A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (29 page)

And then there are some more scenes that reveal that Robert Loggia’s character
also
has more than one identity in the movie, and that at least one of these identities knows both the decadent, lounge-lizardy,
mysterious friend of Bill Pullman’s deceased wife
and
the Mephistophelian Mystery Man, with whom Loggia begins making creepy and ambiguous threatening phone calls to Balthazar
Getty’s home, which Balthazar Getty has to listen to and try to interpret while his parents (who are played by Gary Busey
and an actress named Lucy Dayton) smoke pot and exchange mysterious significant looks in front of the TV.

It’s probably better not to give away too much of
Lost Highway
’s final act, though you maybe ought to be apprised: that the blond Patricia Arquette’s intentions toward Balthazar Getty
turn out to be less than honorable; that Balthazar Getty’s carbuncle all but completely heals up; that Bill Pullman does reappear
in the movie; that the brunette Patricia Arquette also reappears, but not in the (so to speak) flesh; that both the blond
and the brunette P. Arquette turn out to be involved (via lizardy friends) in the world of porn, as in hardcore, an involvement
whose video fruits are shown (at least in the rough cut) in so much detail that I don’t see how Lynch’s movie is going to
escape an NC-17 rating; and that
Lost Highway
’s ending is by no means an “upbeat” or “feel-good” ending. Also that Robert Blake, while a good deal more restrained and
almost
effete
than Dennis Hopper was in
Blue Velvety
is at least as riveting and creepy and unforgettable as Hopper’s Frank Booth was, and that his Mystery Man is pretty clearly
the devil, or at least somebody’s very troubling idea of the devil, a kind of pure floating spirit of malevolence à la
Twin Peaks
’s Leland/“Bob”/Scary Owl.

Roughly 37. The big interpretive fork, as mentioned, looks to be whether we are meant to take the sudden unexplained shift
in Bill Pullman’s identity straight (i.e. as literally real within the movie), or as some Kafka-esque metaphor for guilt and
denial and psychic evasion, or whether we’re to see the whole thing—from invasive videos through Death Row through metamorphosis
into mechanic, etc.—as one long hallucination on the part of a natty jazz saxophonist who could very much benefit from some
professionally dispensed medication. The least interesting possibility seems to be to the last, and I’d be very surprised
if anybody at Asymmetrical will want
Lost Highway
interpreted as one long psychotic dream.

Or the movie’s plot could, on still another hand, simply be incoherent and make no rational sense and not be conventionally
interpretable at all. This won’t necessarily make it a bad David Lynch movie:
Eraserhead
’s dream-logic makes it a “narrative” only in a very loose, nonlinear way, and large parts of
Twin Peaks
and
Fire Walk with Me
make no real sense and yet are compelling and meaningful and just plain cool. Lynch seems to run into trouble only when his
movies seem to the viewer to
want
to have a point—i.e. when they set the viewer up to expect some kind of coherent connection between plot elements—and then
fail to deliver any such point. Examples here include
Wild at Heart
—where the connections between Santos and Mr. Reindeer (the Colonel Sandersish-looking guy who commissions hits by pushing
silver dollars through hit men’s mail slots) and the Harry Dean Stanton character and the death of Lula’s father are intricately
set up and then don’t go anywhere either visually or narratively—and the first half hour of
Fire Walk with Me,
which concerns the FBI investigation of the pre-Palmer murder of another girl, and sets us up to think it’s going to have
important connections to the Palmer case, and instead is full of odd cues and clues that go nowhere, and is the part of the
movie that even pro-Lynch critics singled out for special savagery.

Since it might bear on the movie’s final quality, be apprised that
Lost Highway
is the most expensive movie Lynch has ever made on his own. Its budget is something like sixteen million dollars, which is
three times
Blue Velvet
’s and at least 50% more than either
Wild at Heart
’s or
Fire Walk with Me
’s.

But so it is, at this point, probably impossible to tell whether
Lost Highway
is going to be a
Dune-level
turkey or a
Blue Velvet
-caliber masterpiece or something in-between or what. The one thing I feel I can say with total confidence is that the movie
will be:
Lynchian
.

An academic definition of
Lynchian
might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such
a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like
postmodern
or
pornographic, Lynchian
is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s definable only ostensively—i.e. we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn’t
particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his
fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, where the
deacon of a South Shore church gave chase to a vehicle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver
with a high-powered crossbow, was borderline-Lynchian.

A domestic-type homicide, on the other hand, could fall on various points along the continuum of Lynchianism. Some guy killing
his wife in and of itself doesn’t have much of a Lynchian tang to it, though if it turns out the guy killed his wife over
something like a persistent failure to refill the ice-cube tray after taking the last ice cube or an obdurate refusal to buy
the particular brand of peanut butter the guy was devoted to, the homicide could be described as having Lynchian elements.
And if the guy, sitting over the mutilated corpse of his wife (whose retrograde ’50s bouffant is, however, weirdly unmussed)
with the first cops on the scene as they all wait for the boys from Homicide and the M.E.’s office, begins defending his actions
by giving an involved analysis of the comparative merits of Jif and Skippy, and if the beat cops, however repelled by the
carnage on the floor, have to admit that the guy’s got a point, that if you’ve developed a sophisticated peanut-butter palate
and that palate prefers Jif there’s simply no way Skippy’s going to be anything like an acceptable facsimile, and that a wife
who fails repeatedly to grasp the importance of Jif is making some very significant and troubling statements about her empathy
for and commitment to the sacrament of marriage as a bond between two bodies, minds, spirits, and palates… you get the idea.

For me, Lynch’s movies’ deconstruction of this weird “irony of the banal” has affected the way I see and organize the world.
I’ve noted since 1986 that a good 65% of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6:00 A.M.
tend to qualify as Lynchian figures—flamboyantly unattractive, enfeebled, grotesque, freighted with a woe out of all proportion
to evident circumstances. Or we’ve all seen people assume sudden and grotesque facial expressions—e.g. like when receiving
shocking news, or biting into something that turns out to be foul, or around small kids for no particular reason other than
to be weird—but I’ve determined that a sudden grotesque facial expression won’t qualify as a really
Lynchian
facial expression unless the expression is held for several moments longer than the circumstances could even possibly warrant,
is just held there, fixed and grotesque, until it starts to signify about seventeen different things at once.
¹¹

Bill Pullman’s distended and long-held expression of torment as he screams over Patricia Arquette’s body in
Lost Highway
is nearly identical to the scream-face Jack Nance wears during
Eraserhead
’s opening’s conception montage.

In 1995, PBS ran a lavish ten-part documentary called
American Cinema
whose final episode was devoted to “The Edge of Hollywood” and the increasing influence of young independent filmmakers—the
Coens, Jim Jarmusch, Carl Franklin, Q. Tarantino et al. It was not just unfair but bizarre that David Lynch’s name was never
once mentioned in the episode, because his influence is all over these directors. The Band-Aid on the neck of
Pulp Fictions
Marcellus Wallace—unexplained, visually incongruous, and featured prominently in three separate set-ups—is textbook Lynch.
So are the long, self-consciously mundane dialogues on pork, foot massages, TV pilots, etc. that punctuate
Pulp Fiction
’s violence, a violence whose creepy/comic stylization is also resoundingly Lynchian. The peculiar narrative tone of Tarantino’s
films—the thing that makes them seem at once strident and obscure, not-quite-clear in a haunting way—is Lynch’s tone; Lynch
invented this tone. It seems to me fair to say that the commercial Hollywood phenomenon that is Mr. Quentin Tarantino would
not exist without David Lynch as a touchstone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewer’s deep-brain core. In a
way, what Tarantino’s done with the French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with Little Richard and Fats Domino:
he’s found (rather ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize
it, churn it until it’s smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption.
Reservoir Dogs
, for example, with its comically banal lunch-chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from
decades past, is Lynch made commercial, i.e. faster, linearer, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably
(i.e. “hiply”) surreal.

In Carl Franklin’s powerful
One False Move
, the director’s crucial decision to focus only on the faces of witnesses during violent scenes—i.e. to have the violence
played out on watching faces, to render its effect as affect—is thoroughgoingly Lynchian. So is the relentless,
noir
-parodie use of chiaroscuro lighting in the Coens’
Blood Simple
and
The Hudsucker Proxy
and in all Jim Jarmusch’s films, especially Jarmusch’s 1984
Stranger Than Paradise
, which, in terms of cinematography, blighted setting, wet-fuse pace, heavy dissolves between scenes, and a Bressonian style
of acting that is at once manic and wooden, is all but an homage to Lynch’s early work. Other homages you’ve maybe seen include
Gus Van Sant’s use of a quirky superstition about hats on beds as an ironic plot engine in
Drugstore Cowboy
, Mike Leigh’s use of incongruous parallel plots in
Naked
, Todd Haynes’s use of a creepy ambient industrial-thrum score in
Safe
, and Van Sant’s use of surreal dream scenes to develop River Phoenix’s character in
My Own Private Idaho
. In this same
M.O.P Idaho
, the German John’s creepy Expressionist lip-synch number, where he uses a hand-held lamp as a microphone, is a more or less
explicit reference to Dean Stockwell’s unforgettable lamp-synch scene in
Blue Velvet
.

Or take the granddaddy of in-your-ribs
Blue Velvet
references: the scene in
Reservoir Dogs
where Michael Madsen, dancing to a cheesy ’70s tune,
cuts off a hostages ear
. This just isn’t subtle at all.

None of this is to say that Lynch himself doesn’t owe debts—to Hitchcock, to Cassavetes, to Bresson and Deren and Wiene. But
it is to say that Lynch has in many ways cleared and made arable the contemporary “anti-Hollywood” territory that Tarantino
et al. are cash-cropping right now.
¹²
Recall that both
The Elephant Man
and
Blue Velvet
came out in the 1980s, that metastatic decade of cable, VCRs, merchandising tie-ins and multinational blockbusters, all the
big-money stuff that threatened to empty the American film industry of everything that wasn’t High Concept. Lynch’s moody,
creepy, obsessive, unmistakeably personal movies were to High Concept what the first great ’40s
noir
films were to toothy musicals: unforeseen critical and commercial successes that struck a nerve with audiences and expanded
studios’ and distributors’ idea of what would sell. It is to say that we owe Lynch a lot.

And it is also to say that David Lynch, at age 50, is a better, more complex, more interesting director than any of the hip
young “rebels” making violently ironic films for New Line and Miramax today. It is particularly to say that—even without considering
recent cringers like
Four Rooms
or
From Dusk to Dawn
—D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence
in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. This is
why violence in Lynch’s films, grotesque and coldly stylized and symbolically heavy as it may be, is qualitatively different
from Hollywood’s or even anti-Hollywood’s hip cartoon-violence. Lynch’s violence always tries to
mean
something.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

Pauline Kael has a famous epigram to her 1986
New Yorker
review of
Blue Velvet
she quotes somebody she left the theater behind as saying to a friend “Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see that again.” And
Lynch’s movies are indeed—in all sorts of ways, some more interesting than others—“sick.” Some of them are brilliant and unforgettable;
others are jejune and incoherent and bad. It’s no wonder that Lynch’s critical reputation over the last decade has looked
like an E KG: it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the director’s a genius or an idiot. This is part of his fascination.