Let's Rock

Last Friday I enjoyed one of the oddest and happiest classes of my generally odd and mostly happy career.  In my Heroines & Heroes class we were discussing psychoanalytical literary criticism, preparing them for the paper they're writing this weekend on "Death" from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (which, as all right-thinking individuals know, is the greatest American novel).  Whenever we're talking about conceptual tools I liked to give the students a text to examine (I'm a huge believer in having students learn a theory and then use a theory - which I must have picked up from my father's discussion of medical school).  In this case I showed them the iconic Cooper's dream sequence from Twin Peaks.  I am a firm believer in the notion that David Lynch, with all of his peculiarities and failings, is the most influential director of his generation.  There are movies before and after Blue Velvet, and TV before and after Twin Peaks.  Not surprisingly, very few of the students were familiar with the scene, although a few more had heard of the series, which is not particularly strange since we're almost a quarter-century removed from its inception.  What I loved was when it came time for the midget to dance about half the students began to snap their fingers along with the music; and so we sat there in the darkened room on a snowy day, watching a dancing midget speaking in subtitles, and the students gave themselves to the moment.  All we needed was Lynch himself filming away.  As Nietzsche reminded us, when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares into you.  I guess my students just stare into me, and the weirdness flows.