It’s one of life’s eternal mysteries: In the last two decades of his life, no one wanted to finance another feature film by America’s greatest filmmaker of the era. His last completed feature film was almost as mysterious: the evil twin of his previous film, Mulholland Drive. As Laura Dern’s evil actor segues into the character she plays, this digitally filmed rampage on Hollywood’s boulevard of broken dreams reawakens the narrative fragmentation of her final period. It runs the gamut from camcorder-inspired surrealism to made-up-as-you-go incoherence (that’s what it was: Lynch shot without a finished script).
11. Dunes (1984)
Even the great humiliation of Lynch’s career – butchered in the editing room then disavowed by the director – contains moments of genius. Frank Herbert’s story appears as if transcribed during a week of spices. But what fun the wunderkind, working for the first time with a big studio budget, clearly had with the visuals. The cuttlefish-like spice navigators, the wire force fields, the mountainous three-lipped Shai-Hulud: the baroque opulence puts to shame the calculated corporate taste of Denis Villeneuve’s version. Sting in rubber Y-front gets our vote every time.
“Wild at heart and weird to boot!” » is something of a career motto. But this adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel – made quickly alongside Twin Peaks – feels like Lynch’s most conventional work. Trading in the stock Americana of the road movie Elvis and the Wizard of Oz, it struggles to transcend that iconography and achieve the arresting strangeness that Lynch is accustomed to spotting so quickly. Perhaps the indelible Lynchian moment is when Willem Dafoe’s lewd thug Bobby Peru verbally assaults Laura Dern’s Lula — a scene that could have been incredibly crude in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. With Lynch, it’s funny and shocking – and all the more shocking because it’s funny.
Inspired by the psychological schism that Lynch saw inside OJ Simpson, Lost Highway was the dry version of the innovative Möebius strip narrative of Mulholland Drive. The film “switches” midway between Bill Pullman’s uxoricidal jazz saxophonist and Balthazar Getty’s chad of an auto shop worker, in such a way that it’s not clear which is the fantasy or the projection of who. Structurally avant-garde and – especially when the imperturbable Mystery Man is nearby – often very unsettling, it is also possessed by a sordid determination that ultimately wears you down.
Working as an employee for executive producer Mel Brooks, Lynch was in restrained mode, becoming what amounts to a genteel studio mourner of the classic era. Rather than the technique, all the grotesquerie is entirely in the tale. Not in the disfigured John (Joseph) Merrick himself, played with supreme dignity by John Hurt, but in society’s reactions to him – even in the selfish motivations of his guardian, Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins, all also dazzling). If this was work for hire, there was a naive bravery – culminating in the final crushing vision of Merrick’s mother reassuring him: “Nothing will die”. Words for the Lynch faithful right now.
This prequel to the culture-changing television series has been reevaluated in the 21st century as the debate over gender relations and sexual abuse has intensified in the run-up to #MeToo. What seemed in the early 1990s like a self-defeating rejection of the show’s winning quirkiness now seems ahead of its time and a striking feat of empathy on Lynch’s part. He fully embodies the role of victim, while Laura Palmer courageously faces her dark, incest-ravaged destiny. But there’s no denying, with brilliant FBI knight Dale Cooper barely in the picture, that the situation is still grim.
Lynch began his feature film career as he intended to continue: transmuting his deepest anxieties and phobias onto the screen with complete candor. In this case, his fears of paternity – embodied in the lumpen homunculus deteriorating while in the care of the film’s shock-haired protagonist, Henry. Meticulously filmed over five years, with Lynch, a jack-of-all-trades involved in every technical department, it was undoubtedly the work of a singular sensitivity, of closed house intensity and claustrophobic fireplace ambiance to the cast of hallucinatory entities such as the moon-faced lady who emerges from Henry’s radiator. The stubborn pacing and stupidity only enhanced its midnight movie credentials.
Perhaps the most Lynchian thing Lynch ever did was follow up Lost Highway with this seductive, normcore, sweet and immensely moving fable, based on a true story. Veteran Hollywood actor and former stuntman Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, a veteran who makes a 240-mile trip to see his former brother on a John Deere lawn tractor. This is where all those hours of transcendental meditation paid off for the director: Slowed down to a speed of 5 mph, he extracts every drop of beauty and human goodness from the Midwestern setting, while Straight’s journey decelerates into the sublime tranquility of its climax.
The eighth episode – showing the original sin at Los Alamos that gave rise to the series’ demonic Killer Bob – is often cited as the greatest hour of prestige television of all time. Returning 25 years later, as Laura Palmer promised, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost met the sky-high expectations by confounding them. Disregarding nostalgia by holding back Agent Cooper in all his glory until episode 16, turning David Bowie into a giant kettle and aggressively ignoring TV conventions (two minutes of someone sweeping a bar floor , anyone?), it often seemed closer to video art. than prime time television. But if this is now Lynch’s swan song, at least we have 18 hours of it unexpurgated. As the show’s Manichean struggle spanned New York, Texas and Las Vegas, Lynch gave us a requiem for a broken and demoralized America, culminating with the return of Kyle MacLachlan’s hero waking up in his own nightmare on Laura Palmer’s porch.
Only the man whose Twin Peaks character’s nickname was Gordon Cole – the studio head in the 1950s classic Sunset Boulevard – understood and loved Hollywood enough to pay him what is arguably the greatest tribute ever. This black mosaic to be constantly revisited, assembled from the fragments of a failed television project, is a surreal map of the twin poles of Los Angeles: aspiration and fall, infatuation and rejection, illusion and disillusionment. As she plays the PI with an amnesiac accomplice playing femme fatale, Naomi Watts’ ingénue simultaneously becomes more and more adept in front of the camera: “That’s the girl!” In passing her audition, she seems to penetrate the ineffable mysteries of performance and identity, as well as the soul of Los Angeles itself. Which of course is one and the same thing.
Choosing between Lynch’s two best traits is like choosing between cherry pie and donuts. But Blue Velvet considers it to me to be the more personal and visceral of the two; its formative statement of the violence and evil hidden behind the banality of white picket fences, whose influence quietly blossomed into independent films, artworks and comic books of the 90s. Set in the eternal present from the 1950s-tinged director, it has an almost ritualistic force, as Kyle MacLachlan’s novice student struggles to protect Isabella Rossellini’s lounge singer from Dennis’ nightmarish hipster Hopper – but encounters his own dark side. The signature scene – “the duck’s eye”, as Lynch called such scenes – in which Hopper is undone by a rendition of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams demonstrates the director’s unrivaled ability to use the stylized and the surreal as a masterpiece. orchestra for a raw feeling.
A damn good cup of coffee. A girl wrapped in plastic. An oracle carrying logs. Grief expressed through an original song. Well done from Dale Cooper. Canada as the source of all corruption. Reverse speech of dwarves and ladies. Traffic lights at night. The demon peeping from behind the couch. Like a fish in a percolator, the original Twin Peaks was where Lynchian sensibilities seeped irreversibly into the zeitgeist.
Audiences had never seen anything like it: an ostensible homage to the comfort of the daytime soap opera, none of it easy or ironic, but peppered with Lynch’s usual references to 1950s pop culture, Dadaist sketches and appalling sexual brutality. Not only did it expand the parameters of television, it was the fullest and most appealing expression of the director’s worldview; its great American cosmology, in which the forces of good and evil fight for the souls of small-town prom queens and FBI agents.
Yes, the second season fell apart after Laura Palmer’s killer was revealed, and Lynch was busy with Wild at Heart and other things. But his collaborators’ strenuous attempts to reproduce Lynchian strangeness in his absence only highlighted his inimitable talent for finding the offbeat route to overwhelming emotion. Every time the series called for revealing violence or charged metaphysics (“Here we go again!”), he returned to the director’s chair and never failed to deliver. Thanks for warning us about the Black Lodge, Mr. Lynch – and see you in the White Lodge.
