The Lynch Meditations 7: Dune (1984)

An aristocratic young man goes on an interplanetary adventure, tames giant sandworms, and becomes Space Jesus McRainmaker all in a little over two hours.

Nope. That's not a fair description of David Lynch's adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel Dune. Technically, this movie is set far into the future wherein all the familiar religions of humankind have blended with and penetrated and mutated each other until they have taken on strange new forms while retaining familiar aspects of messianic prophecy, patriarchal structures of authority, and warlike fanaticism all too depressingly familiar to the people of Earth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Frank Herbert's novel handles all this with obsessively detailed worldbuilding, and intricately plotted dynastic power struggles that imbues everything with profound moral ambiguity about the ethics of mind control, propaganda, religious indoctrination, and the use of militarized life-ending aggression on planetary scales. Herbert's novel is meant to get you to question the very idea of a charismatic, all-powerful hero figure.  David Lynch tells a straightforward story of an aristocratic young man taming sandworms, becoming Space Jesus McRainmaker, etc.

Okay, maybe that isn't such an unfair description. 

Re-watching Dune, a film that I enjoy, I couldn't help but laugh out loud at what a nakedly obvious power fantasy it is, totally drained of all the psychological nuance and outright horror of Herbert's novel. I guess you could say something similar about Star Wars, but not really. Sure, Luke Skywalker saves the day. But he does it by standing in solidarity with his friends against the genocidal Empire. Paul Muad'Dib crushes his enemies, tramples them underfoot, and even hears the lamentations of their Bene Gesserit high priestess. He's totally ruthless about it, too. Is this a David Lynch or a John Milius script? 

My shit is totally re-scrambled on this one. How did the filmmaker who crafted such a glorious surrealistic nightmare as Eraserhead and the deeply compassionate The Elephant Man make a New Age version of a Rambo guerilla warfare stroke-off fantasy? 

Do I still like this movie?

Does it matter whether or not I like it? 

David Lynch has more or less disowned it. He had his name taken off the television re-edit version, and he doesn't even list it in the Selected Filmography in his memoir/intro to Transcendental Meditation guidebook Catching the Big Fish. Over the years, he has expressed deep dissatisfaction with the experience of making this movie, and some have laid the blame at the feet of interfering producers wanting a much simplified heroic space opera popcorn movie . . . 

. . . but it really isn't much of a popcorn movie, either. Too weird. Too much freaky imagery. The action sequences don't really play like the typical macho power fantasy theatrics of 1980s action flicks, either. The music is heroic, the good guys win, but it emphasizes the big picture of clashing armies as opposed to the blood'n'guts of a proper shoot'em up. 

Even the Space Jesus McRainmaker transformation isn't as appealing as it could have been. Paul Atreides' ascension to Qwisatz Haderach comes off as a spiritual transition that robs him of what little personality he had to begin with-it's too Zen to be any fun. This is maybe one area wherein the movie evokes a little bit of the messianic angst that made Herbert's novel so compelling. In the book, Paul Atreides is both participant in and spectator to his transformation into a messiah-a man and god in one-and he's ultimately haunted by what he has become, even as he puts on the stoical mask of a Great Leader. Lynch's version, despite it's occasional and surprisingly striking use of voice over, doesn't really let us in on Paul's inner life. Another missed opportunity.

In a way, Lynch's Dune could be to Herbert's original novel what Paul Verhoeven's film of Starship Troopers is to Robert Heinlein's book. Except it's all backwards. Herbert writes a novel that is meant to evoke deep skepticism about the ethics of power and those who wield it in the minds of readers. Lynch takes this narrative and decides to print the Legend of the Fearless Leader. Paul Verhoeven directed his film as a parody of the fascist militarism endorsed as a noble way of life in Heinlein's book. Verhoeven's film is clearly a satire. Lynch's film . . . does not come across that way. It's very serious, is totally lacking in humor, and could only be looked on as a satire if we were to consider it a propaganda film from within the universe of Dune. Which is another similarity with Verhoeven's Starship Troopers.

Maybe.

Diving into Dune '84 again, I am left more critical of it than I had hoped I would be-I wanted to cling to my nostalgia on this one. I really did!

Some of it holds up. The sets and costumes are all cleverly executed. The cast includes Kyle MachLachlan, Max von Sydow, Linda Hunt, Virginia Madsen, Jurgen Prochnow, Everett McGill, Patrick Stewart, Jack Nance, Dean Stockwell, Freddie Jones, Francesca Annis, Brad Dourif-a cast of dozens! My personal favorite is the formidable Sian Phillips who commands the screen with her fearsome incarnation of a Bene Gesserit high priestess. Unfortunately, there are too many characters, and not nearly enough screenplay. Too bad. It's a helluva gathering of master thespians.

The sandworms are quite a lot of fun to behold as they are executed via a mixture of puppets and miniatures. The grotesque Fourth Stage Guild Navigators are magnificently grotesque monster fetuses who use their psionic powers to fold space/time and achieve faster than light travel across the vastnesses of outer space. These hideous beings are the cyberpunk cousins of the subconscious monstrosities previously seen in Eraserhead.

The dialogue isn't terrible, just too clotted with jargon and denuded of context to really sing. Herbert's novel was all about the world-around context. Lynch's film is the Cliff's Notes version.

I like it a little less now. Maybe I understand why Lynch would distance himself from it. It was a big budget production for its time that bombed with audiences and critics. It could've been a career ending flop. It wasn't. Lynch went on to more critical successes with later works, if not overwhelming financial performance. Dune was the first and last time Lynch would attempt to direct a fantasy blockbuster flick. Ultimately, that has been for the best. 

NEXT: 2/19/18: Blue Velvet (1986)

The Lynch Meditations -7

Dune might be my personal favorite David Lynch film. I've watched it many times over the years. It is a fascinating, flawed, crazy ambitious mess that suggests new and intriguing ways of doing science fiction and fantasy cinema. It uses voice overs in a subtle fashion somewhat reminiscent of how they are used in a couple of those Lone Wolf and Cub movies. It goes to some wild places in its depictions of mutated far future human societies. The music, sound design, set design, visual effects, and costumes all make a cohesive whole even if the script falls a bit short.

My main criticism would be that it waters down the moral ambiguity of Frank Herbert's novel. The book is a conspiracy thriller told from the perspectives of warring conspiracies. It has a mood and tone which reminds me of The Godfather and The Godfather part II, or that episode of The X-Files depicting the Cigarette Smoking Man's backstory. I get a similar vibe playing the original Syndicate PC game or the Illuminati New World Order trading card game, which are both games that simulate what it's like to mastermind global organized criminal and terrorist operations using mind control, propaganda, and brute force.  Lynch's film comes nowhere near this darkness opting instead to have the House Atreides be the super good guys and the House Harkonnen be the super bad guys with no real shades of gray between them. It's a missed opportunity.

But as a work of visual invention Dune is spectacular. And it has a vastly overqualified cast who don't get nearly enough to do, but a few moments stand out here and there. The script includes many memorable scenes, but one cannot help but feel that much has been neglected, leaving out key logical steps in the story, and gutting vital character development. In some respects, Lynch's Dune is a great unfinished symphony similar to Alejandro Jodorowsky's meticulously designed and plotted adaptation of the same source material. When I first got into this film I was playing immersive role playing video games like Final Fantasy VII, Suikoden, Phantasy Star IV, Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and Final Fantasy VI, which were full of long stretches of gameplay punctuated by non-interactive cut scenes of high literary quality giving these games a cinematic feel. Lynch's Dune sort of reminds me of a highlights reel of evocative cut scenes without the gameplay. The throughline of the story is there, but the substance is severely diminished. Even the extended three hour version assembled for broadcast television doesn't quite overcome these shortcomings, but is a fascinating alternate cut all the same.

Dune is my personal favorite, but I can understand why many people don't care for it. Objectively, I would say that Mulholland Dr. is Lynch's singular cinematic masterpiece, the Official No. 1. But Dune is my favorite misbegotten freak baby. I love it for both its flaws and its flashes of brilliance.

The Lynch Meditations 6: The Elephant Man (1980)

London, 1870s:
We begin inside a dream, a nightmare of stampeding elephants. We are inside the head of an unfortunate man who has been presented as the deformed son of a woman trampled by an elephant when she was four months pregnant by an unscrupulous freak show ringmaster. This story is, of course, nonsense concocted by the ringmaster, and the unfortunate man no doubt knows this story to be false, and yet he still dreams of elephants. You're told you're one thing for so long you may not start to believe it, exactly, but that's pretty much all you've got. And no matter how ridiculous, no matter how degrading, because that story is coming from the one person your survival depends upon, the one person who shows you some kind of attention, you internalize it, get used to it, grow into the role you've been assigned. This unfortunate man is John Merrick, the Elephant Man.

The Elephant Man-a man with hideous congenital deformities-is exploited for use in a freak show until he is rescued by a humane surgeon who studies this deformed man to increase his own prestige within the scientific medical community. But one form of exploitation is not equivalent to another. One is sheer brutality to make a buck, the other is tempered with compassion, mercy, and the hope that greater understanding of the Elephant Man's condition will benefit all humankind.

The surgeon-a Dr. Treves-is first seen wandering a carnival ground when he suddenly turns around, as though struck by a bolt from the blue, and begins to seek something inside the labyrinthine halls of a freak show. He journeys deeper into this maze, until he comes upon the threshold of the Elephant Man exhibit as it is being shut down by Old Bill for being too obscene, too grotesque. Later, Dr. Treves seeks the Elephant Man again in another labyrinth which almost seems like an unmasked version of the first labyrinth. The first one was decorated with theatrical flair; the second is a nasty, subterranean affair of brick and filth and shadows where John Merrick dwells in a miserable chamber tended by the cruel, drunk ringmaster and his child employee. Dr. Treves bribes the ringmaster to get a private exhibition of the Elephant Man. In glorious black and white, Merrick is revealed as a piteous living expression of physical suffering, and we see Dr. Treves, a model of British stoicism, shed tears in stricken silence.

Dr. Treves is magnificently played by Anthony Hopkins-Hannibal Lecter himself-who captures all the nuances and inner conflict of a British gentleman of the late 1800s who is expected to maintain control of his emotions at all times even when he is absolutely devastated by the sight of the afflicted Merrick. Dr. Treves is a model of exercising strength through a combination of intellect and compassion. He takes mercy on Merrick . . . and yet, his interest is also driven by a desire to make a medical breakthrough he can exhibit to his colleagues and take credit for research into the legion deformities with which Merrick suffers. Dr. Treves is aware of this contradiction inside himself, and, in an uncharacteristic show of vulnerability, asks his wife directly, "Am I a good man, or a bad man?" This new vulnerability and openness which gives him a quiet strength is set in motion by the time he spends with Merrick. Hopkins is perfect in every scene. For me, this is his finest film.

Merrick is played by John Hurt buried under prosthetic makeup that is indescribably grotesque. Do a google image search for "the Elephant Man," or "Joseph Merrick," which is the actual name of the real life Elephant Man. Hurt is one of those actors who never seemed to be driven by ego. He was the guy in Alien who had the alien baby rip its way out of his chest. And then he spoofed himself in Spaceballs. He played a doomed subject of totalitarianism in 1984, and the doomed figurehead of a totalitarian regime targeted by a determined anarchist revolutionary in V for Vendetta. He died this past year of pancreatic cancer. Hit up his filmography. Hurt was an actor's actor. He played just about everything, and he embodies Merrick, his physical difficulties, and his high-pitched voice as though they were all second nature to him.

Other standout performances include a hard-boiled Freddie Jones as the alcoholic ringmaster; a radiant Anne Bancroft as a theatre producer who befriends Merrick; and a delightful John Gielgud as Dr. Treves's rational, enlightened superior in the medical establishment.

The Elephant Man's strongest scenes depict Merrick's process of healing as he discovers his value as a human being with help from Dr. Treves and others who come like angels of mercy into his life.  Merrick is a man who has lived in a state of pure brutalization, and so he must learn what it is to be loved, and to love himself, and to have dreams and hopes for the future. The dark and twisted dream of a misbegotten child born of an elephant's hoof is displaced by new dreams of his own creation, that are more in tune with the reality of his humanity.

If the movie has a flaw, it has to do with that whole "based on a true story" thing. Do a little research, and you will pick up very quickly on what's fiction and what's somewhat factual here. On the whole, I think this movie is a credible dramatization of a process of healing, but it is most definitely not a documentary. The real story of Joseph Merrick, who only lived 27 years, is much more complex, and in some ways is at odds with this film version.

Another flaw is that some of the scenes are played for absolute historical realism, while others veer into melodrama that doesn't quite fit, although they are well played by the actors here. David Lynch's exacting direction almost makes it seamless. The understated dialogue, punctuated with outbursts of great intensity, also keeps things mostly on track.

These missteps are, for me, mostly forgivable.

Bottom line: this is Lynch's most nakedly compassionate, and humane film. Shot in glorious black and white, immaculately designed and lit; and acted to perfection, it is a haunting evocation of a healer descending into a hellish labyrinth of misery to rescue a suffering soul.

NEXT: 1/29/18: Dune (1984)

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The Lynch Meditations -6

"Based on a true story."

I take these words as a warning,
that a life in all its complexity, contradiction, and paradox
is about to be rendered down into a trite, Hollywood stroke-job;
to please as many people as possible
with absurdly simplistic life lessons and bogus uplift
cynically calculated and implemented.

Especially when it comes to the biopic-short for biographical picture-which usually presumes to tell the life story of some famous and noteworthy person from history.
How do you make a human life fit within the artificial confines of the dogma of three-act structure?

The film I've seen that did this thing best was Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman, and that was a totally fictional film that felt like an authentic biopic. Right at the two-hour mark, it managed to make you feel as though you've experienced decades of a woman's life in Japan from the end of World War II through to the early 1960s. I have no idea how Imamura did it. I tried to figure it out years ago, and all I could do was profess my admiration for it, note its unusual qualities, and move on with my life.

The Elephant Man is one of two movies David Lynch has directed-so far-"based on a true story"-with the other one being The Straight Story, and I would place them in second and third place behind The Insect Woman as far as conventional biopics are concerned . . . even though The Insect Woman isn't even a biopic, technically speaking. Sometimes good cinema screws up the usual categories of things. And if you don't like that, or you don't agree, well, um, it's my blog, I determine the reality 'round here, bub!

COMICS REVIEW: APOCALYPTIGIRL: AN ARIA FOR THE END TIMES (2015)

Script and Art by Andrew MacLean

...

"You know, for an apocalypse . . . it ain't all bad."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A woman named Aria wanders a post-apocalyptic world with her sword, her guns, and her twitchy tomcat, Jelly Beans, singing French opera, and not having such a bad time of it, really. The scenery is nice. Lots of trees and other plants reclaiming the abandoned office buildings, vehicles, and ruined  infrastructure. Aria lives underground inside an abandoned subway car wired up to a power source, hooked up to clean water, and she's able to harvest all-organic fruits and nuts from the trees all over the surface world. Aria has a motorcycle, and a broken down mech she has all but given up on repairing for the moment. Fresh air, clean water, healthy food, exercise-Aria's seemingly got the run of the planet.

Except for the muscle dudes in blue warpaint wielding Kalashnikov assault rifles. Oh, and the killer hordes of mutant attack dogs. And the blue-skinned lunatics, those dudes are heavy. And then there's the soldiers of the One . . . but you'll just have to check that crew out yourself.

Aria's life is in danger, but she is not scared. She's armed, she has survival skills, combat training, and a mission to find an ultra-tech power source to give her life meaning, since she is completely isolated from meaningful human contact during her time on this planet, aside from her skirmishes with the blue warpaint dudes and the blue-skinned dudes and the soldiers of the One. Only the soldiers of the One seem to speak Aria's language, and so we can perhaps assume that the lack of an ability to communicate only contributes to the tension and hostility that regularly boils over into lethal violence.

During one of Aria's battles with the blue warpaint dudes, she encounters a teenage boy who can't quite pull the trigger on his Kalashnikov. Aria spares his life, and she comes to be haunted by his intense eyes. Later, one of these eyes sheds a tear over a comrade-in-arms slain by Aria in battle.

At eighty-eight pages, Apocalyptigirl keeps things simple and to the point, telling an action-packed story of a post-apocalyptic wanderer contending with a dangerous world in the vein of A Boy and His Dog, The Omega Man, or the first Fallout game. The art is charming, colorful, slightly cartoony, and brutally violent where necessary. Bodies are blown apart in shootouts. Limbs get hacked off. Aria is not to be fucked with despite her sunny, borderline twee demeanor. The thing which Aria is trying to find is cool looking, but is basically a MacGuffin, just a device to give some semblance of a structure to the plot. I would've preferred a more interesting object for her to quest after, but it doesn't ruin anything. I was particularly pleased with the ending, which I did not expect. There is an intriguing subtext of a society divided along gender lines, with the apocalypse implied to be the outcome of militaristic hypermasculinity gone berserk, but the emphasis is on the action, and the details of Aria's solitary existence. Apocalyptigirl isn't preachy, but it does have more on its mind than is obvious on a first reading.

Overall, Apocalyptigirl gets by almost entirely on the charm and dynamism of its visuals, which is no mean feat. I read it several times over an evening, and I have since ruminated over its visuals, thinking, "What a cozy apocalypse! I would buy the RPG sourcebook. I want to wander this wasteland myself." There's a lot to enjoy within this slim volume. A lot of comics go on and on, to diminishing returns over time. I like it when everything you need is in one volume, between two covers, no bullshit, just the thing itself.

The Lynch Meditations 5: Eraserhead (1977)

WARNING: If you've never seen Eraserhead, go watch it. It's excellent. It's a high point in the career of David Lynch. It's best to go into it totally blind, with no pre-conceived notions. Don't read what I think about it, don't read any other reviews before you see it-do that after, if at all. Eraserhead's worth the time spent with it.
...

An evil man in the moon manipulates a set of levers setting in motion a nightmarish existence for a printer named Henry.

Henry is full of monster sperm he doesn't want.

A woman with a face full of tumors-or maybe Jo Shishido-style silicone injections gone bad-sings of heaven inside a radiator, and stomps out the unwanted sperm monsters.

Henry is so ashamed of his desires,
he literally loses his head sometimes.
When he really gets down, the grotesque head of a monster baby replaces his own.

Henry's apartment transforms into a muggy jacuzzi when he finally has sex with the woman across the hall whom he has desired for so long . . . assuming this isn't a dream.

Henry lies in bed with his fiancee (not the woman across the hall, btw), post-coitus. Suddenly, he starts trying to remove the monster sperms he has filled her with by reaching inside of her and extracting them manually which causes extreme pain to the fiancee.

And then there's the dream of becoming an eraserhead . . .

Eraserhead is full of nightmarish imagery in glorious black and white meticulously planned, lit, designed, shot, scored, sound re-recorded, edited, and mixed over five laborious years in the 1970s. I had to remind myself that this was 1970s American cinema. It has that timeless look that Citizen Kane has, where I have to remind myself of the true age of what I just watched. Eraserhead feels even more contemporary than Citizen Kane, whose snappily paced dialogue and German Expressionist style clearly dates it to the 1940s. Eraserhead is still very much of this present moment with its long stretches of ambient sound scoring, and characters who alternate between anguished silences and awkward exchanges. The characters inhabit a world of deep loneliness and isolation, and so they turn inwards to keep their own counsel, nurture bizarre fantasies, or have outright hallucinations. Or are they transcendent visions? (Maybe these people need social media. I mean, if they could just situate themselves within solipsistic always online echo chambers I'm sure their angst and alienation would be geometrically amplified to lethal proportions-oh, wait . . .)

The question of whether this movie takes place in reality or a dream is seemingly settled by its well-know tagline: "A dream of dark and troubling things." Of course, you could say that every movie is a dream of one kind or another, especially if we define a dream as a discrete set of images, sounds, and moods that constitutes a hermetically sealed experience complete in and of itself.

Gojira is a nightmare of a giant radioactive monster laying waste to Tokyo; Double Indemnity is a fever dream of forbidden desire run riot overturning the placid surface of prosperous lives; Zero Dark Thirty is a slow-burn nightmare of vengeance hollowing out an intelligence analyst's soul; La La Land is a bittersweet dream of attractive young people making it in Hollywood; Mulholland Dr. is a nightmare of attractive young people making it in Hollywood hidden inside a bittersweet dream of attractive young people making it in Hollywood.

Eraserhead is, perhaps, a nightmare of a man who fears having to take care of another living being.

Henry has a child with his fiancee which is a monstrosity seemingly created before the camera from an actual cow fetus, expertly puppeteered like something out of a Clive Barker story. The newborn is piteous, magnificent, repulsive, and irritating in equal measure. He keeps it on top of his dresser in his tiny apartment. It mewls in pain at all hours of the night, and in this world it's almost always night. Henry tries to ignore the monster freak baby, but then he tries to tend to its fragile, bandaged body and everything only gets worse. Which is exactly what drives people from trying to love one another, right? A peculiar fear not just of failure, but of rejection, that no matter what you do you'll only become more vile, more alone, more unworthy of being loved. And because Eraserhead is a discrete set of images, sounds, moods, performances that constitutes a hermetically sealed experience complete in and of itself the only possible escape or transcendence flows from the logic of a dream or a nightmare . . . you just need to see it for yourself.

I really don't want to spoil the ending on this one, but I'll say this: a number of Lynch's movies play like nightmares with a transcendent climax in which some mercy or salvation is achieved even if that transcendence can't help but also encompass a high degree of perversity, of madness, annihilation of self and others.

Eraserhead. It's some weird shit.

1/22/18: The Elephant Man (1980)
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The Lynch Meditations -5

A man sitting on the edge of a bed gets up to walk through a door
a year and a half later
the man walks through the door
well,
that was the shooting schedule,
how it worked out.

Two years into the shoot, the original cinematographer died of some unspecified illness.

Leading man Jack Nance kept his hair all crazy teased-up like that during the entire shoot.

Money ran out, no one knew if it would ever be finished,
everyone involved gave whatever they had: time, money, labor,
with no real profit motive or hope of breaking in to the Hollywood scene,

Five years of filming
Eraserhead's the result.

It's some weird shit.
...

I saw Eraserhead for the first time sometime in 2002 on VHS with a couple of friends in a dingy, collegiate apartment. We watched it in mostly rapt silence, all Lynch fans, a perfect screening.

None of us knew anything about the making of the film. I assumed it was a movie made like any other movie. Maybe I thought of it being something like Night of the Living Dead, shot on weekends by a dedicated group of people over five or six months.

After Eraserhead, I recall us watching Tetsuo the Iron Man but I'm not sure. That would've been a terrific double feature.

David Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard for the cast and crew of Eraserhead to put them in the mood of a black and white reality. I guess we should've watched Sunset Boulevard with Eraserhead back in 2002. Well, we didn't know any better at that time.

Maybe I'll watch Sunset Boulevard first before watching Eraserhead this time around.

COMICS REVIEW: ORBITER (2003)

Writer: Warren Ellis
Artist: Colleen Doran
Colorist: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Clem Robins 

Review by William D. Tucker

In the not-too-distant-future, a NASA space shuttle disappears not long after launch. No one knows exactly what happened, but this loss deals a deathblow to the program of manned spaceflight. The government is no longer willing to invest in any mission which could get people killed, and only robotic space exploration missions are funded. This shift in policy works alongside a drift towards militarism and growing economic inequality inside the United States, and within  a decade of the space shuttle's vanishing, Kennedy Space Center has become a shantytown squat for growing populations of the permanently unemployed, climate change refugees from the flooding coastal regions, and masses of sick junkies, the untreated mentally ill, and those disenfranchised by jingoistic nationalism and white supremacy.

And then one day, the vanished space shuttle returns, crashing into the shantytown, and killing scores of innocent people. The military government of the United States moves quickly to investigate the returned shuttle, and try to crack the mystery of its disappearance. The military supervised scientists discover rather quickly that the shuttle is not what it once was: it is covered in a mysterious skin. Only one member of the original crew has survived. And they may no longer be human . . .

Orbiter is a science fiction allegory about the death and rebirth of manned space exploration in the United States of America. I describe it specifically as an allegory because the emphasis here is on themes, ideas, and an overall message about the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration among the "hard" and "soft" sciences of physics, biology, psychology, and engineering in order to overcome the vast challenges of intergalactic exploration, as opposed to a focus on characters and interpersonal drama. The characters are important, and well-sketched for the most part, but like many science fiction tales, the ideas are what matter most. This results in a cast of characters who mostly exist as spokespeople for different values and philosophical points of view, with a few devolving into stock stereotypes of geekdom and hardline military authoritarianism. I was able to forgive the weaknesses of some of the characterizations because the overall thematic development was so compelling.

The art is seamless and cinematic, foregoing sound effects text and thought bubbles, and emphasizing shadows, earth tones, faces, and the magnificent returned space shuttle which has undergone a startling biomechanical transformation. Scenes of crushing poverty and cataclysmic mass death set a very dark tone early on with an abundance of detail depicting piles of corpses and heaps of trash side by side. Human life has lost much of its meaning and value. But as the human investigators probe deeper into the mystery of the returned spacecraft, the people-with their questions and memories and theories-take center stage lifting the story into a higher plane both visually and textually.

At one hundred brisk pages, Orbiter cuts all the bullshit, and gives you everything you need between two covers.

This comic was originally published as a single volume hardback "graphic novel" way back in 2003, the year the US embarked on its disastrous Iraq adventure, and it seems even more relevant now as the United States struggles to keep its shit together under the shameful administration of Fake President trump and his government of white supremacists, hyper-nationalists, and climate change denying anti-intellectuals. Orbiter, for all its gruesome dystopian world-building, actually depicts a path forward by dramatizing interdisciplinary cooperation in the face of nihilistic inertia and despair. Sometimes dystopia clarifies one's thinking, and makes you realize you need not be bound to the failed institutions and ideologies of the past. This, too, is what I see as the primary lesson of the ordeal of the Fake President trump White House as it implodes in real time: what kind of country do we want marching forward into the future? One that is inclusive of all people regardless of skin color, sexuality, and gender identity? Or a corrupt shithole of jingoism and white supremacy?

Orbiter offered transcendent hope in the dark days of the lying, warmongering Bush/Cheney regime in 2003, and it holds up in this present moment as well.

The Lynch Meditations 4: The Amputee Version One and Version Two (1974)

A woman (Catherine Coulson) writes a letter or maybe a script for a daytime soap opera as a nurse (David Lynch) tends to the stump of her freshly amputated left leg. The right leg has also been amputated. The woman jots down a series of jealous accusations and insinuations exchanged between a group of close friends as the nurse tries to staunch the bleeding stump. The blood continues to flow. The letter or soap opera script or outline of a turgid novel of love and betrayal a la Peyton Place just goes on and on and on narrated in voice over by the woman who does not even seem aware of her amputated legs, the eternally bleeding stump, or the nurse who seems to be incapable of staunching the flow of blood.

Petty soap opera conflicts obscure the larger truth, the larger wound.
This short little flick-available in a five minute and in a four minute version-seems to encapsulate in miniature all three seasons of Twin Peaks + Fire Walk With Me.

The two versions were each shot on a different kind of videotape that the American Film Institute was looking to purchase presumably to cut costs. So this is early video work from Lynch, who would shoot web videos and the labyrinthine epic INLAND EMPIRE on digital video farther on down the line.

The video is a rough looking black and white that enhances the dreamy surrealism of the scene that plays out in one continuous take in both versions.

The scene has no real ending. I was left with the feeling that it just goes on and on, cyclically, a warped soap opera playing out inside the amputee's mind,
while the nurse tends the wound he cannot close,
the wound that will never stop squirting blood.

NEXT: 1/15/18 The Lynch Meditations 5: Eraserhead (1977)
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The Lynch Meditations -4

The Amputee exists because the years long production of Eraserhead-David Lynch's first feature length film-ran out of money and had to shut down. The American Film Institute-which was helping to produce Eraserhead-was looking to test two kinds of film stock. David Lynch and his collaborator Catherine Coulson (known in later years for playing The Log Lady on Twin Peaks) wrote a script overnight, and had Frederick Elmes-the director of photography on Eraserhead-shoot it as one scene, all in one take for each version, shot on the two different film stocks.

So, The Amputee was created to scratch an itch: the desire to create, even in circumstances where there's no money, no real crew, and a script conjured from thin air.

What's possible?

How much something can you get from nothing?

The Lynch Meditations 3: The Grandmother (1970)

Mixture of live action and animation. Some live action sequences are shot as stop motion using human performers giving that weird herky-jerky effect to their motions-people become monsters out of a Ray Harryhausen fantasy sequence.

A man and a woman are secreted and processed by the earth until they reach the surface where they make animal noises, and crawl and fight upon the forest floor. The man brutalizes the woman, forces himself upon her, and a son is born, also secreted and processed upwards by the earth. The son is brutalized by the father, neglected by the mother.

Soon, the son is pissing the bed. The father punishes the son for this, rubbing his face in the bright yellow piss stains, reminiscent of how some dog owners abuse their pets.

The son goes to another bedroom-which might exist only in his imagination-where he piles dirt on the bed, adds water, and a large, spiny plant grows. The plant births an old woman, whom the son loves, and she loves the son. It is not clear if this is actually happening, or if this is a dream of the boy. The old woman-the grandmother-might also be drawn from some memory the boy has of his grandmother from earlier in life, but this is not certain. Personally, I think this grandmother springs wholly from the boy's imagination. He knows there are kindly, loving grandmothers out there in the world, even though he himself has never met one, and so he has created one in his imagination, and has brought her to life through green-thumb magick.

One thing I find interesting here is how the earth is portrayed as a crazy machine manufacturing miserable humans. Is this what human cruelty has done to the earth? Are we on another planet? My take is that this is what we have done to the earth. We humans have brutalized mother earth into a factory specializing in the manufacture of broken, abusive souls.

Animation and surrealism are used to go beyond the mundane surface of miserable lives. If this had been staged in a wholly realistic way, we would have no distance, and we would be deeply depressed. The movie's weirdness gets us into an investigative frame of mind: why are these people so fucked up? Is there a way out? Is fantasy any kind of salvation? Why must so many fathers be abusive, predatory pieces of shit?

I no longer hate The Grandmother, but I think I know why I disliked it so much when I first experienced it. This film is a harrowing portrayal of child abuse, and how a boy suffering abuse uses fantasy to imagine someone who loves him unconditionally in a world without love. The movie, interestingly, isn't trying to get you to fall in love with it-The Grandmother is meant to be difficult, bizarre, unpleasant, and nightmarish. I now have respect for it as a work of cinema, and I hope it does not reflect personal experiences on the part of David Lynch; but if it does portray personal experiences, then I hope this movie was part of some healing process. Either way, it is a challenging experience, and I'm glad I ventured into its frightful world one more time.

NEXT: 1/11/18 The Lynch Meditations 4: The Amputee Version One and Version Two (1974)
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The Lynch Meditations -3

The Grandmother is my least favorite David Lynch film. I've watched it all the way through only once, and I clenched my teeth and wanted to get up and leave for about twenty-five of its thirty or so minutes. I found it to be incomprehensible.

Which isn't the worst thing a film can be-I mean I don't really understand Lynch's Lost Highway, but I enjoy watching it. The same goes for films like Olivier Assayas's Demonlover and Clouds of Sils Maria; or Hideaki Anno's Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo. 

Why did I hate The Grandmother so much? Will I hate it as much on my next viewing?

This feels like an impending long-overdue, awkward, and painful conversation with someone I've purposefully avoided for years.

Fuck me running . . .

The Lynch Meditations 2: The Alphabet (1968)

"Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken."
-Duke Leto Atreides (played by Jurgen Prochnow) in David Lynch's film Dune (1984)


Mixture of animation and live action derived from a real life incident in which the niece of David Lynch's then wife Peggy was having a nightmare of repeating the alphabet over and over again. Lynch has stated that he was attempting to imagine what the nightmare was like for the little girl.

Much like a nightmare, The Alphabet consists of jarring juxtapositions, refined and stylized into a cohesive visual and sonic four minute 16mm film short.

Chaos is created out of animation of schematic lines, letters, basic shapes, and messy organic clouds juxtaposed with live action footage of a girl in ghostly pale makeup (played by Peggy Lynch) writhing on a bed and vomiting blood from her mouth. There is a precise order to these images, but I find that they shuffle together in my mind and seem to take place more chaotically than they actually do in the film itself. The movie is short and exact-as animation and low budget films in general need to be in order to work-and yet my memory is one of nightmarish chaos.

It's also a film that goes from sounds of children chanting ABC and an adult male voice singing a corny educational song to a bizarre insect/human moaning noise to baby mewling noises to the relative quiet of wind whistling.

As in a dream, mundane proportions of human faces and bodies are scrambled, distorted, mutated as the mind processes the day's inputs . . . or whatever the hell goes on when we dream.

A distorted human figure has their head filled with letters and knowledge 'til their head melts down into flowing blood.

A live action mouth speaks from behind bars, begging, "Please remember you are dealing with the human form."

The climax, I suppose, is the girl vomiting blood all over the bed sheets.


Language, logic, the rigorous drills of a standard education cannot contain the irrationality of existence. Language, words are a kind of prison for the essence of being, forcing the Alphabet down a girl’s throat causes her to vomit blood . . . but this agony is unavoidable. Language is a necessity, and change-transformation-is often painful.

“Please remember you are dealing with the human form.”

This cryptic line comes across as a warning

or maybe a plea for compassion.

“Please remember you are dealing with the human form.”

because it is delicate, irrational, and resists all forms of imposed rationality

even if that resistance goes unnoticed or even outright suppressed.

Mouth/tongue/teeth-all behind bars. Language painfully sets them free,

but language can also entrap us when we can’t get it to work how we want it to,
but we must continually drill,
'til we have fluency,
the capacity for communication, listening, and understanding,
no matter how frightful the prospect of change,
potential failure,
our desire to remain asleep, safe, divorced from reality.

NEXT: 1/8/18: The Lynch Meditations 3: The Grandmother (1970)
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The Lynch Meditations -2

Abraham Lincoln speaks us into greater union, invokes the better angels, no matter the cost

Susan B. Anthony speaks us beyond white male supremacy, towards greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the cost, even to herself

Adolf Hitler speaks white supremacy, genocide, the abyss

Churchill speaks us to the defense of what's left of democracy, no matter the cost

JFK speaks us to the stars, no matter the cost

Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks us into greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the long history of slavery, no matter the hardwired injustice and inequality of white supremacist America, no matter the cost, even to himself. 

Post World War II, evil was supposedly vanquished

of course
this was just a story we told ourselves
the evil went invisible, parallel compartmentalized soul chamber
verily, it became entwined with our free market American soul, if there can be said to be such a thing

some words get us to a higher place
some words advocate genocide and white supremacy, cutthroat capitalism, slavery

words mislead people who might've otherwise done the right thing
words, long abused, lose all meaning,
and our faith in communication
as opposed to force
dies.

Language
spoken, written, signed, tapped, felt, touched
is a massive part of the human experience
for all the wreckage
for all the lies
of a voice yoked to this or that rubblemind
we can also speak visions of compassion, liberty, equality, justice,
speak a vision that can take us beyond the boundaries
of family, tribe, village, town, country, city, nation, planet
speak us into a union with cosmos
unless that's just another lie
or a tantalizingly compelling fantasy construction
perfectly internally consistent, logical, full of dramatic reversals and payoffs
yet wholly divorced from reality
it's just a movie.

Which reality are we speaking ourselves into, and what voices are being suppressed?
which voices have we yet to hear?
which voices are we prepared to hear?

The Lynch Meditations 1: Six Men Getting Sick (1967)

Sequence of strangely proportioned men exposing themselves-their very guts-to the sounds of the air raid siren. All kinds of crazy color, raw emotion spews forth. Little fires, little fires-I can’t help but think this is a commentary on the Cold War. Like in that moment when you realize the bombs are going to drop you can’t hold in your nausea, your fear, your very guts anymore. Extreme fear results in an internal spiritual explosion that sends everything inside-fear, anguish, despair, intestines, bones-flying all over the place. The sequence repeats as though these men are caught in some never-ending cycle of panic, nausea, and self-disembowelment.

Or maybe these six men don't need the Cold War behemoths grappling above them and the prospect of being stamped out in the scuffle to bring up overwhelming existential terror from the depths. Maybe the sickness is purely spiritual, irrational, with no definite cause or pathogen. After all, where do capitalism, communism, nationalism, and nuclear warfare come from? Human minds, human hearts.

Another possibility is that these men, if we presume them to be American, might just be giddy at the prospect of annihilation, the sickness and vomit welling up out of them expressions of performance anxiety before the realization of a cherished dream: Better Dead than Red. The bombs are falling, later for humanity, but at least the commies get to be ashes, too.

There's no overt political messaging here, as in most of Lynch's work. If you weren't told this movie was made in 1967, you might not even peg it as a Cold War film or having anything to do with nuclear weapons . Even later Lynch works that explicitly deal with matters of war and conscience-such as Dune and The Straight Story-do not emphasize the conflict with an external enemy so much as the struggle within the hearts of the protagonists to deal with the costs of conflict, brutality, the power of life and death over another individual or the entire human population of planets like Earth or Arrakis. The "Gotta Light?" episode of Season 3 of Twin Peaks explores the sheer terror loosed by the advent of the Nuclear Age, but the sides of that metaphysical conflict are more evenly portrayed, flirting with an explicit good vs. evil duality that was only suggested in earlier Lynch films.

Six Men Getting Sick was David Lynch's first film-an animated painting, really, according to Lynch's own remarks about its origins. Watching it today, it runs about five minutes, and on first viewing it might seem impenetrable, opaque, but the more one watches it, the more one perceives its detail and nuance. It's a densely packed primer of the cinema to come from David Lynch and his future collaborators.

NEXT: 1/6/18: The Lynch Meditations 2: The Alphabet (1968)

The Lynch Meditations -1

Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere, born October 19, 1862
Louis Jean Lumiere, born October 5, 1864
Francis Bacon, born October 28, 1909
Trinity Nuclear Test, July 16, 1945, Trinity Test Site, New Mexico
David Lynch, born January 20, 1946
Truman Doctrine of containment of communist countries, advent March 12, 1947
Louis Jean Lumiere, died June 7, 1948
Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere, died April 10, 1954
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), released 1967, directed by David Lynch . . .

Staid gentlemen
flying apart
under the weight of nuclear jitters
a tarantella communicable
from the bite of fate
furiously unleashing the suppressed terrors
of a world poisoned by the dream
of total annihilation

light obliterates
but it can also capture dreams

two schools of sublime rigor:
nuclear weapons
and cinema
aborning
or metastasizing
within the tormented heart of the twentieth century

The Lynch Meditations 0

by William D. Tucker

Filmmaker David Lynch-director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive, Dune, Lost Highway-refuses to discuss what his films mean. He'll talk about how they're made. He might speak about the roots, the inspirations of a given work, but he doesn't want to tell critics or interviewers or audience members what deeper significance-if any-his work contains, suggests, or embodies. Lynch prefers not to state the theme of a given work directly. This may be because he doesn't consciously construct his films to deliver a singular meaning. It might be that his films are meant to be engaged with in a state of uncertainty, with no definite answers within reach. Lynch has a background as a visual artist, so maybe he approaches his films as visual works first and foremost, and everything else is meant to support the visuals.

Lynch is also a proponent of Transcendental Meditation. He has a foundation-the David Lynch Foundation-which promotes TM as a discipline for achieving personal happiness and world peace. TM involves-as do many meditative techniques-sitting quietly, eyes closed, staying in the moment, taking note of your thoughts and feelings as they occur, all while trying to exist in a wholly non-judgmental moment . . . something like that?

To be perfectly honest, I've never seriously practiced meditation. Maybe I tried to meditate once. I fell asleep. I think that's what happened. I don't claim to understand TM or any other mindfulness discipline. What puts me in a thoughtful, focused state of mind is cinema. Sitting, staring into a screen, ideally in the dark, but sometimes with the lights on, and giving myself over to a fantasy, a gritty neo-realist drama, a progressive documentary trying to throw a wrench into the works of the war machine, a hallucinogenic anime dystopia, a Hong Kong heroic bloodshed shoot-em-up-whatever kind of movie, cinema puts me in an altered state of mind. Maybe I'm just a compulsive fantasist, but cinema is my drug, my therapy, my meditation. It's to the point where I find it hard to articulate, to even want to put it down in words, yet I have this nagging feeling that I should. I don't know why. There's absolutely nothing special about me. I don't see more films per year than other people. I don't have any special expertise or metaphysical insight. But that's what I feel compelled to do every now and again when I have the time and the willpower to put down my thoughts about movies I find interesting.

Although I do not practice any form of mindfulness or meditation, I wanted to try to approach the cinema of David Lynch in a more personal, philosophical fashion, integrating my own feelings, thoughts, and musings from my own experience into the viewing experience. In a way, that's what every film reviewer or critic does, but I wanted to go a bit more loopy with this one.

I've come to view cinema as a kind of secular church, as a spiritual experience that affects me internally in important ways. I don't know who first came up with the term 'The Church of Cinema,'( I think I first came across it reading an interview with Quentin Tarantino who referred to him and fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese as worshiping at different churches as a metaphor for their different styles of filmmaking) but I like it. So these reviews of Lynch's films aren't exactly meant to be sermons-I have no desire to preach definitive visions-but meditations on possibility, interpretation, and feelings. Lynch's films strike me as unusually inviting of interpretation, rumination, and meditation because they can be very weird, abstract, surreal, and grotesque. Lynch's cinema can also be shocking in moments of violence and transformation; and disorienting in their transitions into different realms of existence, perception, and consciousness. Lynch's movies can also be frustratingly obscure, opaque even, and this by design, thus demanding multiple viewings to figure out what, precisely, the hell is going on in a given film. Or maybe this opacity is meant to short circuit rational thought and encourage a shift into more intuitive forms of feeling and knowing, as opposed to rationally dissecting a work into its various parts, and assigning meaning, form, and function to all those parts.

I don't know. But I'm going to take a close look at the cinema of David Lynch, and see what I find.

NEXT: 1/4/18:The Lynch Meditations 1: Six Men Getting Sick (1967)

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