David Lynch Features Poll Results

Thanks to everyone for voting in our most recent (and wildly successful) poll. This is by far the most votes we have ever had in a poll here. We want to thank everyone for coming to the site and voting, and we all truly hope you'll stick around and keep coming back to see what we have to offer. Lynch is certainly one of the major directors who has influenced and inspired each of the writers at this site. So many of his movies have been so great, so I know many people had a tough time picking just one of these features. In the end, though, it was Lynch's last filmic feature that ran away with this poll. Thanks to everyone and on with the poll results!

Which is your favorite David Lynch feature?

Eraserhead- 14 (10%)

The Elephant Man- 2 (1%)

Dune- 5 (3%)

Blue Velvet- 24 (18%)

Wild At Heart- 1 (0%)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me- 3 (2%)

Lost Highway- 10 (7%)

The Straight Story- 7 (5%)

Mulholland Drive- 49 (37%)

Inland Empire- 16 (12%)

Total number of votes: 131


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Lynch Week- INLAND EMPIRE Discussion

We want to start off this final post by again thanking everyone for joining us this week and making Lynch week such a success. Next time, we'll plan a little more advance to get even more posts and more writers involved, but all of us here were thrilled at the response and hope to keep seeing more comments, questions, and discussions in the comments – whether in Lynch posts or other reviews.

For our final post in the official Lynch week, we decided to do something we've never done here before: a real conversation! Well, real enough. Although our proximities to one another do not allow for podcasting, an email conversation is the best we could do. But we are writers, so we probably put our ideas down on paper a little better anyways. After the break, our discussion of Lynch's most recent work INLAND EMPIRE. A lot of people (including all of us) were/are baffled by the movie in many respects, so we tried our best to work through what this movie is, how it works, and why we all responded to it how we did.

More than any of the posts this week, though, we really want to keep this conversation going in the comments. Post your questions, your thoughts, your responses. Hopefully we can get a solid discussion going! So chime in, enjoy the discussion, and come back and visit! Become a follower (link is on the side)!


What the fuck is this movie?

JACOB: Good question! It's sort of a love story/Hollywood exposé/history of Polish sideshows/cranial map/prostitutes a-go-go/revenge thriller...with a heart. I can't really say what it is. But it seems more like a study of tone than a film with a "real” narrative. There's such a palpable dread hanging over most of the film. Even if the "story" stops making sense, the tone is always there to guide the viewer further into the darkness.

JAMES: I sort of ask this question as a joke (and stole it from the most recent issue of Cinema Scope) but I think its sort of the daunting question that lingers over most analysis of the movie. I won’t call it a “film” because that implies the format and one of the leading questions in academic film studies is one of format. Thus begins the questions that this movie brings to the surface, whether through its narrative or production process. What makes INLAND EMPIRE wonderful, whatever it is, is that it dares to be as expansive as it is. I know this probably causes a lot of frustration for viewers who aren’t into the aesthetic or don’t give themselves to the experience. This isn’t a hit at those viewers, or the movie even, but its something that makes the movie constantly challenging and difficult to get a complete grasp on. For the most part, I tend to decide for myself what I think the movie is, and then love hearing other theories, but its never a point of annoyance. Just part of the fun. I actually disagree with Jacob that its all about tone though and that there isn’t a real narrative. For me, its just as invested in narrative as any of Lynch’s film works. There are more narrative threads here (its like a 3 hour version of the last 30 minutes of Mulholland Drive, in many ways) but I think there is plenty to follow, buy into, and become invested in outside of the demonstrative tone.

BRANDON: For me, INLAND EMPIRE is like a Gestalt optical illusion – you know, the ones where the drawing looks like a rabbit AND a duck at the same time, depending on emphasis. All of the parallel narrative and crisscrossing plotlines beg the question, "Which one is the actual reality?" Unlike Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE never reveals this information. Instead, the audience is left with a puzzle in which what might seem like an allegory for one reality might actually be THE reality, which finds its metaphorical expression in a complimentary narrative layer. The movie presents a sort of narratological ouroboros in which every subplot contains strains of other subplots and in which the distinction between one subplot and another is a matter of leaning to one side or squinting harder – the plot doubles over on itself, examining itself, undoing itself, like the mythological serpent. INLAND EMPIRE is in constant rotation and the only way to pin it down is for the viewer to stabilize him/herself, creating a sort of North Star by which to navigate. However, the tricky part is that there are just as many versions of INLAND EMPIRE as there are places to stand still; from every vantage point, the film is altered, different, enriched or refocused or skewed.

JACOB: Brandon, what was the viewing experiment you tried with IE at the Belcourt when I made you watch it twice in a row? Something along the lines of dozing off to wake up during random scenes?

JAMES: If that actually occured, its very classically Godardian. I think he said that he preferred watching movies out of order (just another way to break from the capitalist structures pushed upon him by The Man, man!) If I remember the story correctly, he preferred to watch a couple reels in a row (say 3 and 4) and then come back later to see 1 and 2, and onward with 5 and 6 at a later time. There’s also a famous story from the history of NYFF where Godard sent reels of a film unmarked just so the projectionist would play them in a random order. Can’t remember which film... Anyways, it'd be an interesting experiment to try with IE, but I think after you've seen it a few times that might lose some of its effect. If you did that at the Belcourt, though, I'd love to hear how it made the film work...

BRANDON: Attempting to maximize the irrational, associative dream logic of the film, I did indeed purposefully take naps during the second part of a back-to-back screening at the Belcourt. I remember hearing the film vividly throughout my slumber, in fact, the intensity of the sound design awoke me multiple times during my experiment. As my eyes would open slightly and I would drift in and out of attentiveness, the movie, which was fresh in my mind, would bleed into my subconscious's permutations of its moods and plotlines. I awoke several times in a dazed stupor, having to re-acclimate myself to the dark and the screen. It was a lot like being lost and then passing into and out of different realities. The whole thing was a lot like how I would imagine it might be to actually exist in the INLAND EMPIRE universe.

CHUCK: I like Brandon’s image of the “narratological ouroboros,” as I believe it gives us a good visual representation of the sort of karmicrecapitulations found in INLAND EMPIRE’s narratives. But this does not mean Lynch’s experimentation should be chalked up as an artistic indulgence, as some critics have suggested. Instead, I would argue that the film’s deconstructive, cyclical, self-reflexive structure meshes well with its investigations of cinema, performance, and spectatorship. Even when the film fails to cohere to the plot-logic causality of classical cinema, it does so not as an aesthetic extravagance but as a means of critique. The film dismantles classical diegesis and the structure of narrative cinema in order to make the seams and sutures of the medium more visible. The film also accomplishes this by breaking down many of the binary structures of cinema and Hollywood: spectator/spectacle, performance/reality, authentic/inauthentic, etc. In this way, the movie matches medium with message. As in Ingmar Bergman’s PERSONA, INLAND EMPIRE uses these metatextual tactics for an explicit purpose—not just for shock value.

I would also be remiss in failing to mention Laura Dern’s daring and bravura performance, which anchors the film with a raw, emotive core even during its most chaotic and oblique passages. I would even argue that her performance ranks up there with Maria Falconetti’s work in THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC as my favorite female performance in all of cinema. And I assure you, there is no hyperbole in that statement.


What do you think of Lynch's turn to digital? What does it add or take away?

JACOB: Lynch's defense of his switch is generally something along the lines of "Yes, film stock is beautiful but there's a separate kind of beauty inherent in the digital technology." So he seems to be switching one beauty for another. While it may not be as aesthetically pleasing as the lush photography of "Mulholland Dr." it's still beautiful in its own way. Plus, if the digital technology gives Lynch the opportunity to quickly produce more work or try out experiments that would be too costly on celluloid, then he can go forth with my blessing.

CHUCK: As Jacob said, the digital technology used in IE frees Lynch from the expense of celluloid and gives him more room for experimentation. I would also argue that the film’s harsh, grainy digital photography can be viewed as the perfect fusion of form and content. While the lush cinematography of Mulholland Drive simulated the look and feel of a mythic, classical Hollywood (an image the film challenges and critiques), Inland Empire shows us a more raw and fragmentary representation of Los Angeles—a city full of the grunge and grime and darkness shined over with the false narratives of Hollywood cinema. Filled with murky, hazy, dirty nightmare images, IE goes beneath the surface of Hollywood glitz and glamour, presenting an image of L.A. as a near-apocalyptic wasteland. If MD visualizes Hollywood as both mythic and artificial, then IE explores the sordid, decayed underbelly of Hollywood—the dirty world that exists outside the motion pictures and is often hidden away from us. Both films attempt to dismantle the myth of Hollywood, but they do so very differently.

JAMES: Very much agree with Chuck in terms of the look of the film. Even if his doesn’t look as “pretty” (which, I remind you, is a subjective term) as MD, its precisely because what IE is wouldn’t make sense with the look and feel of MD, just as Eraserhead or Elephant Man wouldn’t work in color and Dune, Blue Velvet, etc. wouldn’t work in black and white. As a precise visual artist, the look of the films always match what the film is going after, whether that be the tone, story, whatever. Some people don’t like grain and they want the picture clean and that is perfectly fine. But it is impossible for me to imagine IE working in such a manner. It is so much about the grunge, interiority, and darkness of the spaces and places that it seems totally disparate from the purposefully sunny view of LA in the first two-thirds of MD. That world (and view on life and Hollywood) has no place in IE so why would it be shown that way. Plus, Jacob is right about it opening the possibilities of shooting and experimentation for Lynch. Hopefully the lack of restraint doesn’t lead to an extreme self-indulgence, though, as some have feared. Some people thought that aspect killed IE, but I found the experience abundantly alive and enthralling. As long as that keeps happening and Lynch doesn’t suddenly turn into Clark/Korine/Wes Anderson/Barney, then I’ll be ok. (Jacob- the Barney slam is just for you). While IE certainly has a lot of “personal” indulgence of sorts, it still less than those would-be great directors and their insolent love of themselves. Lynch’s films allow the viewer a leeway that opens so many possibilites and refuse/refute the criticism of self-indulgence.

BRANDON: I personally have no problem with Lynch being as self-indulgent as he wants. I don’t necessarily watch Lynch for political or social relevance. I watch for something more interior, more universally relevant, which I think he might be able to express more plainly and unabashedly with the freedom of digital filmmaking. I’d rather watch David Lynch hardcore navel-gazing than just about anything. As for the aesthetic limits of the digital shift, I’m kind of wary of it, namely because I feel like Lynch’s commitment to digital work may preclude him from exploring other ideas because they are more suited to film. It’s sad to think that David Lynch will never make another movie on film, though I certainly adore INLAND EMPIRE. Either way, I trust him to make something beautiful.

JACOB: While James removes Matthew Barney's nuts from his vice grip, here are some recent Lynch shorts which might serve as examples of the experimentation Lynch has been involved with as of late.

Absurda

The Boat


What's up with Lynch's re-use of material from his website?

JACOB: This probably isn't the official answer, but Lynch seems to combine ideas in a piecemeal fashion. I'm pretty sure the "Rabbits" series had already been produced when he started shooting scenes for what would become Inland Empire. Why he decided to combine them I couldn't say (which is a pity, because I've constantly been curious about their inclusion). Maybe his next work will feature an animated segment starring the Angriest Dog in the World.

CHUCK: Although we have this image of Lynch as a calculating perfectionist, he is, in many ways, one of the most improvisational filmmakers around. Like the stuffed, clearly artificial robin puppet in Blue Velvet or the shot of Twin Peaks’ Killer Bob peering through the bed frames, much of IE seems to come from an organic, improvisational process. In many ways, IE reminds me of Burroughs’ cut-up method, where textual fragments are arranged randomly in order to create a new, unexpected, usually anti-rational creation. While I don’t think IE should be seen as pure “cut up”—it is far more unified and cohesive than those experiments—the way Lynch splices his central narrative(s) with images culled from his digital experiments does summon up the same illucid, extemporaneous spirit of a surrealist cut up.

JAMES: "Rabbits" was definitely completed before IE began. I’m not sure when the decision was made to include it, but I really love how it works in IE. I actually prefer it vastly within the realm of IE than on its own. It adds another layering to the levels of viewing/watching someone else (or yourself) that run throughout the work. The canned laughter and sitcom-y style positioned in the first half hour with the crying Polish woman who strives for some kind of connection (as made clear in her ultimate connection with Nikki/Sue near the end). She’s kind of a mini- Man in the Planet. Constantly watching and reacting, but seemingly never completely connected or associated what it otherwise going on. All of this plays back into the extemporaneous spirit that Chuck highlights. Aside from "Rabbits", there is a far less known reference; that being the inclusion of Axxon N. If I recall correctly, it is the room/theater where Nikki/Sue ends up auditioning for the man with big glasses and sees herself on screen. Back when I was a member of Lynch’s site, Axxon N was advertised as an upcoming series and I remember it having quite a similar image to the one that ended up being the smoky lips on the IE poster. Axxon N never was released as a series, so my guess is that it melded into IE when Lynch began to develop it a little further. Lynch has said IE started with the 14-page (single spaced) monologue that Laura Dern was to deliver. Perhaps thats what Axxon N was, and, if so, I was certainly thrilled to see it in full form in IE. That monologue is one (of many) highlights the movie has. Even though this may be a form of toying with something he had previously been playing with, its as fresh as ever.

BRANDON: Great call on the Burroughs reference, Chuck. I ALWAYS think about that when I watch INLAND EMPIRE. It’s interesting that we define “Rabbits” and other previously released material as work that is “re-used” rather than considering them as stepping stones on the way to larger projects. I feel as if the work Lynch put on his website and dispersed during his initial digital experiments was never really intended to be viewed as polished or finalized (otherwise, why not put it on a DVD or attempt a more official form of distribution?). Instead, the website work served more as a sort of brainstorming, preliminary dabbling which online subscribers were privy to and which enabled Lynch to receive feedback on his efforts. More than anything, it seems that Lynch was giving greater access to his creative process by utilizing enhanced technology and online tools. As James speculates, some of the earlier projects were potentially included in the INLAND EMPIRE conceptualization or were absorbed into them as the project took shape, growing out of Lynch’s experiments. Additionally, on a meta-textual level, the previous existence of “Rabbits” online links INLAND EMPIRE to a narrative structure that is web-like and associative, playing out like a joyride down the rabbit hole of internet search engines and clickable hyperlinks, weaving in and out of the story. Jim Emerson describes this aspect of the film, writing:

In this sense, you might say, Inland Empire is a digital film, through and through. Not because Lynch shot it with the relatively small Sony PD-150 digicam and fell in love with the smeary, malleable and unstable texture of digital video (where the brightest Los Angeles sunlight can be as void and terrifying as the darkest shadow), or because the first pieces of the movie were digital shorts he made for his Web site before they grew and crystallized into a narrative idea. Inland Empire unfolds in a digital world (a replication of consciousness itself -- hence the title), where events really do transpire in multiple locations at the same time (or multiple times at the same place), observers are anywhere and everywhere at once, and realities are endlessly duplicable, repeatable and tweakable. This is a digital dimension where, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, there's no difference between ketchup and paint and light and blood: On the screen, it's red.

JAMES: I meant to suggest that re-use is the wrong thing to call it (since the material works so well, and most of it is expanded from its original form). Whether I did or not, you cleared it up and hit the nail on the head. As for Emerson's comments, I'll be interested to see if Lynch continues to work with the PD-150 or if he goes to more advanced digital cameras. We'll have to wait and see. I would tend to think the specific camera may vary depending on the project, but, as always with Lynch, anything can happen.
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Lynch Week- We Are All Made of Lynch

As devised in the comments yesterday, today we highlight the work of other writers around the internets who have also shown an outpouring of critical dedication to the work of David Lynch. I would love for this to be a monumental link list of a ton of critical writing on Lynch, so if you have written a piece that you would like included on this list, send me an email at out1filmjournal@gmail.com and I'll be happy to add it to this Lynch link roll. Thanks especially to all the new visitors to the site. We all really hope you'll stick around and become regulars!

There is at least one more Lynch post on the way this evening tomorrow, focusing on some major questions that are predominant in INLAND EMPIRE, and there may be a couple more next week as we unofficially extend the week. There won't be Lynch every day but there is certainly plenty left to talk about.

Let's start the roll of great Lynch writing after the break. For posterity's sake (and in case people run across this post at a later date without finding the other articles), I am including what we have written this week as well as the other Lynch writing that is out there. Once we get more and more links added, perhaps I'll restructure this and separate the links into the specific Lynch work. Let's make that happen! Send me your links!


James Hansen- Mulholland Drive Is Cinema

Chuck Williamson- Commercials As Art?

Jacob Shoaf- Hear The Call of Eraserhead

Brandon Colvin- Inhabited By Intuition (On Twin Peaks)

Out 1 Film Journal- INLAND EMPIRE Discussion

Thomas Britt @ Bright Light FJ- Death, Excess, and Discontinuity (on Lost Highway)

Tony Dayoub @ Cinema Viewfinder- Review of the new DVD of Lost Highway

Ed Howard @ Only The Cinema- Films I Love: Mulholland Drive

Erich Kuersten @ Acidemic- The First David Lynch movie? The Story of Temple Drake (1933)

Erich Kuersten @ Bright Lights FJ- Book Review of The Impossible David Lynch

Jeremy Richey @ Moon in the Gutter- The Last Crush (Memories of Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks

MovieMan0283 @ The Dancing Image- Individual Analysis of the majority of episodes in Twin Peaks...it's really an amazing undertaking

MovieMan0283- Blue Velvet

Movieman0283- Lost Highway

Movieman0283- Inland Empire

Nathaniel Rogers @ The Film Experience- Kissing Betty/Diane
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Lynch Week- Inhabited By Intuition

by Brandon Colvin

What truly separates the work of David Lynch from that of other filmmakers is the director’s incredibly apt intuition. Whether through transcendental meditation or his constant diet of cigarettes and coffee, somehow Lynch has acquired an uncanny knack for visually and aurally divining the power and beauty of images and scenarios in a way that defies the reductive task of analysis or explication. It is this particularly intuitive aspect of artistic creation – Lynch’s greatest contribution to cinema – that enables Lynch to find his way through the surreal depths of his works. Many are tempted to throw psychoanalysis or other systematic ideologies at the auteur’s seemingly obscurantist oeuvre, quixotically attempting to rationalize with words a magic that can only be communicated and understood in images: one that is unshakable once experienced. When I watch a Lynch film, I am almost always moved, challenged, and disturbed in unusual ways – often without understanding why or how. I suspect I would find (and have found, in the past) any attempt at an objective critical exploration of Lynch’s canon limited because that sort of examination forgoes the importance of the irrational, the ineffable in Lynch’s work, which serve as the strobe-lit, smoke-machined factories of the moods, textures, and mysteries that characterize the director’s most stunning achievements; not the least of which is his much lauded metaphysical small-screen soap opera, Twin Peaks.


Understanding and appreciating Lynch’s gift for intuitive narratives and images depends on the viewer’s willingness to inhabit and be inhabited – a truth that is most perfectly demonstrated by Twin Peaks, the lengthiest and most geographically-defined project Lynch has ever put his brilliant mind to. Entering into Twin Peaks is the closest I’ve ever come to partaking in a world beyond day-to-day reality. Absorbing the atmosphere, built steadily over episode after episode, I watched the entire series on DVD in a month’s time and felt myself slowly slipping into the intuitive mode of Lynch and his primary collaborator on the series, Mark Frost. Not only was I being sucked into the show, the show was leaking out into me, for reasons I’m still unsure of, as if it were a form of merging inhabitation or irrational possession. There are moments in Twin Peaks, as in nearly all of Lynch’s work, that strike decidedly esoteric chords with different viewers in ways that are absolutely idiosyncratic and utterly ungraspable. Puzzlingly impactful moments like these are the reasons I return to Lynch and, especially, Twin Peaks. And now, I’d like to share one of these abstract, ineffable instances – one that consistently has a strange and powerful effect on me every time I see and hear it.

In Episode 14, entitled “Lonely Souls,” Laura Palmer’s (Sheryl Lee) killer is revealed (for those readers who don’t know, the premise of Twin Peaks is the investigation of the brutal murder of a popular, but troubled, Washingtonian high schooler: Laura Palmer). A massively important episode (one of a handful actually directed by David Lynch) and essentially the conclusion of the first half of the series – the latter half abruptly dropped in quality, often attributed to Lynch’s absence while filming Wild at Heart (1990) and his growing disillusionment with the show after production heads at ABC ordered the creators to reveal the mysterious murderer’s identity against Lynch’s will – “Lonely Souls” is breathtaking for many apparent reasons, but my relationship to the episode is defined by a very simple moment of atmospheric perfection.


Two young lovers, Laura Palmer’s best friend, Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle), and Laura’s ex-lover, James (James Marshall), rendezvous at the seedy local biker bar known as “The Roadhouse” – a site of more than one instance of metaphysical oddness. The couple, whose past is emotionally convoluted and hinges on a shared loyalty to the deceased Laura, sits in a booth as Lynch favorite Julee Cruise croons eerily onstage. Amidst their conversation is tucked one of my absolute favorite moments of the entire series, one that is positively seared into my brain. When Cruise ethereally sings, “I want you, rockin’ back inside my heart,” the scene cuts to Donna as she looks James in the eyes and lip-synchs the words to the song, her lips up-turned in a seductive grin and her face sparkling with an innocent sweetness. James’ reaction shot reveals his almost unresponsive countenance, an ambiguous Mona Lisa smile framed by his square jaw. Once the sequence cuts back to Donna, mouthing Cruise’s gentle chorus, her expression has grown considerably more troubled, almost sullen, while James maintains his cool stoicism. The brief exchange oozes with romanticism, sexuality, mystery, longing, distance, anxiety, and an underlying strangeness that manifests itself in James’ lack of engagement, Donna’s resultant worrying, and the pervasive reverberation of Julee Cruise’s melody. But, why? What about this combination of elements sparks my soul? What does it all mean? What is the grander purpose of this elegant scene, swirling with a multitude of unspecified relevance? To me, it doesn’t really matter. Most importantly, it just FEELS right. That’s where the intuition comes in. Similar to a scene that would occur later in Lynch’s career and which has a very similar effect on me – Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) lip-synching Linda Scott’s “I’ve Told Every Little Star” while performing at the rigged audition for The Sylvia North Story in Mulholland Drive (2001) – the brief moment Donna/James share affects me very strongly (must be something about beautiful lip-synching women that really gets me going).


Moreover, this exemplifies the value of an intuitive approach to understanding the universe of Twin Peaks, which Lynch advocates via the series’ protagonist, Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan), in Episode 2 (also directed by Lynch), “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer.” In “Zen,” Agent Cooper instructs the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department on the fine art of intuitive deduction, based on logic he developed in a dream about Tibet. Cooper says to his fellow investigators, “I also awoke from this same dream realizing that I had subconsciously gained knowledge of a certain deductive technique, involving mind-body coordination operating hand-in-hand with the deepest levels of intuition.” The description of Cooper’s bizarre process (which involves hurling rocks at glass bottles in an attempt to discover the identity of Laura’s killer) provides an insight into how events in Twin Peaks should be perceived – a combination of reason (connecting the dots), physical engagement (watching and listening closely), and deep intuition (finding what feels right). The last one is certainly the most slippery, but also the most essential. The rewards of engaging one’s intuition when watching Lynch’s work are different for each viewer, but the potential for an involved, invested experience remains the same. By opening ourselves to the whims of our irrational attachments – whether they be lip-synching women or men with one arm – we are able to align ourselves with a viewing experience that rhymes with Lynch’s highly intuitive creative process, maximizing the value of his surreal masterpieces and unlocking doors to the most opaque regions of our own hearts – one reason why I always greet a Lynch viewing with both excitement and trepidation.

The question is, where will he take us next, and who will be willing to follow his/her own intuition down the rabbit hole?
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Lynch Week- Hear The Call of Eraserhead

by Jacob Shoaf

For the past five or six years, Eraserhead has been my go-to response when anyone asked what my favorite film is (and I’ve forced viewership on as many of those askers as I could). I won’t bore you with the details of my long history with the film (though feel free to ask about the French douchebag involved with my first viewing), but I do hope that I can impart at least some of the aspects of my admiration for this film to you which might enrich any subsequent viewings.

For those of you hoping that my talking about this film will finally shed light (distant screams) on what it’s “about,” then I’ll go ahead and apologize. After thirty-something viewings, I’m still not sure that I’m anywhere close to pinning down the narrative. If anything, I usually come up with a new theory every few viewings based on what I emphasized during the film (this time’s emphasis was circular shapes and characters being submerged into liquids). Feel free to theorize in the comments section.


With the exception of a planet which may or may not be within Henry Spencer and an alley which may or may not be beneath a stage in his radiator, there aren’t any open spaces in Eraserhead. Brick walls and generic industrial visages surround the characters. The closest thing to an open space in the film is the alley where Henry steps in a mud puddle. But as he’s surrounded by large buildings, this is hardly an open space. Lynch turns the industrial landscape into a nightmare world. By relegating the majority of its scenes to Henry’s apartment, he strikes something of an agoraphobic tone with the film. Once Mary and the “baby” (AKA-fetus) move in with Henry, he’s only seen outside one more time. From that point on, he hardly leaves his room. And the pressure closes in…

Particularly amazing in the film is its use of sound. Eraserhead is filled with typical urban noises one would expect from such an environment. As Henry walks to his apartment at the beginning and to the X residence for dinner, it sounds like he’s walking through a steel mill. This is a constant reminder of the industrial hell that Henry calls home. Some of the film’s sound effects are also particularly disconcerting. When Henry arrives at the X residence, he’s seated in the living room with Mrs. X and Mary. This is the only view of the room we get for about a minute, but the entire time there’s a sucking sound that’s barely audible over the industrial hum. It’s not until several lines into the scene that the source of the noise is revealed to be a dog suckling its pups. Another off-putting sound effect is heard when Henry and Mary are trying to sleep back in his apartment. There’s a shot of the window which shows the brick wall across the way. In the upper-left corner of the wall, a light is shone onto the surface. There is, of course, the omnipresent hum but it’s accompanied by distant screams as the light is put into place on the wall. When the light pauses, the screams stop. But when the light recedes, the screaming picks back up with the light’s movement. I don’t attribute any particular symbolic weight to this screaming light, but it certainly does add to the film’s already creepy tone.


In the post-dissection/giant fetus head scene, there’s a deep ambient tone that accompanies the image. In a theatrical setting, it’s the equivalent of the bass at a concert being felt in your organs. The film’s drone sounds like it’s made up of a discordant organ tone, some more industrial hum, and the diegetic sounds of the scene (namely the rapidly shifting location of the giant baby head and the light bulb blowing). It is loud and low creating a deeply unsettlingly feeling which would go well in just about any of the film’s contexts, but its use around the dissection scene and thereafter creates something of a transcendent yet terrifying effect. The same also goes for the film’s last shot. When The Lady in the Radiator embraces Henry (in the bright white light), it’s accompanied by what sounds like a large choir holding a beehive while their tea is slowly coming to boil. Particularly disturbing is when the film crescendos with silence. The sound builds and builds but then abruptly switches to an auditory lack as the film cuts to black. Listening to silence and staring at darkness after such opposed extremes seconds earlier is both daunting and a relief. It’s not until the credits finally come up and the muzack begins that an enormous burden is entirely lifted from the viewer allowing them to relax.

The choral sound combined with the white lighting during the embrace give the scene a heavenly feel, but the entire time there’s that undertone of the other unpleasant noises building up. This is something like a variation on the ‘seedy underbelly’ motif that regular Lynch viewers are used to. In Blue Velvet, he shoes us the Pleasantville-esque suburbia and then the camera digs into the ground to find the bugs and corruption below. In Mulholland Drive Lynch shows the bright lights of LA from afar before taking the audience into their realm and revealing the hideous things they contain. This use of the motif is slightly different in that it’s entirely auditory and that it takes place in the last shots of the film. So while the oppression of the city environ has been exposed for the entirety of the picture, these noises refer to Henry. The image may look angelic, but there’s a harshness to the soundtrack that conflicts with what’s shown.

About a year ago, I was able to see a 35mm print of Eraserhead at a midnight screening at the Kentucky Theatre. Seeing it in such an ideal manner allowed me to consider one of my Cinematic Meccas pilgrimaged to. Despite the ass who gave a yell and fist pump at the fetus’ first appearance, I still consider this to be my favorite cinematic experience. If the chance presents itself for you to see a print of the film at midnight (or anytime for that matter), I can’t implore you enough to do so.
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Lynch Week- Commercials As Art?

by Chuck Williamson

As Jean Baudrillard predicted, the media images within our contemporary advertising culture have helped construct a “new technical order” where the subject interacts with and is dominated by a system of objects. If consumption has become the central component that unifies all social order and hierarchies, then commercials can be viewed as a medium through which the semiotics of capitalism are at their most concentrated and coercive. Commercials, for the most part, can be viewed as part of a unified text reproducing the sort of semiotic messages needed for mass consumerism to be sustained.

But this is not always the case. David Lynch’s commercial work infuses a vulgar, materialist medium with an aesthetic and cultural significance that, at times, goes against the foundation of consumerist culture. Singular in their cinematographic excellence, many of these commercials transcend the trappings of a sycophantic advertising culture, wriggling through the prenatal slime, birthed fully-formed as pure artistic products. When viewed within the context of the Lynch canon, these commercials—or short films, as they deserve to be called—cohere to the visual, narrative, and thematic groundwork established in the longer works. But these commercials are also daringly subversive. On the surface, each commercial constitutes an effective use of ad revenue, as they present visually appealing, diverting non-narratives that draw attention to specific high-end products. Nonetheless, this membrane-thin polish masks a more squalid, subversive core that attempts to dismantle the standard consumerist purpose of advertisements. These anti-consumerist, deconstructive commercials disrupt the semiotics of consumerism either through defacement, inversion, parody—whatever tools work best to dismantle the machine. These are more than just diverting bursts of surrealism—instead, we find ourselves staring face-to-face with some of Lynch’s most interesting and beguiling work.


In his 1992 Gio commercial—a moody black-and-white tone poem—Lynch laces his “woman in trouble” narrative—a recurring trope for the director—with the popular advertising convention of personifying the product as a beautiful woman. Gio, the avatar for Giorgio Armani’s fragrance, epitomizes the ice-cold androgynous beauty and couture glamour of the Jazz Age. Like Dorothy Vallens, she lives between the divide of public and private, foisted into the upscale social circles of polite society yet cloistered within a secret, internal world. The film introduces this contradiction in the opening shot, which shows us a front page newspaper story featuring Gio’s photograph. Encasing Gio within three separate “frames”—the photographic border, the newspaper’s margins, and the cinematic lens itself—the film immediately establishes her closed-off world as a prison in which she is contained, encased, and repressed. It further sets up this woman-in-prison motif through various superimposition effects, where the shutters of Gio’s Georgian sash windows slit into narrow shadows that resemble prison bars. Gio drifts into frame like a phantom, unsmiling and smoky-eyed, leered at by gazing partygoers, hounded by paparazzos and photographers. For her, the weight of fame is made only heavier by the confines of polite society and the lingering presence of the gaze—and even during her most intimate moments, she must stare pensively outside the cinematic frame to ensure that no-one is watching her, silently snapping photographs.

Gio’s eventual escape into smoky intercity jazz bars initially sets up the narrative thread of escape, liberation, freedom—a coherent and persuasive ad pitch that conforms to the predictable semiotics of consumerism. Initially, the jazz bar—filled with the fluidity, movement, and dynamism absent in cloistered high society—seems antithetical to the insular world from which Gio escapes. But when Gio’s reverie within the carnivalesque jazz bar is cut short by the intrusion of a team of trigger-happy photographers, the sequence’s fluid, verite cinematography winds down into a protracted, almost balletic slow-motion and the soundtrack’s manic saxophones turn into a doleful, mechanical synthesizer. Like the perfume itself, Gio is contained and forever encased within the glass walls of celebrity, made visible for public display, an object caught within the crosshairs of the male gaze. The photographers do not just capture her image, but they also “imprison” her within the dimensions of a picture. Full of ambiguity, her final gaze to the camera mixes sensuality with subordination, eroticism with acquiescence, and the hypnotic slow-motion cinematography simulates the stasis of confinement. Co-opting the clichés of modern advertising, the commercial inverts the colorful, “free-at-last” narrative, transforming it into a paranoid fantasy that links the product with isolation, confinement, and the loss of selfhood. Those final moments may appear to be nothing more than a semi-erotic photo-shoot—but in Lynch’s hands they become so much more.


This disruption of consumerist desires continues in his 2008 Gucci commercial, which takes the Gio ad’s “woman-as-product” analogue in a different direction. Purely non-narrative, this short film focuses exclusively on three stone-faced models who languidly dance in their paisley-pink boudoir to the repetitious beat of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Ideally, such an image might carry with it a degree of eroticism or sensuality, but the film foregoes titillation, instead choreographing the women’s dance moves in languid, hypnotic bursts that seem more hallucinogenic than sexual. Indeed, the constant dissolves and montage editing create a sensation of indefinable motion, where women’s bodies merge and movements blur into oblique, hypnotic waves. As these bodies fuse together into an impressionist tableau, strobe lights pulse throughout the room and a droning distortion throbs underneath the disco hit. By its conclusion, the film—now completely drained of its sexuality—haunts the viewer far more than any perfume commercial should. In a medium that uses sex as a surefire way to generate sales, the film dares to muddle all erotic signifiers, creating a haunting canvas where women—vacant, blank-eyed ciphers—dance into a phantasmagoric blur. If Mulholland Drive showed us David Lynch’s ability to generate eroticism, then this film demonstrates his ability to strip away these things altogether—ultimately distorting the product’s “sex sales” sign value.


These conventions are subverted even in commercials where the product figures prominently throughout. In his 2002 Nissan Micra commercial, Lynch mixes slick, sexy images of automobiles with a cold, blue-tinted dystopian setting that seems incongruous with the optimism of its sales pitch. As a pair of disembodied blue lips materializes in the sky and starts speaking in linguistic riddles, the commercial produces two dissonant messages: one that sells us on the Micra’s “modtro” qualities, and the other that repels us with the bleak, antiseptic Orwellian future that this car represents. Despite its surrealism, this film can be viewed superficially as a conventional commercial: well-designed, diverting, ruthlessly persuasive. But the commercial is much like the red-haired woman that looks on from a high-rise window: mysterious, aloof, and far more menacing than it initially appears. It’s not a radical work, but it is far more complex than it appears to be on its surface.


In a medium where a lesser filmmaker would coast on a collection of lazy visual tics and line his pockets with dollar bills, Lynch dares to use commercials as an outlet for creative expression—even if the message, ultimately, undermines the fundamental purpose of the medium. These commercials disrupts the convenient fantasy of consumerism, making visible its fictive core. Despite Lynch’s motives and intentions, the commercials become something more substantive than the usual assembly line of disposable, brightly-colored diversions. Not all of his commercials transcend their origins; some are chokingly conservative and highly restrained. But that is a small minority. In all, these “commercials” have been either maligned or ignored by cinephiles for too long—and I think it is time to start giving these things a closer look.
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Lynch Week- Mulholland Drive Is Cinema

by James Hansen

The first David Lynch film I saw was Mulholland Drive in late 2001. I don’t know why it was playing where it was playing, or why I went to see it instead of something a little more usual, but it was the happiest accident I have ever been a part of. It was, and is, the film. I'll play this post nice and close (to my heart), just like in the movies.




As our faithful readers probably know, most of the writers of this site grew up in Kentucky where arthouse films (even mainstream arthouse) didn’t exist. But I still distinctly remember the ones that I saw, and they continue to stand out for one reason or another. The town where I grew up had one movie theater that had one screen. When Titanic opened in 1997, it stayed for 3 or 4 months. I saw it four times. Not because I loved it (although I was young enough to get into the action sequences, and make fun of girls for crying over Leo) but because I loved movies and there anything else to see. With Netflix now, things seem to be much better, but I still have plenty of friends and know people who have similarly frustrating movie going areas. Every once in a while, though, our town would have a sort of break through. I remember seeing The Blair Witch Project and being driven home through the woods and up a winding hill to my house. The film was scary, yes, and, in my view at the time, shockingly independent. Shortly thereafter, I started borrowing video cameras from friends who had them and making short movies of my own, whether for school (creating sequels or spins on classic works) or for fun (creating my 2002 magnum opus- a brutally long 70-minute sequel entitled Cats 2: The Magical Misfit. We wrote original songs and everything!!!) I remember Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon miraculously playing in our town and counting 35 people who walked out once they discovered it had subtitles.

Then, a year later, I was on a Christmas trip to visit my father who lived around Dayton, Ohio. I was already “the movie kid” and it was my turn to pick the movie. So, off went my pastor father, stepmother, 14 year old sister, and myself to see Mulholland Drive at a dollar saver cinema. I don’t remember why it was at a dollar saver as a new release, or how I convinced my parents it was a good idea. I certainly didn’t know what I was getting into. We had watched R-rated movies for a long while, so ratings were never a big deal. I guess we all figured it would just be another movie. It had great reviews, mild Oscar buzz, and sounded interesting. I was already interested in movies, but Mulholland Drive was something uniquely mysterious, baffling, and altogether wonderful. My family harshly disagreed, as you might imagine. I don’t know what it was with the film, but it made something click. It is, almost without question, what got me into film production (I even made an Mulholland Drive inspired short film in college, my best one, that made it into a festival and was entitled The Sylvia North Story...any other crazy fans out there who know the reference?), which eventually morphed into academic film studies. I rarely have problems critiquing films in retrospect, but, for me, Mulholland Drive is so personal and vastly important that discussions remain as allusive as the film itself. Difficult as it is, I’ll trudge forward here in an attempt to codify that which has kept itself at a distance.


I analyze and think about Mulholland Drive much differently now, which is what 6 years of undergraduate and graduate school in film studies will do. At the same time, I still understand why I responded to it in such a way. For me, cinema, as a sort of all encompassing art form, should never be limited by one thing or another. I have met plenty of people working in theaters who think films are all about the story. If there is no story, then it is a waste of time. But to make this requirement seems highly reductive for a form that has access to so many different things. Perhaps stories are what more people can connect to, but should we then forget that cinema is a different form that has multiple possibilities within the realm of narrative? Can’t the form (by which I do not mean pretty cinematography) highlight and strengthen aspects of the narrative or story? Maybe I expect too much from cinema. The current banal set of Oscar contenders certainly has me thinking so. Cinema, though, allows everyone to see stories, to follow narratives, to listen to arguments in a different way than other forms. Without using the complete form, however, there is something that will always be missing. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t enjoy plays put on film, comedies shot with no sense of style, or stylish movies with no sense of narrative. It does mean, though, at least for me, that they aren’t the strongest examples of what cinema should be.

Mulholland Drive, on the other hand, contains everything cinema should be. It refuses a simple classification and purposefully entrenches itself in and refutes any kind of simple “norm” it sets its parameters within. The same can be said for most of Lynch’s work, which is likely why I have continued to respond to nearly all of it. (And this, for the record, is not to say Lynch is the auteur of these works. If anything, it is precisely the established codes of Hollywood that inform Lynch’s films in such a manner that makes them work. But we can save my complains and arguments against the auteur “theory” for another day...)

With an expansive visual sense placed in the classical Hollywood schemata and with story threads that imbed a collective sense of narrative moment and emotional connection, Mulholland Drive embeds itself within two different worlds of cinema. Its rhythms and movements often shift from classical editing into an elongated style for certain scenes that require something unexpected, a la Betty’s audition scene with the older man – one of my favorite scenes of all time. Watch how the scene gradually changes its tone – not just in the wonderful performances, but in the camera movements, the editing, the sound. It’s a perfectly simple scene right in the middle of the most “normal” part of the film, but it illustrates the significance of every aspect of the cinematic process. It’s something that Lynch, an experimental director who has made a mark for himself in Hollywood while simultaneously critiquing the hell out of it, understands and executes to perfection.


In his wonderful book on the LA avant-garde, The Most Typical Avant Garde, David James analyzes the importance of Hollywood film to avant-garde cinema. Its a difficult position to take for sure, and, while I have my reservations about it on whole, there is certainly a point to be made and contemplated in regards to this within an historical perspective and for modern artists as well. Lynch clearly comes to mind, and the mark is made especially clear in Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE. As confounding as some people find the films, typically on the grounds of them being impenetrable and nonsensical, which I think comes partially from their dialectic of two totally different cinematic mindsets, Mulholland Drive is invested in its story (personally, I’ve never had a problem “figuring out” its narrative although there are certainly elements left to grapple with) but it is also an immersive visual and sensual experience very much dedicated to the notions that Hollywood was founded on. Moreover, the use of Hollywood and the experience of actresses serves as a device that opens up the avenues of realization that come with such a complex work.

The film and its characters search for a form of success and understanding in the world they have become entrapped within – quite a similar experience as the one the audience goes through. Lynch never places the film in a superior position to the audience, dangling vague questions with no answers for the audience to become frustrated by. Although some viewers have apparently seen it in this manner, Mulholland Drive is one of the few films that matches the audience step for step and understands the experience it presents. This is underscored perfectly by the wonderful Club Silencio sequence, where the maestro explains his tricks, the experiences, and the ideas behind Silencio. When the audience is confused, so are the characters and the visual style will often match this unbalance. When there are moments of clarity for the audience, it becomes clear to the characters at the same time. Sometimes it may be a trick, but there is distinct cry of reality embedded within this experience that breaks through in the form of the opera. Llorando, indeed.

Lynch may be some sort of mad puppeteer who constantly plays with a number of ideas, but he ensures that everyone can follow if they are willing to give themselves to the experience. The complexity might be difficult to handle, but, from the first time I saw it, it was something I longed to analyze, if not understand, explore, if not discover, and comprehend, if never completely. Mulholland Drive was something I happily gave myself to and have continued to look for while never looking back.

Here's a low quality video of the audition scene, in case you forgot how amazing it was...

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Happy Birthday David Lynch!

Thanks to Chuck for making this image. I decided to add it on here, so now we have two takes on Mr. Lynch. Multi-faceted, as always.



While the rest of the world celebrates that other event going on today, we wish David Lynch a happy birthday! For some reason or another, he's been lost in the shuffle today. But we do not forget! Happy 63rd, David!

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Lynch- Lime Green Set

While our writers work on their posts for Lynch week, here's something to wet your appetite. Here you can find a conversation between David Lynch and Nathan Lee on the Lime Green Set done for NPR's "All Things Considered". None of us can afford said set at the moment, but it would certainly be a great thing for any major Lynch fan to have. Plus, this convo is kind of hilarious, as most with Lynch tend to be. Enjoy the conversation and expect to hear my Mulholland Drive experience on Tuesday!

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Short Films You Must See: Lumiere Film (David Lynch, 1995)

For all of the Lynch fans who contribute to this site, can you believe this is the first post we have ever had about the man? I was shocked to discover that as I looked through our tags and realized he had never come up. That will all change this week. Lynch turns 62 on Tuesday, so, throughout the week, I'll try and come up with some short post on him and his films. Better late than never, right? For now, enjoy his 1995 Lumiere short. It might be only a minute long, but that doesn't hold it back from some form of greatness.



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