I’ve just written a feature script with Alex Livingston(e), a very talented guy, who pointed out to me that you can see the eye of a duck in David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET. (above)
And this was significant since Lynch has a whole theory about the eye of the duck, which he explains below.
The clip I really wanted to show was Mark Cousins’ Scene by Scene interview, where he brings up the duck-eye theory again and gets a typically detailed elucidation of it, and we learn that movies are like ducks and each movie has a scene which is equivalent to the eye of the duck. Mark asks Lynch what the eye of the duck scene is in his latest movie, THE STRAIGHT STORY. Micro-pause. “I haven’t thought about it.”
Brilliant comic timing, but unplanned. The difference between being a comedian and simply being comic, and aware of it. At a certain point, Lynch realized that he could be a comedy character. I don’t think I understood this slightly performative, yet sincere, aspect of Lynch in the first few times I saw him speak, but looking back on them, it was always there.
Of course his recent ice-bucket challenge displays this brazenly.
shadowplay 