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One spy has found David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE!!! Annnddd....
SPOILER ALERT !!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a review of one the big curiosities out there for me. I found I agreed with the point of view of the below reviewer in regards to watching David Lynch's films... I can't wait to see this new one, even if it is 3 hours long. I read recently that it was pulled from the Sitges Film Festival, with the Fest director saying that the studio didn't want to screen it to a bunch of Lynch fans who will love it no matter what because that'll just give Lynch ammo against the studio when they start asking him to cut the film down. It sounds, from the below review, that it could stand to lose some running time, but I hate that sneaky crap. Did these producers honestly think funding a David Lynch movie was going to result in a commercial blockbuster? You do it because he's a demented genius, not to become rich.
Anyway, here's the review. It goes over a lot of the film, but I predict that no matter how much you read you can't really be spoiled for a David Lynch movie. There's just that extra something that he puts in that negates the ability for his films to be spoiled. Enjoy the review!!!
Hi Harry,
Longtime reader, first-time writer, you know the drill. I had the pleasure of seeing David Lynch's new opus, INLAND EMPIRE (all caps, please), at the New York Film Festival last night. Haven't seen much on the web about this, which is a shame, 'cause it's a cinematic experience all AICNers should take. Emphasis on cinematic, because in Lynch's typical style, sound design is a big part of the experience. It just wouldn't be the same viewed at home.
Some context: I'm a big Lynch fan when he has a project out, but in between, I'm not running back to rewatch his films. I'll confess right now I've never seen Eraserhead. I know, I know.... But I was pretty obsessed with Twin Peaks back in the day, and even now, when I flip past Fire Walk With Me on cable, I'll stop and watch, usually for longer than I expect.
Salon did a feature on Mulholland Drive a few years back where they tried to piece together what the heck was going on in that movie. I both loved and hated that enterprise; Lynch's films are about the beautiful/terrifying irreducibility of dream logic, and what happens when it starts to infect waking life. So to reduce them to a linear narrative is a disservice to his art. That said, the urge to understand a story is so practically hard-wired in us, and Lynch's capacity to create an intriguing mystery is so strong in all his films, you can't help but want to piece together what's going on. Who among us wasn't dying to know who killed Laura Palmer? Our disappointment at the denouement of that series after the revelation only underscores the difficulty at the core of Lynch's work; he draws you ineluctably toward a conclusion that you badly want, yet inevitably find lacking. Journey not the destination, Cooper meditating, Tibet, dugpas, yada-yada.
INLAND EMPIRE is both continuous with this thematic element of Lynch's work, and discontinuous with his usual visual approach. In the first ten minutes, you won't believe how terrible the DV looks. COPS-level, people. But then Lynch fave Grace Zabriskie (Laura Palmer's mom) shows up with a Polish accent troweled on as thick as her makeup, and down the rabbit-hole we go. The next 40 minutes race by as we're treated to a variation on Mulholland Drive's narrative of actresses, doubles, betrayal, and performance. Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton: you're seeing actors you love engaging with sharply-observed material in a familiar vein; it all feels very comfortingly, familarly Lynch-ian. "Oh good, I'm going on this ride that I like. People are becoming unstuck in time, actors are reading dialogue that melodramatizes what they're really feeling about each other, terrifying showbiz types are lurking around the edges, and dark corners are being peered into. I know what this feels like, and I missed it." Again, the importance of Lynch's sound design; one scene where Theroux searches a presumably empty movie set amps up the creep factor through selective use of what's heard and what's not quite heard. Again, you're drawn to peer around
the next corner, with trepidation.
As time goes on - and you DEFINITELY feel every one of the 178 minutes - you start to see that Lynch is taking full advantage of the expressive potential of DV. Numerous scenes explore variations of dingy gray-on-black color schemes, which you can only capture on DV; others feature super-saturated color and high-intensity contrast that give the picture an otherworldly feel. At the Q&A afterward, Lynch spoke of the liberating feeling of working with DV, and it shows in the variety of angles, textures, and palettes he works with in the film. What at first feels like a limitation - the low image quality - becomes an area of creative exploration that Lynch exploits, if not to its full potential, then quite far for his first effort.
Despite the elliptical narrative, Lynch gives you the keys to the castle early on: Grace Zabriskie's character, who appears in the first fifteen minutes, exists primarily to explain to Laura Dern's character that she is about to become, like Billy Pilgrim, "unstuck in time." With that idea in mind, the rest of the film's temporal shifts become understandable as part of the character's experience, intensifying your identification with her.
Twenty minutes in, Jeremy Irons's character, the director of the film Dern and Theroux are working on, appears (along with the inimitable Harry Dean Stanton) primarily to explain that the film-within-the-film - which has a wonderfully Lynch-ian title involving "blue tomorrows" - is an unintentional remake. (What a great concept!) That is, the producers failed to inform Irons until shooting was about to start that a prior attempt had been made to produce this story (this screenplay? not clear), but that production was never finished. Why? Mild spoiler: the two leads were murdered. With that, the back-and-forth to the scenes in Poland with Polish actors start to make sense, and you can follow them in the rest of the film as two parallel stories - Polish actors in Poland playing out the unfinished "original" of "Blue Tomorrows", and Dern and Theroux making the presumably to-be-finished American "Blue Tomorrows". Inevitably, the two stories start to bleed into one another.
Now, when I say, "you can follow them in the rest of the film," that's pretty relative. The point is that within the first half hour, you have laid out for you nice and clear the basic rules of the game, which the rest of the film proceeds to bend to the breaking point. But throughout, you understand that Laura Dern is unstuck in time, and that two parallel stories about adulterous lovers are playing out and gradually merging as she ping-pongs through identities and timeframes. In that respect, the narrative elements are quite simple; it's their arrangement and the lack of connective tissue that are beguiling and frustrating.
This dual quality is clearly a product of Lynch's creative process on this one. During the Q&A, both Dern and Theroux talked about the liberating feeling of Lynch's unusual writing style on this project. He would write a scene, they would shoot it; he would write a scene, they would shoot it. Dern went so far as to say that she may have known too much about characters she's played in the past - meaning, having the whole script ahead of time leads you to make certain choices in scenes that set up things you're going to do in later scenes. "Pointing the performance in a certain direction," Theroux called it. In Lynch's set-up on INLAND EMPIRE, the actor has to react more like a person in the real world; you don't know what's coming next, so you react and live in the moment. Now, no one would mistake these characters or their dialogue for the real world - they're stylized in the best Lynchian way, off-kilter, absurd, and periodically menacing. But the idea that each individual moment felt more real to the actors because they didn't know what's coming next is alluring; and the performances do have a certain relaxed naturalism. Let's just go with it, the actors seem to say.
Did I mention the return of Julia Ormond? Or the Mary Steenburgen cameo? Or the circus subplot? The bottom line is that you could easily lose an hour on the three-hour running time and get an even more compelling, beautiful, and creepy mystery. But what's there is definitely worth seeing. Maybe Lynch, with his recent campaign to raise $7 bajillion-ty dollars to fund universities of peace or some such hoo-hah, is trying to teach us how to do transcendental meditation through watching his films. But in any event, Laura Dern's heroic, harrowing performance, the sound design, the cinematography, and the patented Lynchian dread-in-the-mundane vibe are worth the price of admission.
If you use this, call me The Good Dale is in the Lodge.
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How'd that sound?
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A new Lynch project is always something to be interested about. I am particularly curious to see him working in DV. This is good news, but I'll be more interested in seeing the talkback that comes up AFTER people have seen this movie.
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Damn you Michael Bay
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For mentioning sound design twice. Lynch's sound design is always amazing; typical wide shot plus Lynch's patented Subsonic Rumble of Impending Fucked-Uppedness (tm) equals surefire suspense. Question for film geeks: who originated happy tune over badass violence? It was used to great effect in Blue Velvet (Love Letters) and ripped off bigtime in Face/Off. But who was... FIRST!!!
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The scene in Mullholland Drive when the two men go to the back of the restaurant. The sound building upto and after is perfectly observed nightmare noise.
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I really don't know. Early Scorcese? Peckinpah?
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The first time I can think of was in Dario Argento's Deep Red. Would that be right? Anyway... I cannot wait for to see this film. It has been too long since Mulholland Dr.
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"The sound building upto and after is perfectly observed nightmare noise."
exactly! the moment where he goes around the corner and sees the hobomonster, the sound made me feel exactly the way I feel in dreams where in the face of pure terror you suddenly get completely disoriented and can barely move, try to run but it's like your wading in water, etc. Mullholland Drive in my opinion is one of the greatest and most tragic, complexly layered films ever made on the subject and psychology of murder. He tried and did well with Lost Highway, but Mullholland really nailed it in all the areas where Highway failed. -
...he didn't do the other half of Grind House.
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"Singin' in the Rain" over the rape sequence in A Clockwork Orange?
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And he hasn't seen Eraserhead? For shame (cue wagging of finger)
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I'll always remember the first time I saw Lost Highway, and there's that shot of Bill Pullman walking into that impossible dark space between the wall. It scared the fuck out of me, a true image from my own nightmares up there on the screen.
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He's brilliant, I agree that he is the best horror movie director out there for the exact reason BringingSexyBack mentions above, and anyone who calls him/herself a Lynch fan but doesn't watch Eraserhead or doesn't watch the films multiple times for the hell of it ... just ain't a Lynch fan. And what the hell wasn't satisfying about Twin Peaks? Seriously. You do most certainly find out who killed Laura Palmer, and the last scene with the killer is immensely satisfying and one of my favorite scenes in the show. And call me crazy, but I think Lynch's films totally make sense. Sure, they're atmospheric and scary and weird, but there's always a logic behind it. Take Eraserhead: it's marriage as a horror movie. How hard is that? Mulholland Dr.? Yeah, that one is about murder. Lost Highway? About jealousy and the failed attempt to possess and unpossessable woman. But Lynch is one of the very few filmmakers working today that is interested in being artistic about it, and art, i guess, confuses people.
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wild at heart, which is one of the more cohesive narratives. i love lynch, even when he is fumbling around it's exciting to watch a filmaker actually explore the boundries of the medium. also, dune rules. can't wait to see inland empire.
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Hmm, not sure when Deep Red was made but I guess Clockwork Orange (1971) would probably trump it. There also might be such a scene in Scorcese's Mean Streets, when the gunman (who reveals long, long hair before shooting) goes into the bathroom - but I can't recall what the song is or even if there IS a song. I might be confusing it with the very similar moment in John Woo's Bullet in the Head when there's a slaying in a bathroom while "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees is playing. Back to Lynch - finally! A review of Inland Empire! I've been waiting for this to be released for ages, so the first snek review means it edges just that little bit closer...
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That scene on the backyard of the restaurant scared me shitless.
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"Circus subplot"??? That means he's making an excuse to have a dwarf in there. Every Lynch movie has a dwarf during the "weird" dream sequences. Enough already! Dwarves are not weird or creepy - even if they talk backwards.
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It doesn't have an official distributor yet, but Lynch is apparently looking at "new methods" to distribute it.
See here:
http://tinyurl.com/z36fl
Since he shot it digitally, I presume this means some kind of digital distribution - but the practicalities of this are currently unclear, given that not many theaters can project digitally....
PS - you are missed, mate. -
would be a David Lynch porno
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unlike most filmmakers, you can always take something away from all of his movies, for good or ill. can't wait to see this one, i'm sure the experience will provoke a feeling rarely felt in film. wonder though, who shows boobs this time around? (apparently not watts, she plays a talking rabbit????)
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It might be. I love Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Eraserhead too. Welcome back, DL.
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What a trip.
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Oct 10, 2006 12:34:22 PM CDT
Lynch has stated he's distributing the film himself...
by danielkurland
I only hope this means that the running time won't be cut, and it will still get that rumored "November" release. Anything in 2006 would be appreciated!
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in order to save the other good souls that end up there. watch the end of Fire Walk with Me, and you'll see it. it's fucking beautiful. not only does Dale find out who killed the poor girl, but he rescues her soul. that's why Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dale Cooper is one of the greatest heroes ever conceived.
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Seriously. Can you imagine how awesome Mulholland Dr. would've been as a television show? we should only have been so lucky. Which is why I say to HBO -- woo the mad motherfucker, please!
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i would be curious to see what would happen if he started doing more acting.
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Only nine more to go until we find out what happens to Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dale Cooper. Hopefully, Season 2 will be released on DVD before then...
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You haven't seen Eraserhead? Hey, if you're a fan of David Lynch's sound design like you say, do yourself a favor and check out Eraserhead pronto. That movie uses sound to more effect than almost anything I've seen: the crying baby, the hissing radiator, the industrial effects... you can turn off the visuals (but don't, they're great) and that movie would still be creepy as hell.
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"Now hand the phone back to me..." Easily one of the creepiest scenes ever put on film. (And Robert Blake as a scary psychotic apparition was pure genius!)
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give answers... could you imagine the viewer frustration with a mulholland drive television show?! I like lynch to an extent, but I don't think "genius" applies. He made inland empire before he had even finished the script, for christ's sake. He's a weird dude making weird films. I feel like alot of times he's just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, not caring if it makes sense because of his philosophy that everythings connected, even if he doesn't know how. Thing is, he's the director/writer. He SHOULD know how.
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Because Lynch thought of it 10 minutes before filming.
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So many so called fans above have mentioned a every film Lynch has been a part of but I see no mention of "The Straight Story"? What gives? I believe it is his masterpiece. As good as all his other work is, that movie speaks to me more than anything else.
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As someone already mentioned, Lynch is distributing the movie himself. Since Lynch and Studio Canal (or whomever) have done nothing but praise each other continuously, I can only take this to mean Lynch refused to let the movie get cut down in length.
I also agree that the Straight Story was a good movie that should get as much praise (if not more) than his harder to undestand works. I don't understand all the bandwagon hype over the baby crying in Eraserhead. The movie was definitely ahead of its time...but there was nothing creepy about the baby crying. Sorry. I've seen kids movies with creepier sounds than that. It just sounded like a baby. The writer of the review definitely needs to check it out. Finally, my opinion on Lynch isn't that he just makes crap up as he goes, or that he tosses idea at the wall to see what sticks. I find his stories and imagery are more about mood and the atmosphere than story telling. I couldn't tell you what Lost Highway was about and I've seen it a good 6 or 7 times. ALl I know is I couldn't sleep when it was over because of how it made me feel...creeped out and like my subconscious saw something disturbing that my eyes missed. Mulholland Drive, although more understandable, is the same. The emotion and feeling you take from the movie means more than the story. And I think that is why people love or hate Lynch's works. I personally believe LH and MD are incredible while some of his other work is really bad. It just depends on what connects emotionally I think. -
"Why didn't Lynch pitch a show to HBO?" Well, he did. Watch "Hotel Room", and "On the Air" (On the Air maybe wasn't on HBO...), and those were both quickly cancelled too. Howeve,r I do agree that him trying to work with HBO, would be better than ABC.
Homeless guy behind the dumpster is terrifying, Blake in Lost Highway is terrifying, but hands down, the scariest thing he has done is that shot of Laura spying in her room and finding Bob going through her drawers with that FUCKING LOOK on his face. So wonderful. Ray Wise and Frank Silva were just superb actors.
Also, I am a huge, huge Lynch fan, and I'm glad someone mentioned "The Straight Story", because I hate it so much. Can I please get an explanation for why this movie is good, BESIDES the fact that it is a simple story told in a simple way? I'd be willing to re-watch it, and I want to like it, but really, the only bit I enjoyed was the scene with the deer. I'd like to credit my lack of enjoyment due to the fact that Lynch didn't write the screenplay. -
Whatever comments I made above were not meant to seem comprehensive. As fas as the Straight Story goes, I too am a fan of the film. Although Mooly is right -- there are bad Lynch films. I really actually do not like Wild at Heart. I have a tough time with that one. I also hate Lynch's Dumbland stuff. And Dune is a whole lot of fun, but you kind of have to want it. It's pretty sloppy at times, and you have to be willing to forgive it for quite a bit. And as much as I love Twin Peaks, there are gigantic flaws with the show (James? Donna? Josie Packard? Sherriff Truman drunk and angry ("Get OUT OF HERE!!!!")?). But, on the other hand, there is so much goodness in the show that it is all worth it. I blame the really shitty stuff on Mark Frost, anyway, since whenever Lynch directed an episode, it was gold. As for Lost Highway, I am really pretty sure I get it. (I know, that could be the pride before the fall, but ... I can't help it. It just makes sense in a way.) Don't read the rest of this if you haven't seen the movie yet, because I'm just going to crack this mother open. So you have Bill Pullman's character, Fred, and Balthazar Getty's character, Pete. Fred's getting weird tapes that show him his house (the domestic space). The films progress, creeping toward the bed he shares with his wife. We get the sense that theirs is an unhappy marriage. They speak to the police about the tapes, and it's revealed that Fred doesn't own a videocamera because, as he puts it, "I like to remember things my own way, not necessarily the way they happened." So the camera represents a kind of objective viewpoint. Fred also has a vision that his wife is not who he thinks she is. Fred also is shown as being rather jealous and paranoid when it comes to his wife (whose name is Renee). All sorts of weird vibes, and then ... Fred goes to jail for killing his wife. At this point, he turns into a different person, Balthazar Getty's Pete. Pete gets involved both with a mobster named Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent and a woman who looks exactly like Renee, but whose name is Alice. Alice is a porn star working for Laurent. Anyway, the story at this point becomes kind of straight forward. It's sort of the old in-bed-with-the-mobster's-girl story. Pete falls in love, Pete does some dirty work for said girl, and then -- here it comes -- he sees her true colors, realizes he's been used, and all sorts of male insecurities bloom. Pete has sex with Alice a final time, during which she asks him, "Do you want me?" He says, "Yes." As he climaxes, she leans in, really mean, and whispers in his ear, "You'll ... never ... have me." These devastating words cause Pete to turn back into Fred, the insecure jealous husband. Fred goes after Alice, only to find the Mystery Man with the camera. "Where's Alice?" Fred asks. "Alice?" the Myster Man says, "Who's Alice? Her name's Renee. If she told you her name was Alice, she was lying. And you -- what the fuck is your name?" All of this is to say that Alice was the fantasy of the girl who loved him, Pete was the version of himself that actually had a shot at "having" her, but the truth -- the ugly truth that Fred does not want to face more than anything else but which is being forced on him by this demonic force of greater objectivity -- is that she was and never would be his. Not even Dick Laurent could possess her, as best shown in the brilliant scene where she turns what could have been a totally demeaning moment into a show of power and fearlessness. She outlasts and eludes them all. In its way, Lost Highway is one of the greatest feminist films of all time, however couched in male insecurities though it may be. The bottom line, however, is that Lynch layers in all this stuff, but it is a piece of art. It is meant to be evocative more than anything else, I think, and to fully pick it apart is to do it a disservice. But that doesn't mean it means nothing. I think all this stuff adds up and makes sense. How you react from there is part of the fun.
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Give Mr. Lynch a narrative and he can create movies of unparalelled depth and beauty. The Elephant Man and The Straight Story attest to this. I can't fucking stand most if his mind trip films simply because they make little sense. I know intellectualy the are experiments in narrative structure and time. They are just too much of a chore for me. Maybe this makes me shallow - I know I like other confusing time films like Primer. It's just something about him... I'm sorry.
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All hail Lynch fans! Psst... HOBOMONSTER!!! That's just the scene I was thinking of...now that someone else has admitted it, yeah, that scared the hell out of me. 'Cause with Lynch you don't know what's coming...only that it's not some dude with a chainsaw in the back seat. And that scene with Pullman and the dark hallway. Did someone say they're making a Changling remake? Let Lynch direct it, OK? Oh, and I did watch Hotel Room, and I want that hour and a half back.
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I'd forgotten that scene. Time for a rental.
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I also agree that the shot of BOB hiding at the foot of the Laura's bed is one of the scariest things I've ever seen, especially as it is done where Mrs. Palmer remembers it ... but it's weird, because she's thinking about it, remembering it, and then ... she realizes she saw something else ... something terrifying. Gahhhh ... gives me chills just thinking about it.
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The scariest moment on Twin Peaks and probably in TV history is the moment when Bob runs down the hospital hallway. If you haven't seen it, watch it again, terrifying. Also the scene where he comes over the couch at Maddy is pretty scary as well.
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That guy running the Film Fest is an idiot..."I don't want to screen the film for Lynch's fans because then he'll give his fans the movie THEY want instead of the movie his studio wants!" Of all filmmakers, isn't Lynch deserving of final cut authority? I mean how many non-Lynch fans actually like his stuff?
Isn't being a fan of his vision a prerequisite to even WATCHING his work? Its really surprising that someone in charge of a film festival would make such an insultuing statement. Taking away Lynch's idiosyncrasies is like taking away Tarantino's ability to quote from other films...there would be no reason to watch! -
Just thought I'd make my contribution to the David Lynch Cliff Notes ;)
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I never really got the whole "it doesn't make any sense" criticism of Lynch. Maybe I'm totally missing the point, or maybe I'm just a fucking genius, but I thought Mulholland Drive made complete sense. Psychologically, anyway. Diane Selwyn was the scorned lover of Camilla Rose, celebrated starlet of the moment. In her dream/nightmare she's the up and coming talent, and Laura Harring's character is the vulnerable one, totally dependent upon Naomi Watts. Plus, there's dream Diane Selwyn dead and rotting on the bed, which is where I'd probably see myself if I'd just hired some dude to kill my ex-lover. All the other weird shit adds up, if nothing else, as the menacing atmosphere evoked in dreams, good or bad. Christ. I'm surrounded by morons. Signed- SirPompous
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Now, get a proper version of Dune cut!
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I think. Lynch has a lot of genuine fans here. I am amongst them. I'll take Blue Velvet over that Scorcese black & white boxing pic as THE seminal movie of the 1980s. There are woefully few directors for whom the term "auteur" legitimately applies. Lynch is most definitely amongst them.
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When you stop and put yourself in Diane's shoes and think of how you would feel in her situations, the abstract elements of Mulholland perfectly convey those feelings.
what happened in real life: Diane Selwyn moved to Hollywood with dreams of making it big, but she sucked as an actress and all the good roles she wanted went to Laura Herring, who she simultaneously fell in love with. But to laura it was just a fling, she dumped Diane, Diane, obsessed and jilted, ordered a hit on Laura, and then she went mad with guilt and shot herself in the head.
The first half of Mullholland Dr was Diane's sad dream, re-imaging her failed life with a more positive, fantasy spin. All of the characters in this fantasy are taken from her real life experiences in the second half of the film, the real events. In this fantasy, Diane is a gifted actress, and the focus of her obsession (laura herring) is completely dependant on her. The Cowboy\conspiracy seqments are Diane's way of dealing with her failure as an actress. Rather than accepting that she is not a good actor, she perceives a Hollywood conspiracy where outside forces co-erce the director into picking lesser actresses over Diane. The monster at the restaurant WAS Diane. In the restaurant the skinny frightened guy makes eye contact with DIane while she is ordering the hit, and he looks oddly fearful. To Diane, already feeling guilty over the monsterous act she is setting in action, it's like he's looking right through her and seeing the monster hiding behind her eyes. So when Diane revists this scene in her dream, the horrible monster he sees at Winkies is Diane, only her inner monster is more literally represented as a scary hobomonster. Later in the film, when we revist this monster, we see now that he has been reduced to a sad, pathetic figure, which is exactly what Diane is at that moment, sad, pathetic, worthless person who murdered the love of her life out of her petty jealousy. The hobo (diane's self-perception in the dream) then discards the 'dream' box, which in my opinion represents Diane's snapping moment, where she finally gave up on life. Throwing away the box that contained Diane's hopes and dreams in the first segment? I mean that's not particularly subtle, is it ;) - anyway from out of this discarded dream box comes the thing that befuddles most Lynch newbies - Diane's gransparents\aunt and uncle emerge from the box, and pursue Diane through her house, becoming louder and more menacing and disturbing until Diane can't take it anymore and blows her brains out. Obviously, the grandparents represent Diane's guilty conscience, that's exactly what a guilty consience does. It starts of small and weak, surpressed, and grows and grows until you can't take it anymore, and you confess, make amends...or in her case, blow your brains out. One thing I found, is that once you realize in the first half you're watching Diane's sad fantasy of how she wanted things to be, the scene where she whispers 'I'm in love with you' over and over again to her soulless love-slave Laura is absolutely tragic.
It's always important when watching Lynch to get go of literal meanings and events, and realize that a lot of what you are seeing are abstract incarnations of generally intangible thoughts and emotions related to the real, coherent narrative that is hidden between the lines. -
Mulholland Drive is in my opinion the greatest film ever made on the subject and psychology of an utterly failed, ruined person.
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It's heartening to see a talkback which doesn't immediately burst into flames. My favourite Lynch film is probably Lost Highway, but that could just be because it's the first "non-conventional" one I ever saw and left such a huge psychological imprint. Plus Robert Blake man, he's god-damn scary.
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Just wanted to point out that the old couple in MD were actually the judges of the contest that Diane won. They were the people who allowed young, naive Diane to come to the big city to fulfill her dreams. That is why they are brought back when Diane finally snaps. As you say, they represent her guilt and the loss of her innocence, hopes and dreams. They were the last thing to come out of the blue box before it was empty and discarded.
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but they're not telling me WHY. I loved The Elephant Man, so I do like when Lynch does a straight narrative. That whole Romeo and Juliet scene almost made me cry, but I still haven't heard a proper defense of The Straight Story besides the fact that it's a simple story told in a simple way.
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The scene from Clockwork Orange with Singin' in the Rain immediately came to mind, but there's also a scene in the final episode of The Prisoner (1967) with war and carnage to the tune of "All You Need is Love" by The Beatles. Still, that cannot be the first incident of this kind of ironic sentiment. What about the Busby Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway" number in "Gold Diggers of 1935" where a woman is literally tap danced to her death?
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Kubrick was an early master of "happy tune/carnage" trick. I'm not the biggest Dr. Strangelove fan, but I get chills whenever I hear that damn "We'll meet again" song. Thanks to Kubrick, I can only associate this tune with mushroom clouds. On that note, it's hard to listen to Beethoven (sp.?) without conjuring images of gang-raping droogs enjoying a bit of ultra-violence. Yes, Kubrick is a visual genius, but I love him for being a sick, twisted fuck of a man. God love 'im. -
in Reservoir Dogs (torture plus Stuck in the Middle)? Hah... I keed! But seriously, it's nice to bask in the Lynch love. So many cool shots: the ceiling fan in the Palmers' house; "Let's Rock" on the windshield; Killer Bob behind the dresser; Killer Bob murders Laura's cousin (am I actually watching broadcast network TV?); We have GOT to see Ben (resurrected in Private Idaho); "I'm at your house right now."; I want my garmonbozia; Don't be a good neighbor to her. I've been disappointed in some of Lynch's output, but I'm always jazzed to see what's next.
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