David Lynch, THE BIG DREAM

Some thoughts on the first listen of the new David Lynch joint:

--Kind of a rough start - I was beginning to fear that the best track off the disc would be the Bob Dylan "cover". There's a slow, almost minimalist spin to the lyrics, where a tense situation grows moreso through the repetition of certain details, as Lynch's guitars (including an acoustic) and a deep, nearly subliminal synth percolate threateningly in the background. But it doesn't peak there.

--The start is admittedly uneven - the 2am invocation of "last call" doesn't really land. Lynch's music has advanced and grown intriguingly more complex, but in at least the first half his approach to the lyrics wasn't working. (More than once I consider what this would have been like as a series of instrumental sketches.) It sounds more like an album of songs than CRAZY CLOWN TIME did (whether or not CCT was such an album was never really an issue). Nice variations on his mutant blues surface later in the album, and "We Rolled Together" is pretty damn fine, despite its uncanny resemblance to The Police's "Invisible Sun".

--Holy crap, the synth washes in "the line it curves" are absolutely fucking beautiful.

--The album's a kind of transition for Lynch - it's not as consistent as CRAZY CLOWN TIME, nor quite as unsettling (though I'm not sure it really tries for the latter). There are some moments in THE BIG DREAM that transcend the previous album, though I think the next album is where shit's really going to come together.

--In the end, the process of his music doesn't seem the same as that of his films; each movie is its own complete entity, but I think music is a more amorphous entity for Lynch, a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. The albums feel more like sketchbooks than complete, unified works, and I'm pretty sure that he sees his albums and his movies in completely different terms. The albums feel like steps in an ongoing process, and though THE BIG DREAM doesn't feel like a self-contained success, its high points show Lynch fully engaged with that process. The road, the tracks, the train all figure prominently here, and Lynch is riding to the end. And even (especially!) if he can't see the final destination, the ride's well worth taking.

DUNE

The movie just holds up, though it's not hard to see why it was less than successful. It condenses an awful lot of material into its running time, and brother, if you don't pay heed to the dense exposition of the first few minutes you're gonna be lost.

I remember being amazed by the film when I was younger, though having read the novel in anticipation of the film certainly helped guide me through its complicated politics and galaxy-spanning setting. I'd seen THE ELEPHANT MAN and was even at 13 enough of an auteurist that I was excited about seeing a new David Lynch film.

Returning to the film with fresher eyes (and a greater understanding of what, exactly, a David Lynch film is), it's impossible to dismiss the film, as compromised as it is. Though Lynch would never have final cut on a movie this massive, there are plenty of his tropes and obsessions that ring loud and clear, from the grotesquerie of his villains and their setting (the Harkonnen home planet Geidi Prime looks much like the Philly of ERASERHEAD) to the wide-eyed innocence of its hero (and his journey toward wisdom). The power of Paul's unconscious, rendered in vivid dream sequences that no other director could have realized, and the strength he derives from it may indeed be one of Lynch's most direct on-screen corollaries to his own spirituality. (Though D. reminds me that just about every Lynch film features a protagonist confronting his/her subconscious - I immediately remembered Dale Cooper's dreams in TWIN PEAKS, but was further reminded of Betty's dream world in MULHOLLAND DR., and a mess of other examples come to mind just sitting here.)

And even if the thing is choppier than it should have been, torn as it was between Lynch's desires, those of the di Laurentii, and the demands of the marketplace, there's an emotional throughline that feels as tapped to the Unified Field as anything else Lynch has made. It's not clear in the film why it's important that it rain on Arrakis; that it's powerful and moving when it finally does is undeniable.

Given the vast amount of material shot for this film, one wishes Lynch would return to the project, and reshape what was there to something closer to his intent. But his disappointment with the project as a whole is well-documented, and as tantalizing as the notion is it'd be folly to put too much stock in it. What we have is all we're going to get of that particular film. But Kyle MacLachlan's growing divinity; Kenneth McMillan's goony malevolence; the majesty of the sandworms; the beatific but creepy presence of the prematurely mature Alia Atreides; hell, even the guitars that swell up during Eno's Prophecy theme at key moments are more than enough to make this thing, as it stands, feel complete.

LOST HIGHWAY

It was fun to revisit this film at the end of a very busy weekend, which saw your proprietor in Los Angeles for a cleverly conceived, stealthily executed birthday party for a dear, dear friend. During the trip we headed up to Hollywood and stopped by the three houses owned by David Lynch, one of which served as a set for his mid-90s noir psychodrama Lost Highway. About 24 hours later we were back in San Francisco, entering the house, and the fractured mind of deeply troubled saxophonist Fred Madison, on the Castro's screen.

Having rewatched a number of Lynch's films recently, I found LOST HIGHWAY less compelling than some of the others. We might safely attribute the film's more overtly noir flourishes to the influence of writer Barry Gifford, from the more clearly delineated underworld within which Mr. Eddy lurks to the elusive machinations of Patricia Arquette's alluring femme fatale. But on the whole it's built as instinctively as any of Lynch's other films, and just as dually-obsessed. Just as Fred, in extremis, transforms into the bewildered young Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), so does Fred's wife Renee reappear as Alice, a moll for Mr. Eddy who proceeds to upend Pete's already tenuous existence.


The film is bookended with lovely but frantic shots of a highway's line disappearing under the headlights of a speeding car (and scored beautifully by David Bowie's "I'm Deranged", perhaps marking the film as a vent of pre-millennial angst). But the linearity this suggests is thwarted constantly. Left is right in this section of Lynch's universe, right down to the casting: counterculture icon Henry Rollins appears as a prison guard, and the similarly iconoclastic Gary Busey turns in a lovely miniature of a performance as Pete's quietly concerned and clearly loving father. The music is similarly fractured, from Lynch mainstay Angelo Badalamenti's orchestral malaise to Barry Adamson's hypercharged noir jazz to Trent Reznor's horrordrones. But the biggest sonic imprint is left by Rammstein, whose forthright German vocals and heavyheavy guitars prove a perfect coup de grace for ultimate chaos (Lynch put the songs in after discovering that the crew had been listening to them obsessively during the shoot.) As intuitively conceived and unexplained as they are, Lynch's films always feel smooth and reasoned, but even as the film seems to close the circuit, ending as it began, Fred twitches and shifts, ready to explode and derail. Hurtling us and all our questions into a black, unanswering abyss.


It's entirely possible that my remove from LOST HIGHWAY (and disinclination to put it up with Lynch's best work) is some kind of defense against its unrelenting darkness. But one wonders if Lynch himself was put off by what he unleashed here: after creating his darkest features back-to-back (TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and this), he crafted the genial and G-rated (if still thoroughly Lynchian) THE STRAIGHT STORY for Disney.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE

A long, long train rolls by behind the credits. Havenhurst and Vargas, two homicide detectives from a different (and better, if more conventional) film, have their morning rounds interrupted by an 1154 call. Someone's dead.

The setup for this long-awaited David Lynch/Werner Herzog collaboration is juicy indeed, including a glancing encounter between Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon). But once McCullum barricades himself in his home with a pair of hostages, all we can do is watch as the pieces of McCullum's bizarre history assemble, and wait for the situation to reach a boiling point. Or, in this case, not.

Over the course of the last several years, Herzog has been quickly lapsing into self-parody: the anti-nature ranting and bemusement over his human subjects' folly became tiresome in ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. But while some of his routine had been skewered by the gonzo energy of Nicolas Cage in THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, the familiar Herzog tropes roll by in MY SON, etc. as if on a checklist. Though clearly supported and indulged by producer Lynch here, the styles of the two directors prove less than their sum (and there's some Lynchian checklisting here too, as Grace Zabriskie gives the same performance she's given in every Lynch project she's appeared in since TWIN PEAKS). Herzog tries to accommodate some Lynchian shots of suburban torpor-turned-hell, but his obsession with hard, ego-damaging reality doesn't mesh with Lynch's nightmares.

As for lead Michael Shannon, he offers another dangerously unhinged character to his gallery, but one wonders if he's able to grasp a character whose life is grounded in more conventional psychology. Giving him space here to make the attempt might have lent some context to his escalating derangement, but Shannon plays every scene in the same dully insistent monotone.

There's a growing audience for Herzog's comedy of detachment, and the numerous shots of flamingos and ostriches will surely tickle this crowd (as they did at the screening your proprietor attended). Those hoping that a producer with as strong an auteuristic bent as Herzog's would send him into new territory will be disappointed.

Here's hoping Absurda yields better material with King Shot, if financing allows.