Disclaimer: This is a transcribed conversation between Dom Kelly and Liam O’Brien that contains several spoilers, virtually spoiling David Lynch’s entire body of work. You have been warned.
LIAM: As most of you probably know, David Lynch is a very famous American director.
DOM: Oh, are we talking about David Lynch?
LIAM: Who did you think we were talking about?
DOM: Liam Lynch.
LIAM: Of course, Liam Lynch. You know, I did think that they were related when I first got into David Lynch because I didn’t know any other famous people with that surname. David Lynch is a famous American director known for his surreal and dreamlike imagery, direction and sound, as well as his off-beat… I’m hesitating to call his humour “quirky”…
DOM: There’s his weather reports…
LIAM: His weather reports, his brand of coffee, and the quirky traits that his Twin Peaks has that have become firmly embedded in American television history, such as Dale Cooper’s coffee and cherry pie obsession, Diane, BOB etc. It’s all significant.
DOM: David Lynch was born in…?
LIAM: David KEITH Lynch, you mean.
DOM: Ahh, so you do know his biography. Can you go through it for us?
LIAM: I don’t know when he was born, but he was born in… some town, moved to Philadelphia, and then the events he experienced in Philadelphia inspired Eraserhead – becoming a father, having a fairly tumultuous relationship with his wife which led to a divorce, etc. Not long after Eraserhead’s run of midnight screenings, Stanley Kubrick called it his favourite film of all time and reportedly screened it for the actors and crew working on The Shining to try and get a similar feeling. This propelled Lynch into Hollywood, where he made his second feature…
DOM & LIAM: The Elephant Man!
DOM: However, we should get back to Eraserhead.
LIAM: Actually, we should first talk about how we got into Lynch. I remember that you saw Mulholland Drive first.
DOM: That’s true. Before we were into film (it’s amazing to consider that) I found Mulholland Drive at my aunt’s house. She recommended it because she loved Twin Peaks, so I watched it and thought it was… pretentious.
LIAM: *laughs*
DOM: Now you have to remember, this is… how old was I?
LIAM: You would’ve been sixteen.
DOM: A bit older, perhaps. Let’s say seventeen. I had no idea of anything, and… this was in 2007 which was very much my blogging period, when I was at my “I have interesting things to say and I’m going to talk philosophy a lot” phase. And I hated post-modernism despite not really knowing what it was at the time, because post-modernism in its truest sense (funnily enough) means that there is no true opinion and that you can have all these things at once and it’s not a problem, as opposed to modernism which is about seeking the one truth. I thought post-modernism meant a few “wink wink, nudge nudges”, basically.
LIAM: Lynch’s movies very obviously work on their own logic.
DOM: Let’s be honest, I just didn’t get Mulholland Drive when I first watched it.
LIAM: I had that too, but the other thing is that… this isn’t Lynch’s fault, but his “Clues to Unlocking Mulholland Drive” on the back of the DVD case seemed to be very “Look at this cryptic creation of mine, ha ha, figure out my masterpiece” to someone unaware of Lynch’s intentions as a director, and his personality. It came across as a little patronising towards the audience, which wasn’t the intention at all.
DOM: Yeah, I was uneasy about the movie just from reading the questions. Funny thing is, I still don’t know all the answers to those questions, but I don’t care, whereas at the time I was thinking “Oh, so this is how you unlock the film, should I really be doing this? This is uncalled for, for a filmmaker”. Who cares where Aunt Ruth is, it doesn’t add or subtract anything from the movie.
LIAM: There are some Lynch films where it’s more obvious what’s happening. You do have this surreal imagery going on, but in terms of a general theme, like in Eraserhead, you understand what’s going on. There are those in which it’s completely and utterly chaotic, like Inland Empire, but even then you’ve got a vague idea so far as she’s an actress that becomes lost in her own character, but you don’t want to know any more than that. At least I don’t, I find that I don’t want to know the ins and outs of Lynch’s movies because I love them so much on a visceral level, I don’t really have a desire to dissect them.
DOM: There’s a point where the narrative stops becoming plot progression and starts becoming emotional progression, it’s sort of… it’s the kind of thing that if you explain it in words (and this is probably why Lynch doesn’t) it does sound like the most pretentious thing ever, whereas if you just experience it, it’s not. It’s like trying to explain 2001: A Space Odyssey to someone, you would just be like “Oh, it’s just 20 minutes of some things moving in space in a circle while music plays”.
LIAM: Or “Some people walking around Hungary for seven hours”
DOM: *laughs* In Satantango?
LIAM: So many people dismiss it as pretentious based on what they’ve read on paper. They’re really missing out.
DOM: It’s a visual medium!
LIAM: Exactly. You don’t make your mind up about a film based on a plot summary. I’m not saying that “Some people walking around Hungary for seven hours” is a plot summary of Satantango, by the way.
DOM: There are things about Mulholland Drive that I’ve only just recently found out. You know the comic interlude with the hitman, how there’s that long comedy moment where he kills someone by accident and then he keeps on having to kill other people to cover the mistake? It’s really funny, but then I read that he’s the person that she hires to kill Camilla in the real world, and therefore in the dream world that scene is her wishing that the hitman is inept and will screw up. I never cottoned onto that, but it doesn’t matter. It’s nice knowing and understanding more of the film as it goes on, but when you’re watching the movie, if you expect to come out knowing everything, not only have you missed the point but you’re actually just likely to infuriate yourself. You’ll come out of it thinking “Err, what a stupid director, he thinks he’s above us because it went over our heads” whereas he’s not trying to do that at all, he’s trying to communicate dream logic to you without words.
LIAM: It’s very successful. Just from talking about it, it might go up in my list of preferred Lynch movies. I love it. It’s undeniably layered, you know, you can’t just call it aimless imagery because all of it connects together so well.
DOM: We watched Blue Velvet again quite recently, and I ended up liking it a lot more. It’s the second Lynch movie I saw, and like with Mulholland Drive I used to think it was disjointed. But watching again, it completely works. I just don’t think I was ready for it.
LIAM: Same with me. I’ve always enjoyed it but it wasn’t until the recent screening that I acknowledged it as a completely functioning movie. Some parts just went over my head at the time. And I find that funny, because it’s the most intelligible of Lynch’s movies. Not including straight narrative stuff like Dune, The Straight Story and The Elephant Man.
DOM: We should point out by “screening” we’re talking about Imaginopolis. Have we talked about this?
LIAM: No, we haven’t! This will be the first mention of it on Projectorheads.
DOM: Just like we first mentioned the decade list in our Haneke discussion. We’re bad at this.
LIAM: In short: we have a cinema. You might have noticed that it says “SCREENINGS” at the top of the Projectorheads website and a thing that says “COMING SOON”, that’s not there for hype reasons, I’m just too lazy to write about what happened and what we plan to do. It’s a fortnightly cinema night that we’re holding in Newcastle, and our first screening was a double-bill of Blue Velvet and Mr Vampire.
DOM: Other way around, but yeah, that was what it was. Getting back to when I watched Mulholland Drive, on the special features there was an interview with him, and I honestly sat down watching it expecting them to ask something like “So what does this metaphor mean?” and he’d respond with “Weeeell, the symbolism of the red lamp symbolises the period, the time of the month…” or something boastful and indulgent, but what we get is someone asking “What is the theme of the film?” or whatever and he just goes “Ahh, it’s about…people…feeling bad…in Hollywood” and then someone says “What about your use of music in scenes, why do you do it like that?” and he replies with “Ahh, well I think music…can…make emotions”. It’s not that he’s stupid, it’s that either he is knowingly not explaining himself, or more likely he just can’t communicate it in words. He doesn’t need to explain himself, and why would he? The films speak perfectly for themselves, and if a director needs to tell you everything about a film then it’s failed. That was initially my problem with Mulholland Drive, I thought the director did have to tell me, and after seeing that interview I thought “Oh, OK, so maybe I’m not meant to be told anything, I’m just meant to watch it and enjoy the experience and then maybe think about it later” but I was reading too much into it at the time.
LIAM: That’s the Cannes interview isn’t it? The press conference.
DOM: Yup.
LIAM: I remember when someone asked a question and Lynch went into this really vague rant about the road on Mulholland Drive and how creepy it looked at night, and ended with “And I think it’s a great… road”.
DOM: You see that, because there’s that in Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, they both have those shots of the headlights going on the road. Does Wild at Heart have it too?
LIAM: I imagine it would, yeah. It’s a road movie after all.
DOM: That particular shot of looking over the headlights onto the road and seeing stretches of road coming closer and closer. He does it in Blue Velvet, I’m assuming that’s the first time he ever did it, and of course it became the opening and closing – depending on how you want to read it – of Lost Highway. So, his first movie was Eraserhead.
LIAM: Yes, but we’ll talk about his pre-Eraserhead work first. In the late 60s Lynch went off to an art college in Philadelphia to study painting.
DOM: Which explains a lot, actually.
LIAM: Yeah, he was a very dedicated painter, and there was this one point in which he wanted to create moving paintings, or installations, and so he made an installation called Six Men Getting Sick which was this loop of six flaming heads vomiting with a siren in the background and a whoosh of wind. It’s kinda cool, actually, and it was a success around his college, a hit with the art students. He was commissioned to make another work, which was The Alphabet. I think. Again it was successful, but I think there was a project in between the two that turned out to be a failure. An installation for a friend.
DOM: And there’s a lot of stop motion in that, right?
LIAM: In The Alphabet? Yeah.
DOM: Which is interesting. Lynch used stop motion for Eraserhead as well.
LIAM: He did it himself too.
DOM: Yeah, it’s either stop motion or live puppetry, there’s a bit of it at the end of Blue Velvet with the robin, but then after that he just didn’t do it ever again. He gave it up. Usually when you’re a puppeteer or a stop motion animator you do it for life. Just look at Svankmajer, all he ever does is stop motion animation.
LIAM: The closest Lynch has gotten to that is Dumbland, which was frame by frame animation. But that was decades later. When was The Alphabet made?
DOM: 1968, I think.
LIAM: The animation is a lot like Terry Gilliam’s stuff. When was Python?
DOM: Early 70s.
LIAM: So The Alphabet predated Python. It might have actually influenced him.
DOM: It’s possible Gilliam was influenced by it, I mean, he grew up watching Fellini movies so he has his knowledge of certain sections of cinema. I guess he would’ve seen some Lynch.
LIAM: Anyway, word spread and Eraserhead became very big, even though it was initially rejected by critics.
DOM: It became a midnight movie as well. Although I sort of understand why it got this reputation, it always seems weird to me that you can get those three-in-one “Midnight Movie” DVDs, and you’ll have The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos… and Eraserhead. There’s such a gap between Eraserhead and Pink Flamingos. One is a midnight movie cult-wise because it’s crap, one is a midnight movie that is cult because it’s crap but everyone’s in on the joke, which is Rocky Horror, and one is a midnight movie because it’s genuinely brilliant and scares the shit out of everyone when they go see it.
LIAM: It also benefits from being played at midnight. Before Eraserhead there were two other short films, one was The Grandmother and the other one was The Amputee, but I saw them so long ago that I can’t really talk about them. But I know there was a script called Gardenback which eventually became Eraserhead. It was a very short script. I mean, the Eraserhead script was only about 10 pages long when he first pitched it, I recall reading.
DOM: And he spent years making Eraserhead, too.
LIAM: Yeah, 4 or 5 years.
DOM: Isn’t there that shot of Jack Nance walking through a door, and when he made his way into the room, four years of production had passed?
LIAM: It’s amazing.
DOM: Lucky he has the hair, because that actually makes him definable enough that he can get away with it.
LIAM: It’s a marvellous piece of continuity, the fact that he can walk through that door years later without the audience noticing.
DOM: What I wanted to ask is, considering it’s autobiographical, and the whole thing about Eraserhead (if you want to “dumb” it down to a very simple summary of what it is), is that it’s about a father having a baby and feeling that the baby is going to usurp his life.
LIAM: And that is undeniable because Eraserhead was mirroring Lynch’s life at the time.
DOM: It’s not just a dream thing, that’s what it’s about. The question I was going to ask is: the baby that Lynch struggled with, was it Jennifer Lynch?
LIAM: *laughs*
DOM: Because if so, why didn’t he do a Henry Spencer and kill her? It would have spared the world Boxing Helena.
LIAM: I’m not sure if it was Jennifer Lynch, actually, it was either her or his son. I can’t remember which one is older.
DOM: And Jack Nance’s hair is almost Lynch-esque.
LIAM: It predated Morrissey’s hair.
DOM: Another thing that’s not often mentioned about Eraserhead, which is the same with a lot of films that are considered “arthouse” or highly experimental, black and white films that provoke “Ooh it’s so difficult to watch, only pretentious snobs watch them” responses (The Seventh Seal cops it as well)… people just forget how funny these movies are. The Seventh Seal is both warmly and darkly funny, and I don’t understand… if you were to level that accusation at a Bergman you’d choose Winter Light or something, not The Seventh Seal. But there’s a lot of that, you know, “the essential art cinema is unfunny”. 8 1/2 is not a funny film, apparently. And Eraserhead, I don’t understand how you could not find Eraserhead funny, there are scenes like… the dad of the girlfriend, he has some amazingly funny expressions.
LIAM: I love the bit where Henry goes to cut the chickens, and he’s like “Oh, should I cut them up like regular chickens?” and he starts to do it, the weird bile leaks out of the chicken, the mum gets upset and runs off and the dad’s just smiling the whole time. There’s also the scene where the mother finds out about Mary X’s pregnancy, Mary is sobbing in the background and the dad’s just staring at Henry, grinning, as if he’s oblivious to what’s going on behind him. It’s really ambivalent, though, because you are affected by what’s happening in the background, but the foreground is so funny that you’re torn between emotions, and that happens for a lot of Eraserhead. It’s really comical at times.
DOM: And also, if you want comedy that’s arguably slightly juvenile but is also genuinely clever and funny, there’s the sperms scene, where the Lady in the Radiator is tapdancing on the sperm. I always laughed at the scene where the sperm is thrown at the wall with reckless abandon, I don’t know, it’s very funny.
LIAM: That song, In Heaven, Everything is Fine has been covered by so many musicians. The Pixies most famously, but there’s also Bauhaus, Devo, Faith No More and Tuxedomoon. And I think Lynch’s earlier work including Eraserhead would’ve had a significant influence on The Residents.
DOM: And it’s the first example, I assume of Lynch having a song key to the film that sums it up, and… who wrote it?
LIAM: He did. He and Peter Ivers. The soundtrack was also heavily supervised by Lynch, which is another thing, Lynch is always very involved in the sound recording process. Imagine Eraserhead without that soundtrack, it adds such a layer of depth to it.
DOM: There’s that continued noise throughout it, isn’t there?
LIAM: Through the whole film, yeah.
DOM: Since his next movie was The Elephant Man, a thought just popped into my head: You know in The Elephant Man, there’s that Victorian theory of “He looks like an elephant because his mother was frightened of an elephant”? If we’re going to take their word for it, why does Henry Spencer’s son look like an alien?
LIAM: *laughs*
DOM: Was Mary X threatened by Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Because that was around that period.
LIAM: Maybe she just hated it. Oh, before we go onto The Elephant Man, maybe we should explain how we were introduced to Lynch’s work.
DOM: Good idea.
LIAM: Dom gave me Mulholland Drive a few months after he’d seen it, and I remember having an even worse reaction.
DOM: We started watching it again, and about twenty minutes in I had to go home.
LIAM: Yeah, and the next time I tried watching it, I got up to the exact same spot, which was the bit where Betty arrives in Hollywood. I just gave up on it. I mean, from memory nothing too off-beat, surreal or non-linear happens before then, I was probably just looking for things to hate based on what I’d read or heard. I was sixteen, okay!
DOM: It’s funny how watching all these films considered pretentious has actually made us a lot less pretentious as people, if anything it’s made us more easy-going because we’ve realised that by opening our minds to all these things that are considered snobby, we’ve been able to ascertain for ourselves that none of these movies are snobby. In fact, my theory about it is that I don’t think there is a film that is pretentious, or that it’s possible for a film to be pretentious…
LIAM: …But a filmmaker can be.
DOM: It’s the director who may be pretentious, it could be a wanky analysis or a general snobbish appraisal, but the film itself is a film, it’s stand-alone, it’s an object. So even if the director’s interpretations are completely over the top and wanky as hell, you can still love the film and ignore that a lot of the time. But we don’t have to with Lynch, he doesn’t offer any interpretations anyway.
LIAM: I got into Lynch sometime in 2008 when I was studying at Uni. I was doing a Contemporary Music degree, but what really interested me at that time was cinema. Nothing really kick-started it, but before I moved away from home we had developed a vague interest in film. We weren’t seeking out directors or anything but we found ourselves together watching more films, branching out more than we had before.
DOM: See, if I can interject for a slight second (because your story is boring), in 2007 I was also studying music at Uni, and this was the year where I was a little know-it-all piece of shit. It came about because I’d been so depressed at leaving my course and feeling like I was failing at life, like someone had taken a picture of my life and put it on Failblog or something. But because of that I became more pretentious, you know, like that inferiority complex to superiority complex thing. I think if you’re feeling down then you start becoming more obnoxious a person because you want to bring other people down, whereas if you’re really happy like we are now, you don’t bring anyone down except for Wes Anderson. But I was doing music at Uni and that is, funnily enough, how I got into film. We had a lot of subjects and the only subject I enjoyed was Film Music. That was where I learned about Bernard Hermann, that was where I first saw a scene from Mulholland Drive, before I saw the film, and -
LIAM: And Eraserhead!
DOM: Mmm, Eraserhead too. I can’t remember what scene, all I remember was it being a blur of black and white and freaky noise, but -
LIAM: That’s where I first heard about the continuous sound thing, you’d told me sometime after that lesson.
DOM: And the Mulholland Drive scene was the scene at the cafe, fairly early on in the movie. I didn’t truly get the film at that point but I liked the music, and so that’s how I got into film. Arguably, like with you, it was Lynch who got me into it. He’s a great entry point to cinema.
LIAM: Yeah, and that’s not to patronise his work, either.
DOM: Even if you don’t like his films immediately I think there’s a point where you can talk to other people (because pretty much everyone who’s into film has seen a Lynch movie) and they will tell you that you are overthinking things. I think that will make you realise that you don’t have to overthink these things, they’re there to be experienced. Same with Stanley Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s another entry point.
LIAM: And they’re linked, because of Kubrick’s praise for Eraserhead.
DOM: We’ve rounded a circle now, just like Lost Highway. Anyway, go on with your story.
LIAM: I’m not sure how I became interested in certain directors, but while I was at Uni I watched a fair bit of stuff. The movies I remember seeing were Au Hasard Balthazar, a few Ingmar Bergman movies, Wild Strawberries, Persona… and there was Lukas Moodysson’s stuff too, I had seen Fucking Åmål when I was sixteen and loved it (it remains my favourite movie to this day) so I sought out the rest of his filmography. I could only find Lilya 4-Ever, A Hole In My Heart and Container, though, it wasn’t until last year that I saw Together. When it comes to Lynch, though, I was casually browsing Youtube one afternoon and I found myself watching the trailer for Mulholland Drive, and it suddenly sparked an interest. I know I’d given up on it years ago, but since I’d watched and loved films that would’ve inspired Lynch, such as Persona, I thought I’d be able to view Mulholland Drive differently.
DOM: Mulholland Drive even references Persona. Two women form a bond and one’s persona starts taking over the other’s, and…
LIAM: There’s even that shot of Rita and Betty in the mirror, with Betty running her fingers through Rita’s wig. Very similar to Persona. So I went to HMV the next day to look for Mulholland Drive. Oh yeah, when you’re in Australia, don’t be looking for DVDs at HMV because there’s practically nothing there. It’s not like the UK branch, which I hear is pretty plentiful.
DOM: World cinema-wise, anyway.
LIAM: I said “Hey, do you have any David Lynch movies?” and they only had Blue Velvet, so I bought it, watched it and was really surprised. In fact I think I had to watch it a few times to understand what it was I was watching. We said before that it took us a while to accept Blue Velvet as a completely functional movie, but there were things like Frank Booth’s first scene with Dorothy Vallens that I’d never seen before in a movie before. I felt really confused because I don’t think I’d seen many films that were as ambivalent as that, where you could take a scene and be able to provoke two total opposite reactions, being shocked by it while also finding it disturbingly funny. I thought it was a great movie.
DOM: I should point out that when we had the screening recently, because we showed Mr Vampire first (which is a very funny Chinese vampire movie from the mid 80s) we got everyone into a laughing mood, and then we played Blue Velvet immediately after and I was thinking “I wonder if people will laugh at this” because most of the people I assume hadn’t seen it before, and they did, they found it very funny but it also freaked the shit out of them.
LIAM: And I also felt a pang of realisation because the audience was predominately male (there were two girls) and I guiltily remembered that Mr Vampire, despite having hilarious slapstick situations was a bit misogynistic from time to time with jokes that revolved around prostitutes and female stereotypes. I mean, I don’t think it would be offensive to women but I was conscious of that, especially since we screened Blue Velvet after it, an exploration of male sexuality, bloodlust and the masochistic desires that even the pure at heart have. And like, the Frank Booth/Dorothy Vallens scene, I hadn’t even thought of how that’d be received, but from what I could tell they seemed to have found it thought provoking and funny. Yeah, next time we’ll make it more balanced instead of putting two overly masculine movies back-to-back. After seeing Blue Velvet I located a copy of Mulholland Drive and ended up loving it to bits. That ending left me in a state of emotional exhaustion. And the scene with Betty and Rita, the love scene, at the time I found it to be one of the few truly movingly love scenes I’d seen. Before then I’d hadn’t been emotionally affected by a relationship in a movie, not ever.
DOM: What’s also admirable is that it’s VERY hard to portray a lesbian relationship in a film with two extraordinarily attractive actresses without making it look sleazy in the slightest. Obviously the internet has embraced it as a really hot scene, but then again the internet embraces ANY movie sex scene as being a hot scene. Yeah, I’m still astonished that Lynch managed to pull it off, maybe it was the choice of music, or the completely unobtrusive camera. I don’t know.
LIAM: On the subject of Mulholland Drive and sleaziness, I have a friend who I’ve known since childhood, he’s a close friend but he’s also a bit sleazy. I remember a few years ago he asked me to bring some DVDs to his house because I was staying overnight, I said “Alright” and brought a stack for him to choose from. He picked Mulholland Drive, and maybe it was snobby of me to say this because at the time I was thinking of Lynch as the be all and end all of cinema, but for very casual popcorn viewing with a friend on an afternoon I didn’t think it was a good idea. I just wanted to save him the boredom. He said “How about this?” and I replied, “Ahh, I don’t know, you might not like it”, “Why wouldn’t I like it?” he said, getting all defensive. Yeah, he didn’t like it, in fact he fell asleep ten minutes into it. I had to go to the toilet a few minutes before the love scene came on, so I got off the couch and walked out of the room. At this point they weren’t even making noises, I suspect his sixth sense or whatever could perceive their love-making. As I was leaving the room I saw his eyes slowly open, and when I came back he was hurriedly trying to fast forward the video, his pants around his ankles, panicking. See, Lynch doesn’t like putting chapters in his DVDs because he thinks it diminishes how people view films, he likes the idea of starting at the beginning and ending at the end, no skipping scenes. So basically my friend was jerking off over the love scene and had to rewind it, so he pressed “Previous Chapter” on the remote,which ended up resetting the movie. And this was on a PS2, which has snail-paced fast-forwarding, so he was going “COME ON, COME ON” under his breath, his finger on the fast forward button. He didn’t even bother pulling up his pants. The week after he asked for Inland Empire, and I said “…Nah, let’s just watch something else.”
DOM: There’s one scene at the end where she kisses the lost Polish girl.
LIAM: That would’ve been enough for him.
DOM: Oh come on, at the end of a three hour movie? I don’t think even he’d be able to sit through it.
LIAM: He’d just sleep for most of it.
DOM: Did you end up finishing Mulholland Drive?
LIAM: Yeah, but he fell asleep again.
DOM: With that massive digression, now we should finally talk about The Elephant Man. After all that praise we threw at Eraserhead, we’re now going to be talking about The Elephant Man in not so happy tones.
LIAM: I think for us as Lynch fans (we haven’t seen The Straight Story or Dune so we can’t really say for sure) it’s hard to separate him from these projects, so when he delivers something that is vaguely Lynchian but at the same time… isn’t, it’s hard to identify it as a great film. Maybe The Elephant Man is a great film, but I can’t help but think of it as a subpar Lynch film.
DOM: Mel Brooks got him onto that, right? On the strength of Eraserhead. And it does feel… I don’t want to say it feels too Hollywood, or too generic, it’s just not that interesting. And I don’t understand because it’s such a popular film as well, and it’s iconic. You know what it feels like, it honestly just feels like Lynch trying to do a fairly straight adaptation of Frankenstein, that whole thing of a misunderstood monster. I shouldn’t call him a monster, misunderstood PERSON who looks like a monster, it’s just… I think the problem with it, understandably for a film like this: even though the makeup is great I don’t think you ever really truly got into the grotesqueness of how he looked. And the thing is, Lynch would usually love looking at how grotesque something is and then making you sympathise with it.
LIAM: The baby in Eraserhead.
DOM: Yeah, whereas in The Elephant Man it never really feels more than some guy with plaster on his face. I don’t think you even get that many closeups of him, he’s kept at arm’s length, which unfortunately is why it isn’t sold very well emotionally. The Victorian people who lived with him at the time, even the people who liked him, they were communicating with him as this sophisticated gentlemen. At the same time you’re looking at someone who scares the shit out of you because he looks like this disturbing, disgusting thing, and there was none of that in the film, he just felt like a man wearing slightly offensive clothes or something. There was a quiet dignity to it, to be fair, but I just thought it could’ve been more grotesque, to be totally honest. I know that sounds like a horrible thing to say, but it just feels a bit too surface level.
LIAM: It was also controversial because Lynch took a Victorian surrounding, threw in his obsession with the Industrial Era, which is historical inaccurate but it was Lynch’s spin on the characters’ world. Many Brits were offended.
DOM: You know what he should’ve done? Lynch loves showing the undercurrents, and the Victorian Era had fascinating undercurrents. It had the freak shows, which we saw a bit of but there wasn’t enough of that. If Lynch was already being historically inaccurate he should’ve gone nuts. There’s that thing of the Victorians… they weren’t racist, because you had a lot of foreigners coming in all the time, but they were naive, and they did see these people as being separate to them completely and as being exotic, like they found them fascinating, it was almost as if the incoming Chinese people were things for them to study rather than, you know, actual people, and there could’ve been more of that coming out in The Elephant Man, him being an exotic thing as well as something that just slightly disgusts them.
LIAM: I think we can both agree that the best part of The Elephant Man is the most Lynchian part, at the beginning, the dreamlike sequence of the elephants and the smoke. It’s one of the few bits you can identify as the work of David Lynch. It’s probably the highlight of the movie and it’s only 20 seconds long.
DOM: We should say, we don’t think The Elephant Man is bad at all, it’s just a bit too straight laced and surface level. And normally I’m not that concerned when a director makes a movie that isn’t too representative of their style, it’s like how Brothers Grimm is a shockingly bad film for Terry Gilliam to have made, even though you could argue that it has a lot of things he’s interested in. It’s just such a surface-level movie. It’s that kind of thing, they feel like they were more like directors than visionaries on those films. And apparently that’s also the case with Dune and The Straight Story, but we haven’t seen them so we can’t talk about them. So technically he had two not very brilliant films in a row, and he did the second one just so he could finally finance his next film, Blue Velvet in order to properly kick start his career.
LIAM: Partially. The thing with Dune is that he was genuinely interested at first. He wrote the screenplay as well as a sequel, so he was very much into the idea of adapting Dune.
DOM: I guess in a sci-fi environment he would’ve had a lot of room to run around and go crazy.
LIAM: Exactly. There are bits where you can tell he’s cared a lot about the film, some really polished moments (I’m basing this on clips I’ve seen on Youtube, admittedly) but the studio did mess around with him, which is why I think he became an Alan Smithee.
DOM: It’s a shame that Jodorowsky’s Dune never got made. What was up with that again?
LIAM: The emperor who likes crapping in dolphins’ mouths.
DOM: *laughs* That’s it, that’s his sexual fetish. Good old Jodorowsky.
LIAM: Anyway, after Dune Lynch produced one more feature for the Dino DeLaurentiis Company which was Blue Velvet. Since Dune was such a financial and critical disaster, Blue Velvet pretty much saved Lynch’s career. It saved Dennis Hopper’s, too, as he’d been blacklisted from most of Hollywood in the past.
DOM: He wasn’t allowed to drive in Australia.
LIAM: Oh really?
DOM: He did an exploitation film in Australia in the early 80s, and he did a LOT of cocaine. At one point he did something so reckless with a car that he was banned from driving a car ever again in Australia. Imagine being the officer, telling him that. Getting stared down by Dennis Hopper.
LIAM: Especially after Easy Rider. He was notoriously known as a drug abuser and an alcoholic in Hollywood, which is why he was so perfect for the role of Frank Booth. He really is in a way an embodiment of the character. And that’s not to knock him either, he himself pleaded Lynch for the part, saying “I am Frank Booth!”
DOM: The thing about Dune is… Lynch was offered Return of the Jedi, wasn’t he?
LIAM: I think that’s right.
DOM: I do sometimes wish he’d done that instead. On the other hand, who’s to say that his career may have flopped after that, he may never have made Blue Velvet. So technically it’s worth Dune for everything else. The other thing about Dune which leads us into Blue Velvet is that that is where he met Kyle MacLachlan, is it not?
LIAM: Yes it is, I was about to say that. He’s one of Lynch’s most famous collaborators, considering the characters of Dale Cooper and Jeffrey Beaumont. And speaking of those two characters, the great thing about Blue Velvet I think is that you can legitimately look at it as a prologue to Cooper’s character.
DOM: Because you don’t know anything about Cooper’s past in Twin Peaks, beyond the implication in Fire Walk With Me that he may have been in the Black Lodge the whole time.
LIAM: There’s a spin-off Twin Peaks book, an “autobiography” of Cooper made up of his transcibed dictations to Diane, but I’m just going to ignore that. From memory it wasn’t that amazing. Anyway, the Jeffrey/Cooper comparison: Cooper is highly moralistic, and his ideals come from somewhere. You get the impression from Twin Peaks that he has had a lot of trauma in his past, especially since his wife was killed by Windom Earle, so there’s a developed sense of morals and justice that actually come from something. You can sort of look at Jeffrey Beaumont as being a young Cooper, discovering the dark side of human sexuality, violence and unquenchable desire, and the undercurrents of a sleepy, 50s town.
DOM: You see at the end of Blue Velvet, he’s pretty much in Heaven. Not in the way that Jack Nance is in Eraserhead, but in a kind of happy Heaven, where everything’s gone right for him, and the robins of love have come. But then again there’s something oddly sarcastic about that, which almost suggests that maybe something bad will happen to him again.
LIAM: It’s torn between being earnest and sarcastic, you get a lot of that in Blue Velvet. Maybe sarcastic isn’t the word, ahh…
DOM: It’s not sarcastic so much as cynical, or knowing that it’s a hopeless dream that he’s going for, that cheesy 50s dream. Also, to be fair, it’s something that Lynch is swiping wholeheartedly from Night of the Hunter.
LIAM: Yeah, exactly.
DOM: You have that wholesome, stereotypical 50s family (in a 50s film, too) which is torn apart by this bizarrely dark character who has no real background that we know of.
LIAM: He’s named it as an influence, I forgot about it.
DOM: Yeah, and there’s the scene in Night of the Hunter when they’re in the riverbed with the fake animals, which is VERY Lynchian. Blue Velvet feels like, in a way, a remake of Night of the Hunter.
LIAM: He’s named a bunch of influences, umm… I think he said his favourite Kubrick film was Lolita, which is interesting; he said he loved Persona, he likes Meshes of the Afternoon, and he’s into Tarkovsky. He would’ve taken a lot from the dream sequences in The Mirror.
DOM: And he’s also a big Sunset Boulevard fan. There’s lots of references to it in Mulholland Drive. Even the name is a reference, sort of.
LIAM: So, back to Blue Velvet.
DOM: Blue Velvet was also the first time he worked with Badalamenti, right?
LIAM: Yep. Julee Cruise, Isabella Rossellini too. Even though his later films don’t really reflect Blue Velvet, I think he found his feet as a director with it.
DOM: So thematically, Lynch’s obsession with 40s and 50s Hollywood, the Hollywood now, and the “Hollywood Dream” as opposed to the reality, maybe there is something in the fact that he takes the daughter of some of the most incredible genes you could have, Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, and has her raped and abused… she has her show at the nightclub, a sensual, very 50s nightclub, the reality is that the sadness she’s conjouring up for the song is fake, but her actual life is a hell of a lot worse as she’s being abused and blackmailed by Frank Booth. So did he choose Isabella Rossellini for that part? If so, that makes perfect sense.
LIAM: I’ll get to that, but it’s also fitting that Betty’s landlord in Mulholland Drive is played by Ann Miller, a classic Hollywood actress, and that Mulholland Drive was her final role before she died.
DOM: Oh, really? I hadn’t realised. That’s like Lars von Trier taking the American Dream in Dogville, with Young Americans by Bowie in the credits, stripping away the Hollywood set and making it an empty soundstage with chalk outlines representing a town, stripping away all the patriotic dreams of what America is and makes America what it is in its history, and yet who has he got in it? Lauren Bacall. It feels so apt.
LIAM: Back to how Rossellini was cast: Lynch was having dinner with some friends one night and one of the friends had brought Isabella Rossellini with her, and at one point during the night Lynch said to her “God, you look so much like Ingrid Bergman” and then the friend said “You idiot, she’s Ingrid Bergman’s daughter”.
DOM: What about Laura Dern, how did he meet her?
LIAM: She was randomly selected but he considered it fate, because…
DOM: Like with Sheryl Lee, how he accidentally cast her and then went “Wow, I’ve been waiting for this actress all my life”.
LIAM: When making Eraserhead, what alleviated him of his anger and anxiety was his meditation. He ended up practicing this transcendental meditation for years, and during the casting session for Blue Velvet he met Laura Dern, who turned out to practice the very same meditation. And so they developed a very deep bond through Blue Velvet, which has kept on going throughout both their careers. She’s his most frequent collaborator if you don’t count Badalamenti. It is even creepier, if you are taking this as the result of fate, that Lynch’s next door neighbour in LA in 2007 was Laura Dern. It was their first union in quite a while.
DOM: You know how we were saying Jeffrey could well have become Dale Cooper? I guess it’s possible that Laura Dern in Blue Velvet could have become Laura Dern in Wild at Heart. Unfortunately they have different mothers, so it’s not that likely. It feels thematically like it could work, though. Wild at Heart, as I’ve said many times, is like Blue Velvet MK II. That said, although there’s an undercurrent in Wild at Heart, the whole film is wild, whereas Blue Velvet is mostly…not normal, but idealistic, and then suddenly, smack! Which is why Wild at Heart isn’t as good.
LIAM: I think that surprised a lot of people at the Imaginopolis screening, because until the Dorothy Vallens scene we had a cool, mysterious, noir-ish movie with a curious detective type, and then suddenly Frank Booth comes in and shocks everyone. He’s the only character in the film who swears, too.
DOM: Is he?
LIAM: Yeah, although Ben does once, repeating Booth’s “Here’s to your fuck” line. I find that really funny.
DOM: And how did Dennis Hopper get cast?
LIAM: I said before, didn’t I?
DOM: Yeah, but what’s the story of him on camera, the cameraman…
LIAM: Dennis Hopper was doing an improvised rehearsal on camera, and at one point he looked directly at the camera and the cameraman screamed.
DOM: *laughs*
LIAM: He is the scariest looking person ever, Dennis Hopper. And Badalamenti wasn’t originally the composer either. He was hired to help Isabella Rossellini sing because she wasn’t a very gifted singer. It works in Blue Velvet because she has a kind of frailty to her voice, and she sometimes doesn’t hit the notes, but it works. She was a lot worse before Badalamenti stood in to help her. He’s actually in that scene, he’s the piano player.
DOM: Ahh okay.
LIAM: But eventually he and Lynch became good friends.
DOM: We’ve been talking about things that are apt: it’s also apt because it’s highly unusual for a director to immediately cast the music composer as a key musician in the film, the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is The Man Who Knew Too Much, the first time Hitchcock worked with Bernard Hermann. He cast him as the conductor, probably thinking “This guy is my musical alter-ego”. Lynch was probably thinking the same thing. It shows in his filmography.
LIAM: It’s as tight a pairing as Hitchcock and Bernard Hermann, I think.
DOM: Yeah, maybe in terms of the number of movies they did, it’s the same amount, but they didn’t stay together for as long a period as Lynch and Badalamenti. And of course Bernard Hermann is famous for many other things as well, Badalamenti’s got…
LIAM: …Dolores O’Riordan and Cabin Fever.
DOM: *laughs* He’s famous for Julee Cruise and David Lynch, that’s it, really.
LIAM: He’s had a number one hit, the Twin Peaks theme in Australia. Another great Badalamenti story… I’d normally save it for when we talk about Twin Peaks but I’ll tell it now. He was hired by Paul McCartney to conduct the orchestra for his performance on the Queen’s birthday. It wasn’t televised, it was just an intimate performance, and he’d been stressing out for ages trying to get it note perfect to impress the queen. Badalamenti was preparing the orchestra, and at the last minute the Queen’s chamberman came in and said “I apologise, Mr McCartney, but the Queen will not be joining you tonight. The performance is canceled.” Exasperated, McCartney asked why, and the chamberman replied with “Twin Peaks is on”.
DOM: *laughs*
LIAM: And McCartney gave the most loathsome look towards Badalamenti. That’s one of the best film-related stories I’ve heard.
DOM: So with Blue Velvet, arguably, Lynch hit his oeuvre, despite the fact that Wild at Heart isn’t that great. But on the other hand there’s no non-Lynch decisions in it, it is recognisably a “Lynch movie”. The only problem is, you do get the feeling that in Wild at Heart he’s being a bit too…himself. It feels like a rehash of Blue Velvet.
LIAM: I’m glad he hasn’t made more films like Wild at Heart. The thing is, I don’t think he takes what the critics say to heart, but there was a real critical opposition to Wild at Heart so maybe he realised he was going in the wrong direction. Ebert said he considered Lynch to be highly talented, he just thought Lynch was making the wrong movies. Movies that were “Lynchian” on surface level but weren’t honest or true to himself.
DOM: For a long time though, Ebert reeaaally hated Lynch. Up until Mulholland Drive, wasn’t it? He liked them more and more as they went on.
LIAM: Technically The Straight Story, but from what I’ve heard it is barely recognisable as one of his works. Maybe less so than The Elephant Man.
DOM: I don’t think I can necessarily fault Wild at Heart. I don’t usually like pigeonholing directors, but I don’t think it’s something he excels at, which is essentially a road movie that is a pastiche of Elvis. And again it’s that 50s thing, this time it’s 50s roadster instead of 50s wholesome family, and for some reason he’s better at the latter than the former.
LIAM: I think it’s unnecessarily cluttered, too. Too much happens in a short space of time, like Sheryl Lee’s scene, it just feels so cramped.
DOM: And Willem Dafoe is just Dennis Hopper MK II. To be fair, he’s surprising good at that role. He manages to make that character memorable in a way I wouldn’t have expected. But he’s not even that relevant to the film as a whole, he just turns up.
LIAM: You can look at that as being to the film’s credit or being a fault, you never know. It’s so free.
DOM: It’s arguable that Wild at Heart doesn’t have a flaw and that it’s just not our thing, which is fair enough. But then again, I think I prefer Wild at Heart to The Elephant Man, if we’re going to play that game. Wild at Heart feels like it is its own thing in a way that I can’t necessarily criticise, whereas The Elephant Man feels like a bit of wasted potential, really.
LIAM: Now we should move onto Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is certainly Lynch’s biggest success, it was an international phenomenon at least for its first season. Mark Frost and Lynch got together because they were hired to make a documentary about Marilyn Monroe’s life for a television station; it was probably ABC, since they ended up funding and broadcasting Twin Peaks. That project fell through, but Frost and Lynch found that they worked well together, so they decided to write a television series that became “Northwest Passage”, later retitled as “Twin Peaks”. The general consensus was that it wouldn’t succeed, especially since it was up against massively popular programs like Cheers. And they screened it and it had an overwhelmingly positive response.
DOM: Goddamnit, that’s the thing with television executives, they always, always underestimate the audience. They always assume that just because people watch shows, they like them, whereas I think a lot of executives don’t realise that people watch shows purely cause it’s something to do, purely because they’re on. They don’t necessarily watch shows because they like them.
LIAM: And on American television, American programs at the time, there was nothing like Twin Peaks. Internationally there were television shows celebrated as being more than entertainment, but in the realm of American television Twin Peaks had a real artistic integrity. It set a standard of quality, even though people argue that the first season is the best and that season two droops. Which isn’t the case. “The first one is very consistent, but you know, the second has two episodes that suck therefore the entire season sucks”. No, Twin Peaks is almost completely brilliant throughout. What’s hilarious is that ABC screwed up twice: not only did they cancel Twin Peaks, but early last decade they commissioned Lynch to make a pilot for a television show, the show being “Mulholland Drive”. They rejected the pilot, Lynch edited it into a feature film, and you know what? It was almost unanimously called the best film of last decade, he won Best Director at Cannes, received Academy Award nominations… it’s like the film equivalent of Decca Records saying to the Beatles in the late 50s “you have no future in show business”.
DOM: Actually, you know what else is interesting about Twin Peaks to me? We’ve talked about how when Lynch is doing his own thing and isn’t influenced by other people coming in and telling him what to do, he works best… but although he directed Twin Peaks, we can’t downplay the involvement of Mark Frost, who as far as I know is a soap writer. And surprisingly that collaboration works incredibly well.
LIAM: To Lynch’s credit, if you read Mark Frost’s script for the last episode, had Lynch not stepped in it would’ve been a disastrous end to the series.
DOM: But that’s because Mark Frost didn’t get the whole weird thing, he was a soap writer. He wrote soap opera characters and relationships.
LIAM: Yeah. They have to be working together for it to work properly. Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks is that script, and Lynch’s Twin Peaks is Fire Walk With Me.
DOM: We’ve seen that happen later with the criminally underrated and underseen Funland, where you have The League of Gentlemen writer Jeremy Dyson doing the weirdest things he can, and the Eastenders writer writing along with him. And it’s a soap about a town with dark secrets, too.
LIAM: The absolute creepiest thing in the world, I think, is BOB, how accidental BOB was. Because they had no idea what was happening in Twin Peaks as they wrote the episodes. Well, that’s not entirely true, but…
DOM: But they did know… oh hang on, can we talk about who the killer is?
LIAM: *laughs* No, no we can’t. Even though there will be a disclaimer in this editorial warning readers of spoilers, I don’t think I could handle it if I spoiled Twin Peaks for someone. Again.
DOM: But they did know who the killer was, didn’t they? Because they told the actor later.
LIAM: Umm, I think they knew it a few episodes prior to the reveal, but they didn’t know from the beginning. I think.
DOM: Right. Or maybe they knew as soon as BOB entered the series.
LIAM: Maybe.
DOM: I remember from the documentary, the actor was told “It was you, it was always you” which sort of implied that they knew for quite a long time.
LIAM: Would’ve been such a shock for… that actor. I was going to say, there’s a scene in the pilot where Sarah Palmer is having a dream, and in the dream an unknown person in a forest picks up Laura’s necklace, and as she wakes up, screaming, the camera pans upwards to a wall mirror. You can only see this on close inspection, but a man with long grey hair is sitting in the room, reflected in the mirror. The crew said “Damn, the set designer is reflected in the mirror, let’s do the take again” and Lynch said something along the lines of “No, no… this is amazing!” Again, it’s fate. He cast the set designer, Frank Silva as BOB, the overall villain of Twin Peaks. It’s an unbelievably spooky accident.
DOM: Another example of the collaboration between Lynch and Frost, usually in a Lynch production, the question you are asking is “What’s going on?”. Whereas in Twin Peaks the question is “Who Killed Laura Palmer?”, and it’s not something Lynch would normally do, so I assume it was mainly Frost’s idea because it’s a very soapy kind of thing. “Who Killed Blah Blah Blah” or “Who’s the Father of Blah Blah Blah’s child”, you know, but what makes it interesting is that the question of Who Killed Laura Palmer is… there is eventually a reveal of who it was, but the thing that drove that person is so unusual and so un-soapy and supernatural, that’s what makes it such an interesting question, because unlike a similar plotline in a typical soap opera, the answer is a hell of a lot more interesting than the question. Without meaning to even slightly spoil it, the killer is not unmasked at the end of the last episode of season two, probably about 2/5 of the way through the season. What’s interesting is that the killer is revealed, things happen, dare we say that storyline ends, but the way it ends is “but it will happen again”, but not in the sense of that killer doing it again, but that BOB would infect another person. And that fascinated me because the central question of the series was over, but there was this thing of “Oh my god, who’s next?” I remember that being one of the most interesting endings. That episode’s probably the best in the entire show. *laughs* And then it segues into James buggering off to nowhere, and it sort of wasn’t good then! But it picks up pretty quickly. And that was because Lynch went away, right?
LIAM: Yeah, I think Mark Frost left too. Diane Keaton directed an episode during that time.
DOM: Because they were forced to reveal who it was. They didn’t want to, but ABC pressured them.
LIAM: That said, that’s one of the few executive decisions from ABC that was a good idea. They revealed it in the best possible way. I mean, it does decline for a few episodes, and that puts a lot of people off the second season. But there’s a lot of gold after those episodes.
DOM: The first season is so consistent because they weren’t pushed either way, so when the push came from the executives, it forced them to go into an incredible high and then drop, suddenly. I think, to be honest, I prefer the high and the drop to consistency. I love Twin Peaks because of season two, not season one. That’s a fairly unpopular opinion to have but I think because they managed to reach those highs, I mean, the ending episode… we should probably stop talking about Twin Peaks, it’s not one of his films.
LIAM: I will end on this note: despite the fact that we segregate film and television by font – film in bold and television in italics, because let’s face it, cinema is more bold than anything on television. Bold is not better, by the way, it’s just riskier. In saying that, Twin Peaks is almost certainly my favourite thing in the world and I prefer it to any of my favourite films, despite not being a massive TV enthusiast.
DOM: Now that we’ve talked about Twin Peaks, let’s talk about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me! Which has David Bowie in it.
LIAM: The bit with Dale Cooper and the surveillance cameras is one of the creepiest Twin Peaks moments.
DOM: Which IS the David Bowie moment, he appears on the monitor.
LIAM: There’s something about Cooper. You look at him normally and you think “Oh, this is a very charming, nice person” but when you look at him as the doppelganger Cooper, he suddenly has these beady, hollow eyes.
DOM: It’s because his eyes are so black, there’s no colour to them. That’s why he’s such an interesting lead, because the blackness to his eyes almost makes you feel that there’s… not no character to him, but no complexity. He’s the virtuous hero without being over the top about it, the black eyes make you feel that, because he’s simple. But then when he becomes the doppelganger, again the eyes work in that favour, they’re so blank that they become horribly sinister.
LIAM: Lynch essentially made Fire Walk With Me because of Sheryl Lee, right? He wanted her to tell the story of that character, the wholesome girl who is dying on the inside.
DOM: Yeah. The problem with Fire Walk With Me is purely that it’s disjointed, and it kind of has to be because it’s a prelude. Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s probably better if you’re a Twin Peaks fan though. Some people started with it.
LIAM: Some die-hard fans have gotten into Twin Peaks through Fire Walk With Me, which astounds me because the movie immediately tells you who was Laura’s killer. Maybe you can enjoy the series as much as anyone else with that perspective, but I can’t fathom it. It’s got some great scenes, though. I like Chris Isaac’s character. Now there’s another musician Lynch has cast as a character. I liked his subplot more than the rest of the movie.
DOM: Let’s move onto Lost Highway, since we’ve told most of our Twin Peaks stories already. We’ve said that Lynch is nightmarish, but I don’t think he’s generally a horror director. Except you COULD argue that Lost Highway is his horror movie.
LIAM: Kind of like Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf. It’s not necessarily a horror movie but it’s comparable to the genre.
DOM: And there’s something about the style of it. It’s also very 90s.
LIAM: It feels a lot darker than his other movies, cinematography-wise rather than the themes and story. Even day feels like night. I know that doesn’t make sense but that’s what it feels like.
DOM: Is it because the entire film is arguably, unlike the rest of them (even Mulholland Drive), a nightmare?
LIAM: Yeah.
DOM: It’s a looping nightmare.
LIAM: We need to watch it again. I used to have a bad VHS rip of it – although I guess a VHS rip is appropriate, since a lot of the film revolves around VHS tapes – but it got erased off my hard drive somehow.
DOM: Liam’s a big fan of Michael Haneke’s Caché, which…
LIAM: MUST reference Lost Highway. It’s just too coincidental (otherwise). The Laurents are the family in Caché, and Dick Laurent is the gangster in Lost Highway. And there’s the static shot of the house getting mailed to the owners. The two films are nothing alike, I just find it strange that Haneke would pay tribute to Lynch. Lynch’s violence is horrifying, and I don’t think he ever glorifies violence, but that said he’s not nearly as moralistic and staunch about violence as Haneke is.
DOM: Haneke hates the whole thing of directors wanking over violence. Although Lynch plays up the comedy of it sometimes, apart from Wild at Heart I don’t think Lynch ever does that. He always portrays it as something horrific. It’s never realistic, but it’s horrible.
LIAM: Lynch’s personality reflects that, he preaches for peace, his meditation is such an idealistic venture.
DOM: He’s no Tarantino, going on about exploitation cinema like “Man, this shit is GREAT!”. No offense to Tarantino by the way, I’m just pointing out the differences there.
LIAM: Haneke despises Tarantino.
DOM: I’m not surprised.
LIAM: Lost Highway’s soundtrack is strange for a Lynch movie. Great, but it’s atypical of him.
DOM: Although Badalamenti does some of it, the big thing is that… I’m pretty sure the 50s style songs in Blue Velvet were all original pieces by Badalamenti, but they’re still 50s-ish, and Lost Highway is so 90s. You’ve got Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Rammstein, it’s like a relic of the 90s. It works better for that.
LIAM: Marilyn Manson’s in it, as well as on the soundtrack. He’s one of the guys in the porn film.
DOM: We mentioned Funland before, that’s got a direct reference to Lost Highway in it, the girl stripping to I’ve Got A Spell On You. And speaking of the music, as a Bowie fan I love how Lost Highway bookends with I’m Deranged. But my favourite thing is the Rammstein song. It always comes in with a baritone “RAMMMMSTEINNN” and then that’s it, it cuts off the song. It’s hilarious.
LIAM: Rammstein are David Lynch’s favourite band. He even made a music video for them.
DOM: Also, maybe for the first time in Lynch’s filmography the villain is not personable. He is this mystery character, which carries into Mulholland and Inland, he’s…
LIAM: He’s not necessarily a villain, either. If you remember, he kills Dick Laurent and ends up helping the main character. So he’s not a villain so much as this mysterious guy who is overshadowing their lives, which is much more nightmarish. He’s an enigma.
DOM: It’s his first venture into true dream logic that isn’t Eraserhead, which leads us into Mulholland Drive. It’s funny how “It was a dream” is such a cliched, crappy reveal, but for Lynch it’s always appropriate. It’s because he captures what a dream is, whereas usually dreams in other movies have a logic to them. Sorry, Lynch’s films have a logic, but for instance the Dallas twist of “It’s all a dream” is lame because the season felt totally normal, and then it was revealed, whereas in Lynch’s films nothing that happens in the dream sequences feel normal, you accept it but it doesn’t feel normal at all, and then when you find out it’s a dream you go “Ahh OK”. Then again the real world isn’t that normal, either. It explains a lot of things in Mulholland Drive. There’s the restaurant scene, which is so stilted, and there’s the scene where they find the car, the two policeman, and they talk in the most stilted way possible. When I was watching it I thought “I don’t really like these scenes”, I still don’t really like them a great deal because I think they’re stilted, but I get why they’re there, and they do contribute to the main feeling of the film.
LIAM: The latter one I agree with, but with the former I think I go with the consensus of it being terrifying. It’s mainly because of his face, he’s such an alien-looking guy.
DOM: Maybe it’s because I saw that scene in my Film Music class.
LIAM: Ahh, so you saw it out of context.
DOM: Yeah.
LIAM: OK, yeah, it’d probably be really silly out of context.
DOM: It’s really comedic, I wasn’t sure what it was at the time. I think it might have tarnished it for me. Also, Mulholland Drive returns to Lynch’s 50s obsession again, moreso because of Hollywood rather than the wholesome family thing. Is it the first time that Lynch is making a movie about movies?
LIAM: Yeah, it is. I haven’t seen Sunset Boulevard (I’m very ashamed of this) but I’ve heard people say that Mulholland Drive is today’s Sunset Boulevard. Would you agree with this?
DOM: Umm… it’s probably today’s Sunset Boulevard in the same way that Blue Velvet is a more modern Night of the Hunter, you can see the big similarities but then again they’re very different. Also Sunset Boulevard is a noir, Mulholland Drive isn’t.
LIAM: It isn’t, but it has noir-ish moments.
DOM: But like, Blue Velvet is way more of a noir than it. There’s definitely links, though.
LIAM: When it was still a pilot, I remember Naomi Watts was upset because the pilot ended before her second character appeared. Without the other character, the pilot makes her look like a really bad actress.
DOM: *laughs*
LIAM: But when you see the whole film, she’s amazing. Of all the films to kick start Naomi Watt’s career internationally, it was Mulholland Drive. She’d been in a few things beforehand but she said that Mulholland Drive improved her career opportunities by 120%.
DOM: And Laura Harring had been in soaps, right?
LIAM: Yeah. Speaking of soaps, Mulholland Drive was originally conceived as a spin-off of Twin Peaks. Not that many people know that. The main character was Audrey Horne, and it was about her moving to Los Angeles. And as we said before, another similarity is that ABC canned both of them.
DOM: Since we exhausted all our Mulholland Drive stories earlier, I guess we have to move onto something else.
LIAM: Let’s talk about his web content. David Lynch started davidlynch.com as a place to exhibit exclusive content to subscribers, but he ended up using it for other things, such as distributing his homegrown coffee. It’s all in the beans, and he’s just full of beans.
DOM: The ad for his coffee is hilarious.
LIAM: How great is his ad for the Playstation 2? I read a Youtube comment saying “How pretentious of him to make an advertisement that doesn’t advertise the product”, but seriously, you know how long that ad stayed in my mind? About a decade. I spent so long looking for the ad.
DOM: Yeah, I mean, what was the ad for Wipeout? It was a girl drugged out on a sofa. Yeah, and Wipeout didn’t sell or anything.
LIAM: One of the best Playstation ads is the “Mental Wealth” TV spot with the girl with the large head, by Chris Cunningham. That’s another that stayed in my mind. And actually, didn’t Wong Kar Wai direct an ad for Sony?
DOM: OK, Sony has the best advertisements, hands down.
LIAM: So Lynch started a production company called Absurda, dedicated not only to producing feature films, but acquiring the rights to his previous films. He made “Eraserhead 2000″, the first DVD transfer made of the film with remastered audio. He also bought a Sony PD150 and started making shorts, eventually getting a DVD release in the form of Dynamic 01. Some of them are brilliant, some of them not so much, because until that point Lynch hadn’t used a digital camera so he’s like “Wow, look at all the cool in-built digital effects I can do” and so the films aren’t that fascinating. Digital zoom experiments, sepia tones, solarise effects, that kind of thing. And there’s a 40 minute documentary of him building a lamp, which is ahh, not the most engrossing thing ever made.
DOM: That’d make a great joke – How many minutes does it take David Lynch to screw in a lightbulb? 40.
LIAM: *laughs* He made Darkened Room, he made Rabbits, which is very significant for reasons I’ll explain, and surprisingly good for a 40 minute static shot of Rabbits in a room speaking nonsensical dialogue with a brooding soundtrack in the background. My friend has noise-canceling headphones and often watches movies on the train to and from TAFE, and he jumped a mile at the loud scream that breaks 30 minutes of repetitious sounds. There’s also Dumbland, a humourous and juvenile flash cartoon about an obese, farting alpha male American. It’s hilarious picturing this 60 year old guy sitting with Flash just making fart noises and making a cartoon.
DOM: Again there’s the undercurrents, you’ve got the ants for one, like in Blue Velvet.
LIAM: Not only that, but the singing ant is supposed to be a caricature of Julee Cruise.
DOM: So you could argue that it has thematic depth… but it’s probably just a bunch of fart jokes.
LIAM: And a guy that has sex with ducks.
DOM: But it’s better than any film Kevin Smith ever made on the same subject, so.
LIAM: Lynch also made daily weather reports for his website. He’d get on his webcam and go “OK, it’s a nice day in Los Angeles, there’s a nice summer breeze, it’s only 30 days until Bastille Day”, he was obsessed with Bastille Day, probably because he’d recently received the Legion of Honour from the French government. He has some pretty strong ties with France. I might be wrong, but I think every movie after Blue Velvet has been funded by StudioCanal. Anyway, one day he said “OK, it’s a nice day in Los Angeles, there’s a nice summer breeze, I’ve made a new feature film called Inland Empire”. What I said about Dern appearing in Lynch’s neighbourhood happened two years before this announcement. You see this intercut throughout Inland Empire, but that bit in Inland Empire where Dern’s character is talking to the psychiatrist was originally a twenty page monologue, which Dern memorised, intended to be a short film for davidlynch.com. Another scene that started as a short film is the bit where she finds Piotrek, the Phantom, and he’s got the lightbulb in his mouth. These scenes impressed Lynch so much, as well as the prospect of making a feature film on DV and with Dern in the lead that it resulted in a three hour hallucinatory epic stretching from LA, Hollywood to Poland. I think it’s amazing.
DOM: It was the Lynch movie that finally made me a fan, probably because it was three hours so I was able to get fully immersed in it.
LIAM: It’s another one of those movies that uses its runtime so effectively.
DOM: I came out of it and went “Oh, OK. That’s what David Lynch is”. Even though I did like Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet at that point, that’s when I “got” him. And that trend continues, because my two favourites are Inland Empire and Eraserhead, so I guess I prefer the more experimental ones. Inland Empire has the best tagline of all the Lynch films, in my opinion.
LIAM: Most appropriate, maybe. “A Woman In Trouble.” What can you say about Inland Empire?
DOM: Very little.
LIAM: It’s very sparse. Despite a lot of things happening, there’s not a lot of dialogue. And the DV format works well for it, too. I always use SBS as my reference point, but there are bits in Inland Empire where I think “yeah, this is an aesthetic I really like, the DV, SBS World Cinema look”. I disagree with people who think it’s ugly. I mean, in a few parts maybe it looks too much like digital video, but for most of it I think it’s surprisingly well shot and textural. Also, it’s his first feature film post-Blue Velvet that hasn’t been scored by Badalamenti.
DOM: Inland Empire feels like a culmination of all his themes.
LIAM: Yeah, it’s like an anthology film.
DOM: Which doesn’t mean that it’s just for fans, but he’s throwing all his obsessions into the one film.
LIAM: Everything from the red lanterns, the guy sawing the log, the cast of Lynch regulars, Rabbits being intergrated into the plot, etc. There are a lot of Lynch regulars, Naomi Watts (in a Rabbit costume), Laura Harring, Grace Zabriskie, Justin Theroux, Laura Dern obviously, David Lynch himself – as the guy who’s screaming down from the film spotlight – and Harry Dean Stanton, who plays Freddy. His monologue about “the ocean of possibilities” and asking Laura Dern for money to pay his landlord, those are two of my favourite scenes.
DOM: Yeah, despite the fact you said Rabbits was good, I think… you maybe wouldn’t agree, I think it works better in Inland Empire than as a standalone thing.
LIAM: No, you’re right, it does work better in Inland Empire. I kinda said that because I saw Rabbits before Inland Empire, and since Inland Empire is a culmination of everything Lynch has done, I’d advised people to watch it first. It’s weirdly terrifying seeing the characters of Inland Empire and Rabbits interact. You know how Rabbits is pretty much one static shot? Seeing it break from that formula, especially the scene where the man Rabbit walks out the door and into Dern’s house, there’s just something unsettling about that. Especially the bit where Dern contacts the Rabbits by phone, and when she enters their realm as their heads slowly turn towards the opening door. It’s hard to get across how creepy it is.
DOM: It’s also very funny, Rabbits. Inland Empire is in general.
LIAM: Yeah, the humour is subtle but it’s hilarious.
DOM: The opening scene where the woman warns Dern about everything is actually very funny, but it’s also scary. It’s her eyes, they’re bugging out.
LIAM: Some of the jokes eluded me a few times. You know the scene where Laura Dern and Justin Theroux go on the talk show, and they’re talking about something scandalous that’s happened but you actually don’t know what it is? I love how it implies in the next scene that the scandal was that he said she had a nice arse. The big laugh-out-loud moment for me comes from Jeremy Irons, playing a film director named Kingsley, where he goes “This film is in fact a remake”, Theroux goes “A remake. I wouldn’t do a remake” and Kingsley replies with “Well of course, but you didn’t know!”
DOM: *laughs*
LIAM: And the bit where he and Freddy walk into the soundstage. Freddy has this massive bump on his head, Kingsley says something like “We were just having a cup of tea. In fact, it was a terrible cup of tea, wasn’t it Freddy?”, Freddy murmurs something under his breath, and Kingsley stares at Dern and Theroux unblinking for about thirty seconds. I don’t know why it’s funny.
DOM: Also in Rabbits, the sitcom laughter is hilarious. The fact that they laugh at the most simple lines, like “What did you do today?” or whatever, and yet also it gets creepy because it’s like disembodied voices being forced to laugh when they’re not supposed to laugh.
LIAM: If you look at it in retrospect, most of his davidlynch.com shorts seem to tie into Inland Empire, even Dumbland. Certainly Darkened Room does, with the cigarette through the cloth thing. Not a lot of people have picked up on this, from what I’ve read, but in 2007 Lynch submitted a short called Absurda for the anthology feature film To Each His Cinema which featured shorts by Lars von Trier, Gus van Sant, Wong Kar Wai, Roman Polanski, Abbas Kiarostami, the Coen brothers etc. I only noticed this on a recent viewing when I watched Inland Empire on New Year’s Eve: in Absurda, there’s a bit towards the end with a ballerina dancing in a cloud of smoke, and if you pause the Inland Empire DVD around the bit where Dern’s character kisses the Lost Girl, you can see that same ballerina. It’s barely noticeable because the opacity is low, but it’s there. I have no idea what it means but it was a creepy thing to discover. Well, we’ve now talked about his filmography!
DOM: Yeah, other film blogs have given fairly good arguments of his films, unlike the one we’ve just given you.
LIAM: So the next project on the table is Snootworld, his CGI animation movie. And he’s producing King Shot by Jodorowsky, he’s just produced My Son, My Son by Werner Herzog, and… Surveillance by Jennifer Lynch.
DOM: Jennifer Lynch, the best possible note for us to end on.
Inland Empire was our #1 film of the decade, you can read the complete article here.
