A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (30 page)

If the word
sick
seems excessive to you, simply substitute the word
creepy
. Lynch’s movies are inarguably creepy, and a big part of their creepiness is that they seem so
personal
A kind way to put it is that Lynch seems to be one of these people with unusual access to their own unconscious. A less kind
way to put it would be that Lynch’s movies seem to be expressions of certain anxious, obsessive, fetishistic, Oedipally arrested,
borderlinish parts of the director’s psyche, expressions presented with very little inhibition or semiotic layering, i.e.
presented with something like a child’s ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness. It’s the psychic intimacy
of the work that makes it hard to sort out what you are feeling about one of David Lynch’s movies and what you are feeling
about David Lynch. The ad hominem impression one tends to carry away from a
Blue Velvet
or a
Fire Walk with Me
is that they’re really powerful movies but that David Lynch is the sort of person you really hope you don’t get stuck next
to on a long flight or in line at the DMV or something. In other words a
creepy
person.

Depending on whom you talk to, Lynch’s creepiness is either enhanced or diluted by the odd distance that seems to separate
his movies from the audience. Lynch’s movies tend to be both extremely personal and extremely remote. The absence of linearity
and narrative logic, the heavy multivalence of the symbolism, the glazed opacity of the characters’ faces, the weird ponderous
quality of the dialogue, the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterly way scenes are staged and
lit, and the overlush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted—these all give
Lynch’s movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cinéastes view as more like cold and clinical.

Here’s something that’s unsettling but true: Lynch’s best movies are also his creepiest/sickest. This is probably because
his best movies, however surreal, tend to be anchored by strongly developed main characters—
Blue Velvet
’s Jeffrey Beaumont,
Fire Walk with Mes
Laura,
The Elephant Mans
Merrick and Treeves. When his characters are sufficiently developed and human to evoke our empathy, it tends to cut the distance
and detachment that can keep Lynch’s films at arm’s length, and at the same time it makes the movies creepier—we’re way more
easily disturbed when a disturbing movie has characters in whom we can see parts of ourselves. For example, there’s way more
general icki-ness in
Wild at Heart
than there is in
Blue Velvet
, and yet
Blue Velvet
is a far creepier/sicker/nastier film, simply because Jeffrey Beaumont is a sufficiently 3-D character for us to feel about/for/with.
Since the really disturbing stuff in
Blue Velvet
isn’t about Frank Booth or anything Jeffrey discovers about Lumberton but about the fact that a part of Jeffrey himself gets
off on voyeurism and primal violence and degeneracy, and since Lynch carefully sets up his film both so that we feel a/f/w
Jeffrey and so that we (I, anyway) find some parts of the sadism and degeneracy he witnesses compelling and somehow erotic,
it’s little wonder that I find Lynch’s movie “sick”—nothing sickens me like seeing on-screen some of the very parts of myself
I’ve gone to the movies to try to forget about.

Wild at Heart
’s characters, on the other hand, aren’t “round” or 3-D. (This was apparently by design.) Sailor and Lula are inflated parodies
of Faulknerian passion; Santo and Marietta and Bobby Peru are cartoon ghouls, collections of wicked grins and Kabuki hysterics.
The movie itself is incredibly violent (horrible beatings, bloody auto wrecks, dogs stealing amputated limbs, Willem DaFoe’s
head blown off by a shotgun and flying around the set like a pricked balloon), but the violence comes off less as sick than
as empty, a stream of stylized gestures. And empty not because the violence is gratuitous or excessive but because none of
it involves a living character through whom our capacities for horror or shock could be accessed.
Wild at Hearty
though it won at Cannes, didn’t get very good reviews in the U.S., and it wasn’t an accident that the most savage attacks
came from female critics, nor that they particularly disliked the film’s coldness and emotional poverty. See for just one
example
Film Comment
’s Kathleen Murphy, who saw
Wild at Heart
as little more than “a litter of quotation marks. As voyeurs, we’re encouraged to twitch and giggle at a bracketed reality:
well-known detritus from pop-culture memory, a kind of cinematic vogue-ing that passes for the play of human emotions.” (This
was not the only pan-job along these lines, and to be honest most of them had a point.)

The thing is that Lynch’s uneven oeuvre presents a whole bunch of paradoxes. His best movies tend to be his sickest, and they
tend to derive a lot of their emotional power from their ability to make us feel complicit in their sickness. And this ability
in turn depends on Lynch’s defying a historical convention that has often served to distinguish avant-garde, “nonlinear” art
film from commercial narrative film. Nonlinear movies, i.e. ones without a conventional plot, usually reject the idea of strong
individual characterization as well. Only one of Lynch’s movies,
The Elephant Man
, has had a conventional linear narrative.
¹³
But most of them (the best) have devoted quite a lot of energy to character. I.e. they’ve had human beings in them. It maybe
that Jeffrey, Merrick, Laura et al. function for Lynch as they do for audiences, as nodes of identification and engines of
emotional pain. The extent (large) to which Lynch seems to identify with his movies’ main characters is one more thing that
makes the films so disturbingly “personal.” The fact that he doesn’t seem to identify much with his
audience
is what makes the movies “cold,” though the detachment has some advantages as well.

Wild at Heart
, starring Laura Dern as Lula and Nicolas Cage as Sailor, also features Diane Ladd as Lula’s mother. The actress Diane Ladd
happens to be the actress Laura Dern’s real mother.
Wild at Heart
itself, for all its heavy references to
The Wizard of Oz
, is actually a pomo-ish remake of Sidney Lumet’s 1959
The Fugitive Kind
, which starred Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando. The fact that Cage’s performance in
Wild at Heart
strongly suggests either Brando doing an Elvis imitation or vice versa is not an accident, nor is the fact that both
Wild at Heart
and
The Fugitive Kind
use fire as a key image, nor is the fact that Sailor’s beloved snakeskin jacket—“a symbol of my belief in freedom and individual
choice”—is just like the snakeskin jacket Brando wore in
The Fugitive Kind. The Fugitive Kind
happens to be the film version of Tennessee Williams’s little-known
Orpheus Descending
, a play which in 1960, enjoying a new vogue in the wake of Lumet’s film adaptation, ran Off-Broadway in NYC and featured
Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Laura Dern’s parents, who met and married while starring in this play.

The extent to which David Lynch could expect a regular civilian viewer of
Wild at Heart
to know about any of these textual and organic connections is: 0; the extent to which he cares whether anybody got it or
not is apparently: also 0.

Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is
surrendering to it, letting it dominate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the tranced distance from the screen,
the being able to see the people on the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people on the screen being
so much bigger than you, prettier than you, more compelling than you, etc. Film’s overwhelming power isn’t news. But different
kinds of movies use this power in different ways. Art film is essentially ideological: it tries in various ways to “wake the
audience up” or render us more “conscious.” (This kind of agenda can easily degenerate into pretentiousness and self-righteousness
and condescending horsetwaddle, but the agenda itself is large-hearted and fine.) Commercial film doesn’t seem like it cares
very much about an audience’s instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film’s goal is to “entertain,” which usually means
enabling various fantasies that allow the moviegoer to pretend he’s somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more
coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than a moviegoer’s life really is. You could
say that a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so
pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it—this seduction, a fantasy-for-money transaction, is a commercial
movie’s basic point. An art film’s point is usually more intellectual or aesthetic, and you usually have to do some interpretive
work to get it, so that when you pay to see an art film you’re actually paying to do work (whereas the only work you have
to do w/r/t most commercial films is whatever work you did to afford the price of the ticket).

David Lynch’s movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what
they really occupy is a whole third different kind of territory. Most of Lynch’s best films don’t really
have
much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretive process by which movies’ (certainly avant-garde
movies’) central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch’s
movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.” Lynch’s movies are indeed susceptible to a variety of sophisticated
interpretations, but it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies’ point is “film-interpretation is
necessarily multivalent” or something—they’re just not that kind of movie.

Nor are they
seductive
, though, at least in the commercial senses of being comfortable or linear or High-Concept or “feel-good.” You almost never
in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to “entertain” you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money
to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard
unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence
of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium
as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie
wants
from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it.
¹⁴
The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get
inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish
(we’re defenseless in our dreams, too).

This may, in fact, be Lynch’s true and only agenda: just to get inside your head.
¹⁵
He sure seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there. Is this “good” art? It’s
hard to say. It seems—once again—either ingenious or psychopathic.

Given his movies’ penchant for creepy small towns, Los Angeles might seem an unlikely place for Lynch to set
Lost Highway
, and at first I’m thinking its choice might represent either a cost-cutting move or a grim sign of Lynch having finally Gone
Hollywood.

LA in January, though, turns out to be plenty Lynchian in its own right. Surreal/banal juxtapositions and interpenetrations
are everyplace you look. The cab from LAX has a DDS machine attached to the meter so you can pay the fare by major credit
card. Or there’s my hotel’s
¹⁶
lobby, which is filled with beautiful Steinway piano music, except when you go over to put a buck in the piano player’s snifter
or whatever it turns out there’s nobody playing, the piano’s playing itself, but it’s not a player piano, it’s a regular Steinway
with a weird computerized box attached to the underside of its keyboard; the piano plays 24 hours a day and never once repeats
a song. My hotel’s in what’s either West Hollywood or the downscale part of Beverly Hills; two clerks at the registration
desk start arguing the point when I ask where exactly in LA we are. The argument goes on for an absurdly long time with me
just standing there.

My hotel room has unbelievably fancy and expensive French doors that open out onto a balcony, except the balcony’s exactly
ten inches wide and has an iron fence with decorations so sharp-looking you don’t want to get anywhere near it. I don’t think
the French doors and balcony are meant to be a joke. There’s an enormous aqua-and-salmon mall across the street, very upscale,
with pricey futuristic escalators slanting up across the mall’s exterior, and yet I never in three days see a single person
a- or descend the escalator; the mall is all lit up and open and seems totally deserted. The winter sky seems smogless but
unreal, its blue the same supersaturant blue as
Blue Velvet
’s opening’s famous sky.

LA has a big city’s street musicians, but here the musicians play on median strips instead of on the sidewalk or subway, and
patrons throw change and fluttering bills at them from their speeding cars, many with the casual accuracy of long practice.
On the median strips between the hotel and David Lynch’s sets, most of the street musicians were playing instruments like
finger-cymbals and citterns.