Writer/director David Lynch. (Mark Mainz/Getty Images)
Enigmas, get back inside your riddles: this spring brings a David Lynch doubleheader. The master of phantasmagoric deviance, and the owner of the best hair in filmdom, has written a book called Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. In between reading his mini-ruminations on meditation and film, superfans can catch Lynch’s first movie in five years, the free-associating, two-hour-and-59-minute, digital-video epic INLAND EMPIRE (Lynch prefers all caps). Finally, a film for those who found Mulholland Drive too obvious.
Furiously obscure, and more than momentarily brilliant, there is no other American director as adamant that an audience respond to film with intuition before intellect. Lynch, a devotee of Transcendental Meditation, has spent his directing career perfecting the sensation of being both inside and outside of human experience, which is a decent definition of movie-going, and maybe – oh, he would hate this – post-modernity. David Lynch is also very funny.
Of course, that’s just my interpretation. Lynch is a DVD-commentary-track refusenik who isn’t keen to reveal his meanings or his methods in interviews, either (he has never explained how he made that Eraserhead baby, but doesn’t flat out deny the rumour that it involved a calf fetus). “I’m not an intellectual,” he has said in his gee-whiz voice. “Images just pop into my head.”
In Catching the Big Fish, Lynch pulls back his mental velvet curtain and lets us peek inside that melon-sized head. Let’s see if Lynch’s words as an author will guide us toward a deeper understanding of the most delicious, perplexingly Lynch-y moments in his movies.
Or not.
Eraserhead (1977)
What? Lynch was a film school grad delivering newspapers for a living when he imagined this industrial wilderness of mutant fowl and aberrant offspring, set to a rumbling, grinding, mechanical soundtrack. Henry (the late cult hero Jack Nance), with a shrub of hair on high alert, distracts himself from the baby-thing heaving in the shadows by listening to the Lady in the Radiator sing her love songs.Jack Nance in Eraserhead. (Miramax Films)
Moment You Will Need to Discuss With Your Therapist: The meet-the-in-laws dinner where Henry is asked to carve a tiny, pulsating, menstruating chicken, inducing an orgasm (or maybe a panic attack?) in his new mother-in-law. Cheers!
Lynch-y Line: Henry’s wife: “They’re still not sure it is a baby!”
Lynch-y Insight: “Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say this, but it is.” (Catching the Big Fish, page 33).
Blue Velvet (1986)
What? The mother (or “mommy, mommy”) of all suspicious suburbia movies. An inverted film noir with Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey, a gleaming college student who finds a severed ear on a pristine green lawn (things are a little wormy underneath, natch). Soon he’s hiding in closets and spying on a femme fatale (Isabella Rossellini, bravely playing a human bruise) whose gangster husband, Frank (Dennis Hopper), likes to top up his mommy issues with several huffs of amyl nitrate.Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet. (Embassy Communications)
Therapist Moment: Frank threatening Jeffrey with red lipstick death kisses while a fat dwarf dances on the hood of a car to the song In Dreams.
Lynch-y Line: Detective Williams: “That's a human ear all right.”
Lynch-y Insight: “[The idea] was red lips, green lawns and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of Blue Velvet. The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.” (p. 23)
Wild at Heart (1990)
What? Lynch leaping, giggling, into Technicolor pop-melodrama. Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage, perfecting his Elvis quiver) are lovers on the lam from Lula’s psychotic mother (Diane Ladd), a platinum Wicked Witch of the West.Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart. (MGM)
Therapist Moment: Nubby-toothed villain Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) blows his own head off – and it bounces.
Lynch-y Line: Sailor: “This is a snakeskin jacket. And for me it's a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom.”
Lynch-y Insight: “The light can make all the difference in a film, even in a character. I love seeing people come out of darkness." (p. 129)
Mulholland Drive (2001)
What? A young blonde named Betty (Naomi Watts) lands in Hollywood with her dreams in her suitcase, and hooks up with an amnesiac brunette (Laura Elena Harring). A little blue box and a key appear to undo everyone’s identity, as Betty – in life or in character? – slides into drug-addled anonymity, starlet style.Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring in Mulholland Drive. (Universal Studios)
Therapist Moment: The blonde and the brunette, the latter now blonde, in the cavernous nightclub Club Silencio, witnessing a miming trombonist, a Franco-Spanish lecture on reality from a wicked emcee, and the chilling headline act: Rebekah Del Rio’s Spanish a cappella version of Roy Orbison’s Crying.
Lynch-y Line: Betty: “I just came here from Deep River, Ontario, and now I'm in this dream place. Well, you can imagine how I feel.”
Lynch-y Insight: On the box and the key: “I don’t have a clue what those are.” (p. 115)
INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
What? Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), an aging star, has a dangerous love affair on the set of a Gypsy-cursed film. Surrealist zigzags to 1930s Poland and a movie version of the American South find Nikki encountering soothsayers, Eastern European carnies and Hollywood prostitutes (the non-actress kind) along the way. A story shot through with rabbit holes that beget rabbit holes – and inside one of them are actual rabbits, or humans in rabbit suits enacting a 1950s sitcom.INLAND EMPIRE. (StudioCanal)
Therapist Moment: Gigantic cartoon clown mouth projected onto the saliva-streaked grin of Nikki’s husband/murderer/lover/stranger/co-star as he/it appears from the shadows in the hallway near the rabbits’ apartment.
Lynch-y Line: Nikki: “Wake up and find out what the hell yesterday was about. I'm not too keen on tomorrow, and today's slipping by.”
Lynch-y Insight: “It was a risk, but I had this feeling that because all things are unified, this idea over here would somehow relate to that idea over there.” (p. 145)
INLAND EMPIRE opens in Vancouver on May 3, Montreal and Toronto on May 4 and Calgary on May 18. Other Canadian cities to follow.
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is published by Penguin.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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