic success, Mexican ambition fiercely seeks…survival.
Survival or success are radically different and each taps into antithetical aspects of collective character and intelligence.
Fierce ambition to succeed and high intelligence are an unstoppable combination in today’s rapidly advancing technological and global society. The fierce ambition to survive and average intelligence will only be rewarded with survival, the baseline that high strivers are driven to leap beyond.