INLAND EMPIRE (2006) A Film by David Lynch

While INLAND EMPIRE may be the most inscrutable, impenetrable, incoherent, even aggravating film of David Lynch's career, it is certainly the most significant. With it, Lynch has made a massive unspoken statement on the power of cinema as an art form: there is no right or wrong, and that the pairing of sound and image can be beautiful even stripped of narrative causality or commercial aesthetics. Lynch does not merely fiddle with the mechanics of both; in fact, they're not even on his plane of thought anymore. There's little that grounds INLAND EMPIRE to film at all, other than the fact that stretches of it revolve around Hollywood and that a camera created it. Still, Lynch does not use a film camera, but instead makes the transition from the cumbersome medium of film to the expedience of digital, from the grain to the pixel, from shooting a scene to being "deeper inside the scene". But even then it is not just the swift import of digital that he is after. Had this been the case, he may have moved to the Red camera, as Steven Soderbergh (for Che) and Roy Andersson (television commercials and supposedly his forthcoming feature) have, in which case a look of sleek quality could be obtained under convenient working conditions. For Lynch, the fuzzy coarseness and magical permeability of digital is his prerogative, so he descended to the level of a consumer camera, the Sony PD-150, with which the musty dreaminess of early silent cinema is regurgitated in a new light.

Lynch's roots are as a painter, and he cites his early shorts as the most conscious extensions of his painting, but INLAND EMPIRE may be the better example. He first came upon the need to work with film when he decided that a plant in the dark was not sufficient enough a work of art without the sound of the wind's rustling of the leaves. This penchant for extracting the sublime out of prosaic objects is rampant in Lynch's latest; lamps, walls, hallways, light-bulbs, and the human face are all given exacting and lengthy attention, and their employment within the frame is always malign, foreboding, and drenched in a foggy palette that is at times reminiscent of runny watercolor paint. The video quality runs from relatively clean and sharp to muddy and harshly pixellated, so much so that under low light situations the image becomes difficult to read, allowing "room to dream". What Lynch means by this typically vague statement is that one has to attempt to decipher what's inside the frame, and this becomes a compelling idea in itself.

This aesthetic, which stands as the most assured and seductive statement with the new media to date, is utilized for Lynch's most free-associative film yet. The rate at which it vacillates between its several shards of narrative is entirely dependent upon Lynch's uninhibited psyche. It's as if through transcendental meditation he has discovered a new way of filmmaking, of acting spontaneously upon ideas buried deep within himself without regards to coherence. INLAND EMPIRE revolves around Laura Dern's showstopping performance; her various selves consist of an established Hollywood actress named Nikki Grace, a haggard prostitute with a band of singing and dancing whores who shift their locales (icy Poland, cosmopolitan LA) with the snap of a finger, and a Southern adulteress named Susan Blue, the character Nikki is starring as in the film On High in Blue Tomorrows aside Justin Theroux's ladies' man Devon Berk. There are connections to each of Dern's embodiments, but as the extra-dimensional labyrinth unfolds, it becomes uncertain which portrayal is ostensibly "real", or if any are. Dern's Nikky/Sue however is not the only enigma to sort out, for there is also a historical figure, a seemingly deceased Polish prostitute (perhaps the star who died in the first attempt at On High in Blue Tomorrows, thus setting the supposed curse on the film) who stares periodically throughout the film at a television which shifts from static to Nikki's "real-time" experiences to an absurd soap drama with life-size rabbits as the droll protagonists. Furthermore, Nikki's suspicious Polish husband seems to hold links to both the past and a current troupe of threatening Polish circus workers.



If you're attempting to decode the film's mysteries, there's more. Atop this baffling narrative, there are a great portion of visual and aural rhymes that scatter throughout. Different characters repeat the same portentous lines in different portals of time, the mysterious phrase "axxon n" shows up on walls during many of Nikki's dimension-swapping moments, and Grace Zabriskie has some sort of preternatural bond with everything that happens, evidenced by her soothsaying arrival at Nikki's mansion in the beginning of the film. Nikki tells her that there is no murder in the script for On High on Blue Tomorrows, but Zabriskie's character creepily insists that there is indeed "brutal fucking murder". She then goes on to give an anecdote about a boy who walked through a door and "evil was born", and a girl walked through a door and got "lost in the marketplace". If Nikki's ensuing bouts of extemporaneous shifts in time and place are likened to a marketplace, there are perhaps enough motifs in the film to account for each item in the marketplace.

INLAND EMPIRE can be read as a lot of things: "a woman in trouble", the encapsulation Lynch so adamantly sticks by, a comment on the morphological nature of film acting and becoming lost in the role, another indictment of delusional Hollywood, an exercise in time as a continuum, or an elaborate nightmare housed in the mind of a deeply regretful woman (the Polish woman in front of the TV). I don't think that there is any such succinct interpretation of the film though; there is too much complexity to come at in a narrative or allegorical mindset. The film is best appreciated as a purely avant-garde work that washes over the viewer chillingly. Lynch knows how to suffuse commonplace moments (Nikki wandering through a film set or down a hallway in broad daylight) with frightening purpose, accompanying the entire film with pitch-perfect sound design, either the shrieking clamor of violin strings, the characteristic low hum of all of his films, or an array of magnificently placed musical cues, like Beck's "Black Tambourine" or Lynch's own "Ghost of Love". The rabbit sitcom is another story, but jibes with the whole film's teasing undertones even given its modularity. Call it self-indulgent, but don't deny its cinematic importance and destabilizing mood.

Mulholland Drive (2001) A Film by David Lynch

In many ways, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was a summation of his career when it was made, the addition of any set of themes, images, and intertextual references into one composite whole. Similarly, it allegedly stands as his final work on celluloid, as he has now transitioned into the more nebulous realm of digital video. It is, then, perhaps fitting that with it, he ransacks the history of cinema, not always specifically but broadly, paying impulsive tribute to the recognizable traits of Hollywood movie genres more exhaustively than ever before. Furthermore, the film is largely about Hollywood, a Los Angeles-set exploration of the dream-machine, the naive thirst for stardom, and the cruel machinations of the entertainment business. Lynch targets these ideas from a characteristically obtuse angle, recontextualizing Lost Highway's doppelgänger technique but also twisting its focus on jostled identities into a flip-flopped dream, deceptively straightforward at heart rather than ourobouric.

A hopeful young actress named Betty (Naomi Watts) is the victim of these Hollywood fantasies. She comes to Los Angeles to take a stab at an acting career, staying in her aunt's vacant apartment. When she gets there however, she discovers the place is not empty, for it houses the amnesiac woman who stumbled off Hollywood's hills in the first ten minutes of the film following a brutal car crash. In Hitchockian manner, this woman (Laura Elena Harring), a voluptuous brunette, handpicks the name Rita for herself when she sees it on a Gilda poster on the wall. Contrary to rational logic, Betty is not unsettled by the creepily silent, blank-slated Rita. Alternatively, she assists her in a Nancy Drew-style investigation into Rita's real identity, leading her enthusiastically into the puzzle even when it suggests noirish tomfoolery - Rita's purse contains wads of cash and an inexplicable blue key. A rotting corpse is eventually discovered in the apartment of a certain Diane Selwyn, the lone name that Rita can remember, prompted by its sighting on a waitress' pin.



During the search for Rita's identity (no pun intended, but this also takes on metaphorical undertones in several instances), the film treads over all sorts of brief pastiches channeled from genre clichés. In a subplot, a pompous young director named Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) lives through a day worthy of screwball comedy had it been given more comic emphasis. First, his creative freedom is ripped from him by a behind-the-scenes corporation bent on making an unknown actress, Camilla Rhodes, play the lead role in his movie. Then, after the production is shut down, an ominous phone call like those in Lost Highway tells Kesher's production assistant to send him atop the hill for a meeting with "The Cowboy", a quick, hackneyed foray into the western. Kesher also comes home to his wife cheating on him with the electrician, which turns into a run-of-the-mill revenge sequence topped off with fist-fighting. In another subplot, a clumsy hitman sets off a string off mishaps when he mistakenly shoots through an office wall at a woman not part of his gig, a hilarious shoot-em-up coincidence that feels spliced out of Pulp Fiction. Despite the banality and familiarity inherent in these scenes, Lynch makes them strangely discomforting by fiddling with the atmosphere slightly by adding one of his visual tics (buzzing lights or lamps partly illuminating red walls) or transforming the expected dialogue into something oddly strained and seemingly symbolic.

We discover that this is all because "Betty" is living a Hollywood movie, a bloated fantasy littered with the generic references one might expect would be floating around in the mind of a hopelessly determined wannabe. It is no flaw in the direction that the first hour and forty-five minutes of the film come off as hammy and unlikely. Despite this though, Lynch supplies everything with a dose of off-kilter menace, either through the use of Angelo Badalamenti's moody droning soundtrack or his penchant for larger-than-life caricatures, so it's given the uncanny tone of a dream. Like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive relies on a central dichotomy, this time of reality and the dreamlike construction of it. Naomi Watts' ability to actually act eventually wallops the viewer when she performs in a rehearsal for a part in a melodramatic scene aside a veteran actor. This is also more or less a turning point in the film, the moment when Watts' character's overacting topples over first into heated erotica and then hard-boiled realism. The final section of the film is a startling shock of reality featuring Betty, whose name is now Diane Selwyn, as a worn-out, embittered loner denied by her lesbian infatuation - the successful actress and love object of Kesher, Camilla Rhodes (Harring again) - and left with the inevitable remains of an unsupported go-get-em attitude: a neglected, lowly production worker. Naomi Watts, with her dynamism and complete understanding of Lynch's purpose, makes a case for herself as one of America's finest actresses.



Perhaps an even more substantial turning point in the film is the Club Silencio sequence, which takes place in the middle of the night after Rita wakes up in a trance-like state whispering Spanish phrases: "No hay banda...Silencio". Betty and Rita take a cab to a deserted theater downtown, and their entrance is viewed from a creepy, distant trajectory across a naked alleyway (with the exception of blowing papers), a shot which then chases them inside only to be denied entrance before the doorway. The lively jolt of the camera forward suggests a hidden observer, like the grotesque vagabond from behind the diner who is introduced earlier in the film, but it also simply underlines the subtext of the coming scene: all is illusory. Although an audience is aware that there are real humans behind a work of art, it can still be moving. This is the case for the bizarre stage transposition that takes place, where a mysterious showman staunchly urges that "there is no band, no orchestra...it is all an illusion" before giving way to a singing performance by Rebekah Del Rio in which she faints halfway through and the heartrending pierce of her voice remains intact. The theater soon fills with fog and sputters with spotlights, piling on the weirdness as Betty convulses in her seat. This is the most beguiling, thrilling, moving sequence Lynch filmed since parts of Eraserhead, and I can hardly make it out without getting chills, if not tears. Betty and Rita leave it with the discovery of a blue box seemingly fit for the key from Rita's purse.

Lynch tosses around several overt nods to classic doubling films throughout this section of the film; a screen-filling overlap shot of the two woman's faces in bed echoes Ingmar Bergman's Persona, while Rita's application of a blond wig to closely mirror her savior Betty reminds us of Hitchcock's Vertigo. What's most interesting is how these manifest themselves so bluntly amidst an otherwise vaguely referential affair. One wonders whether Lynch actually self-consciously chose these riffs, or if he too is a victim, like Betty, of cinematic influence. Nonetheless, they resonate perfectly in the context of Mulholland Drive, adding an ever more complex dimension to Betty and Rita/Diane and Camilla's congruence in Diane's mind. Diane lusts so strongly after her object of desire that she projects herself into a dream in which the two of them are passionately in love and are perhaps two halves of the same person. Moreover, she puts the subject of her humiliation (Camilla's fiancé, Adam Kesher) through a troubling domino of events.



A fact that always manages to surprise me is Mulholland Drive's television pilot origins. I am extremely grateful for the network's denial of it though, for I think it caused Lynch to focus on the project with greater intensity, intent on bringing to the screen something that would succinctly visualize the story he was trying to tell. Had the pilot been accepted, Mulholland Drive may have become another Twin Peaks, releasing shockwaves of visceral moments but also being plagued by the fruition of slightly uninteresting backstories. The feature-length format allows these instances to be briefer and more potent, emphasizing their existence as Hollywood hodgepodge. After all, the film is very much about film, its power to influence people, and its unique ability to delight even in the face of trite surfaces, so it works best as a film. It also works as the greatest and most emotionally debilitating film of Lynch's career since his debut feature.

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".