Yesterday BoingBoing pointed to an article on The Psychologist Online by Huw Green that argues that David Lynch’s work, particularly Inland Empire, is an accurate depiction of what it’s like for someone with a psychotic illness to encounter reality.

I immediately thought of last week’s episode of FilmCouch, in which I used Lynch, a new documentary about the filmmaker, as a point of entry to talk about his recent work. I compared Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire to recent films penned by Charlie Kaufman, namely Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I argued that Lynch’s films are far more effective due to the fact he, unlike Kaufman, refuses to provide the viewer with the necessary tools to keep track of the breaks in narrative convention.

Green’s article points out nearly the same thing (without the comparison to Kaufman). Measuring Lynch’s effect on the viewer, Green says:

The audience, who have been led through the early stages of the plot with some of the conventional devices of storytelling (coherent dialogue, linear chronology) are suddenly thrown into a world of unfamiliar film cuts, unexplained locations and wordless acting. We are forced to jump to our own conclusions and build what narrative we will from scant concrete evidence as to events. Our sense of sense itself forces us to put something together and, given the presence of ominous emotions and apparent malice, what we put together is a paranoid and terrifying vision of the intentions of the characters in the film and even the world we inhabit.

Green goes on to conclude that Lynch’s ability to elicit a paranoid reaction from the viewer makes his films an effective window into the mind of a psychotic patient. I love how audacious that is, who would have thought that weird indie films would have a clinical use?

The article does a great job of pulling apart how Lynch messes with the viewer’s mind, but being that I’m a film lover with little to no experience with mental illness, I think these films serve a purpose beyond acting as psychosis simulators. For me, Lynch’s ability to force us to draw hasty, paranoid conclusions about what’s happening provides a peek at how all films tamper with human emotions. It’s no coincidence that both Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire deal with the making of a film. Lynch shows how forming an emotionally convincing story in our minds based only on a series of images is always a mild form of mental delusion.