A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (54 page)

²⁵
After absorbing so much about it from the media, actually visiting Los Angeles in person produces a curious feeling of relief
at finding a place that actually confirms your stereotyped preconceptions instead of confounding them and making you loathe
your own ignorance and susceptibility to media stereotype: viz. stuff like cellular phones, rampant pulchritude, the odd ambient
blend of New Age gooeyness and right-wing financial acumen. (E.g., one of the two prenominate people named Balloon, a guy
who wore Birkenstocks and looked like he subsisted entirely on cellulose, had worked out an involved formula for describing
statistical relationships between margin-calls on certain kinds of commodity futures and the market value of certain types
of real estate, and had somehow gotten the impression that I and/or
Premiere
magazine ought to be interested in describing the formula in this article in such a way as to allow Balloon to start up a
kind of pricey newsletter-type thing where people would for some reason pay large amounts of money for access to this formula,
and for the better part of an afternoon he was absolutely unshakable, his obtuseness almost Zen—like a Lynchian bus-station
wacko with an advanced degree from the L.S.E.—and the only way to peel him off me was to promise on my honor to find some
way to work him and his formula into this article, an honor-obligation I’ve now fulfilled, though if
Premiere
wants to take the old editorial machete to it there’s not really any way I can be held responsible.

(By the way, in case
you think I’m lying or exaggerating about having met two unconnected persons named Balloon on this visit, the other Balloon
was part of a rather unaccomplished banjo-and-maraca street duo on the median strip just outside the lavish deserted mall
across the street from the gorgeous balcony that was too narrow and hazardously fenced to step onto, and the reason I approached
this Balloon was that I wanted to know whether the wicked welts on his face-and-neck-area were by any chance from errant quarters
or half-dollars thrown at him from speeding cars, which they turned out not to be.) )

²⁶
(looks like a blank canvas or stunted sail, helps concentrate light where they want it)

²⁷
It’s unclear whether this is her first name or her last name or a diminutive or what. Chesney is dressed in standard grunge
flannel and dirty sneakers, has about 8 feet of sun-colored hair piled high on her head and held (tenuously) in place with
sunglasses, and can handle an anamorphic lens like nobody’s business.

²⁸
(There’s one young guy on the crew whose entire function seems to be going around with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper
towels and Windexing every glass surface blindingly clean.)

²⁹
(
₌
“Computer-Generated Images,” as in
Jumanji
)

³⁰
I.e. “Electronic Press Kit,” a bite-intensive interview that
Lost Highway
’s publicists can then send off to
Entertainment Tonight
, local TV stations that want Pullman-bites, etc. If the movie’s a huge hit, the E.P.K.’s can then apparently be woven together
into one of those
Behind the Scenes at the Making of Thus-and-Such
documentaries that HBO seems to be so fond of. Apparently all name stars have to do an E.P.K. for every movie they make;
it’s in their contract or something. I watched everybody’s E.P.K. except Balthazar Getty’s.

³¹
(Pullman’s turn as the jilted con man in
The Last Seduction
had some edge to it, but Pullman seems to have done such a good acting job in that one that few people realized it was him.)

³²
Premiere
magazine’s industrial juice or no, I wasn’t allowed to watch footage of the porn videos both her characters frolic in, so
I can’t evaluate the harder-core parts of her performance in
Lost Highway
. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the porn videos survives the final cut and the M.P.A.A.’s humorless review. If much
of what the videos are rumored to contain appears in the final
Lost Highway
, Arquette may win a whole new kind of following.

³³
R. Blake, born 1933 as Michael James Gubitosi in Nutley, New Jersey, was one of the child stars of
Our Gang
, was unforgettable as one of the killers in
In Cold Blood
, etc.

³⁴
Dennis Hopper’s last powerful role before
Blue Velvet
had been the 1977
Apocalypse Now
, and he’d become a kind of Hollywood embarrassment. DaFoe had been sort of typecast as Christ after
Platoon
and
Last Temptation
, though it’s true that his sensualist’s lips had whispered menace even on the cross.

³⁵
And Richard Pryor’s in the movie as Richard-Pryor-the-celebrity-who’s-now-neurologically-damaged, not as a black person.

³⁶
Dean Stockwell’s Ben in
Blue Velvet
was probably technically gay, but what was relevant about Ben was his creepy effeminacy, which Frank called Ben’s “
suaveness
.” The only homoerotic subcurrent in
Blue Velvet
is between Jeffrey and Frank, and neither of them are what you’d call gay.

³⁷
(There were also, come to think of it, those two black hardware store employees (both named Ed) in
Blue Velvety
but, again, their blackness was incidental to the comic-symbolic issue of one Ed’s blindness and the other Ed’s dependence
on the blind Ed’s perfect memory for hardware-prices. I’m talking about characters who are, like,
centrally
minorityish in Lynch’s movies.)

³⁸
(Wholly random examples:) Think of the way Parker’s
Mississippi Burning
fumbled at our consciences like a freshman at a coed’s brassiere, or of
Dances with Wolves
’ crude, smug reversal of old westerns’ “White=Good & Indian=Bad” equation. Or think of movies like
Fatal Attraction
and
Unlawful Entry
and
Die Hard I-III
and
Copycat
, etc., where we’re so relentlessly set up to approve the villains’ bloody punishment in the climax that we might as well
be wearing togas. (The formulaic inexorability of these villains’ defeat does give the climaxes an oddly soothing, ritualistic
quality, and it makes the villains martyrs in a way, sacrifices to our desire for black-and-white morality and comfortable
judgment … I think it was during the original
Die Hard
that I first rooted consciously for the villain.)

³⁹
(solipsism being not exactly the cheery crackling hearth of psychophilosophical orientations)

⁴⁰
For somebody whose productions are supposed to be top-secret, Lynch and Asymmetrical seem awfully tolerant about having functionless
interns and weird silent young people hanging around the
Lost Highway
set. Isabella Rossellini’s cousin is here, “Alesandro,” a 25ish guy ostensibly taking photos of the production for an Italian
magazine but in fact mostly just walking around with his girlfriend in a leather miniskirt (the girlfriend) and grooming his
crewcut and smoking nowhere near the butt can. Plus there’s also “Rolande” (pronounced as an iamb:
“Rolande
” ; my one interchange with Rolande consisted mostly of Rolande emphasizing this point). Rolande is an incredibly creepy French
kid with a forehead about three feet high who somehow charmed Lynch into taking him on as an intern and lurks on the set constantly
and does nothing but stand around with a little spiral notebook taking notes in a dense crabbed psychotically neat hand. Pretty
much the whole crew and staff agrees that Rolande’s creepy and unpleasant to be around and that God only knows what the tiny
precise notes really concern, but Lynch apparently actually likes the kid, and claps him avuncularly on the shoulder whenever
the kid’s within reach, at which the kid smiles very widely and then afterward walks away rubbing his shoulder and muttering
darkly.

⁴¹
Lynch’s best-known painting, entitled
Oww, God, Mom, the Dog He Bited Me
, is described by Lynch in his
Time
cover-story this way: “There’s a clump of Band-Aids in the bottom corner. A dark background. A stick figure whose head is
a blur of blood. Then a very small dog made out of glue. There is a house, a little black bump. It’s pretty crude, pretty
primitive and minimal. I like it.” The painting itself, which is oddly absent from the book
Images
but has been published as a postcard, looks like the sort of diagnostic House-Tree-Person drawing that gets a patient institutionalized
in a hurry.

⁴²
(not even the Lynch-crazy French film pundits who’ve made his movies the subject of more than two dozen essays in
Cahiers du Cinéma
—the French apparently regard Lynch as God, though the fact that they also regard Jerry Lewis as God might salt the compliment
a bit …)

⁴³
(q.v. Baron Harkonen’s “cardiac rape” of the servant boy in
Dune
’s first act)

⁴⁴
Here’s one reason why Lynch’s characters have this weird
opacity
about them, a narcotized over-earnestness that’s reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern trailer parks. The truth
is that Lynch needs his characters stolid to the point of retardation; otherwise they’d be doing all this ironic eyebrow-raising
and finger-steepling about the overt symbolism of what’s going on, which is the very last thing he wants his characters doing.

⁴⁵
Lynch did a one-and-a-half-gainer into this pitfall in
Wild at Heart
, which is one reason the movie comes off so pomo-cute, another being the ironic intertextual self-consciousness (q.v.
Wizard of Oz, Fugitive Kind)
that Lynch’s better Expressionist movies have mostly avoided.

⁴⁶
( = Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate students who want to write fiction or poetry
professionally)

⁴⁷
(I’m hoping now in retrospect this wasn’t something Lynch’s ex-wife did …)

⁴⁸
(e.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Vachaud)

⁴⁹
This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop psychology, might be termed the Unintentional Fallacy.

⁵⁰
(i.e. “in-spired,” = “affected, guided, aroused by divine influence” from the Latin
inspirare
, “breathed into”)

⁵¹
It’s possible to decode Lynch’s fetish for floating/flying entities—witches on broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good
Witches, angels dangling overhead—along these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in Wand owl=Darkness in
TP
: the whole point of these animals is that they’re mobile.

⁵²
(with the exception of
Dune
, in which the good and bad guys practically wear color-coded hats—but
Dune
wasn’t really Lynch’s film anyway)

⁵³
This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews of both
Blue Velvet
and
Twin Peaks
.

⁵⁴
(which most admiring critics did—the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch in the
New York Times Magazine
)

⁵⁵
(Not to mention ignoring the fact that Frances Bay, as Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, standing right next to Jeffrey and Sandy at
the window and making an icky-face at the robin and saying “Who could eat a bug?” then—as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen
the movie like eight times—proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it’s not a bug she puts in her mouth it’s
a tidbit sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure Lynch means
something
by having her do it right after she’s criticized the robin for its diet. (Friends I’ve surveyed are evenly split on whether
Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this scene—have a look for yourself.) )

⁵⁶
As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying
and exciting. This is why the colors are so lush and the
mise en scène
so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited
by the scene but because he—like us—is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate
Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time.

⁵⁷
(prematurely!)

⁵⁸
I don’t think it’s an accident that of the grad-school friends I first saw
Blue Velvet
with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie—the two who said they felt like either the movie was really
sick or they were really sick or both they and the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie’s artistic power
but declared that as God was their witness you’d never catch them sitting through
that
particular sickness-fest again—were both male, nor that both singled out Frank’s smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy’s
nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying “
You re like
me” as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal moviegoing history.

⁵⁹
Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better
at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And the series’ second season showed that he was aware
of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode, the show had degenerated into tics and shticks
and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from
the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I actually preferred
Twin Peaks
’s second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative
artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going
to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on
national TV
).