A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (32 page)

The set’s true executive class—line producer, unit publicist, underwriter, D.R—have personal pagers that sometimes will all
sound at once but just slightly out of synch, producing in the weird ionized Santa Ana air a sound-blend that fully qualifies
as Lynchian. And that’s how you can tell people apart telecommunicationally. (The exception to every rule is Scott Cameron,
the 1st A.D., who bears with Sisyphean resignation the burden of two walkie-talkies, a cellular phone, a pager, and a very
serious battery-powered bullhorn all at the same time.)

But then so about like once an hour everybody’s walkie-talkie starts crackling, and then a couple minutes later Lynch and
the actual shooting team and cars come hauling back in to Base and everybody on the crew springs into frantic but purposeful
action so that from the specular vantage of the roadside cliff the set resembles an anthill that’s been stirred with a stick.
Sometimes the shooting team comes back just to change cars for a shot: the production has somehow acquired two identical black
Mercedes 6.9’s, and each is now embellished with different kind of filmmaking attachments and equipment. For a particular
shot inside the moving Mercedes, some of the grips construct a kind of platform out of reticulate piping and secure it to
the hood of the car with clamps and straps, and then various other technicians attach a 35mm Panavision camera, several different
complicatedly angled mole and Bambino lights, and a 3’ × 5’ bounce
²⁶
to various parts of the hood’s platform. This stuff is locked down tight, and the 2nd Asst. Cameraperson, a breathtaking
and all-business lady everyone addresses as “Chesney,”
²⁷
fiddles complexly with the camera’s anamorphic lens and various filters. When sunlight off the Mercedes’s windshield becomes
a problem,
²⁸
the Director of Photography and the camera guy in the especially authentic-looking pith helmet and Chesney all huddle and
confer and decide to brace a gauzy diffusion filter between the camera and the windshield.

The camera truck is a complex green pickup whose side door says it’s the property of
Camera Trucks, Unltd
. The back part has three tiers for gear, lights, a Steadicam, a video monitor and sound feed, and then little seats for David
Lynch and the Director of Photography and a camera operator. When it’s back at Base, technical crewpeople converge on the
truck in clusters of entomological-looking avidity and efficiency.

During the crews’ frantic activity—all of it punctuated with loud bullhorn commands from Scott Cameron—the technicians from
the camera truck and the stand-ins from the cars take their own turns standing around and talking on cellulars and rooting
through the baskets of corporate snacks on the snack table looking for stuff they like; i.e. it’s their turn to stand around
and kill time. The exterior driving-shots all have stand-ins in the cars, but usually when the shooting team returns to Base
the actual name actors will emerge from their trailers and join the roil. Robert Loggia in particular likes to come out and
stand around chatting with his stand-in, who’s of the same meaty build and olive complexion and has the same strand-intensive
balding pattern and craggy facial menace as Loggia, and of course is identically dressed in mobster Armani, so that from the
distance of the roadside cliff their conversation looks like its own surreal metacommentary on parallel identity crises.

David Lynch himself uses the down-time between takes to confer with A.D.’s and producers and to drink coffee and/or micturate
into the undergrowth, and to smoke American Spirits and walk pensively around the Mercedeses and camera truck’s technical
fray, sometimes holding one hand to his cheek in a way that recalls Jack Benny. Now 50 years old, Lynch still looks like an
adult version of the kind of kid who gets beat up a lot at recess. He’s large, not exactly fat but soft-looking, and is far
and away the palest person anywhere in view, his paleness dwarfing even the head-shop pallor of the lighting and F/X guys.
He wears a black long-sleeved dress shirt with every possible button buttoned, baggy tan Chinos that are too short and flap
around his ankles, and a deep-sea fisherman’s cap with a very long bill. The tan cap matches his pants, and his socks match
both each other and his shirt, suggesting an extremely nerdy costume that’s been chosen and coordinated with care—a suggestion
that with Lynch seems somehow endearing rather than pathetic. The sunglasses he wears on the camera truck are the cheap bulgey
wrap-around kind that villains in old Japanese monster movies used to wear. The overstiff quality of his posture suggests
either an ultradisciplinarian upbringing or a back brace. The general impression is that of a sort of geeky person who doesn’t
especially care whether people think he’s geeky or not, an impression which equals a certain kind of physical dignity.

Lynch’s face is the best thing about him, and I spend a lot of time staring at it from a variety of perspectives as he works
the set. In photos of Lynch as a young man, he looks rather uncannily like James Spader, but he doesn’t look like James Spader
anymore. His face is now full in the sort of way that makes certain people’s faces square, and it’s pale and soft-looking—the
cheeks you can tell are close-shaved daily and then moisturized afterward—and his eyes, which never once do that grotesque
looking-in-opposite-directions-at-once thing they were doing on the 1990
Time
cover, are large and mild and kind. In case you’re one of the people who figure that Lynch must be as “sick” as his films,
know that he doesn’t have the beady or glassy look one associates with degeneracy-grade mental trouble. His eyes are good
eyes: he looks at his set with very intense interest, but it’s a warm and full-hearted interest, sort of the way you look
when you’re watching somebody you love doing something you also love. He doesn’t fret or intrude on any of the technicians,
though he will come over and confer when somebody needs to know what exactly he wants for the next set-up. He’s the sort who
manages to appear restful even in activity; i.e. he looks both very alert and very calm. There might be something about his
calm that’s a little creepy—one tends to think of really high-end maniacs being oddly calm, e.g. the way Hannibal Lecter’s
pulse rate stays under 80 as he bites somebody’s tongue out.

“David’s idea is to do this like dystopic vision of LA. You could do a dystopic vision of New York, but who’d care? New York’s
been done before.”

“It’s about deformity. Remember
Eraserhead?
This guy’s going to be the ultimate Penishead.”

“This is a movie that explores psychosis subjectively.”

“I’m sure not going to go see it, I know that.”

“It’s a reflection on society as he sees it.”

“This is a sort of a middle ground between an art film and a major studio release. This is a hard niche to work in. It’s an
economically fragile niche, you could say.”

“This is his territory. This is taking us deeper into a space he’s already carved out in previous work already—subjectivity
and psychosis.”

“He’s doing a
Diane Arbus
number on LA, showing the
slimy undersection
of a dream-city.
Chinatown
did it, but it did it in a
historical
way, as a type of
noir-history
. David’s film’s about
madness
; it’s
subjective
, not
historical
”

“It’s like, if you’re a doctor or a nurse, are you going to go buy tickets to go see an operation for fun in your spare time,
when you’re done working?”

“This film represents schizophrenia
performatively
, not just
representationally
. This is done in terms of
loosening of identity, ontology
, and
continuity in time
.”

“Let me just say I have utmost respect—for David, for the industry, for what David means to this industry. Let me say for
the record I’m excited. That I’m thrilled and have the utmost respect.”

“It’s a specialty film. Like
The Piano
, say. I mean it’s not going to open in a thousand theaters.”

“‘Utmost’ is one word. There is no hyphen in ‘utmost.’ ”

“It’s about LA as hell. This is not unrealistic, if you want my opinion.”

“It’s a product like any other in a business like any other.”

“It’s a Negative Pick-Up. Fine Line, New Line, Miramax—they’re all interested.”

“David is the Id of the Now. If you quote me, say I quipped it. Say ‘“David is the Id of the Now,” quipped______, who is the
film’s ______.’”

“David, as an artist, makes his own choices about what he wants. He makes a film when he feels he has something to say. The
people who are interested in his films… some [of his films] are better than others. Some are perceived as better than others.
David does not look at this as his area of concern.”

“He’s a genius. You have to understand this. In these areas he’s not like you and me.”

“The head-changings are being done with makeup and lights. No CGIs.”
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“Read
City of Quartz
. That’s what this film’s about right there in a nutshell.”

“Some of [the producers] were talking about Hegel, whatever the hell
that
has to do with it.”

“Let me just say I hope you’re not planning to compromise him or us or the film in any way.”

Laura Dern’s soft blond hairstyle as Sandy in
Blue Velvet
is identical to Charlotte Stewart’s soft blond hairstyle as Mary in
Eraserhead
.

The word
postmodern
is admittedly overused, but the incongruity between the peaceful health of his mien and the creepy ambition of his films
is something about David Lynch that is resoundingly postmodern. Other postmodern things about him are his speaking voice—which
can be described only as sounding like Jimmy Stewart on acid—and the fact that it’s literally impossible to know how seriously
to take what he says. This is a genius auteur whose vocabulary in person consists of things like “Okey-doke” and “Marvy” and
“Terrif” and “Gee.” After the last car-filming run and then the return to Base Camp, as people are dismantling cameras and
bounces and the unbelievably alluring Chesney is putting the afternoon’s unused film under a reflective NASA blanket, Lynch
three times in five minutes says “Golly!” Not one of these times does he utter “Golly!” with any evident irony or disingenuity
or even the flattened affect of somebody who’s parodying himself. (Let’s also remember that this is a man with every button
on his shirt buttoned and highwater pants: it’s like the only thing missing is a pocket protector.) During this same tri-”Golly!”
interval, though, about fifty yards down the little hypotenal road the catering trailer’s on Mr. Bill Pullman, who’s sitting
in a big canvas director’s chair getting interviewed for his E.P.K.,
³⁰
is leaning forward earnestly and saying of David Lynch both: “He’s so truthful—that’s what you build your trust on as an
actor, with a director” and: “He’s got this kind of
modality
to him, the way he speaks, that lets him be very open and honest and at the same time very sly. There’s an irony about the
way he speaks.”

Whether
Lost Highway
is a. smash hit or not, its atmosphere of tranced menace is going to be really good for Bill Pullman’s career. From movies
like
Sleepless in Seattle
and
While You Were Sleeping
and (ulp)
Casper
, I formed this view of Pullman the actor as a kind of good and decent but basically ineffectual guy, an
edgeless
guy; I always thought of him as kind of a watered-down version of the already pretty watery Jeff Daniels.
³¹
Lost Highway
—for which Pullman has either lost weight or done Nautilus or both (he has, at any rate, somehow grown a set of cheekbones),
and in which he’s creepy and tormented and plays jagged, haunting jazz saxophone under a supersatured red-and-blue spot, and
in which his face contorts in agony over the mutilated corpse of Patricia Arquette and then changes more than once into somebody
else’s face—is going to reveal edges and depths in Pullman that I believe will make him a true Star. For the E.P.K. he’s in
a tight all-black jazz musician’s costume, and his makeup, already applied for a night scene in a couple hours, gives his
face a creepily Reaganesque ruddiness, and while various kinds of crepuscular bugs plague the E.P.K. interviewer and cameraman
and sound guy these bugs don’t seem to come anywhere near Pullman, as if he’s already got the aura of genuine stardom around
him, the kind you can’t quite define but that even insects can sense—it’s like he’s not even quite
there
, in his tall chair, or else simultaneously there and somewhere primally else.

Ms. Patricia Arquette has been bad in everything since
True Romance
without this fact seeming to have hurt her career any. It’s hard to predict how audiences will react to her in
Lost Highway
. This is a totally new role(s) for her, as far as I can see. Her most credible performances to date have been as ingenues,
plucky characters somehow in over their head, whereas in
Lost Highway
she herself is a part of the over-the-head stuff Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty get plunged into.
Lost Highway
’s female lead is the kind of languid smoky narrow-eyed Incredibly-Sexy-But-Dangerous- Woman-With-Mindblowing- Secrets
noir-type
role that in recent years only
Body Heats
Kathleen Turner and
Miller’s Crossings
Marcia Gay Harden have pulled off without falling into parody or camp. From the footage I saw, Arquette is OK but not great
in
Lost Highway
. She vamps a lot, which is apparently the closest she can come to Sexy But Dangerous. The big problem is that her eyes are
too opaque and her face too set and rigid to allow her to communicate effectively without dialogue, and so a lot of the long
smoky silences Lynch requires of her come off stiff and uncomfortable, as if Arquette’s forgotten her lines and is worrying
about it. Even so, the truth is that Patricia Arquette is so out-landishly pretty in the film’s rough-cut footage that at
the time I didn’t notice a whole lot aside from how she looked, which, seeing as how her Duessa-like character basically functions
as an object in the film, seems OK, though I’m still a little uncomfortable saying it.
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