The following is an article I wrote for the seminal UK slipstream/horror magazine, The 3rd Alternative. Over the course of its run before it morphed into the equally memorable Black Static, editor Andy Cox published a number of articles on film-makers who operated outside the mainstream--directors like Lynch, The Quay Brothers, Terry Gilliam and David Lynch among others.
My piece on Lynch appeared in #17 in June 1998, before he got round to his last three films and Twin Peaks: The Return, hence the absence of any commentary on those works. Following the unexpected death of Lynch last week at the age of 78, by way of a personal tribute, I'm posting the article in fill here. Though I'd love to offer my extended thoughts on his later works, particularly Mulholland Drive, which easily ranks among his two or three greatest films, and Twin Peaks: The Return, which gave us far more than we could have expected in terms of genuinely innovative and unsettling television drama, rather than attempting to revise and update the piece, I'm presenting it as it first appeared.
One more thing to point out, as a reader of the 3rd Alternative pointed out at the time, the article was shamefully negligent on the importance of sound in Lynch's films. Any future attempt I might make at revising the article, would feature a significant chunk on the crucial role of the Lynchian soundscape.
In the meantime, I hope this will inspire you to revisit your own favourite Lynch works.
In Heaven, Everything is fine
In an Amsterdam cafe early in 1980: strategically mounted on the pastel walls are half a dozen television screens; a mixed clientele are seated around the split-level floor, drinking tea or coffee and watching an old government sponsored anti-dope propaganda film called Reefer Madness. At least half the viewers are stoned. Wooden ramps connect the different levels, and the waiters, dressed only in silk sorts and vests, rollerskate between tables, carrying orders to and fro.
1986. A man and a woman book into a seedy North London hotel for a night of keenly anticipated sex and passion. Somehow they find themselves part of a riotous wedding celebration, which is punctuated by wild dancing and drunken renditions of Irish Rebel songs. In the wee small hours, scheduled for sex, someone sings mournful ballads about lost loves and dead mothers. The man and woman have no regrets.
What have either of these events to do with David Lynch? Bear with me. Think about: a young man visiting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. At the dinner table her father asks him if he’ll do the honours and carve their ‘man-made chicken’. The man politely obliges, only to find that when he pierces the small bird with the fork, slime oozes from its innards and its talonless legs begin to twitch. His girlfriend’s mother has a fit. Father turns to him and says, “Well Henry, whaddya know?” as if nothing untoward has happened. Henry’s reply is, “I don’t know much of anything.”
Roses bloom above a white picket fence; a fire engine rolls by, with a fireman on the running board, waving to us, a dog at his feet. A middle aged man waters his lawn on a sunny afternoon. He collapses from a heart attack. Laying on his back on the lawn, he clutches the hose to his chest, fountaining water into the air. A small terrier arrives and jumps on his chest, playfully sticking its head in the jet of water, oblivious to the man’s suffering. A toddler wanders into view, attracted by the dog’s yapping, wanting to join in the fun. In a seedy roadhouse a man use a hand-lamp as a microphone and lip-sychs camply to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” to an audience of hoods, whores and three or four matronly, middle-aged women. A mother tries to seduce her daughter’s boyfriend in a hotel toilet in order to separate the two. Her advances spurned, she becomes, in effect, the Wicked Witch of the East. A man has a conversation with a weird looking guy at a party. The weird guy appears to know him and claims to have been in his house. The first man denies this, only for Mr Weird to tell him that not only has he been in his house but that he is there right now, at the same time he is there at the party, talking to the man. To prove his point he hands the man a cellular phone and has him call his house where Mr Weird answers him.
These are ‘Lynchian’ events, the first two in reality, the others on film. What makes the scenes in the Amsterdam cafe and the North London hotel even more Lynchian, is that, immediately after Reefer Madness, the cafe programmers screened Eraserhead, and immediately prior to that thwarted sexual encounter at the hotel, I had seen Blue Velvet for the first time. David Foster Wallace has defined ‘Lynchian’ as referring 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 perpetual containment within the latter” (Premiere, September, 1996). The implication is that normality is a facade behind which lurks strangeness. Sometimes, in reality, we’re allowed a glimpse behind the screen. In the films of David Lynch, we are, more often than not, confronted with a big time weirdness that causes us to question the nature of reality itself.
Described by Lynch as “A dream of dark and troubling things”, Eraserhead is the most explicit cinematic vision of the Surrealist manifesto since Buñuel and Dali took an Andalusian dog for a walk. It’s a bleak, disturbing and sometimes insanely funny take on sexuality and parenthood. Jack Nance plays Henry Spencer, a print worker in some vaguely post-apocalyptic American city, a grotesque Chaplin devoid of sentimentality but complete with a full set of pens in his breast pocket. Early on you realise that a coherent narrative is not what’s on offer. We see Henry in his shabby apartment - bowls of water in the chest of drawers, a mound of earth with a spindly tree atop his bedside table, a window that looks out on a brick wall - and later, at the home of his girlfriend Mary, we have that first meeting with her parents. In what is both the film’s funniest scene and, perhaps, one of the most excruciatingly embarrassing ever committed to film, Henry undergoes a series of ritual humiliations. First he pretends not to notice a bitch nursing her pups on the living room floor; then Mary has a fit, which he tries to ignore while explaining his job to her mother. Mary’s father, a plumber, appears and complains that people seem to think pipes grow in their homes. Later, there is the dinner of ‘man-made chicken.’ Mary’s grandmother, catatonic, or more likely dead, sits in the kitchen and has her arms manipulated by mother to toss a salad, perhaps to make her feel more involved. Mother asks if Henry has had sexual intercourse with Mary and threatens him with ‘bad trouble’ if he won’t co-operate.
There is a baby, of course, and it is this baby that is at the heart of Eraserhead. Looking like a close relation of the creature that exploded from John Hurt’s stomach in Alien, the baby embodies Henry’s fear of responsibility and his sexual guilt. In a series of stunning dream sequences, Lynch makes this explicit and also seems to offer Henry a way out. His mutant sperm are everywhere - in one nightmarish scene he extracts them from Mary, as if to undo the birth of the child, while she struggles, tangled up in the bedsheets. In another dream, a Doris Day clone with chipmunk cheeks crushes the sperm beneath her feet and sings: “In Heaven / everything is fine / You’ve got your good things / And I’ve got mine”.
Finally, Mary leaves and Henry has to care for the sick child alone. We feel sorry for Henry, and admire him when he nurses it (him/her?) back to health. But soon, our allegiance switches to the baby as Henry grows increasingly intolerant towards it. His killing of the child is a shocking and brutal moment, and the film’s final image, showing Henry embracing the chipmunk woman, (presumably in Heaven?) seems to confirm his desire for a sexual relationship devoid of commitment or responsibility.
Describing Lynch as a “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”, Mel Brooks gave him his first mainstream directorial assignment, The Elephant Man. Based on the true story of the hideously deformed John Merrick, who was rescued from life as a circus freak by the Victorian surgeon Frederick Treves, the film avoids the usual Hollywood cliches about human dignity triumphing over adversity by raising questions about Treves’s motivation. Has he rescued Merrick from his appalling life for humanitarian reasons, or to further his own reputation as a man of science? Lynch coaxed brilliant performances from John Hurt as Merrick and Anthony Hopkins as Treves, and Freddie Francis’s beautiful black and white photography creates a vivid picture of Victorian London, while at the same time evoking the expressionistic style of Eraserhead. The subject matter too, dealing with freaks and outcasts, echoes some of the themes of the earlier film. Perhaps these unsettling Lynchian overtones account for the film’s failure to win a single Oscar, despite eight nominations, including one for best director. An omen, perhaps, of the way Lynch’s relationship with Hollywood would pan out.
Lynch was born in the town of Missoula, Montana in 1946 and trained originally as an artist in Boston and Philadelphia. He had made a five minute short, The Alphabet - in which a creature gives birth to the letters of the alphabet - by the time he was eighteen, followed by another short, The Grandmother - in which a child plants seeds which sprout into a grandmother - in 1970. Eraserhead (1976) was his first full length feature, and following the success of The Elephant Man, Lynch was offered the director’s job on Return of the Jedi. While it’s interesting to speculate what Lynch would have done with Luke Skywalker, Hans Solo et al - give Chewbacca a junk habit, have Luke develop a sordid obsession with Princess Leia’s hidden past as a transsexual drag queen - for various reasons, he turned down the job. His adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune, which he both wrote and directed, perhaps gives us some indication of how a George Lucas / David Lynch collaboration might have turned out.
As it is, Dune is a major disappointment. Apart from two, or possibly three performances, the actors—particularly Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides and Sting as Feyd Rautha—are miscast or simply wooden. Lynch later admitted that he shouldn’t have done the film, but that he was tempted by the possibilities it offered to do the things he loved. The script is uneven and episodic, and only the performances of Brad Dourif as the slimy Piter De Vries, Paul Smith as the Beast Rabban, and especially Kenneth MacMillan’s wonderfully over the top portrayal of the Baron Harkonnen, seem to hit the right note. Despite some perverse Lynchian touches, mostly to do with the Clan Harkonnen—the heartplugs the baron has implanted into his (male) sexual slaves, the hints at a homo-erotic relationship between the Baron and Feyd Rautha, and the gross acne that has erupted over Harkonnen’s face, which seems to be an external manifestation of his inner evil—Dune doesn’t really work as a Lynch movie should. It seems though, that Lynch came out of the project a shrewder man. “I learned a lot of stuff on Dune,” he said afterwards. “I started selling out on Dune.”
If Lynch had started selling out, there was no sign of such a manoeuvre in Blue Velvet, his dark exploration of the corrupt underbelly of small town America. Having had to suffer studio interference on Dune, Lynch accepted Dino De Laurentis’s offer to direct Blue Velvet for a minuscule budget and a pittance for his directorial duties, in return for total control over the film. It’s a safe bet to assume that De Laurentis didn’t get the film he was expecting. What he did get was Lynch’s most personal, and accomplished film to date.
Blue Velvet begins with a recreation of a small town American idyll: the aforementioned white picket fence and fire engine, shattered by the Lynchian fusion of the mundane and the bizarre—a dog using a dying man as a plaything. The film tells the story of Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan, much better here than in Dune)—the son of the heart attack victim, who has survived—getting caught up in a possible murder investigation. He finds a human ear in a field near his house and takes it to the local police station. Although warned off getting involved in the case, Jeffrey’s curiosity is sparked by information he receives from the detective’s daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern). Like a latter day Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew, Jeffrey and Sandy continue to investigate the case, almost as if it were some innocuous puzzle: “What happens next?” she asks, early on. “Are you game for more?” Jeffrey replies.
Lynch delights in placing Jeffrey in situations which force him to acknowledge his own darker desires. Whilst hiding in a closet in the apartment of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a nightclub singer connected with the case, Jeffrey is unable to suppress his own voyeuristic impulses and witnesses her being forced to have brutal sex with Frank (Dennis Hopper), the film’s chief incarnation of evil. Later, he has sex with Dorothy and finds himself re-enacting Frank’s brutality towards her. While Dorothy seems at first a willing victim, she later tells Jeffrey and Sandy that “He (Frank) put his disease inside me”. While we can accept that she has been forced to into this sadomasochistic relationship through Frank’s holding her husband and son hostage, we are left wondering how Jeffrey can justify his own sexual violence. The truth that Lynch seems to be implying is that we all have the potential to be monsters like Frank, a point made explicit when the latter tells Jeffrey, “You’re like me”.
Blue Velvet personifies weirdness—from Frank’s constant need for pure oxygen, to Dean Stockwell’s camp serenading of Frank. Sandy has a dream in which robins represent the light of love, explaining to Jeffrey that “it means that there is trouble until the robins come”, implying the triumph of good over evil, love over hate. But Lynch subverts this simplistic notion by having a robin appear at the end of the film, with a bug in its mouth. Jeffrey’s aunt turns away in disgust, commenting “I could never eat a bug.” Maybe so, but what Lynch seems to be implying is that love and disgust, beauty and ugliness, are all facets of the same concept. Sick? Perhaps, but Blue Velvet earned Lynch his second Oscar nomination for Best Director, (almost inevitably, he didn’t win) and it remains his most powerful and provocative film.
When I first saw Wild at Heart I thought it a dazzling road movie, with a great soundtrack, two fine performances from Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern, and some wonderfully strange cameos from an impressive supporting cast including Harry Dean Stanton, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rossellini, Willem Dafoe and Crispin Glover. Despite this, and the award of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, subsequent viewings have tempered my initial enthusiasm somewhat. On the whole, Wild at Heart never really hangs together; it is disjointed and incoherent in a way which suggests a failure of nerve rather than the surreal. Where Blue Velvet had something serious to say amid all the black comedy and strangeness, here, Lynch seemed to be treading water. Which is a crying shame because the road movie genre seems a particularly appropriate one for Lynch to explore.
Even so, there is still a lot to enjoy in the film, not least Nicholas Cage’s sublime rendition of ‘Love me Tender’. Cage and Dern are excellent as the two young lovers, Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, on the run from Lula’s obsessive, lunatic mom (Ladd). There are a few Lynchian—or, what we might call, ‘slipstream’—moments: a philosophical conversation about cigarettes; the scene where Johnny Farragut (Stanton), the private detective/boyfriend of Ladd, sent by her to track down her daughter, is tortured; a disturbing scene where Sailor and Lula come across Sherilyn Fenn, bloody and confused, the only survivor of a car smash; and Willem Dafoe’s truly repellent performance as another of Lynch’s bizarre villains, the rotten toothed Bobby Peru. The cinematography, music and sound editing, are all uniformly excellent (throughout his career in film, Lynch has paid particular attention not just to his soundtracks but to all the incidental sounds, and one could write a thesis on the importance of his films’ soundscapes alone), with the director continuing his fruitful collaborations with Frederick Elmes (camera) and Angelo Badalamenti (music). This being Lynch, there is also the usual mix of explicit violence and black comedy, a lot of sex, and some great dancing.
I don’t want to say too much about Twin Peaks (1990), the television series because this is, after all, meant to be a feature on Cinema. Conceived in collaboration with Mark Frost, the first series was, to usurp a cliche, a televisual phenomenon, both in the USA and Europe. With Twin Peaks, Lynch managed to do for television drama what Blue Velvet had already done for film. Exploring a similarly dark terrain, the series follows FBI agent Dale Cooper’s (Kyle MacLachlan, again) investigation into the murder of teenage Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in a small town in Washington state. Full of Lynchian characters, dialogue and events, Twin Peaks was an unexpected success, utilising the directorial skills of such as Lynch himself, Frost, James Foley, Tim Hunter, Stephen Gyllenhaal and Diane Keaton.
There followed a second series in 1992, but Lynch’s involvement this time was much less than on the original project, limited to directing only a couple of episodes. It seems that Lynch and Frost had wildly differing views on how to continue Twin Peaks, resulting in Frost gaining control over the television series, while Lynch went on to direct and co write (with Robert Engels) a prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which tells the story of the last seven days of Laura Palmer. While the film does have cameo appearances from some of the cast regulars, including MacLachlan, Catherine Coulson as the Log Lady, Dana Ashbrook as Bobby Briggs, Mädchen Amick as Shelley Johnson and Ray Wise as Leland Palmer, many of the other regulars are missing—Sheriff Truman, Audrey Horne, Josie Packard and Catherine Martell. While fans of the series may be disappointed at the absence of these familiar faces, what I find wearying is the way that Engels and Lynch use those regulars who do appear. Rather than adding anything new to our understanding of their characters, they seem to be merely going through the same old motions. Of more interest—apart from an embarrassingly inept performance from David Bowie—are the guest appearances from the likes of Harry Dean Stanton, Chris Isaak, Kieffer Sutherland, Lynch himself and Miguel Ferrer, in that they provide an injection of dark humour and pathos.
It’s hard to understand the indifference and even hostility that Fire Walk with Me provoked among fans of the series. While the film fails to tie up all the loose ends from both the first and second series, to expect it to have done so was to have expected Lynch to conform to the sort of dramatic conventions he rejected from the word go. Instead of bemoaning the fact that the mystery of Bob, the Red Room, the dwarf and so on remain unresolved, why not rejoice in Lynch’s absurd and yet accurate representation of the banal nightmares of teenage life? While advance word on the film contrasted its explicit sex and violence with that of the censorship restrictions of the television series, it is the scenes of pathos and mundane rather than violent horror, especially from Sheryl Lee—who gives a moving and complex performance in a difficult role—that stick in the mind.
Lynch collaborated with Barry Gifford (writer of the novel on which Wild at Heart was based) on the script of Lost Highway. To describe the result as a thriller would be like describing King Kong as a tale of unrequited love—accurate enough in itself but it leaves so much out. Lynch himself has said, “It’s a dangerous thing to say what a picture is. If things get too specific, the dream stops” (Sight & Sound, July 1996), which seems to capture precisely the frame of mind needed to enjoy Lost Highway to the full.
There appear to be two separate narratives woven into Lost Highway, the first concerning Fred Madison’s (Bill Pullman) deteriorating relationship with his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). Fred is a jazz musician who seems oddly detached from life in a way suggestive of a dreamlike state. A series of videocassettes are left on their doorstep, showing first, the exterior of their house, and then interior shots, including a scene of the couple asleep in their bedroom. At a party, Fred meets the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), who says they’ve met before at Fred’s house and that “As a matter of fact I’m there right now.” He hands Fred a cell phone and there follows a surreal three way conversation between Fred, the Mystery Man at the party and that same Mystery Man on the phone at Fred’s house. That the Mystery Man represents an incarnation of evil is confirmed by a vampiric allusion: Fred asks how he got inside his house; “You invited me,” the Mystery Man replies. “Its not my custom to go where I’m not wanted.” Like Dracula, his victims appear to offer an invitation to their nemesis. The final videocassette reveals Renee, horribly murdered in their bedroom, and Fred himself, crouched beside her, covered in her blood. Fred is found guilty of her murder and sentenced to death.
The second narrative strand begins in the condemned man’s cell, when a prison guard finds, not Fred, but Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) there. Having established that Pete has no connection to Fred, he is released and returns to his job at Arnie’s garage. Pete is the favoured mechanic of local gangster Mr Eddy (Robert Loggia), and it is not long before he is involved in an affair with Mr Eddy’s girlfriend, Alice (Patricia Arquette), who bears a striking resemblance to Renee. Soon, Pete is caught up in scary world of drugs, pornography and murder. Alice/Renee provides one link between the two narratives; another is provided by Andy, who was the host of the party at which the Mystery Man talked to Fred. Andy may have been having an affair with Renee; certainly he has had dealings with Alice, and also with Mr Eddy. Alice manipulates Pete into killing Andy. Mr Eddy, alias Dick Laurent, also connects with the first narrative in that at one point Fred hears a voice on his intercom telling him that “Dick Laurent is dead.” The truth of this is revealed when, after Pete has seemingly metamorphosed back into Fred (by this stage we assume that Fred and Pete are one and the same), we see Fred cut Mr Eddy/Laurent’s throat in the desert, then drive back to his LA house and speak the same words into his own intercom.
To digress for a moment: Lynch specialises in particularly grotesque onscreen deaths. Think of Baron Harkonnen pulling the heartplugs on his victims, or the climax of Blue Velvet, where the corrupt detective remains standing upright postmortem in Dorothy Vallens apartment; Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, falls on his shotgun and blows his own head off—it sails through the air and lands beside the already sickened Sailor; in Lost Highway, Andy is thrown across the room and encounters the corner of a glass coffee table head on. With his head impaled on the glass and his rigid body sticking out from the table, he resembles some sort of weird designer attachment which every home should have.
I said that Fred seems to wander round in a dreamlike state and Gifford confirmed this by describing the second narrative as Fred’s “psychogenic fugue” as he awaits execution. Not only is Pete a positive manifestation of Fred’s wish to escape his rendezvous with death, but the Mystery Man represents the obverse—the darker side of his personality, his unconscious desire for blood and sexual violence given free reign. Fred might almost be an older Jeffrey Beaumont, and the Mystery Man the side of him that beat Dorothy Vallens, made explicit. But of course, this being Lynch, things aren’t quite that simple. The ongoing police investigation into Pete and his connection to Mr Eddy, undermines the notion of this narrative as a fugue, as do the subtle hints at alternative endings, none of which are either credible enough to provide a sense of closure, or ridiculous enough to be dismissed. Almost inevitably, given its stubborn refusal to conform to Hollywood notions of what a genre movie should be, Lost Highway failed at the box office. I don’t know if Lynch is bothered by this commercial failure, but what can be said is that is that he has survived his collision with the Hollywood machine with his integrity and artistic vision intact.
Way back in The 3rd Alternative #1, Chris Kenworthy spoke of ‘slipstream’ writing as transcending genre fiction ‘while operating in its wake.’ I think the implication was that such writing conformed neither to genre or mainstream conventions, but that it occupied a space somewhere between the two. Kenworthy went on to say ‘the weirdness ... is grounded in the ordinary; everyday events take place in unordinary ways, and the familiar is made strange, with the impression that something is going on beyond our normal level of perception.’ This seems to me to sum up precisely the filmic region that Lynch has chosen to explore in his best films, from Eraserhead right up to Lost Highway. They are not really horror or science fiction; they don’t really function as noir or thrillers. They are something else. Slipstream, if you like. Which could be just another way of saying Lynchian.
Filmography:
1966 Six Men Getting Sick, (Moving sculpture), (Director).
1967 Alphabet, (Short), (Director).
1968 The Amputee, (Short), (Director)
1970 The Grandmother, (Short),(Director, Producer, Writer).
1976 Eraserhead, (Director, Writer, Composer, Editor, Producer).
1980 Elephant Man, (Director, Writer - Academy Award Nominations for both).
1984 Dune, (Director, Writer).
1986 Blue Velvet, (Director - Academy Award Nomination, Writer).
1990 Wild At Heart, (Director, Writer, winner of Palme d’Or at Cannes).
1990 Twin Peaks, 1st series, (TV) (Director, Writer, Producer, Actor).
1990 Industrial Symphony No. 1, (Composer, Director, Producer).
1990 American Chronicles, (TV) (Director, Producer).
1992 Twin Peaks, 2nd Series, (TV), (Director, Actor).
1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, (Director, Writer, Actor, Producer).
1992 On the Air, (TV) (Director, Producer).
1993 Hotel Room, (TV) (Director, Producer).
1994 Crumb, (Documentary) (Producer).
1996 Lost Highway, (Director, Writer, Producer).
1999 The Straight Story, (Director).
2001 Mulholland Drive, (Director, writer).
2006 Inland Empire, (Director, Writer, Producer, Cinematography, Editor).
2017 Twin Peaks: The Return, (TV) (Director, writer).
"In Heaven, Everything is Fine: David Lynch", first appeared oin The 3rd Alternative #17, in June 1998.
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