surreal

The Story Inside of the Story

Chet Kozlowski — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 18:56:19 +0000

The Story Inside of the Story Chet Kozlowski June 5, 2023 - 14:56

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I first encountered David Lynch's work in 1977. It was at a midnight show of Eraserhead, his first film. No one had heard of him. The theater was pretty empty. I had gone there alone. I sat there in the dark, not sure what the hell I was watching. It seemed so crazy yet so familiar. At about 2:30 a.m., the movie ended to stunned silence. The credits rolled, and one guy, in the middle of the auditorium, actually stood up and implored the screen, "What kind of mind comes up with something like this??"

What kind of mind indeed?

That night was one of my most memorable times in the cinema—the film and the guy—and I say that not to impress you that I saw him that early, but to say how satisfying it's been to watch David Lynch's career trajectory since. Lynch has been called a lot of things; in the new film Lynch/Oz, a "populist surrealist." I'm a fan. He is, in my opinion, a poet of my generation: the generation that was raised on black and white TV, rabbit ears, three networks, and signoff at midnight to the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner. That experience shapes a person. It shaped David Lynch.

In Lynch/Oz, director Alexandre O. Philippe attempts to define that shape by way of The Wizard of Oz. That film is eighty years old, and was released in the same year, and made by the same director (Victor Fleming) as Gone with the Wind. It found popularity not in 1939 but later, on TV, on those snowy black and white screens. For many of us, it was our introduction to Dorothy, Toto, and crew. TV was the only way to see it, pre-VHS, and it was formative. Lynch's generation was raised on wonder, and realizing that Wizard wasn't originally snowy, or solely in black and white but was in fact in glorious sepia and Technicolor was a head spinner. It opened new layers to our shared aesthetic.

You might say "yeah, yeah," linking Lynch and Oz is a little facile and even redundant, given all the explicit allusions to it in films like Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive. Of course, we see it in Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, The Elephant Man, and even in the Disney-fied The Straight Story. One could make the case that Twin Peaks, the series and Fire Walk with Me, is a virtual remake of The Wizard of Oz, and it may not be completed yet. Lynch/Oz even challenges Joseph Campbell's seminal Hero's Journey, demonstrating how The Wizard of Oz represents nothing less than a sturdy template for the tales in the "grand scope of American storytelling," in all their triumphs and disappointments.

Mr. Philippe is intent on showing us the story inside of the story. Lynch/Oz rolls out slowly and lovingly and ends up a real feast for the cinephile. It's divided into six chapters—Wind, Membranes, Kindred, Multitudes, Judy, and Dig—and leaves it to reliable narrators such as Amy Nicholson, John Waters, Karyn Kusama, and David Lowrey to make intriguing connections and discuss recurring themes and techniques: parallel worlds, multiple identities, opacity transitioning, frame performances, even Judy Garland's life—all are viewed as instrumental in portraying the American character's "attitude toward adventure, which will be unplanned, a surprise."

So many connections, so much to ponder (including why in the hell Naomi Watts didn't win an Oscar for her performance in Mulholland Drive). Phillippe's artful split screen compares Lynchian scenes to those in non-Lynch movies like The Matrix, Back to the Future, The Big Lebowski, Apocalypse Now(!), even I Wake Up Screaming, inspiring epiphanies and Eureka moments. Especially affecting is the sweet montage of auteurs and their favorite flourishes: Hitchcock's birds, Malick's fields, Campion's curtains, Wong Kar-Wei's mirrors. Clips evidence how these motifs appear often enough, integrally enough, in each filmmaker's work, that it becomes style. All to help us understand the strange power Lynch exercises.

I could go on, but I don't want to spoil the joys of discovery. Here's a perfect double feature: Lynch/Oz on the same bill as Thom Andersen's 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself. Both will remind you of some of the reasons you love movies in the first place. Both contemplate the art and the artifice that holds films together.

Mr. Philippe directs movies about movie directors, like 78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene (2017), Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist (2019). Mr. Lynch himself did not participate in the making of Lynch/Oz. He hovers over it, though, in excerpts from interviews, speeches, and his YouTube weather reports. Lynch is as always affable yet driven. He is an enigma, given to grotesque visions yet a practitioner of transcendental meditation. Such singular appetites. To John Waters he's said, "I love making the movie. Then it's released and the heartbreak begins." His homespun brand of passion is delivered in that midwestern twang. He laments early compromises: "When you don't have final cut, total creative freedom, you stand to die the death. And die I did."

The point is not to figure out David Lynch, to solve him. Better to bask in the mystery, savor the complexity. One exasperated interviewer says to him onstage, after having advanced a particularly cogent theory: "I know you hate saying what things mean in your films. But am I right in thinking that that's at least (audience titters) in the right area?"

David Lynch smiles and waits a beat.

"No," he answers.

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Lynch/Oz. Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. Produced by Janus Films and Exhibit A Pictures. 108 minutes. 2022. In theaters.

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Jim Woodring - The Dusty Wright Show

Dusty Wright — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 23:27:32 +0000

Jim Woodring - The Dusty Wright Show Dusty Wright June 26, 2010 - 19:27

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Vidcast

Do The Worm

Dusty Wright — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 22:37:08 +0000

Do The Worm Dusty Wright March 6, 2006 - 17:37

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Film Review

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surreal

Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive DVD)

This is the scariest movie I've ever seen. Period. I had an anxiety attack in the parking lot walking to my car one bleak, winter's night a few years back trying to comprehend the connection of Henry -- the movie's protagonist -- to my sad, bleak life in Akron, Ohio. With my college graduation looming that spring, I envisioned my own future marriage and "mutant" baby (urban legend claims it was created from an embalmed cow fetus) as quite a possible reality. That really fucked with my mind. No other way to put it when you're uncertain of your reality, that can be the scariest reality of all. According to director David Lynch, the fantasy/horror movie was heavily influenced by his time at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in the '60s surrounded by the urban decay of Philadelphia, a place -- he claims in the Q&A documentary portion of the new DVD -- where it was "sunny one day out of the year."

Moreover, his wife was pregnant when he made the film, and some suggest that this was his attempt to deal with impending fatherhood. Uber director Stanley Kubrick believed that Eraserhead was one of the most perfect "cinematic experiences" created. He screened it before beginning production on his horror classic The Shining to get his cast and crew in the mood.

Eraserhead was shot intermittently over the span of five years. Sets were disassembled and reassembled over and over again. Finally it was completed in 1977, premiering in March of that year. It was also partly financed by actress Sissy Spacek. (She was married to Lynch's childhood friend Jack Fisk, who appears in the film as the "Man in the Planet.") And Lynch lived in the same room that functions as the main room in the movie.

Set in some black and white industrial post-apocalyptic wasteland devoid of trees, bushes, flowers, or grass, there is the ever-present din of humming, clanking, hissing, and other non-musical "factory" noises. The terrifying tale focuses on the very isolated and lonely Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a printer who through the course of the film is on vacation. After a very weird dinner with his ex-girlfriend Mary X's (Charlotte Stewart) family, he finds out that has given birth to a bizarre, alien-looking child. She moves in with him -- one-room flat with piles of dirt and branches stuck into them -- and just as quickly moves out, leaving the baby with him.

Henry then has a sexual encounter with his neighbor, the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts), who he discovers is a prostitute. Moreover, he also spies on or perhaps dreams about the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near). Radiator Lady has distended cheeks and sings "In Heaven" while squishing giant sperm cells with the heels of her shoes. There is so much psychosexual dream imagery that it could very well be Lynch's own psyche smushed all over the Radiator Lady's stage floor.

In fact, the movie was developed from his script Gardenback, a story about adultery for the AFI (American Film Institute) in LA. He lived and worked in the stables of their sprawling Beverly Hills compound for over four years while meticulously slaving over the project when he had money to buy film stock and pay his crew.

Perhaps there were copious amounts of reefer ingested, too. But who can be sure? Lynch has never discussed the premise nor shared in its obtuse meaning.

Is it Lynch's confession to his own sins? His discourse on sin and the nature of man? Or as Lynch's description reads, just "a dream of dark and troubling things"? After all, Mel Brooks once said that David was "Jimmy Stewart from Mars." Watch it and decide for yourself. You will not easily forget the experience.

Eraserhead is available through DavidLynch.com and Amazon.