Shadow States

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It’s a dangerous thing

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to say

what a picture is.

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If things get

too

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david lynch

the films 10

eraserhead

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Blue Velvet

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Lost Highway

Mulholland Dr

inland empire

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special events

cit y of dreams

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the

dream

stops.

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David Lynch

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After all the discussion, no one could fault the conclusion that David Lynch is the most important film-maker of the current era. Providing a portal into the collective subconscious, the daydream nation conjured up in tales such as “Blue Velvet,” “Lost Highway” or “Mulholland Dr” is by turns frightening, exasperating, revelatory and wild. Nobody makes films like David Lynch. He is our spooky tour guide through a world of dancing dwarves, femmes fatales and little blue boxes that may (or may not) contain all the answers. We wouldn’t want to live in the places he takes us.

Somehow, we suspect, we do.

The Guardian (UK)

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eagle scout, missoula, montana Born in Missoula, Montana, David Lynch grew up in the exact kind of classic American small town familiar from his films. “Because I grew up in that very beautiful, sort of perfect world,” Lynch says of his idyllic childhood, “other things became a contrast. I wanted to have strange things happen in my life. I knew nothing was as it seemed, not anywhere, but I could never really find proof of it. It was just a feeling.”

Intending to become an artist, Lynch attended classes at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC while finishing high school in Virginia. He enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for one year before leaving for Europe, planning to study with Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. Although he had planned to stay for three years, Lynch returned to the U.S. after only 15 days. “I didn’t take to Europe,” he explains. “I was all the time thinking, this is where I’m going to be painting. And there was no inspiration there at all for the kind of work I wanted to do.”

At the age of 20, in 1966, Lynch moved to Philadelphia to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. One day he was struck by a vision of the trees in a painting moving in a breeze. This mental image led him to film, as a way of making paintings move. His first film, now known as “Six Men Getting Sick,” was an animation loop of six faces projected onto a relief sculpture of six faces on a wall. The work won him the school’s annual best of show award.

In 1967, he married his girlfriend Peggy, and the next year their daughter Jennifer was born. That experience, plus living in a violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired “Eraserhead.” The movie’s popularity on the midnight-movie circuit brought Lynch to the attention of Mel Brooks, who was looking for the right director for an adaptation of the play “The Elephant Man.” The enormous critical and commercial success of that film earned Lynch his first two Academy Award nominations: for

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When it’s unconscious, you don’t know it… but ideas seem to bubble up. best director and best adapted screenplay. After turning down George Lucas’s invitation to direct “The Return of the Jedi” Lynch instead helmed “Dune,” a disastrous science-fiction epic. Tellingly, the most successful parts of that film were the conceptual themes of dreaming and reality; it was in the science fiction genre elements that Lynch faltered.

After the failure of “Dune,” Lynch vowed that he would never again make a film without complete creative control. He struck a bargain with Dino de Laurentiis, the producer of “Dune,” to allow him to make his next film with no interference, but on half the previously agreed budget. That film, “Blue Velvet,” showed what he could do when he was allowed to express his own vision freely. “Blue Velvet” was his most original work since his debut and earned him his second nomination for best director.

He subsequently achieved a huge cult following with his absurdist TV series “Twin Peaks” which introduced him to a wider audience and broadened his appeal with a more lighthearted take on his dark vision.

Lynch pursued a few other television projects following “Twin Peaks” but didn’t return to feature films until 1997, with “Lost Highway.” That film met with mixed reviews for its deliberately opaque characters and inconclusive plot. Siskel and Ebert gave “Lost Highway” two thumbs down, prompting Lynch to take out ads in the Los Angeles Times announcing “two good reasons to see ‘Lost Highway.’” Despite the mixed reviews, “Lost Highway” cemented many of the themes of Lynch’s later work: settings in Southern California, circular story lines, and fractured identities.

Surprisingly unlike his films , in person, Lynch seems neither dark nor disturbed. He speaks in a nasal drawl and says

things like “golly” and “holy jumping George.” His disarming, down-to-Earth personality led Mel Brooks to call him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” In a 1990 interview, he described himself simply as “Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.” A dedicated believer in transcendental meditation, he has meditated twice a day, every day, for over 30 years. His beliefs in reincarnation and the metaphysical connections between all people may present a clue into the shifting planes of reality in his films.

The intuitive sense of secret strangeness he felt as a boy remain central to Lynch’s films and life. He talks about getting ideas with metaphors of fishing. “When it’s unconscious, you don’t know it, so it has to be conscious. But ideas seem to bubble up...” he says, waggling his fingers in the air in a habitual gesture, “and then bingo! They enter the conscious mind and you see them, and you’ve caught an idea like you catch a fish, and you’re rolling.“

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I don’t know why people expect art to make sense

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when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. david lynch

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Eraserhead Starring Jack Nance Charlotte Stewart

year released 1977

Awards Deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant� by the Library of Congress National Film Registry

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Set in an industrial city in which giant machines are constantly working, spewing smoke, and making inescapable noise, Henry Spencer lives a life of loneliness and anxiety. His only escape is the dreamy lady behind his radiator who sings about finding happiness in heaven. Henry’s girlfriend, Mary, has just given birth to their child, a grotesque mutant that never stops crying. Mary can’t tolerate it and abandons it to Henry. Depressed and emotionally numb, Henry desperately tries to escape the nightmare that is his life.

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In heaven

everything is fine.

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original review

1978

Eraserhead: Is there life after birth?

Mary Lynch has the uncertain advantage of being married to the writer, producer, and director of “Eraserhead,” a film currently playing weekend midnights at the Cinema Village. “I saw one 20 minute segment before I saw the whole film,” she says, “and it was so beautiful. I had no idea of anything about it, and I was so struck by its beauty. Then I saw the whole thing, and some of the images were really disconcerting.

I mean, I just couldn’t look at some of them, and sometimes that bothered me so much that I didn’t actually see what was going on. Now I’ve seen it eight or ten times, and the images have gotten less and less like that to me, and I see more of the integral part of the film. I’ll tell David what I think it means and sometimes he’ll laugh at me.”

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David Lynch, a 30-year-old painter and filmmaker who was born in Montana, has created in his first feature-length film an experience and atmosphere that is so unlike anything that has ever appeared on the commercial screen before, that it almost defies description or interpretation. Even his wife, obviously a close part of his life, must try to understand solely for herself, from her own experience. He’s not telling.

“That’s the way it ought to be,” he says. “The whole film is under​currents of sort of subconscious… You know, and it kind of wiggles around in there, and it’s how it strikes each person. It definitely means something to me, but I don’t want to talk about that. It means other things to other people, and that’s great.”

The story upon which the film is structured is simple. It’s merely the thread that holds the images together. The protagonist, a printer named Henry Spencer, has perhaps got a woman pregnant and he marries her. After the birth, she leaves him and goes back to her parents.

He has a sexual encounter with a beautiful woman who lives across the hall in his apartment building. He “kills” his child out of mercy and goes off into the sunset with a fantasy woman in the radiator in his room. “Henry is like sort of a confused guy,” Lynch says, “and he’s sort of come unglued. He’s trying to maintain, and there are problems.”

Lynch thinks of “Eraserhead” as “a dream of dark and troubling things.” The remarkable fact of the film is that, unlike other films that are dreams or have dream sequences, “Eraserhead” actually reproduces the dream state in all its nightmarish possibilities and impossibilities. The effect is not achieved by showing someone going to sleep or waking up (although there are dreams within the film). The film itself is the dream, the nightmare.

The film is very personal, and because there was no deadline for its completion, it is very controlled. It took two years to finish.

The time and personal attention show. The framing, the tones of black and white, the montages, the slow pacing all reveal the effort of an artist creating a work.

The dialogue comes in clusters, and the rest of the soundtrack is filled with heightened industrial noises, steam, and assorted natural sounds that have been distorted. “Alan Splet and I worked together in a little garage studio,” Lynch says, “with a big console and two or three tape recorders, and worked with a couple of different sound libraries for organic effects. Then we fed them through the console. It’s all natural sounds. No Moog synthesizers. Just changes like with a graphic equalizer, reverb, a Little Dipper filter set for peaking certain frequencies and dipping out things or reversing things or cutting things together.

We had a machine to vary the pitch but not the speed. We could make the sounds the way we wanted them to be. It took several months to do it and six months to a year to edit it.”

The sounds and sound effects of the movie do not work like a conventional soundtrack where the music is used to underscore or flesh out a weak scene. At times, the sound/noise changes with each shot in the same scene. It is used as atmosphere, almost as a character, and is a memorable part of the film.

The black and white tone of the movie is evocative of early Polish films and some Japanese and Russian films. Grays are shot against grays, figures emerge out of gray and become translucent (especially the appearance of the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall). There is no sense of obvious lighting; the film is lit beautifully. “Eraserhead” was filmed entirely at night in Los Angeles, and subsequently the movie has a very nighttime feel to it.

Lynch disclaims any influence from foreign films, and says he hasn’t seen them. “Well, people say that ‘Eraserhead’ has a real Germanic quality to it,” he admits, “but I got ‘Eraserhead’ really from Philadelphia.” Lynch went to Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on Broad Street, where he studied painting and eventually made his first movie, a one minute animated film loop projected on a sculptured screen. “I lived at 13th and Wood,

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The Lady in the Radiator, played by Laurel Near, was not in the original script. In her own bizarre way, her presence lightens and humanizes the film and gives a glimmer of hope to Henry’s fate.

right kitty-corner from the morgue. That’s real industrial. At 5:00 there’s nobody in that neighborhood. No one lives there. And I really do like that. It’s beautiful, if you see it the right way.”

The characters themselves are drab depressing figures in a wrist-slittingly cheerless environment. John Nance, who plays Henry Spencer, is in Lynch’s words “just a regular guy an a real good actor,” He was Henry for a long time and really got into the part, even wearing Henry’s slippers at home.

The character Mary X was played by Charlotte Stewart, who can be seen on television in “Little House on the Prairie” as the schoolteacher. With her cardigan and shapeless dress, she is the perfect “Unknown.” Her scenes with Henry are painful.

Her mother, Mrs. X, is Jeanne Bates, a veteran of numerous Columbia Pictures B-films and currently a soap opera actress. Judith Anna Roberts, who plays the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, was married to Pernell Roberts of “Bonanza.” “Eraserhead” is her first big break, and already most people are talking about her scene in Henry’s room. Although she has very little dialogue, her presence is charged with sexuality.

“Eraserhead” was made with a grant from the American Film Institute, but Lynch will not say how much it cost. Mary Lynch says she did fund raising for the film before she had seen any of it. “For me,” Lynch says, “the film cost a lot of money. The warehouse only cost about thirty-five or fifty dollars to build, but other things cost a lot of money. You know you can build something and work it up over some time and really make it look just the way you want it to.

The most frustrating part of the whole thing was finding locations. There just isn’t anything in Los Angeles like I wanted. Like the front of Mr. and Mrs. X’s house: I’d seen a place in San Francisco that he had the kind of feeling I wanted. But when we went looking in Los Angeles, we finally had to build it. In the movie, it’s just a facade. In fact, the steps are Styrofoam, and

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there’s no porch at all. When Henry walks up there, he’s standing on a plank. The whole thing was barely held together.”

David Lynch’s background of surrealistic painting surfaces in “Eraserhead.” Surrealistic obsessions with dreams, chance, libido and intuitive rather than logical thinking are manifest in the mood and narrative of the film.

Henry Spencer decides very little about his life. He lives in a room that seems to be furnished with Salvation Army purchases, with piles of string that appear and disappear, bowls of water in drawers. Fetuses are “delivered” unceasingly in his bed, electrical malfunctioning occurs throughout and climaxes in the cataclysmic denouement. A fantasy figure, The Lady in the Radiator, smiles inanely, dances sedately on a black-andwhite-tiled stage, steps on and squashes fetuses and sings: “In heaven, everything is fine / You’ve got your good thing / And you’ve got mine.”

The film was worked up rather like a painting, “It changed a couple of different times,” Lynch says “But it was real weird how stuff that had been shot before was ready for a change. And a few of the new things just went in naturally, and I changed emphasis.

I never got locked in and said I wished it had been done like that.

There were scenes that were taken out, but they were scenes where Henry went off, away from the line. They fell away pretty naturally. The lady in the Radiator was not in the original script at all. It was a very dark film until she came along.”

Women tend to react strongly to the film, to be afraid, and perhaps this is because they fear the chance of giving birth to abnormalities. Others who have seen “Eraserhead” have hated it, gone home to nightmares, or laughed.

There are funny moments, but they work as releases.

“There’s a guy,” Lynch says “a projectionist, who will not see this film, and he couldn’t stand to see the film I made before this, ‘The Grandmother.’ It would do something to him inside that he could not stand. It wasn’t the film at all, it just triggered something.

Everybody has a subconscious and they put a lid on it. There’s things in there. And then along comes something, and something bobs up. I don’t know if that’s good.”

Lynch images have an emotional impact and dredge up experiences in the viewer; although the facts of the viewer’s experiences may be different, the intuitive knowledge of them is similar.

It’s as if Lynch subscribes to the Jungian theory of “collective unconscious.” Or, as Mary Lynch says. “There’s a little “Eraserhead” in everybody.”

Eraserhead concerns itself with death and rebirth. Carl Jung describes a state not unlike Limbo (called “Bardo” in the

Due to the inability to find funders for such a strange project, “Eraserhead” took over five years to film and another two in postproduction. Actor Jack Nance played Henry Spencer for so long that he even started wearing the character’s clothes at home.

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Everybody has a subconscious and they

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Scenes such as the crying, diseased baby and the bleeding chicken dinner have earned “Eraserhead” a reputation as one of the most grotesque movies ever made. Nevertheless, Lynch decided to cut a scene in which two women were tied to a bed and approached by a man carrying a buzzing electric machine, calling it “too disturbing.”

put a lid on it. There’s things in there.

Tibetan Book of the Dead), and intermediate state between death and rebirth. It is broken up into three stages: 1. the psychic happenings at the time of death, 2. the dream state that follows immediately after death and is accompanied by karmic illusions, and 3. the birth instinct and prenatal events.

At the very end of “Eraserhead,” Henry goes through the radiator and joins his fantasy woman and the screen becomes flooded with light so that the figures are hardly visible. In the Book of the Dead, it says, “The wisdom… will shoot forth and strikes thee with a light so radiant that thou will scarcely be able to look at it.”

Anyway, Lynch isn’t saying. “The film’s gotta make sense somehow, you know, in your own way. When you go to a mystery film and they tie it all up at the end—to me, that’s a real let down. In a mystery, somehow in the middle it’s all opened up, and you can go out to infinity trying to form your own conclusions. There’s so many possibilities. And that feeling is like, real neat to me. In ‘Eraserhead,’ there are a lot of openings and you go into areas and it’s all—there’re sort of like rules you kind of go by to keep that feeling kind of open and I don’t know, it’s real important to it. It’s more like a poem or a… more abstract, even though it has a story. It’s like an experience.”

“I’ve heard people say that people who write and direct their own things sort of make the same film over and over again, but I don’t know about that. I don’t know where these things come from really. Ideas sort of pop up out of some different levels somewhere, and down in there that’s where Henry is. So it’s hard to say it’s a philosophy or anything. Everything makes sense to me, you know. ‘Eraserhead’

is real logical to me, and it has rules that were followed and it has a certain feeling that was followed all the way through. And you sort of tune into that at the beginning of the film, and you sort of know what’s right. And it makes certain sense to me and it feels right.”

And again, he says, “other people seem to pick up on that, but they have different interpretations of what it all means. Because the openness has room for different interpretations.”

By Stephen Saban and Sarah Longacre The Soho Weekly News, October 20, 1978

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blue velvet Starring Kyle MacLachlan Isabella Rossellini Dennis Hopper Laura Dern

year released 1986

Awards Academy Award: Best Director (nominated)

academy award: best supporting actor, dennis hopper (nominated)

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In the charming, peaceful town of Lumberton, college student Jeffrey Beaumont stumbles upon a human ear in a field. With the local police department unable to investigate, Jeffrey and Sandy, his girlfriend, decide to do their own sleuthing. Jeffrey becomes suspicious of nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens, who is involved with Frank Booth, a violent and evil man. Jeffrey’s disturbing experiences with both of them leads him to discover that nobody is innocent, and a dark underworld exists in their hometown, as well as in his own soul.

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In the dream‌

the world was

dark.

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original interview

1985

David Lynch Out of Bounds David Lynch has emerged as one of America’s most imaginative directors. I met with Lynch in his small white office in Los Angeles. Dozens of index cards pinned to the wall listed scene breakdowns for his next project. Lynch himself conveys an almost childlike wonder of the world and its goings on. During our meeting, when he was halfway through his cup of coffee, he suddenly asked if I wanted to see “a neat trick.” He then carefully dragged his styrofoam coffee cup across the desktop. The vibrations caused by the friction transformed the coffee cup into a bubbling, rippling, spitting lava pit. He laughed.

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Have there been any reactions to “Blue Velvet” that have surprised you?

There were so many violently positive and so many violently negative reactions to the film… I know some people really hate the picture, but it doesn’t bother me, because I like it so much.

With “Eraserhead,” for example, negative criticisms would make me kind of warm inside. They didn’t bother me one bit. A film— especially when it’s a personal film—is going to hit somebody or it’s not. It’s like mathematics. There’s nothing you can do about it.

So you don’t try to fix a film to suit the audience?

The more you try to fix a film, especially a personal one, the more you are going to kill it.

You once said that “Blue Velvet” has about a one-in-onehundred chance of being made. Were you surprised when the film got the go-ahead?

Yes, Hollywood makes movies for strange reasons. It never surprises me that films are made, but it’s surprising me that some films aren’t made while others are. But I did not feel that “Blue Velvet” was so strange—in fact, I always said it was my most normal film. It’s an American picture. It deals with human beings and human problems, and its the present day and there are cars in the picture.

And car chases.

And car chases. Dino de Laurentiis gave me a unique and very special deal. He called me up and said, “David, I have crazy idea.

You want to make ‘Blue Velvet.’” I said “Yes,” and he said, “You

want total artistic control?” And I said “Yes.” So he says, “You cut your salary, you cut your budget, and I’ll give you total artistic control.” So I cut my salary in half, I cut the budget down almost in half and made it. And Dino was true to his word. He gave me total artistic control. He figured maybe he’d break even. Or at least he wouldn’t lose. And now they’ve ended up making money.

So now Dino wants to do this deal again for me, and he wants to do it for other directors as well. “Blue Velvet” has done some neat things for this industry.

The amazing thing about watching the film is that some people in the audience are laughing while others are telling them to be quiet because they think it’s all deadly serious.

People are so divided in their reactions to the film.

I know… I have seen it happening. What can I say? Strange things happen.

The first time I saw the film. I was very affected by Dennis Hopper’s performance. Then the second time, Isabella Rossellini’s performance really stood out—even more than Hopper’s. How was Isabella cast?

No casting agent ever mentioned her. I didn’t even know Isabella Rossellini was an actress. I just happened to meet her in a restaurant in New York and we discussed the movie. I told her I was casting it, not even realizing she was an actress. Then a week later I was looking at a copy of Screen World and I found a picture of her from a film she did with the Taviani brothers, and I said, “good night! She’s an actress!” So I got a script to her, and she loved it instantly. She felt that she knew Dorothy and that she knew the part. So, because of her attitude and because I felt she was right in every way, it happened. Then all I had left to cast was Frank Booth.

What would you have done if you hadn’t had Hopper?

I can’t think about it because I’d become crazy. That’s what happens with films sometimes, you don’t get the right person.

To have a successful film is so rare because you can’t control the world.

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Lynch always remains open to new inspiration and gives his actors considerable freedom to interpret their roles. Dean Stockwell’s brief but iconic role singing “In Dreams” originally called for an ordinary microphone, but when the actor picked up a spare work light on a whim, Lynch loved the effect and shot the scene that way. The singer’s unexplained bandaged hand was also Stockwell’s idea, to hint at a vaguely disturbing back story.

I heard Dennis said that he had to play Frank because he is Frank. Is that a little disturbing to you?

Dennis Hopper’s name had come up in meetings before, but as soon as it did, it was shot down because of his reputation. Not because he wasn’t right, but because his reputation was so strong that it was just out of the question. And that was sad, because he had been off everything for over a year and a half and no one really knew that. So his manager told me that Dennis was totally different and that we could phone the producers whom he had just worked with to check. And then Dennis called and said, “I have to play Frank because I am Frank.” Well, that almost blew the deal right there. But he was truly great to work with. Other actors who had read the script said the role was two-dimensional. But Dennis, in a couple of key moments, made it three dimensional, and that’s exactly what it needed.

Your films are always in such barren settings. This town called Lumberton seemed so desolate.

Was that by design?

This could be a psychological thing within me. When you work, your assistant director is in charge of background action. He’s the one who fills in the background with as many people as you want.

And I always opted for as few people as possible. It just felt right. I just don’t know how to explain it.

But if you walk around a small town, you’re not likely to meet a whole lot of people. One of the most important things that happened that wasn’t in the script is how we picked the town. Patti Norris, the production designer, wanted me to pick a name for the town. She had said that if we picked a town somewhere in North Carolina, we could get the police to give us their stickers and all that stuff for free. So I looked at the map and bingo! “Lumberton” leaped out like a frog. I loved the name, and I decided that there was going to be logs and lumber related items everywhere in the film. In fact, some of the things were already in the script and they worked out perfectly—like the man buying a new axe in the hardware store. But so many parts of a film are discovered as you go along. That’s why I say the film isn’t finished until it’s finished.

Are you fussy about the way a line is delivered?

A line has to be said in a certain way. A director should never say a line the way he wants to hear it. You have to go behind the line and explain things in abstract terms. The line will come out just the way you want it.

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In Lynch’s original script, Frank Booth is specified as inhaling helium, to raise his voice to a higher pitch. Dennis Hopper, who had just gone through detox, told Lynch that Frank should have a tank of amyl nitrate, a drug Hopper had experimented with. Hopper later regretted convincing Lynch not to use helium, when it occurred to him how unsettling it would be for a maniac to be threatening people with a squeaky voice.

A lot of Freudian people who have seen “Blue V

People assume that Jeffrey’s character (played by Kyle MacLachlan) is really you, that his vision of things is close to yours.

Jeffrey is an observer. In a way, it’s a pretty thankless role. He does some incredible things, but a lot of the time he just watches other people do things. It’s not easy to play a person who does that. A lot of very subtle things have to be done so that it seems real. Kyle added a lot of things to Jeffrey’s character on his own.

There seems to be such a twisted Freudian undercurrent to the sex scenes. I was wondering if you’ve ever been through analysis yourself.

Well, like they say: “People who go to psychiatrists ought to have their heads examined!” I did go one day. I wanted to find out about something. I observed a circle, a pattern, in my life and I wanted to take a look at it. So I talked to this psychiatrist for a while. He was a very patient sort of person. I was doing all the talking—which is what you are supposed to do, I guess—and I realized some important things. But when I asked him if he thought the analysis could interfere with my creativity, he said “Well, David, I have to be honest with you, I think it might.” And so I said “thank you very much.” And I know a lot of people think that it can’t affect your creativity, but this guy was a doctor! I saw the diplomas on the wall! Honestly, I don’t think I want to know so much… I don’t want to unravel that ball of twine. I love abstract and mysterious things. I realized that if everything

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had a name, I might lose interest. But a lot of Freudian people who have seen “Blue Velvet” say they could have a field day tearing it apart.

I want to talk about the extraordinary moment where Dorothy stands stark naked in front of Jeff’s house. How did that scene occur to you?

It came like a spark. That’s the way ideas seem to come—at least in my mind. There’s a little moment that’s very intense. And as it comes up into the light of day, it expands—because it’s been living down deep in my mind under all this pressure. It starts to bob to the surface and it becomes filled with all sorts of details.

Finally, I see the whole scene, complete with character.

What kind of industry reaction have you had?

I feel that Hollywood has been behind me since “The Elephant Man.” “Dune” didn’t kill me; it just kind of kept things the same.

I’m not really a “hot” director; I’m hot with quite a few qualifications. If “Blue Velvet” were making $100 million at the box office, then it’d be hard to keep the door shut. These days you need to make a pile of money, before people will take a second look. You need quite a stack, actually, before you’re really smoking.

Velvet” could have a field day tearing it apart. the film looks different, lives differently, thinks differently, smells different—yet they are all in Lumberton. It’s just the way things are.

Were there any important people who encouraged you as a filmmaker?

I remember one in particular: Bushnell Keeler. He was a painter. Until I met him, I thought that Van Are there people—actors—with whom you would love to work?

Gogh was the last man who painted. I was thirteen I sort of work the other way around. I get a part and say, “Oh, boy, wouldn’t and lived in the Northwest, so for me there were no they be perfect?” But there are people I would like to write a part for. I’d painters. When I heard that Bushnell was a painter, like to write a part for Isabella again. I’d like to write a part for Laura Dern and that he did it for a living, I nearly passed out. I became feverish. I didn’t want to go to school anymore. again. John Hurt, also. I like to work with people I’ve worked with before.

It was an awakening. By the time I was a junior in high They become like friends and family. I’d rather go through the war with school, I started renting a room next to his studio. My people I get along with. father paid half the rent which was a super-cool thing for my father to do, because having a studio was not a Did you keep actors in the dark on “Blue Velvet”? Did everyone normal thing. High school didn’t have a big hold on me. read the script and know how they fit into the overall picture?

I knew I was going in a different direction. But life back Everyone read the script, although it doesn’t really matter. I mean, then was fantastic.

I don’t know how you’re going to figure in the rest of my life, and you don’t know how I am going to figure in your life, but we’re still What about later influences—in terms of film? here playing our “scene,” so to speak. You don’t need to see the Well, there was Frank Daniel [of the AFI], the former dean of whole picture, but I don’t generally hide it from actors, as some Czechoslovakian Film School. He was a huge influence and a directors do. great teacher. He taught me film structure. He taught me that 70 index cards, with a scene written on each one, equals one It struck me that every character in “Blue Velvet” had a feature film. I still work by that rule. distinct vision of what was going on, especially the Laura Dern character.

She’s a great actress. She wants to know lots of things and

By Gerald L’Ecuyer she has lots of ideas for her character—some of which she doesn’t even talk about. So Laura as Sandy believes certain Interview Magazine, 1987 things very strongly. And so does Frank. In fact, every character is very different from the others. The contrast is so great that everybody seems to stand out. Each person in

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lost highway Starring Patricia Arquette Bill Pullman Balthazar Gett y

year released 1997

Awards Palme d’Or, Cannes film festival

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Fred Madison is plagued by the fear that his wife Renée is cheating on him. When she is found murdered in their home, Fred is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. While Fred is in prison, something strange happens—and suddenly it’s not him any more. A young man named Pete Dayton sits in the cell. The baffled authorities let Pete go, and he soon he meets a beautiful woman who looks just like Renée, even though her name is Alice and she’s a gangster’s girlfriend. Strange echoes of Pete’s former self keep cropping up as the story of violence and betrayal comes full circle.

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I like to

remember

things my own way.

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original review

1998

Lost on lynch’s Highway The ever-quotable pop artist and underground filmmaker Andy Warhol reportedly stated that films are “better talked about than seen.” With his latest film adventure, “Lost Highway,” David Lynch has given audiences a complex and perplexing story to ponder and some astonishingly brilliant images to enjoy. Yet the majority of critical responses to Lynch’s new horror noir have denounced the film’s narrative as being interesting but impenetrably chaotic at best, and some have even gone as far as to call the film unwatchable. Even the cinephiles who have recognized the significant aesthetic achievements of Lynch’s film have announced that he is unconcerned with narrative logic in “Lost Highway.”

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Perhaps part of this critical response is due to a reluctance to embrace the robust eroticism and taste for violence displayed in Lynch’s works. Lynch has ventured beyond linear film narratives and left incredulous critics and puzzled onlookers muttering that either his picture is obscure by accident or that he is engaged in some frivolous form of cinematic gamesmanship. Some reviewers have expressed their opinions in a tone of righteous indignation and used the supposed “mess” of this film to exact some type of petty revenge upon those who acclaimed Lynch upon the triumph of “Blue Velvet.”

The difficulties with “Lost Highway” lie with the movie’s unremitting dream-like images and Lynch’s uncompromising determination to sustain an eternal sense of mystery and wonder throughout the film. He has designed a film with an open architecture in which equally plausible interpretations of the film can be constructed, and which enables the audience to use its imagination to fill in the blanks.

The strategy of posing open questions is reminiscent of Antonioni in films like “L’Avventura.” A large part of what has confounded spectators in Lynch’s enterprise is how to distinguish between scenes that reflect the characters’ fantasies, and those that belong to the narrative “reality.”

“Lost Highway” is a film that would appear to have a complete disregard for differences in ontological levels. Only a recognition that its visual language communicates a descent deeper and deeper into madness can reveal “Lost Highway’s” intricate conceptual meaning.

Lynch has given notice that his film takes its structure from the circular form of the Mobius strip, and herein lies the constraint against which he weaves his thematic concerns. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is living a nightmare: his mind is racked by suspicion, paranoia, and anxieties about the fidelity of his sensuous but emotionally cold wife, Renée (Patricia Arquette). Events quickly take a sinister bend when the Madisons begin receiving unmarked videotapes on the front steps of their ominously underdecorated house. The tapes reveal that an intruder has invaded the Madisons’ home and taped them while they were asleep. Unsettled by the violation of their private space, Fred falls into a twitchy, zombie-like state.

A third videotape arrives and he sits down to view it. He screams out in horror when the picture reveals Fred looking into the camera’s eye beside Renée’s savagely bloodied corpse. Although we see nothing of the crime on screen, Fred is summarily sentenced to execution for his wife’s murder, and swiftly ensconced in a cell on death row. Isolated in a primitive prison cage, his mind is shattered by excruciating headaches, unrelenting insomnia, and strange hallucinations (all marvelously captured in the film’s mesmerizing visual effects).

Suddenly, in “Lost Highway’s” Kafkaesque center sequence, a prison guard discovers a bewildered and bruised stranger in Fred Madison’s cell. A brief investigation by prison authorities determines the identity of the stranger: Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), who lives in Van Nuys with his parents, and has absolutely no

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For some of the visual effects in “Lost Highway,” Lynch explains, “we developed this thing we called ‘whacking’ where the guys would pull the lens, and then reseat it, and then pull it again. For extreme defocusing and jiggling. It’s beautiful. I told Pete [Deming, director of photography] to start de-focusing the lens, but he couldn’t get the image as far out of focus as I wanted; he had reached the end of the lens. I said, ‘Well, we’ve got a problem.’

He replied, ‘The only thing we can do is to take the lens out.’ So I said, ‘Okay, take it out.’ He popped the lens on and off the camera as we did the shot, and it looked beautiful!

Fred’s hallucination is an escape into fantasy and recollection of how he mysteriously materialized to replace Fred Madison in prison. Pete is welcomed back to normal life and his job at Arnie’s auto garage. Delighted with Pete’s return, Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), a gangster prone to comically capricious outbursts of violence, provides Pete with work on his vintage luxury cars. When Mr. Eddy brings in his 50s model Cadillac for a routine tune-up, Pete fatally falls for Alice Wakefield (also Patricia Arquette), Mr. Eddy’s seductively carnivorous blonde bombshell, and they embark on a furtive and—for Pete at least—obsessive affair.

It should be acknowledged straightaway that “Lost Highway” is, by design, extremely resistant to reduction into a definitive narrative account; by the film’s end, it is evident that Lynch has intentionally withheld the answers to questions inevitably provoked by the narrative’s elusive and elliptical plot. It is virtually impossible to reconstruct a definitive and rational account of what happens in “Lost Highway.”

According to the majority of its detractors, what happens in the film’s prison sequence is that Fred is transformed (think “Metamorphosis”) into Pete Dayton via some type of supernatural intervention. Throughout the second half of the film, Pete’s parents and girlfriend, Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), allude cryptically to the mysterious and ominous circumstances of the fateful night that something strange happened to Pete. Although Pete has no recollection of that night, we repeatedly see Pete’s parents and Sheila in front of the Dayton’s house under a threatening evening sky, crying out to avert some impending catastrophic event.

“Lost Highway” features several visual images that give some weight to a metamorphosis thesis. After all, for the most part, the film proceeds as if the central narrative has shifted from Fred’s story to Pete’s story. While Fred agonizes in his prison cell, images of lightning flashes and horrific distortion fill the screen with overtones of extraworldly visitation.

Nevertheless, the idea that Fred is literally morphed into a man with a new identity obscures more than it clarifies the subject of “Lost Highway.”

Lynch has publicly called his film a "psychogenic fugue," a term that in this context refers to a mental state in which a person is delusional although seemingly fully aware, a state from which he emerges with no memory of his actions.

It also involves losing oneself and taking on an entirely new identity.

Most of the second movement of “Lost Highway” can be best understood as an elaborate journey into the hallucinations of such a state. The early sequences of the film demonstrate that Fred’s consciousness is disturbed by suspicion, paranoia, and nightmares. He also has a pronounced tendency to daydream. This is made most evident when he tells the police detectives, “I like to remember things my own way… How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” Fred’s tenuous grip on reality is undermined by his voluntary flights into fantasy.

Lynch provides few signals that equal degrees of reality should not be attributed to all the actions of the film. By contrast, in Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” the viewer is given cues, like the jingling of bells on the sound track, to distinguish

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a terrifying ride into a nightmare beyond his will.

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The Möbius twists of “Lost Highway’s” plot are reflected in its characters too. The same actress, Patricia Arquette, plays

fantasy from reality. The most persuasive evidence for an interpretation of “Lost Highway” as a subjective film understood primarily as Fred’s hallucination occurs during the prison sequences. During his time in jail, Fred is plagued by unrelenting insomnia. Hints of his delusional state of mind can be gleaned from the sound of seagulls on the sound track as he slumps in the prison exercise yard overwhelmed by a combination of excruciating headaches and exhaustion.

Hallucinations also occur in his prison cell: Fred sees the flames of an exploding desert cabin run backwards—an image that occurs again at the end of the film when Fred "returns" to replace Pete. However, the key image that provides evidence for the hallucination thesis is a distorted close up of Fred’s face shaking violently back and forth before he screams out in horror. This image occurs twice: in prison before we are introduced to Pete, and just prior to the film’s conclusion.

The flashes of lightning and out-of-focus visuals are all evidence that Fred’s mind is spinning out of control. Between the parentheses, Fred creates a parallel universe in his mind that takes on a will of its own.

The two parallel stories of “Lost Highway” are two manifestations of one essential story: a man obsessed with possessing the wrong woman. Although Fred and Pete are played by different actors and have distinct identities, they can be understood as representing the same self. Lynch’s casting of the same actress in the roles of both Renée Madison and Alice Wakefield adds further credence to the notion that “Lost Highway” contains two mythic representations of the same couple. In Fred’s tormented mind, Alice embodies his obsession with the now dead (and maybe murdered by him) Renée. (The use of one actress in twin roles recalls Buñuel’s playful use of two actresses for the role of the tormenting Conchita in “That Obscure Object of Desire,” or, perhaps, Hitchcock’s use of

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two different characters who have nothing to do with each other: Fred’s passionless wife, and a gangster’s bombshell girlfriend. At the same time, two different actors play Fred and Pete, who seem to be actually the same person.

Kim Novak as one woman impersonating another in “Vertigo.”)

Fred’s hallucination is partly an escape into fantasy and partly a terrifying ride into a nightmare beyond his will. By envisioning Pete’s story, Fred creates a new incarnation of the object of his obsession, but in the end his hallucinated encounter with a seductive and compliant temptress is no less catastrophic than his earlier attempts to control the remote and withheld body and soul of his wife.

The structure of “Lost Highway” is modeled on the form of the Mobius strip: a strip twisted 180 degrees and then looped by connecting the opposing ends. In the first image of “Lost Highway” we are speeding down the center of a desolate two-lane flattop along the dashed canary-yellow center line; we hear the industrial beat and the haunting baritone of David Bowie’s “I’m Deranged” flowing over the credits on the sound track. This image opens and closes the film. It forms a frame, provides symmetry, and evokes both the closing of a circle and a sense of the infinite (as if this dream or nightmare could go on forever).

The circular structure also enables Lynch to construct a world where conventional notions of time are obliterated. In the film’s first scene, a disheveled-looking Fred is at home and roused into action when he hears a voice giving an enigmatic and unnerving message over the intercom: "Dick Laurent is dead." When he goes to the window, the speaker has vanished. In the closing scene of the film it is Fred outside his own-house who delivers the same message: "Dick Laurent is dead." In the end, we find

out who Dick Laurent is and the two parallel stories are linked together, but many of the film’s mysteries remain.

Despite the accusation that the film is chaos, or that Lynch is unconcerned with narrative logic, “Lost Highway” is contained within what Sontag terms a theme-and-variation narrative.

Instead of a conventional story, chronology or plot line, a themeand-variation form of narration is nonlinear and uses the subject material as a thematic resource to develop variations on the central theme of the film: here, mirroring. The theme, which implies both duplication and opposition, manifests itself on many levels.

The primary example of mirroring is captured in Arquette’s characterization of two sides of the same woman: Renée (who appears passive and elusive) and Alice (who determines the action). On the superficial level of appearances, Arquette’s Renée has dark hair and favors long dark silhouettes, while Arquette’s Alice is a bleached blonde with a taste for revealing necklines and short skirts. However, they are the same in that each evokes a luxurious sense of carnal potency—one withheld, the other flaunted—and each wears fetishist-friendly platform high heels.

The theme-and-variation narrative form enables Lynch to use devices of duplication, opposition, repetition, deviation, and inversion. Arquette’s characters have opposing temperaments: Renée is quiet, removed, and cool; Alice is white-hot. The notion of duplication is explored when both Renée and Alice appear

in the same photograph; of repetition when Alice and Renée repeat the same dialogue, and when the film’s Mystery Man repeats dialogue in the two separate parallel stories of the movie.

Variations on the mirroring theme are worked throughout the film. Early on we see Fred fervently playing his saxophone, and later Pete listens to the same piece of music over the radio as he works on a car at Arnie’s garage. However, Pete’s reaction constitutes the emotional inverse of Fred’s sensibility: in a fit of annoyance, as if he was subconsciously disturbed by the music’s manic intensity, he shuts the radio off.

Lynch also employs doubling when characters are introduced in pairs at various points of the film: the odd pair of police detectives, the two prison guards, and the two surveillance cops who follow Pete after his release from prison. Several of “Lost

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The Mystery Man, played by Robert Blake, is a sinister figure who seems to have some control over the strange twists of Lost Highway’s story. Barry Gifford, who co-wrote the screenplay with Lynch, explained that the Mystery Man “is a product of Fred’s imagination, too. I think the phone call scene at the party is pretty interesting. It’s the first visible manifestation of Fred’s madness.”

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Highway’s” key images—like the two-lane highway, shots of long corridors, the exploding cabin shown in reverse, the frantic scene in front of the Dayton home—are also repeated, emphasizing the film’s self-referential character and clear intention to pursue a theme-and-variation form of narration. Together, the complex combination of the circular structure and elliptical story line invites repeated journeys along the twisted strip of the film’s narrative in search of its closely guarded secrets.

“Lost Highway’s” greatest success is that it deftly subsumes its experiments in structure and form under the aesthetics of hallucination and the iconography of horror. The primary attraction of a Lynch film lies in his virtuosity as a visualist and his ability to conjure up moods with disturbingly visceral impact.

Although “Lost Highway” starts out looking like the "real" world, it quickly becomes a "constructed" world: an extravagant phantasmagoria with twilight-zone metaphysics. The structure, form, and visuals all conspire to construct a self-contained allegorical nightmare where the sense of time is eviscerated.

The first clear indication that we are within some kind of alternate universe is the appearance of the Mystery Man. When a mysterious stranger with a mask-like face and pancake-white makeup approaches Fred during a festive party, all the background sounds magically recede away. The Mystery Man claims that he is presently at the Madisons’ house and challenges Fred to call him there right now. Confused by the absurdity of the claim, Fred reluctantly dials his own number… to find the Mystery

“Lost Highway” deftly subsumes its

Man’s voice answering at the other end of the line. Frightened, bewildered, and angry over yet another invasion of his private space, Fred asks for an explanation, but the Mystery Man only lets out a Vincent Price-style cackle and walks away.

The establishment of a constructed world permits Lynch and cinematographer Peter Deming to develop the film’s aesthetics of hallucination. One of the film’s most visually effective scenes occurs when slow-motion photography captures the electricity and longing in the initial gaze between Pete and Alice.

The mythic mood of the image derives part of its considerable emotional power from the perfect congruence between sight and sound. The slow burn of Arquette’s sultry blonde bombshell is heightened by the languid sound of roaring electric guitars.

Perhaps the aesthetic high point of “Lost Highway” is the love scene in the desert. When Pete and Alice begin their impromptu sexual encounter in the middle of a windswept desert night, their incandescent naked bodies are brightly illuminated by automobile headlights, creating a mood of intoxicating ecstasy and reverie. In the desert, the windblown golden sand and Arquette’s radiant hair and torso explain Pete’s total surrender to her overpowering sexual energy. The emotional mood shifts from dream to nightmare with disorienting suddenness when the headlights dissolve into darkness and the music’s floating lyricism creeps into a brooding drone of synthesizers.

Throughout the film, Lynch keeps the emotional tone within a dream-like register, and he changes keys between images that appear idyllic and icons of the horror genre.

“Lost Highway” is a decidedly dark work. In the majority of the film’s interior scenes, Lynch favors murky shading and low lighting to elicit the fear of the unknown: long, dark corridors used in a variety of ways to evoke feelings of disorientation: a hallway where Fred is completely swallowed by darkness. Later in the film, Pete’s walk along a corridor is accompanied by flashes of lightning and special effects that are the standard fare of the horror genre; his walk down a hallway to find the bathroom is a frightening hallucination: lightning flashes illuminate numbered doors, one of which Pete opens to find a woman, apparently Alice, taunting him. Pulsating music and red filters add to the

disorienting effect. The images fittingly project Pete’s turmoil in the moments just after discovering the profoundly sordid elements of Alice’s life.

“Lost Highway’s” labyrinthine construction enables Lynch to subordinate traditional cinematic concerns with dialogue and plot to a visual language that communicates moods and emotions. Although the dialogue in the film is spare, the drama of a man driven mad by his obsession with the woman he loves has an extraordinary emotional vividness.

“Lost Highway” is a mystery, a fable, an allegorical nightmare.

Although it can in some moments resemble our notion of reality, Lynch has basically jettisoned the tyranny of logic to take the viewer on an enigmatic journey beyond the limits of reason and reality—down some lost highway.

Despite denunciations of the movie as irredeemably chaotic, it actually—with its haunting circularity and endless narrative loop—adheres to a disciplined aesthetic formality. Like “Eraserhead,” the film evokes the interior world of one man’s bad dream, the mystery and confusion of a consciousness afflicted by obsession, suspicion, and passion.

by Eric Bryant Rhodes Film Quarterly, Spring 1998

experiments under the aesthetics of hallucination.

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mulholland dr Starring Naomi Watts Laura Harring Justin Theroux

year released 2001

Awards Academy Award: Best Director (nominated)

Best picture of the decade: Film Comment, The Village Voice, Les Cahiers du CinĂŠma, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association

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Betty Elms, an optimistic young woman in search of stardom, has just arrived in Hollywood. She discovers a beautiful, mysterious woman in her new apartment, a survivor of a car accident in the hills above Los Angeles, who calls herself Rita but suffers mass amnesia. Betty is intrigued by Rita’s situation and pursues the mystery of her forgotten past, and finds herself falling in love. In this twist on the classic Hollywood film noir, we soon discover that nothing is as it seems in the city of dreams.

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now I’m in this

dream place.

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original review

2001

Mulholland Dreams “I just came from Deep River, Ontario, and now I’m in this dream place,” says Betty, the absurdly naive and optimistic young actress whose downward trajectory is the emotional and narrative center of David Lynch’s voluptuous Hollywood horror film, “Mulholland Dr.” Literalizing the metaphor of Hollywood as a factory of dreams, Lynch constructs his archetypal movie industry story as a journey into the realm of the oneiric where time collapses and nothing, not even the film itself, is what it at first seems to be.

“Mulholland Dr” originated as a pilot for an ABC television series. Rejected by the network as too dark, slow, and confusing, it was acquired by “The Straight Story” producers Alain Sarde and Pierre Edelman and the French company Studio Canal Plus, which more than doubled the original budget of $7 million so that Lynch could shoot a new ending. The result is a bifurcated, through-the-looking-glass narrative in which the second half turns the meaning of the first upside down while putting up its own impediments to our search for the truth.

While Lynch’s films all have dream-like qualities, “Mulholland Dr” is his first since “Eraserhead” to employ “the logic of a dream— a nightmare” (how Welles described Kafka’s “The Trial” in his film adaptation) from beginning to end. And like a nightmare, the film’s effect is twofold. It creates an extreme sense of unease, of dread even, which provokes, in turn, an investigative impulse­—as if by using one’s analytic skills to piece together its puzzling narrative, one could exert control over the anxiety.

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The anxiety embedded in the dream that is “Mulholland Dr” has to do with loss of identity. And who should end up with a shattered psyche, a broken heart, and a failed career but the person whose unquestioning belief in herself is too good to be true?

When we first meet her, Betty (Naomi Watts) has just arrived at LAX and is bidding farewell to an elderly couple who befriended her on the plane. “Be careful,” they tell her (for “Mulholland Dr” is nothing if not a cautionary tale). “We’ll be watching for you on the big screen,” one of them says encouragingly. But no sooner has she gone on her way, than they dissolve into paroxysms of mocking laughter.

As movie fans—the little people in the audience who both adore and envy the larger-than-life stars—they know that Betty’s in for a nightmare, and they will return, Lilliputian size, at the end of the film, to slip under her door and into her dreams, scaring her to death.

“A love story in the city of dreams”—Lynch’s minimal description omits the crucial fact that “Mulholland Dr” is a lesbian love story, a fulfillment of the lesbian desire latent in “Blue Velvet.”

Deep River is the name of both Betty’s hometown and the apartment building where Dorothy Vallens lives in the earlier film. But Betty’s position in Lynch’s meta-narrative isn’t that of Dorothy; she’s another version of Sandy Williams, the good-girl-next-door, whose curiosity about Dorothy encourages Jeffrey Beaumont in his investigation.

With her desire mediated by Jeffrey and kept in check by the protective forces of small-town patriarchy (not for nothing is her father a cop), Sandy is guided to the safe waters of marriage and the family. But what if instead she became unmoored and

was borne on the currents of the deep river that is the Lynchian unconscious to “the dream place” where, with no male figure to protect her, she turned into one of thousands of interchangeable blondes who send out their 8x10 glossies, hoping to be fingered for stardom? And what if, alone and vulnerable, she met someone very much like Dorothy—another damaged, dark-haired mystery woman—and in trying to save her, fell in love, and lost herself instead?

That’s the setup of “Mulholland Dr.” And if blonde Betty is the film’s governing consciousness (or, as we come to understand, its governing unconscious) then dark-haired Rita (Laura Elena Harring) is its object of desire. When Betty arrives at the Hollywood apartment lent to her by a helpful aunt, she is startled to discover a naked brunette with a vacant expression crouched inside the shower. “I’m Rita,” says the brunette, borrowing the name from a conveniently placed poster of Hayworth in Gilda.

Like a certain strain of femme fatale, Rita’s allure is in her emptiness and passivity, but the fact that she’s suffering from total amnesia renders her helpless rather than threatening in Betty’s eyes. As Betty tenderly uncovers the wound beneath Rita’s luxuriant hair, we know she’s already in too deep for her own good. Betty may seem as straightforward as Nancy Drew, but her investigative drive harbors a need to control. If she can save Rita, she will have power over her, she will have made herself indispensable. It’s this psychosexual dynamic that links “Mulholland Dr” to noir and the fact that Lynch transposes it to a lesbian love affair hardly changes it.

The search for Rita’s elusive identity, and Betty’s simultaneous attempts to jump-start her Hollywood career, draw the two women into the film’s sordid but farcical subplot, which features a petulant auteur who’s being forced by mobbed-up moneybags to accept a talentless, dead-eyed blonde as the lead in his Fifties doo-wop musical. “This is the girl!” insists one of the financiers, holding up a photo of a pert but worn-looking ingenue with the name Camilla Rhodes printed at the bottom.

The phrase, repeated like the chorus of a litany, becomes a free-floating signifier for a film that, crossing “Vertigo” with “Persona” (and maybe Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon”),

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Michael J. Anderson, who played the dancing, backwards-talking dwarf in “Twin Peaks,” appears in “Mulholland Dr” as Mr. Roque, a mysterious studio magnate.

Lynch had Anderson stand on the seat of a wheelchair while a full-sized prosthetic body was constructed around him. The effect is of a paralyzed man with a strangely disproportionate head. “David’s work isn’t consciously coherent,” Anderson says, “but its coherence on an unconscious level is inescapable—almost against your will.”

is one of the most disturbing portraits of woman as pawn and victim in American movie history.

Lynch situates his doomed lesbian love story within a classically paranoid, though not necessarily untrue, vision of the industry as a closed hierarchical system in which the ultimate source of power remains hidden behind a series of representatives—here depicted as Mr. Roque, a partially paralyzed dwarf, and, more chillingly, as The Cowboy, a desiccated recluse, part ghost of Howard Hughes, part Sunset Boulevard pimp.

Revealing that romance has taken precedence over career, Betty passes up what could have been her big break, fleeing the set of the doo-wop movie to meet Rita, who now thinks that she might be someone named Diane Selwyn. The intrepid twosome break into Diane’s apartment only to be confronted by the rotting corpse of a woman lying amidst twisted rose-brown sheets. Betty and Rita run screaming from the house (and this is pretty much where the original TV pilot ended).

“Mulholland Dr” then enters an electrically charged transitional section in which Betty and Rita make love and pay a post-coital visit to a dilapidated, near-empty theater where a sleazy master of ceremonies gives a veiled lecture on cinematic illusionism in a mix of Spanish and broken English (“there is no orchestra but you hear an orchestra”). Then a woman delivers a show-stopping rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish—except that there’s no show to

stop. On returning home, Rita casually opens a shiny blue box (one of the clues to her identity that has been circulating mysteriously throughout the previous scenes) and we fall, as through a rabbit-hole, into Diane Selwyn’s apartment. But now it’s Betty’s body in the bed, and she’s not dead, but lost in sleep.

“Get up, pretty girl,” says The Cowboy, and, as the faded, drugged-out blonde in the bed struggles to consciousness, we understand in an instant that there is no Betty, that Betty is Diane’s fantasy alter ego, and everything we’ve seen thus far has been a classic anxiety dream that’s part grandiose wish fulfillment and part prophecy of death.

Lynch’s dazzling act of revisionism transforms what might have been a more adult version of “Twin Peaks” into a formally inventive and psychologically unsettling realization of the surrealist theory of film as dream. Powerful as the move is, it’s not without precedent: Fritz Lang’s “The Woman in the Window,” in which the framing device that turned the entire film into Edward G. Robinson’s nightmare was inserted after the fact because the studio thought that Lang’s vision of reality was too dark for audiences to accept, is one prior example; the episode of “Dallas” that conveniently wrote off the entire preceding season as one character’s dream is another.

Lynch teases convention by following the macabre jitterbug contest that opens the film with an ominous Steadicam move across a sleeping figure buried head to toe in rumpled bedclothes, her heavy breathing suggesting that she’s having very bad dreams. The image is so dark and ambiguous that it might not register upon first viewing. It’s only in retrospect that we understand it as an image of Diane, wrapped so deep inside a

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In Mulholland Dr, there is no conclusive recurrent nightmare of blowing her brains out that, eventually, it kills her.

Far more radical than a film such as “The Woman in the Window,” “Mulholland Dr” is constructed entirely in the language of dreams. It’s not only that Angelo Badalamenti’s insinuating score and Peter Deming’s twisting Steadicam suggest the free-floating anxiety of the dream state but also, on a narrative level, the temporal collapses, the shifting identities, and the displaced objects are all aspects of what Freud describes as the “dreamwork.”

In Freud’s theory, dreams are distorted manifestations of unconscious desire that can only be understood dialectically in relationship to the waking life of the dreamer. But in “Mulholland Dr,” there is no conclusive evidence that the dreamer ever awakes. While the second half of the film transforms the meaning of the first half, it does so by reflecting one dream in a mirror opposite.

Despite the seemingly expository moment when Diane tells the story of her failed Hollywood career and her forbidden,

blighted love for Rita (who, in this round robin of identities, turns out to be Camilla Rhodes, while the blonde initially identified as Camilla is repositioned as Rita/Camilla’s “kissing cousin”) the second half of the film is even more Borgesian in its circularity and more hallucinatory in its imagery than the first.

And yet the film leaves one with the uneasy feeling of having missed the crucial element that will put all questions to rest. Is this the story of a woman scorned who actually hires a hit man to kill the object of her unrequited passion? Or the story of how an unrequited love and the humiliations involved in climbing the Hollywood ladder destroy her soul and turn her into someone she doesn’t recognize, even in her dreams?

And even if you could determine which story this is, that knowledge is no guarantee against the wild desire the film taps into: the desire to lose yourself in the other, or in the fantasy that is all you ever know of the other—the other as a movie, as “Mulholland Dr.” As Buñuel wrote of “Belle de Jour,” “I myself could not say what is real and what is imaginary in the film. For me they form a single thing.”

By Amy Taubin Film Comment, September 2001

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evidence that the dreamer ever awakes.

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inland empire Starring Laura Dern Jeremy Irons justin theroux

year released 2007

Awards Best experimental film: National Societ y of Film Critics

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Nikki Grace, an actress, is the star of a new film: one that is supposedly cursed. As she gets deeper into the role, it begins to take over her identity. The boundaries between truth and fiction blur as Nikki skips between alternate realities among prostitutes, Polish crime bosses, a family of humanoid rabbits, and her own performance of a disturbed woman haunted by violence. As she gets lost in the dark corridors of her anxieties, we are left to wonder how much, if any of it, is real—or whether the world inside the mind is more real than the one outside.

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cast out this

wicked dream.

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original review

2006

The Trippy Dream Factory of David Lynch There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch’s head. It is a head where the wild things grow, twisting and spreading like vines, like fingers, and taking us in their captive embrace. Over the last three decades these wild things have laid siege to us even as they have mutated: the deformed baby of “Eraserhead” evolving into the Reagan-era surrealism of “Blue Velvet,” and the metacinematic masterpiece “Mulholland Dr,” a dispatch from that boulevard of broken dreams called Hollywood.

Mr. Lynch revisits that bewitched boulevard in the extraordinary, savagely uncompromised “Inland Empire,” his first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse. I’m still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits—which seem to be living in Ralph Kramden’s apartment, as redesigned by Edward Hopper—have to do with the weepy Polish woman who may be a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after all), probably both.

As the Good Witch of the North says, it’s always best to start at the beginning and, so, once upon a time, an actress, Nikki Grace (a dazzling, fearless Laura Dern), receives a stranger (Grace Zabriskie, hilarious, unsettling) into her home. The unnamed visitor, a new neighbor with bulging eyes and an East European accent, engages in some gossip (“I hear you have a new role”) before delivering

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two brief parables that hint at the weirdness to follow. When the boy went out into the world to play, the stranger says, evil was born and followed the boy. When the girl went out to play, though, she got lost in the marketplace, which pretty much sums up what happens to most pretty actresses in Hollywood.

Like “Mulholland Dr,” which this new film resembles like an evil twin, “Inland Empire” involves an attractive blond actress who tumbles down rabbit holes inside rabbit holes inside rabbit holes. In “Mulholland Dr,” the actress finally chokes on the acrid smoke that billows out of the dream factory, imagining herself in a starring role before gasping her last breath in what looks like a Nathanael West rooming house of horrors. They shoot actresses, don’t they? Yes, they do, and usually before the clincher. Mostly, though, actresses just fade away, undone by wrinkles and the industry’s lack of interest in anything female that doesn’t jiggle.

By contrast, in his strange way, Mr. Lynch loves women, or at least their representations. And he gives them terribly tasty roles.

Few are tastier or finally more terrible than the role of Nikki Grace, whose porn-star name suggests tacky self-invention and a straight-to-video career. Soon after entertaining her foreignaccented visitor, Nikki, who looks to be in her mid-30s, is rehearsing for a new film called “On High in Blue Tomorrows” with a director, Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons, expertly blending unction with ego), and her co-star, Devon Berk (Justin Theroux, butched-up as a neo-greaser).

A romantic melodrama, this preposterously titled film involves Susan Blue and Billy Side, nattily dressed Southerners who flirt with indirection on the veranda while an almost-unrecognizable Julia Ormond plays the other woman, kind of. In time, this film-within-a-film casts an enveloping shadow over Nikki, leading her real and reel lives to blur.

The reeler it gets, the weirder it gets. Nikki or Susan or perhaps both enter another story that resembles a tawdrier version of “On High in Blue Tomorrows.” In this unvarnished version of the film-within-the-film, Susan spends a lot of time in a sinister house with some half-dozen women who appear to be whores. The whores chew the fat and their naughty lower lips, lounge on a street in a snowy Polish city in what appears to be the 1930s and end up laughing on a nostalgically seedy modern Hollywood Boulevard. A couple also pop up in a suburban backyard that looks like what you would expect to find in the bleak Southern California region of the larger film’s title. Most dance while lip-synching “The Loco-Motion.”

The gritty, burned-out atmosphere of “Inland Empire” is partly a result of Lynch’s use of a commercial-grade digital video camera. The director found that he liked the unpredictable tones, and shooting digitally gave him the freedom to experiment and improvise scenes more closely to his original idea.

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The film feels as if it could have been made in The “Rabbits” scenes of “Inland Empire” were originally filmed as a series for Lynch’s web site. Laura Harring and Naomi Watts, the stars of Mulholland Dr, play two of the rabbits in the absurd sitcom.

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The easiest way into “Inland Empire” is through the grand mansions, derelict houses, ominous hallways and grubby back alleys that Nikki, Susan, the big rabbits and the whores inhabit. Each room brings new moods, textures, threats and sometimes even a crime, as well as such familiar Lynchian flourishes as a buzzing electric light and velvety red curtains. The film shows a small room in which the weeping Polish woman watches a television set flooded with static. This room is replaced by another, more claustrophobic one crowded with floral designs, in which a woman and a man settle what sounds like a money-for-sex transaction; this is, in turn, is replaced by a lavishly appointed, gilt-edged room of the sort found in European palaces and museums.

How Nikki and the other characters wind up in these rooms—how, for instance, the pampered blonde ends up talking trash in a spooky, B-movie office—is less important than what happens inside these spaces.

In “Inland Empire,” the classic hero’s journey has been supplanted by a series of jarringly discordant scenes, situations and setups that reflect one another much like the repeating images in the splintered hall of mirrors at the end of Orson Welles’s “Lady From Shanghai.” The spaces in “Inland Empire” function as way stations, holding pens, states of minds (Nikki’s, Susan’s, Mr. Lynch’s), sites of revelation and negotiation, of violence and intimacy. They are cinematic spaces in which images flower and fester, and stories are born.

Each new space also serves as a stage on which dramatic entrances and exits are continually being made.

The theatricality of these entrances and exits underscores the mounting tension and frustrates any sense that the film is unfolding with the usual linear logic. Like characters rushing in and out of the same hallway doors in a slapstick comedy, Nikki/Susan keeps changing position, yet, for long stretches, doesn’t seem as if she were going anywhere new. For the most part, this strategy works (if nothing else, it’s truer to everyday life than most films), even if there are about 20 minutes in this admirably ambitious 179-minute film that feel superfluous. “Inland Empire” has the power of nightmares and at times the more prosaic letdown of self-indulgence.

In an interview published while this film was in production, Mr. Lynch said he shot “Inland Empire” without a final screenplay, which is easy to believe. Like the surrealist practice of automatic writing, the film feels as if it could have been made in a trance, dredged up from within. Then again, this is a filmmaker who probably

Lynch often works with the same actors in many of his films. Laura Dern has appeared in four of Lynch’s films including “Inland Empire,” in which she plays (at least) two roles.

a trance, dredged up from within. doesn’t need to tap his unconscious to let loose his demons; one suspects they are lurking right there in the open. Even when his images are flooded with bright Southern California light, danger hovers, suggestively buzzing. No one makes that caressing light seem so dark, so frightening, perhaps because few American filmmakers dare to peel back the surface of things to show us what squirms beneath.

“Inland Empire” isn’t a film to love. It is a work to admire, to puzzle through, to wrestle with. Its pleasures are fugitive, even frustrating.

The first time I saw it, I was repulsed by the shivers of Lynchian sadism, a feeling doubtless informed by my adoration of the far more approachable, humanistic “Mulholland Dr.” On second viewing, though, “Inland Empire” seemed funnier, more playful and somehow heartfelt. Certainly, there is nothing but love in Ms. Dern’s performance, which is as much a gift to us as to the director who has given this actress her greatest roles. It’s easy to get lost in a David Lynch film, but Ms. Dern and her amazing rubber-band mouth, which laughs like the sun and cries us a river, proves a magnificent guide.

By Manohla Dargis The New York Times, December 6, 2006

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I feel that I live in darkness and confusion

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and I’m trying to make some sort of sense of it. david lynch

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A mysterious diva singing on a spotlit stage. A glamorous party in a classic Hollywood theater.

Songs that mix (and remix) love, fear, and loneliness. And of course, beautiful, inscrutable films.

Presenting five features spanning 35 years, from his earliest fever dreams to his latest masterpieces, and rarely screened commercial and music video work, Shadow States celebrates the dark mysteries of the unconscious mind, as revealed by David Lynch.

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now it’s

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dark.

into the shadows opening gala

Shadow States begins with a dark and mysterious affair at the Vogue Theater, an classic movie house and club in Hollwood.

Featuring live music, Lynch-inspired cocktails, and damn fine coffee, this is the place to meet your fellow Lynch fans and set your plans for the weekend’s festivities. The scene will be dark, sumptuous, and dare we say even a bit Lynchian. vogue theater 6675 Hollywood Boulevard Hollywood, california

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the dark night of the soul featuring danger mouse David Lynch’s prolific film output is matched by his work in the visual arts.

In 2009 music producer Danger Mouse, famous as half of Gnarls Barkley and a longtime Lynch fan, approached the director about a collaboration he was working on with his friend, the late musician Sparklehorse. The album, called “The Dark Night of the Soul” after a line in one of Lynch’s songs, was released accompanied by a book of Lynch’s photos of sinister, surreal suburbia. On a Saturday night at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Danger Mouse will spin tracks from “The Dark Night of the Soul.” Over 50 of Lynch’s photos inspired by the music will be displayed in sequence with the tracks on the album.

Saturday, September 29 / 9:00 pm los angeles contemporary exhibitions 6522 hollywood boulevard Hollywood, california

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ariana delawari live in concert

Born in Los Angeles just days after her parents fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Ariana Delawari’s music has been shaped by growing up in the shadows of two cultures. Delawari took the mortal risk of recording part of her debut album, “Lion of Panjshir,” in Kabul, with traditional Afghan musicians.

Recording Afghan-influenced pop music in that war-torn city was a powerful political statement, and a highly successful artistic one as well. “This mixture of cultures and her melodies and lyrics conjure a great unique feeling in people,” says Lynch. “Ariana’s got something to sing about, and she does it real well.”

Delawari will perform at the Catalina, an intimate venue in the tradition of classic Hollywood jazz clubs.

Sunday, September 30 / 9:00 pm Catalina Jazz Club 6725 West Sunset Boulevard Hollywood, california

Ariana Delawari’s got something to sing about, and she does it real well.

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featured films Spanning over thirty years, Lynch’s films are as strange and varied as life itself. Shadow States presents five of his deepest explorations into the darker corners of the unconscious mind. Nikki Grace’s identity is fractured through a cursed film script. Diane Selwyn (if that is her name) is haunted by a lost love. Fred Madison gets lost on the highway of his own troubled mind. Jeffrey Beaumont finds that he may have more in common with a psychopath than he wants to know. And of course there’s Henry, trapped in “a dream of dark and troubling things,” with no hope of release except through his own disturbed fantasies.

These are our guides through the shadow states of Lynch’s cinematic world.

Eraserhead

blue velvet

Set in an industrial city in which giant machines are constantly In the charming, peaceful town of Lumberton, working, spewing smoke, and making inescapable noise, Henry college student Jeffrey Beaumont stumbles upon a human ear Spencer lives a life of loneliness and anxiety. His only escape in a field. With the local police department unable to investigate, is the dreamy lady behind his radiator who sings about finding Jeffrey and Sandy, his girlfriend, decide to do their own sleuthhappiness in heaven. Henry’s girlfriend, Mary, has just given ing. Jeffrey becomes suspicious of nightclub singer Dorothy birth to their child, a grotesque mutant that never stops crying.

Vallens, who is involved with Frank Booth, a violent and evil Mary can’t tolerate it and abandons it to Henry. Depressed man. Jeffrey’s disturbing experiences with both of them leads him to discover that nobody is innocent, and a dark underworld and emotionally numb, Henry desperately tries to escape the exists in their hometown, as well as in his own soul. nightmare that is his life.

Starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart

Starring Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern

1977, 79 minutes 1986, 120 minutes

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lost highway

Mulholland Drive

Fred Madison is plagued by the fear that his wife Renée is cheatBetty Elms, an optimistic young woman in search of staring on him. When she is found murdered in their home, Fred dom, has just arrived in Hollywood. She discovers a beautiful, is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. While Fred is mysterious woman in her new apartment, a survivor of a car in prison, something strange happens—and suddenly it’s not accident in the hills above Los Angeles, who calls herself Rita him any more. A young man named Pete Dayton sits in the but suffers mass amnesia. Betty is intrigued by the woman’s situation and pursues the mystery of Rita’s forgotten past, and cell. The baffled authorities let Pete go, and he soon he meets finds herself falling in love. In this twist on the classic Hollywood a beautiful woman who looks just like Renée, even though her name is Alice and she’s a gangster’s girlfriend. Strange echoes film noir, we soon discover that nothing is as it seems in the of Pete’s former self keep cropping up as the story of violence city of dreams. and betrayal comes full circle.

Starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette,

Starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, justin theroux

Balthazar Gett y

2001, 147 minutes 1997, 124 minutes

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Inland Empire

various short films

Nikki Grace, an actress, is starring in a new film that is supA girl has a violent nightmare about learning the alphabet. posedly cursed. As she gets deeper into the role, it begins A boy dreams up a loving grandmother to escape his abuto take over her identity. The boundaries between truth and sive family. A glamorous woman fantasizes about fame and fiction blur as Nikki skips between alternate realities among perfume. Each feature film in the festival will be preceded by a different short film from Lynch’s prolific career. From the prostitutes, Polish crime bosses, a family of rabbits, and her proto-Eraserhead domestic nightmare of “The Grandmother” own performance of a disturbed woman haunted by violence. to ominous rats in a “Clean Up New York City” ad, you never As she gets lost in the corridors of her anxieties, we are left know what to expect from these short pieces. Shocks and to wonder how much, if any of it, is real—or whether the world surprises abound. The exact screening schedule will not be inside our minds is more real than the one outside. released. A little mystery makes life more interesting.

Starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux

2007, 179 minutes

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city of dreams For a weekend in September, Hollywood will play host to a celebration of its unlikeliest auteur. On September 28, 2012—the 35th anniversary of “Eraserhead’s” initial New York premiere—Lynch’s monumental career will come full circle. Opening with a private gala at an abandoned (and supposedly haunted) movie theater, a weekend of events and festivities will unfold on Sunset Boulevard and beyond. Shadow States will take you deeper into the world of Lynch’s dreams—and your own—than you’ve ever gone before.

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9/28

Friday

Into the Shadows

9/29

9:00 PM

Vogue Theatre

2:00 PM 7:30 PM 10:00 PM 12:00 AM

Avalon Hollywood Avalon Hollywood Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Avalon Hollywood

2:00 PM 6:00 PM 10:00 PM

Avalon Hollywood Avalon Hollywood Catalina Jazz Club

Saturday

Blue Velvet

Lost Highway

The Dark Night of the Soul

Eraserhead

9/30

Sunday

Mulholland Dr

Inland Empire

Ariana Delawari in Concert

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MAP OF

HOLLYWOOD

FRANKLIN AVE

CIT Y OF DREAMS

HOLLYWOOD BLVD

.5 mile

E 105

LAX

40

5

SUNSET BLVD LA BREA AVE

110

5

FAIRFAX AVE

10 10

HEIGHTS BLVD

HOLLYWOOD

CRESCENT

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to Mulholland Dr.

A 10

FOUNTAIN AVE

LOCATION IN LOS ANGELES

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vogue theatre

The festival events are all within an easy walk of each other in Hollywood, near many bars and restaurants, just down the hill from Mulholland Dr. The map above shows the official venues as well as other points of interest in the area, listed on the following page.

The classic Vogue Theatre with its landmark neon marquee tower has stood empty for over a decade. Shadow States has gained exclusicve access to the gloriously unkempt space for a one of a kind Lynchian celebration.

Location

6675 Hollywood Blvd Hollywood 323/461-2020 www.thevoguetheatre.com Transportation

Metro Red Line: Hollywood & Highland

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F

FRANKLIN AVE

C 101 2 1

3

D

I

M

M METRO HOLLYWOOD & HIGHLAND

J

METRO HOLLYWOOD & VINE

H

G 4

B

VINE ST

HIGHLAND AVE

CAHUENGA BLVD

K

L

2

Avalon Hollywood

Location

Transportation

Metro Red Line: Hollywood & Vine

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Founded in 1978 by local artists, LACE has become an international pioneer among art institutions. The nonprofit gallery provides a local venue that exhibits innovations in art-making.

An intimate supper club on Sunset Boulevard, the Catalina Bar has hosted such jazz greats as Dizzie Gillespie, Max Roach, and Wynton Marsalis.

We’re certain that Dorothy Vallens and Fred Madison would love it here.

Los Angeles contemporary exhibitions

One of the great old theaters of Hollywood, this Spanish-style is equal parts beautiful and strange. It was the perfect venue for a certain Club Silencio. Walk through the heavy doors and as the curtains part, you will enter another world.

1735 Vine St Hollywood 323/461-2020 www.avalonhollywood.com

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Location

6522 Hollywood Blvd Hollywood 213/957-1777 www.welcometolace.org Transportation

Metro Red Line: Hollywood & Highland

Catalina jazz club

Location

6725 West Sunset Blvd Hollywood 323/466-2210 www.catalinajazzclub.com Transportation

Metro Red Line: Hollywood & Highland

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oh, I’m on vacation.

hey, pretty girl, time to wake up.

What to do

Melrose Trading Post 7850 Melrose Ave Los Angeles, CA 90036

B Dunes Sunset Motel and Coffee Shop 5625 Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90028

This Saturday flea market is the perfect place to pick up ominous little lamps, mysterious boxes, or a snakeskin jacket to wear as a symbol of your individuality.

C Magic Castle Hotel 7025 Franklin Ave Los Angeles, CA 90028

A Mulholland Drive Between the 101 and the 405

A scenic, old, winding road above the Hollywood Hills, full of beauty, mystery and unexpected twists.

Museum of Jurassic Technology 9341 Venice Blvd Culver City, CA 90232

The weird, briliant, and imaginary coexist in this tribute/ parody of natural history museums.

Necromance 7220 Melrose Ave Los Angeles, CA 90046

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Oddities, curiosities, and taxidermied animals abound at this old-fashioned shop. There might even be an embalmed cow fetus in there somewhere.

where to sleep

D Hollywood Downtowner Inn 5601 Hollywood Blvd Hollywood, CA 90028 E Sunset Tower Hotel 8358 Sunset Blvd West Hollywood, CA 90069

damn fine coffee.

Heineken?

Fuck that shit!

where to eat

where to drink

F 101 Coffee Shop 6145 Franklin Ave Los Angeles, CA 90028

H Burgundy Room

1621 Cahuenga Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90028

Bob’s Big Boy 4211 Riverside Drive Burbank, CA 91505

I Frolic Room 6245 Hollywood Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90028

Caesar’s Restaurant 1016 El Segundo Blvd Gardena, CA 90247

J Hotel Cafe 1623 1/2 Cahuenga Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90028

G Kitchen 24

1608 Cahuenga Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90028

K The Well 6255 Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90028

Pink’s Hot Dogs 709 La Brea Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038

L Three Clubs Cocktail Lounge 1123 Vine St Hollywood, CA 90038

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It doesn’t do

any good

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to say,

“This is what it means.”

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I like films that

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leave

room

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to

dream.

David Lynch

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