Flashes Of Animation

Below David Lynch talks about creativity and "where great ideas come from." Animation accompanies his words well and it got me thinking about the power of animation to convey ideas generally, including advertising ideas; the "It's Time to Fly" commercials from United Airlines came to mind.

Lynch's messages overlap a bunch with Elizabeth Gilbert's famous TED talk, "Your Elusive Creative Genius." They make similar points about inspiration and suffering.

1. Inspiration - For Lynch the "protective psychological construct" Gilbert speaks of (the muse or genius) is the "man in another room" flipping the puzzle pieces of the final product into Lynch's creative process. Just the right amount of creepy.

Lynch and Gilbert experience their participation in inspiration as something that happens to them, not something wrenched from within themselves. The inspiration can only be traced to metaphors for an "unimaginable source." "Ideas are like fish," Lynch says, "You don't make the fish, you catch the fish."

2. Suffering - Lynch is pretty down on suffering: “A lot of artists think that suffering is necessary,” he says. “But in reality, any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity.” Here the word "flow" is important. While suffering dams up the flow of creativity being attentive to experiences of suffering around the creative process no doubt augments what we can be creativite about. Suffering is a universal human experience that can engender special forms of empathy and compassion, for instance. 

It's the fatalistic view on suffering and creativity that's damaging. Gilbert notes our complicity in this fiction: "We’ve completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish." Lynch's references to Van Gough and diarrhea expand on this idea. Lynch is anti-diarrhea when it comes to creativity. 

Finally, the animation. Actors, even under the direction of Lynch, wouldn't be able to capture the flow and emotional whimsy of his ideas as well as the animation does. Animation provided a similar solution in 2004 for United Airlines.

The founders of Fallon Worldwide describe in their book Juicing the Orange that "the artistry of the animator's work gave us permission to be more overtly emotional."

One of the other great things about animation is that because it's such a specialized skill getting it done means there's going to be extra collaboration. Quality collaboration means giving up control, just the kind of thing Lynch and Gilbert are suggesting.

Here again we see how a medium that stretches the conventional boundaries of representation can do a lot of work in a potent way. Animation not only opens up what can be done with representations in space, but also in time. Being able to "draw outside the lines" of reality creates expansive possibilities that can accommodate stories spanning long periods.

In the same way our inspiration isn't subservient to our will the medium of a message isn't subservient to the message. The richest material for the "It's Time to Fly" vignettes was mined from the space the possibilities of animation opened up. The inevitable serendipity that different creative methods promise isn't born into existence by the suffering artist. It emerges from a dynamic not entirely within our control. The message I get from Lynch, Gilbert and these ads is that this lack of control, creepy as it may sound, can be a fruitful consolation.