Quoted By:
David Foster Wallace once wrote a piece about David Lynch. In the piece, he coined a new term: "Lynchian". Wallace described a Lynchian tone as "the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal."
He described a husband beating his 1950s housewife to death because she bought the wrong brand of peanut butter. "I told you to buy the JIF," he'd say as he's clobbering her to death. This, he said, would qualify as almost perfectly Lynchian.
I think Fishtank and this post-phase enters into Lynchian territory. The image above shows a simple internet scene. It appears to be some young people on a stream. The girls are trying to create content to get their new careers off the ground. But as you notice more details it slowly dawns on you that these are young girls being groomed into a cult.
Despite the obvious subtext and the salesman's hope to normalize this horror, the average person is totally disgusted. Nevertheless, the viewer is fascinated. We're drawn further into this. The sheer naked horror of what they're portraying, the blase quality with which they're portraying it, it creates this brutal paradox that almost rapes the viewer's basic sense of what is decent.
