Lynchathon III, Part III: Inland Empire, Conclusion

FINALLY.

Actually, I think I've pretty much sabotaged myself, and probably did so intentionally, by waiting so long to write my reaction to Inland Empire that I'm left without much of anything to say, but in a more justifiable sense than I would've had nothing to say right after seeing it.

I suppose it's convenient at this moment in his career to look at Lynch's oeuvre as a whole and momentarily pretend that he's not going to do anything in the future. I assume that's not the case; in spite of my various misgivings and difficulties with much of his work, I very much hope it's not the case. But what you get by pretending that Inland Empire is Lynch's farewell work is that it's very much a return to the beginning of his career, as though he'd been following a long creative loop away from the example of Eraserhead and finally made his way back to the beginning; back to home. Like Eraserhead, Inland Empire begins with what appears to be an intelligible plot and then dives headlong, deeper and deeper, into a pool of Lynchian filmic dreamspace. It's as difficult to grapple with as every intervening Lynch film combined, and it's twice the length of Eraserhead. (Also, both films took literally years to make, unlike the rest of his works; the ever-unfolding production schedule undoubtedly both stems from and feeds the dreamlike, elusive relationship with normal cinematic storytelling that binds these movies.)

While I wasn't in the best frame of mind to watch it, I was in a more receptive mood than I was for Eraserhead, which is part of why - despite the aformentioned length - I drew more from it and had a better experience. But perhaps more importantly, and if I were going to pretend that Lynch specifically learned something from his sojourn in the relatively more accessible territories he mined for the 25 years between his first film and his most recent one it would be this, Inland Empire presents us with an inscrutable structure and story but marries it to a very scrutable emotional core, based in Laura Dern's astounding performance. The performances in Eraserhead are effective, but they're as inscrutable and outside the waking experience of life as everything else in the movie; we can reconstruct what the main character is going through emotionally - the film is, after all, more or less a dramatization of what's in his head and his heart - but the performances aren't so viscerally engaging because the emotional experience is presented in a way that's detatched from metaphorical viscera (though not literal, gastrointestinal viscera, of course). Whatever Laura Dern's character (characters?) is going through during Inland Empire, she puts that emotional experience onscreen through her own work as much as the film around her dramatizes it; though, as in Wild at Heart, her performance is by the necessity of Lynch's script and his world somewhat off-kilter, it's off-kilter in a way that ties directly back to recognizable human behavior, or rather the way we're used to seeing recognizable human behavior portrayed by modern actors in the Western performance tradition, which is the method of performance I - and most of you! - recognize as "realistic" however artificial its tropes actually are.

Dern pulls the disparate strands together, whether she's playing what seems to be her actual character - a somewhat distant actress - or the character that actress plays, or one of the various mirrors and shadows of those women. It's in some ways one of the most impressive performances I've seen because it really has to stand on its own in a way that very performances do. Not to diminish the quality work done by the actors onscreen with her - it's not that her performance needs to stand alone the way a one-woman show/monologue does, it stands alone because it's the only thing we have to hang our hat on, the only thing that reaches out to the audience and says "here, you can use me, use this, as your entrance into this world." And as someone who's a sucker for good acting that's skating on the edge of near over-the top emotionalism, Dern makes a congenial Constant Companion through the impenetrable (to me, certainly) rooms the film travels through.

(Incidentally, since I spoke at some length about Dern's scorching presence in Wild at Heart, this is why it's all about the performance, and what makes it in some ways more impressive: I think Dern is more attractive as a mature woman than she was as a 21-year old or whatever she was back then, but her performance, and her sex scene with Justin Theroux, isn't burning-the-metaphorical-filmstock [Inland Empire was shot on digital video] hot the way almost every scene in Wild at Heart was because it's not that kind of movie and not that kind of character and so it doesn't call for that kind of performance.)

ANYWAY the point being that after Eraserhead, which was at most kind of an oblique film in emotional terms, Lynch went on to make a bunch of movies that, in tension with the received narrative about his work, are very accessible and recognizable emotionally, and actually wear their joy and sorrow and heartbreak and terror on their sleeve in a way that seems inaccessible simply because we're not used to movies where the emotional experience is so unfiltered, especially in an otherwise challenging context. Inland Empire then closes the (artifical, intellectual, critically-imposed) loop by bringing that heavy emotional attitude to the mystery and dreamstate of Eraserhead. That - the unfiltered, whether it be emotional or visual or structural - is really the throughline, I suppose, of what I've had to say about Lynch and what I ripped from David Foster Wallace's "behind-the-scenes" piece on the making of Lost Highway, that what we get in a Lynch film seems like a more or less unprocessed transference from the man's innermost brain to our screens. The structural conceits we're used to - plots, character arcs, orderly and clever structures - are the detritus of the way our brains help us to make sense of the stimulus around us, an often inescapable imposition of the higher consciousness on direct human experience, one that is arguable necessary for us to live the lives we do, but one which arguable shuts off some potentially valuable experiential real estate, if we can let ourselves go and just feel everything without organizing it. That's, from a different angle, what we're getting when we experience ecstasy in whatever form, be it religious, sexual, social, and of course chemical: a reprieve to some greater or lesser degree from the ongoing wear of having an evolved, social, human brain. Thinking becomes tiring without reprieve.

Of course the catch is that no trigger is universal; not every sexual encounter gives you that release, not every art form moves you in that way. I used to find something hair-raising and exuberant about elements of the Catholic mass when I was a boy, and I don't feel that any more. Music can take me there, and sometimes film or even more likely TV (because what's going to push me over that edge is likely to be a built up reaction to a character or an onscreen relationship, and TV gives me more time to build my own relationship with the people on screen, and more time for them to get into the depths of a character if that what they want to do). Most of Lynch's films, for me, miss the mark of pulling my non-cognitive trigger. There are moments, and in the case of Mulholland Drive (admittedly one of the more accessible Lynch films on a moment-to-moment basis) I'm wrapped up in that world with real investment (and again consider how that movie is tied together by a remarkable performance, or really two remarkable performances, by its central actress), but for the most part the presumably unfiltered products of Lynch's brain miss my personal mark.

But there's nobody doing what he does, that I'm aware of, certainly not with American prominence, neither in his most remote and inaccessible or most inviting and intellectually intelligible works, and I'm certainly a bigger Lynch fan than I expected to wind up being. He's a challenging artist, which is in itself something I respond to; I've said that a Spike Lee failure (and in my opinion there's a fair number of them) is more daring and interesting than most other people's successes, and while Lynch can't really be judged in those same terms, he's equally worthy of respect and consideration even at his most questionable moments. I can't think of a good conclusion here so I'm just going to stop.

But not before I leave you with the credits for Inland Empire. Just get up and go and feel something, for your sake and mine.

I run to the river.

Lynchaton III, Part II: Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive

So.

(This might get more spoiler-y than usual, or at the least, it's going to unfold the commonly understood explanation of "just what the fuck was going on" in Mulholland Drive, which I guess is like a spoiler for watching the film two or three times.)

(Also: I entirely refer to characters in Lost Highway by actor because I don't remember the character names, and because the notable thing in that film is that two actors play what ends up being, sort of, in some ways, the same character. I refer to the characters in Mulholland by character name because I recall them without having to refer to a castlist, and because the notable thing in that film is that Naomi Watts plays what appear to be, in some ways, two different characters.)

I was right to pull The Straight Story out of order because Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive really do share commonalities of style, theme, and structure, and really they stand together, and stand apart from the rest of Lynch's filmography.

Actually, let's break this down real fast: Lynch has made three films that were either written by other people or written by Lynch yet significantly "controlled" in script style by source material - The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story. The remainder of his work was either completely produced by Lynch or the result of a collaboration (Twin Peaks) or adaptation (Wild at Heart) that Lynch's personality dominated throughout the creative process. And in that group that I consider more or less Lynch's product from genesis to final cut, there are three subgroups: three works made consecutively that have relatively linear and comprehensible plots (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks), two works that at first seem to have linear and comprehensible plots but ultimately subvert that expectation (the two films under discussion here), and two films that are overtly dreamlike and most aggressively "Lynchian" from the get go (Eraserhead and Inland Empire).

Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive not only share a vague similarity in the structural confusion of their scripts, they have in common a theme that seems to animate that structural confusion: sexual jealousy. The details of how each film perverts your understanding of the narrative structure differ, but what really ties them together is that in a very real way it seems that the distorted structure is a result of sexual jealousy (and other stuff, but it's the emotion in common between the main characters). The emotional force of Bill Pullman and Naomi Watts contorts the fabric of reality. Now, in Mulholland Drive it seems clear that most of this stuff happens inside Naomi Watts' head, whereas in Lost Highway it all seems more or less real.

The blemish on the filmstock here is that Mulholland Drive was initially intended to be an ongoing TV show, and the majority of what's onscreen in the film was actually the pilot. When the project wasn't picked up, Lynch reshot some scenes and wrote a bunch of new ones to turn the whole thing into a movie. Now, all along, I've somewhat intentionally underread Lynch interviews and Lynch scholarship, so it's possible that I could have gathered a great deal more information about what was in the pilot and what was new for the film, and how much the overall conception changed from one project to the next. I kind of wanted to just see the films and experience them on their own, and suppress my natural urge to overread on a subject of new interest. I have a suspicion that the real structure of Mulholland Drive was conceived after the pilot was rejected, and that Lynch more or less intentionally drew inspiration from what he'd done in Lost Highway, though the execution is quite different. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, especially since Lost Highway is in my opinion quite the inferior film.

I mean, it's not bad or anything, but in comparison to Mulholland, which I think is a masterpiece, Lost Highway suffers. It's also the more difficult film to understand, as the final line of the film (which turns out to be the same of the first) upends what was already an overtly surreal film world. It sends you back looking for the hitch in time where the film kinked around on itself (or, you know, it would've done that if I'd enjoyed it enough to watch it immediately again, which I didn't). Lost Highway differs from Mulholland also in that it takes place in a world not only Lynchian but supernatural; things happen that cannot be explained away by the shifting narrative, whereas ultimately Mulholland can be easily understood in a realistic context - which should not take away from its magic. I'm not really sure what to say about Lost Highway other than rehashing its story, which isn't really interesting to me and not really why I bother to ramble on in these posts. But to return to what I wrote above, Mulholland Drive is a film where the force of a character's emotions (including sexual jealousy) drive her to murder (via hitman), then suicide, and in her last moments (falling, gasping into the pillow in the film's first moments) she dreams or desperately imagines everything that follows. The characters of Diane Selwyn's real life are reconfigured into an emotionally satisfying fantasy - not precisely wish fulfillment, but the self-satisfied fantasy of someone certain she's been wronged. The fantasy cannot hold, though, and grows progressively darker until "Betty" - Diane's alter ego in the fantasy - finds the dead body of a woman named Diane Selwyn, and not long thereafter the mysterious cowboy tells Betty it's time to wake up, and she does, and we see what led up to those final breaths into the pillow, as the real Diane fell apart.

But Lost Highway is more structurally daring, less easily explained, more sterotypically Lynchian. Bill Pullman's character appears to possibly murder his wife, and might have done so out of what seems like suspicions of infidelity, and then once sentenced to death row transforms himself into another man, played by Balthazar Getty, with a complete life of his own (but an incomplete memory). I'm honestly not sure whether Getty's character is meant to be diegetically real, and an actual transmigration of some sort took place, or if he's meant to be a fully realized fantasy brought on by extreme emotional duress, like the Diane/Betty dyad. I'm not really sure it matters, either, because I can't see how either possibility could make the film's pieces hook up as neatly as Mulholland's do. Balthazar Getty meets Bill Pullman's dead wife, but she's not her, she's her sister, (except there is no sister), and she turns out be everything Bill Pullman was afraid she was. Patricia Arquette ... doesn't quite make this all work. She's attractive enough to believe that men are going to be as drawn to her on first sight as they are, but not a good enough actress - in this role, at least, which let's be honest isn't what I'd call a rich or rewarding one - to sell the seduction necessary for us to believe they'd stick around and do what she tells them. (I should note that I thought she did a nice job in Flirting With Disaster, so it's not like I've got anything against her.) She just seems a little detached from everything, which I guess could come off as alluringly hard to reach, but for me at least comes off as kind of disinterested. On the other hand, her final line is effectively delivered, and effective; at what seems like the moment of sexual climax with Balthazar Getty, she leans down and whispers "You'll never have me," which is the heart of everything Bill Pullman was afraid of. And like the cowboy's gentle invitation for Diane Selwyn to wake, this is the invocation that returns Bill Pullman to Getty's body, so he can do whatever it is he does that brings us back to the beginning.

What Lost Highway lacks - aside from superior, magnetic performances, though Robert Blake is something awesome here - at least for me, is Mulholland Drive's rich, captivating visual imagery. The whole dream of the film gives us a rich tapestry not only of imagery but characters and behaviors and the totality of Diane Selwyn's dream is captivating for me, or to me. I've seen the film too many times, because I wrote a paper on its sound design in college, and had to watch it seven times in a row with nothing better than the occasional fast forwarding to get me to the points I wanted to see, because Lynch apparently doesn't trust DVDs with chapter divisions. But I still think it's a masterpiece, Lynch's most intoxicating and successful film, at least for people like me. Maybe that's in part because it just looks better, for what are likely reasons of technology and the quality of DVD transfers, but Blue Velvet, on DVD at least, seems flat by comparison to the lush and inviting colors - and imagery - onscreen in Mulholland. And invited in I'm completely given up to the weird Hollywood of Diane Selwyn's imagination and the ultimate tragedy it reveals.

By comparison Lost Highway is alternately shadowy and kind of dull, and the Lynchian affect of the performances seems here more narcotized and less genuinely odd. Putting aside the explicitly surreal work of Eraserhead and Inland Empire - coming soon to a blog post near you, since I already saw it a couple of weeks ago - I think the success of Lynch's more "realistic" films, at the least superficially realistic, is correlated with how closely they track to something like a severely tweaked verisimilitude. In Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive we're mostly watching strange behavior in a fairly recognizable world; in Wild at Heart and Lost Highway we're watching in some ways less odd people in an odder world - or we're watching equally odd people who seem less odd by comparison to their surroundings - and unfortunately part of the oddity of those films becomes a decreased focus on the characters. However off-kilter Jeffrey Beaumont and Frank and Betty Elms and Adam Kesher may be as people, they're full people, whereas Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty are barely character sketches of jealousy and addled lust, respectively. Lost Highway appears superficially "realistic" - by Lynch's standards, at any rate - but is really a long step towards the nightmare logic of Eraserhead. I don't know if Lynch is incapable or merely, so far, disinclined to marry the more extreme elements of his imaginative superstructure with the more interesting depths with which he can endow his characters, but perhaps he believes or recognizes that in some sense those impulses are ultimately incompatible. Real people can be incomprehensible, but people in dreams are outside the ken of the waking.

Since I'm sort of trailing into babbledom, I should stop, because I've basically exhausted what I had to say about Lost Highway, and while I have a great deal more that I could say, both inquisitive and laudatory, about Mulholland Drive, I think I'll let this end here.

Silencio.

Oh, Hi There

Been busy personally, professionally, mentally ... I've had the next two films in my final Lynchathon push in the apartment for a week and haven't watched either one. I'm basically working, coming home, going to the gym, watching basketball, staying up way too late to take advantage of my having gone to the gym, and then doing it all again and again and again.

Some brief thoughts:

Bulls-Celtics has got to be the best NBA playoff series ever in which neither team had a remote possibility of even making it to the NBA finals. It's astoundingly good and entertaining. There will be a seventh game. In the six games so far, there have been two single overtime games, one double overtime game, and one triple overtime game. There have never been so many overtime periods, or games with overtimes, in a playoff series before. I of course want the Celtics to win, and I'm not sure I can even bear to watch game 7 because of it (though of course I almost certainly will) but I almost don't care who wins the series, I just want to watch as much of it as I can. As weird as it sounds, right now these teams are both playing ridiculously good basketball considering that they're somehow overmatched against each other; the Bulls simply don't have the talent and skills (YET - get back to me in a year or two) to hang with the Celtics, but the Celtics are too injured and thin on the bench to be able to hang with the Bulls. I just watched a triple overtime game and then spent five minutes on the phone with my dad detailing my theories about whether or not a player's foot was on the three point line when he made a clutch shot. (My answer: it wasn't when he began taking the shot, but it was when he finished taking it.)

Also of some currency; there was just a training session and test for a lot of the staff working for my employers on a specific facet of what we do. The test was admittedly, by its designers, intended to be easy and passable, and the training session was geared specifically towards the knowledge necessary to pass the test. (Important clarification: I'm, for these purposes, on the QC team [three people], which had to take the test, because we have to be able to QC the work performed by the actual frontline staff [about twenty-five people, more or less].) The person running the training program told me that I had the high score. Apparently a bunch of the frontline staff did poorly on the test. Like, a bunch of them. Now:

I've gotten very good, for a variety of reasons, at reflexively deflecting apparent high achievement on my part when compared to subpar achievement from others; I'm quite facile at finding flaws in methodology and process and explaining away other people's poor performance. Partly because while I'm intellectually confident, I don't think I'm conceited; partly because I don't want people to think I'm conceited; partly because I think some of my deflections are accurate; partly because I honestly believe that a lot of what people perceive as evidence of my intelligence isn't actually evidence of my intelligence. It's evidence of my ability to notice, absorb, and retain much more information across a much broader spectrum of topics than the average person. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if curiosity and strong memory were highly correlated with other traits that I consider more authentically "intelligence," because that's a cluster of skills that complement each other well, but I think I'm smart because I can rapidly assimilate new information that's not just factual but procedural or argumentative, I can perceive different angles from which to view a problem, I'm good at disassembling arguments [better at that than creating them, which is why I hoped to become the poor man's Sidney Morgenbesser], and a bunch of other things, some of which I only notice by comparison to other people, like - in the training session for this test - how frustrated and confused a lot of people seemed to be by having a process they understood in one context presented to them in another context. The point being that people who don't know me that well think I'm intelligent because I know who John Jay was, whereas I don't understand why everyone else who took U.S. History in high school [which is to say: everyone] doesn't remember who John Jay was, since he certainly came up once or twice.

ANYWAY the point being that I can see a whole bunch of reasons why my getting the high score despite first attempting to learn the necessary information a couple of weeks before the test, while people who'd been actually doing the job for years performed poorly, isn't actually a valid indication of our relative ability to perform the task at hand in a real world situation. I've thought of lots of them. Because frankly it's sort of frightening that I should have done better on the test than someone who's had that job for thirteen years. I actually didn't want to be the high score on the test; I wanted to do very well, for a variety of reasons, but I really wanted for entirely selfless reasons to have a score that looked good but wasn't as good as the scores achieved by people who'd been performing the relevant tasks for thirteen years. It's, honestly, kind of scary to contemplate, because those are the people who are actually doing the work, and have been considered competent (well, there are issues there, but) to do the work for years, in some cases. But here we are. (By the way: I scored a 92, so it's not like I rocked the shit out of it. I've actually got a good guess as to what questions I missed and what questions the experienced employees missed; I bet I missed a few of the questions that required knowing all the many details of abstract policy - who qualifies for what deduction - that I could only partially stuff into my head because some of them are honestly so freaking arbitrary, while they missed the complex and crafty calculations stuff that I found easy because all I had to do was follow the damn direections.) Sigh.

Lynchathon III, Part I: The Straight Story

"What kind of pickup was it?"

That line is the setup for the biggest laugh in The Straight Story, and maybe the biggest laugh I've ever gotten from a Lynch film.

I pulled The Straight Story our of order, watching it ahead of Lost Highway, because of an idea that Highway and Mulholland Drive are giong to have significant commonalities that aren't shared with the intervening film.

Multiple commenters have referred to The Straight Story as un-Lynchian in subject matter and even much less than normally Lynchian in presentation, with punning nods to the layered meaning of the title, one of them supposedly being that in telling the story of Alvin Straight, Lynch has also chosen to "play it straight" for once in his career.

Ehhh, not so much. For one thing, there's a reading of the film - that I won't go into, but you can find the link on the movie's Wikipedia page if you really care - that puts together a fair amount of information to suggest that another layer of the film's title is deceitful: Alvin Straight, through the movie, tells various strangers pieces of the story of his life, but the pieces don't actually fit. When you go back and reconsider the film with all the information you have by its end, contradictions emerge: the story Straight tells doesn't add up - it isn't (excuse me) straight. He's eliding a great deal, especially, this reading has it, his own agency in a domestic tragedy that he speaks of relatively early on, in which "someone should've been watching," but wasn't. The someone was him.

I suspect that this reading is accurate and that the film's script can in fact be decoded for clues to understand more about who Alvin Straight really was, and I suspect that such detective work would be more fruitful than in other of Lynch's works, but I think it's equally beside the point. The purpose of The Straight Story's narrative isn't to provide a mystery for the attentive viewer to unlock - to challenge the implicit flatness of the film's title, affect, and Iowan landscape - but like everything else Lynch has done, it's foremost to provide an experience for the viewer to take in as he goes along. Alvin Straight's contradictory reminiscences, if detected, create a subcurrent of unease that, really, is incidental compared to the more central mystery of the film. Why does Straight decide that he absolutely must journey under his own power to see his brother, even though the limitations of his own power (he cannot drive, he will not accept a ride, he does not care for public transportation) mean that an automobile trip of one day's hard drive takes him six weeks atop a lawn mower (a lawn mower slowed down [!] by the weight of dragging Straight's jury-rigged trailer). The orneriness of an old country man doesn't really suffice for answer, here.

Now, it's necessary to observe that the film is "based on a true story," because there was a real Alvin Straight who spent weeks atop a lawn mower travelling from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit a brother laid low by a stroke. I'm not especially interested in trying to find out how much of the script's detail was drawn directly from the true story (although supposedly the film shoot did follow the actual path the real Straight took), and I imagine that a lot of it is fabricated. Straight was already dead when the movie was made, and while the screenwriters interviewed his family members, they apparently didn't really know much of what transpired, either. (The Straight Story is the first and only Lynch film not written by the director himself, but one of its cowriters, Mary Sweeney, was Lynch's longtime editor, producer, and [romantic] partner; they married and divorced in 2006.) Perhaps I'm wrong and indeed the negative tones - both overt and covert - came from the family, but there are some revelations in the film that they probably could not have known. In any case, I would argue that no matter how much the film's story diverges from the reality, it isn't important; narrative and emotional truth in fiction is not the same as factual accuracy, and often the twain must part.

So back to the experience:

The Straight Story is beautiful. I was moved. I wept. Granted, it's a calendrical period of fraught emotion for me, but I may have never cried so early into a piece of art as I did at The Straight Story. It was the look on the face of the old shopkeeper as Straight mowed his way, molasses slow, out of town. He's sad, and afraid, for his friend and for himself, and the lonely vulnerability of the elderly is the sort of thing that can get to me reliably. (Which is why in addition to it being awesome I also found Bubba Ho-Tep so moving.)

Old people is the key; the film is beautiful and simple and despite some signature flourishes from Lynch's creative personality, it does appear sort of un-Lynchian, and those flourishes are relatively understated. And it's because, I think, the film's subject matter doesn't require an overt imposition of Lynch's personality to get us to see whatever it is Lynch sees or wants us to see in his movies, because the film's subject is inherently Lynchian and strange. Consider first the plot, again: an old man builds a trailer from scrap metal, attaches it to a damned riding mower, and drives a few hundred miles, at a pace you could keep up with by means of a low-key jog. It's just strange. But consider, more importantly, the elderly: old people are Lynchian in and of themselves. The work required to put us into Lynch's head - or, if you like, the experience of being in Lynch's head that comes from watching one of his movies - is generally a reordering of our cognitive processes, showing us new things or old things in a new light. Lynch's worldview is accessible (usually) but unusual (always). And yet old people are like Lynchian people: their preoccupations are strange, their language curious, their pace mystifyingly slow, their gestures and facial expressions bizarre and stylized and out of sorts with our experience of the world.

I'm obviously way overplaying this point, but think about it seriously: think about all the weird thumbs-up-ing and overlong grinning that marks the characters in Twin Peaks, and how weird if endearing that is (recognizable gestures of approval that are stretched out of normalcy into a sort of uncomfortable otherness), and then think about the really really old waiter who's apparently a vessel for the mysterious giant figure, and how when he does it, it seems more natural than when Dale Cooper or the sherriff does it, and think about why. It's because he's really old! Old people do things like that! So do small children - who are also quite Lynchian, which is really the point, I guess. At the margins of everyday society you find entire age cohorts of people who have either not yet been socialized into understanding the appropriate and expected natural behavior of a normal person, or have moved on and been passed by. The people who are currently old and weird by virtue of their oldness weren't weird when they were my age, they're weird because society changed (or they changed) as they aged out of the mainstream; in part I think this is because of the various lamentable degradations in mental acuity that so often come with advanced age*, and in part I think this is just a fact of changing social customs.**

So a lot of the things that seem Lynchian in their out-of-placeness about character behavior in a "normal" Lynch film are natural and don't need to be imposed as part of a directorial vision because he's dealing with a main character who's already kind of prone to seeming a little askew from what the median audience member recognizes as everyday behavior. (I stumbled upon what appears to be a copy of the original script online, including scenes which weren't in the final cut, and in one Straight's daughter asks why he's gluing pesos onto the band of his hat. His reply: "Ballast." Awesome.)

I'm, as alluded to above, overarguing this point, but it's because a lot of what I've read about the film highlights its curiosity in the middle of Lynch's ouevre, whereas I felt that aside from a much more linear and graspable plot than any Lynch film except The Elephant Man (and you could say Dune, which wanted to have a linear and graspable plot, but didn't), it was quite of a piece with the rest of them. More "Lynchian" to me, honestly, than The Elephant Man was. Again, if you get away from the notion that Lynch is putting us on or putting on a show or in any way doing something calculated with the presentation and meaning of his images, and instead just embrace the idea that he's more or less the guy he seems to be, and he's just (I say "just": he's of course and obviously a great technician and a supremely skilled artist who's almost always in command of his craft, however you feel about it) ... he's just putting images into the camera that match the images in his head when he closes his eyes (or keeps them open), the Otherness of Lynch's worlds fades into just another askew perspective, maybe more askew than others, and The Straight Story is askew like the rest.

But also, and most imortantly, I implore you, Reader(s), it's lovely. OK, I've got a thing for vulnerably sad old people, but really: Old people are Lynchian, yes, and they're also sad, yes, but they're also kind of beautiful, and whatever wickedness he may be trying to atone for on his ridiculous pilgrimage, Alvin Straight is beautiful, (played beautifully by Richard Farnsworth, who was incredibly ill during the filming and eventually took his life), and the film is beautiful. You should all see it. All of you. We should all ride for six weeks to go see Harry Dean Stanton on a beleagured front porch, and then sit down and look up at the stars.

* Comedy derives from truth, right? I assume that greater familiarity with technology from a young age will make this less apt as a comedic touchstone going forward (in terms of mere old-age confusion vs. genuine senility), but I giggled for a reason. Plus it's sweet when it could've been mean; sometimes the claws are better when you don't show them.

** Like in my puzzlement over prior modes of emotional display here.

Lynchathon II: Twin Peaks

One casualty of my schizoid attitude towards blogging (I must write things here/I hate the things I write here/No one cares what I write here/I feel an obligation to try and fail to entertain the people who read the things I write here) is that I didn't blog about Twin Peaks back when (or just after) I actually watched it, which at this point is over a month ago. As I worked through the series I had all sorts of thoughts and reactions, but I guess I'll just (!) confine myself to some bullet points.

BULLET --> I highly recommend that anyone reading this check out the first season of the show. If you dig it, move on to the second season. At whatever point you start feeling like maybe you should get off the train because it seems like derailing is imminent, trust your instincts and get off, because actually the derailing happened before you noticed it. I'd be glad to fill anybody in on what happens after you save your time and patience by taking the remainder of Season 2 off your Netflix queue. That's sort of like the advice my friend Phil gave me when he saw me reading the first volume of the Dune series back in college: "Stop with this one. Trust me, don't go forward. I'll tell you whatever you want to know, but for your own sake, don't pick up the next books." I ignored his recommendations, and people, I was Wrong.

BULLET --> Of course, David Lynch directed the unutterably bad adaptation of Dune.

BULLET --> Special Agent Dale Cooper is one of the greatest characters in the history of filmed media. From his introduction (somewhere between ten and twenty minutes into the pilot) he grabbed me, and I have a hard time imagining anyone wouldn't find him charming. He's actually the best explanation for the fact that

BULLET --> Season 1 of Twin Peaks was ridiculously popular. Watching the show almost twenty years later, the idea that a massive viewing audience tuned in for something that weird just blows my mind. My friend Fay suggests that it's because TV was super shitty back then, so very weird but good shows had a better shot at mass success. I also imagine there was a lot of misunderstanding the show in the same way people misread Blue Velvet and make it all about "darkness in the heart of small town America." But I think a lot of it had to do with Dale Cooper, addressing the mysterious Diane by dictaphone, and exulting about "these magnificent trees".

BULLET --> Dale Cooper is played by Kyle McLachlan, who also played Paul Atreides in Dune (ugh) and Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet (yay). And actually, Cooper is sort of very like what would happen if Jeffrey Beaumont grew up and became an FBI agent; there's a kind of wide-eyed gumption that the characters share, a fascination for the world and an endearingly sincere, Hardy Boys kind of approach to life and mystery. Cooper seems like what would happen if Jeffrey matured, saw the world, and came to terms with the things he learned about himself in Blue Velvet.

BULLET --> Cooper also reminds me a lot of my aforementioned Phil, completing the little nexus here of mental associations. This is the first time, hopefully the last, and certainly the best possible situation in which I might observe a character in a David Lynch work and think "Hey, I know somebody sort of like that." I mean this in the best possible way, but Phil also has an enthusiastically Hardy Boysish side.

BULLET --> In the things I've read about Lynch, the Hardy Boysishness (and I wish I had a better way to describe it) seems like an undersold element of his aesthetic. David Foster Wallace gestured towards it in his behind the scenes look at the filming of Lost Highway when he observed that it's hard to know whether or not to take Lynch seriously when he says, apparently unironically, things like "Golly" and "Terrif." I presume it's (almost?) entirely sincere, because that kind of American Boy of the Fifties thing is such a big part of Lynch's work. Smiling men who love coffee and give each other thumbses up (which, because it's Lynch, go on a little too long to be truly comfortable), grown up American boys who read adventure comics and never leave home without a pocketknife and dreamed of finding an old Indian arrowhead in the backyard. Consider that (miniscule spoiler) two malevolent spirits at the heart of the Twin Peaks story turn out to be named MIKE and BOB and BOB, in particular, is a greasy middle-aged guy in a denim jacket, the sort of guy who looks like he might brain you with a tire iron behind the gas station and take your money, or leer at children when they make too much noise in the general store. He's creepy in a completely unassuming Americana kind of way, and it's not because Lynch is indicting or exposing the whole gestalt of that aesthetic, it's because he's telling a story he wants to tell (which involves good and evil and mysterious spiritual forces, or in the case of Blue Velvet, about adolescence and corruption) and he's put it into a setting he enjoys or finds interesting (the rural northwest), not because the setting inspires some dissective urge in him, but because he likes it. Again, Lynch's idea of exposing how bad a place can be is Eraserhead, which is among other things about how he hated living in Philadelphia.

BULLET --> The devolution of the show's quality over the second season is pretty sad, both in the filming and the writing. Lynch's idiosyncratic filmic gestures are always motivated by something which caught his painterly eye - even late in the series, you can find meaninglessly meaningful cuts like one that stays with me in particular, where in one instant we're close up on a character's frightening grin and in the next frame we're looking dead on at the side of a pie that's been cut into. The crust and top frame the huckleberry (or whatever) inside like lips frame teeth. It has no story importance, but you walk away for the first time thinking "Wow, it never before occurred to me that from a certain angle, a pie with a few slices missing looks like a smile." In place of that, though, as the series goes on, the camera starts lingering on objects of no especial visual interest, like it's just killing time and trying to seem portentous via the properties of a slow zoom. Look at the black telephone, audience, look at it! It's not ringing! This script was SHORT SO LOOK AT THE PHONE. Also the characters start getting served more and more poorly. By the end of the series, the Indian sheriff's deputy Hawk is talking about the stories of his People and quoting cheesy parables; at the beginning of the series he said something that sounded like a hoary proverb about love, and then instantly clarified: "That's a poem I wrote for my girlfriend: [Girlfriend's Name], Ph.D, Brandeis."

BULLET --> A surprising portion of the cast doesn't actually seem to be any good at acting.

BULLET --> A surprising portion of the cast is sufficiently awesome enough at acting that I can't figure out why they aren't in more things.

BULLET --> I don't even know what to say about the movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, other than to note that now I understand why it got booed at Cannes.

BULLET --> If people who make a film actually haven't really thought about what they need to do to make the film work, it's going to be apparent pretty quickly; a film is only so long, you know. If people making a continuing dramatic TV show haven't really thought about what they need to do to make the show work, it can take a whole bunch of episodes before that becomes apparent. I'm not interested in dissecting the contributions and failings of Lynch vs. Mark Frost vs. the involvement of the network in the implosion of Twin Peaks, but these were not people who knew what they were doing. These were not people who thought about how to tell a compelling dramatic story over the course of 30+ hours, nor about how dramatic TV might require different rhythms and techniques than dramatic film, nor about how to engage and satisfy the ongoing requirements of an audience that comes to you with open hearts and willing eyes once a week. I'm not a huge fan of J.J. Abrams these days, and he royally frakked up Alias, but he said of the pilot to that show [paraphrasing]: "I knew I'd eventually want to start taking the show in an overt science fiction direction, but I hadn't worked out the details of it yet, so I made sure to seed some unexplained science fiction-y looking stuff in the pilot episode so that when we returned to the more out-there concepts two months later, the viewers wouldn't be asking where the hell it all came from." That's a guy who's thought more about how to approach making a TV show than the Twin Peaks team did. David Foster Wallace wrote that he thought people became dissatisfied with the show (among other reasons) because (mild spoilers) our moral sensibilities require that Laura Palmer's scuzzy life had to be connected to her death. Maybe, but more to the point it felt like a lot of time had been wasted; it's one thing to say (and accept) that the murder investigation is a MacGuffin because what we're really watching is Dale Cooper interacting with a mysterious set of compelling characters, but it's quite another to say that the murder investigation is a red herring because what really happened to Laura Palmer had nothing to do with what we saw and loved in the first season but is in fact vitally important because the series turns out to be concerned with elemental forces of good and evil (which to be fair is something alluded to about midway through the first season, but doesn't come clearly to the fore until much later).

BULLET --> Goodnight, Diane.

Lynchathon I, Part II: Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, and Being Uncomfortably Turned On

The truth is that Lynch's stuff so far hasn't been the best blog-fodder because I don't generally have all that much to say beyond an uninvested critical reaction; there's very little yet that I react emotionally to, or am inspired by in some direction or another. These are by and large good movies - The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet are both at least near-masterpieces in my estimation - but they're not really in my wheelhouse and there generally isn't something I can latch onto as a point of self-indulgent departure. I'm not interested, e.g., in telling you whether or not Bones is a good show - watch an episode and decide for yourself. I write flabby and undisciplined rambles like that because I'm interested in some facet of the show or want to work out some thoughts I have about it beyond the thumbs up or down, and Lynch's first five movies don't dig into my brain in that way, the notable exceptions being the apocalyptic badness of Dune, and various aspects of Wild at Heart.

A lot of what's interesting to me in this film is the comparison it provides with Blue Velvet. Eraserhead was bizarre and completely introverted artistically, The Elephant Man was a well-selected project that nonetheless was someone else's and the least Lynch-like Lynch so far, Dune an ill-begotten catastrophe, and then Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart are near-accessible films with discernable plots and characters, but in a decidedly Lynchian mode. Here is where I recognize (and appreciate) the artist behind Mulholland Drive.

The apt comparison between these two films is once again David Foster Wallace's (all DFW references are cribbed from a several months' old rereading of his "on the set" piece about the making of Lost Highway, which was collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's a great essay as well as a great exegesis of Lynch's major artistic accomplishments as of the mid-90s): Wild at Heart suffers in comparison to Blue Velvet because where the earlier film had distinctly drawn characters - and in Jeffrey Beaumont a relatively grounded protagonist with whom the audience could ally their emotional responses - Wild at Heart has fuzzily drawn characterish entities that are nearly impossible to relate to as recognizable human beings. Good or bad, they're all as inexplicably weird as Frank Booth. Wild at Heart actually has a more conventionally explicable and digestible plot (barring the wizard of Oz riff/detours). A getaway/chase/road movie winds up feeling kind of aimless even before Sailor and Lula (yes, those are their names) wind up stalled and temporarily doomed in Big Tuna, Texas.

There's an interesting, unsettling relationship between two scenes of sexual violation in these movies. Blue Velvet famously has Jeffrey hiding in a closet, watching Frank rape Dorothy. There's a lot of setup that went into the scene; Jeffrey snuck into Dorothy's apartment, watched her come home, watched her undress, and just when it's getting a little too Porky's, she realizes that she's not alone and goes after him with a knife. With Jeffrey at her mercy, Dorothy first chooses to humiliate him by ordering him to undress, duplicating and reversing the violation he perpetrated on her, and then she starts to treat him (still rather demandingly, still with the knife) as a lover. Whether this was a change in Dorothy's mood or if the initial (justifiably) vengeful humiliation was always meant as prelude to sex I have no idea. Dorothy's perhaps a naturally kinky lady, but she's also in a very bad place emotionally and it's clearly fucking up her sexual proclivities - there are people who like violent sex for its own sake, let's say, but I think Lynch wants us to think that Dorothy likes Jeffrey to hit her because her son is gone. Maybe I'm way wrong and oversimplifying, but it's definitely the case that sweet young naive Jeffrey thinks that's the case.

Anyway, after the foreplay but well before the consummation of Jeffrey and Dorothy's affair, Frank comes banging on the door and Jeffrey is sent back to the closet. Frank comes in, demands a drink, and then has sex with Dorothy. It's clearly rape, and it's also clearly a longstanding arrangement; Frank is verbally threatening but doesn't really resort to physical violence, because the threat of hurting her family is sufficiently coercive. He has a particular game he wants to play and she knows what Frank expects of her. Jeffrey watches all this in fascinated horror and, of course, horror at his fascination. He's in some degree titillated, which is discomfiting for the viewer because Jeffrey kind of is the viewer and we'd rather not be confronted with the fact that watching a sex act under these circumstances could be titillating while also morally repulsive.

But now we've got Wild at Heart, and Lula, who's just cottoned on to the fact that she's pregnant, is holed up sick in the motel room in Big Tuna while Sailor is out doing whatever, and Willem Defoe comes in playing the character of Bobby Peru, and he violates her, again without becoming physically abusive but backed by the verbal threat of physical harm (which he's clearly capable of). He touches Lula sexually and insists that she say "Fuck me." When she tries to pull away he grabs her and threatens to kill her, then continues to insist that she say "Fuck me" while continuing to touch her. It's deeply unpleasant to watch. And then Lula makes a gesture with her hand that we've already seen, earlier in the film, to indicate sexual pleasure, and she does in fact moan "Fuck me." At which point Bobby Peru jumps back, makes a joke, and leaves.

I had to stop the DVD and process that for a while. While nobody has any fun playing misery poker, it was simultaneously true that (a) intellectually, I believe what Frank did to Dorothy was much worse than what Bobby did to Lula, and (b) I was much more disturbed by the Bobby/Lula scene than the Frank/Dorothy one. So why?

First because we know Lula better. The scene happens past the halfway point of the movie and she's been on screen for much of that time. Dorothy is still a new character to us when she's raped, and we're less invested in her. Second because Lula absolutely loves Sailor with a crazy devotion and what Bobby Peru takes from her is an emotional violation as well as a physical one; she's clearly horrified that she could feel physically pleasure (and she clearly does) at Bobby's unwelcome touch, and that she emotionally may have betrayed Sailor somehow. Frank uses Dorothy's emotions to get what he wants, but he doesn't demand anything of her emotionally other than that she play the role he requires; he wants her to act, not to feel. Third because while identifying with Jeffrey's horror and a little bit of arousal in that closet was a discomfiting feeling, Jeffrey still provides a distance, a buffer, from what's going on. We're actually not really watching a rape (although we totally are), we're watching a guy watching a rape. In Wild at Heart it's just us in the room with Bobby and Lula in a scene that started with goofy piss jokes and then got real weird on us real fast. And Fourth because, honestly, the scene is kind of sexy, which is the really daring AND upsetting thing about it (and on the DVD Laura Dern is still clearly a little amazed if not that she was asked to play that scene, which apparently didn't really exist in the script, and one gets the sense that it took her a while to get OK with it). The Frank/Dorothy rape is shot from a distance and dispassionately, whereas Bobby/Lula is shot up close, sweaty, sun coming through the slats of the window, insert shots of hands and lips and people shaking while standing perfectly still. Which works - and the scene, and Lula's journey through it are both "believable" inside the film's world - because, frankly, Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie and there's no way around it. I've now seen six David Lynch films and this scene - two people in a room, no props, no violence, no funny sound design or prosthetics other than Bobby Peru's grotesque dentures - is easily the most disturbing thing, emotionally, that he's put me through. More than the Frank/Dorothy rape (gasmask and all), more than Jeffrey acquiescing to Dorothy's request that he hit her during sex, more than Naomi Watts' character masturbating while crying in Mulholland Drive...if there's a place where Lynch's introverted psyche does have a sympathetic resonance with mine, it's in his presentation of sexuality; not that I identify with it - whatever weird shit I may or may not be into, Dear Reader, I assure you with all honesty that it's not nitrous oxide, or crying, or blue velvet bathrobes, or bad teeth - but that something in me is going to pick up on these vibrations, whereas all the bulbous growths in Eraserhead and Dune just make me glance at something else. I'd already figured this out from Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet but I was completely unprepared and unarmed for the possibility that I'd find something like the Bobby/Lula scene hot. You win, David Lynch, you made me embarrassed of myself.

And since I'm arriving at this point, I'm going to shift gears and ignore the ways in which that scene totally fucks with the rest of my reaction to the film, and reiterate against my better judgment that Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie. I can't overstate this; it's astounding. I really shouldn't talk about this because I'm quite possibly guaranteeing that if I ever want a girlfriend again I should keep her from reading this paragraph. What's especially funny is that I think Dern is someone who's steadily grown into her looks; she's got sort of a funny, equine face, but I think it looks more attractive now than it did when she was a teenager in Blue Velvet, and she's still not completely there in Wild at Heart, when she was in her very early twenties I think. So it was weird watching the movie and registering that in her appearance Dern wasn't even as attractive as she was going to be later in life, and nonetheless she's turning in what is absolutely the hottest performance I've ever seen. It actually made me reflect that there are very few honestly sexy sustained performances from women in film (I'm abstaining from a consideration of male performance). There are lots of performances by actresses who are sexy, but few really sexy performances. And actually I've only seen two that can compare: Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and the young lady in the bookstore in The Big Sleep, but she's only got one scene to work her magic with Humphrey Bogart. Note that, on watching this scene in Film 101 in college, my friends and I readily agreed with no debate that it was the sexiest thing we'd ever seen. The key, I guess, is that actresses appear to tend to play "seductress" when they're supposed to be sexy. They're vamping for male attention, which certainly has its distinct charms, but instead consider that bookstore employee or Marisa Tomei in ...Devil... - they don't need to seduce anyone, they're incredibly attractive people who know that they're attractive AND most crucially they're unabashedly sexual beings, and therefore completely free not to try and turn on their scene partner (and thus the viewer) but rather completely free to be turned on. It's so simple I can't believe I never noticed this before watching Wild at Heart; Laura Dern melts my brain because I completely believed that she was turned on for most of the movie, which is a thing I've almost never believed of any actress for more than five minutes at a time, in a real movie or a pornographic one for that matter. Every shoulder shrug and neck stretch and balance shift and hand gesture screams arousal. If I'd seen this movie at twelve I would either have been desperately afraid of it or sprouted considerable chest hair. It's not nearly as good as Blue Velvet, but it made me think more and has stuck with me harder, despite the shitty ending and attendant weirdness. Now I just need to spend the rest of my life pretending not to be hopelessly infatuated with a Laura Dern performance from twenty years ago and I'll be all set.

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.