好莱坞真正的大师/一代宗师

                
                
非热爱钓大鱼的大卫林奇莫属
读了下面纽约时报的长篇报道，相信你肯定同意
这里简单做个摘要：
林奇基金会组织的冥想入门课如今是好莱坞人新宠
入会费平均1000刀，包括为您度身打造的私密咒语
项目内容很简单：静坐对着自己念经，一日两次，一次二十分钟
场地就是《妖夜荒踪》那栋宅府，也就是林奇的私人工作室
近来新入会的有美版《办公室》的B. J. Novak，《破产姐妹花》那一对姐妹花
话往回讲
1973年7月1日上午11时，身在洛杉矶的林奇有了顿悟
此后30年，林奇娶了几个老婆，拍了一把暴力阴暗电影，但也不忘在片场抽时间去自己拖车冥想
2002年，林奇花100万美元买到满以为能近身跟随Maharishi大师修炼一个月的机会
结果发现修炼是通过电视会议形式进行
但没关系，就像Maharishi做过的所有事一样，他的缺席合乎情理
“当我在脑海回放时，他就在那里”
一个月后林奇回到洛城，感觉自己变了个人
过去十年，林奇只拍了一部电影，大部分时间用在全世界旅行传教上
曾经因为怯生会预录致辞上台领奖只放不说的他，现在面对三十多个国家成百上千的现场观众畅所欲言，机智风趣
2005年，林奇创立大卫林奇基金会，目标是筹募70亿传播冥想，为了“世界和平”
一年后，林奇第三度离婚，没过多久，又和比她小两圈的无名女演员Emily Stofle订婚
被问及为何离了又结结了又离时，他的回答是
“我们活在相对的领域中，事情在变”
2008年2月，Maharishi辞世
就在之前没几周，他在一次电视会议中向林奇道了生日喜
照别人看来，这有那么层将其视为传人的意味
如今，林奇基金会的努力有了成果
一些低端公立学校已设立“Quiet Time”项目
让学生一日两次，每次10分钟进行冥想，且已初见成效
他的基金会拥有大量明星会员
Gwyneth Paltrow, Ellen DeGeneres, Russell Simmons, Katy Perry, Susan Sarandon, Candy Crowley, Soledad O’Brien, George Stephanopoulos，还有 Paul McCartney的孙儿女
Russell Brand是林奇的左右手，经常伴同他一起出席基金会活动
Howard Stern, Laura Dern, Clint Eastwood，Jerry Seinfeld这些老牌冥想家都给林奇拍过广告，帮他筹募资金
2009年，Paul McCartney与Ringo Starr多年来的首次重聚演出也发生在林奇组织的义演上
尽管他俩四十多年前曾对Maharishi的运动产生幻灭
但外人看来，林奇式冥想已经不剩多少Maharishi影子，反而更像是瑜伽式的健身运动
“我只是个信差。我只是把Maharishi告诉我的东西讲给他们听”
对了，文章最后作者爆料，说林奇正忙个新剧本，而且题材一如既往的阴暗
照林奇本人的说法，“我想观众该能认出来”
                
                
David Lynch Is Back … as a Guru of Transcendental Meditation
By CLAIRE HOFFMAN
Published: February 22, 2013
Inside David Lynch’s bunker of a studio in Los Angeles, a small crowd of happy people gathered on a late summer morning to meditate and learn about the nature of consciousness. The dozen or so young actors and musicians and others were recent initiates of Transcendental Meditation, a trademarked form of relaxation that involves sitting quietly and saying a mantra to yourself for 20 minutes twice a day. T.M. initiation — a multiday instruction program that includes the bestowing of a secret personalized mantra — costs, on average, $1,000. But those gathered had been initiated as a gift of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Through its work, Lynch, who has been practicing T.M. for 40 years, hopes to teach meditation to the world and, as a result, create world peace.
Lynch’s compound is where Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette dove into a nether world of lust, porn, murder and shadow selves in his 1997 film, “Lost Highway.” But “Lost Highway” was 16 years ago, and besides, it was just a movie. On that recent summer morning, the sun flooded into the dining room and the table was laid out with pastries and lemonade. The wild-eyed actor B. J. Novak, formerly of “The Office,” wandered in, holding a to-go cup of coffee. The heiress Aileen Getty, whose foundation supports Lynch’s work in teaching the homeless to meditate, lingered near the door. Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs, stars of the sitcom “2 Broke Girls,” stood to the side, laughing. Adam Gaynor, a former member of the band Matchbox 20, told me how meditation helped him deal with the recent death of his mother. “I heard about it and pushed it off a few times,” he said. “But afterward, I was so grateful.”
Near a window that looked out onto the Hollywood Hills, a large, framed, pastel poster was set up. Standing beside it was Lynn Kaplan, a dark-haired, energetic woman who works for Lynch’s foundation, which is based in Manhattan. Kaplan had assembled this group of young talent and personally initiated each one with their own mantra. “This is where the mantra comes from,” Kaplan explained, gesturing toward the evolutionary pictogram of Indian men radiating light. At the base stood a small man in a white robe, his hands clasped. This was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, she said, the late founder of the T.M. movement and Lynch’s guru. Beneath him floated a pastel world, glowing.
Word came that Lynch was on his way down, and the crowd shuffled over to his in-house recording studio and screening room, settling into built-in, modern easy chairs. Lynch slunk in through a side door, casting a leery eye up at his audience. He took a seat near the wall, looking uncomfortable. Everyone fell silent. Lynch was stylishly rumpled. His frame was lean and his hair was pomaded loosely into a mature faux-hawk. He wore faded khaki pants that bloused over a worn leather belt. In the breast pocket of his white dress shirt, a pack of American Spirit cigarettes was at the ready. Lynch is a notorious creature of habit: he spent seven years drinking the same chocolate milkshake at the same time every day from Bob’s Big Boy in L.A., because he thought it affected his creative process; and part of his persona is his uniform approach to dress. That day, a yellow watch gave a flash of color.
Lynch, 67, has the plain-spoken demeanor of an old cowboy actor, a posture that masks a lifelong fear of public speaking. When his quietness got uncomfortable, Kaplan announced the start of a short meditation. For 10 minutes, the soundproofed room was dead silent. When it was over, Lynch stood up, refreshed. “So, do you guys have any questions?” he asked.
Kat Dennings’s boyfriend raised his hand and asked how he started meditation. Lynch made a funny face — he has answered this question a hundred times, all over the world. “I started here in Los Angeles on July 1, around 11 o’clock in the morning, a beautiful Saturday sunny day in 1973.” The group laughed at his exactness. “It was just yesterday,” he said softly. He continued: “I always tell the same story. The Beatles were over with Maharishi in India and lots of people were getting hip to Transcendental Meditation and different kinds of meditation, and I thought it was real baloney.” There was a knowing murmur — those in the audience had once had their doubts, too. “I thought I would become a raisin-and-nut eater, and I just wanted to work. And then all of a sudden, I heard this phrase, ‘True happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.’ And this phrase had a ring of truth.”
Lynch brightened proudly. “You just got to stay regular in your meditation,” he eventually said. “It’s the transcendent that does everything good for us human beings. You get a key that opens the door to that with Transcendental Meditation as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.”
Over the past few decades, David Lynch’s babbling dwarfs, ominous red curtains and just-around-the-corner episodes of hideous violence have become shorthand for a generation of art-house filmmaking. “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Mulholland Drive” and his hit TV series “Twin Peaks” received critical acclaim. And somewhere along the way, Lynch’s fringe vision of reality became a marketable brand. He directed commercials — with flickering light and his signature unease — for Calvin Klein and Dior. He has lent his name to several products, from Lynch edition bottles of Dom Pérignon to the David Lynch Signature Cup Organic Coffee company. He recently released a discordant musical album — “Crazy Clown Time” — and has produced a number of others. For decades he has exhibited paintings and drawings and photographs around the world. He designed a nightclub, Silencio (a reference to the theater in “Mulholland Drive”), in Paris. Every night, people line up outside with hopes of experiencing something Lynchian, a phrase that David Foster Wallace once defined as that which “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s containment within the latter.”
What Lynch has not been doing, though, is making movies. Since “Mulholland Drive” was released in 2001, Lynch seems to have turned his focus almost entirely away from shadowy underworlds and toward spreading the word about Transcendental Meditation. In 2003, he told a group of reporters that he was part of a project to build “peace palaces” all around the world, where thousands of practitioners would live, eat, sleep and meditate around the clock. And during the last decade, Lynch has traveled the world, telling all who will listen about transcending to a unified field of being. In the meantime, he has only released one feature film.
Whether his tireless work for T.M. has prevented him from focusing on his directorial work or whether the peaceful world he now inhabits has become his higher calling remains unclear. But in 2011, the independent film director Abel Ferrara told the blog Indiewire that he thought Lynch had given up on movies entirely. “Lynch doesn’t even want to make films anymore,” he said. “I’ve talked to him about it, O.K.? I can tell when he talks about it.” And then, rhetorically: “I’m a lunatic, and he’s pushing Transcendental Meditation.”
Watching Lynch stand in front of a giant movie screen, preaching in his singsong frontier voice about how meditation could transform all that ails, it seemed as if Ferrara might be right. Lynch told someone in the audience that the decision to meditate should be an easy one: “If you had a choice to vomit all day or feel healthy and strong, it would be kind of obvious.” Then he cackled, and it occurred to me then that, despite the lack of dwarfs or talking animals in the screening room, Lynch might be up to something else too. Trying to create world peace through meditation might simply be the most Lynchian thing that Lynch has ever done.
From the moment that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived at the Honolulu airport in 1958, wearing robes, his ambition was to make Transcendental Meditation a global practice. He had been traveling across India for a few years, spreading the notion that meditation wasn’t just for monks and yogis but instead could be simplified for the masses. He would soon seize on a generation of young people’s desires to recreate the nirvana of hallucinogenic drugs and to live meaningful lives. In 1967, the Beatles met Maharishi, and he quickly became their spiritual adviser. Life magazine declared 1968 “the Year of the Guru,” with photographs of Maharishi. By 1977, a Gallup poll reported that 4 percent of Americans said they practiced T.M.
But then things got murky, and questions about the cult of personality grew. The Beatles left Maharishi’s ashram in a huff. Maharishi intensified his focus on a “world plan” to create peace through what he called the “Maharishi Effect,” in which 1 percent of the square root of the world population would meditate and radiate positivity. By the late 1970s, he had told his followers that they should practice more advanced, and more expensive, meditation techniques that took about two hours a day and could result in superhuman powers — the strength of an elephant and the ability to levitate.
By the 1980s, only a devout base remained dedicated to the world plan, and many of them settled in a small community in a corner of southern Iowa. Deepak Chopra, who worked for the Maharishi at the time, told me, “I started to be uncomfortable with what I sensed was a cultish atmosphere around Maharishi.” Soon, Maharishi stopped making public appearances, spending his time in an isolated compound in the Netherlands. He named a Lebanese neuroscientist as his successor, giving him the ceremonial name and title Majaraja Adiraj Rajaraam, the First Ruler of the Global Country of World Peace. He had given him his weight in gold.
Far away, in Southern California, David Lynch drank, made money, married a number of women and directed violent and dark movies. Still, he loved meditating. On set, he would leave each day to go spend time alone in his trailer, “diving within.” Then, in 2001, Lynch heard about a rare opportunity: the Enlightenment Course. Maharishi, who had barely been seen in public for years, was offering devotees the chance to pay about a million dollars to spend a month with him in the Netherlands.
When Lynch arrived at the compound in Vlodrop, in June 2002, he had hopes that the $1 million fee — a significant investment for him — would allow him to spend a month at his master’s knee, basking in the glow of his enlightened consciousness. He was disappointed when he was told that Maharishi would not physically attend the meetings but instead would communicate with the small group of devoted benefactors via a teleconference system from his room upstairs. But it didn’t matter — like all things Maharishi did, Lynch says, his absence made sense. “When I play it back in my mind, he was right there,” he said. “It’s a strange thing. He was right above us but came through the television. But it was as if there was no television. And that’s the way it was.”
At the end of the Enlightenment Course, Lynch made his way back to Los Angeles as a changed man. “Everyone I saw was like a hero to me, trying to do the best they can, live life,” he said. “I was just in the strangest place. I’d pass through these different airports, and I’d look at the people, and I’d just love, love, loved the people.” I asked him if he still had the same feeling. “Yeah,” he said, looking away from me. “But the thing is, you could very easily sit under a tree. But if I heard that before I started — that you might want to sit under a tree, I’d stay away from that ’cause I want to work. You see what I mean? It gives you that feeling that you could sit under a tree, but it also gives you the feeling you could just go work.”
Could he have ended up sitting under a tree? I asked.
“No. I’m not enlightened.”
Lynch did feel a new sense of mission. “It was important for me to say something to the people, whether they listened or not, about my personal experience,” he said. Though he had long been fairly private about his love of T.M., Lynch started announcing his support of not only meditation but of Maharishi’s agenda for world change. This zeal didn’t go unnoticed by the leaders of Maharishi’s organization. In 2005, John Hagelin and Bob Roth, who spent decades working for Maharishi, suggested that Lynch start a foundation dedicated to helping troubled children through meditation. Lynch quickly expanded on the idea: he wanted to raise $7 billion to spread T.M. “I just remember him taking this idea and going two or three ideas beyond what we had in mind,” Hagelin said.
A year after the inception of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, Lynch’s life began to change more visibly. He filed for divorce from Mary Sweeney, his third wife, longtime collaborator and the mother of his 14-year-old son. Not long after, Lynch was engaged to Emily Stofle, an unknown actress decades younger. When asked why he married so many times, he told this magazine: “We live in the field of relativity. Things change.” In 2006, Lynch released his first film in five years, “Inland Empire,” which grossed a meager $4 million. The Times called it a “savagely uncompromised” piece of art; others panned it as alienating nonsense.
Regardless, it would be his last movie to date. Lynch set out on a two-year global speaking tour that took him to more than 30 countries to talk to mostly college-age audiences about meditation, creativity and peace. Lynch’s phobia of public speaking was such that he occasionally pretaped acceptance speeches when honored with an award and stood silently at the microphone as the recorder played his voice. But on the global speaking tour, in front of audiences of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, he cracked jokes and told personal stories of his own transformation.
Then, in February 2008, Maharishi died. In the weeks before his death, the guru acknowledged Lynch’s birthday in a group teleconference — a special honor. “It was a celebration taking place long-distance over Skype,” Hagelin said. “Maharishi was so intent on participating and hearing, and he took great satisfaction. Even then Maharishi saw with David the great potential to meet many people, to fulfill Maharishi’s vision of alleviating the problems of the world.”
On a 100-degree morning last summer, I was with Lynch in the back of a stretch limousine for a long, slow ride down Mulholland Drive. The narrow two-lane road, which runs along the top of the Hollywood Hills, separates the multimillion-dollar canyon homes of Los Angeles from the sprawl of split-levels that make up the San Fernando Valley. Tacking between suburban and glamorous, the road itself is broken down, potholed and in places overgrown with desert flower bushes. It always feels a little lonely.
There was an unspoken logic to us being up there. It was during the making of “Mulholland Drive,” which opens on a shot of a stretch limo lurching down the road, that Lynch began his transformation from iconoclastic director with a public-speaking phobia to global public evangelist for meditation and peace. On that summer morning, Lynch was a bit grouchy. (He was on a cleanse.) He squinted, watching the road as if we were braving a blizzard.
As the car hummed along and we relived his spiritual journey, I asked Lynch what he really believed. Did he see Transcendental Meditation as simply a technique for relaxation, perfect for young Hollywood actresses, or rather as an all-encompassing way of life, as Maharishi had encouraged — one with peace palaces and an army of meditators fomenting world peace? Lynch paused, and then spoke for more than five minutes, explaining that T.M. was the answer for all seeking true inner happiness. He ended with this thought: “Things like traumatic stress and anxiety and tension and sorrow and depression and hate and bitter, selfish anger and fear start to lift away. And that’s a huge sense of freedom when that heavy weight of negativity begins to lift. So it’s like gold flowing in from within and garbage going out. The things in life that used to almost kill you, stress you, depress you, make you sad, make you afraid — they have less and less power. It’s like you’re building up a flak jacket of protection. You’re starting to glow with this from within.”
Lynch looked over at me scribbling on my notepad. When I finished, there was a pause, and I laughed — what could I say after all that? I had asked if T.M. was something he believed could be compartmentalized, like doing yoga or avoiding dairy. Lynch chuckled, but it seemed as if it was because he felt that he’d just given the definitive answer to all questions that might follow from me or from the universe for that matter.
I should say here that Lynch was not explaining transcendence to a neophyte. I got my first T.M. mantra when I was 3 years old, and for as long as I can remember, meditation and Maharishi were the basis for everything I did growing up. I was 5 when my family moved to Fairfield, the small town in Iowa where Maharishi and his followers bought a bankrupt college and established a community. Most of my early education took place at the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, where our curriculum was interwoven with our guru’s philosophy. His photograph hung on nearly every wall of my school and home. We wore crisp conservative uniforms and meditated twice a day in our classrooms. Those meditations were graded.
I still meditate. For 20 minutes or more, twice a day, I’m able to step back from the news scroll of thoughts and be truly quiet. I use T.M. to deal with anxiety and fatigue and to stave off occasional despair. But that’s because, in my head, I’ve managed to excise the weird flotsam of spirituality that engulfed T.M. for the first part of my life. Now, for me, it is something very simple, like doing yoga or avoiding dairy. Objectively speaking, meditation has been shown to decrease the incidence of heart attacks and strokes and increase longevity. The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense commissioned studies to determine whether T.M. can help veterans alleviate post-traumatic stress disorder. Thanks to the David Lynch foundation, low-performing public schools have instituted “Quiet Time,” an elective 10 minutes, twice a day, during which students meditate, with some encouraging results.
Lynch seemed unsatisfied with my limited appreciation for the possibility of T.M. “Now, Claire,” Lynch said, leaning forward and staring into my eyes. “When I first met you, I felt that you had doubts. Is that a real feeling?” By doubts, Lynch was talking about T.M. as a worldview and the belief that Maharishi was an enlightened guru. He was talking about the T.M. organization’s $7 billion plan to create world peace. He seemed to want me to understand that transcending would change everything, for everyone. I had doubts.
As the sunlight streamed through the tinted windows, my mind turned to Laura Harring, the red-lipped heroine of “Mulholland Drive,” and the way Lynch used this road as a portal into an underworld where monsters and dwarfs await by the nearest stalk of bougainvillea. Where had transcending taken Lynch? Had T.M. stripped him of the subversive weirdness that made him such a powerful artist? Had he allowed himself, on some level, to sit under a tree? Then, before I had a moment to consider the notion, he was nudging me, laughing. “Wave to them! Wave to them!” He rolled down his window and waved gaily to a Hollywood tour bus across the street, full of passengers frantically taking photographs of our limo. Lynch beamed. It was hard to see the macabre in the mundane.
As he rolled up his window, I asked him about the rewards of immersing himself in advocacy and philanthropy. Did they outweigh those he felt as an artist? He snapped at me — saying that this was all just a thing that happened and that his real focus was his wife, his children and his work. Lynch said he was just waiting for a movie idea to come to him. Then he quickly switched to the quantum mechanics of transcendence, and my mind wandered to what Abel Ferrara said. It must be hard to come up with an idea for a movie when you believe that you have the power to change people’s lives and maybe even the world.
The office of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in New York is filled with young adults, many of whom grew up practicing Transcendental Meditation. Since Lynch started spreading the good news about T.M., the number of people learning the technique has increased tenfold. Close to Lynch’s heart are those suffering from PTSD, it seems, but it is in his own industry that he has made a more visible impact. Roth, who runs the foundation, spends much of his time flying around the world as well as initiating a long list of public figures: Gwyneth Paltrow, Ellen DeGeneres, Russell Simmons, Katy Perry, Susan Sarandon, Candy Crowley, Soledad O’Brien, George Stephanopoulos and Paul McCartney’s grandchildren.
Russell Brand, the British comedian, often accompanies Lynch as an M.C. at the foundation’s star-studded fund-raisers in New York and Los Angeles. Howard Stern, Laura Dern, Clint Eastwood and Jerry Seinfeld, who meditated without much fanfare for decades, have filmed testimonials to help Lynch reach his $7 billion goal. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr sang together for the first time in years at a Lynch fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in 2009. Oprah Winfrey recently dedicated an entire show to T.M. As did Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Despite the totality of the vision he laid out in the limo, one thing that is abundantly clear inside the foundation’s office is that the Lynch brand of Transcendental Meditation is vibrant and uncomplicated and unburdened by T.M.’s more controversial past. It is no longer, as Brand often says, “for weird, old hippies.” Nor is it only for committed devotees willing to spend their lives meditating in rural Iowa. Maharishi’s visage was nowhere to be seen.
Maharishi, in fact, seems to have disappeared from the conversation entirely. Many of those I interviewed, who learned T.M. through Lynch’s foundation, compared the practice to going to the gym. Kevin Law, a former music-industry executive who has been invited to join the foundation’s board, told me that he was inspired by the fact that people like Martin Scorsese and the billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio were very public that T.M. had changed their lives. “These masters of the universe,” he said, “all from different backgrounds, all have one thing in common and it’s Transcendental Meditation.” Law said that for him, T.M. is more like working out. When I asked him about his sense of Maharishi, he said, “I know shockingly little about him because it’s not important.”
This reminded me of a conversation I had with Lynch along Mulholland Drive. I asked him why he went from someone who would talk only to friends and family about meditation to someone who was spending his life on the road, promoting a cause. At the time, he shrugged and demurred that he had simply been asked. Now, in the clean and well-lighted office of the David Lynch foundation, I wondered if this, in fact, was the reason he was asked. Was this simplified version of T.M., based in an office with Oriental rugs and pictures of Seinfeld, in keeping with Maharishi’s dying wish? Or was it a creation of Lynchian proportions?
A few months later, I reached Lynch by phone at his hotel room in Paris. Bob Roth had told me that Lynch said he was working on a new script and that it was typically dark. When I asked Lynch about this, he paused, annoyed. “Bobby’s got a big mouth,” he said. I asked him if the script was influenced by his work with T.M., and he said no, absolutely not. This will be a David Lynch picture, he said, adding, “I think people would probably recognize it.”
During our time together, I heard audiences ask Lynch over and over how he could create disturbing movies while dipping into a field of pure bliss. He had universally assured them that it was no problem: he has been meditating for years, and it actually helps him be more creative, to come up with better, more visceral stories. But when I pointed out that it had been more than six years since his last film, Lynch demurred. He was just a tool, he told me, in some larger, transcendent plan. “Mother Nature is very, very happy when people stop suffering and move things forward in a beautiful way,” Lynch said. “That makes me feel good. I’m just the messenger. I’m just telling them what Maharishi told me.”
Claire Hoffman is a journalist who has written for Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles.
Editor: Jon Kelly
Chart credits: Top row: Rob Kim/Getty Images. Bottom row, from left: Rob Kim/Getty Images; Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Motion Picture and Television Fund; Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images; Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images; Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Naras; Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for HBO; Michael Buckner/Getty Images for HFAG; Jason Merritt/Getty Images; Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Walt Disney Studios; Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.