EVERY DAY IS HALLOWEEN 11: THE WORTHY TRACE

that movie poster's a goddamn lie

1974’s Countess Sadistica’s Satanic Castle of Orgies

BEHOLD THE NIGHTMARE REALITY PROPHESIED BY THE MARQUIS DE SADE!!!

a comic book illustration of a fanged’n’smiling tall, willowy, pale-skinned, red-haired, and red-eyed vampire queen,

twirling a whip over her head,

diaphanous see-through lingerie wind-tossed in all directions,

a line of girls in chains kneeling before her-brunette, raven, blonde,

whilst a vampire hunter in pilgrim-looking attire twists and howls as he is impaled upon a steel spike by a hooded executioner,

a look of supreme agony upon the face of the wannabee Van Helsing,

a wooden stake slipping out of his grasp at the moment of death

-no scene that outrageous, bloody, or cool ever occurred within the body of the film

its connection to the works of the Marquis de Sade is notional at best

the actual contents consisted of a dry-as-a-collegiate-production-of-Chekhov knockoff of a Hammer Films style Van Helsing vs. Dracula thriller with a bunch of Americans doing fakey British accents 

shot in somebody’s parents rather nice house somewheres upstate if the three archived professional reviews from the era are to be credited

-nor was it banned in 36 countries

it only had a brief theatrical run in American coastal cities

where it was met with a half-dozen or so lukewarm reviews

distributed by the unlamented Metropolitan Distributors’ Association,

two other films released under their banner,

both forgotten porno flicks,

(one-Kentucky Ken’s Orgy-a clip job of three separate, unfinished hillbilly-themed bang-out scenarios,

the other titled Holly’s Secret Door-no synopsis, stills, or footage survive)

rose to the surface

ever so briefly

then sank

only the poster remains

a damned lie beyond all statistics

a deceptive piece of anti-evidence

of a fever dream that never was

I mean,

the poster IS pretty cool

so I'm glad they made the movie

so I can have it on my wall and everything

too bad about the director,  writer, cast, and crew

whose careers went nowhere

didn’t even show up in any other exploitation flicks of the era

just a group of friends browbeaten into some ill-conceived vanity opus for all we know

dig that poster tho'

-August 2020

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #3: SYNDICATE (1993)

 At-a-distance-command-and-controlled cyborg hit squad

give them just the right levels of aggression and cunning

load them up with bionic parts and heavy artillery

make sure at least one asset’s packing a cute little brainwash gun

get the enemy worker bees on your side,

light up the whole fuckin’ hive

-not to worry, not when it comes to the collateral damages and such

the whole planet’s been paved over

by all the rivalling, property-obsessed oligarchic factions

everywhere you go

the same architecture, the same infrastructure

all of Earth

is a campus for some New Era Corporate Citizen,

the constiuent flunky-shit-work drones that make up the bodies politic

of the Money Titans of this contemptible era

-so go nuts,

Young Mastermind,

shoot up the hired gunslingers of the Other Side,

and go ahead and nuke the saloon set, too, while you’re at it

it’s expected and encouraged,

actually . . . sure, sure, sure-sometimes it’s a defector extraction bit,

that requires finesse,

obvi

-but force is pretty much default,

now,

then,

forever,

and all the parts and pieces of infrastructure

and personnel

have been totally rationalized, standardized, and maker-ized,

ready to be vat-grown and secreted,

or assembled-to-spec in sundry micro-manufacturies world-around,

so get your damage on, son!

Fully Militarized Globally Scaled Gentrification of the Earth

makes all the white trust fund hipster-gentrifiers of the recent past look like amateurs

especially nowadays,

since there’s no pretense of “art,” of “starting a band,” or “doing theatre,” or “opening a cute little coffee spot,” or “thinkin’ I’ll set up a micro-brewery to get a couture drunk-on, bro,”

it’s just straight up guns and bombs and brainwash rays and full-on suicide soldiers

when you need some of those;

carnage-on-demand

whenever and however you like it, son,

no slow death of economic, racial, and social apartheid, in-this-the-cruellest-now,

just fast-paced commando death squad dropship action,

24/7

you wouldn’t even know how to close, dude!

it’s the only way you can elevate yourself from a mere Destroyer

to a full-on Decider . . .

Syndicate is-in my mind-a training program for a dystopian cyberpunk future villain-kinda like a next level Bond Villain, or something like that. 

It should have come with a fully functional vat-grown synth-cat to perch on your lap,

making those biscuits,

as you stroke its fur,

the greatest pack-in feelie of PC gaming history,

ordering the next atrocity,

at-a-distance

command-and-controlled,

‘cause the one true executive core competency

you must master

is how to orchestrate the slaughter

with not a spot of blood on you 

secure in your airship

your vicious little godhood.

I’d say it beats minimum wage . . . but what doesn’t?

Really

the more I think about it

you need a prequel to the training program of Syndicate

like what’s the sorting process

to even get into a murderous executive scumbaggery career track?

I mean what with the economic, racial, and social apartheid IRL-

what the fuck does that look like eye-deep into a dystopian cyberpunk future?

Now that one-that would be too depressing to contemplate.

Something like an All-American capitalist version of Papers, Please. 

Probably too much to contemplate even for a pessimist like me.

The Lynch Meditations 2018-2019 by William D. Tucker

The Lynch Meditations 0

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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. You would need the Sam Peckinpah of The Wild Bunch to do a proper Rambo-Dune. A helluva thought, that . . .

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 its 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 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. 

The Lynch Meditations -8

David Lynch once told Roger Ebert in an interview that when he and his brother were children they saw a naked, crying woman walking down the street, and that he wept at the sight. In retrospect, it seems that this woman was most likely trying to escape horrific abuse at the hands of her husband or boyfriend. But Lynch, as a child, was confused by this sight, and so this incident worked its way into his filmmaking.

David Lynch's experience seemed to form the basis of one of the most disturbing scenes in his film Blue Velvet-a movie which was created in part to explore the mysteries of human cruelty and the secrecy which society imposes to cover up such abuses.

Blue Velvet is another example of Classic Lynch, one of his best films . . . I think. I haven't watched it all the way through in quite some time. I'm guessing it will hold up better than Dune did for me . . . but we'll see.

I remember quite fondly the first time I got to watch it in its proper aspect ratio on a decent sized TV at a friend's apartment. So much better than watching the shitty pan and scan VHS. I have absolutely no nostalgia for that format.

So here we go . . .

The Lynch Meditations 8: Blue Velvet (1986)

It holds up.

I don't want to spoil too much with this one. If you haven't seen Blue Velvet go watch it. It is a tightly assembled mystery that is surreal without totally departing reality for parts unknown.

If you have seen Blue Velvet, I'll try not to bore you with what has already been said many times over about this film. So let me see if I can say something that hasn't been said about it before . . . I might not be up to the task . . .

I'm a big fan of point-and-click mystery adventure games: Shadowgate, Deja Vu, Uninvited, King's Quest, Nightshade Part 1: The Claws of Sutekh, Snatcher, Grim Fandango, the Gabriel Knight series, the Tex Murphy series, the Phoenix Wright series, and pretty much everything put out by Wadjet Eye Games. These are games where you drag a cursor around the screen, looking for some kind of response from the program, looking for any kind of a clue. You might need to interrogate people by choosing dialogue prompts, being careful not to say the wrong thing which could potentially shut down a conversation prematurely. Usually these games take place in a series of rooms and passages, where each section must be thoroughly investigated and solved before you unlock more rooms, and more passages, that are, ultimately, all connected in some unexpected, labyrinthine fashion by game's end.

Point-and-click games are sometimes notorious for the difficulty of their "moon logic" puzzles-conundrums whose solutions are so arbitrary and obscure that they could only possibly make sense in the hermetically sealed, hyper-postmodern reality of a video game. Sometimes, though, these moon logic puzzles transcend to a level of surreal brilliance which delights, but just as often they make you want to throw your monitor through a window. The best point-and-click adventures create an internal logic that subtly challenges you to engage with the mystery on its own terms, giving you enough clues and worldbuilding contextualization so that you have a fighting chance to reach the end state of the game with a sense of earned achievement.

Blue Velvet creates a near-perfect point-and-click adventure scenario with its own internally consistent reality that seems rooted in our world, but departs from it in key moments to give us a bit of a jolt at just the right moments. We even have a video game cypher of a protagonist (perfectly played by Kyle MacLachlan as a twin-souled square and voyeuristic freak all in one) who allows us to enter into the world with just enough perception to suss out a mystery worth diving into, but lacking that extra bit of common sense which would send a normal person running the fuck home. Visually, we are presented with a series of images and objects that lead us further into the heart of mystery: a severed human ear; a propeller hat; a blue velvet robe; angry and agonized and ecstatic faces distorted in dreams; human forms moving from the background of shadows into the foreground of light; an apartment and a living room presented as though each were a proscenium stage; a work light used as a microphone . . . we are encouraged to think in terms of a show presented before our eyes and how exactly that show has been put together.

The video game cypher takes time out of the adventure to assemble his thoughts and experiences in montage, drawing conclusions that advance the program closer to the end state.

Meanwhile, Angelo Badalamenti's lush score seems to emanate from a dimension of refined film noir that blurs the lines between cinema and reality. After my latest viewing, I am now convinced that the world of Blue Velvet was born from Badalamenti's mysterious score, as opposed to being a film created by a cast and crew of hundreds of people as you would expect from most movies.

Much like in a point-and-click mystery adventure, our protagonist doesn't notice all there is to notice until he is deep into things. When he first goes to a nightspot called the Slow Club, he is mesmerized by a sad and beautiful torch singer. Later, after he's been through some shit, he goes back to the Slow Club, is once again mesmerized by the sad and beautiful torch singer . . . but now he sees someone else in the audience. Someone who was probably there the first time, but our protagonist had no reason to notice this person as distinct from the other anonymous customers in the crowd. I imagine a New Game+ version of these sequences where you can play through it, again, and have a different outcome.

But Blue Velvet isn't a video game. It's a movie. It flows in one direction, coming to one conclusion every single time, and it will never change.

Unless, of course, David Lynch decides to go back into it with computer graphics technology and add in copious amounts of bantha poodoo, digitally enhanced explosions, and maybe an extra rock for Kyle MacLachlan to hide behind inside that closet-maybe R. Kelly could be digitally matted in to keep MacLachlan company . . . this would be so fucked-up and absurd I kind of want to see it happen.

But I get drawn into this one every time I watch it. Maybe it's a great movie. Maybe I'm just a great sucker.

The Lynch Meditations -9

I first watched some out of order episodes of Twin Peaks on cable TV when I was a teenager. I didn't quite know what the hell was going on, but I got the drift. I tracked down Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on VHS, watched it, loved it, and realized I had to see the rest of the series.

You might already be aware of this . . . but Fire Walk With Me basically gives away the entire mystery of Twin Peaks. It's also a grotesque and confusing piece of cinema. I loved every minute of it.

I finally ordered the VHS collection of Twin Peaks right as I was graduating high school. It featured every episode-except the pilot-recorded in glorious Extended Play (EP) format. The quality was shit, but not unwatchable. I had to tape the pilot, which was unavailable on VHS for some reason at that time, off of cable. Later, I dubbed a rental copy VHS release of the international version of the pilot episode, and so I had, on a variety of shitty VHS tapes, a piecemeal Twin Peaks Perfect Collection. 

As much as I rag on the VHS format-because it fucking sucks-I could not stop watching Twin Peaks once I got started-even watching crummy EP picture and sound quality. At that time, it was my first experience watching a long-form TV show from beginning to end. I hadn't even watched an anime series from beginning to end at that point. I couldn't get enough. I even liked all the Second Season shit with the boring dude on the motorcycle. That's how good this show was: it transcended the scuzziness of the VHS format to fire a beam of art directly into the center of my brain mass.

Some years later, I tried re-watching Twin Peaks on DVD, and I couldn't even get all the way through the pilot. Not because I disliked it, but more because my memories of the show were already so vivid. I didn't need to re-burn 'em into my brain. Now, I've watched Fire Walk With Me a number of times, because it remains a mystery to me, and also, probably, because I'm a twisted fuck . . . but I'll get to Fire Walk With Me down the road . . . but Twin Peaks has always stayed with me since the VHS viewings. That's how good this show is-it gets you the first time, doesn't need a second shot at your heart.

So . . . I don't think I'm going to re-watch the whole series. I don't have the time. My disdain for TV has only grown over the years, although I keep hearing that it's some kind of a New Golden Age. Are we still in that New Golden Age? There's been some good shit, for sure: The Wire, The Big O, most of Breaking Bad, a good chunk of The Sopranos, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Transformers Prime, the PBS Frontline Documentaries . . . so I buy the New Golden Age rhetoric. Why not? You gotta stay positive in dark times. But TV . . . is just so tedious to me in general. I guess I got old and cranky. I can't even really complain about the commercials, now, that shit's purely optional. But I'm still aware of the passing of time, the growing shortness of my potential lifespan as I sit watching something passively, body going to seed, eyesight fading, ass cheeks gathering bulk, gut creeping over my belt-line, once beautiful mane of hair giving way to bald spots . . . hey, may as well sit down, watch some old TV all over again. Fuck it.

So . . . a compromise.

I'm only going to watch the episodes of Twin Peaks directed by David Lynch. I'll skip the others.

We'll see how that works . . .

The Lynch Meditations 9: Twin Peaks Broadcast Pilot (1990)

"She's filled with secrets."

Logging machinery sharpens its own teeth as the music of mystery plays.

An endless parade of actor names blink on to the screen-how many people are in this show? What kind of a name is 'Ontkean?' Is that the name of a murderer?

A sad and beautiful woman puts on makeup in front of a mirror only to turn towards the camera just so-as though she were suddenly aware of the camera, and now cheating out to the audience to reveal an eerily powdered face.

A fisherman kisses his hand and touches his wife's ear before going out to the shore to discover a woman's corpse wrapped in plastic.

The police show up to take pictures of the corpse, make a preliminary identification, and a tall, goofy looking cop weeps openly despite the admonitions of his superior to handle his business. Apparently, this policeman weeps at the sight of the fallen.

The cops try to keep a lid on the news of the identity of the murdered young woman, carefully regulating the dissemination of the information to the immediate family . . .

. . . but soon enough the word gets out: Laura Palmer has died. And the specter of grief prowls the community of Twin Peaks bringing shock and tears to many who learn of Laura's death. Apparently, this young woman was well regarded in her home town. She was popular, beautiful, smart, the golden child.

Of course, this is all revealed to be partially a facade of perfectionism covering soul-deep misery, uncertainty, and a fear of secret, all-consuming evil, but this first episode concentrates on the ripples of grief and heartbreak emanating in all directions from the carefully wrapped corpse of Laura, what her death means symbolically to those who knew her or knew of her. Her death is a small town version of the murder of JFK: a catalyst for bringing to the surface deep-seated conflicts that go beyond the mere mechanics of murder-of an aggressor taking the life of their victim-and into the realm of metaphysical conspiracy.

When an admired person is senselessly killed, we struggle to make sense of why such a person had to die and in such a pointless, brutal fashion. Surely there must be some larger significance than the anger and entitlement of the perpetrator triumphing over the life of the victim. A lone asshole with a gun-Lee Harvey Oswald-murdered an American president, and we, as a nation, have never been able to live that down. How can one miserable piece of shit strike so deep into the heart of the nation all on his own? Surely there must be some far-flung conspiracy, some allegorical significance?

But in America, lone pieces of shit with guns strike deep into the national heart all the time, usually by slaughtering scores of unarmed children attending public schools. Sane gun control would pretty much end these crimes, but American society is infected with an irrational belief in a kind of interpersonal militarism that mandates that each person is all alone and must provide for their own security at all times by becoming a soldier in the Army of One ready to shoot anyone who poses a threat at all times . . . but I digress.

Twin Peaks is a fictional construct, and so it is, by design, full of secrets, constructed to be rich with internally logical allegory and symbolism, and, yes, Laura Palmer's death is not just another sad and sickening outcome of America's longstanding culture of violence toward women-indeed, she will be revealed to be at the nexus of a vast metaphysical struggle worthy of George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien.

But in this first episode, we have yet to rocket off into the realms of high Lynchian weirdness. We are essentially presented with a realistic, if quirky, police procedural involving a joint FBI-Twin Peaks PD investigation into Laura Palmer's murder. The large cast of characters-all those names popping up in the opening credits-exist to give various layers of depth to the story, to allow a nuanced, meandering exploration of the ripple effects of grief, and to provide a wide array of possible suspects within the mainline murder mystery plot.

This pilot episode runs about ninety-three minutes, and almost plays as a self-contained feature-length film, save for its cliffhanger ending, and abundance of characters and clues which have yet to be satisfactorily paid off by episode's end. The pilot assembles a large cast, and establishes a distinctive look and tone with simple, direct filmmaking. It isn't nearly as weird as the episodes to come-this is the David Lynch that would go on to make The Straight Story, not so much the Lynch of Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., or Inland Empire.

But the weirdness is coming.

In fact, there's another version of this pilot-a misbegotten twin that leaned hard into the desire for tidy endings in order to secure a release as a stand alone movie for European television . . .

The Lynch Meditations -10

The Twin Peaks pilot was re-edited and released with additional footage as a stand alone feature length movie to be shown on European TV. I think. That's what I've read. I wasn't there, you know? This was done to get some value out of the production of the pilot in case it wasn't approved to become a series by the network.

Later, David Lynch and his collaborators would shoot a television pilot called Mulholland Dr. which was not approved to become a series, and so Lynch and co. took out a scene or two, shot more footage, and released it as a feature film which became nominated for many awards, and is regarded by some as Lynch's masterpiece. Is that where the New Golden Age of Television began? I probably shouldn't ask such grandiose questions about TV since I don't much care for it. Or was it The Simpsons? That show's going strong even today . . . Futurama's pretty good, too . . . I liked that South Park movie but the TV show got kinda long in the tooth for me . . .

So, if you end up with a pilot that a network doesn't want, you can go make a movie out of it. Or just dump it on YouTube so it doesn't have a shot at competing against snarky comedy movie reviews and inane unboxing videos. YouTube is fun.

The Lynch Meditations 10: Twin Peaks Pilot Alternate Version (1990)

This is basically the same as the broadcast pilot but with an ending involving a one-armed man discharging a revolver into another man presented as Laura Palmer's killer, and an extended dream sequence shot for a later episode involving Agent Dale Cooper in the Black Lodge and listening to the Man in the Red Suit as he says weird shit, and then does a dance.

I'm trying to avoid spoilers if you've never seen Twin Peaks. I don't know how much longer I can hold out. Once I get to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, I'll probably be at Full Spoilers, so be warned.

If you've seen Twin Peaks, like I have, I'm guessing you are going to be underwhelmed by this alternate version of the pilot, though it is not terribly done in and of itself. I consider it largely superfluous-an artifact of the convoluted processes of getting a network contract for an entire series as opposed to a movie that truly stands on its own.

I first watched this alternate version sometime in late 1999 or early 2000. I recall renting a Warner Home Video VHS at a Blockbuster, confused that the real deal pilot was nowhere to be found in terms of an official release ("official release" . . . sounds kinky!) and so I had to tape the actual pilot during a rebroadcast on one of the cable networks that was re-running some-but not all-of the Season One and Season Two episodes. I want to say it was the Bravo channel, but I don't recall, exactly.

Anyways, all this confusion really doesn't matter anymore. The complete run of all three seasons of Twin Peaks has been released in numerous formats, and if you try hard enough or spend enough money you can get 'em all in one place, and watch 'em real convenient-like. Such is the wonder of our digital age!

Onwards . . .

The Lynch Meditations -11

What if you only watched the episodes of Season One and Two of Twin Peaks that were directed by David Lynch? Will that unlock a secret version of the show? Is there a certain recondite combination of button presses on the DVD remote that will open up the Twin Peaks debug menu? Is that what the Black Lodge is: the debug menu for Reality Itself?

Only one way to find out . . .

The Lynch Meditations 11: Twin Peaks Episode 2 (1990)

"Some ideas arrive in the form of a dream."

-The Log Lady

This episode contains a favorite scene: Agent Cooper throwing rocks at a glass jar as Sheriff Truman reads off the names of various people connected with the Laura Palmer murder. Agent Cooper frames this bizarre ritual as some kind of exercise in near-mystical lateral thinking derived from study of meditative practices from Tibet. Cooper gives a brief historical lesson on the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and one is left wondering, "Is Dale Cooper an FBI Agent with a FREE TIBET bumper sticker on his car?" In retrospect, this scene is a massive piece of misdirection, but it does open up a larger investigation into the corruption swirling beneath the surface of Twin Peaks: illicit drugs, the prostitution ring run out of the One-Eyed Jacks casino across the river, and, of course, Laura is connected to all this. But I get the sense that this early scene was maybe meant to be a portal into that larger world, since the original intent of the series creators was to never solve the murder of Laura Palmer, and have the show be an ever spiraling set of tangents from that tragic starting point.

Whatever the original intent, there is a later scene which, in hindsight, seems like a massive red flag as to who the murderer is supposed to be . . . I won't say what it is if you haven't seen the show, but, well, I dunno . . . maybe not everything is so obvious about Laura Palmer's murder. But someone sure stands out . . .

We have some very atmospheric scenes of scared people venturing into dark woods with their way illuminated by a bouncing flashlight beam-a visual which would recur in Fire Walk With Me. An angry man's face takes on a red tint out there in the woods, and an unknown figure lurks in the shadows-surprisingly creepy stuff. It doesn't look like a TV show in these moments. It looks like cinema. Once upon a time, this was an important distinction. TV tended to look like shit when compared to movies. Now, TV looks great. In many instances. Sitcoms still tend to look like shit. If they're filmed in front of a live studio audience.

The most famous scene here would be Agent Cooper's dream voyage to the Black Lodge and an encounter with the Man from Another Place-a little person in a red suit, who speaks in riddles, and does a really hip dance. This is where the series begins to unveil the metaphysical nature of the conflicts roiling beneath the placid surface of Twin Peaks. Things have been quirky, and a little spooky up to this point, but now a gateway to another reality has opened before us-what will happen next? What new revelations await behind the red curtain?

The Lynch Meditations -12

Wild at Heart is, for me, the flat-out goofiest and most willfully distasteful and tacky of all of Lynch's movies. If you would've asked me what my least favorite Lynch film was a year or two ago, Wild at Heart would be the bottom of the list. But not because I think it's a bad film. I just find it unpleasant to watch. But I admire its commitment to sheer bugfuckery. Yeah, that's it: I admire it even if I don't exactly enjoy it. This is Lynch getting as close to doing a John Waters film as he possibly can-not that anybody can actually do what John Waters does other than John Waters, but Lynch gives it a go.

So, let's see what I think of it now.

Well, not right now, not this exact moment. In this moment, as I type, I have the same opinion, basically.

I mean, after I watch it again.

So . . . let's see what I think about it . . . two hours and change into the future?

Yup. That's it . . .

The Lynch Meditations 12: Wild at Heart (1990)

"Everything's bigger in Texas!"

-Former Texas Governor Rick Perry

Okay. Wild at Heart works a little better for me this time. It's basically a hallucinatory redneck soap opera pervert version of The Wizard of Oz. Or something like that.

David Lynch isn't exactly a redneck himself . . . so is this cultural appropriation? Redneck-sploitation? I'd be lying if I told you I actually gave a fuck one way or another. I've known some rednecks. They inspire little to no pity in my heart. Hey, they got their Fake President trump, right? I'm sure they're all wealthy and healthy and free of opioid addictions and have secure employment and all those bigly income tax refunds are no doubt buyin' every last one of their dreams and aspirations.

No Spoilers . . . so I'll just describe my favorite scene:

Two lovers

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern

on the run into the night

riding in their super-cool convertible

headlights barely pushing back the darkness

they see clothes scattered across the highway

and a car run off the road, headlights on

so our lovers pull off to investigate

to find the corpse of a man lying beneath the bestilled car's headlights

a young woman comes staggering out of the dark

gibbering semi-coherently about losing her pocket

due to a massive head wound-presumably incurred in the crash

Cage and Dern follow the young woman around some trees

trying to coax her to get into their car,

drive into town,

drop her off at an emergency room,

somethin'

but the scene is also about two of the living

trying to call a dying soul back

fighting against the gravity of the abyss

in a film filled with goofy grotesques, rape, sexual violence, incest, and hysterical overacting

this is an unexpectedly poignant moment.

Oh, and that bit about shooting a porno Texas Style-that was funny. I dug that.

The Lynch Meditations -13

Episode 8.

I have no memory of what happened, exactly, in Episode 8 of Twin Peaks.

Maybe I never actually watched it.

No, no-I watched all the episodes once upon a time.

And yet . . . I have no memory of Episode 8.

I may as well have never watched it in the first place.

Shit, I shoulda took notes.

All life is a test.

And it's just waiting to jump out and fail my ass.

Okay,

here we go . . . back into Episode 8 . . . watching it again for the first time!

The Lynch Meditations 13: Twin Peaks Episode 8 (1990)

Oh, yeah! This was the ninety-four minute Season Two premiere!

This might be the aftermathiest of aftermath episodes. It's juggling lots of plot balls, and is basically serving as a re-introduction to the world of Twin Peaks. Remember, when this show first aired there was no streaming video, no VHS or laserdisc home media releases of the earlier episodes, and so this episode takes its sweet time setting up the chess board again. Driven by cleverly written dialogue and nuanced acting, Episode Eight is full of rewards for the patient and attentive viewer-as is the whole of Season Two, in my opinion-but this is not a rapidly paced thriller. Settle in, put on a pot of coffee, and pay attention. It is a well-executed, if somewhat thankless episode serving as a bridge between the seasons.

Season One ended with Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI getting gunned down in his hotel room by an unknown assailant. Did Coop die? Will he live on to solve the murder of Laura Palmer?

Well . . . Coop lives. And a lot happens in this episode.

A vista of donuts fades into an aerial view of trees blowing in the wind.

Major Briggs, in his immaculate and metaphysical way, tells his wayward son Bobby how much he loves him and hopes he has a bright future by way of a parable involving a heavenly mansion seamlessly renovated into containing new rooms.

Cooper and several other characters deal with grievous wounds and injuries, and try to will themselves back into health. Will they ever be whole again? Have they all been permanently diminished in some hard-to-define sense?

Not to mention a soul chilling glimpse of Killer Bob howling over the corpse of Laura Palmer.

But the best scene is arguably at the beginning: Agent Cooper lies on the floor of his hotel room, two shots blocked by his bulletproof vest, with a third having entered Coop's abdomen where the vest was improperly fitted due to the FBI agent patting his body down to get a wood tick off himself.

As Cooper lies on the floor bleeding out, barely conscious, and in severe pain, an elderly waiter comes up to his door with a warm glass of milk. This elderly waiter-later nicknamed by Albert Rosenfeld Senor Droolcup-moves at a comically slow pace, and seems unable to perceive Coop's urgent need for medical evac and treatment. Coop speaks into his voice-activated micro-cassette recorder addressing his perennially unseen muse and aide-de-camp Diane and confesses his hope for the freedom of Tibet from communist Chinese hegemony, his desire to make love to a beautiful woman that he truly loves, and how he wishes to treat the people who are dear to him in his life with greater kindness if he survives this current predicament. And then the mystical prophecy giant shows up out of thin air . . .

Cooper faces his own mortality and decides that love for his fellow human beings is what's best in life. And he doesn't seem to be bullshitting. At the point of dying, he affirms what's best in himself and vows to become an even better person if given the chance.

Surely, Coop, the purest of hearts, will achieve everything he puts his mind to in this episode and all others of Twin Peaks.

The Lynch Meditations -14

Hmmm . . . watching only the David Lynch directed episodes of Twin Peaks is interesting, but doesn't really do justice to the overall series. This show was the result of a unique team of directors, writers, actors, crew, and musicians and not just the vision of one director.

For now, I'll continue with just the Lynch-directed episodes, but at some point, I will need to consider the series as a whole overall.

The Lynch Meditations 14: Twin Peaks Episode 9 (1990)

Oh, man is this a thankless episode. It really doesn't stand on its own as a piece of "cinema for television." It's even more transitional and incremental than Episode Eight. It is well done for what it is, full of terrific acting and clever dialogue, but unless you watch it in the context of the full series, you're likely to be lost.

Highlights:

Windom Earle is set into play . . .

The Horne Brothers try to figure out which piece of evidence to destroy . . .

Teleporting creamed corn . . .

Deputy Andy gets all fucked-up with the scotch tape . . .

THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM . . .

Major Briggs's anomalous intergalactic messages . . .

Thirty year old teenagers in love . . . "Just You and I" . . .

And the most memorable scene: Cousin Maddie's terrifying vision of Bob who comes crawling over a couch after her. Every scene with Bob in Twin Peaks is way more frightening than I would expect anything on network television to be-how did they get away with this shit?

Yeah, I'm going to have to come back to this series and consider it as a whole at some point.

The Lynch Meditations -15

Episode 14 . . .

"It is happening again."

Killer Bob claims another victim . . . how in the fuck did they air this horrific scene of rape and murder on mainstream television in 1990? This scene-which I will not spoil, I guess-has always scared the living shit out of me. It is absolutely nightmarish.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that some of the most disturbing scenes I've ever seen in TV or film come from Twin Peaks. Most of Twin Peaks isn't like this, though, and so, until recently, I tended to remember Twin Peaks as a show filled with brilliant dialogue, excellent acting, and memorable characterizations. But there is some horrific shit in this show.

Even my recent watch of Twin Peaks: The Return/Season Three, which has some memorably horrifying sequences, didn't remind me of the disturbing scenes from Seasons One and Two. Season Three might be my favorite stretch of live action television next to Ultra-Q and The Wire. My memory of the first two seasons, until recently, was of a quirky, talky, somewhat fantasy oriented drama-comedy. It is also, in certain sequences, pure depravity and horror. So, what I'm saying, is that the third season has largely eclipsed what has come before, but I am starting to realize I really need to carve out the time to revisit Seasons One and Two in full.

Enemy Time . . . working against my ass . . .

The Lynch Meditations 15: Twin Peaks Episode 14 (1990)

Episode 14 . . .

"It is happening again."

I'll try not to spoil too much . . . but this episode contains a startling depiction of profound metaphysical defeat. 

Agent Coop's sitting in the Roadhouse, taking in a live music show when a giant of prophecy manifests upon the stage, displacing the band to some other space-time reality for a moment or two. The giant tells Coop,

"It is happening again."

And then there's the look on Coop's face . . . he's staring into the very abyss. For he realizes he has failed to save a life. Again. 

This is a mysterious, yet devastating scene, one that strikes me with more force now than whenever I first watched it back in the day. 

The Lynch Meditations -16

The last episode of Twin Peaks Season Two is up there with my favorite last episodes: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, The Wire-it brings the hammer down. Whatever the flaws of Season Two-which is widely regarded as deeply flawed, as missing a step, losing the plot-the very last episode brings the threads together, reminds the loyal superfans why they got hooked in the first place.

By the way, I've never agreed with the negative critical assessment of Season Two. I have only one explicit criticism, which I'll try to convey without spoiling anything: a character impersonates another . . . and that twist has not aged well. Not so much the idea of a character disguising themselves, but rather the uncomfortable representational politics of it . . . more I will not say. If you take the time to watch the entire series you will immediately know what I'm talking about. Aside from this one element, Season Two has never been a deal breaker for me.

Oh, yes . . . I will have to come back to this show in full . . .

The Lynch Meditations 16: Twin Peaks Episode 29 (1991)

In the year 1991 . . .

Episode 29 . . . 

Until 2017, this was the farthest along in the saga of Twin Peaks we were able to get. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me actually took us all back in time to explicitly tell the story of the last week of Laura Palmer's life. So we had the complete backstory, but for many years we didn't know what happened next. In fact, Episode 29 strongly suggested there was no next.

Hmmm . . . my decision to not do spoilers when discussing Twin Peaks has become onerous. I think I'm going to go heavy into spoilers starting with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. After all it is the chronological beginning of the whole saga, and it was the first thing I watched before I ever saw the television series.

But about Episode 29: I recall the excitement I felt as I watched this episode so many years ago. I realized just how monumentally fucked-up the very last episode was going to be, and how I had never watched every episode of a television series from beginning to end before Twin Peaks. This was my first complete watch.

Episode 29 represents the triumph of mystery. The original premise of the show involved the murder of Laura Palmer never being solved. Well, her murder got solved. New mysteries were uncovered. Mysteries so powerful they well up and swallow what's left of hope and truth and love . . . yeah, it gets dark at the end. I dug it back in the day, I dig it even more, now.

Okay, next up is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I'll be doing spoilers from here on out.

And I will definitely be coming back to Twin Peaks as a whole,

Enemy Time permitting . . .

The Lynch Meditations -17

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was my first taste of Twin Peaks.

Yeah, I did it all wrong. Fire Walk With Me gives it all away, but I didn't care at the time. Even though I was a fan of David Lynch from Blue Velvet, Dune, and The Elephant Man, I had no interest in sitting through hours of television even if it was something with the vaunted cult reputation of Twin Peaks. So, I purchased a VHS copy of Fire Walk With Me, watched it almost as many times as I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, and loved every minute of it.

Weirdo FBI agents investigate crimes with no earthly solutions. 

Hey, that's David Bowie! Oh . . . now he's gone. 

A gang of demons hang out in a ratty apartment wheeling and dealing for creamed corn shares of garmonbozia ("Pain and Sorrow"). 

A bizarre, curtained-off salon represents some kind of hellspace of judgment (?). 

A one-armed man bellows a mortal warning to a young woman in danger, his face burning with emotion, fighting to have his voice heard above revving engines. 

An out of control drugs-and-booze orgy in an after hours club features subtitles to render dialogue understandable above the punishingly loud music.

A tracking shot across a wasteland of crushed-out cigarette butts,

the ruins of addiction,

of pain unceasing,

desire unending,

no cure, no magic pill in sight . . .  

I loved every minute, even if I didn't understand all those minutes. My take on it was that it was a plunge into a hell of murder, rape, incest, hallucinations, small town conspiracies, extra-dimensional influences, and ultimately, absurdly, inevitably hope. Sure, it's a hope found in the final traumatic moments of death as a broken mind unleashes a cascade of uplifting electrochemical sensations to give you a gentle glide into the abyss. But you take hope where you can find it in this life, right?

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a detective story, a teenage romance (featuring twenty-six year old teenagers, of course, but that's probably for the best), it's a character study featuring magnificent dialogue and engaging performances, and it is most definitely a kind of horror film. It transcends easy genre categories, and, at the time when I watched it, I saw it as an extension of the approach Lynch took with Blue Velvet. I still think this, but now I also see Fire Walk With Me in the context of the Twin Peaks TV series. It might also be my favorite Lynch work after Twin Peaks: The Return/Season Three. 

Hmm . . . how will it hold up after another watch?

The Lynch Meditations 17: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD . . .

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me goes backwards in the timeline of Twin Peaks to tell the story of Laura Palmer's last week alive on Earth. The movie is both prequel and sequel to the television series, due to some strange space-time effects of the extradimensional salon known as the Black Lodge, but it is mostly a prequel, with just a little bit of sequel in the mix. What you get has mostly to do with the prehistory of the overall saga, but there are small moments here and there that address the fates of characters towards the end of the series.

Fire Walk With Me is so bizarre that when I first watched it, I assumed it to be about Laura Palmer's point of view more than anything else: a series of grotesque hallucinations brought on by the trauma of violence, abuse, incest, and manipulation, and further complicated by cocaine, booze, and escapist fantasies of salvation, but the first half hour establishes a world outside of Laura Palmer's experience with two FBI agents investigating the murder of a woman named Teresa Banks who ends up having a connection with Laura.

When we are first introduced to Laura, she is walking down a sidewalk, the very picture of normalcy, someone that if you saw them on the street, and knew nothing of their life, you would not be likely to speculate about the horrors of their existence. As the movie goes on, Laura's life is revealed to be a nightmare of rape, sexual exploitation, and supernatural attacks on her very soul. It is important to keep in mind that Laura is a teenager-we are dealing with the destruction of a child. The world of Twin Peaks, despite its surface quirkiness and charm and damn fine coffee, also consumes its youth without mercy.

I saw this movie a couple years before I watched the television series in full, which is not how you should watch it, but I don't regret it. Fire Walk With Me isn't about mystery, so much as it is about the nature of human evil. From the moment we enter Laura Palmer's narrative, it is very quickly established that Laura's father, Leland, is a manipulative, abusive, overbearing presence in Laura's life. It is also quickly established that he is a rapist, and that his victim is his own daughter. Later, Leland is revealed to be the murderer of Teresa Banks, a sex worker whom he had patronized and confided in about his fantasies about Laura. Leland is clearly a predator who murders both Teresa and Laura and attempts to murder another young woman, Ronette Pulaski, in order to maintain the facade of 1950s patriarchal normalcy. This is somewhat different from the way Leland is presented in the TV series, where his crimes are largely blamed on his possession by a demonic spirit known as Killer Bob.

Killer Bob is a presence within Fire Walk With Me as well, but when I first watched it, he came across as a kind of fantasy scapegoat created by Laura to avoid dealing directly with the fact that her own father is the one creeping into her bedroom at night. Bob, along with other bizarre supernatural entities, are present within this movie, but they are not allowed to take the blame for Leland's actions as much as they are in the TV series. In Fire Walk With Me, Leland is a monster whose actions result in him losing his soul, as opposed to a man who is possessed against his will.

Laura has to deal with the crimes committed against her essentially on her own. Every male presence in her life contributes to her suffering: her high school boyfriends James and Bobby are too selfish to inquire about her obvious pain and distress; her psychologist exploits their intimacy to fulfill his own desire; and the Canadian-American gangsters use her and other teenagers as both a drug mule and a sex slave.  Laura is totally consumed by the underworld of the idyllic-seeming Twin Peaks. Fire Walk With Me drags you into an abyss of horror with only tiny spikes of the quirky humor and sugary earnestness of the TV version.

This unrelenting hellscape, I think, is best experienced before watching the TV series. Remember, the TV show wasn't planned out in every detail from the beginning. The writers and directors found the story as they worked on it for a few years, so the mystery, as it unfolds, is rather thrown together. And you can tell, as you watch, that the shaggy dog approach to characters, story, and plot goes down some slow roads here and there. But if you watch Fire Walk With Me first, the series becomes a totally different beast: we see Leland Palmer putting on a truly sickening and desperate show-at times, a literal song and dance number-of his innocence and grief. It makes the TV version unbearably tense and unnerving to see the monster hiding in plain sight episode after episode.

As for Laura, she is left to fend for herself on earth and in the Black Lodge, which is also a kind of bizarre afterlife, Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory all in one. At the very end of the movie, she is comforted by a psychic projection of a noble FBI agent who was not able to save her; and she is brought peace by an angel seemingly derived from a painting which hung on her bedroom wall all those years she was preyed upon by Leland. The angel didn't protect her in life, but in the Black Lodge it manifests as a kind of giant, living Christmas ornament. All this seems to be a hallucination brought on by a cascade of neurochemistry at the moment of death. Her mind takes mercy on Laura, and gives her comforting visions of angels and a cinematic FBI agent to make the plunge into oblivion less agonizing.

Meanwhile, spiritual parasites fight and barter over their scraps of pain and sorrow, operating according to codes and norms and laws totally alien to humankind, neither saving us nor damning us.

Laura Palmer, in the end, faced unimaginable suffering and death on her own with only fantasies and hallucinations to comfort her.

The Lynch Meditations -18

Premonitions Following An Evil Deed . . . 1995 . . . never seen it.

Not sure I've ever even heard of it.

Maybe, when I watch it, I'll remember it, but I don't think so.

I'm just about certain I've never seen this one before.

But maybe, just maybe, I can convince myself that I've seen it, and then reconstruct a fake version of the memory of my having seen it . . . and maybe, by some serendipity, it will be a perfect recollection of a movie I've never even seen.

Maybe . . . if I can get fifty million other people on this planet who've never actually seen this movie to try "remembering" it, then out of those millions of make-believe memories we'll somehow get it right-that whole fifty million monkeys with fifty million typewriters spontaneously coming up with Shakespeare type of deal.

Hmm . . . or I could just watch the fucking thing, blog about the thing itself.

The Lynch Meditations 18: Premonitions Following An Evil Deed (1995)

This one's like a rogue transmission from an unauthorized future. Made me think of the eerie future dreams from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness just a little bit. Seems to be riffing on the paranoia induced by the presence of uniformed police assets, deadly secrets concealed by cheery home facades, and grotesque alien abduction scenarios. It's so short that it's easy to watch over and over again and pick it apart, but I almost think it should be seen once, and then never watched again, except within one's memory where it will be inevitably distorted, expanded, and transformed into some other wholly unauthorized thing. Kinda like how Shigesato Itoi-the creator of the Super Nintendo game Earthbound- supposedly saw a scary scene from an obscure old film as a child and then spent a lifetime haunted by a memory of that scene which he had wholly concocted within his imagination-an imaginary scene which became a foundation for some of the freakier aspects of the cult classic JRPG. 

Say . . . is it copyright infringement if I intentionally choose to distort someone's film within my imagination, and put together my own fan-edit/remix of a film inside my brain studio? I sure hope not.

But if it is . . . think about how exciting it would be to live in such a dystopian future where copyright lawyers become ultra-tech brain-vivisectionists to cut out and destroy unauthorized "Brain Cuts" of films.

Holy shit . . . I want to be on the run in such a hellish future. I could have elaborate martial arts battles with all the copyright lawyer brain-vivisectionists. A dystopian hellscape fugitive routine is also good cardio. And every day would be Leg Day. 

But, um, as for Premonitions Following An Evil Deed . . . it's a sharp little nightmare of stylish black-and-white micro-cinema. Dig on it to the max!

The Lynch Meditations -19

Lost Highway on pan-and-scan VHS in the late 1990s . . . it almost felt like an elaborate, deeply sick prank on the home viewing audience. The widescreen compositions totally obliterated. The already dark cinematography downgraded into absolute murk. Whispered dialogue overpowered by a burst of violently blaring buddy-cop flick saxophone. A circular structure that renders the movie either utterly pointless or filled to overflowing with metaphysical significance-you decide!

I honestly couldn't decide at the time if this movie was incomprehensible garbage, or if it was brilliant big-screen art ruined by a shitass VHS release. In fact, watching this movie on tape pretty much turned me against the VHS format. VHS tapes within the plot of this film seem to be symbols of evil, sinister distortions of reality, and murderous madness. Anyone who professes a hipsterish affinity for the rightly bygone format should be made to watch the pan-and-scan Lost Highway on tape-that'll straighten their pretentious ass out!

So motherfuck VHS into a molten puddle of plastic with a thousand blowtorches.

Some years after I first watched the movie, I bought the soundtrack on used CD, and Lost Highway became one of those movies-like Conan the Barbarian and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly-where I listened to the soundtrack many more times than I actually watched the movie. It was the kind of CD I could just put on and listen to straight through without having to skip any boring or grating tracks. The soundtrack became a kind of condensation of a version of the original movie that somewhat existed in my memory-a highlights reel of the parts that made the strongest impression: Robert Blake's bug-eyed vampire mystery man; Robert Loggia's comically macho gangster; a man impaled through the forehead on the corner of a coffee table; David Bowie's sepulchral voice singing over a first person camera POV racing down the road in the middle of the night; the usually bland and non-threatening Bill Pullman transforming through flashing lights and Jacob's Ladder-style head vibrations into . . . Balthazar Getty of all things.

Lost Highway never worked on my mind as a complete movie. It hit me as a kind of fragmented, postmodern multimedia experience. Here's some images, here's some bursts of spoken word performance, there's the curated soundtrack, it's all kind of connected, but not so much for me. Overall, Lost Highway seemed like it was either much smarter than me as an audience, or that an hour of footage had been left out that might have made it work better as a narrative. I always assumed-wrongly-that there was a more expansive director's cut lurking within some unauthorized dub no doubt recorded in Extended Play Mode-maybe it would turn up in a Luminous Film Works catalog someday . . .

So what will I make of Lost Highway now that I'm older, wiser, more experienced?

Yes, this is the question that must be answered . . .

The Lynch Meditations 19: Lost Highway (1997)

WARNING: Spoilers . . . I guess? I'm not sure Lost Highway is spoil-a-ble, in the usual sense. The structure of the film is a kind of crazy loop . . .  and telling you that is the biggest spoiler of all, so, like, there you have it. I actually think the movie becomes more interesting once you've seen it once, because then you're aware of its circular, cyclical nature, and that's when the movie starts to become structurally and thematically meaningful. The characters aren't that complex or deep, consisting mostly of stock types derived from old crime novels and classic film noir and slightly tweaked to conform to the post-Tarantino late 1990s regime of edginess that many filmmakers were chasing once upon a time. Overall, Lost Highway is a film I admire for its thematic, visual, sonic,  and structural qualities, but it is not a film I can truly love. It's much too cruel for the softer, sadder 2018 version of myself.

"I don't need anything. I want."

-Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette plays a dual role as both the dark-haired victim of a jealous, psychopathic husband (played by Bill Pullman) and as a vengeful blonde femme fatale who manipulates a young and horny auto mechanic (Balthazar Getty) into seeking vengeance against a vicious Los Angeles gangster-pornographer (Robert Loggia). The Loggia character raped the future femme fatale at gunpoint when she was an aspiring actress and forced her into a career of sexual slavery which involved the production of pornographic films.

Back in '97, I perceived much of this as trashy neo-noir hyperbole emanating from the fevered imaginations of Lynch and co-screenwriter Barry Gifford-both known aficionados of classic film noir.

Now, with all the revelations about systemic oppression of women in Hollywood through means involving enforced inequality of pay and opportunity, intimidation, organized surveillance campaigns, sexual harassment, and rape several scenes in Lost Highway play like stylized historical docudrama, as opposed to the hard-boiled surrealism I previously saw this film as embodying. Lost Highway now seems-in 2018-at least as far as the vengeance plot elements in which the second Patricia Arquette character plays a significant role-to have much more to do with reality than I would have guessed. Robert Loggia's character even seems closer to the role of a jealous, violent, and controlling movie studio head than the throwback 1940s gangster I used to see him as, with his entire porno empire acting as the expression of his overwhelming sense of misogynist entitlement to total control over women's minds, bodies, and images. The idea of Hollywood as a machine that chews up and spits out women aspiring to be on the silver screen would later resurface in Lynch's Mulholland Dr. albeit in a more dramatically coherent form.

Lost Highway doesn't do much with the femme fatale plot thread, basically reducing the dual Arquette roles to secondary status since the point of view is mainly from the Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty characters, who seem to be doppelgangers of each other, or maybe protagonists from different noirish psycho-thrillers whose fates have been spliced together to serve the twisted desires of the Dracula-looking Mystery Man (played by a bug-eyed and cackling mad Robert Blake). The Mystery Man seems to be purposefully interdicting the reality of the film in order to trap the characters in an eternal, nightmarish loop of recurring psychosis and misery. The Mystery Man may also be a demon from the Black Lodge of the Twin Peaks Universe, and, therefore, his motivation in creating the eternal loop of the Lost Highway might be to use that loop as a kind of mystical superconducting super collider to produce quantities of garmonbozia ("pain and sorrow") to feed his own endless hunger by crashing the characters against each other over and over again until the end of time.

The Mystery Man is often seen with a camcorder in his hand, and videotape is a format associated in this film with pornography, exploitation, and bondage. The Mystery Man seems to be recording this hellscape of trapped souls for at home, masturbatory use thereby suggesting how ensnared this all-powerful demon is in his own appetites. Unlike the rest of the characters, though, the Mystery Man seems to relish his prison of eternal recurrence.

So, have a care, viewers: watch Lost Highway, if you're curious, if you're a Lynch completist. Just don't get caught in the loop of garmonbozia . . .

The Lynch Meditations 2019

The Lynch Meditations -20

Disney Presents

A David Lynch Film

The Straight Story

. . .

. . .

. . .

A David Lynch movie produced by Disney?

Does this mean that the characters in this film are owned by Disney?

Will these characters and their world appear in the next Kingdom Hearts?

Probably not 3, but surely there will be a Kingdom Hearts 4, right?

Got to be.

Got to be.

There needs to be a final boss fight between Richard Farnsworth on his riding lawn mower and Sephiroth.

Mr. Farnsworth’s Limit Break attack could be throwing his riding lawn mower at his enemy,

getting a bead on it with his shotgun,

blasting it with his shotgun,

causing the riding lawn mower to explode in spectacular fashion,

and inflicting 9999 damage upon the targeted foe.

Once you've leveled up, you upgrade to a tractor and a portable rail gun.

Although,

as I understand it,

Kingdom Hearts 3 de-emphasizes the Final Fantasy characters and world-building.

So Sephiroth probably won’t be there for a battle royale.

But he could be.

Disney could make this happen.

If they wanted to . . . and why wouldn’t they want this?

Twin Peaks is back in a big way . . . made a big cult splash . . .

. . .

. . .

. . . you ought to know where I’m going with this.

Disney buys Twin Peaks.

Lock. Stock. And the  goddamn barrel.

Kingdom Hearts 4 gets to have Sephiroth merged with Killer Bob.

Farnsworth gets his shotgun exploded riding lawn mower Limit Break gimmick.

Everything becomes as purest gold.

I don’t remember when I first watched The Straight Story, but it was on DVD, and I don’t think it had any chapter breaks, which was a creative choice by Lynch, who doesn’t want you to skip around while watching his movie. Lynch tried to enforce this regime on the Inland Empire DVD, but that movie is a super-tough sit, so it ended up with chapters you could skip to and from about like a standard DVD release.

The Straight Story is a magnificent movie. Just about perfect. Even though it is Rated G, it has that grittiness and even the grotesquerie one associates with Lynch’s work but in a more subdued fashion . . . but it is there. People smoke in this movie. They drink beer. They’re old, and pretty obviously heading towards their mortality around the seventy-to-seventy-five year mark. Death is a palpable presence in this film, is what I’m trying to say. This is a Disney-produced film in which every character is painfully mortal, finite, and struggling against the limits of their bodies, their finances, their modes of transportation-no superheroes, no cartoon characters, no Jedi, no faster than light travel-just damaged people trying to survive, who can’t pay their bills and medical expenses; who drive broken down vehicles or can’t afford to drive; and yet they struggle to do the right things for themselves and others before death claims them.

That’s how I remember it.

Will it hold up on a second viewing?

I’m thinking that it probably will.

We’ll see.

Going in . . .

The Lynch Meditations 20: The Straight Story (1999)

We begin with stars, with cosmos.

We don’t see our hero, elderly World War II veteran Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth in the role of a lifetime), right away, but we see the exterior of his house. We hear a noise as he falls to the floor of his kitchen inside his house, but only because we are an audience for a movie, and the movie’s sound design is made for us to pick up on such cues. But the next door neighbor is oblivious.

Down at the neighborhood bar, people are waiting up for Alvin. Alvin is rarely if ever late, despite only being able to walk with the use of two canes, and so one of the gang decides to check in on Alvin, and it is revealed he has suffered a serious fall.

Life is quite precarious. It is possible, in this world, especially for those who are vulnerable, to fall through the cracks, to suffer in silence, unnoticed, and, in the event of death, maybe even die unmourned.

Alvin gets word that his estranged brother, Lyle, has suffered a stroke, and may not be around much longer. Alvin and Lyle have hated each other for years, the cause of this animosity long forgotten, and now Alvin feels the need to make amends, to patch things up before it’s too late, before everyone is dead and gone. Alvin is poor, he cannot legally drive, and he doesn’t even own an automobile to break the law if he was inclined to do so, and so he decides to drive from his home in Iowa to his brother’s home in Wisconsin-a journey of 260 miles-on his riding lawnmower.

Alvin is a stubborn man. He sees his doctor after his fall, and has little interest in taking advice, or getting anymore treatments or procedures. Alvin senses the presence of the reaper, and he no longer sees the point of submitting to the will of his healthcare provider. Alvin’s been to war, raised a family, lost a family to his own alcoholism, and now is only connected to his grown middle-aged daughter Rose (flawlessly played by Sissy Spacek) who was declared mentally incompetent in a court of law and lost custody of her kids after a tragic house fire for which she was held responsible. Both father and daughter tried to raise families, and ultimately lost them.

During an evening thunderstorm, Alvin sits in his living room, while the the shadows of rain pouring down the front window crawl across his anguished face, like amplified tears of the very soul, in a possible homage to the 1967 movie version of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood,  in which a similar scene plays out involving a psychopathic murderer contemplating his impending execution. Alvin isn’t exactly a serial killer, but he does carry significant guilt from his World War II service, a guilt which he has held onto for decades without any kind of relief. We don’t know this until much later in the film, but I mention it here, because, well, the scene takes on a new significance once you know that . . . and if you’ve never seen this movie before . . . spolier?

Sorry, but I shouldn’t say too much more. I’m not sure how popular The Straight Story is among Lynch’s films, but it’s a journey you will be grateful for taking. The journey takes many sharp turns, and if your primary understanding of Lynch’s work comes from movies like Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Mulholland Dr. you are in for a shocker of a different kind. Yes, this is a G-rated film, so, yes, you could watch it with just about anyone, including children if you got some of those. But . . . dammnit, you really need to see this one. Although it is not my favorite Lynch work, it might be the one I would absolutely recommend above all others. It is firmly set in the real world-excepting maybe one scene of mechanical comedy-with not a trace of Lynch’s surreal supernatural weirdness. As much as I love wild fantasy, a movie set firmly in unforgiving, unadorned reality has increased value in this era of nonstop comic book spectacle, rampant online misinformation, and endless lies emanting from authoritarian governments around the world. The Straight Story does not exist to distract you, to anesthetize you,  or to whip you into a frenzy against a scapegoat. It exists to get you to pay close attention to a vulnerable human being making a profound series of existential choices as he nears the end of his life.

The DVD has no chapter skips. You can skip back to the very beginning. But you can’t skip ahead. (This was also done for the Mulholland Dr. DVD release-but we’ll get to that one later.) You’ve got to take this ride from the beginning, with no interruptions, no distractions-I mean, you can pause the DVD, if you want, if you need a piss break or something like that, but the film is intended to be watched in its entirety, and all in one sitting. If you can, do It.

One last spoiler: the film ends in stars, cosmos.

The Lynch Meditations -21

David Lynch produced a documentary about the years he spent in the 1970s making Eraserhead back in 2001. I’ve never seen it, ‘til now. My understanding is that it is sort of the precursor to the special features on the Inland Empire DVD, but who knows?

Going in . . .

The Lynch Meditations 21: Eraserhead Stories (2001)

Here be some yarns, all right.

The one that is most obvious to talk about is how Lynch got hold of a dead cat, and all the stuff he did to the feline corpse . . . was this deceased animal used to make the monster baby whatsit? Lynch doesn’t say that, exactly, but he says some other things about it. Yeah . . .

This is an entertaining watch, but it is also the “official story,” produced by and centered upon David Lynch, so keep that in mind while watching. I found it generally convincing, but it is on-brand with Lynch’s policy of not explaining the why of things, what the movie means, things of that nature. There is a lot of how here, though, and that’s as it should be. There’s quite a remarkable story behind Eraserhead, one of absolute devotion to the pursuit of an uncompromised artistic vision despite every kind of hardship. Lynch and his collaborators lived and breathed this movie for about six years or so. Kind of unbelievable. But it’s all true.

And, yes, this does seem to be the start of a kind of brand identity for Lynch as an independent filmmaker, which he would carry on with Inland Empire a few years later. Eraserhead Stories seems to be the start of Lynch taking a hand in how he is documented as an artist at work, and more of his process as a filmmaker would be documented as it happened in behind the scenes special features for Inland Empire and Twin Peaks Season 3. Lynch seems to have an interest in controlling how he is perceived as an artist, which is interesting considering how cagey he can be in interviews. I get the impression that he wants to shift the emphasis solidly from why questions to how questions in this regard.

Lynch speaks into a microphone. There are curtains in the background. It’s in black and white. Great stories. Goes deeper than the usual behind-the-scenes puff pieces. You get an actual sense of what went into the making of Eraserhead.

Not much more to say about it on my end. Watch it after you’ve watched Eraserhead, is the only thing I can think to tell you.

Onwards . . .

The Lynch Meditations -22

Mulholland Dr. is the first David Lynch movie I saw in a theater and on a big screen.

After years of watching Blue Velvet on shitty pan-and-scan VHS,

I could see a Lynch film exactly the way it was intended. It did not disappoint.

Mulholland Dr. was that rare movie that ended up being everything I could’ve hoped for and then some.

Initially, I was concerned that it might be a bit of an overheated mess, like Lost Highway,

which was the most recent Lynch film I had seen at the time.

(I’m not sure I even knew about The Straight Story back then.)

But Mulholland Dr. delivered a nightmarish and hilarious mystery rooted in character and atmosphere

and driven by clever dialogue suffused throughout with a sense of the cruel and the absurd.

Some movies, when I’ve watched them, have confused the shit out of me.

I am full of questions and perplexities and conundrums.

I am left profoundly unsettled, uncertain of the ground upon which I stand.

I no longer know who I am, or I’m not as certain about myself as I was before.

What does this mean?

Why is all this weird shit happening?

Who is that guy? Where did this gal come from?

Why are the dead rising from the grave?

Who actually thinks nuclear war is a good idea?

What the fuck is going on?

Why was Kane so hung up on that snowsled?

Did the monolith make the primates smarter?

Why does the primate ancestor throw the bone up into the air?

Did the bone become an orbital missile platform just like that?

How did that happen?

Is the magic in the choice of edit?

Is the magic of the edit the power to fuck with space and time and space/time?

Why is there a giant fetus-in-a-bubble in orbit around the Earth?

Why did the astronaut-man get old and die?

Was the elderly astronaut-man reborn as the giant space fetus?

Why did the smart computer being murder the one astronaut?

What was HAL-9000’s major malfunction?

Did Tetsuo evolve into a universe at the end?

Why did the kid go and do that?

Where did he get all that extra mass?

Why do Kanaeda and Tetsuo shout each other’s names over and over?

Where does Optimus Prime’s trailer go when he transforms?

Why do all the crew members of Space Battleship Yamato have arrows on their uniforms

pointing down towards their crotches?

Is Space Battleship Yamato the one true Love Boat?

Did Batman actually die in a nuclear fucking explosion?

Did Alfred actually see Bruce and Selina at that cafe, or was that just his fantasy?

Did The Dark Knight Rises rip off Gundam 8th MS Team’s indecisive double ending?

Why would they do that?

Is it so hard to say goodbye to Shiro and Aina or the Batman?

Or to let a powerful ending work-just leave it the hell alone, people!

Sometimes it’s okay for your protagonist to die.

Especially if it counts for something big, y’know?

Why does Hollywood spend millions of dollars to make a new Halloween movie,

when they could spend a fraction of that cost just to re-release the original John Carpenter film?

That’s the one to see.

None of the sequels or remakes have lived up to the original.

Not even close.

If Hollywood is going to do exploitative remakes, they should try something kind of arty.

Like a remake of a respectable arthouse picture as done by YouTubers.

Think about it: if the Angry Video Game Nerd, the Nostalgia Critic, and Red Letter Media

spent the same amount of time trying to make actual movies that they’ve spent mocking pop culture,

they would be among the most prolific filmmakers in the business.

I want to see a remake of Blue is the Warmest Color

directed by Mike Stoklasa

and starring Jay Bauman and Rich Evans

in the roles originally played by Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, respectively.

Why can’t Hollywood do something like that?

What’s the holdup?

Mysteries . . .

Will I be forgiven for wishing they would've made the Mulholland Dr. tv series?

Was it Killer Bob or Leland Palmer who ended those young women’s lives?

Did Killer Bob take over all the spiritual command and control functions,

or did Leland let Killer Bob in?

Was it collaboration?

Or total takeover?

Or did collaboration lead to total takeover?

Why did Agent Cooper get fragmented into so many different Coops?

Is the Black Lodge a factory for cranking out doppelgangers or tulpas or whatever you want to call them?

I watch,

and I think,

and I always ask,

“Is this a metaphor or is it just a motherfucker?”

Mulholland Dr., when I first saw it, struck me as a surrealistic mystery which must be definitively solved.

Over the years,

I’ve come to think of it as an experience of unstable identities,

shifting realities,

very much like Lost Highway,

but with more relatable characters, and something closer to a coherent narrative

despite the all-encompassing Lynchian weirdness.

I feel as though I’ve come to understand Mulholland Dr.

in a way that I cannot grasp Lost Highway or Inland Empire-

two of Lynch’s more forbidding cinematic works.

And yet, one mystery still abides regarding Mulholland Dr.:

How in hell did Justin Theroux get top billing over Naomi Watts?

Must have a killer agent.

What will I think now?

Diving in . . .

The Lynch Meditations 22: Mulholland Dr. (2001)

"You ever done this before?"

"I don't know."

We see swing dancers overlapping each other against a purple background.

A blonde beauty queen gets a crown.

Flashing lights.

Remember those corny swing-dancing GAP ads?

I'm thinking about 'em, now, for some reason.

Then we're in a first person camera POV,

diving into a pillow.

Is all that transpires after this but a dream?

Now we're following a limo through the curves of Mulholland Dr. a famous road associated with Los Angeles, with Hollywood, with the movies. It was the setting for a hilarious road rage episode in Lost Highway. Deepest night, and a beautiful raven-haired woman is riding in the limo, apparently against her will, as one of the goons in front points a silenced handgun at her. The woman is rescued when drunken teen joyriders collide with the limo, killing the goons, and tossing the woman clear, albeit with a serious head injury. She staggers off into the night.

The woman with the head injury eventually lays down to rest . . . are we entering a dream within a dream? Or is it all just one big dream? Who is dreaming who into existence?

Because the blonde beauty queen arrives in Los Angeles as an aspiring actress from Ontario. And soon enough she and the beautiful raven-haired woman meet, and the whole scenario feels like . . . a film scenario. Happenstance. A woman in trouble. A plucky young civilian investigator. The Canadian beauty queen makes like a wannabee Nancy Drew and offers to assist the amnesiac limo lady with her dilemma.

Oh, yeah: and there's a hitman who just barely manages to shoot his way out of a hairy situation, piling up two too many corpses. Three, if you count that poor damn vacuum cleaner.

Meanwhile, a filthy homeless man-who may be the secret evil god of this reality-hangs out behind a diner's dumpster, scaring to death anyone who looks directly upon his face.  Also: a sinister cowboy seems to dictate the fate of a young filmmaker. And then there's Mr. Rocque, the studio head who seems to want to exercise total control over the young filmmaker's dream project just because he can. Why have power if you cannot inflict it upon people, right?

Lotta sinister secret masters in this world-do I need to include the creepy-as-fuck elderly couple?

The mobster who is very particular about his espresso?

And Dan Hedaya-that guy always seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. Just like a secret master would . . . shit, he might even be playing the same character he played in Clueless. One moment he's fretting about his teenage daughter's provocative fashion sense, the next he has to go give the business to some upstart young director punk. When it rains.

Has anyone ever written fanfic about the Mulholland Dr./Clueless Extended Universe? Somebody oughtta get on that shit.

Initially, we are presented with idealistic, youthful people trying to make it in Hollywood: an aspiring actress/civilian detective and filmmaker making his first big studio film. The Canadian actress wants to become a star AND solve the mystery of her new friend's amnesia while sinister forces swirl all around her. The filmmaker is trying to resist the oppressive hand of the studio while also dealing with his unfaithful wife and worsening financial situation.

But then the narrative shifts: and an idealistic actress/detective becomes a vengeful jilted lover and the rebel filmmaker is revealed to be a self-serving cog in the studio machine; and the beautiful amnesiac woman is revealed to know exactly who she is and what she wants out of life no matter who gets hurt along the way. The idealistic protagonists struggling against fate are all unmasked as opportunists trying to hustle and con their way through life just like every other person in Los Angeles.

A weird nightclub host tells us, "IT IS ALL RECORDED," and, "IT'S ALL ON TAPE," and a song goes on even after a singer collapses . . .

A blue key opens a void that displaces one reality with another . . .

A woman sees a corpse that turns out to be her own-but only after a shift in space/time . . .

Are we seeing the fantasy Hollywood unmasked as a nightmare of free will cancelled by sinister Lovecraftian deities lurking in deepest mindshadows?

Or is it more of a loop or maybe a simultaneity?

When I first saw this movie, I perceived it as a slow revelation, an unmasking of a horrid reality, but, after absorbing Inland Empire and the third season of Twin Peaks, I can't help but see it not so much as a fantasy followed by the revelation of the dark reality powering it but more of an evocation of the instability of reality itself-of identtiy-of dream-of nightmare.

It's a whole lotta weird shit.

I have no explanations, no solutions, but I'm reminded of something the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany said about how a writer should not attempt to employ popular tricks and commercial writing techniques to improve their fiction, but rather should be aware of the opposed tensions within the text. The writer can only control those tensions and how they are deployed. Everything else is out of the writer's control. I'm not sure I completely understand what Delany was getting at-he also brought up Wittgenstein, I think-but it resonates in my mind with what Lynch is doing in Mulholland Dr.: opposed visions of reality, of characters presented within the same film. What does this bizarre set of oppositions do to us, as filmgoers?

It confuses the shit out of us, but that confusion goads us to think about what we've seen, heard, felt, thought, experienced. We are no longer being passively entertained. We are engaged.

Or maybe we're yelling at the screen in frustration.

Maybe we're desperately wondering what the fuck is going on, what did I just watch?!

Maybe we're all just a dream in the mind of Alicia Silverstone's character in Clueless.

"As if."

"Silencio." 

The Lynch Meditations -23

Inland Empire was the second-and, to date, last-David Lynch movie I saw in an actual theater, on a decent sized screen, albeit with digital projection, which wasn't exactly the greatest back in 2007. I think they just set up a consumer-grade digital projector-the kind that many aspiring filmmakers and film buffs buy to stage their screenings anywhere they please. (At the same venue, this was better than a screening of an actual film print of Argento's Suspiria, which was so fucked-up that much of the film looked like it had been invaded by obnoxious demon fireflies.) The movie was murky. You had to squint. You needed a full night's rest and an empty bladder to make it through its shadowy 179 minutes. This is pre-HD, we're talking, but maybe this murkiness was intended to add to the atmosphere of mystery. My circa 2007 DVD copy of the movie actually looks pretty good playing on a Blu-Ray player hooked up to a decent-sized modern LED TV. It's murky, but in all the right places. The lo-fi video look is actually quite slick. And some moments really jump out at you in contrast to the SD-nightmare shadows. So, I guess that's a plug for the DVD release. No, I'm not on the David Lynch payroll.

My theatrical experience was at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta, GA. They had a table set up with some fun feelies: Inland Empire bumper stickers, promotional cards for David Lynch's brand of all-organic coffee beans, and lobby cards with the title of the movie printed on them. The Plaza Theater is quite a nice space. At the time-I don't know what the Plaza looks like now-it had the look of an old-fashioned theater, with curtains and balconies-kinda like the movie theater you see late in the film itself when the Laura Dern character starts to become aware that she-or some part of her-is living inside a movie. 

Inland Empire was dense, impenetrable, and atmospheric. It had the heaviest mood of being absolutely lost in a confusing nightmare space of conflicting cinematic realities that have been fused and sutured together by sinister forces-using eldritch means-into a labyrinth of oppression. It seemed to be another extended meditation upon the corrupting, crazy-making experiences of trying to make movies in Hollywood in the vein of Mulholland Dr., but with an extra forty minutes on the running time, and fewer minutes overall devoted to clever dialogue exchanges and quirky moments of comic relief. Much time is spent stalking hallways and corridors and going up staircases and magically teleporting between the studios and sidewalks of Los Angeles, California and the snowy streets and well-appointed old-world interiors of  Lodz, Poland. 

Laura Dern seems to be playing a few different versions of herself: successful Hollywood actress Nikki Grace; the character she's playing in a movie called On High in Blue Tomorrows; and a kind of grim and gritty real life version of the character in the movie. Dern warps from one shard of fractured reality to another, guided only by the surreal nightmare logic of an allegedly cursed screenplay that seems to absorb and torment anyone who tries to produce it. Dern's Nikki Grace is also oppressed by a psycho jealous stalker of a husband who may or may not be possessed by a supernatural hypnotist known as the Phantom-who is sort of like a 1960s Marvel Comics villain-think the Miracle Man or the Ringmaster-imported into a Lynch movie. 

At some point during her wander of the nightmare labyrinth, Dern's Nikki morphs into a dystopian version of the melodramatic Southern Lady she plays in the movie, and she ascends a series of staircases inside a derelict building, only to find herself seated before an emotionally depressed, passive-aggressive man-hunched, bespectacled, and puffy-cheeked-in a shabby suit seated behind a desk who comes across as a cursed bureaucrat straight out of Kafka. This version of Nikki proceeds to give a deposition in which she expresses her rage at being poor and a lifelong victim of rape and sexual harassment by an endless succession of men in a miserable, polluted industrial town. This expression of rage is broken up into several sequences throughout the movie, and it seems to represent another part of the fractured reality that Nikki wanders through. The character is just this side of over-the-top. At first, the community theater American South accent draws attention to itself, and we seem to be back in the grotesque caricature of Wild at Heart; but as this nightmare deposition continues, the authentic emotions of rage and despair elevate the character and performance into an almost unbearably raw level of intensity. The Kafkaesque auditor, after listening to Dern for some time with almost no expression on his face-except a vague, oily contempt-asks her if she cheated on the husband who beat and raped her repeatedly, the implication being that she deserved the sadism inflicted upon her. This is a nightmare realm of misogynistic cruelty without compassion, mercy, or justice. 

Nikki is sometimes an active force in the narrative, as she stalks the mad maze, and at other times she becomes a bewildered observer of other people's personal hells. It reminded me of Martin Sheen's assassin-traveler in Apocalypse Now. Dern has an almost impossible task as an actor: endless variations of bewilderment, terror, confusion, and cataclysmic rage as she is confronted by a series of incomprehensibly weird dislocations and alienations from her identity, memory, and the space/time continuum itself. 

Oh, and it's a kinda/sorta musical. 

And there's a sitcom starring people in giant rabbit-head masks that a kidnapped girl imprisoned within a purgatorial hotel in Poland is forced to watch. This does not alleviate her suffering. 

Dern and her psycho-husband morph into alternate, working poor versions of themselves, which seems to embody some kind of rich white people's terror at the thought of losing their comfortable, privileged lives, and becoming consumed with the minutiae of daily budgeting for food and bills and toilet paper. 

There's a lot going on here. I'm not sure it all works. I'm not crazy about this Lynch trope of a brutal man being possessed by an evil spirit and, therefore, is not truly responsible for his actions. The Phantom is a variation on Killer Bob. Did we need all 179 of those minutes? Can this clusterfuck of space/time identity confusions and disruptions be so directly resolved by discharging a symbolic firearm into a comic book villain master manipulator? I mean . . . if it's all in a dream, right?

Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of playing with dream logic to the extent that David Lynch does in this movie. You do find yourself asking, What's the fucking point if it's all a dream or a hallucination or whatever? 

But aren't so many movies unlikely fantasies that pander to our desire for everything to be okay in the end? Comic book movies. Space operas. Rom-coms. Hyper-simplified biodramas. Pandering Oscar bait flicks. A lot of these kinds of movies strike me as more absurd and fucked-up than Lynch's idiosyncratic nightmares. At least, with a Lynch movie, there's a name on the front you can blame or praise. There's an author. I guess that goes far with me.

I haven't watched Inland Empire in awhile. 

Will I be able to make the epic sit? 

Diving in . . .

The Lynch Meditations 23: Inland Empire (2006)

MAJOR FUCKING SPOILERS, PEOPLE.

OR MAYBE NOT.

WHEN IT COMES TO SUCH A BIZARRE MOVIE AS INLAND EMPIRE, I ACTUALLY DON'T REALLY KNOW IF I UNDERSTAND IT PROPERLY. 

I THINK I DO.

I'LL PROCEED WITH CONFIDENCE I DON'T ACTUALLY POSSESS.

THAT USUALLY WORKS.

You know what?

I blame the Phantom.

For everything.

It's his manipulations of people's minds that create all the chaos and displacement and contortions of space/time inside this cinematic nightmare. He's like the Robert Blake character from Lost Highway. The difference is that here, the Phantom seems to have less godlike control over people's fates, and ultimately he is vanquished. The guy even seems relieved when Laura Dern dumps a clip in him at the climax. The Phantom's death is presented as a relief. The gunfire manifests as flashes of liberating light. And then his face distorts and ruptures into a frightening underwater bloodmouthed clown. And all is right with the world. The women trapped in Hotel Purgatory run free. Even Laura Dern's psycho hubby gets to go back home to Poland and be the working class father he was meant to be, as opposed to the wealthy Hollywood power spouse. All ascend to Heaven-which is a ballroom filled with beautiful women dancing and lip-synching to Nina Simone's Sinnerman, by the way.

Why not?

The nightmare becomes a dream.

Laura Dern's Nikki Grace-somehow-manages to remember she's in a dream which seemingly gives her access to the symbolic power-represented in the handgun-to see through the Phantom's lies-which have even seemingly ensnared him-and blast her way out of the nightmare labyrinth. I like that the villain seems to have forgotten his own identity. In his death, he remembers himself, and awakes into his own crazy clown time hell.

This is all great.

My only criticism is that I would've liked Nikki to shoot the creepy rabbit-head people,too.

She opens the door into their TV show world.

Why not sort them out, too?

Wasn't one of the rabbits also the heartless auditor who an alternate version of Nikki endlessly confessed to throughout the movie?

Fuck those creeps.

Not bad.

It's a hella decent film.

After this movie, David Lynch didn't do much. He supervised the official releases of deleted footage from Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I think he directed an expensive viral ad for some perfume company.

And then came 2017. And the third season of Twin Peaks. Also called Twin Peaks: The Return.

One more journey into the Black Lodge.

Another reboot, another excavation of pop culture past-you could almost call it a remake.

Just what we need, right?

It's probably gonna suck.

The Lynch Meditations -24

If I really, really, really like a movie

I want to ruminate on the best parts

extract them

make my own unauthorized sequel-thing inside my mind

I should be a YouTuber, right?

but I kinda like it that a lot of these highly illegal sequels

exist solely inside my brain

which is where my mind lives

and I like to joke about a dystopian future where the Brain Police cut into your brain to confiscate unauthorized Brain Cuts of films

leaving the criminal sequelizer in a sorry, drooling state

and this is all highly fanciful

and I really, really, really should devote those thought cycles to more fruitful projects

but some movies have transcendent images

that go beyond what they were strictly intended to be

busting loose from their original context and mode'n'motivation of production

and spiral into new forms

under my criminal mental guidance.

the black and white trees and burning sun of Rashomon

becomes Rashomon 2 under my sinister influence;

the final shootout of The Wild Bunch combines with the final sword fight from The Sword of Doom and merges with the jogging astronaut sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey

or maybe one of the geometrically regimented orgies from Salo

yes, mashups are part of the unauthorized Brain Cuts, as well

but I want it to exist solely inside my mind.

I'm daring the enforcers of this dystopian imaginary

to come get me

make this interesting

see 'em come out in force

make 'em purchase my brain at the highest price . . .

whoa, crazytown, ya'll

but that brings me to Twin Peaks Season 3.

my favorite parts are where people move from the background

into the foreground

those moments of threshold

(fuck that word liminal-no one knows what the hell it means, sometimes you need more than one word, goddamnit, to get over)

a person moves from the shadows into the light

and best of all

that scene where Evil Coop takes that long walk to meet with the Philip Jeffries

who isn't really Jeffries anymore

and then that other scene

where the one armed man warmly invites the One and Only Cooper to fire walk with him

and they go for a long walk

to meet the Jeffries

that isn't really Jeffries anymore

I've done a lot of walking in my time

my walking caught a reputation, you dig?

I was the guy who walked everywhere

"Why walk everywhere?" assholes and nitwits would ask

redneck shitbags would shout from the cabs of their trucks

what with my long hair and beard

all kinds of inappropriate comments

plenty of college assholes, too

and then they would be surprised

they caught that red light all wrong

and I jog up to the driver's side window

and I'm pulling some surprised fucker out of their gas-guzzling mobile armor

by their jowls, by their popped collar,

and I've got questions,

"Wanna say that shit again to my face, redneck fucker, college asshole?"

oh, the fun you have as an all-too-frequent pedestrian!

and in the American South?

fun's afoot when you have your fun on foot!

-but I'm way off track.

wandering afoot

my mind would compose epics beyond the reach of words and cinema

as I stalked the concrete and strip mall and church and state and automobile gridlock wastescape

my unauthorized brain cut

of Twin Peaks Season 3

combines my own pedestrian adventures

with those exquisite moments of threshold that Lynch and his camera crew contrived

which is now all inside me

illegal beyond all conceptions of lawbreaking

ha, ha, haaaa!

I'm never not getting up to fun . . .

they'll have to cut my legs off to end my wander

just make sure you bring an army of Brain Cutting Copyright Cops

up-armored, fully militarized

so's you can say you put out maximum effort

and met honorable defeat by my left hand

'cause you're not good enough for my right

zing! pow! bap!

zip! zap! zop!

...

...

...

Okay. I've had my fun.

I'll say something more normal for the 24th Lynch Meditation.

Pinky swears and spit in the hand and oaths upon my mother's tits.

Amen.

The Lynch Meditations 24: Twin Peaks Season 3 (2017)

"We live inside a dream."

-FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper

"Dreams sometimes hearken a truth."

-Audrey Horne

WARNING: YOU HAVE TO WATCH TWIN PEAKS SEASON 3 OR TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN OR WHATEVER IT WANTS TO BE CALLED BEFORE READING ANY OF THIS. I'M NOT FUCKING AROUND HERE. JUST GO WATCH IT. EVEN IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FIRST TWO SEASONS-JUST WATCH IT. AND BE BEWILDERED. AND DELIGHTED. AND SOME OTHER THINGS, TOO. I ACTUALLY DON'T CARE IF YOU READ THIS THING HERE, BUT TWIN PEAKS SEASON 3 IS MUST-SEE TV. SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.

What surprised me most about the third season of Twin Peaks is how complicated it got with the mystical logic hinted at in the first two seasons. In the earlier episodes, it was gradually revealed that supernatural forces were in play helping and harming human beings to achieve inscrutable goals. You have Killer Bob-a sadistic demon who thrives on murder, rape, and terror-and you have the mysterious giant, who seems to be trying, however cryptically, to communicate with Cooper-"It is happening again." Between these two moral/spiritual polarities-an aggressive predator and an awkward prophet-you have Bob's old partner Mike, who also exists as the flesh-and-blood one armed man Phillip Gerard; the little man in the red suit who is apparently a transformation of the arm that Phil Gerard lost; the creepy jumping kid in the long-nosed mask; a woodsman; and some other creepers you only see in the background of Fire Walk With Me. Season 3 takes all those creepy-spooky types and depicts them as godlike beings who are manipulating mundane humans, possibly for sport, in the manner of the Greek deities of yore, and possibly to pursue a kind of clandestine war of diametrically opposed principles: good vs. evil; chaos vs. order; visionary vs. vulgar; love vs. hate; light vs. dark; and we ordinary mortals are just pawns on some kind of a four-dimensional chess board. Fire Walk With Me suggests that these spirits are fighting for a spiritual creamed-corn edible known as garmonbozia-which is a made-up word that means "pain and sorrow," so are these spirits vampires feeding on our suffering? Seems like it. 

Prior to Season 3, these malevolent spirits seemed highly localized, furtive, disorganized, and rather squalid, dwelling in dingy apartments, forbidding forests, and the souls of twisted, predatory men. They're metaphysical vultures who aspire to take over people's bodies to wreak more havoc and destruction and thereby keep the garmonbozia economy cranking. Perhaps that could be a metaphor for how the stock market goes up whenever a scumbag, pro-business politician gets elected. 

Season 3 gives us a more detailed mythology: the supernatural manifested in our world after the Trinity nuclear test, which drew a frightful-but kind of sexy in a Silent Hill boss fight kind of way-entity known as The Experiment into our corner of the cosmos. The Experiment vomited up all sorts of evil creatures, including a frog-insect hybrid parasite that crawls down the throats of little girls when they sleep, and the aforementioned Killer Bob. Opposing the Experiment's expectorations is the awkward giant who is revealed to have another name-The Fireman. The Fireman responds to the vomit of evil by vomiting up a ball of light that contains the face of Laura Palmer, and then he has a woman he lives with known as Senorita Dido bless this ball of light with a kiss, and fire it off towards the planet Earth, where it arrives in the town of Twin Peaks. Yeah, uh, I guess the Fireman and Senorita Dido live in a fortress in another dimension? They seem like good people. They're lookin' out for us, at the least, which is something. 

At the end of Season 2, Killer Bob manifested a doppelganger of Cooper and escaped from the Black Lodge, leaving the One True Cooper trapped within the otherwordly salon. 25 years later, we have Season 3, and the One True Cooper is still trapped in the Black Lodge. Meanwhile, Evil Cooper-the doppelganger-has been free in our world, creating a far-flung criminal network of killers, thieves, drug pushers, and truckers, all while exploiting his access to FBI resources to evade capture or destruction by the law or by rival criminal outfits. Evil Cooper is the absolute negation of the One True Cooper: cold, cruel, manipulative, murderous, vindictive, living only to satisfy his endless appetites for power, money, vengeance, and sex, he isn't a million miles away from the competence porn protagonists of John Wick,  007 films, first person bro-shooter video games, and legion Steven Seagal straight-to-redbox flicks. Evil Cooper sorta looks like a Steven Seagal protagonist, but more handsome, effective, and in fighting shape. Evil Cooper is good with guns, computer hacking, cell phone spoofing, driving, close quarters combat, arm wrestling, has an excellent memory for coordinates, and seems to have a knack for getting other dudes' wives to fuck him. He is a twisted fantasy avatar of toxic masculinity gone berserk, hilarious and horrifying to behold. I want to see a spinoff where Evil Cooper teams up with Neil Breen. (Breen does doppelgangers, too, I'm sensing excellent synergy here . . . )

Due to abstruse spiritual law-or the surreal whims of Mark Frost and David Lynch-Evil Cooper must evade being sucked back into the Black Lodge. To this end, Evil Cooper has manufactured a doppelganger of himself-that's right, a doppelganger of a doppelganger-and this Decoy Cooper is meant to spoof the system and allow Evil Cooper to continue living the crazy high life of a heavy underworld operator. 

Meanwhile, back inside the Black Lodge, the Fireman appears to the One True Cooper and seems to nudge him towards escape. Through a process much too bewildering to summarize-you'll just have to watch the show for yourself-the One True Cooper escapes his spiritual captivity, and manifests in our world. But the One True Cooper suffers a kind of shock to his soul due to his unauthorized re-entry, and he is transformed from his iconic, whipsmart, dashing self into a kind of sleepwalker who must relearn how to be a functioning adult, step by painful step, phrase by awkward phrase. Sleepwalking Cooper is totally dependent upon the people around him, and, at first, his utter, childish lack of competence produces fury and confusion in the people around him. And then these people realize that Sleepwalking Cooper gives them an opportunity to be heroes, to help another human being in direst need, and to show love and empathy. Oh, and Sleeepwalking Cooper also hits nothing but jackpots on the one-armed bandits at the casino. He ends up being a pretty popular dude. 

The implication here is that Cooper's qualities have been split across multiple beings. Even though Cooper was a real knight-in-shining-armor in the first two seasons, he was an FBI agent-a super-pig, in other words, and he had typical super-pig qualities: self-righteousness, ruthless in interrogations, cornball affinities for flags and national anthems-but his super-pig self was tempered by high intelligence, compassion for his fellow human beings, and absolute sincerity of purpose. He was also a guy who seemed to be sort of stuck in adolescence, but not in a gross way-he was just so absorbed in being the best FBI agent he could be that he was socially and emotionally a bit of an innocent. Evil Cooper got the very worst of his masculinity and super-pig bullshit. Sleepwalking Cooper is an extreme manifestation of his childlike and adolescent qualities. Evil Cooper is a million steps ahead of God Himself, and is always running angles. Sleepwalking Cooper is encountering the world all anew, and every moment is a chance to discover joy or boredom. Evil Cooper sees through everyone he meets and quickly assesses their value to him and his twisted schemes. Sleepwalking Cooper is a blank slate upon which others see themselves anew, possibly reborn. Evil Cooper could outfight Satan and reign in Hell. Sleepwalking Cooper is some kind of a Christ. You get the idea.

I kinda blew past something extraordinary: Laura Palmer is some kind of a spiritual being. She is characterized as a golden light-THE Light. So, when you look at the pilot for Season 1, and her death seems like a small town version of the death of JFK-well, seems there was something truly transcendent to her. I know, I know-what about poor Teresa Banks. Or maybe even Ronette Pulaski-shouldn't all victims of violence be precious to us? Yes indeed: there's a cruelty at the heart of all the metaphysical New Age transcendental meditation mumbo-jumbo: some people are special, and some people are shit. Some are born with midichlorians and others are fated peasants. Pay for this pricey seminar and you shall be special, and shall not be as shit. Have faith or burn in hell. Makes you feel all warm and screamy inside. And outside. 

The last episode adds even more mind-bending complications to all of this: the One True Cooper uses his mojo to travel back in time and prevent the murder of Laura Palmer. But this choice seemingly violates some abstruse spiritual law, and Laura Palmer is sucked away into another reality. The One True Cooper saves her from Killer Bob, but now she is lost from this reality altogether. The One True Cooper undergoes a final transformation into a hard-boiled character named Richard-who brings Evil Cooper's aggression into line with the One True Cooper's unbending sense of righteousness. This Richard goes looking for the space/time lost Laura-the Light-and finds her . . . but now Richard and Laura seem to be lost in a strange new reality, where the cowboys cannot be trusted, and a horrifying demon known as Judy has her claws on the switches for all the lighting cues . . .

The One True Cooper and Laura the Light are bound together by an incomprehensible supernatural fate. Coop must seek out and protect the Light. And the Light-Laura-is doomed to be targeted by a world of corrupt and leering fools. This is insane, arbitrary, and nonsensical. Kinda like . . . do I even need to say it?