> torment the reader because they suggest the possibility of meaning
The first time I experienced this in art (was it Blue Velvet, Un Chien Andalou, or Ohio Impromptu?), it seemed exceedingly novel.
Unfortunately, every subsequent experience has given less and less. Surrealism, after sufficient exposure, became as dull as the most formulaic blockbuster.
Maybe I'm just not appreciating it enough. Maybe narrative and convention are arbitrary and overrated, and that principle is so profound that it has become the only thing worth discussing in art.
I feel compelled to speak up on behalf of Un Chien Andalou.
You know that scene, right at the very beginning, where an unseen person strops a razor before the famous slicing with it? Four strops are given four shots, alternating angle with side of the razor. The woman's eye is your own. This film with its technique will open up the metaphorical eye of your perception of it, suggesting unknown and even unknowable things.
Now, I won't argue that Dalí or Buñuel did or didn't achieve that. My knowledge of the subject is sparse in comparison to others'. But I would say that the opening scene (by itself) qualifies as one of the most sophisticated, novel and ambitious prologues/invocations humanity has generated. I'd further posit that that knowledge should raise one's priors for suspecting dense meaning in the rest of the work, knowing nothing else.
Edit/Afterword: I'd also argue that Lynch's absurdities and nonsense are not intended to frustrate the viewer, or if so it is only true inasmuch as frustration is a signal to loosen assumptions in terms of what you are watching--to parables and dreams have a deep logic to them, in that they use symbol and association to convey felt perceptions, understandings and beliefs.
I get that the complaint is that at some point people start replicating the form without being motivated by (what one perceives as) artistic genius. But that issue, of an initially straightforward and perspicuous intent generating works of great meaning which are in time stripped of their most attractive aesthetic attributes in culture's great scrapyard, is endogenous to this society of ours. It doesn't make those aesthetic qualities bad, and it certainly doesn't need to poison the value of their source (whether it does or not is up to the beholder). Yet it is understandably easy to grow jaded in a world where aesthetic competency is almost totally uncorrelated from rational/conceptual merit.
Sure, Dali and Lynch are definitely film school's textbook answer.
> I get that the complaint is that at some point people start replicating the form
Not really, the complaint is genuinely with the originals. Even at their best, we get what from surrealism, maybe one message? ie, the norms of artistic expression are fundamentally arbitrary?
That's just... the sort of thing I expect any 16-year old to find obvious.
So I can entertain a few possibilities:
1) Everyone finds this message, which I find obvious, to be deeply profound, to the point where they want to be bludgeoned with it over and over.
2) No one actually understands why these films are good, they're just endorsing the bizarre to look intelligent. Or parroting what film professors or critics said about them, who in turn made careers off of taking iconoclastic positions.
3) There's something deeper in these forms of art that I haven't directly experienced and no one is quite able to articulate.
4) People like what they like. (Hat tip to John Hodgman.)
I've never really found overwhelming evidence to support or disconfirm any of the alternatives, and not holding out hope I ever will, but would love to see it someday.
I genuinely would like nothing more than to hear that (3) is the right answer. I've had multiple hours-long conversations looking for support of that one.
In the absence of persuasive evidence in any direction, I should probably favor (4). It has no predictive power as a model, which sucks, but of the available options, it's the most charitable to all concerned.
