Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive. And now… DLF.TV. David Lynch’s new website is an offshoot of the David Lynch Foundation, an organization through which Lynch defends Transcendental Meditation as a means for adolescents to cope with depression, anxiety, learning disorders, and substance abuse.
The site offers original television programming that “celebrates consciousness, creativity and bliss,” as well as proactive information on donating, volunteering, and becoming a student affiliate for the DLF. User-friendly, it’s a sharp contrast to some of Lynch’s famously dark, sometimes impenetrable feature films. The front page features highlights from the site’s inaugural Change Begins Within Concert, including performances by Sheryl Crow, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Eddie Vedder (the Concert Special is “coming soon”).
From here the site offers various links to TM, framed here as a life-changing technique — and product. For a whopping $2000 ($1000 for those who are fulltime students), you can learn exactly how to perform the technique that DLF.TV raves about in practically every segment. (At those prices, it’s no wonder Lynch started his own foundation to help disseminate the technique.) The TM FAQ tab takes users to a trio of short instructional videos that explore the “whys” and “whats” of the method. At once quirky and intense during each of these presentations, Lynch sits in a director’s chair before a crimson curtain (reminiscent of both Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks — to assert that TM can inspire and guide the mind. In one clip, he calls TM “a mental technique that literally turns the mind within,” allowing practitioners to achieve a state of “enlightenment, fulfillment, liberation.”
At this point, you may be asking, “How is all of this television?” Well, there is a link to “Videos,” as well as a listing of channels that range from the “Daily David” to “Concerts,” “Conferences and Summits,” and “David Doing Stuff.” These focus on Lynch’s media involvement and the promotion of the DLF learning creed. The site also offers a few tutorial-styled videos in which Lynch discusses tricks of the trade for which he’s best known. “How to Make a Good Movie” is an excerpt from one of Lynch’s public appearances where he tells an audience of young admirers that the politics of moviemaking can often challenge a director, but that one must remain steadfastly dedicated to the execution of the original vision. The clip is reminiscent of a talk show, tying it to the idea of web television and simultaneously making a connection with film, Lynch’s first medium.
An additional clip captures a monologue in which Lynch recalls his very first meditation. It was a moment, he says, when he experienced the “sublime, waves of bliss, waves of happiness, felicidad.” From here on, the other videos offer more of the same, which is, promoting TM as a means for self-reflection and inner peace. In “Trout and Octopus,” though, Lynch departs from the repetition and hilariously uses the marine animals as symbols for distinct film projects that a filmmaker might juggle. There is no apparent “point” to these 53 seconds, but they offer a welcome, humorous departure from the other clips’ more serious and instructional tone.
As brief as the videos may be, each reveals flashes of an intensely peaceful Lynch that create a stark contrast to the typically dark image that is held of him. DLF.TV emphasizes Lynch╒s sunnier side. His speeches indicate an earnest desire to spread his wealth of knowledge on TM and its benefits for the creative mind and curious the soul. Though he refers to TM essentially as a transformative healing process, he never specifies the “disease.” Though he initially describes TM as a way for others to cope with substance abuse and depression, the site doesn’t follow up on this possibility. Rather than focusing on the negative reasons that inspire this self-reflection, Lynch concentrates on the positive outcome of meditation. Throughout the site, TM becomes an entity in itself, and is portrayed more as an enlightening vehicle for inner peace than a therapeutic, medicinal prescription.