Eels and Smoke

Over twenty years ago, I signed up for a Yahoo! account because there was no site for Houyhnhnms. To this day, I remain married to it due to various other things I signed up for with the e-mail and friends and family members who can't remember my g-mail address. That doesn't stop me from forgetting to check it for weeks or months at a stretch which has produced no shortage of ire and inconveniently missed notifications. Now there's a new wrinkle--Yahoo has been chucking genuine e-mails into the spam folder while dumping piles of spam into my regular inbox. A couple days ago, I discovered an e-mail from my friend Tim from a year ago and the new Sirenia Digest from last month.

So to-day I read the story contained therein, "UNTITLED 47". It's a nice vignette, deliberately blurring the distinctions between dream, art, and memory. I particularly liked a moment where the narrator views an eel-like creature in the depths of a remarkably clear body of water. That's a story by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

In her blog to-day, or from a couple days ago actually, Caitlin mentioned David Lynch's recent announcement that he has emphysema. That really fucking sucks. There goes the last, slim hope for another season of Twin Peaks, or a proper one, at any rate. Lynch says he won't retire though his condition keeps him from going very far from his home.

I've been watching the third season of Twin Peaks again this summer, the 18 episode "Return" that came out over the summer of 2017. I still remember how marvellous it was to get another piece of a David Lynch movie every week. Seeing episode 11 premiere at Comic Con remains one of my best Comic Con memories. It's become inextricably bound up with my idea of what a great summer should be. Watching Twin Peaks season three is a more reliable boost for my spiritual and mental mood than any chemical I've ever encountered.

Last night I watched episode seven in which Gordon Cole, the character played by Lynch, meets with Diane in her home. He mentions in this scene that he gave up smoking. If only that had mirrored real life. But I really don't want to take Lynch to task. He does describe smoking rather beautifully:

I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco -- the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them -- but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema.

Of course that's why he liked smoking. The man's art really is his life. It fits with his aesthetic. Think of the shot of Darya's head with the smoke coming from it. Of Pete after the mill fire, describing how he felt like his lips were glued to a tailpipe of a bus. Or the sooty woodsmen.

Oh, well. Maybe he'll film some cool vignettes from his home over the next few years.

X Sonnet #1869

Rebuttal time rebuffed the bouncy brain.
Tremendous force returned the god to space.
Intrinsic life imbues the daily grain.
But something more creates the human face.
Persona swaps attend the table change.
Impressive clouds contain the nightly heat.
Tortilla talk distorts the flour range.
Awareness rouged the Queen's albino beet.
Decaying orbit brings the ball in view.
Diverting questions keep the metal safe.
Convulsing human figures filled the pew.
Above the altar sits a wingéd wraith.
Suspicious sludge is seeping out the grill.
Computer blue was spiked with sour will.

The Answers to the Questions

This is my favourite so far, both song and video, from Chrystabell and David Lynch's new album, "Cellophane Memories". I love how subtle the video is. Lynch doesn't direct the viewer to any of the almost imperceptible changes that occur, your own eye is responsible for whether you're watching Chrystabell in the see-through dress or the little man with half a face caught in mid-motion.

Like the previous songs, there's a siren's call quality to it. Chrystabell seems not so much to be a definite woman but a dreamt of ideal or manifestation of fundamental, irrepressible desire. The man with the fractured face is almost indistinguishable from his environment. One indefinite being dreams of another. The sense of sorrow and urgency underlying it all imbues these clouds with anxiety parallel to the weird sedative quality. It's lovely.

It reminds me of "Ghost of Love", Lynch's song from the Inland Empire soundtrack, especially with that guitar and percussion.

Relentless Love

So that's the new thing David Lynch released this week, which he teased last week. I knew it wouldn't be Twin Peaks related. I kind of hoped it would be a movie announcement. But I'm not surprised it's not.

It's been a long time since he and Chrystabell released a collaboration. I believe this is the first time he's actually shot one of her music videos for a song he's written for her. This song kind of reminds me of "The Voice of Love" from the Fire Walk with Me soundtrack except a little creepier. That makes sense; eternal love would be both creepy and comforting.

"Sublime Eternal Love" is going to be on an album called Cellophane Memories to be released on August 2.

My favourite Chrysabell and David Lynch collaboration (not counting Twin Peaks: The Return) remains "All the Things":

Crossing the Streams

In case anyone was wondering, I did get my refund from Amazon. So for future reference, for anyone wishing to cancel their Prime subscription, the current procedure seems to be to chose the "won't renew" option on the subscriptions page and then, after Amazon renews your membership and charges you anyway, you need to ask for a refund, which you will receive in "three to five days". Funny they can charge you instantly but when it comes to giving you money they were never supposed to take to begin with, well, that takes some processing time. Naturally.

Of course, I still have Japanese Amazon Prime, which is a whole lot cheaper. I said five dollars a month a few days ago but I forgot how weak the yen is now so it's probably more like three dollars. I don't have access to the various channels I did on American Amazon Prime and of course there's a lot of content unavailable in Japan. I also can't rent movies because, although I can pay for the subscription with my American debit card, I'm required to have a Japanese card in order to rent or purchase any streaming content off Amazon Prime Japan. I have no idea why. I'm able to get Japanese Netflix with my American card. Currently I only have Disney+, Criterion, and Japanese Amazon Prime, though. I've been tempted to cancel Disney+ but Doctor Who's starting next week.

I miss Netflix sometimes. I read to-day that David Lynch had two projects in the works for Netflix that've been cancelled by the streamer. So much for Netflix being more open to maverick filmmakers. It's a shame Criterion doesn't have the money to finance Lynch. I wonder what he'll try next. Whatever he does, with so many Twin Peaks cast members dying, and Lynch himself getting no younger, it seems like time is running out. It's really sad. Here's a man, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers, if not the greatest filmmaker, alive, and yet he can't find a studio to produce his work. It's not like Twin Peaks: The Return did so poorly in 2017. But maybe people figure its success was due to coming back after a couple decades and any new endeavours wouldn't have that appeal. It seems like Lynch wasn't totally happy with his experience making the show for Showtime. I wonder if that would change if Sony does manage to buy Paramount, as they've put forward a bid to do. Given Sony's rigidity, I can't imagine things would change for the better.

Too bad he doesn't have wineries to sell, like Francis Ford Coppola did. Coppola's wineries became legends in themselves and he was able to sell them in order to attain every auteur filmmaker's dream; total creative control over a big budget movie. I'm so looking forward to Megalopolis. But even for Coppola, this is likely something he'll only be able to do once. This is why, as much as I love movies, I never wanted to pursue a career as a filmmaker. Even the greatest talents in the industry have to go through hell and high water just to get a movie made.

And Now the Weather

Happy Twin Peaks Day, everyone. Of course, I have been watching the series again. I wonder how many times I've watched it through since I first saw it in high school, just shy of thirty years ago. I dozed off watching the third episode (fourth, counting the pilot) a few nights ago, the one with Laura's funeral. I can slip in and out of consciousness and still enjoy the pleasant company of each familiar scene. Ben Horne standing between Albert and Doc Hayward. Shelly recounting Leland throwing himself on the coffin. Doctor Jacobi in a hat and velvet cloak at the cemetery after dark. It's not even a David Lynch episode, neither written by nor directed by him but I can still dig it at this point.

I wonder if there's any chance of another season. There was that rumour about a project at Netflix codenamed "Wisteria" years ago. Lynch made that short film for Netflix about interrogating a monkey. It seemed like he was testing the waters, seeing how amenable Netflix would be to his shooting style. Behind the scenes footage showed him frustrated with studio interference during the third season but I don't think Paramount's going to let him make Twin Peaks anywhere else. I've wondered if he thought he could make a spin-off about Carrie Page somewhere else, if he thought he could plausibly say it's not connected to the Twin Peaks IP even though it obviously would be. I wonder if he's working on anything now. He separated from his wife, Emily Stofle, late last year and I read she wants sole custody of their twelve year old daughter. That's gotta be time consuming.

He does have an installation coming up in Milan, something called "A Thinking Room". Sounds like it could be like visiting the Black Lodge. Man, I wish I was in Italy.

X Sonnet #1820

The blinking sabre cat absorbed the grass.
When timeless swords would rust the soldiers wait.
Without a glance, tempestuous ghosts'll pass.
So Fluffy sets a slimy, writhing bait.
The rolling drum would flatten trees and shrubs.
Titanic storms were smashing times in fields.
With all the gowns and pretty traffic hubs
Imagination often lightly yields.
Imagine mental strength divides a word.
With marriage thoughts, you jiggle likely brains.
Above, consult the cream and iv'ry bird.
You'll find the words were naught but choc'late stains.
And so the show concludes with "coming soon".
The flashing screen would please a lucky loon.

A Practical Head

Happy Halloween. Since I seem to be revisiting old favourites this Halloween season, I watched 1977's Eraserhead last night. I still love this movie, David Lynch's first film, but sometimes I wish I could find old Lynch movies as disturbing as people who hate Lynch do. It's like how I stopped having nightmares once I learned to enjoy them. But, boy, what a masterpiece of nightmares Eraserhead is.

When we watch a movie, a work of fiction, we're always at some level aware of the artificiality. That's why art needs help to push it into the emotional registers to give it the required visceral impact. That can be as simple as having a good musical score. It can also mean having a woman give birth to a slimy little dinosaur worm wrapped in gauze.

That's a good way to capture the anxieties of parenthood. More comforting narratives try to tell you that these normal events in life follow reassuring patterns. Lynch isn't making a movie about or for such conventions. Life is weird as fuck, there are always gross, brutal, and absurd surprises. That's what he gives us in Eraserhead, a true transmutation of experience into cinematic form.

I love the shots of Henry (Jack Nance) in bed with Mary (Charlotte Stewart). When he looks across the sheets at her, it seems like an alien landscape.

And there's that terrific sequence where she's struggling with her sheets like a straitjacket. It all captures the strangeness of having another human being in bed with you, with all the weirdness and discomfort that might entail.

You could say the movie's called Eraserhead because of the dream Henry has where his head is ground into erasers for little pencils. Or maybe it's because his identity as father of the Gauze Baby seems to erase his old self, as we see in shots where his head is replaced by that of the baby.

Or maybe it's because, finally, all things compel Henry to erase them.

Eraserhead is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Territories Along the Inward Voyage

Every three days or so, I get a mad desire to watch a David Lynch movie. Which is terrible because Lynch movies benefit from infrequent viewing, when he can surprise you with a well chosen sound effect, musical cue, or image. Fortunately, I've only watched Inland Empire about fifteen times or so and not at all since moving to Japan three years ago. So I watched it last week.

Released in 2006, it's looking increasingly likely to be Lynch's final feature film. Which would be appropriate considering the closing credits feature what seems almost to be footage of his retirement party, complete with dancing girls and a man sawing wood.

Some consider the third season of Twin Peaks, released in 2017, to be basically an 18 hour feature film. I do believe I ranked it among films myself on my yearly ranking and on my ranking of films from the 2010s. American TV has become increasingly serialised over the past decade, but even by those standards, the episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return feel inextricably linked in ways no other show does. Inland Empire is not dissimilar.

It's a three hour film about an actress, Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), who gets trapped in a haunted screenplay. Inland Empire is arguably Lynch's most postmodern work because, at its heart, it's a commentary on the audience/artist relationship. The concept of a haunted screenplay is a good vehicle for this because it provides a pretext for commenting on how stories connect people across time and space. Lynch uses the concept, too, to string together a number of previously standalone vignettes he filmed for his web site that all take on a broader meaning within the narrative.

But unlike most postmodernist dramatic works that are unsatisfying due to the emotional distance the writer clings to in an analytic mode, Lynch's unique mastery of visual and audio storytelling creates a visceral and personal experience. That shot of Laura Dern running on the hillside with that garish grin is always scary. The troupe of prostitute spirits, which becomes a kind of Greek chorus, almost an audience surrogate, is effectively mysterious and unnerving yet oddly comforting. Their mocking dance to "Locomotion" is a celebration, a satire, and a tormented cry all at once. Because human feelings are that complicated and self-contradictory.

I love the scene where Nikki, performing with her co-star played by Justin Theroux, has to break character and laugh, commenting how the lines are just like the screenplay for the movie. It's such a brilliant moment of Alice in Wonderland logic. something that literally makes no sense and yet also makes perfect sense on a deeper level. We know what she means even though what she says is meaningless.

The story is episodic and disjointed and yet undeniably all a smoothly connected whole. I often feel Lynch's movies are best taken in one gulp, an opinion I think he shares, considering he dislikes providing chapter menus on his DVD and blu-ray releases. People underestimate the importance of sequence not just on a narrative level but on a sensual level. A funny scene has a different impact if it comes right after a scary scene, a scene of romantic consummation is different if it comes after scenes of darkness and confusion. You really have to be open to taking the ride.

Inland Empire is available on The Criterion Channel.

Worthy at Heart

One title conspicuously absent from Criterion's David Lynch playlist is 1990's Wild at Heart. Although it's generally been ranked among the films definitive of Lynch's most celebrated stylistic preoccupations, discussion of it has been scarce in the past fifteen years. Perhaps Straight Story is more neglected but at least it's available on Disney+. Wild at Heart isn't stocked on any streaming service and there's been no talk of a director approved blu-ray release, whether by Criterion or otherwise. Nicholas Cage, one of the stars of the film, randomly brought the film up on Stephen Colbert recently to a crowd that didn't seem to know what he was talking about. I found a copy on Japanese Amazon for just over 900 yen, or less than eight dollars, so I bought it and watched it.

It's been at least fifteen years since I watched it, I think. I certainly hadn't watched it since first watching Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017. I might have drawn a comparison between how Lynch comments on American culture in both projects. They're both road movies with lots of hotels and motels. A trip to Texas seems like a trip to an underworld in both.

Wild at Heart's Texas is filled with demons led by Willem Dafoe in one of the roles that established him as an excellently revolting bad guy. The scene where he intrudes on Lula (Laura Dern) really crystalises the film's themes.

He seems like he's going to rape her but instead he ends up making her say, "Fuck me," and mean it. In a movie about liberation, where Sailor and Lula's sexual freedom is shown as a means of expressing their love honestly, the idea that Lula could actually respond physically with as much arousal to anyone else is devastating. The tension in the movie is between freedom and anarchy. Is freedom the potential for all people to realise their good will and pursue happiness, or is it chaos in which all needs can be boiled down to chemical compulsions?

A film that specifically comments on culture and media would seem inevitably to be a postmodernist commentary. But it is in the Texas segment that I think Lynch takes aim at the dehumanising tendencies of deconstructionism. Jack Nance, as one of the Texas demons, is the only character in the film aside from Lula and Sailor who references The Wizard of Oz. He tells her he has a dog and points out how she's compelled to picture a dog before he describes one, and suggests perhaps she imagines Toto from The Wizard of Oz. She seems intrigued before he laughs in apparent mockery of his own insight.

Bobby Peru, Dafoe's character, similarly possesses intelligence and insight when he perceives that Lula is pregnant. But he does so only with the intent to degrade and destroy. Much as deconstructionists, in their analyses, also exhibit insight, but generally only with the intent of undermining the substance of narratives, sometimes even, as Laura Mulvey stated in her essay on the gaze, with the express intent of extinguishing the pleasure of the viewer, "to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film."

Although it wouldn't be the first or last time Lynch referenced The Wizard of Oz in film, Wild at Heart is certainly the Lynch film that's most explicitly concerned with The Wizard of Oz. Lula and Sailor refer to their path as "the Yellow Brick Road". Lula has a vision of the Wicked Witch (in the form of her mother) and Sailor has a vision of the Good Witch (played by Laura Palmer herself, Sheryl Lee). The Wizard of Oz is the closest thing Lula and Sailor have to a religious text, a narrative anchor they use to keep their lives from spinning into chaos.

The dying girl played by Sherilyn Fenn functions a little like one of the demons. The brain damage she incurs after the accident reduces her to complaining randomly about her purse and her brush, her concerns disconnected from the reality at hand, an apparently damning demonstration of how the human mind is compelled to create narratives at variance with reality. Lula recalls a story about her cousin Dale, played in flashback by Crispin Glover, who had paranoid theories about aliens destroying Christmas. His compulsion to make hundreds of sandwiches in one night is not a practical method of satisfying his stated goal of making his lunch. But both of these fractured, counterproductive narratives arise from exterior or chemical forces doing damage to the brain. I wonder if Dale was also meant to be a reference to Mark Frost, Lynch's co-writer on Twin Peaks, who was interested in introducing a story about aliens to the series. Dale may have been a parody of Twin Peaks' protagonist Dale Cooper under that scenario.

A big part of Wild at Heart is devoted to Lula's mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd), who may serve as an example of someone without a narrative or with a very weak one. She's characterised by wildly inconsistent motives and indecision. First she wants to have sex with Sailor, then she wants to kill him. First she sends Harry Dean Stanton after Lula and Sailor, then the hitman, Santos. She regrets doing both. She ends up following Harry Dean Stanton but can't seem to decide if she wants to commit to a relationship with him.

Sailor and Lula are as wild at heart as Lula accuses the whole world of being. But their wildness is coupled with love, vulnerability, and compassion making them one of the more appealing, and romantic, couples in film history.

Twitter Sonnet #1699

Adornments swamp the swanky sobbing ball.
Aggrieved, the lizards pass the skull around.
Behold the drinking tree, a mile tall.
Revenge a penny begs a vengeful pound.
Of shattered webs, the stars have softly told.
Traversing roads of words, the riders go.
Derived from books of death, the angels hold.
Defense against the ice demands the snow.
Purveying phony jackets doomed a man.
Disaster beans were counted dead and dark.
Embedded fire roasts the coffee can.
Excited birds erased the actor's mark.
Abusing baubles close blockades ahead.
Enchanted claws enclose the frightened dead.

All the World's a Song

Criterion has a David Lynch playlist currently streaming so last night I watched Mulholland Drive again. Not for the first time, I found myself comparing and contrasting the Club Silencio scene with Jean-Luc Godard. I suspect a lot of people who watch Mulholland Drive take the Club Silencio scene as a commentary on movies and art in general. I'd say it's more of a commentary on a commentary, specifically the kind of postmodernist deconstruction Godard made.

In Mulholland Drive, the two protagonists visit an avante-garde stage performance in which a sinister man maliciously reminds the audience that all of the music they hear is not truly live, that it's just a recording.

This reminds me of the musical number in Godard's Une femme est une femme in which Godard repeatedly removes the music from the soundtrack.

Godard's point, as it was in similar moments in Vivre sa vie and Pierrot le fou, is to show audiences how they're being manipulated by the music. The key difference is that Lynch argues there's something sinister about it, that it clearly disturbs Betty, who experiences a seizure. As I was saying in my recent Vertigo analysis, fantasy seems a necessity for maintaining sanity. One could argue Betty/Diane shares some blame in making her fantasy so precarious as to lead to her own destruction. But the ambiguity of just how much control she has over herself is fundamental to the tragedy.

I Just Have a Few Notes

I got home late from Osaka last night and didn't feel like watching a movie. In the morning I watched the second episode of Robert Blake's YouTube series. Recorded within the last couple years, the episodes are just him at home going through boxes of old photos. So far he's talked almost exclusively about his roles as a child. Apparently he didn't think too much of Lost Highway at that point in his life, something seemingly confirmed by David Lynch in this interview:

Although, this interview from the time of the film's release shows him being more positive about it--and also somewhat derisive of his body of work previous to it:

I guess people change. Which is a pretty good summary of Lost Highway, actually.

I didn't realise Lost Highway, in 1997, was Blake's last movie. I wonder why. His arrest didn't happen until 2002.

Speaking of performers with strong personalities, lately I've been reading about how Jenna Ortega rewrote a lot of her own dialogue on Wednesday.

“There was times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense, where I just started changing lines … I would have to sit down with the writers, and they would be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ And I would have to go through and explain why I couldn’t do certain things."

Ortega went on to give specific examples, quoting stereotypical “teenage” dialogue that clashed with Wednesday’s dark, brooding persona.

“Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” Ortega said. “Her being in a love triangle made no sense. There was a line about like, this dress that she has to wear for a school dance and she said, ‘Oh, my God, I love it. Ugh, I can’t believe I said that. I literally hate myself.’ And I had to go, ‘No, there’s no way.’”

Ortega even mentioned choreographing her own dance, the most iconic scene from the show, after discovering that Wednesday was originally meant to inspire a flash-mob, stating: “why would [Wednesday] be okay with that?”

Ortega implied that she had completely reshaped her character to give Wednesday more of an arc, saying, “I grew very, very protective of her, but you can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc because then it’s boring and nobody likes you.”

I don't agree that arcs are essential to creating good characters or stories but, for the most part, it sounds like she was definitely a better writer than the show's credited scribes. The fact that Tim Burton has just cast her in Beetlejuice 2 suggests it wasn't Burton she was clashing with, either, and that Burton had a relatively small creative role for a director on Wednesday. If they do another season, I hope they get better writers. Maybe they should just have Jenna Ortega do the writing.

Speaking of publicised rewrites, I've been amused by this ongoing story about Dave Filoni's supposed involvement in the filming of the Vader hallway scene at the end of Rogue One. Freddie Prinze Jr., star of Filoni's Rebels, recently claimed the Rogue One scene was 100% conceived and executed by Filoni even though Filoni himself claimed in an earlier interview that he'd never filmed any live action before his work on The Mandalorian. Then, finally, Gary Whitta, one of the original writers on Rogue One, said the scene was filmed by the film's original director, Gareth Edwards. It wasn't even part of the reshoots by the second unit director.

Which sounds a lot more plausible to me. I remember when Filoni imitated the sequence in the final episode of Rebels where it made absolutely no sense.

I bet at some point Filoni, or one of Filoni's people, told Freddie Prinze that story about Filoni making the scene for Rogue One, just like Filoni has successfully convinced people he created Ahsoka Tano. The guy's career is taking credit for things at this point. Meanwhile, what has he done since George Lucas sold Star Wars that wasn't running off fumes from Lucas and Jon Favreau? I suspect the upcoming Ahsoka Tano series will be the make or break point. When that show ends up sucking, everyone's going to stop buying into his PR except his most virulent stans. And that'll be yet another headache Disney can't afford.

I'm reminded again how Bob Dolman complained about Disney execs tampering in the writers room on the Willow series. And the stories going around about how the ending to the latest Ant-Man movie was changed to its current lame incarnation. And I'm reminded of the Disney Dark Ages of the 1970s and early 1980s, when a lack of a strong creative vision and too many unimaginative cooks in the kitchen nearly sunk the studio. And here we go again.

Robert Blake

Robert Blake passed away a few days ago. The 89 year old actor was one of the Little Rascals, he gave an extraordinary performance as a killer in In Cold Blood (clip above), he starred in a popular cop show called Baretta, and he was the Mystery Man in David Lynch's Lost Highway, the role I best remember him for.

When you search for "Lost Highway clip" on YouTube, most of the most popular results are of Blake's character. Lynch made a brilliant choice in casting Blake well against type. His eerie black eyes and tenacious grin create the demoniac man more than the makeup and costume.

Quentin Tarantino dedicated his novelisation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to Blake. Which has led people to draw comparisons between Blake and the character of Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in the film. Both men may have murdered their wives, neither was found guilty of the crime, leaving only a court of public opinion to weigh in. It's a circumstance more familiar in a David Lynch movie or series, particularly Twin Peaks, which is populated by characters who seem to be different people depending on the circumstance and perspective.

Who was Robert Blake? All I can say for sure is he was a great actor and a fascinating man.

Behind the Sylvia North Story

If you're a David Lynch fan, it's been a good time to have The Criterion Channel. In addition to having his first film, Eraserhead, the channel also has Fire Walk with Me, numerous interviews with and about Lynch, and the two movies most people regard as his greatest, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive leaves the service at the end of this month so I took the opportunity of watching it again. I realised it'd been quite some time--I don't think I've watched it since before Twin Peaks season three aired in 2017. I found it a different experience, watching it through the lens of a post-Twin Peaks 2017 viewing.

The ends of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive are a bit similar. They move the characters out of one reality and into another in which familiar characters have different names and identities. Even Cooper leading Laura by the hand is similar to Camilla leading Diane by the hand. The most popular interpretation of Mulholland Drive is that the first half is a dream Diane has before her death. What if it's another reality? The film could then be a statement on just how potently aware someone is of the alternate possibilities in their lives because those alternate paths actually play out somewhere.

An explanation isn't so important, though, as much fun as it is to speculate. Lynch isn't presenting a puzzle to be solved but a puzzle that compels you to contemplate it. The juxtaposition of experiences is the important thing, an explanation would only be a distraction. The differences and similarities between Betty and Diane, Camilla and Rita, are interesting regardless of whether or not they're in any sense explicable.

Clearly Diane is in some way aware of Betty. Or of the aspects of herself that resemble Betty. I assume Diane must have met the elderly couple at some point. But, then, maybe she only glimpsed the encounter between them and Betty through the interdimensional mists.

I find myself thinking of the lines from the Eddie Vedder song, "Running out of Sand", he performed on Twin Peaks--"Who I was I will never be again . . . There's another us around somewhere with much better lives." It's amazing to think that the song wasn't written for the season and that it was Laura Dern who recommended Vedder's inclusion in the series.

What a cruel thing Hollywood is. Or maybe it's better to say, what a cruel thing a dream is. Of all the masterful scenes in the movie, the one that haunts me the most is that dinner party near the end, where Diane watches Adam and Camilla together. She sees Camilla kiss another woman and Camilla is clearly in some kind of relationship with Adam. It isn't just that Camilla has broken up with her, Diane is realising how different Camilla is from her impression of her. She's not Rita, maybe she never was. Or did Diane see something in Camilla that Camilla has buried? It's the kind of question we can't answer for sure about our relationships with people in real life so Lynch appropriately avoids answering it, too. But he does present possibilities.

Is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? I find that a difficult question to consider because I can't imagine never having loved anyone. Unless, of course, I've unknowingly never experienced the depths of true love. Either way, it's an unanswerable question. All we can consider is possibilities. I suppose you could say Diane's downfall is her need for the impossible--for a stable reality and identity. The end of the film clearly implies her horror at the contrast between who she's become and who Betty was. She can't accept that any more than she can accept the differences between who she thought Camilla was and who Camilla seems to be now. Diane's motivation to protect her worldview with violence would be seen as admirable in another context. How often has corruption come from a desire to protect purity?

It would be cheap to condemn her for it. It would be heartless of us. We've shared in her vision and, if we're watching with feeling, we've, to some extent, loved the things she's loved. What's the alternative to not having something you love so much that you'll lose your mind when you lose it? To have nothing? Or does one inevitably have nothing? I'd say the point of the Club Silencio scene is to say that, however hard someone tries to prove something isn't real, it's still real if you feel it. It's the opposite of what Jean-Luc Godard did by randomly shutting off the score in Vivre sa vie and Une femme est une femme. Or further down the same train of thought. Godard seems to be saying the music is making you feel something unwarranted, Lynch seems to be saying your feeling is warranted because of the music.

An Eternal Instant, a Quiet Cacophony

That picture in Gordon's office makes perfect sense and yet is also totally absurd. And that's the essence of David Lynch at his best, as he was with Twin Peaks season three. I'm now on my fourth viewing since it premiered in 2017 and am further confirmed in my impression of it as a masterpiece. At this point, I do think it's better than the original series, though I wonder if I'm biased by factors like how many times I watched the old series. A lot of the power of Lynch is in how he surprises the viewer with sounds and images and the more you rewatch his works, the less potency there is in that power. Yet the mysteries on Twin Peaks yield their own rewards for repeat viewings.

It's a sensory experience above all, though. And facts and clues have value insofar as they contribute to that sensory experience. I still come to the end of every episode with that delicious, transformed feeling I normally only get from watching an extraordinary, particularly good movie.

What Lynch crafts is something about the energy between people and the strangeness and improbability of human life. To take an example, the scene where the Buckhorn police are examining the body in Ruth Davenport's apartment. Detective Macklay (Brent Briscoe) walks into the bedroom, holding his hands in the air, which are covered with blue latex gloves. Talbot (Jane Adams) looks up and says, "Good, Dave. You're behaving yourself." It makes sense when you think about it--she's in charge of forensics and maybe in the past Macklay wasn't very careful about putting on gloves to avoid contaminating a crime scene. But without this context, we're forced to contemplate the strangeness of the moment of a man holding his blue hands in the air and a woman expressing approval with slow, careful words.

Even the little moments force you to pay attention, to figure out what's happening not from the standpoint of what you expect from a TV show but what you expect from life.

In this way, the show is a perfect antidote for narrow thinking. It requires a receptive viewer, of course. But if you're willing to sit quietly with it in a dark room, it can help you breathe like few other things in media can these days.

To Kill a Giant

Captain Ahab has finally appeared on deck and the Pequod is far from shore. I love Melville's choice there--at Nantucket, Ahab is spoken of but never seen, instead we have the two disciplinarian but basically decent Quaker captains. Ahab doesn't emerge until the crew are in immersed in life at sea. He's like the spirit of cabin fever.

I hadn't intended to read Moby Dick again, it just sort of happened. Mostly I blame the voice Melville created for Ishmael. Despite the fact that the character becomes less and less directly involved with the action--I'm not sure there's ever a sign Ahab even notices him--his voice is such a crucial part of establishing the little world at sea of whaling men. Something of the habituation to horror and death is as much in Ishmael's cyclical repetition of sounds as it is in the man he's describing, in this case Stubbs.

He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.

Few books more plainly show the folly in the modern preoccupation with character arcs. I don't think a single character has an arc in this book. Everyone is sort of grimly or sadly immutable 'til death.

Lately, in addition to the Japanese pop students recommend to me, I've been watching Chrysta Bell videos a lot. It keeps occurring to me the simple English David Lynch uses would make the songs good for ESL students but I suspect the songs and videos would be too weird for most of the kids.

Twitter Sonnet #1451

Replacement rocks replenished magma lights.
Revealing planks the walls were warmly wood.
A fire fixed the hearth to useful rights.
A second note is never understood.
The greenish cloud has stolen cues from gods.
To understand the chicken ask the crow.
We played with dice to fool the double odds.
Arrange the shoes beside the booted row.
The risen arm detects a cam'ra near.
The quiet hall was yet composed of noise.
Behind the drapes the hollow faces peer.
A lucid stack became the hazy toys.
The iv'ry thuds along the splintered deck.
The shape of health belongs to future wreck.

A Highway Unnavigable

It turns out Lost Highway is available on Netflix in Poland. I found this out a few days ago when I watched a left-wing YouTuber called Maggie Mae Fish's comparative analysis of Lost Highway with The Shining. As the title of the video, "MYTH OF THE AUTEUR", suggests, Fish uses the two films to attempt to demonstrate the illegitimacy or immorality of auteur theory. Like many people who criticise auteur theory, she either doesn't understand it or pretends not to understand it. Certainly her analysis relies on very selective pieces of evidence. This is a problem I find common to reviewers with political bias, left or right. Ironically, it's not unlike Fred Madison's own selective memory, his preference to remember things his own way to create a palatable narrative.

Oddly, Mae argues that Lost Highway is a superior film to The Shining because Lynch is less true to auteur theory than Kubrick. I suspect this would be quite a surprise to Lynch considering how vocal he's been about the necessity of film directors having final cut. Some of Mae's evidence is directly contradictory, as when she criticises Kubrick for not directing his actors and praises Lynch for allowing actors to make creative contributions. Surely, Kubrick is doing just that by not directing his actors? Also, Lynch is known for not directing his actors, too. Harry Goaz talks about having to do the same take dozens of times in a behind the scenes feature on Twin Peaks season three while Lynch wouldn't directly tell him what it was he was looking for.

Underlying Mae's argument is the implication that to be an auteur you must be responsible for every creative decision in a film. Which is silly because no proponent of auteur theory argues that auteurs never use separate screenwriters. Alfred Hitchcock, one of the very principle directors cited in the days when the concept of the auteur was formulating, was known for not directing some of his actors and for being generally hands off in productions later in his career. He didn't compose the scores and he didn't design the costumes. He had some input on these things but not always. Yet his films do represent his consistent creative signature because he was ultimately in charge of choosing his collaborators.

Mae argues that both Lost Highway and The Shining are about a misogynist and that Lost Highway is the better film because the misogynist is less sympathetic. I would dispute three points there--I don't think Jack Torrance is more sympathetic than Fred Madison, I don't think the presence of a sympathetic misogynist degrades a film, and I don't think there's any evidence that Fred Madison's a misogynist.

We don't even know for sure--he doesn't even know for sure--that he killed Renee. A guy doesn't need to be a misogynist to be a murderer and we never see Fred or Pete make any statements, direct or oblique, applying any general opinion of women. The best I think you could argue is that Pete cheats on Sheila with Alice after Fred was angry at Renee for cheating on him. That's hypocrisy that may imply a double standard. Or maybe it just means Fred/Pete tends not to think things through. We do have evidence of that.

In any case, Mae's obvious love for David Lynch is endearing, anyway. I'm grateful for her VPN ad that tipped me off about the film being on Netflix Poland.

Like most of Lynch's films, I think Lost Highway benefits from not having a single valid interpretation. I watched it on Friday and enjoyed soaking up its atmosphere in a quiet, dark room. I'll give you my interpretation, in case you're wondering.

I think Robert Blake's Mystery Man is an agent from the Black Lodge. Fred Madison is sort of like Cooper's doppelganger--a denizen of the Black Lodge who left and didn't return at his appointed time. The Mystery Man is a demon who feeds on jealousy and violence and he was attracted to Fred because of this. He was surprised to find that Fred was also a denizen of the Black Lodge, a shapeshifter who long ago forgot his original name and shape. I came to this conclusion after the scene where the Mystery Man points a camera at Fred and asks, "What the fuck is your name?!" It suggests the Mystery Man doesn't know and he really wants to find out--he also seems slightly surprised and infuriated that it's an issue. But the two of them are birds of a feather, after all, because they collaborate in killing Mr. Eddie. I think the Mystery Man had an assignment to kill Mr. Eddie in retaliation for the killing of the porn star played by Marilyn Manson. I think Manson's character may either have been from the Black Lodge or someone important to the people of the Lodge. I don't think Fred consciously understands any of this.

Anyway, that's my current interpretation. Mostly I think it's a film that works brilliantly on an emotional level and that its lack of clear logic is evocative of the irrationality of the human mind. You can string together the beads in so many meaningful ways because the underlying currents of emotion are meaningful in ways beyond words.

World's Biggest Rabbit

Last night I dreamt I was trying to google "The largest rabbit ever recorded." Trying to find the right words to get what I wanted, my first attempt for some reason yielded a video from an old Unsolved Mysteries style news magazine show. It was a segment about a woman discussing a paranormal experience she'd had. As usual, they had footage of the real woman being interviewed and a "dramatic reconstruction", an actress portraying the events described. The real woman was saying something about how she'd walked into a particular corner of a room and had this strange sensation of connecting with multiple potential versions of herself. Whoever made the dramatic reconstruction didn't, I felt, interpret her accurately and showed the actress in a queue of copies of herself with different facial expressions.

At that moment, I very distinctly heard a voice behind me say, "I see everything you do." And I woke up.

Here's what came up when I googled "The largest rabbit ever recorded" to-day:

And I think this also calls for a viewing of David Lynch's "RABBITS".

The Past TV Dictates the Future TV

And I'm still watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I gather the younger generations aren't really impressed by the series. Who'd have thought Friends would retain more pop cultural currency? I guess a lot of people, it was always more mainstream. The special effects on Buffy certainly haven't aged well.

There's also the lack of a proper HD release and Joss Whedon's name mysteriously being mud in Hollywood because he cheated on his wife. How can that sink someone's career in this day and age? Then there's the mysterious behind the scenes drama with his Justice League reshoots. I feel like no-one's taking Ray Fisher's allegations seriously anymore, he seems pretty clearly to be trying to make PR hay. The vague rumour about Whedon locking Gal Gadot in a room seems to be holding more water. When Warners said they were taking "remedial action" following the investigation prompted by Fisher's allegations, I assumed it was kicking Whedon off the new series about Victorian crime fighting women he created for HBO Max. Now I'm starting to wonder if he left that show for different reasons because iO9 just published a new positive review of Firefly, Whedon's popular, prematurely cancelled series from a couple decades ago. Since iO9 seems to be completely a corporate shill at this point, I assume very few articles get written by them unless a studio asked or paid for it. Which makes me wonder if a Firefly relaunch is on the horizon. We are in the age of relaunches and reboots, and, Whedon's phony controversies aside, there are few properties more deserving.

Another of those few is obviously Twin Peaks. Are any of you still watching David Lynch's weather reports? In the past couple he's referred to douglas firs and cherry pie.

That stuff about the ice cream and the cherry pie having been refrigerated makes me wonder if his new Wisteria series is a spin-off of Twin Peaks. Obviously that would be much more exciting than a Firefly continuation but I'd be very happy to see both. In any case, the massive influence Twin Peaks and Buffy continue to have on new television and film ensures they'll have at least one kind of immortality.

Monkey Hands and Chicken Breasts

Interrogating a monkey is something even the most hardened detective rarely anticipates. But it is the task before David Lynch in 2017's What Did Jack Do?, a short film written by, starring, and directed by David Lynch. Released just a couple days ago on Netflix, it's a strange little gem that moves almost imperceptibly between broad comedy and weird mystery.

Capuchin monkeys sure are expressive and Lynch has used them before, most notably in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. This is the first time he's given one a starring role, though, and his own voice and presumably his mouth allows the animal to reluctantly divulge information about his violent affair with a chicken.

It's funny, of course, but it becomes strangely entrancing, too, as Lynch finds interesting ways of matching dialogue to the tiny quirks of the monkey's brow. Incredibly, this film returns to one of Lynch's most persistent preoccupations: the torment of an individual who's done violence to his or her loved one. Explored in more serious terms in Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive, Lynch takes this most grim topic and reduces it to the ridiculous. Yet it somehow retains some of the intrinsic sorrow of the circumstance.

Only one other human is featured in the film, Lynch's wife, Emily Stofle, playing a waitress. But Lynch and the monkey are an engaging enough duo on screen.

Getting One Thing Straight

Movies and television in the U.S. so often shoot things the same way that audiences are trained to expect certain things and can become peculiarly frustrated when their expectations aren't met, even if, some might say especially if, it's a superior product. Watching David Lynch's 1999 film, The Straight Story, again a couple nights ago I marvelled at the shots he created of Iowa and Wisconsin with cinematographer Freddie Francis.

It's the same kind of visual revelation as Fargo. One kind of forgets how consistently studios shoot southern California for Montana or Indiana or Minnesota that these images have an almost alien quality.

I guess in that sense it's appropriate the previous time Freddie Francis worked with David Lynch it was on Dune and, before that, on The Elephant Man. The Straight Story wasn't only his last film with Lynch but the last film of Francis' career. A magnificent note to go out on.

The true story of a man, Alvin (Richard Farnsworth), travelling across country on a tractor just to see his estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton) is played with a perfectly understated note by Lynch and the actors. Long quiet moments of Alvin driving while Angelo Badalamenti's gentle score plays create this beautiful story through sensory experience.

Twitter Sonnet #1278

Computer beads effect a careful count.
Divided tables add to sev'ral games.
As pieces move the problems slowly mount.
To carve the bones is like to give them names.
A tractor took the hundred miles once.
Of broken belts the war would never tell.
For salt the tiger's tongue forever hunts.
Saliva falls but not for ev'ry bell.
Commended books discard the earthly pulp.
A distant gated drive was shortened quick.
Translated words retract in shrinking gulp.
A careful plan became a lousy trick.
The amber dream remained through inky night.
The slowest wheels approach a morning light.

Comic Con Report: volume 1

I took the trolley to Comic Con every day this year. The station at the Convention Centre had special Stranger Things themed signage.

One common thread I heard on panels this year was the issue of how much control writers or producers ought to exert over a television series. I sat through a screening of the pilot for an upcoming series called Manifest on Saturday after which the stars, Melissa Roxburgh and Josh Dallas, along with creator Jeff Rake, appeared on the panel to answer questions. Rake explained how, when he pitched the series, he had to give a complete synopsis of exactly where the show would eventually go at the end of its run. This was to avoid, he said, something like what happened with Lost. I've never seen Lost but I will say one of the reasons I didn't like the Manifest pilot I saw on Saturday is that it seemed too attached to a plan. Its premise about a passenger plane flight that jumps five years into the future has a lot of potential for developing characters but every reaction the protagonists had to the situation seemed flat and artificial. When their friends and relatives met them after they'd disappeared five years earlier none of the reactions felt authentic. It all felt sort of like a filmed synopsis.

Two days earlier, on Thursday, I saw the panels for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul where the creator of the former and co-creator of the latter, Vince Gilligan, spoke several times about how important it was to remain creatively flexible and ready to change plans when inspiration strikes. He cited several examples but the biggest he referred to was the fact that the character Jesse (Aaron Paul) was originally meant to die in season one of Breaking Bad. Gilligan changed course on that as a reaction to Aaron Paul's performance as the character.

Betsy Brandt, who played Marie Schrader on the show, talked about how creatively involved she was with her character, even down to coming up with her character's job and, to some extent, wardrobe. On the other hand, Bob Odenkirk, who plays Saul/Jimmy McGill on both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, was adamant that he was only there to perform what was written for him and he had no desire to contribute to the writing or concept, expressing a complete faith in and admiration for the creators.

The Better Call Saul panel had footage from the upcoming season which starts on August 6th and the Breaking Bad panel was an anniversary panel--apparently that show's already ten years old somehow. Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul along with most of the main cast were there. Both panels were hosted by Bill Burr, one of the best moderators I saw this year, largely because he didn't seem like he was trying so hard to prove himself. He also had a small role on Breaking Bad which he lobbied aggressively for. The full panels can be seen here and here.

On Saturday I stayed up for the 8pm Twin Peaks panel which featured several actors from the new series. Much of the conversation revolved around how the show allows the viewer to develop his or her own interpretation. Very little from the panel has been put online so far so I uploaded my own footage. I apologise for the low quality video, I have a good camera but a small memory card.

Twin Peaks: The Return clearly benefited from careful planning before Lynch started shooting but Lynch has talked about his need for "room to dream". It occurred to me one could interpret the season as a contrast between the benefits of allowing oneself to be an instrument of the universe, like Dougie, or someone who tries to assert his own will or plot on the universe, like Agent Cooper or Mr. C.

I think Lynch's work could be described as an artist's art; he deals so often with ideas about dreams and creativity. So maybe it's not surprising that I met two artists in their booths this year who were showing Twin Peaks fan art--Josh Howard and Chaman Vision. Howard has a series of comic book style fan art tributes to the new season of Twin Peaks while Chaman Vision has put together some posters imagining a film starring David Bowie as Phillip Jeffries.

To-morrow I'll post more from this year's Con. I'm still exhausted.