A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (36 page)

This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch
movie has ever tried to do—maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological context of the series and the fact that you
had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie—and it required complex and contradictory and
probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying.

The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of
Fire Walk with Me
, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: “We always
knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and fucked roadhouse drunks less for the
money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity
as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it’s hard to know whether it’s terrible
or a tour de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose
head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready:] or both.”
Or
both? Of
course
both. This is what Lynch is
about
in this movie:
both
innocence and damnation;
both
sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in
Fire Walk with Me
is
both
“good” and “bad,” and yet also neither: she’s complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate
this “
both
” shit. “
Both
” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate that’s what we criticized
Fire Walk with Me
’s Laura for.
⁶¹
But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s muddy
bothness
is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy
bothness
in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a
bothness
we go to the movies to get a couple hours’ fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and
the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but
acknowledged
, and not just acknowledged but
drawn upon
in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself—this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we’re
going to feel, in
Premiere
magazine’s own head editor’s word, “Betrayed.”

I am not suggesting that Lynch entirely succeeded at the project he set for himself in
Fire Walk with Me
. (He didn’t.) What I am suggesting is that the withering critical reception the movie received (this movie, whose director’s
previous film had won the Palme d’Or, was
booed
at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival) had less to do with its failing in the project than with its attempting it at all. And
I am suggesting that if
Lost Highway
gets similarly savaged—or, worse, ignored—by the American art-assessment machine of which
Premiere
magazine is a wonderful working part, you might want to keep all this in mind.

1995

When Michael Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling,
but he’s not really smiling—his face’s circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the
top of the toss’s rise. He wants to hit it fully extended and slightly out in front of him; he wants to be able to hit emphatically
down on the ball, to generate enough pace to avoid an ambitious return from his opponent. Right now it’s 1:00 Saturday, 22
July 1995, on the Stadium Court of the Stade Jarry tennis complex in Montreal. It’s the first of the qualifying rounds for
the Canadian Open, one of the major stops on the ATP’s “hard-court circuit,”
¹
which starts right after Wimbledon and climaxes at NYC’s U.S. Open. The tossed ball rises and seems for a second to hang,
waiting, cooperating, as balls always seem to do for great players. The opponent, a Canadian college star named Dan Brakus,
is a very good tennis player. Michael Joyce, on the other hand, is a world-class tennis player. In 1991 he was the top-ranked
junior in the United States and a finalist at Junior Wimbledon,
²
is now in his fourth year on the ATP tour, and is as of this day the 79th best tennis player on planet earth.

A tacit rhetorical assumption here is that you have very probably never heard of Michael Joyce of Brentwood/LA. Nor of Florida’s
Tommy Ho. Nor of Vince Spadea, nor of Jonathan Stark or Robbie Weiss or Steve Bryan—all American men in their twenties, all
ranked in the world’s top 100 at one point in 1995. Nor of Jeff Tarango, 68th in the world, unless you remember his unfortunate
psychotic break in full public view during last year’s Wimbledon.
³

You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything.
I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.

Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court facility can hold slightly over 10,000 souls. Right now, for Michael Joyce’s qualifying match,
there are 93 people in the crowd, 91 of whom appear to be friends and relatives of Dan Brakus. Michael Joyce doesn’t seem
to notice whether there’s a crowd or not. He has a way of staring intently at the air in front of his face between points.
During points he looks only at the ball.

The acoustics in the near-empty Stadium are amazing—you can hear every breath, every sneaker’s squeak, the authoritative
pang
of the ball against very tight strings.

Professional tennis tournaments, like professional sports teams, have distinctive traditional colors. Wimbledon’s is green;
the Volvo International’s is light blue. The Canadian Open’s is—emphatically—red. The tournament’s “title sponsor,” du Maurier
cigarettes,
⁴
has ads and logos all over the place in red and black. The Stadium Court is surrounded by a red tarp festooned with corporate
names in black capitals, and the tarp composes the base of a grandstand that is itself decked out in red-and-black bunting,
so that from any kind of distance the place looks like either a Kremlin funeral or a really elaborate brothel. The match’s
umpire and linesmen and ballboys all wear black shorts and red shirts emblazoned with the name of a Quebec clothing company.
⁵
The big beach umbrella that’s spread and held over each seated player at end-change breaks has a lush red head and a black
stem that looks hot to hold.

Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court is adjoined on the north by the Grandstand Court, a slightly smaller venue with seats on only
one side and a capacity of 4800. A five-story scoreboard lies just west of the Grandstand, and by late afternoon both courts
are rectangularly shadowed. There are also eight nonstadium courts in canvas-fenced enclosures scattered across the grounds.
Professional matches are under way on all ten Stade Jarry courts today, but they are not exactly Canadian Open matches, and
for the most part they are unwatched.

The Stade Jarry grounds are all spruced up, and vendors’ tents are up, and Security is in place at all designated points.
Big TV trailers line the walkway outside the stadium, and burly men keep pulling complicated nests of cable out of ports in
the trailers’ sides.

There are very few paying customers on the grounds on Saturday, but there are close to a hundred world-class players: big
spidery French guys with gelled hair, American kids with peeling noses and Pac-10 sweats, lugubrious Germans, bored-looking
Italians. There are blank-eyed Swedes and pockmarked Colombians and cyberpunkish Brits. There are malevolent Slavs with scary
haircuts. There are Mexican players who spend their spare time playing two-on-two soccer in the gravel outside the Players’
Tent. With few exceptions, all the players have similar builds: big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-sized
arm and one monstrously huge and hypertrophie arm. They tend to congregate in the Players’ Tent or outside the Transportation
Trailer awaiting rides in promotional BMWs back to the Radisson des Gouverneurs, the tournament’s designated hotel. Many of
these players in the “Qualies,” or qualifying rounds, have girlfriends in tow, sloppily beautiful European girls with sandals
and patched jeans and leather backpacks, girlfriends who set up cloth lawnchairs and sun themselves next to their players’
practice courts.
⁶
At the Radisson des Gouverneurs the players tend to congregate in the lobby, where there’s a drawsheet for the Qualies up
on a cork bulletin board and a multilingual tournament official behind a long desk, and the players stand around in the air-conditioning
in wet hair and sandals and employ about 40 languages and wait for results of matches to go up on the board and for their
own next matches’ schedules to get posted. Some of the players listen to personal stereos; none seem to read. They all have
the unhappy self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and waiting around in hotel lobbies, the
look of people who have to create an envelope of privacy around them with just their expressions. Most of these players seem
either extremely young—new guys trying to break onto the Tour—or conspicuously older, like over 30, with tans that look permanent
and faces lined from years in the trenches of tennis’s minor leagues.

The Canadian Open, one of the ATP Tour’s “Super 9” tournaments that weigh most heavily in the calculation of world ranking,
officially starts on Monday, 24 July. What’s going on for the two days right before it is the Qualies. This is essentially
a competition to determine who will occupy the eight slots in the Canadian Open’s main draw designated for “qualifiers.” It
is a pre-tournament tournament. A qualifying tourney precedes just about every big-money ATP event, and money and prestige
and lucrative careers are often at stake in Qualie rounds, and often they feature the best matches of the whole tournament,
and it’s a good bet you haven’t heard of Qualies.

The realities of the men’s professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse
does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin. For every Sampras-Agassi final we watch, there’s been a week-long tournament,
a pyramidical single-elimination battle among 32, 64, or 128 players, of whom the finalists are the last men standing. You
probably know that already. But a player has to be eligible to enter that tournament in the first place. Eligibility is determined
by ATP computer ranking. Each tournament has a cutoff, a minimum ranking required to get entered in the main draw. Players
below that ranking who want to get in have to compete in a kind of pre-tournament. That’s the easiest way to explain what
Qualies are. In actual practice the whole thing’s quite a bit messier, and I’ll try to describe the logistics of the Canadian
Open’s Qualies in just enough detail to suggest their complexity without boring you mindless.

The du Maurier Omnium Ltée has a draw of 64. The sixteen entrants with the highest ATP rankings get “seeded,” which means
their names are strategically dispersed in the draw so that (barring upsets) they won’t have to meet each other until the
latter rounds.
⁷
Of the seeds, the top eight—here Agassi, Sampras, Chang, the Russian Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Croatia’s Goran Ivanisevic, South
Africa’s Wayne Ferreira, Germany’s Michael Stich, and Switzerland’s Marc Rosset, respectively—get “byes,” or automatic passes
into the tournament’s second round. This means that there is actually room for 56 players in the main draw. The cutoff for
the 1995 Canadian Open isn’t 56, however, because not all of the top 56 players in the world are here.
⁸
Here the cutoff is 85. You’d think that this meant anybody with an ATP ranking of 86 or lower would have to play the Qualies,
but here too there are exceptions. The du Maurier Omnium Ltée, like most other big tournaments, has five “wild card” entries
into the main draw. These are special places given either to high-ranked players who entered after the required six-week deadline
but are desirable to have in the tournament because they’re big stars (like Ivanisevic, #6 in the world but a notorious flakeroo
who
“forgot
” to enter till a week ago and got a last-minute wild card) or to players ranked lower than 85 whom the tournament wants because
they are judged “uniquely deserving” (read “Canadian”—the other four players who get wild cards here are all Canadian, and
two are Québécois).

By the way, if you’re interested, the ATP Tour updates and publishes its world rankings weekly, and the rankings constitute
a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading. As of this writing, Mahesh Bhupathi is 284, Luis Lobo
411. There’s Martin Sinner and Guy Forget. There’s Adolf Musil and Jonathan Venison and Javier Frana and Leander Paes. There’s—no
kidding—Cyril Suk. Rodolfo Ramos-Paganini is 337, Alex Lopez-Moron 174. Gilad Bloom is 228 and Zoltan Nagy is 414. Names out
of some postmodern Dickens: Udo Riglewski and Louis Gloria and Francisco Roig and Alexander Mronz. The 29th-best player in
the world is named Slava Dosedel. There’s Claude N’Goran and Han Shin (276 but falling fast) and Haracio de la Pensa and Marcus
Barbosa and Amos Mansdorf and Mariano Hood. Andres Zingman is currently ranked two places above Sander Groen. Horst Skoff
and Kris Goossens and Thomas Hagstedt are all ranked higher than Martin Zumpft. One more reason the tournament industry sort
of hates upsets is that the ATP press liaisons have to go around teaching journalists how to spell and pronounce new names.