Lynchathon I, Part I: Eraserhead - Blue Velvet
Towards the end of last year I decided that my new Netflix Project would be to watch the complete works of David Lynch. (Well, the complete readily available works representing the main thrust of his career; my interest in seeking out examples of Lynch's painting, his music videos, his short films, his comic strip, or the various other things he may or may not consider essential artistic expressions is nonexistant. I'm interested in the feature films and Twin Peaks.) A Netflix Project isn't simply my decision to watch a TV show, because that's a contained work with a single plot and cast of characters; I don't consider watching all five seasons of Babylon 5, e.g., to be a Netflix Project. (And yes, I have done so. Lots to say about Babylon 5 good and bad [really, really bad] but I think the show raises an interesting quandary that I'll toss out for the moment: if your two best actors, by far, head and shoulders above everyone else, are also the two regulars most saddled with ridiculous costumes and oppressive makeup of the sort that most actors find it difficult to work through, is that on the whole a better or worse thing for your show?) I have engaged in two prior Netflix Projects: watching all the canonical James Bond films (which at the time did not include Quantum of Solace, though I did later see it in theaters) and watching the films of the Coen Brothers (many of which I'd seen before; this project remains officially incomplete since I keep pushing The Ladykillers down in my queue). Both of these projects were undertaken and essentially completed before I started this blog.
SO:
Things I've previously seen by David Lynch:
Mulholland Drive.
That's it. So I'm coming at all of this fresh. I'm also coming at it in pieces, because it's kind of overwhelming and not exactly endearing to my easier aesthetic sensibilities. So naturally being broken into (at least) three chunks, of which only the first has been completed. This chunk consists of the five theatrical films made before Twin Peaks. They are:
(1) Eraserhead
OK, I have to admit that I kind of fast forwarded through parts of this one. I am a philistine, I know. I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to watch it; kind of physically and intellectually tired is not the ideal state for engaging with some really slow moving black and white surrealism. And I mean really slow moving. There were things which made me laugh, but ultimately ... look, the film is a classic, and I can see why, and even muster up a "deservedly so" devoid of the condescension sometimes implicit in the qualifier, because you know there's a "but" coming afterwards. But: especially in his more elliptical and plotless films, Lynch is - as David Foster Wallace, among many, observed - finding ways to transfer his inner emotional/imaginative/psychological state onto a screen for your consideration and, one might hope (though Lynch possibly doesn't give a damn one way or another) sympathetic identification. Eraserhead would seem to be a very deep transition, which is unsurprising given the elongated, isolated process of filming it, with a tiny cast and crew. Though it's surely an exaggeration, Lynch seems happy to let you think that for five years, he ate a grilled cheese sandwich and french fries every day, shot Eraserhead in a barn, and then slept in the barn, and when production had to shut down for some reason or another, he probably just faded into limbo until the finances and personnel were in place to continue, at which point he returned to a more reassuringly tangible corporeality and continued to process images from REM sleep with minimal mediation. There are other works in which I find that I do have an emotional interaction with the projections of Lynch's psyche, but the stuff in Eraserhead just doesn't sync up with my personal wiring - a lot of things Lynch finds fascinating I find either boring or extremely upsetting - so what's left if you don't resonate with the film in that way is a lot of weirdness moving very slowly. Lynch himself attributed the genesis of Eraserhead to his memories of and emotions toward the city of Philadelphia, where he went to art school; this is by itself enough to let you know that we're in the deep matter of one guy's brain, and how you feel about it is really a question beyond the ken and ambit of critial inquiry.
On the other hand, Eraserhead did produce "The Lady in the Radiator Song," the Pixies' cover of which I am quite grateful for. So I owe it that much.
(B) The Elephant Man
The thing about David Lynch's lengthy career that I personally find most bizarre and inexplicable: that Mel "Yes, that Mel Brooks" Brooks, who was looking to produce a script about John Merrick, saw Eraserhead and thought to himself, "That's my guy!" It's actually a pretty startling artistic leap of faith, frankly, to see Eraserhead and think: "This is someone who should make my pet project, an emotional yet emotionally restrained (because British) period film." Somewhat less astonishing is that he was undoubtedly right. The Elephant Man is a great movie and worth spending time with. I have no personal desire to rewatch it at any point - it, again, doesn't really resonate with me, but unlike Eraserhead, where without the resonance I had no purchase, The Elephant Man is sufficiently conventional - maybe the most conventional film of Lynch's career? - that it's easy to appreciate the things one normally appreciates about a film. Plus it's moving, although I don't know if I'm quite with John Hurt when he says on the DVD that if a person isn't moved by the end of The Elephant Man then he doesn't want to know that person.
Positive: Carr Gomm rhetorically asks Treves if he can possibly imagine what John Merrick has gone through in his life. Treves rather dimly replies that yes, he feels he can. Carr Gomm (a wonderful John Gielgud) immediately assures him that no, none of them can imagine what it's like. The look on Treves' face is priceless; Anthony Hopkins throughout this movie delivers a beautiful performance of a man alternately too confident of his nobility and his wickedness. Also he looks really dashing in a beard. He was quite the handsome little man back then.
Negatives: This film was apparently ground zero for the vogue of using Barber's Adagio for Strings as overbearing musical blanket for Emotional Scenes, especially (though for this Lynch cannot of course be blamed) - as Kyle Gann puts it - "so many muted scenes of handsome young men dying in battle". Also there's a slightly snotty little note (at least I read it as slightly snotty) distinguishing the film from stage adaptations of John Merrick's life, which is unfortunate because the film takes just as many liberties with his biography as the (unrelated) play does.
(Gamma) Dune
OhmyGOD you cannot even imagine, without having seen it, how painful Dune is. It's worse if you've read the novel and worse still if you liked it. This is like ground fucking zero for some of the things I said here. You know what? I can't even really write about this here. Maybe I'll talk about it and the book(s) some other time. But to pile on the mindblowingness of Mel Brooks seeing Eraserhead and knowing that he absolutely had to get that guy to direct British actors in Victorian dress, Lynch apparently agreed to do Dune INSTEAD OF RETURN OF THE JEDI. GEORGE FUCKING LUCAS IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE OFFERED LYNCH JEDI ON THE STRENGTH OF ERASERHEAD AND A PERIOD DRAMA. This is in its own way actually more explicable; the mind reels at the possibility of actually witnessing the intersection of Lynch and Ewok, but Lynch's comment on the episode is probably correct: Lucas' vision was so firm that Lynch wasn't really intended to be a creative participant, just a technician to hold the reins. Lucas thought Lynch was a good director and any good director would do, because (a) Lucas's artistic control was viselike and (b) Lucas, clearly, doesn't really understand or respect what it is a director is supposed to do or be, or what he could do or be to a movie, so letting somebody else actually look through the viewfinder would've just been a relief of hassle.
(ZOSO) Blue Velvet
Yeah so you know this is the Big One, and as far as I can tell it's deservedly so. David Foster Wallace posited that Blue Velvet's extreme popularity and success vs. other Lynch films is generally indicative of a trend in his work whereby those films with relatively three dimensional, well and "realistically" drawn characters are the ones it's easiest for an audience to (a) sit through and (b) relate with. Jeffrey Beaumont is the realest of any character in a Lynch film other than The Elephant Man, and what he's going through emotionally is so compelling because universal that it makes what he's going through plot-wise seem halfway reasonable and accessible even though it's actually over the top nuts and doesn't totally make sense. (At least it doesn't totally make sense explicitly; you can color in the gray areas of the plotline, but the plot is a MacGuffin so why bother, you know?) It's almost like an artist playing with the fact that to a small child the adult world is huge by exaggerating the effect past what's strictly accurate. I mean, there are people in the real world like there are in Blue Velvet, although maybe they don't use gas masks as part of their sex play (not in the way Frank does), but the aggressive weirdness of Frank and Dorothy to Jeffrey, combined with the heightened bizarreness of Frank's milieu in general, bolsters the (dis)comfort with which Blue Velvet can be watched as an expressionistic rendering of Jeffrey Beaumont's traumatic entry into adult life, where he finds out that people aren't noble and sex isn't simple. The Rotten Suburbia thing, hammered in the film's opening moments, is a red herring. I think Lynch is too smart and too sui generis in his worldview to think it's interesting to go after suburbia as a mythic ideal. For one thing, Blue Velvet's true target of fear/disillusionment (not the best way to put it) is more daringly and more mundanely (oh ha ha) the adult world itself. Decay happens everywhere, not just under pristine lawns. For another thing, we know what it looks like when Lynch ostensibly sets out to process his feelings about a place in an explicit manner - he had a shitty impression of Philadelphia and produced freaking Eraserhead. Blue Velvet's Lumberton is I think unimportant to the movie overall in that really it could've been set anywhere. Lynch grew up, I believe, somehwere similar, and I would imagine is just interested in and comfortable with that setting.
I just ran out of interesting things to say about Blue Velvet that aren't better served in context with our next film, and besides, more than any other work of Lynch's, this film has been watched, analyzed, and considered both well and poorly for some time. I doubt I have anything original worth adding to the discourse.
SO:
Things I've previously seen by David Lynch:
Mulholland Drive.
That's it. So I'm coming at all of this fresh. I'm also coming at it in pieces, because it's kind of overwhelming and not exactly endearing to my easier aesthetic sensibilities. So naturally being broken into (at least) three chunks, of which only the first has been completed. This chunk consists of the five theatrical films made before Twin Peaks. They are:
(1) Eraserhead
OK, I have to admit that I kind of fast forwarded through parts of this one. I am a philistine, I know. I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to watch it; kind of physically and intellectually tired is not the ideal state for engaging with some really slow moving black and white surrealism. And I mean really slow moving. There were things which made me laugh, but ultimately ... look, the film is a classic, and I can see why, and even muster up a "deservedly so" devoid of the condescension sometimes implicit in the qualifier, because you know there's a "but" coming afterwards. But: especially in his more elliptical and plotless films, Lynch is - as David Foster Wallace, among many, observed - finding ways to transfer his inner emotional/imaginative/psychological state onto a screen for your consideration and, one might hope (though Lynch possibly doesn't give a damn one way or another) sympathetic identification. Eraserhead would seem to be a very deep transition, which is unsurprising given the elongated, isolated process of filming it, with a tiny cast and crew. Though it's surely an exaggeration, Lynch seems happy to let you think that for five years, he ate a grilled cheese sandwich and french fries every day, shot Eraserhead in a barn, and then slept in the barn, and when production had to shut down for some reason or another, he probably just faded into limbo until the finances and personnel were in place to continue, at which point he returned to a more reassuringly tangible corporeality and continued to process images from REM sleep with minimal mediation. There are other works in which I find that I do have an emotional interaction with the projections of Lynch's psyche, but the stuff in Eraserhead just doesn't sync up with my personal wiring - a lot of things Lynch finds fascinating I find either boring or extremely upsetting - so what's left if you don't resonate with the film in that way is a lot of weirdness moving very slowly. Lynch himself attributed the genesis of Eraserhead to his memories of and emotions toward the city of Philadelphia, where he went to art school; this is by itself enough to let you know that we're in the deep matter of one guy's brain, and how you feel about it is really a question beyond the ken and ambit of critial inquiry.
On the other hand, Eraserhead did produce "The Lady in the Radiator Song," the Pixies' cover of which I am quite grateful for. So I owe it that much.
(B) The Elephant Man
The thing about David Lynch's lengthy career that I personally find most bizarre and inexplicable: that Mel "Yes, that Mel Brooks" Brooks, who was looking to produce a script about John Merrick, saw Eraserhead and thought to himself, "That's my guy!" It's actually a pretty startling artistic leap of faith, frankly, to see Eraserhead and think: "This is someone who should make my pet project, an emotional yet emotionally restrained (because British) period film." Somewhat less astonishing is that he was undoubtedly right. The Elephant Man is a great movie and worth spending time with. I have no personal desire to rewatch it at any point - it, again, doesn't really resonate with me, but unlike Eraserhead, where without the resonance I had no purchase, The Elephant Man is sufficiently conventional - maybe the most conventional film of Lynch's career? - that it's easy to appreciate the things one normally appreciates about a film. Plus it's moving, although I don't know if I'm quite with John Hurt when he says on the DVD that if a person isn't moved by the end of The Elephant Man then he doesn't want to know that person.
Positive: Carr Gomm rhetorically asks Treves if he can possibly imagine what John Merrick has gone through in his life. Treves rather dimly replies that yes, he feels he can. Carr Gomm (a wonderful John Gielgud) immediately assures him that no, none of them can imagine what it's like. The look on Treves' face is priceless; Anthony Hopkins throughout this movie delivers a beautiful performance of a man alternately too confident of his nobility and his wickedness. Also he looks really dashing in a beard. He was quite the handsome little man back then.
Negatives: This film was apparently ground zero for the vogue of using Barber's Adagio for Strings as overbearing musical blanket for Emotional Scenes, especially (though for this Lynch cannot of course be blamed) - as Kyle Gann puts it - "so many muted scenes of handsome young men dying in battle". Also there's a slightly snotty little note (at least I read it as slightly snotty) distinguishing the film from stage adaptations of John Merrick's life, which is unfortunate because the film takes just as many liberties with his biography as the (unrelated) play does.
(Gamma) Dune
OhmyGOD you cannot even imagine, without having seen it, how painful Dune is. It's worse if you've read the novel and worse still if you liked it. This is like ground fucking zero for some of the things I said here. You know what? I can't even really write about this here. Maybe I'll talk about it and the book(s) some other time. But to pile on the mindblowingness of Mel Brooks seeing Eraserhead and knowing that he absolutely had to get that guy to direct British actors in Victorian dress, Lynch apparently agreed to do Dune INSTEAD OF RETURN OF THE JEDI. GEORGE FUCKING LUCAS IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE OFFERED LYNCH JEDI ON THE STRENGTH OF ERASERHEAD AND A PERIOD DRAMA. This is in its own way actually more explicable; the mind reels at the possibility of actually witnessing the intersection of Lynch and Ewok, but Lynch's comment on the episode is probably correct: Lucas' vision was so firm that Lynch wasn't really intended to be a creative participant, just a technician to hold the reins. Lucas thought Lynch was a good director and any good director would do, because (a) Lucas's artistic control was viselike and (b) Lucas, clearly, doesn't really understand or respect what it is a director is supposed to do or be, or what he could do or be to a movie, so letting somebody else actually look through the viewfinder would've just been a relief of hassle.
(ZOSO) Blue Velvet
Yeah so you know this is the Big One, and as far as I can tell it's deservedly so. David Foster Wallace posited that Blue Velvet's extreme popularity and success vs. other Lynch films is generally indicative of a trend in his work whereby those films with relatively three dimensional, well and "realistically" drawn characters are the ones it's easiest for an audience to (a) sit through and (b) relate with. Jeffrey Beaumont is the realest of any character in a Lynch film other than The Elephant Man, and what he's going through emotionally is so compelling because universal that it makes what he's going through plot-wise seem halfway reasonable and accessible even though it's actually over the top nuts and doesn't totally make sense. (At least it doesn't totally make sense explicitly; you can color in the gray areas of the plotline, but the plot is a MacGuffin so why bother, you know?) It's almost like an artist playing with the fact that to a small child the adult world is huge by exaggerating the effect past what's strictly accurate. I mean, there are people in the real world like there are in Blue Velvet, although maybe they don't use gas masks as part of their sex play (not in the way Frank does), but the aggressive weirdness of Frank and Dorothy to Jeffrey, combined with the heightened bizarreness of Frank's milieu in general, bolsters the (dis)comfort with which Blue Velvet can be watched as an expressionistic rendering of Jeffrey Beaumont's traumatic entry into adult life, where he finds out that people aren't noble and sex isn't simple. The Rotten Suburbia thing, hammered in the film's opening moments, is a red herring. I think Lynch is too smart and too sui generis in his worldview to think it's interesting to go after suburbia as a mythic ideal. For one thing, Blue Velvet's true target of fear/disillusionment (not the best way to put it) is more daringly and more mundanely (oh ha ha) the adult world itself. Decay happens everywhere, not just under pristine lawns. For another thing, we know what it looks like when Lynch ostensibly sets out to process his feelings about a place in an explicit manner - he had a shitty impression of Philadelphia and produced freaking Eraserhead. Blue Velvet's Lumberton is I think unimportant to the movie overall in that really it could've been set anywhere. Lynch grew up, I believe, somehwere similar, and I would imagine is just interested in and comfortable with that setting.
I just ran out of interesting things to say about Blue Velvet that aren't better served in context with our next film, and besides, more than any other work of Lynch's, this film has been watched, analyzed, and considered both well and poorly for some time. I doubt I have anything original worth adding to the discourse.
Labels: Film, Lynchathon
posted by medrawt at
21:13
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