David Lynch - Classic or Dud

Going to watch Straight Story again this week.

yeah that's definitely an interesting take and has made me keen to see it again. cheers for the link.

You definitely need to show his early animations. "Six People Getting Sick" and "The Alphabet". This is a good source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Films_of_David_Lynch

Plus "The Cowboy and the Frenchman" is on it, which I remember was pretty funny.

I have my full list of viewings in a text file at home (god, i just realized i'm getting old because a teenager probably would have put it on google drive or something. my flesh...is decaying...my face...the wrinkles widen...*close-up of flame*), but the first night is going to be Six People Getting Sick, The Alphabet, The Grandmother, the Amputee, and then Eraserhead. I'm trying to straight-up chronological, as much as I can. Once it gets into the 90s and 2000s I'm going to have to be a little bit more selective, though. It's already at 13 nights, 2+ hours each, and that's with leaving out some things.

My main dilemma is whether to show the pilot ep. of Twin Peaks (American version), pilot episode (Intl. version that has the weird grafted on "ending"), or Fire Walk with Me.

I'm already planning on showing a few related clips (the coffee commercials, maybe the SNL sketch with Kyle MacLachlan and Phil Hartman doing a hilarious Leland), so showing both the pilot episode + Fire Walk with me would be overkill.

but but but you gotta! both the pilot and fwwm are essential documents, much more so than the related ephemera.

i don't know why i'm worrying about it anyway, by the 7th night of the series it's just going to be me, alone

I'm kinda leaning toward the Pilot only, and maybe just the American version. The thing is, both Fire Walk with Me and the intl. version of the pilot would reveal the Bob/Leland connection, and that might the entire show for people who haven't seen it yet.

fair enough. fwwm is probably my least favorite of lynch's feature length films, so if you gotta cut one...

Missing words in my posts, case log #2134:

forgot to include the word "ruin" between "might" and "the entire show"

so, i'm still working my way through his oeuvre, chronologically. last night was Hotel Room (1993), next week is Lost Highway.

Hotel Room. made for HBO, 3 episodes (the first two are 30 minutes, the last is 40). Lynch directed the first and last. Each episode takes place in the same hotel room (and the outside hallway), but with a different cast (except for the bellboy, who is the same age and has the same appearance even though the three episodes span 60 years of time). The middle episode has some random director that they brought in at the last minute, and it's not worth mentioning. the first is compelling in its own way and has a really nice performance from harry dean stanton.

but the third episode, "black out"...very much worth watching. it takes place in 1936, and crispin glover is just fantastic in it. he plays a husband from oklahoma that's shepherding his mentally disturbed wife in a trip to NYC to visit a doctor. they talk and talk. it's wonderful. check out the first episode if you have time, but if not, invest 40 minutes in this, it's worth it if you're a lynch fan (skip to 53:40 for the third episode):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI_I6ewm-FY

and if you're concerned about the quality of the video/audio, the youtube clip is about as good as it gets. it was released on VHS only, never on DVD (at least in the US), and it's long out of print.

alicia witt is so fuckin good in that

This doc is pretty good (NB: I'm only 10 mins in):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td5u4gW0g54

that lumiere short is seriously one of the most impressive things he's done, and the best short in that "lumiere and company" film for sure. i also fondly recall the one by idrissa ouedraogo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bFITC5Kb5g

xpost

great doc! I hadn't seen that one before. It is interesting to see Lynch asked some difficult questions and get challenged on some of his answers.

is that the one where he talks about "the eye of the duck"?

I don't like wind on my collarbone.

xpost it is!

That eye of the duck stuff is amazing. Slow and fast rooms. "Maybe an empty room is 2. A person is a 7. Fire/electricity takes it up to 9..."

You guys, that is just standard TM talk... :-\

what's TM?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_Meditation

Does TM really talk about the eye of the duck?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s

i imagine that's pretty much the level of discourse you're going to get at those TM conferences that david lynch frequents

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03d114j/The_Sound_of_Cinema_The_First_Time_with_David_Lynch/

nice show about sounds which influenced him as he grew up.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnsD7gJIgAAMgyq.jpg

DL on Eraserhead and Philly

It was a film that was inspired by the city of Philadelphia, and it’s an industrial world. It’s a smokestack-industry world. It’s factory-worker homes tucked away out of time. It has a certain feel, and the sounds have to marry to that feel, and [sound editor] Alan Splet and I just would work until we got the thing to feel correct.

I went there a couple of years ago, and the city is completely different. It felt very normal to me, not like it was then. It was brighter and cleaner and it had graffiti. And graffiti has ruined the world....

It’s defaced the beauty of the architecture, and you can’t film anywhere without the patinas on the bricks on the buildings. It’s been ruined. It happened in all the places I already love, like factories and railroad lines and bridges. All these places have been so badly defaced.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/david-lynch-interview-eraserhead-midnight-movies.html

“Not that it should surprise anyone who’s seen how Lynch depicts ostensibly idyllic small-town America, but the director’s avowed love for his adoptive hometown is hardly reflected in his work.” In “Muted Golden Sunshine: David Lynch’s Los Angeles,” a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Nordine considers Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/muted-golden-sunshine-david-lynchs-los-angeles#

i was surprised that thom andersen didn't address any of those films in his "Los Angeles Plays Itself"

there's definitely a current in lynch's work that rhymes with the whole Reaganite "morning in America" stuff even though surface readings of e.g. Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks would seem to indicate the opposite. but Lynch seems to consistently conflate poverty, filth, and moral rot in a way that could be read as reactionary.

poverty? really?

you don't think so?

I'm at a loss to recall any particular instance of some kind of classist snobbery in his work. In Twin Peaks the working class guys (Big Ed, Truman, Hawk, James) are the good guys. The Straight Story also has a certain dignity-of-the-working-class tone to it. IE, MD, and LH I would have a hard time identifying any of the central characters belonging to any specific economic strata (I guess Naomi Watts is obviously not as rich as Justin Theroux - but the latter is a clueless asshole whereas the former is deluded but more sympathetic). Dune is all about aristocracies until you get to the Fremen, who are obviously salt-of-the-earth types, and the ones responsible for redeeming the universe. Eraserhead is just about industrial wasteland in general, seems like everybody is poor and suffering in that movie unless there's some kindly rich character I'm forgetting.

the filth and moral rot seem to operate at all levels of society for him afaict.

Blue Velvet it seems like everybody is from the same middle class social strata, some people are just more psychotic than others lol

it's not as simple as classist snobbery. he's not a snob in that sense. there's a kind of middle-class, middle American distaste for both the rich and the poor. a sense of moral rot at both extremes, though it often seems more visceral when connected to poverty. i'm thinking of the trailer parks in twin peaks, much of the underworld that jeffrey encounters in blue velvet, the homeless guy in mulholland drive, some other stuff that i can't immediate bring to mind.

i think the veneration (?) of the working-class types is not inconsistent with a visceral disgust (i wouldn't exactly call it hatred) of the idle poor.

this was not an uncommon critique of lynch ca. twin peaks, btw. maybe it's off base, but it always seemed at least partially correct to me.

i think the veneration (?) of the working-class types is not inconsistent with a visceral disgust (i wouldn't exactly call it hatred) of the idle poor.

btw this is where "reagan democrats" and morning in america, etc. come in...

i was surprised that thom andersen didn't address any of those films in his "Los Angeles Plays Itself"

I went to a screening of Mulholland Drive last month, introduced by the author of this new book, The Architecture of David Lynch. He brought up the fact that Thom Anderson left Lynch out, and claimed Anderson had said it was because Lynch sees LA as a tourist, which didn't interest him.

i'm thinking of the trailer parks in twin peaks, much of the underworld that jeffrey encounters in blue velvet, the homeless guy in mulholland drive

I'd say almost all of these (w the exception of Blue Velvet) are balanced out by extremes of evil at the other end of the economic strata in the respective films/shows. Blue Velvet is weird, I dunno what signifiers indicate that any of the underworld types are poor. They're weird and creepy, but they aren't living in housing projects. I guess you could read a lot into the Heinekin/Pabst Blue Ribbon thing (a pair of signifiers which have oddly switched places since).

oh i think there are plenty of indications that frank's milieu, esp. the place where dorothy's son is being held, is on the wrong side of town, so to speak.

it's amazing how vividly i recall details of that film w/o having seen it for years, btw.

Here you go, re: Thom Andersen and Lynch:

It may say something that Mulholland Drive is a movie often cited by people who live outside of Los Angeles, but never by people who live here. Maybe it’s because Lynch’s vision of Los Angeles remains that of a tourist, although he has lived here for many years.

From Collateral Damage: Los Angeles Continues Playing Itself

Andersen's attitude seems to have softened since then, however:

I liked Inland Empire, my favorite David Lynch film … With Inland Empire what I had first regarded as arty in his work I began to realize was vulgar. I started to appreciate his films more after seeing that.

http://parallax-view.org/2011/03/24/screening-los-angeles-an-interview-with-thom-andersen/

thanks for that!!

i think andersen can be really dogmatic when it comes to films depicting L.A., as the first quote kind of indicates (cited in what? for what? by whom?)--i still like his essay film though.

i think even lynch would probably admit to seeing L.A. somewhat like a tourist. but that doesn't invalidate his vision! L.A. is, among other things, a major tourist destination.

Yeah, that was the attitude Richard Martin (the speaker) expressed: that it was all the better for it being an outsider's (Betty's) view.

i think maybe lost highway could be seen as more problematic, but lynch's films are so hermetic and strange that objecting to its view of los angeles seems sort of beside the point. i do think he's obviously admiring of aspects of L.A.'s built environment.

in twin peaks and blue velvet there's a sense of boundaries (moral boundaries linked to geographical ones)that are being invaded from outside or that one chooses to cross but in the l.a. films evil has a home everywhere; there's no sanctuary or innocence left to corrupt. imo.

I don't know how the compassion and openness of his Interview Project (http://interviewproject.davidlynch.com) can fit with or relate to the corruption of his film worlds, but it seems worth considering when making broad claims about his oeuvre.