The Straight Story (1999) A Film by David Lynch

When a current Disney film is made, it's usually by a chameleon director with the ability to shuffle sensibilities at random and take on stories that are not necessarily their own. This is why it's a shock thinking about the fact that David Lynch, an esoteric artist, has made his stamp on the Disney canon. 1999's The Straight Story is a humble road movie about an elderly war veteran named Alvin Straight who rides his John Deere on a month-and-a-half pilgrimage from Iowa to Wisconsin to reconnect with his alienated brother Lyle, a recent victim of stroke. The story is based on the real life of Alvin Straight, and if you've seen any of the webisodes in The Interview Project, a cross-country getting-to-know-you exercise undertaken by Lynch's Absurda Production Company, you'll notice that Straight looks as if he's one of the subjects of the project. It is this interest in simple folk, people who are just trying to get by, that links Disney and Lynch's set of concerns. Lynch loves grizzly spirits beaten down by life but without submission to it, and also old-fashioned Americana types (his short The Cowboy and the Frenchman is a blatant testament to this fact), which is ultimately what lifts The Straight Story from being just another middlebrow Disney throwaway, and more like a paean to life and the kindness of the human spirit, as a true Disney film should be.

Yet it is not just joy and happiness that infuses the film; Lynch refuses to cloak life's hurdles by adhering to sentimentalism. Alvin is a tremendously mournful character, and he tinges the entire affair with a potent sense of our own mortality, as he puts himself through thick and thin in his poor physical state (he has to walk with two canes), adamantly undergoing his somewhat dangerous travels on a lawnmower that perpetually runs the risk of crapping out. At the same time, Alvin is no miserablist. He yearns for reconciliation with his brother who he became estranged from, a problem he diagnoses as such: "Anger, vanity, you mix that together with liquor, you've got two brothers that haven't spoken in ten years." In traditional road movie fashion, he meets several characters along the way, offering them a slice of his own world-weary wisdom. Alvin is remarkably in tune with the pleasures of life, the things that really count, like his mentally retarded daughter Rose, the only of seven surviving children he is in touch with. Rose herself has been through great hardship; due to her condition, authorities took her children away from her, leaving her to live with Alvin.

The story sounds maudlin and typical, but Lynch does not go down that route, instead paying lovingly close attention to the humanity, crafting an elegy to youth that breathes with the rhythms of the Midwest. It's uncharacteristic of Lynch to be as restrained and lyrical as he is in The Straight Story. With the help of his longtime cinematographic collaborator Freddie Francis, the film carves a poetic monument that feels closer to the work of Terrence Malick than it does to Lynch. Between the sequences where Alvin makes human connection, there are extended reposes set to pastoral folk music that simply watch him as he travels down the open road at 5 mph, sandwiched by vast corn fields dotted on the horizon by small farms or villages. The camera glides slowly at high angles, respectfully paying tribute to the American landscape with a warm, yellowish color palette. In more traditional Lynchian fashion, there is little explanation for Alvin's motivations, nor is there any sort of payoff when the film reaches its inevitable denouement. The film lets us slowly understand Alvin as a man, and Richard Farnsworth's performance does great justice to this technique. Loads of poignant expression is visible, even through his scraggly white beard and beneath his omnipresent cowboy hat. While The Straight Story is unexpected from Lynch, it proves that yes, as well as being visually and conceptually stimulating, he can tell a moving story with honorable restraint.

Lost Highway (1997) A Film by David Lynch

Identity has always been a thematic undercurrent in David Lynch's career, either its displacement (Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet), its confusion (the titular character in The Elephant Man), or its realization and fulfillment (Kyle MacLachlan in Dune). Not until Lost Highway however was this subtext explored so acutely and abstractly, and it stands as the preface of what has become the style of his late career (also including Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and the myriad of video works he has dished out), which has moved even further towards enigmatic, moebius strip narratives. Lost Highway is a vastly underrated psycho-thriller, dense in its construction and immensely rewarding with its aesthetic choices.

The narrative is split into two parts that are ostensibly unrelated. In the first, Lynch presents a slow, tense study of martial dissolution set in an ultramodern, box-like flat in the suburbs. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is an emotionally severe, constipated free-form Jazz saxophonist who approaches an intercom in his household one day and hears an unidentified voice saying "Dick Laurent is dead". This is the first in a series of bizarre interruptions into Fred's supposedly stable life. His relationship with his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) is claustrophobic, unromantic, and bitter, evidenced by his silently hostile disposition when asking her if she'd go to the club for his show that night, and the passionless sex that ensues later. The two begin receiving cryptic videotapes on their doorstep, which Renee initially writes off as simply Real Estate videos until subsequent tapes reveal the camera entering their household and eventually observing the couple in their sleep. At a party held by a man Fred is suspicious of for his involvement with Renee, Fred is approached by a clown-like character (Robert Blake) vaguely titled "The Mystery Man" in the production notes. He informs Fred of his presence in his home at that very moment, ordering him to call the house for assurance. The day after, Fred once again receives a videotape, this time detailing him viciously slaughtering his wife, which comes as the abrupt finality of the initial half of the film.



Fred is placed on death row, where he undergoes severe mental suffering before eventually his physical state is swapped for that of a young mechanic named Pete Dayton, a curiosity that baffles the guards and triggers the release of Pete. The film then takes the form of a noir thriller, showing Pete with a troubling connection to the local mob lord, Mr. Eddy. The roots of their relationship are unclear, but his negative impact on Pete's life is without question. Mr. Eddy has a moll, Alice Wakefield - significantly also portrayed by Patricia Arquette, only this time with wavy blond hair rather than straitjacket brown - who, after seducing Pete in hyper-generic femme fatale fashion, reveals herself to be longing for freedom from her expansive seedy ties. Pete becomes entangled in a string of potentially threatening situations, both serious and minor, involving Mr. Eddy, his own neglected girlfriend, Alice, and the components of her pornographic double life.

The stories eventually connect themselves, and in doing so, present the possibility of there never being a separate character from Fred in the first place. Lost Highway is ultimately a brooding psychological puzzle inspired by the phenomenon of psychogenic fugue, an incredibly rare occurrence that involves the subconscious creation of an entirely distinct personality following a traumatic incident as a means of escape. Inevitably though, the strain of reality gradually imposes itself on this fantasy world, explaining the reappearance of Patricia Arquette (an extremely sensual reminder of Fred's heavy guilt), the man at the party with links to his wife's hidden personality (likely the explanation for Fred's murder in the first place), and the Mystery Man. In this sense, Lost Highway's separate halves are split, to a degree, into the literal and the metaphorical. Pete's story is largely Fred's creation, and so to are characters such as The Mystery Man, the most salient embodiment of evil in the film, who appears whenever a shift in personality, reality, or identity is on the verge. He also is closely related to the lost highway (a symbol itself that stands as a metamorphic entity) and hides out at a shadowy cabin in Death Valley which is always introduced by one of the most compelling images of the film: a protracted reversal of the fiery explosion of the cabin.



There's also a great amount in the film about the recorded image and its relation to reality. It becomes clear that Robert Blake's character is supposedly the person behind the video tape conundrum, but this is only what it seems on the surface. If The Mystery Man is an extension of Fred himself, the tapes are actually his own transmissions from the subconscious, if you will. This premise is reminiscent of Cache, although Lynch's film is not interested in the employment of personal and political history as in Haneke's, instead using video strictly as a piece of mental hardware. The same voyeuristic shots that track with Fred through the dark corridors of his own living space arrive on the videotapes as grainy black and white footage, asserting itself as the evil recesses of his mind that he prefers not to venture into. It is no surprise that he says himself when asked by the police if he owns a video camera, "I like to remember things my own way...Not necessarily the way they happened." This is underlined by the new reality for himself he thus creates.

As much as this cursory exegesis does for the film on a narrative level, there's still a wealth of complexity at the core of Lost Highway that is best left unexplained. In fact, Lynch strongly advises against the interpretive process, preferring for the "room to dream" to be left intact. What's most important in the film is its uniquely spooky mood. Lynch's use of sight and sound in the film is so in sync, so complimentary, that it creates an experience of almost physical as well as emotional involvement, with the body tightening and relaxing during scenes of simmering tension and brief comic pauses, respectively. It is this distinctly cinematic atmosphere that takes full emphasis, dwarfing the sometimes vague and mannered dialogue. Nonetheless, each line spoken in the film rings with latent meaning, or at least for the purpose of stylistic heightening, as in one scene when the fiercely sarcastic Mr. Eddy calls Pete and repeats to him with a resilient sneer on his face: "I'm really glad to know you're doin' ok." (Robert Loggia's caricatured yet exhilarating performance is one of the finest in the film). Because of these menacingly original qualities, Lost Highway deserves more than the label of "pretentious" that is all too often slapped upon it, for it is a riveting, mesmerizing transitional piece for Lynch.

Premonition Following an Evil Deed (1995) A Short Film by David Lynch

In 1995, several internationally acclaimed directors were offered a chance to shoot a 55-second film using the original camera of the Lumière brothers, the French duet responsible for the dawn of cinema. Three restrictions were imposed - time length, eschewing of sync sound, no more than three takes - in order to approximate the look and feel of the brothers' pioneering cinematic works, given the context of a century of cinematic maturation. Despite the breadth of intriguing names involved, the results in the completed documentary are somewhat stale, with a few exceptions, namely David Lynch's micro-masterpiece, Premonition Following an Evil Deed. His entry towers over the rest, if only for the uncontested devotion to creating something that would provoke and engage rather than using the opportunity simply for experiment, or, even worse, self-fulfilling cuteness. The film progresses as follows: a middle-aged woman in dismay, a dead woman on a lawn before policemen, a cryptic sequence where zombie-like creatures in a steamy room boil naked women in tubes, and policemen entering a house to inform the dismayed woman and her husband of, presumably, the dead woman shown before. In a way, it's a mini procedural drama, reminiscent of Twin Peaks, but is at once completely elusive. Who is the murderer? Who is the victim? The title provides some assistance, perhaps placing the mother as the murderer of her own daughter while subsequently being haunted by malign images of guilt. In the end though, it's as just as much a smoke and mirrors act as Lynch's best work, where he teases you with possibilities of finding a solution but ultimately intends only for the viewer to be swept up by mystery. Premonition Following an Evil Deed, a monochrome fantasia that hearkens back to the wonder of early motion pictures while keeping in line with a modern, abstract sensibility, does exactly that.

Dune (1984) A Film by David Lynch (or is it Alan Smithee?)

If one were to apply some sort of numerical system for rating the consistency or artistic similarities in David Lynch's oeuvre, it might look something like this, with Dune being that fat, bulky outlier in no man's land. The last project the film community expected Lynch to partake in following his initial two features was the adaption of Frank Herbert's colossal saga, Dune, a 412-page novel now and then declared as one of the greatest sci-fi epics ever written. Lynch condensed this into a three hour epic of his own which targets the grand tradition of Star Wars but lands somewhere altogether different. Taking into account the harsh critical bashing that is often lobbed at the film - not to mention the dispensation of it as "A Film by Alan Smithee", the official pseudonym used in Hollywood when a director wishes to disown his project - Dune stood before me as a brutish task. As a Lynch "completist", I knew I had to see it, but could have easily watched something else before it. Well, now I have indeed seen it, and it certainly is a confusing enigma, an undeniably bizarre sojourn into big-budget filmmaking for the otherwise self-motivated artist.

One of the greatest mistakes the film makes (to distinguish from a mistake Lynch makes, because it is difficult to say with the finished product what was the studio's addition and what was Lynch's) is in the first ten minutes, when a didactic narration accompanies Herbertian paintings of galactic scenes, the rapidity of which strands the viewer in left field. The narrator, who sounds like an indifferent, drunken Gene Hackman, fires establishing information at us about the Dune universe, the desert planet, the three sparring planetary houses (House Atreides, House Harkonnen, House Corrino), the gargantuan worm that lives beneath the desert and harvests a certain spice that induces eternal life, and also a bit about the tapestry of individuals. Duke Leto Atreides is the good in the universe, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, a bile, tumor-laden, flying obesity, is the evil. The Duke's son Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) is destined to become heroic but must first stave off an unnamed traitor he is informed of. The supporting narration - seemingly a reason to make comprehensible that which is skidded over in Lynch's kinetic storytelling style - returns variably throughout the film, providing more and more dense information in a slapdash manner. These were likely manifested as extended descriptions in Herbert's novel that required rereading.

Another device frequently used in the film that requires prerequisite knowledge of the book in order to make sense of it is the slew of internal monologues spoken in portentous whisper. Paul is the heftiest purveyor of such confusion; when faced with a difficult situation, he resorts to his conscience, gasping lines like "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." or "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.", and also connecting occurrences to celestial meanings regarding "the second moon...", "the spice...", or "the voice...". However, one cannot say that the film is from the point of view of Paul, because several other times throughout Dune we hear the same device utilized for Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, the Duke, and Piter De Vries, a bushy-eyebrowed deceiver of Atreides, to name a few. Lynch's use of the internal monologue here is haphazard and listless, providing us with combating modes of thought that echo in the mind as they do on the soundtrack. It is uncertain what kind of grasp the "director"/studio-heads have over the project, for it seems a beast as unpredictable as the massive, spike-mouthed worms that seethe beneath the desert planet, and the result in an inchoate blob of sci-fi schtick.



All narrative inconsistencies aside, the film has a special kind of visual allure that spawns not out of calculation of tone but rather out of a certain gaudiness inherent in the special effects work. Dune is the kind of film where the illusion of reality is shattered when it becomes blatant that action sequences are taking place largely in front of green screens. This is visible when Paul lassos the worm and lands on its back, when space shuttles hover smoothly over planetary surfaces, and when crew members are shown from the inside of their flying devices. Scenes like this back-peddle through cinema history to a point where Kubrick's 2001 is undeniably superior. But believing in the action is not what counts; it's often an enjoyment just to marvel at the artifice. Also, the costumes and sets are spectacularly elaborate - albeit relatively plastic-like on the outset - so that there's frequently something within the frame to pick out and stare at when the drama goes haywire. Unfortunately, the color seems to have been mildly drained out to a putrid brownish.

The film is a classic case of heavy studio interference. Lynch apparently shot a great amount more than what is seen in the finished product. It's arguable whether or not any more length or personal vision would have enhanced this film; it seems more likely that it would augment the already tedious nature of the current version. Despite this, there are several times when the film rushes through segments, most crucially the finale, which boasts Paul as a hero but does not accompany his stature with filmic grandiosity. The narrative has its best moments when Lynch slows down the pace, such as when Reverend Mother Ramallo tests Paul's strength through a miniature box designed to infict mental suffering. Dune only occasionally stumbles over a recognizably Lynchian element (the brief dream sequences involving dense superimpositions with ominous hands), and when it does it is largely unsatisfying, like a lazy reprise Eraserhead's cosmic imagery. One leaves the film with a bad feeling, both for having witnessed such a grueling, incomprehensible film, and also for thinking of the great amount of sets, talent, and labor that went to waste.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) A Film by David Lynch

Following the widespread success of the television series Twin Peaks, the powers that be thought it necessary to tack on an obligatory prequel film, essentially a detailing of Laura Palmer's final weeks. Undoubtedly, Lynch's enthusiasm regarding the show was probably running close to empty given the amount he had to wrestle with television executives, which perhaps explains the indolent, free-for-all wackiness inherent in the film version. What many expected as an explanatory piece, Lynch does not provide, instead deepening the ambiguity of the series by piling on more and more symbols, Black Lodge enigmas, and non sequiturs. It's an oafish mess of a film, yet it is not without its pleasures, as it attains the sort of mystery that only Lynch could find in such a campy premise.

The film's first section is without question its most lackadaisical. Set somewhere around the region of Twin Peaks, it follows a previously unheard of FBI agent named Chester Desmond as he investigates the murder of a woman named Teresa Banks with a clumsy sidekick (Kiefer Sutherland). Lynch goes heavy on the lunacy here, offering up brief absurdist character sketches - like Harry Dean Stanton as a white trash murder witness - and unusual bits of secret agent insights: Desmond and his sidekick meticulously dissect an encounter with a zany woman dressed in red garbs introduced by Gordon Cole, the hearing impaired special agent played by Lynch himself. Once her body is found and returned to FBI headquarters, the two disappear without explanation. Then a portentous character played by David Bowie arrives in the offices, elicits a short burst of dream logic, and disappears as well, arousing suspicions that he was never there in the first place, although the security cameras tell otherwise. This is a confusing case of the eruption of mystery in everyday life, because Lynch never harps back on it, forgetting Bowie and the two investigators and even Special Agent Dale Cooper, the star of the television series who makes a brief appearance predicting Banks' murderer's next victim. That he predicts with such uncanniness the exact criteria of the next victim - a blond high school girl serving food at that very moment, to which Lynch cuts immediately to Laura working on "Meals on Wheels" - makes us wonder why Cooper could not have saved her, and by extension, why he drives into Twin Peaks with such newfound enthusiasm for the case when the television series begins.



In fact, one of the major flaws in Fire Walk With Me is its dissonance from the show, especially when it comes to characters. The most salient example of this is Laura Palmer's best friend, Donna Hayward. Lynch was unable to cast Lara Flynn Boyle, the firebrand who portrayed her in the series, so Moira Kelly takes over, but with this change comes a complete transformation of the character of Donna; in the show she is a strong individual, whereas in the film she is emotionally fragile, timid, and always looking for verbal confirmation that Laura is her "best friend". Laura - whose face permeates nearly every scene following the initial section - does not fit the esteemed sweetheart description that was so prominent in the show, for Lynch gets right down to business establishing her as a feral piece of work with sinister ties. Never do we see a hint of humanity in her eyes, even during the few times that she's seemingly speaking from the heart. Sheryl Lee's performance as Laura is spot on when dealing with cryptic erotica, but if there's ever a scene that calls for emotion, Lee muffs it and comes across awkwardly, ultimately leading to her inability to carry the film. Fortunately, Ray Wise as Leland Palmer, her self-feuding, antagonistic father, picks up the energy that she lacks.

Because the film only answers shaky questions that were already explained on the show, once can't help but think Fire Walk with Me is simply an excuse for Lynch to return to the mordant dreamworld of Twin Peaks, to revel in the perplexing imagery of the series once more. In tone, the film most closely resembles the final episode, with illusory interruptions left and right. The red room, or Black Lodge, is revisited frequently, although this time new characters arrive, such as a boy beneath a mask with an elongated nose, an old woman who constantly is pointing or offering pictures of empty rooms to Laura, and even a menacing primate. They are each curiously entrancing, but whether there is meaning to each individually is up in the air. Most disappointing though is the fact that their arrivals mean the omission of the giant and the butler from the series, and ultimately the abandonment of coherence. The film gains some life towards the end, once Lynch's (and Laura's) hysteria begins to take full force, but on the whole it never appears to have a raison d'être, making us long to get to the point in the story where we hear Jack Nance's character recite the famous words: "she's dead, wrapped in plastic".

Wild at Heart (1990) A Film by David Lynch

It has always been a mystery to me what was going through the minds of the jury at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival - an able one at that, with Sven Nykvist, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Fanny Ardant in the bunch - when they chose David Lynch's Wild at Heart as the Palme D'Or. As well as acting as another launching point in the flippant career of Nicolas Cage, the film toys with so many archetypes, references, and genres that it amounts to a scattered mess, loaded with shrill fragments and lacking any semblance of dramatic thrust. Lynch's love for cheesy, trailer-trash reworkings of vaguely 50's-esque milieus had hits its apogee when he made Wild at Heart, which is cushioned by the yokel-made The Cowboy and the Frenchman and his extensive Twin Peaks era. You can see some strands from these works laying loosely over the edges, but they are assembled in such a way that makes them uglier, soapier, and more clichéd.

Toothless hags, psychotic mothers pinned to their chairs, obese people wearing "Made in America" shirts, sausage venders who are pedophiles on the side: these are the types of people that you likely have no interest in meeting. These are also the kind of people that populate Sailor (Cage) and Lula's (Laura Dern) road trip in Wild at Heart. Out of desperation caused by Lula's mother's heated denial of her rebellious boyfriend Sailor, the fiery couple takes to the highway, constantly being swept away by their car radio, an endless repeat of deserted 50's bar rock. Sailor's interested in keeping his girl and his life, and Lula gives herself over completely to Sailor's gimmicky romance (Sailor frequently impresses her with his monklike devotion to his snakeskin jacket, his "symbol of individuality and personal freedom"). The central couple is the most tired attempt at symbolic archetype Lynch ever made; Sailor is a mix of James Dean and Elvis, and Lula straddles Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and "Like a Prayer"-era Madonna. Neither of them have that effervescent air of mythic American characters though, or perhaps they have too much, because their blunt overacting and lack of subdued physical expression only makes them laughable. Of course, this could be read as Lynch's intention, to push the parameters of histrionics to a point where the film would reach the terrain of intertextual meta-critique. Nonetheless, Sailor and Lula's inability to shut up and simply act natural for a moment aggravates on a level high above the storyline.

It is hard to believe, but there is a literary source to Wild at Heart: Barry Gifford's novel of the same name. There is something to be said about Lynch's knack for stranding a work so distant from its novelistic origins, the result of which must have excited Gifford, for their collaboration continued on to Lost Highway. But Lynch's cinematic realization of Gifford's material here is uninspired; he seems to have less interest in the story than he does in taping on goofy metaphors and discomforting vignettes. Some of the bizarre characters, Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) specifically as a heinous, womanizing bandit that Sailor hooks up with, are right up there with the rest of Lynch's freaks, but their additions often feel meaningless and hollow, existing only to fulfill Lynch's desire for spastic narrative detours. The tacky allusions to Wizard of Oz are also fruitful, culminating in the grandly embarrassing finale of the film, but whether or not Sailor and Lula are journeying along the yellow brick road doesn't matter - the metaphor is totally arbitrary. Similarly, Lynch can't seem to let go of his characteristic fascination with fire as a dominant motif, but it too is stolid, incorporating itself as more of a fixation Lynch can't shake off rather than a fitting element. Admittedly, I have a hard time speaking this negatively about Lynch, but Wild at Heart struck me upon first viewing, and still to this day, as the nadir of his career.

The Cowboy and the Frenchmen (1988) A Short Film by David Lynch

The Cowboy and the Frenchmen is an absurd, tongue-in-cheek short made by David Lynch as part of a television program called The French as Seen By..., which otherwise included shorts by Jean Luc-Godard, Werner Herzog, and Andrzej Wajda, among others. The film is probably the least intellectually demanding Lynch has ever been, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It takes place on the range where a troupe of cowboys (Henry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Tracey Walter) spontaneously witness a Frenchman skidding down the mountainside nearby. They are unsure of who or what it is at first, Stanton's character "Slim" continually exclaiming "What the hell is that thing?", but their xenophobia eventually wears off when they begin searching his suitcase, unearthing baguettes, romantic pictures, french fries (of course, Lynch can't deny this joke), and all other matters of stereotypical French paraphernalia. The Frenchman's overall excitement towards America, specifically citing the Empire State Building, unites him with the cowboys for a night of galavanting around the stables, singing "home on the range" campfire style, and hitting it off with a few local gals.

Ultimately, the film becomes a no-holds-barred joke. Every chance Lynch gets, he hyperbolizes the already mindless caricatures; the Frenchman, with his beret, suit, and mustachio, does little more than stare like a puppy dog at his surroundings and swoon romantically to the tune of his journal, the cowboys shoot birds and snakes uncontrollably and repeat their orders dumbfounded, and the women wear high jeans while serving the men food or offering them someone to sleep next to. Lynch has a way of drawing his character's gestures out so that they become awkward or unnatural, and thus humorous. What really gives the film its goofiness though is the deliberately stodgy aesthetic. The video quality looks several notches below professional. Clumsy superimpositions, iris effects, and stagey dance sequences are all put to good use. An amusingly simplistic honky-tonk score fills out nearly every one of the twenty-six minutes. There is even a motherly shot of three woman harmonizing quick ditties over the landscape which is repeated frequently throughout the film. I wouldn't say The Cowboy and the Frenchman holds an important notch in Lynch's resume, but it at least stands as a testament to the variety of his material. You'll only walk away from it knowing one more thing: this is apparently the French as seen by David Lynch.