(Twin Peaks, Season 2 and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) In August, Lynch and Sweeney broke away from their bundle of joy for twenty-four hours and flew up to Washington’s Snoqualmie Valley for the American premiere of the film, which had already been playing to big crowds in Japan. A local Washington group, headed by Snoqualmie’s Vicki Curnutt, thought it would be great to have a summer festival honoring Twin Peaks and its fans. Combining efforts with New Line Cinema, the film’s distributor, the group presented “Twin Peaks Fest 92” on the weekend of August 14–16. New Line flew in actors Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Moira Kelly, Catherine Coulson, Al Strobel, and Jonathan Lepell for the event. The esteemed visitors amiably mingled with the ten thousand fans who gathered from around the world to talk about the show, buy Peaks-related souvenirs, and sample a number of activities such as a celebrity look-alike contest, tours of filming locations, a cherry pie-eating contest, a climb up Mt. Si (one of Twin Peaks’ peaks), the Log Lady Relay Race, and a raffle of the old gray sedan in which Agent Cooper first drove into Twin Peaks. There were also several soldout events which allowed smaller gatherings of fans to have “Dinner With the Stars” and “Breakfast With the Stars,” all leading up to the big film showing in the funky old North Bend Theatre just across from the Mar T Café. This would be an unusually racy, R-rated evening for the movie house, which normally showed Disney and other family-oriented fare. The whole weekend had a mildly subversive air about it, as the churchgoing, flag-waving towns of North Bend and Snoqualmie were swarmed by people obsessed with a fiction that centered on sex, drugs, incest, and child-murder. Lynch had been scheduled to appear at earlier festival events, but he kept his participation under tight control, flying in late on Sunday afternoon, talking to no media representatives, and, with Mary and the actors, only showing up a few minutes before the film screening at 8:00 p.m. The premiere was long-ago soldout, but throngs of people crowded the sidewalk outside the theater hoping for a spare seat and at least a glimpse of the celebrities as they pulled up in long black limousines, with the mountains of Twin Peaks filling the twilight background. Lynch stepped out of the car, waved to the cheering crowd, and stepped into the sweltering, non-air-conditioned theater, his hand outstretching to whoever would first take it, that person being a local boy who tore tickets on the weekends. The director said “Glad to meet you” to his impromptu greeter and, with Mary, took a seat in the far right back section of the auditorium, on the aisle. The director, Sweeney, Sheryl Lee, Moira Kelly, Catherine Coulson, Al Strobel, and Jonathon Lepell were each dressed in formal black (no tie for Lynch), but Ray Wise, perhaps to counteract all the darkness he portrays in the film, wore a white suit and tieless shirt. In contrast to Lynch, the actors sat halfway down toward the screen, surrounded by adoring fans, who included Pat Cokewell, owner of the Mar T Café and maker of those heavenly pies. The seats filled quickly, and as everyone exclaimed about how bloody hot the room was, Lynch said a few words before the film. A tall dark figure against the white screen, he stood onstage and, with a wide smile, acknowledging the standing ovation. He spoke with confidence to the large group, and his natural humor bobbed to the surface. “Thank you guys very much. This really reminds me of a theater in Los Angeles called the NuArt, where I once stood in front of a packed theater and talked a little bit about Eraserhead. You’ve got a great theater here. [Audience laughter, assuming he’s being sarcastic.] No, I’m not kidding you—this is, ah—it smells—and it—it’s definitely the real thing.” [Much crowd laughter.] Then he treated the group to a classic Lynchian non sequitur, beginning a convoluted story that went on and on and led up to the reason he and Mark Frost originally decided to shoot Twin Peaks in the Snoqualmie Valley: “‘I’m still not sure where we’re going to shoot it, Mark.’ So I said, ‘Call me,’ and he said ‘Okay’—now before the film, I want to introduce some members of the cast.” [Audience laughter over another abrupt Lynchian swerve away from revealing information.] Lynch introduced his actors and had them join him on stage, as the crowd whooped and applauded, and he acknowledged, “in the back, my girlfriend, Mary Sweeney, the editor of the film.” He closed by thanking all the Washington communities that had helped make the film possible and said, “the cast, Mary, and I are all very happy to be here and we truly hope that you love Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” The Lynchian paradox was palpable: This well-mannered, funny, and endearing master of ceremonies was proudly ready to plunge us into his carefully wrought creation, which many critics would characterize as a depressing miasma of moral degradation. However, thanks to the complexity of human nature, the audience jammed into the North Bend Theatre was ready and eager to take the dive with Laura. The buzz of voices faded as the auditorium grew dim—but then a woman’s voice called, “Lights! Turn on the lights!” As though in a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover depicting a small-town community project goof-up, Twin Peaks Fest organizer Vicki Curnutt took the stage to do two things she’d forgotten. After directing a round of applause at the festival’s many volunteers, she called Lynch back to the stage. Since he hadn’t been around to attend that afternoon’s Celebrity Awards Ceremony, she handed him his trophy: a varnished wooden plaque with a rope hangman’s noose attached to it. He chuckled along with the crowd’s laughter and applause, and added, “Things were a little slow at Cannes this year, so this really hits the spot.” At last, it was night in the room, and Lynch’s darkness would flow. The director could not have handpicked a more receptive audience for his work. They were thrilled to be the first in the country to see the film, and, especially to have key cast members and Lynch himself in the auditorium with them breathing the same hothouse air. As the film opened, the crowd cheered and clapped for every actor’s name and technical credit name, and when each actor first came on the screen, no matter how far into the movie it was, they exploded again. Lynch was sharing less of this experience with the crowd than they thought, however. Like parents who have tucked their audience in bed so it can have a dream of Laura Palmer, Lynch and Sweeney tiptoed out the back after the first few minutes unreeled, so they could hasten back south to their dear little Riley. The first thing we see is one of Lynch’s visual abstractions signifying mood and emotion, like a black smudge of malaise that haunts an oppressed character in one of the artist’s drawings. Here the screen is filled with a vibrating blue storm of electrical particles that roil within the frame of a TV set like the churning black insects beneath the idyllic lawnscape of Blue Velvet. In the earlier film Lynch used insects to represent the evil hiding within our environment and our own psyches, and in Fire walk With Me, electrical energy, the wires that transport it, and the Palmer’s humming ceiling fan, allow malevolent forces to invade our world and wreak havoc. A moment after watching the angry swarm of blue energy we hear a woman scream “Nooo” for the last time in her life, and then the ugly thud of a death blow. Filtering his feelings about electricity through the childlike-wonder part of his sensibility, Lynch restores a sense of primal magic and menace to the invisible force that hums within galaxies and the neurons in our heads, flows into our homes to heat us and cook our food, and which can kill us if we’re not careful. Michael J. Anderson remembers a moment during the filming that illustrates Lynch’s mystical feeling about electrical vibrations. They were shooting a scene in the Red Room where The Man From Another Place holds a ring up to the camera. The generator blew out in this scene. So they plugged in another generator and tried to run the scene again. And it blew the generator again. So they plugged in a third generator and this time Lynch made some changes: “Well, this time say this part first and then this part, and instead of being over here, stand over there and point this way.” Now, he didn’t change the power requirements, he did not adjust the lights or the camera or anything. He merely moved the pieces of the scene around a little bit. When we hooked up the third generator it ran, and kept on running. I heard David say, “Yep, I thought that might have been it.” In 1997, Lynch spoke about how the massive concentration of electrical lines can cause tumors to grow in the heads of people living near the wires. “Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not, you know, whacking you.” (The workers who strung the original power lines of Thomas Edison’s pioneering electrical company said they were afraid of “the devils in the wires.”) The director’s first major fictional linkage of electricity with danger and evil occurs in his unproduced screenplay for Ronnie Rocket, which he began in the mid-1970s. Inspired by the concept of alternating electrical current, Lynch imagined a story in which a villain reverses the flow of power so that he can control a large city by zapping people with “bad electricity.” This terrible rain of negative power makes people confused, dizzy, and unable to talk straight, and when the rain becomes a deluge, some start to eat their own hands and feet, and others burst into flames. Like the motif of a man simultaneously braking and accelerating a car in his earlier unproduced One Saliva Bubble, which Lynch eventually utilized in Fire Walk With Me, the director uses the Ronnie Rocket idea of bad electricity in his Twin Peaks movie, though in a more subtle way. In Ronnie Rocket, the villain overtly employs the electricity as a weapon, while in Fire Walk With Me it is a darkly poetic signifier of evil’s intrusion into our world, a warning of disturbance in the air when BOB’s dimension hungrily invades the one we live in. The blue-electricity TV screen that opens the film is linked to the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), which FBI agents Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak), Sam Stanley (Keifer Sutherland), and, later Dale Cooper (Kyle Mac- Lachlan), come to investigate in Washington State. Lynch uses this first, thirty-minute portion of his film, before he takes up Laura’s story, to show us the depth of the mystery that his detectives are confronting and to indicate the limitations of their investigative skills. In a fanciful, yet straightforward way, Lynch spells out, through his character of FBI boss Gordon Cole, his sense of the correct proportion between phenomena we can decipher and happenings that are beyond our understanding. Enacting the same artist-to-audience relationship that Lynch has with his viewers, Lynch as Gordon Cole presents Desmond and Stanley with a performance-art piece for them to decipher. This puzzle is Lil (Kimberly Ann Cole), a gawky, pinch-faced woman in a red dress who makes odd, dance-like motions. The seasoned Desmond helps Stanley read her messages: They’ll have trouble with the local authorities on the Teresa Banks case, the sheriff is hiding something, there’ll be lots of legwork, the case involves drugs. But, Stanley wonders, what about the blue rose pinned to Lil’s lapel? Desmond replies, “I can’t tell you about that.” What a succinct summation of Lynch’s ethos: By paying close attention we can comprehend much that we encounter in life, but the more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know. That botanically impossible blue rose, that bit of the Beyond that remains a mystery, will forever tantalize us and arouse our questing souls. Desmond and Stanley enact a condensed version of the investigative process that Twin Peaks’ TV lawmen played out over many episodes. The two make careful observations, perform forensic science, and talk to witnesses, but they’re nowhere near a solution to Teresa Banks’ murder. Then Desmond follows his intuition into blue rose territory, revisiting the trailer where the victim lived, getting an eerie vibration from the number six electrical pole, and, at dusk, finding Teresa’s lost ring beneath a strangely shining silver trailer. Having plugged into some ineffable energy circuit, Desmond vanishes from the film. After Lynch gives us a patriotic Eagle Scout image of the Liberty Bell, he shows that more mysteries are gathering at Philadelphia’s FBI headquarters. For the audience members who viewed the whole Twin Peaks TV series, the experience of watching Fire Walk With Me creates the almost subliminal sensation that we’re simultaneously seeing things that happened both before and after the TV show. And this feeling perfectly synchronizes with the fluid, dimension-interpenetrating sense of space and time that permeates Lynch’s film. So when we see Agent Cooper crisply stride into Gordon Cole’s office, it’s as though he’s snapped out of some of the sartorial and touchy-feely emotional excesses that Lynch didn’t like about Copper’s second-TV season presentation, those character modifications that happened while Lynch was disengaged from the production. Cooper is hyper-alert this morning because of a troubling dream about February 16, and his nocturnal subconscious agitation takes daytime substance in the form of long-lost agent Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie), who unexpectedly shows up at the FBI building. Jeffries comes in via a veritable Blue Rose Highway, whipping out of the elevator through a blue archway and striding down an azure carpet into Gordon Cole’s office. When he enters the room, it becomes charged with metaphysical turbulence. We’ve never seen Cole and Cooper so unsettled, and as the deeply shaken Jeffries spews out fragmentary impressions of the things he’s witnessed, a strange reality takes over Cole’s office and fills the screen. The agent mentions someone named Judy that he’s not going to talk about (more blue rose material) and says “we live inside a dream” (a truly Lynchian sentiment) as we see what he saw at “one of their meetings” above a convenience store. Assembled in the dilapidated space are Twin Peaks’ extra-dimensional BOB and The Man From Another Place, sitting at a table covered with pans of creamed corn, which they call “garmonbozia.” Across many cultures, corn has been seen as a sacred food since ancient times. It is a vegetable composed entirely of edible seeds, so when we eat it we are literally and poetically consuming the kernel of life, gobbling up the future in the present moment. In ancient Mexican and South American lore, corn symbolizes death as well as life, and is linked with blood sacrifice. BOB may dine on garmonbozia, but his primary occupation is consuming the lives, souls, and futures of human beings; and at the end of the film the corn takes on the connotation of “pain and sorrow.” Twin Peaks is also concerned with the point at which life and death meet and change places, and Fire Walk With Me is a journey leading to Laura’s blood sacrifice—and beyond. It was Lynch’s intention to imbue the creamed corn with sacramental power, and Michael J. Anderson (The Man From Another Place) says that Lynch “got quite upset” when the actor spilled some of it. “He didn’t get angry, but it was like a big concern came up and he got down and talked to me, and he goes, ‘Now you don’t want to spill this at all. Not even a little bit. It’s like gold.’ And then he just stood there like, ‘Do you get it? Can you grasp what I am telling you?’ He was very serious. It wasn’t a joke.” Among those present at the convenience store gathering Jeffries witnessed are Mrs. Tremond (Frances Bay) and her grandson (Jonathan Leppell), the pair who Donna encounters on TV in her Meals-on-Wheels route. The boy, who’s a clairvoyant magician, wears Lynch’s favorite blacksuit-and-white-shirt outfit, and was played by the director’s son, Austin, in the series. The film’s grandson wears a white plaster mask that lifts momentarily to reveal a shadowed monkey’s face. The mask and what it hides are another statement of Lynch’s belief in a multifarious reality, in deep truths concealed by facades. Looking underneath the detestable surface behavior of Elephant Man–exploiter Bytes, Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth, and Marietta of Wild at Heart, Lynch finds love—a quality of primal grace and goodness—that’s been twisted and perverted into evil. Most often, however, the director delves into the darkness hidden beneath benign surfaces, thus projecting the balance he sees in the world around him. The monkey behind the mask signifies Lynch’s characteristic linkage of animalism with evil, and is a metaphor for monkey man BOB’s dwelling within Leland. Jutting out from the mask’s “third eye” position on its forehead is a crooked stick of wood, indicating that the BOB-possessed Leland’s spirituality is earthbound and blocked. Only when he is released from BOB in death is Leland able to “go into the light,” where he sees his beautiful, shining Laura. In her poem, young Harriet Hayward had also seen Laura glowing after death. For Fire Walk With Me, Lynch reshot the iconic image of Laura’s dead blue face being unwrapped from its plastic cocoon and, as he did two years earlier on a cold Washington beach, he carefully placed a glimmering grain of sand in the region of her third eye. Leland tragically succumbed to BOB’s domination, while Laura heroically defied it, and thus her forehead’s spiritual eye is ready for an illuminated divine vision. Jeffries’ remembered experience with this otherworldly crew seems to bleed through the reality of Gordon Cole’s office in a cloud of blue static like the film’s opening TV screen. As the spent and screaming agent finishes his narration, Lynch stresses his notion of electrical-atmospherical disturbance being a sign of transport between dimensions by having Jeffries vanish amidst more blue static and a shot of power lines against blue sky. In the Fire Walk With Me script, Lynch specifies that Jeffries is standing in a Buenos Aires hotel one moment, and the next he’s in Gordon Cole’s office, and then suddenly back in Argentina. In the film, the director pumps up the mystery quotient by having Jeffries materialize from nowhere and everywhere. It’s interesting to note that the numerals in Jeffries’ hotel room number add up to nine, as do Cooper’s at the Great Northern Hotel, and to recall our discussion of the cosmic, circling, yin-yang energy that impels nine to become six: the universal constant of dualistic poles trading places and realities transforming. With his white tropical suit and burnt-out, shellshocked manner, Jeffries is like one of novelist Graham Greene’s or Joseph Conrad’s northern men whose life falls apart in southern climes. Lynch wants his characters, and us, to hit the road, delve into mysteries, learn all we can, and gain enlightenment from the experience. But he also knows that this path is fraught with dangers, and he makes Jeffries a man who bears the psychic wounds of too much traveling. Earlier, Fat Trout Trailer Park manager Carl Rodd sounded a cautionary note about voyaging when he talked with agents Desmond and Stanley. Lynch juxtaposed a shot of eerily twittering power lines against blue sky with the haggard, bandaged face of Rodd, who spoke like a haunted man: “I’ve already been places. I just want to stay where I am.” When Cooper travels to Washington State to investigate agent Desmond’s disappearance, he visits Carl Rodd’s trailer corral and is drawn to what looks like an unremarkable patch of earth where a trailer was once parked. We know what Cooper doesn’t, that this is where Desmond touched the ring and was lost to sight, that the trailer belonged to two members of Twin Peaks’ otherworldly cosmology, and that the “Let’s rock” written in red on the windshield of Desmond’s car is a phrase the little Man From Another Place will say to Cooper in a dream twelve months from now. Cooper, the magician who longs to see, can recognize investigational elements that give him “a strange feeling,” but he can’t perceive what they mean. This state of mind mirrors Lynch’s comments about how his own process of art-making proceeds in a “strange, abstract way,” in which he lets his feelings guide his creating hand and only later sees how the assembled elements coalesce into intellectual meaning. Agent Chester Desmond: vanished. Agent Phillip Jeffries: vanished. The murder of Teresa Banks: unsolved. Even Cooper, the detective’s detective, must concede that the FBI’s quest has reached “a dead end.” In The Wizard of Oz, which Lynch loves so much, Dorothy and her three male companions reach a roadblock on their odyssey to Oz when they’re told that they can’t enter the city that they’ve been striving so hard to reach, and which holds the Wizard’s special knowledge that they seek. But, when the officials see that Dorothy is wearing ruby slippers, the doors are opened. And, likewise in Lynch’s world, there is often a means of entry, a gateway to deeper mysteries, that is waiting to be recognized. The investigating men can take us no further into the dark wonders of Fire Walk With Me. To proceed all the way to the end of the night, we must walk and die with Laura Palmer, the saddest schoolgirl in the world. As Lynch opens Laura’s story, he presents images that make a quick transition from sunny innocence to dark experience, as he did at the start of Blue Velvet. Teenage Laura and her best friend, Donna, wearing their 1950s-echoing plaids and sweaters, walk to school down the same sidewalk they’ve trod for years and years together. At school they link pinkie fingers to say goodbye—and then Laura’s snorting cocaine into her brain and weeping and saying, “I’m gone, long gone” as James, one of her boyfriends, touches her naked breast. In Blue Velvet, a shadowy, insectoid force churning beneath an idyllic small town invaded the daylight world when, like a bug bite to the neck, Jeffrey’s father was stricken with a seizure. In Fire Walk With Me, the darkness seems to have already been gnawing at Laura for some time; she must have been doing some harrowing traveling to feel so “long gone” at such a young age. It is a measure of Lynch’s commitment to his artistic vision that, in Fire Walk With Me, he strips away all the user-friendly, trademark Twin Peakson-TV elements that viewers love (detectives, pie and coffee, humorously quirky characters) and focuses the world through Laura’s pained, sad, and desperate consciousness. The second law of thermodynamics states that everything in the universe will eventually run down, wear out, fade away, melt; that unless new energy is introduced from an outside source, things will devolve from order to chaos. Lynch has spoken of his poignant feeling that there’s an underlying “wild pain and decay”65 gnawing at the world, of how even bright new buildings and bridges carry the seeds of their own dissolution. The director says that “it’s the scariest thing” to see the forces of entropy consuming a human being, especially one as beautiful, gifted, and loved as Laura. She’s the community’s golden girl, but Lynch shows us that this radiant seventeen-year-old is “dying on the inside. Since age twelve, BOB has been a plague on her body and mind, creeping through her bedroom window in flashes of blue light and thrusting himself between her legs as she moans with eyes closed like a troubled dreamer. She sees BOB as the animalistic man with long gray hair, whereas most people viewing the film, because of their experience of the TV show, already know that her sexual partner is her BOB-possessed father, Leland. Part of Fire Walk With Me’s drama hinges on Laura coming to this shattering realization late in the film. For now, BOB is not content to feed on her sexuality, he also wants her soul, her personhood, and much of the film is devoted to Laura’s attempt to cope with this threat. Enthralled beneath the ceiling fan outside her bedroom, which whirls infernal energies into her life, Laura hears BOB hiss, “I want to taste with your mouth.” She lives with BOB using her sexually, but she fights against his hunger to penetrate and own her soul. Lynch, in his screenplays for Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, uses the verb “open” to denote one person having transgressive sexual access to another (Bobby Peru leers at Lula, “I’ll open you like a Christmas present.”68) In the Twin Peaks TV series, when Leland lies dying, the terrible knowledge that he killed his own daughter and was possessed by BOB finally comes flooding into his conscious mind. Even though the young Leland had invited BOB in to play his wicked games, the dying adult’s language of recollection connotes a homosexual rape: “He opened me and he came inside me.” By implication, BOB joins a list of Lynch’s villains (The Elephant Man’s Bytes, Dune’s Baron Harkonen, Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth) with homoerotic appetites, for if Fire Walk With Me’s evil entity gains possession of Laura, he will be having sex with the men she beds. Those who perform dark deeds in Lynch’s work often do so with an ecstatic glee that embodies the Marquis de Sade’s idea that “crime is an enchanting affair, for, in truth, from the flames by which it licks us is kindled the torch of our lust. Only crime is sufficient, it alone inflames us, and only crime can ravish pleasure through all degrees of our sensibility.” Hearing this idea, BOB would certainly grimace and grunt his agreement, but Laura would burst into tears. She is sexually promiscuous, sells her body for money, has a major cocaine addiction, and laughs when Bobby blows Deputy Howard’s head open, yet her night prowling brings her no pleasure or solace. So, as her friend Donna entreats, “Why do you do it?” In Jennifer Lynch’s book, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, young Laura often hears BOB’s disembodied voice like her own private cult leader giving her affirmations from hell. “I’VE BEEN HERE FOR YEARS AND YEARS, YOUR BELIEF DOESN’T MEAN A THING. YOUR OPINION IS NOTHING. THINNK ABOUT IT. LOOK AT YOUR LIFE. YOU GO FUCKING AROUND WITH PEOPLE. DRUGS ALL THE TIME. YOU’LL BE SIXTEEN SOON. YOUR LIFE IS SHIT AND YOU’RE NOT EVEN SIXTEEN YET. LOOK IN THE MIRROR AND SEE FOR YOURSELF. YOU ARE NOTHING.” Ironically, Laura has devolved into this degraded state by trying to elude BOB, reasoning that it was her sweet innocence that first attracted the long-haired invader through her bedroom window, so if she acts like a depraved slut, he will leave her alone. To her despair and horror, she learns that she can’t loosen his grip on her no matter what she does, and that the manipulative BOB thrives on toying with her autonomous sense of self and personal volition as “an experiment.” In his film, Lynch characteristically avoids the detailed verbal sparring matches between BOB and Laura that Jennifer Lynch includes in her book, preferring to keep his villain and heroine’s minimal exchanges on the primal level of an animalistic predator stalking his prey: “He wants to be me or he’ll kill me.” By not spelling out the motivation for Laura’s bad-girl behavior, Lynch frees us to hypothesize that BOB’s intrusion into her life at a crucial stage of her psycho-sexual development has twisted her sense of identity so that she feels unworthy of leading a normal, wholesome life, and that the dark, shadow side of her nature is her true self. She can be kind and giving and loving to those around her, but she feels she doesn’t deserve the same in return and she uses her sexuality to manipulate and gain power over others. If BOB wants to be her, then she must already be BOB-like. She feels that her angels have all gone away at the same time that she has turned away from them. The girl who feels “long gone” parties until dawn with a fellow night-denizen who calls himself “The Great Went,” as in Go all the way to death; a fellow whose motto is “There’s no tomorrow.” As nihilism and despair make Laura’s world a permanent midnight, she becomes fictional kin to Blue Velvet’s Dorothy, another victim of deeply wounding sexual-emotional abuse. In the earlier film Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey strove to keep Dorothy from embracing death, and in Fire Walk With Me his Agent Cooper, appearing in Laura’s dream, warns her not to take the ring that’s linked to Teresa Banks’ murder and Agent Chet Desmond’s disappearance. Lynch, through his alter ego MacLachlan, again shows his urge to protect victimized women. And he again illustrates the fluid nature of space and time in Twin Peaks, for the Cooper that Laura sees is from the future, the “good Dale” who’s trapped in the Red Room, while his dark self provides the TV series with its final, chilling images (BOB grinning back at him in the mirror). Jeffrey was able to prevent Dorothy from losing her mortal life, but Cooper can’t stop Laura’s death. Lynch as he did with Henry in Eraserhead and The Elephant Man’s John Merrick, has a higher destination in mind for Laura, a rewarding realm beyond our temporal world that she, like Henry and Merrick, can only reach through the portal of death. In her dream, Laura quakes with fear when the ring pops into her hand for a moment, but her journey toward spiritual fulfillment has already begun. Hungry BOB, with his ability to get inside your head and poison your house, is the force of willful control that Lynch fears, and that some of the director’s characters resist unto death. Poor Leland Palmer has yielded his psyche to BOB, and actor Ray Wise shows the inhabiting entity’s shadowy presence creeping into Leland’s pleasant face with superb subtly. One afternoon Laura encounters BOB in her bedroom tampering with her diary, and then sees Leland emerge from the Palmer house. Her conscious mind panics and tries to deny the thought that BOB and her father are one and the same, but her being begins to absorb this terrible possibility. Laura at this moment is an interesting contrast to Wild at Heart’s Lula, who never gained the conscious realization that her mother killed her father. Like Agent Cooper, Laura’s soul moves her to want to see and to know, and when BOB next comes through her window at night, she focuses her mind while he has intercourse with her and furiously demands, “Who are you?” And, as BOB’s grunting face fleetingly transforms into Leland’s, her most devastating suspicion is confirmed. Lynch includes a few precious moments of loving tenderness between Leland and Laura in the film, thus poignantly giving us a measure of how much emotional treasure BOB has stolen from the Palmer family. Ray Wise and Sheryl Lee deserve surpassing praise for their rich, complex, and emotionally draining incarnations of Leland and Laura. Every moment of their relationship is heartfelt, and indeed Wise for months carried Lee’s photograph in his wallet with the pictures of his own family. The don’t-fence-me-in dynamic of Wild at Heart propelled Lula away from her dictatorial mother and out onto the road, where she found her maturing sense of self, sexuality, and love while traveling with Sailor. Laura tries to define her identity apart from her father by seeking the solace of friends, lovers, and drugs, but Leland is also BOB, and BOB is everywhere. Taking a road trip away from Twin Peaks would only bring her to the same dead end. Like Eraserhead’s Henry and The Elephant Man’s John Merrick, she must find physical escape and spiritual deliverance close to home. A true friend with a heroic sense of loyalty, Laura does her utmost to keep the darkness that’s engulfing her from tainting and endangering those she loves, such as Donna, James, and Harold Smith, the keeper of her secret diary. Lynch has—either consciously or not—put Laura in a position that, with poetic resonance, echoes the mythic stance of Tibetan Buddhist nuns who, in ancient tales, personally engaged and grappled with devouring demons in order to keep the world safe from harm. However, Laura is not a sacrificial lamb with a martyr complex. Her primal need is to save herself from BOB, and to do so she must die. Like Henry, she must follow a trail of subconscious promptings, reading her dreams and the clues in the wind, and finally committing an act that obliterates her temporal self. Henry picked up scissors and killed his baby, and Laura slides that fateful ring onto her finger. A derelict train car that no longer travels is Laura’s point of departure for her journey beyond death. As the air crackles with blue electricity, the bound Ronette Pulaski is freed when she prays for deliverance and her guardian angel appears. Laura feels she’s in an abject state that’s unworthy of prayerful help: she’s seen her guardian angel vanish from her bedroom picture, and the angelic figure of roadhouse singer Julee Cruise asks in her song, “Why did you turn away from me?” Laura has fought to keep BOB from invading her psyche, and in the train car she glimpses what it would be like if she lost the battle when she sees the fiend glowering back at her from a mirror. This horrifying vision gives her the final jolt of courage she needs to leap into the unknown, and she slips on the ring. Lynch, rather than simply having Leland be BOB’s unwitting pawn at this climatic moment, makes him tragically semi-conscious of the horror he is about to perpetrate, as he matches his daughter’s screams with one of his own: “Don’t make me do this!” Lynch visualizes Laura’s murder as an abstraction in which we see short-duration images separated by flashes of light and blackness: Leland thrusting a knife, BOB thrusting a knife, a passage of various views of Laura’s pale face spurting blood from her mouth, her golden broken-heart necklace, her face finally not moving. This last shot, which Lynch frames upside-down, with her forehead at the bottom of the frame and chin at the top, recalls a shot he composed for his 1968 film The Alphabet. In that student work, he had positioned a woman’s face in the same topsy-turvy way and added a false nose on her chin to make it look like the bottom of her face was actually the top, as if to say, “Appearances can be deceiving.” In the twenty-four years sine The Alphabet, Lynch had not composed a close-up of an inverted face until he filmed Laura, whose dead face paradoxically hides the truth of her deathlessness. After killing Laura, BOB propels Leland into the extra-dimensional realm of the Red Room, where he’s confronted by the only entity he fears: Mike, his former partner in crime. After moving Leland’s body to bow respectively to Mike, then emerges from his host and the two stand facing Mike and the little Man From Another Place. When Mike had decided to spurn BOB and live on the side of good, he took off his arm, which was tattooed with the powerfully evil symbol that’s still inscribed on BOB’s arm and which adorns the ring that Laura chose to wear. Mike’s discarded arm was transformed into the Man From Another Place, who can still exhibit a malevolent streak. But now Mike and his “arm” speak in unison, demanding that BOB give back the sacramental corn (“garmonbozia”) he stole. Garmonbozia also means “pain and suffering,” some of BOB’s choicest food, so giving it up is true punishment for the demonic entity. BOB accomplishes Mike’s demand by touching Leland’s shirt, which is stained red from the bloody murder-scene towels he stuffed inside it. BOB then pivots his hand away from Leland and, with a throwing-away gesture, splatters Laura’s blood onto the zig-zag-patterned floor. BOB, one of the scariest fictional manifestations of evil to be portrayed in late-twentieth-century culture, has been, at least for the moment, subdued—though he’s certainly back at full power to wreak havoc in the TV series that’s still to come in some alternate time stream. Still, in our time frame, this movie comes after the series, and its conclusion allows us to depart the world of Twin Peaks in a glow of exaltation. In counterpoint to the hours of fear, pain, sadness, and dread we have lived through in the Twin Peaks experience, Lynch leaves us with the feeling that a hard-won measure of justice had been attained. As the Man From Another Place, following the proper ritualistic protocol of his realm, lovingly sucks up the golden garmonbozia corn between his full lips, we see the face of the monkey that was hiding behind the mask in Philip Jeffries’ recollection-vision of his harrowing encounter with the extra-dimensional denizens. The mask is now gone, and the simian face smiles slightly and softly says, “Judy.” Throughout his career Lynch has linked animalism with evil, and in the Middle Ages the monkey was a symbol of the devil, heresy, lust, vice, and paganism. The simian was related to the Fall of Man and represented a distorted, debased aspect of humankind. And in Lynch’s dear The Wizard of Oz, menacing flying monkeys abducted Dorothy and her friends and delivered them to the Wicked Witch. In Jeffries’ vision, the monkey behind the mask suggested BOB, with his ravenous animal appetites, hiding within Leland. But now the garmonbozia has been returned and consumed, Laura’s burden of pain and sorrow has been lifted, and the face of animalistic energy wears a benign expression and speaks the name (“Judy”) of she who is perhaps the ultimate authority/spiritual figure in this dimension. Is BOB a bad boy who eternally disobeys a maternal goddess? Or is it just that Lynch knows that when, in his beloved The Wizard of Oz, one of the little Munchkin women comes up to Dorothy (Judy Garland), she looks at Garland and says, “Judy” by mistake. Lynch maximizes the evocative power of his Twin Peaks lore by not spelling out its details too clearly. Fantasist writer-director Clive Barker has emphasized that in his Hellraiser films he doesn’t tell the audience where the monstrous villains, the Cenobites, come from: There’s a mythology, a cosmos, that we only glimpse. As Lynch says, “it leaves you room to dream.” At any rate, BOB will soon be back in potently evil form, riding the black wind of night, manipulating Leland like a puppet, making him kill Maddy, then making Leland smash his own head to death, extracting Windom Earle’s soul, and guiding the dark aspect of Agent Cooper into an unsuspecting world. But Laura will not be his. As the Roman philosopher Seneca (4 B.C. –65 A.D.) said, “He who learns how to die unlearns slavery.”73 Defying the forces that would control her soul, Laura had courageously chosen her own spiritual path—but where does it lead? The iconic image of the plastic wrapping being pulled aside to reveal Laura’s cold, dead blue face with its glittering grain of sand in the “third eye” position of the forehead melds with a familiar zigzag-patterned floor and ruddy curtains, and we find ourselves in the Red Room, where a more grown-up-looking Laura wearing a long black dress sits in a comfortable chair. Standing beside her, his hand on her shoulder, is Dale Cooper the Good. She has a blank, lost look, but as blue-white light illuminates her face and draws her gaze, a smile begins to form, mirroring Cooper’s beneficent smile. With a childlike expression of wonder, Laura receives all the grace and love of the universe, and she sees the white-winged guardian angel that had faded from her bedroom picture now, magnificently, floating in the dark air above her. Throughout the film, she has wept with shame, loneliness, fear, and despair, but now, for the first time, she cries tears of joy and laughs as though she would laugh forever. The felicitous meeting of Laura and Cooper in the Red Room has a beautiful poetic resonance. The abject victim/courageous heroine and the questing detective, both longing to see, have followed their dreams, intuitions, and deeply felt impulses and reached this point together. The translucent walls of the Red Room are like the enclosing membranes of a heart, and in this ruddy chamber Laura sees both Cooper, her loving protector, and her winged female angel, and Cooper watches Laura his dark muse and dream lover finally find the light. Will they gaze on until the next heartbeat, or as long as the world spins? These are Blue Rose questions. This moment, which gloriously culminates David Lynch’s Twin Peaks saga and perfectly balances his craving for both knowledge and mystery, is one of the director’s most magnificent achievements. Surely, he felt, fans of the series would empathize with their dear Laura’s last seven days of degradation and abuse and glory in her well-earned spiritual triumph. And Twin Peaks novices would be intrigued by this in-depth psychological exploration of an incest-infested home and be swept up in the romance of all the lowdown nightlife, the evocative dream sequences, the surreal Red Room, and the one who lurks in the dark woods and behind the eyes of Leland Palmer. How much more wrong could David Lynch be? Greg Olson/ David Lynch/ Beautiful Dark
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(Twin Peaks, Season 2 and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) Today, Lynch looks back at Twin Peaks with frustration and regret over “the many clues and threads that we never got to follow.”Frost is more calmly philosophical about the show’s demise. “That three-year period was great from start to finish. It would have been much better to see Twin Peaks continue for another year or two. But sometimes the best experiences aren’t the longest running, and in a way that makes them sweeter. As the years go by I think of the show with great fondness. It was a very happy experience, something really special and meaningful in all our lives and in our work—a very rare combination.” Twin Peaks is a glowing memory for Frost: He ranks it at the top of his list of distinguished creative accomplishments. But he also honorably takes responsibility for production decisions that caused the show’s downfall: I left to make Storyville during the second half of the second season, after we finished the storyline of Leland Palmer being his daughter’s killer. I regret my decision to not be there. That’s where we dropped the ball. Once the central Laura Palmer–Leland Palmer story was resolved, we were at a deficit in coming up with a story that was as compelling. And frankly, we didn’t. The Windom Earle thread took too long to develop, it didn’t start off with a bang. Selecting that story and allowing it to get too leisurely paced really hurt us. Mark Frost and writer-producer Harley Peyton assumed that the show would follow the stunning death of Leland Palmer with a radiance of love. The smoldering longings of Audrey and Cooper for each other would flame into overt romance: The series’ two most charismatic surviving characters would share their hearts and bodies, and because we cared about them so much, they’d be prime candidates for exciting plot lines that would put them in jeopardy. Stacks of letters from eager viewers reinforced Frost and Peyton’s conviction that the Cooper-Audrey union would bring robust life to postLeland Palmer Twin Peaks. But Cooper, rather than offering Audrey an invitation, was an impediment to love. As Frost recalls, “even though we made a point of stressing that Audrey was eighteen, Kyle MacLachlan felt strongly that Cooper, with his steadfast moral and ethical compass, would never engage in that relationship. He may well have been right.” Frost half-seriously jokes that “we should have revealed that Audrey had flunked high school for three years and was actually twenty-one—that might have satisfied Kyle.” So since Cooper and Audrey couldn’t face love and danger together, “we introduced the Annie Blackburn character for him, which was too little too late. And the Windom Earle storyline got pushed to the launching pad before it was ready to go, which was a big problem.” Everyone from Harley Peyton to directors Tina Rathborne and Lesli Linka Glatter to actors Kyle MacLachlan, Catherine Coulson, Kimmy Robertson, and Jack Nance felt that the show had lost its focus and initial high level of inspiration: The quality of the material just wasn’t up to the rarified level to which they’d become accustomed. Some of the actors entreated Lynch to step in and somehow make things like they used to be when the series was fresh and magical. But Frost was jumping at the chance, made possible by the notoriety of Twin Peaks, to go and direct a film, and Lynch felt stymied and frustrated by his other collaborators doing “not what you would do.” His heart wasn’t absolutely devoted to the show any more; it was no longer the center of his Art Life: “you don’t have enough time to get in there and do what you’re supposed to do.” Aside from a unified Lynch-Frost energy not being engaged with the latter stages of Twin Peaks, the ABC executives made what Frost calls “the bonehead move” of shifting the show to the TV graveyard of Saturday at 10 p.m. And President Bush the first was culpable. Frost stresses that “the Gulf War was an under-appreciated element in the show not making it over the hump. We were pre-empted for six out of eight weeks, and we didn’t have a chance to come back from that. Too much time had gone by when we resumed. Viewers couldn’t sustain their concentration over the gap. We’d laid out so many threads that it was very difficult for even dedicated fans to keep track of them.” Frost had some definite threads in mind for season 3, a series of episodes which he felt would far surpass the second year in quality. Audrey and Pete would survive the bomb blast at the bank, Ben Horne would be back, the good Cooper would be trapped in the Black Lodge for a long time, while the bad Cooper menaced Annie and other townsfolk. Frost recalls that during the second season, Joan Chen, who played Josie, asked to leave the series to make a film. To accommodate her, the writers stuck Josie in a wooden drawer pull for safe keeping, so that she could be retrieved for a comeback. But there would be no season 3, so Twin Peaks fans were left with the mystery of flesh melded with wood grain, and the sorry spectacle of an evil, cackling Cooper loosed on an unsuspecting world. Because the script for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me mentions creamed corn, and since the film’s co-writer Robert Engels has spoken a number of times of a cosmology in which one-armed Mike, BOB, and the Man From Another Place all come from a “place of corn,”31 many people assumed that Engels originated the corn concept. Actually, it’s another of Lynch’s spontaneous inspirations, which struck two years earlier during the first third of the TV series’ production. In 2003, Mark Frost told me that “David always loved the process of discovery, of finding something in a scene or a performance or in life that would take things in a completely unexpected turnaround. He had the confidence to see and sense that something was happening, and to make the most of it, to not rely completely on Plan A.” Frost always insisted on discussing changes before they were shot, so one of Lynch’s alterations of Plan A “threw me for a loop.” Looking at the rushes of the day’s shooting, Frost watched a scene in episode 10 in which Donna brings a Meals-on-Wheels to the bed-ridden old Mrs. Tremond. There was no creamed corn mentioned in Harley Peyton’s script, but here was Mrs. Tremond stressing that she didn’t like the stuff, and then Frost saw the corn on her plate vanish, only to materialize across the room in the cupped hand’s of David Lynch’s son. Young Austin, playing Tremond’s magician grandson, and dressed and groomed to look just like his dad, held the golden corn in his hands, then made it vanish into thin air. After viewing the footage, Frost tracked down Lynch and asked him what the deal was. Lynch replied, “I was eating creamed corn at lunch; it looked so fantastic, I just had to do something with it.” So the corn component of the Twin Peaks mythos was born because David Lynch had lunch at the ABC commissary on a certain day. The folks watching the final episode at the Mar T Café in Washington State may have had divided opinions on the series’ conclusion, but they voiced a unanimous sentiment as they stepped into the rainy June night to go home: “I hear they might make a Twin Peaks movie—wouldn’t that be great!” Twelve hundred miles to the south, David Lynch shared their sentiment. “At the end of the series, I felt sad. I couldn’t get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks. I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside. I wanted to see her live, move, and talk. I was in love with that world and I hadn’t finished with it.”36 Rather than brood over the loss of the TV series, Lynch poured his creative energy into writing a feature film screenplay with the series’ head creative script consultant Robert Engels. There would be no UFO references, no Miss Twin Peaks Contest or Civil War reenactments, no doublecrossing business schemes, no arch and clever Windom Earle, and no plaid shirts for Agent Cooper. Series co-creator Mark Frost amicably declined to be part of the film project, citing his belief that the audience hungered for the story to move forward and tie up loose ends. Whereas Lynch wanted to return to the broken heart and endangered soul of Twin Peaks: the final seven days of Laura’s life, so that “we could actually see things we had only heard about”37 on the TV show from those who had survived the town’s favorite daughter. And Lynch would conduct his mission to reclaim the authentic essence of Twin Peaks up north where he’d shot the pilot episode, where “a certain wind” blows through the woods and small towns of Washington State. Lynch chose cinematographer Ron Garcia, who’d shot the pilot episode in the sunless, overcast February of 1989, to lens the feature film, which would be called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Assuming they would again be working with a palette of chilly grays and earthen browns, Garcia and Lynch were shocked to find Seattle and the Snoqualmie valley bathed in eighty-five-degree Indian summer sunshine in September 1991. Rather than being thrown off course aesthetically by the unexpected weather, the pair decided to, according to Garcia, “exploit the contrast, with these golds and greens and blue skies against which these horrible things were happening to Laura Palmer.” Once again, Lynch let happenstance help determine the “correct” form of his art. It was chance that let me witness some of Lynch’s art-making process. Being the director of the Seattle Art Museum’s film program, I often work late and don’t watch the local eleven o’clock news. But one night I saw that Lynch and company had arrived to begin filming at a dilapidated Snoqualmie trailer park. By early afternoon the next day, I was on the case. Lynch, who loves to delve into hidden secrets in his work, wanted the plot details of his film to remain a mystery until it hit the screen, so the news cameraman had only been allowed to catch a glimpse of the closed trailer park set through a knot hole in a cedar fence. Lynch wanted absolutely no media coverage of the production, and I later learned that a friend of mine who wrote for Entertainment Weekly magazine out of New York was told to “not even think about catching a plane to Washington State.” I didn’t want to photograph or write about the production or have fire walk with me, but I did want to see. I was fascinated by the way that Lynch’s fictional neighborhood intersected with the touchstones of my own physical and imaginative life. My Swedish-immigrant father had been a young pre-chainsaw lumberjack in the woods just outside Twin Peaks, I’d gotten my first driver’s license a stone’s throw from the Double R Diner and graduated from high school in a nearby salmon-hatchery town, and as a boy the surrounding rivers, forests, and mountains had been the dwelling places of Huckleberry Finn and Rip van Winkle. And at night the deep black sky and its sparkling stars, at full force so far from city lights, held the promise of stories and possibilities without end. As I approached the trailer park near Meadowbroook Street in Snoqualmie, I was stopped by a roadblock that was backed up with numerous police cars and local law enforcement officers. Parking a few blocks away, I approached the police blockade on foot, trying to look purposeful and busy, like the movie crew members who swarmed back and forth within the cordoned-off area. Expecting to be challenged at any second, I strode past the policemen, picked up my pace, rounded a corner, and almost smacked right into Dale Cooper. What an arresting sensation, suddenly sharing three feet of sidewalk with a fictional character, his double-breasted overcoat, monumental ivory chin, and slicked-back black patent-leather hair as perfect as they were on my TV at home. The illusion passed in a second, as Kyle MacLachlan’s natural, looserthan-Cooper body posture and grinning demeanor asserted themselves, and I marveled at the transformative power of the actor’s art. I found the fence that the TV news crew had peeked through, and an unexpected gap through which the crew was moving equipment, so I slipped into the film’s Fat Trout Trailer Park. And, right behind me, stepped David Lynch. He was wearing baggy tan khakis, a white shirt with its collar button closed, a rumpled black blazer with holes at the elbows, and a charcoal, long-billed cap. A toothpick, like a little splinter of divining rod, jutted from his lips. The furrow between his eyebrows gave him an earnest, concerned look that opened easily into amusement and amazement. For eight years (in Dune, Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks), MacLachlan had tracked clues and read dreams as Lynch’s truth-questing alter-ego, and the two men—who both spent their early years in Washington State—began work on their new collaboration with a firm handshake. First up is a scene in the town of Deer Meadow, where young Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) has been found murdered and wrapped in plastic. FBI boss Gordon Cole (David Lynch) has sent agents Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Keifer Sutherland) to investigate, and Desmond has mysteriously disappeared. This is one of Cole’s “blue rose cases,” referring to the botanical impossibility of a blue rose and thus coding the mystery as one that violates the borders of rational scientific investigation and delves into paranormal dimensions. This is Cooper’s territory, so Cole sends him out to see where Desmond went one year before. Once in the field, Cooper hears about a place called Twin Peaks and a girl named Laura. The last place Desmond had been seen was the Fat Trout Trailer Park, and I watch Lynch set up scenes in which Cooper talks to scruffy, haggard park manager Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton) and they look around the lot. Rodd points Cooper toward a certain trailer and then, exasperated, sees the agent, who seems almost in a trance of aroused intuition, wander off in another direction. For a number of rehearsals and takes I savor Stanton bellowing, “Why the hell are you going up that way?” Lynch speaks only a few quiet words of direction, but on one take says “Okay, Harry Dean, let’s get that anger up there” before calling “Action!” through his amplified megaphone. As the Gordon Cole–volume twang of his voice cuts the still Snoqualmie air over the course of the afternoon, I notice that he calls actors by their real names, but refers to MacLachlan as “Cooper.” With the scenes involving Stanton and MacLachlan in the can, Lynch thanks them for their “doggone good job.” A teenage girl crosses the shooting area and joins two friends near me. One asks, “Could you see a lot over there?” The girl looks wistfully at MacLachlan and sighs, “All I know is, there he is.” But in a blink, he isn’t there anymore, nor are Lynch and Stanton. I follow a dirt path arcing left through the trailers to the lazy Snoqualmie River. On the grassy banks, kids skip stones across the green water that flows from here to the double smokestacks of the Weyerhaeuser sawmill (the Packard Mill in the series’ opening credits), on to the Salish Lodge (the Great Northern Hotel), and over the 217-foot Snoqualmie Falls (Whitetail Falls) that local Native Americans still worship. Hearing an occasional soft murmur of voices, I look over my shoulder and see Lynch and his two actors sitting on the narrow porch of Stanton’s character’s trailer. After taking a silent pause to gaze at the river, Lynch gets up and spends a lot of time playing with a hose and some dirt. His fascination with the interface between industrial and organic textures is fully evident as he alternately floats dust and mists water onto the weathered steel of a 1970s car. Finally, the car looks like it hasn’t been driven or touched in months—except that it’s got “Let’s rock” written across its windshield in hot pink. Speaking of rock, this evening the MTV Music Awards are being handed out three hours ahead in New York, and they’ve sent a crew here to beam a live message to the viewers from popular singer-actor Chris Isaak. Wearing his Chet Desmond FBI overcoat, he sits down with the river in the background for a short on-camera interview. While Isaak is earnestly answering questions, Kyle MacLachlan exhibits an un-Cooperesque sense of mischief. Grabbing a small tray and a cup of coffee, and wearing his own FBI overcoat, he intrudes on the interview. Like a butler, he holds out the tray, saying, “Your coffee, sir.” Isaak throws him a curve: “I didn’t order any coffee,” to which MacLachlan responds with BOB-like intensity “You must take this coffee!” As the afternoon spends itself in golden splendor, a little group of production-watchers gathers. The cast and crew cheerfully mingle with trailer park residents, town locals, and tourists from New York, England, and Sugarland, Texas. There’s a feeling that we’re all Twin Peaks dwellers in spirit, and it seems perfectly natural that when Lynch has to stop a take around 4:30 p.m. (“We’ve got a bad siren”), a Snoqualmie resident calls out, “That’s the Packard Mill changing shifts.” As twilight adds an eerie aura to the meandering rows of ramshackle old trailers, Lynch sets up a shot in which Isaak will walk between them looking for clues. The director reveals his eagle eye, and part of his conception of Twin Peaks, when he spots a 1990 trailer license tab the size of a postage stamp in the far corner of his camera frame. A production assistant, responding to Lynch’s “We gotta lose that ninety,” covers it with tape, thus keeping the director’s fictional world running on expansive dreamtime rather than constrictive calendar chronology. Lynch and his work bespeak his feeling of kinship with those who are physically and socially outside the consumer-culture-imaged mainstream. The director next readies for a scene in which Isaak and Stanton are interrupted by an old woman with a sunken chin and permanently stiff arms ending in curled hands. “Where’s my goddam hot water? Where’s my goddam hot water? Where is my goddam hot water?,” she importunes Stanton. The woman, a local, speaks at the wrong moment. This is the last natural-light shot of the day and there are precious few minutes left to get it. Lynch stops the take and patiently tells the woman how he wants her to enter the action. They take the shot three times, and she demands a lot of hot water in perfect form. After the final “Cut!” he walks straight past Isaak and Stanton and puts his long arm around the woman’s stooped shoulders: “That was very, very good, Margaret.” Night gathers around the trailer park, which is illuminated into hyper-reality by all the movie lights, and a sense of camaraderie and happily shared experience bathes the scene. Lynch, with his hand on an electrical switch, experiments with various ways to get a flash of bright light to flood through the window of a trailer when someone opens its door. He calls this “a beautiful day,” and grins when Mar T Café owner Pat Cokewell arrives with a steaming bowl of special-order chili for Harry Dean. Chris Isaak signs autographs and Keifer Sutherland, who plays his FBI cohort Sam Stanley, shows up with a bag of burgers from the 1950s-vintage Burgermaster drive-in. He’s accompanied by two large, loving golden dogs that have traveled with him from L.A. And if you think that anyone’s going to mention the fact that the Pretty Woman, the Runaway Bride herself, Julia Roberts, just called off her and Sutherland’s romance and wedding a few days ago, you’ve been out in the woods too long. Watching the production at work was an addictive experience, so as the strangely unshrouded Northwest sun beat down on a balmy September and October, I tracked the filmmakers all over the territory. Since they adamantly did not want any plot details leaking out, I realized that my anonymous sixfoot-two presence could be challenged at any moment. Sure enough, as I stood at Lynch’s elbow while he watched a scene rehearsal of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and Donna Hayward (Moira Kelly) walking to school, assistant director Bill Jennings gently pulled me aside and asked, “Are you with us?” If I said yes, he would want to know in what capacity, so, reluctantly, I replied “Not really” and retreated to a respectful distance. Over the weeks Bill’s gatekeeper stance relaxed, and I huddled with him in the deep night woods watching moths flame out as they batted into hot movie lights, while I listened to this African American who so wanted to be in the film industry speak movingly of his mentorship with independent director John Korty (Crazy Quilt, 1966). The crew got used to seeing me around, and I developed a chatting relationship with Lynch assistant/publicist Gaye Pope and location scout Julie Duvic, started using actor’s trailers for bathroom breaks, and heard Dana Ashbrook’s (bad-boy Bobby Briggs) enthusiastic rendition of a dirty joke involving a hunter who enjoyed getting blowjobs from a grizzly bear. Still, no matter how at-home I felt with the production, I knew that Lynch could instantly eject me, so I diligently tried to avoid catching his eye. In this film all eyes would be on Sheryl Lee, the young Seattle actress who became world famous playing the corpse of Laura palmer in the Twin Peaks pilot, and did a solid job of portraying Laura’s unworldly cousin Maddy. For Fire Walk with Me she would have to carry the full, harrowing emotional weight of Laura’s tormented existence but, like Lynch, she was eager to return to the character: “Laura always had a tremendous amount of life, because for two seasons everybody talked about her—yet I didn’t get to do those things and be her.”41 But being Laura was an emotionally draining ordeal, in which Lee felt she was “living a lifetime in just two short months.”42 Desperation, fear, pain, and weeping were her constant companions, and above all, “Everyday I felt an incredible loneliness that was very hard to bear.” We know that Lynch and his protagonists love the thrill of pursuing and revealing dark, hidden secrets. But in Fire Walk With Me the director is exploring the “horror of secrets”: the torturous burden that the one keeping the secrets must bear. Lee had to inhabit the terrible truth that though Laura’s community sees her as its golden girl, she’s actually whoring and drug-sniffing her way through life. And, at the root of everything, there’s BOB, the scary entity with long gray hair who’s been forcing sex on her for years and who is also, somehow, her father Leland. And there’s BOB’s voice hissing from the ceiling fan that he wants to be her or he’ll kill her. Believing that she’s contaminated by some virulent spiritual contagion and is beyond saving, she doesn’t reach out to those who might help her, but rather strives to contain her “disease” and not infect those who love her. Lee felt all the isolation and psychic tension of Laura’s double life: “There were days when I didn’t know how I was going to go another minute.” Lynch fully understood and appreciated the anguish Lee was experiencing for the sake of his art, and he tenderly guided her through Laura’s journey. “Thank God for David. I had to go to a deep place to play Laura, a place I didn’t think I could reach, but he helped me get there and survive it all.” I first witnessed Sheryl Lee’s awe-inspiring incarnation of Laura as Lynch filmed a traffic-jam scene in which Leland and daughter are accosted by one-armed Mike (Al Strobel), BOB’s former familiar in malevolence who’s now out to stop his partner’s evil. While Laura and Leland are stuck in traffic, Mike raves at them, concluding, “It’s your father,” meaning that Leland is BOB’s incest-committing host. While Mike yells, Leland simultaneously holds one foot on the brakes and races the engine with the other, a motif that Lynch employs in his unproduced screenplay of One Saliva Bubble and the 1999 film The Straight Story. In the context of Fire Walk With Me, this gesture mirrors the conflicting impulses warring within Leland, who is both Laura’s loving, protective father (brakes) and her slavering, BOB-inspired molester (accelerator). Mike drives off and Leland roars the Palmer convertible into a gas station, where he and Laura have an intensely emotional scene while sitting in the car. Mixed feelings boil in close-up shots. Even though Leland isn’t consciously aware that BOB sometimes uses his body to do bad things, the BOB-part of his psyche is severely disturbed by the threat Mike poses, leaving the surface Leland confused and angry. Intercut with this scene in the finished film will be footage detailing Leland’s extramarital sex with Teresa Banks (who “looks just like my Laura”) and the time Teresa lined up an extra girl to party with, who turned out to be his daughter (unbeknownst to Laura, he fled when he realized it was her). So, back in the car, there’s a component of BOB-inflamed suspicion and sexual jealousy to Leland’s inner turmoil (So, my girl is ready to screw an anonymous man for money!). Filming Leland’s subtly shifting, distraught face without any dialogue, crouching just outside camera range, Lynch calls for “absolute silence” and, as he and Ray Wise focus intently, the director intones: “Look at her ... now back forward . . . change slightly, settle into it . . . steal a look . . . a little more devious, more frightening . . . and cut. That was beautiful Ray.” In this scene, Laura’s emotional storm has to even exceed Leland’s. She has to react to Mike’s raging, denouncing words, her father’s extreme reaction to Mike, and his weird stomping on the accelerator while they’re stopped, plus, in the midst of her fear and trembling, she must project an accusatory, angry tone toward Leland as she speaks of the day she first realized he and BOB may be one and the same. In order to reach the emotional heights she needs, Lee surprises us all by screaming loudly a few times just before the first take rolls. Lynch seems thrilled by her heartfelt participation in his project. He began his odyssey with her by carefully arranging sand grains on her forehead as she lay wrapped in plastic on a freezing Washington beach. And now, almost two years later, he speaks softly to her between takes and gives her a little kiss on her blond bangs. Her arduous day over, Lee strolls toward her trailer, smiling down at the waist-high Snoqualmie kids who encircle her and say, “Goodbye, Laura, goodbye.” A few nights later Lynch demonstrated both his affectionate bond with his leading lady and his embrace of spontaneous happenings. The film production was occupying a large section of land in the center of the town of Fall City, just downriver from Snoqualmie Falls. This huge set encompassed the parking lot and exterior of the Roadhouse and the exterior of the Log Lady’s (Catherine Couslon) cabin. So on a Friday night, lots of unusual lights and activity were evident right next to the town’s only bridge across the Snoqualmie River, and a crowd of hundreds had gathered to watch the moviemakers. Dana Ashbrook was there just to hang out, and Coulson arrived cradling her log and wearing her hiking boots, long tweed coat, and glasses for the upcoming scene. As Lynch talked camera moves with Ron Garcia, Sheryl Lee arrived dressed in Laura’s all-black, short-skirted nightprowling ensemble, her long blonde locks pulled up away from her face by large pink hairpins. The director stepped over to her end and, as they put their arms around each other’s waists and he kissed her on the cheek, the segment of the watching crowd nearest to them went “Awhhh.” In the scene, Laura, with her hair down, will drive her yellow ’56 Buick into the dirt lot, park, and walk to the Roadhouse entrance, where the Log Lady will intercept her and give her some words of advice. Everything goes fine in rehearsal, and Lynch gets ready to roll his camera. During the preparation period, the crowd has been in a festive mood, eating snacks, drinking beer, keeping track of their children, and shooing away a big white dog that’s been cruising for handouts and occasionally trying to hump the backs of various crowd members who are sitting on the ground. Just to be safe, assistant director Bill Jennings grabs the canine and plants it firmly on the sidelines, where it is content to sit. Lynch calls “Action!” through his megaphone, and Lee pulls up, stops her car, gets out, and starts across the puddled parking lot. At this point the dog stands up and strides straight into the shot, almost clipping Lee as she walks, and then keeps right on going off into the night at a diagonal angle from Lee’s trajectory. Lee completes her walk, meeting the Log Lady, and Lynch yells “Cut!”—and then for all our benefit, “Perfect!” He’s got a grin on his face, and his crew and the watching hundreds erupt in laughter, cheers, and applause. On another night, without spectators, the director and his crew shot what would have been the largest-scale scene in the film, but it didn’t make the final cut. At a forested place appropriately called Ravendale, we see on the right a ramshackle low building that will be the truckstop bar where Laura and Donna spend a debauched evening with lustful loggers Buck (Victor Rivers) and Tommy (Chris Pedersen). Left of the structure is a long dirt lot with a tall metal post supporting a sign that says, with Special Agent resonance, “Cooper Tires.” Lynch positions his camera near the bar looking back into the lot, with the paved forest road beyond. To round out his composition, the director has placed a long line of parked logging trucks on the paved road that will dwindle to the vanishing point in the background of the shot, and behind the trucks, in the woods, he’s put an atmospheric light source that shines spectrally through the trees. In the midst of all these hectic preparations, which take hours, property master Daniel Kuttner brings over a tarnished old silver metal ice chest with a red Coca-Cola logo on it for Lynch to approve. The director’s ability to disengage from the commotion around him and focus on the object was positively Dale Cooper–like. He silently stared at the chest for what seemed like two minutes, and simply concluded, “That’s a beautiful thing.” Around 10 p.m. everyone’s ready to realize on film these few lines from the script: “EXTERIOR, BORDER TRUCK STOP—NIGHT. Establish. Tommy takes the car like a rocket into the parking lot and does a complete three-sixty before rocking to a stop.” The scene will not use stunt people. Chris Pedersen will be driving, with Moira Kelly at his side and Sheryl Lee and Victor Rivers in the back seat, and they’ll all be grasping beer bottles. They rehearse the action at half-speed and then, after workers sweep the dirt lot smooth, they’re ready for what everyone hopes will be a one-take shot. With the camera rolling, the car’s headlights appear way down the road and quickly grow larger as the vehicle roars along the line of logging trucks. Without slacking its speed, the car veers off the pavement into the truckstop lot, heading straight toward the camera. If it kept coming for a second or two more it would wipe out Lynch and many of his crew, but Pedersen expertly jerks the steering wheel, sending the car into a perfect donut spin around the Cooper Tires signpost. Almost up on its two inside wheels, the sliding car spews dust and sprays a wave of gravel in its wake. The car skids to a stop after circling the signpost, and the driver and his three passengers climb out on wobbly legs as the camera cuts. All eyes but two are on the intrepid riders as Lynch and his crew crowd in with cheers and congratulations. I notice that the bill of Lynch’s cap is pointing straight up and follow his gaze in time to see a round beige cloud of dust rising into a twinkling star field. I am sure that if he could have grabbed a camera fast enough he would have tried to film this poetic exhalation of his car-action scene. I spent my final night watching the production miles above North Bend’s Mar T Café in the lower Cascade Mountains. I turned off the highway, drove down a secondary road, parked, and trekked in to the encampment. Up here, night is night, and in a sweeping, murky panorama of forest, mountains, and black sky, the only light and heat emanated from the moviemakers’ electrical generators. There was definitely enough illumination for the prop men to see what they were doing as they stuffed the head of a mannequin that resembled actor Rick Aiello (Deputy Sheriff Cliff Howard) with raw hamburger and explosive blood packs: it looks like Cliff isn’t going to make it through the night. Like drivers who can’t resist looking at a car crash, a group of crew workers and actors eating dinner from paper plates gathered to watch the gory head-shot preparations, knowing their stomachs were going to turn flip-flops. But at least they got to emote in histrionic disgust, “Oooooh, yuk!,” and one wag added, “Hey, spoon some of that onto my plate.” After eating, the crew, using flashlights to see with, carries the mannequin and all the necessary equipment a half-mile down a narrow dirt path deep into the evergreen forest. Setting up camp at the base of a huge oldgrowth cedar tree trunk, Lynch takes hours to film the sequence in which Laura and Bobby, high on cocaine, meet with Deputy Cliff Howard to score more of the drug. Laura and Bobby arrive before Cliff, and Lynch illuminates their scenes with just their flashlights, which play only on their faces and a few spooky trees, so that the darkness truly envelops them. Laura, giddy and goofy with cocaine, gigglingly points out some of the natural attractions to her escort (“Bobby, I found a leaf; Bobby, I found a twig”) in a drug-induced perversion of Lynch and Cooper’s wonderstruck way of seeing the world. In the next scene, when Cliff shows up with the snow, he pulls out a gun and looks as though he’s going to plug Bobby, so Bobby shoots first. Even though Dana Ashbrook’s gun is loaded with blanks, a concussion and some black powder will still shoot out of the barrel, so the actor does some test firings against a white sheet to gauge the safe distance he should stand from Rick Aiello. With a very high percentage of assurance that he will be safe, Aiello takes his “bullets” like a man and dies a good movie death. Still, I am on edge watching this scene. We’ve all seen thousands of gun killings on the screen, but to witness firsthand someone pulling out a revolver and shooting a person a few feet away from them is a viscerally shocking experience. In a few seconds the illusion of violence is committed to film and vanishes from our world, with Ashbrook and Aiello both laughing as the killer helps his victim to his feet. My composure is just returning to normal when, out of the corner of my eye in the dim light, I realize that the man standing next to me has a long narrow face and shoulder-length gray hair brushing his black leather jacket. It is BOB himself, standing in the middle of the night woods, and I have to concentrate to transform his grinning face into that of the friendly, jocular Frank Silva. It’s slightly reassuring to realize that I’m a bit taller than one of the creepiest essences of evil ever put on film, the fiend who has haunted some of my friends’ dreams and attics. Lynch concludes the first stage of this evening’s work by splattering the Cliff Howard mannequin’s meaty brains and blood across the forest’s green vegetation. And he lingers on the incongruously smiling face of Laura, who feels her own life is so devalued that she reflexively laughs and laughs above the lawman’s steaming corpse. She gets the joke of just how close her own death is to her. This evening’s stage two begins around ten o’clock as Lynch and company penetrate still deeper into the woods and set up their camera on the narrow path looking back in the direction they’ve come from. And in the scene they’re preparing, Laura and biker James (James Marshall), her truest love, pause on the metaphorical abyss-edge of Laura’s coming dive into death and poignantly sum up their relationship. This will be one of those visually uncluttered, emotionally complex two-person scenes that Lynch does so well. As Lynch’s characters often do, Laura and James emerge out of darkness, the tiny far-off flicker of his Harley’s headlight growing larger and larger as James, with Laura clinging to his waist, rumbles up the forest path and stops in front of the camera. Lynch wants to make the lighting even more atmospheric, so he has his crew rig a translucent window shade over a big light, and they practice the new setup a few times. As the motorcycle couple rides up near the camera, Lynch hand-signals “Now!,” and two crew members raise the windowshade, seamlessly bathing James and Laura in extra illumination, so that her golden hair and ivory skin glow against the rich, deep, forest black. Sheryl Lee and James Marshall rehearse their most intense moments together in the film, as she does a bravura job of inhabiting Laura’s sadly fluctuating feelings. No single way of being brings her peace, so she wavers desperately between emotions, alternately kissing him with lust, mocking him with words and a slap, declaring her love and saying “Let’s get lost together,” then coolly withdrawing and telling him to take her home. Laura was drugging and boozing before he picked her up so, in addition to portraying Laura’s fragmented emotions with breathtaking conviction in her forest scene with James, Lee makes a wonderfully subtle transition from a woozy, sexy, slurred manner to a chilly, alienated lucidity. Because the dense woods comes right down to the narrow path Laura and James are on, Lynch and about ten of us are just outside the camera’s frameline as Sheryl Lee slaps James Marshall and they whisper and weep and cling to each other for dear life. If I tripped and fell forward I’d be in the shot so, standing on a spongy carpet of fallen twigs and leaves, I try to freeze my muscles and scarcely breath during the long-duration takes. Lynch is very subdued and soft-spoken with Lee and Marshall, and during filming only he and a few of the crew look directly at them. These are actors pretending to be other people, and yet when they share their intimate moments, most of us can’t bear to intrude with our eyes, so we look down at the ground. By now, it’s after midnight, and I’ve got to be at work later this morning. So when everyone takes a breather before finishing the scene, a couple of crewmembers head back down the path toward the filmmakers’ main encampment, and I go with them. It takes a while for me to walk all the way back out to my car in the total darkness, but my key finds the lock and I look back toward the production area. In the horizon-to-horizon blackness, a bright spot of light emanates from the trees, giving the stone bases of the surrounding mountains an eerie sheen. Lynch is beginning the shots in which Laura gets an unexpected jolt of terror and seems to see something in the woods beyond James’ shoulder—but nothing’s there. Suddenly, far off, yet weirdly close in the still air, I can hear Laura scream. Back in Los Angeles, she most certainly screamed again on Halloween night, when Lynch finished shooting the film with the train-car-interior scene of her murder by the BOB-possessed Leland. Out of respect for the arduous emotional journey Sheryl Lee was taking with Laura’s life cycle, the director chose to have her enact the death scene in sequence at the end of the production process. Even though BOB was wielding the power in the scene, the night was disturbing and “scary” for Frank Silva, and it gave Sheryl Lee nightmares. But the dark, death-of-Laura vibrations generated on that October 31 were somewhat mitigated by the fact that after shooting the harrowing scene everyone celebrated Frank’s Halloween birthday. Lynch told his old friend Catherine Coulson (The Log Lady) that on Fire Walk With Me “he’s never been happier shooting a movie,”49 but the May 1992 Cannes Film Festival did not help him sustain a well-pleased mood. The film was poorly received by the audience and Lynch, reacting to all the “hostility, upset, and anger”50 in the air, fell ill during the night and had to call a doctor to his hotel room. When he walked into his press conference, “feeling like I was made of broken glass,”51 some critics actually hissed and booed. Surrounded by a cadre of friends (composer Angelo Badalamenti, co-writer Robert Engels, actor Michael Anderson, producer Jean-Claude Fleury), Lynch kept his cool and politely fielded many questions. He maintained his familiar positions, saying that just because his films contain drug use and savage violence it doesn’t mean that he condones such activities, and emphasizing that his works have definite meanings for him, but that he doesn’t want to color the viewer’s personal interpretation by talking about his own private conception. Lynch summed up his remarks by restating the core of his worldview: that studying the details of a phenomenon like the life and death of Laura Palmer, and receiving some answers from it, will not dissipate its essential mystery. From the international media’s point of view, Lynch himself was a walking mystery as he strolled the sun-bleached promenades of Cannes, for two years earlier he had kissed Isabella Rossellini on the lips before a mass of flashing cameras, and now he was holding hands with an anonymous, and very pregnant, woman in black. England’s The Daily Mail, after interviewing Rossellini, reported that she had, in the paper’s words, “severed all romantic ties”52 with Lynch, having found his “individualism, eccentricity, and whacky idiosyncracies tiresome and irksome.”53 But later Rossellini said, “I had thought David had finally relaxed and had believed after so many years that we could finally, officially, be a couple.” Lynch doesn’t like to talk about his romantic relationships, but Jennifer Lynch told me that “there was a time near the end of his five years with Isabella when she wanted more than he felt he could safely give. What man doesn’t want to be everything for a woman like that? But he realized you can be everything you are and still not be everything the woman is looking for. Things end in relationships for him for what may at the time seem really brutal or sad reasons, but they all seem appropriate.” Rossellini must have felt like the Heartbroken Woman in Lynch’s Industrial Symphony No. 1, but like that suffering character who found a glimmer of hope in a shower of sparkling space dust, Rossellini, as Lynch does, believed that “there is always some light in every situation.” After some time passed she achieved a state of equanimity in which she spoke of Lynch’s talent with warm respect, said that she would love to work with him again, and declared that of all the men she has had relationships with, including Martin Scorsese, Lynch was the most supportive of her creative endeavors. In 2004, Jennifer Lynch added that “my father and Isabella are very close to this day.” The media covering the 1992 Cannes Film Festival learned that the pregnant woman accompanying Lynch was his new “girlfriend,” as he said in his 1950s-adolescent way. Mary Sweeney, a graduate of the prestigious New York University cinema studies program, was a painter and film editor who had helped Lynch piece together Blue Velvet, Industrial Symphony No. 1, Wild at Heart, and part of Twin Peaks. Lynch had been drawn to the black-haired, sweet, laughing woman who sat with him in Los Angeles and put as much energy and care into poring over every frame of his films as he did. She was already sharing the rhythms of his work, and Lynch found it natural and wonderful to embrace her into the flow of his life. What a perfect situation for an artist, to have one’s professional collaborator and romantic partner be the same person. Lynch felt so at home with Mary that he allowed her to move into his artist-bachelor’s Hollywood Hills lair and fill the architectural work of art with cooking smells. Leaving their disappointing Twin Peaks: Fire walk With Me experience behind them in the South of France, Lynch and Sweeney stopped off in Paris on their way back to Los Angeles. Lynch has spoken of how, when you look in the mirror, one becomes two. And now, in the City of Light, two became three as Sweeney gave birth to Riley, Lynch’s third child and second son. Greg Olson/ David Lynch/ Beautiful Dark (Twin Peaks, Season 2 and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) The following week’s episode 10, directed by Lynch and written by Robert Engels (the two would combine talents on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), is a solid effort, though it does not present any of the inspired setpieces that highlight each of the other installments the director personally guided. Still, even an “average” Lynch episode has its rewards. As Cooper enjoys his breakfast at the Great Northern Hotel, he speaks of the former rulers of Tibet, known as “the happy generations,” while a cheery barbershop quartet serenades the diners. The FBI man, and Lynch, understand the age-old threat of malevolent forces that would supplant joyful Tibetan rulers and shatter their culture, as the Chinese Communists did, or would endanger the pleasant scene of breakfasters relishing good food and music, as does something in the dark woods of Twin Peaks. Indeed, Cooper’s mood shifts toward concern and fear as he learns that his former partner, Windom Earle, has escaped from an asylum. And Cooper is surprised by the pang of emotion he feels when he’s told that Audrey is missing (we know that she’s being held against her will at One-Eyed Jack’s). The agent’s tendency to “dwell on the contents of her smile” is the beginning of the storyline that would have developed a romance between Cooper and the high schooler, a relationship which Kyle MacLachlan found unseemly and talked Lynch into abandoning. Episode 10 also launched the connection between the doings in Twin Peaks and extraterrestrial activity, as Major Briggs tells Cooper that the agent’s name and the phrase “The owls are not what they seem” are linked in recorded radio signals (“COOPER”) from outer space. The further development of this extraterrestrial plotline, which Lynch did not endorse, showed the director that the world of Twin Peaks that he loved so much was not as subject to his control as he would like. As this episode scans the communicative skies, it also may have inspired future X-Files creator Chris Carter, especially as Major Briggs declares, “Any bureaucracy that functions in secret inevitably lends itself to corruption.” Laura’s best friend, Donna Hayward, is interested in secrets, especially the ones that would shed light on her best friend’s murder. In her girl-detective mode, Donna takes on Laura’s former Meals-on-Wheels duties, hoping to gain information while visiting homebound town residents. At the home of old bedridden Mrs. Tremond (Frances Bay), Donna has an entertaining experience. While chatting with the woman and her young grandson, who’s studying magic, the creamed corn on Mrs. Tremond’s plate vanishes, then appears cupped in the boy’s hands, then dematerializes completely. Donna appreciatively responds as though she’s witnesses a well-done trick, but we, who have beheld more of the town’s paranormal space-time properties than she has, know that the magic is real, a visual manifestation of the multidimensional currents that course through Twin Peaks. The grandson is played by Lynch’s eight-year-old son, Austin, who was named after the director’s beloved grandfather. The boy has the face, hair, speaking style, mannerliness, and black suit and white shirt of his father. It’s a telling point that Lynch chooses to have his own flesh and blood portray a magician. In the Lynch-authored poem Cooper hears in his earlier dream, “The magician longs to see,” the FBI agent, with his uncanny deductive abilities, is that magician—as is Lynch, who wants to see things that are hidden and, through his artistic conjuring, show them to us. For Lynch, one who makes magic is a metaphor for one who makes art. Both tap into powers of spirit and pull a tangible conclusion out of the air that wasn’t there before: As Cooper says to Harry Truman at a puzzling crime scene, “Sheriff, a picture is forming.” Cooper’s abilities may seem like magic to his fellow mortals, but he, in turn, is mystified by the deeper necromancy of the Giant, the Man From Another Place, the Red Room, and BOB, and it will be his ultimate test to try to fathom its methods and meanings. It is indeed a black art that enables BOB to inhabit the uncomprehending Leland and make him kill his own daughter. Episode 10 is the first to overtly link the two males, as Leland recognizes BOB’s face on a police poster and remembers him as a boyhood neighbor. Cooper is both challenged by Twin Peaks’ mysteries and soothed by the town’s old-fashioned, kinder, and gentler way of life, which reflects Lynch’s idealization of the 1950s. Sensitive biker boy James, equipped with his electric guitar and two microphones, and his girlfriend Donna and Laura’s cousin Maddy aren’t out in the garage stoned senseless, screaming anarchic punk anthems. They’re safely and soberly ensconced in Donna’s living room, with good old Doc Hayward upstairs, singing a slow song that could have come out in 1955, in which Lynch’s simple lyrics say it all: “Just you, and I; just you, and I; together, forever; in love.” The song is soulful, so they aren’t smiling, but they seem to embody that Tibetan “happy generation” spirit Cooper referred to. Lynch’s artistic intuition tells him, of course, that this is the perfect time to add emotional discord and fear to the scene. There’s a reverb echo in James’s sound system, so he’s singing with two voices. And, as he faces toward his love, Donna, and Maddy, who looks so uncannily like his lost love, Laura, it’s like he’s singing to multiple women. Seeing the eye contact between him and Maddy, Donna is upset and breaks off the song, and James goes to comfort and reassure her. Alone in the living room, Maddy feels the comfy space become charged with menace as Lynch mixes a breathing sound into the soundtrack and BOB enters. Moving directly toward Maddy (and us), he creeps bent over like an animal, stepping over the barriers of the sofa and coffee table and lunging his face into ours. He vanishes as quickly as he came, but we have the terrible feeling that Maddy has a demon suitor who lusts to tell her, “Just you and I, together, forever.” The next episode that Lynch directed, number 15, does indeed consummate Maddy’s terrifyingly unwished-for relationship with BOB. This outstanding installment, written by Mark Frost, conveys the same all-consuming dread and sadness that the co-creators brought to their series’ pilot episode. In this episode, Lynch revisits one of the fundamental dynamics of his artistic sensibility: a perfect home world invaded by contagion. For Leland and Sarah Palmer, niece Maddy, who looks just like their dear Laura, has been a consoling presence who’s helped fill the void left by their daughter’s tragic death and eased their period of traumatized grieving. Lynch positions Maddy snuggly between Sarah and Leland as Louie Armstrong sings “What a Wonderful World,” his words evoking the idyllic, before-the-fall town in Blue Velvet and the imagery of Lynch’s own childhood memories: “trees of green, red roses too, clouds of white, skies of blue.” As the three sip after-breakfast coffee, Maddy announces that she’s going to head back to Missoula, Montana (Lynch’s birthplace), to resume her own home life. Leland reacts with avuncular understanding, which surprises the women. But we, the viewer-detectives, note that Leland’s “I’m happy, everything’s fine” demeanor often seems to mask more agitated and disturbing subterranean feelings. The vinyl surface of the “Wonderful World” record glows white with the same reflected morning light that bathes Maddy’s, Leland’s, and Sarah’s loving-family tableau. That night, however, the living room is empty, and the now-shadowed record clicks and clicks endlessly long after the song is over. No longer broadcasting love and goodness, the dark, unstoppable spiral of the spinning record is like a black vortex waiting to suck in souls. The endlessly circling disc and its sound recall the incessant, oppressive mechanical poundings of other Lynch films, and it foreshadows a primal theme of Stephen King’s 1998 miniseries Storm of the Century: “Hell is repetition.” Across town, at the Road House bar, Cooper has a vision of Julee Cruise singing on stage being replaced by the Giant, who gravely tells him, “It is happening again.” Everything that the Giant has previously told the agent has come true, so Cooper ponders the full weight of his spiritual helper’s ominous words. But what could be happening, now that Cooper’s got Laura’s killer, Ben Horne, locked up in jail? Horne may have violated his marriage vows and any number of society’s moral codes, but he didn’t murder Laura, who he had been sleeping with. How can it be that Cooper has made such a big mistake? The agent has demonstrated his keen ability to discern meaningful patterns within clusters of seemingly random events. As a police detective in Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway says, “There’s no such thing as a bad coincidence,” but Lynch and Frost know that this isn’t always true. In a world where Absolute Knowledge is hidden behind a fog of uncertainty, it’s comforting to believe that we can combine the small glimmers of truth we see into an approximation of the everlasting Light that will illuminate our correct path of action. This practice has stood Cooper well in the past, as it has his creator Lynch, whose life’s work is built upon synthesizing thoughts and feelings that occur together into expressive artistic structures. Lynch likes to let his mind drift into that childlike, dreamy state in which the associations, coincidences, and correspondences the world sends him have magical significance; but he also knows that, of the four times he’s presented a movie at the Cannes Film Festival, the fact that his left shoe was untied has only won him one Palm D’Or. All the signs that Cooper’s read have told him that Ben Horne is the killer, so having the unscrupulous tycoon behind bars should put our FBI man at ease, but instead he’s edgy and hyper-alert as he sits in the Road House. It’s as though a kind of atmospheric disturbance generated by the Palmer house’s rotating ceiling fan and spiraling record turntable, and the horror about to be unleashed there, have galvanized the air all over town. Before passing out, the drug-groggy Sarah Palmer sees a white horse, a traditional symbol of death, in her living room. In an ancient Chinese legend, the Yellow Emperor used magic to imprison the cosmic forces of chaos within mirrors, but it was known that someday the spell would weaken and our human world would suffer a terrible invasion. Now, as Leland admires his image in a living room mirror, Lynch and Frost give us the payoff we’ve waited months and hours for: Reflected back at the smiling patriarch is the lasciviously grimacing BOB. Even if we’ve suspected that Leland had sex with and killed his own daughter, this moment of revelation is stunning, as is the realization that Leland, as BOB’s unwilling human host, has been a victim along with Laura. While we’re off-balance from receiving this dramatic news, Lynch hits us with one of the most disturbingly violent sequences ever shown on non-cable television. Maddy, smelling the stench of burnt motor oil that emanates from BOB’s murderous frenzy, and fearing there’s a fire in the house, runs into the living room and right into Leland’s attack. Wearing white surgical gloves, he bloodies her face with a single hard punch and, as she babbles and cries in a delirium of pain and terror, he pulls her slumping, gasping body against his chest and spins her in a ghastly dance. Leland alternately weeps and calls Maddy Laura as though she’s his dying daughter, and manifests as BOB, who with guttural animal sounds hungrily nuzzles her throat. Then, enraged that Maddy, his consoling surrogate-Laura, wants to leave him, Leland yells, “You’re going home to Missoula, Montana,” and fatally smashes her head into a photo of a serene mountain lake. Another Lynchian character with a will to stifle others’ freedom, BOB-as-Leland has shown Maddy that he is the ultimate controller of her comings and goings. But if he had been getting what he wanted from Laura, by enjoying her sexually for years, why did he kill her? Lynch will delve into this mystery in his Twin Peaks feature film. For now, the director makes us register the full impact of a dear young life extinguished. Maddy may have wanted to be like her fast-living, darkness-dabbling cousin Laura, but she wasn’t, and Lynch saturates the final moments of episode 15 with a poignant mood of innocence snuffed out. The harsh white light that has supernaturally linked the hellish doings at the Palmer house with Cooper and the Giant in the Road House fades, as does the Giant, but both locations remain awash in sadness. We now know the tragedy that the BOB-possessed Leland has been living, and at the Road House, Donna feels responsible for the suicide of recluse Harold Smith, and toughie Bobby Briggs realizes that his scheme to enjoy domestic bliss with Shelley, that’s subsidized by Leo’s comatose condition, isn’t going to work. Donna and Bobby have their own problems, but as agitation and pain distort their faces, they seem poetically to be responding to Maddy’s death. And the old bellhop from the hotel who stood interminably above Cooper after he’d been shot comes over and tells the FBI man “I’m so sorry,” as though the agent has lost a member of his own family. Cooper doesn’t know that Maddy’s dead. He doesn’t know that Leland kills young women. Try as he might to read the vibrations in the room, he doesn’t know what has just happened. Lynch has spoken of his characters and he himself being “lost in confusion,” and for a person of Cooper’s abilities to be in such a state indicates the magnitude of the mysteries he is facing. It is a sad night, ruled by evil and loss and indecipherable happenings, but our hero does not bow his head and slink away in defeat. Lynch leaves us with one of his archetypal headshots, and one of Twin Peaks’ most iconic close-ups, as Cooper’s alert, pale face, tilted upwards, scans the air for signs and meanings. Behind him, red curtains materialize, and his head slowly fades into them: The Red Room will be his ultimate destination and challenge. Episode 15 aired on November 10, 1990, and Cooper won’t set foot in the red Room until June 10, 1991, in the Lynch-directed second-season finale. During these twenty-eight weeks, ABC consigned Twin Peaks to the death-zone slot of Saturday night, put it on hiatus for two months, and saw its viewership decline to only 10 percent of TV-owning households. Laura’s murdered body was found in the April 8, 1990, pilot episode, and her case wasn’t wrapped up until episode 17, shown on December 1. In the time frame of the town, only eighteen days passed, while viewers had to wait eight months for the mystery’s resolution. Fans of the show were happy to absorb the narrative at Lynch and Frost’s slow-for-TV pace, while less-committed viewers felt frustrated, angry, and exploited. Without the emotional dynamo of the Laura Palmer case to drive the series, and since Kyle MacLachlan was unwilling to let his Dale Cooper fall in love with teenage Audrey (some say MacLachlan’s jealous lover, Lara Flynn Boyle, who plays Donna, influenced his decision), Twin Peaks’ various writers launched a number of lower-voltage subplots that weren’t able to sustain a mass audience’s interest. It seemed that Twin Peaks couldn’t win: Viewers deserted the show both because Laura’s murder wasn’t being solved, and because it finally was resolved. Also, since the show presented such a complex and voluminous intertwining of plot threads, quirky characters, unfamiliar cosmologies, and paranormal happenings, it was dauntingly difficult for a casual viewer to drop into Twin Peaks in mid-stream and understand what was going on. The show was indeed “TV like you’ve never seen it,” but also TV that was too different, challenging, and provocative for many to want to see. Most commentators agree that Twin Peaks’ second season scattered its creative energy all over the landscape while trying in vain to regain the intense, inspired focus of season 1. Still, even though it was firing on less than eight cylinders, the show provided enough engaging material to keep its loyal followers watching. They witnessed a Mark Frost–written passage where Agent Cooper tenderly guides the dying, head-wounded Leland into a redemptive spiritual light in which his beloved Laura dwelled. They saw scheming land-grabber Ben Horne, (deliciously played by Richard Beymer) descend into madness, recover his psychological bearings by elaborately acting out tableaus of the South winning the Civil War (reverse the flow of history, reverse the course of your life) and emerge as a zealous environmentalist who chomps carrots instead of his usual foot-long cigars. And writers Mark Frost and Harley Peyton paid due respect to the multitude of impulses warring within Ben by having him declare, “Sometimes the urge to do bad is nearly overwhelming.” Since daughter Audrey doesn’t get to consort and cavort with Cooper, and probably be prime victim material for BOB, she does enjoy an emotionally closer, full-fledged-adult relationship with her father. Twin Peaks is rife with family dysfunction and upheaval: Even the stable and secure Hayward household is about to be rocked as Donna discovers that nefarious Ben, not good old Doc Hayward, is her real father. So it’s gratifying that there’s a new warmth and mutual respect between Ben and Audrey, but how can we not miss the Audrey who cut a swath through town with impish attitudes and pranks, rather than grown-up behavior? Still, even though she wears gray power suits and takes high-level meetings in Seattle, she’s able to give us a major surprise, for this schoolgirl with a gale-force air of sexual knowingess, whose tongue can massage a cherry stem into a blissed-out knot, is still a virgin. While Audrey is discovering sex and love with the preternaturally pretty Billy Zane, Cooper, with the biggest smile we’ve seen on his face, is falling for diner waitress Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), who’s fresh from a convent where she’d sought solace from an unhappy relationship that drove her to slash her wrists. Good guy Cooper sees Annie as a beautiful young woman who he can rescue from sadness, but he’s also drawn to her for a very Lynchian reason. Because she’s been cloistered away from the wide, wide world, she now sees things the way a child does, the way Lynch likes to. For Annie the world is new and amazing, and mundane occurrences have a wondrous significance: “music and people, the way they talk and laugh, the way some of them are so clearly in love.” And she has a Lynchian sense of the balance between known and unknown worlds: “It’s like a foreign language to me; I know just enough of the words to realize how much I don’t understand.” Drawn to Annie’s innocent, life-discovering viewpoint, Cooper feels that by embracing her they can each start afresh on the road to love and redeem their own personal romantic tragedies. Cooper had been in love and having an affair with Caroline, the wife of his psychotic former FBI mentor and partner, Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh), who stabbed Caroline to death and is now lurking in the woods of Twin Peaks waiting to destroy our hero. If BOB, who says little but terrifies much as he evokes the timeless primal power of animalistic evil, is a Lynchian villain, then the brainy, verbose, multiple-disguise-wearing, chess and social game-playing Windom Earle is a Mark Frost malefactor. (As Lynch says, “Windom Earle is all Mark Frost.”9) Earle is like a mastermind villain out of the Sherlock Holmes books, whose cerebral malevolence is spiked with a wicked sense of humor and who relishes the theatrical flair he employs to stay at least one step ahead of Cooper. If Earle is an earthly spark of evil adept at destroying human flesh, then BOB is a roaring fire who spans worlds as he devours the very marrow of human souls. This is the “incomprehensible” power source that Earle covets, and which his scholarship has told him resides in the Black Lodge, a spectral dimension which relates to Major Briggs’ extraterrestrial monitoring and which is the source of the town legend’s ancient darkness. Earle’s mission is to gain access to the Lodge and obliterate Cooper in the process, which brings us to the secondseason finale, scripted by Mark Frost and chief writers Harley Peyton and Robert Engels, and directed by Lynch. Lynch’s working procedure when making one of his own films centers on the actors and technicians “tuning in”10 and harmonizing with his fundamental conception of the project. He considers others’ suggestions and sudden intuitions as part of the process, but he hews to the core of his original inspiration. Working on a weekly TV series with a multitude of collaborators frustrated his natural modus operandi: “There are other directors, other writers, other things that come in. It may be fine, but it’s not what you would do.”11 And whatever he wants to do is the motivating principle of Lynch’s art. The director felt that “Cooper is real close to me; he says a lot of the things I say,”12 and earlier in the series Lynch felt that Frost and some of the other writers weren’t striking the proper Cooperesque note of awestruck terseness in the agent’s speeches. It’s more than a casual remark when Lynch, playing FBI boss Gordon Cole, tells Cooper to lose those colorful, open-collared plaid flannel shirts and get back into his crisp, black Federal Bureau of Investigation suit. Peggy Lipton, who played Norma Jennings, notes that as the second season progressed Lynch was “no longer as involved as he had been,”13 and “tensions and dissentions began to divide the Twin Peaks family.”14 It is a measure of Lynch’s distance from the day-to-day shaping of the show that, when we total up the entire two seasons of Twin Peaks, he has four writing credits, while Frost, Peyton, and Engels together have thirty-two. When it came time to direct what turned out to be the final hour of Twin Peaks that would ever be broadcast, Lynch could not abide the all-important conclusion of the script that his colleagues handed him: “It was completely and totally wrong.”15 Lynch and Frost had conceived and launched the show in a perfect synchrony of creative energy but, in Lynch’s judgment, Twin Peaks had wandered off course, bogging down in a swamp of conventional soap-opera plotting and cerebral, prosaic, rationalistic philosophy. Knowing that his relative lack of hands-on participation had contributed to this sorry state of affairs, he dipped into his rich pool of inner vision, determined to give Twin Peaks a final jolt of magic and poetry. First, he gave his old friends, Eraserhead colleagues, and former husband and wife Jack Nance (Pete Martel) and Catherine Coulson (the Log Lady) their only face-to-face scene of the series. Then, after filming written plot elements in which benign Doc Hayward brutally attacks Ben Horne for announcing that he is Donna’s real father, and Audrey is in danger when a bank blows up, Lynch threw away the script and spontaneously created a heartfelt fantasia on what he considered to be the key Twin Peaks themes. Throughout the series, Cooper’s masculine, heroic quest has been aided by the feminine intelligence, courage, wisdom, and vision of the Log Lady, Sarah Palmer, Audrey, Donna, Ronette Pulaski, and Laura, who finally makes sure he remembers her whisper about Leland being her killer. And now the Log Lady, with her news about the scorched motor oil being “an opening to a gateway,” helps Cooper slip through the forest’s red curtains into the Black Lodge. Windom Earle, with the kidnapped Annie in tow, has proceeded Cooper, certain that the agent will come to rescue his love, and thereby fall victim to Earle’s Black Lodge–enhanced evil power. Frost, Peyton, and Engle’s script had the season’s final confrontations occurring in an abstracted black-andwhite location that melded a doctor’s office with a throne room, but Lynch knew that he must return to that ultimate seat of mystery, the Red Room. Cooper has visited this Lynch-imagined place in dreams, but now he’s really there, breathing the air contained by the red-curtained walls as his polished black shoes click on the zig-zag-power-field-patterned floor. As the poem has it, Cooper has been the seeker who “longs to see,” and here he’s met by a vocalist (the legendary Jimmy Scott) who seems to personify the Black Lodge’s secrets as he soulfully sings, “And I’ll see you, and you’ll see me,” implying that all will be revealed. The singer also ominously intones, “I’ll see you in the trees,” recalling the way that Josie Packard’s spirit, thanks to the gloating BOB, ended up imprisoned within a wooden drawer knob: The Black Lodge is a place charged with great danger as well as potential knowledge. In the last thirty minutes of Twin Peaks, Lynch gives us a profound gift by making the red-curtained rooms and corridors of the Black Lodge a place beyond Cooper’s and our absolute comprehension. At first we’re able to keep track of which room the agent is in by noting the placement of a white marble Venus statue in the corridor outside, but then the signpost statue is gone, and it’s impossible to know which way is backwards or forwards, and Cooper is able to enter the same room from different directions. After disorienting Cooper’s familiar sense of space, Lynch brings time into the mix by having the agent receive a cup of coffee that, within a few seconds, turns from liquid to solid to a viscous sludge that oozes slowly from the cup like one of Salvador Dali’s melting watches. Further confusion is added when the Man From Another Place (the dancing, backward-talking dwarf) tells Cooper that the Great Northern Hotel’s old bellhop and the Giant are “one and the same,” or is it the Giant and the man From Another Place that are the same—or all three? The little man also says that the Red Room contains the doppelgangers, or shadow-selves, of people Cooper is familiar with, and as the agent traverses corridors and rooms, he has some scary and mystifying encounters. The doppelgangers have creepy white eyes, and Cooper meets a pale-pupiled Laura, who screams at him; Leland in his sly “I didn’t do anything wrong” mode; and Caroline, Cooper’s former love who was slain by her cuckolded husband, Windom Earle. Then Annie and Caroline seem to interchange places, evoking Cooper’s guilt and pain over his adulterous part in Caroline’s death and linking it with his anguish over the way his love for Annie has made her a potential victim of Earle and the Black Lodge. Has Windom Earle absorbed enough of the Lodge’s power to be able to torment Cooper by manipulating these images of Caroline and Annie trading places, or is some higher authority trying to break down our hero’s stalwart sense of righteous self-possession? Earle thinks the force is with him and bossily tells Cooper he’ll let Annie live if the agent will give up his own soul, which Cooper agrees to do. However, BOB, and probably Lynch as well, is tired of wordy windbag Earle trying to usurp the Black Lodge’s power, and the demonic entity growls “Be quiet” in his face. Asserting his dominance, BOB tells Cooper that Earle had no right to make such a bargain. And, facing the terrified Earle, tears his soul out, which Lynch visualizes as a flame shooting up out of the villain’s head. Flaming souls feed the fire that walks with BOB, as does fear. Cooper is usually cool under pressure, but his psyche has just received two major blows: He’s been wracked with guilt over the perverse way that his love for both Caroline and Annie has put them in harm’s way, and, in darkness whipsawed with white-hot flashes of malevolent electricity, he’s seen BOB’s ferocious, soul-stealing power close up. Cooper’s face remains calm, but inside he’s beside himself with agitation. Lynch has said that the Red Room reflects the mindset of the person experiencing it. When Cooper first visited the Room in his dream shortly after arriving in Twin Peaks, he was falling in love with the young, beautiful, murdered Laura, so his encounters were pleasantly mysterious. It was a place of “good news” with “music in the air,” where the Man From Another Place smiles sweetly, as did Laura, who kissed Cooper and told him her biggest secret. And now that Cooper’s actually in the Red Room, and has, for the past weeks been immersed in the dark side of Laura, Leland, and the whole town, and has been reminded of some of his own profound mistakes and failures, the Room has become a head-splitting locus of disorientation and fear. Our intrepid, resolute, single-minded hero has lost his way, and the Black Lodge is able to pounce on his vulnerability, splitting him in two, so that a shadow-shelf Cooper cackles with BOB and chases the terrified good Cooper down the red corridors. And yet, behold: An unconscious Cooper and Annie materialize back in the real-world woods, where good old Sheriff Truman has been keeping a vigil all night. Again and again in his work, Lynch projects a sense of home disrupted and then reconstituted. A feeling of homecoming and reunion permeates the endings of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart, and now, Cooper wakes in his familiar bed, surrounded by Doc Hayward and Truman. This tableau makes the world of Twin Peaks seem once again safe and secure, as Lynch evokes the ending scene of his beloved The Wizard of Oz, in which far-traveling Dorothy awakens to find family and friends at her bedside. Cooper’s first words are “How’s Annie?,” and Truman reassures him that she’s doing fine in the hospital. As if to certify the restoration of order over chaos, creature-of-habit Cooper gets up to enact one of the simple ritualistic pleasures he (and Lynch) so appreciates, and that keep his life centered. Alone in the bathroom standing before the sink and mirror, Cooper picks up his toothbrush and paste and starts to squeeze the tube. But, with the significance of a cosmic disruption, he’s gripped by an uncivilized, animal impulse, and empties the whole tube in the sink. Then, to our horror, he smashes his head into the mirror, causing two trickles of blood to stain his forehead, for now Cooper, like the rest of Twin Peaks, is marked by doubleness. Then, to end the season and the series, we see the most dreadful sight Lynch could imagine: the feral face of BOB leering in the mirror back at Cooper, just as the evil one reflected back at Leland. The last thing we hear is our normally sincere and caring hero mocking his own recent words of loving concern (“How’s Annie?”) with a sneer and laughing and laughing like a man possessed. There weren’t many Twin Peaks viewers left to witness Cooper’s sad and tragic last moments on the air. The series’ premiere had attracted an audience of thirty-five million, while its finale only managed to scrape together six million. The show finished a distant third in its time period, beaten by sitcom reruns and a rerun of Northern Exposure, a much less challenging and daring Northwest small-town show with quirky characters and occasionally surreal storylines that some called “Twin Peaks for beginners.” When the first season ended the year before, so many fans wanted to watch the finale in the series’ spiritual home, the Snoqualmie Valley of Washington State, that they filled the big dining room of the Salish Lodge (Twin Peaks’ Great Northern Hotel) to overflowing. This year, there were barely enough supporters to fill the booths at the little Mar T Café (the show’s Double R Diner). As that last, disturbing image of Cooper faded into the eleven o’clock news, the fans’ reactions were mixed; “The show started off plain and simple and then really went off into the bizarre”16; “How could David Lynch do that to Agent Cooper—it just really hurt”17; “It’s the evil that I really like”18; “They kept leaving more strings untied—there better be more to come”19; and “To show that even Cooper could succumb to BOB was a perfect way to end. Greg Olson/ David Lynch/ Beautiful Dark (Twin Peaks, Season 2 and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) In the late spring, summer, and fall of 1990, everyone heard about David Lynch. All of America’s TV viewers may not have been impatiently waiting to discover who killed Laura Palmer when Twin Peaks resumed in autumn, but anyone who came in contact with news and entertainment media felt like they were living in Lynch’s world. Wild at Heart’s Cannes Film Festival win was trumpeted far and wide, and Lynch- and Twin Peaks–related articles appeared in, among others, People, US, New York, M, Esquire, Arena, Rolling Stone, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, Egg, Video Watchdog, Radio Times, and Soap Opera Weekly. Broadcast journalists Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer covered the Twin Peaks cultural phenomenon, and the hit daytime TV talk show king Phil Donahue devoted a whole show to Twin Peaks, CBS’s series Northern Exposure parodied Twin Peaks, Kyle MacLachlan portrayed Agent Cooper when he hosted Saturday Night Live, and Twin Peaks received a stunning fourteen Emmy nominations. Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer, published the bestselling The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer; the evocative strains of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks music haunted elevators and supermarkets aisles across the land; professional conservative William F. Buckley’s magazine, National Review, featured a cover story called “David Lynch’s Weird America”; and Lynch himself, his face half-lit with red and half with green, his eyes looking in two directions at once, adorned the cover of Time magazine and the feature story “Czar of Bizarre.” And Lynch/Twin Peaks mania gripped foreign lands, especially Japan, where viewers were moved by the show’s air of melancholy, and held mock funerals for Laura Palmer. Lynch and his art had never before received so much attention, and he was gratified by all the recognition. But he also knew that, since the beginning of his career, a fair number of people would respond negatively to his work, so he tried to be ready for the “tearing down”1 that would surely follow the “building up”2 of his public image. With his formidable powers of mind, Lynch concentrated on “what you’re supposed to be thinking about”: the work that needs to be done. Domineering Marietta may have melted out of Lula’s life, but her meddling spirit was now trying to keep Lynch from being wild at heart. The Motion Picture Association of America, which assigns ratings to movies exhibited in the United States, would not let the Cannes Film Festival–winning version of the director’s picture be shown here without an X (adults only) rating, which would severely curtail the film’s earning potential: Some newspapers wouldn’t even run ads for X-rated films. High-caliber directors like Martin Scorsese, Paul Veerhoeven, Phil Kaufman, Pedro Almodovar, and Peter Greenway were being told that they had to alter their films to secure a commercially viable R rating. Lynch says that it takes a lot of provocation to get him angry, but issues of artistic freedom really push his hot buttons, for his mission in life is to express his ideas with maximum power and feeling. Still, he knew that he was contractually obligated to provide an R-rated picture for the Samuel Goldwyn Company to distribute, so he artfully set out to do as little as possible to earn his film the stamp of approval. The ratings board insisted that Lynch rework the scene in which Bobby Peru, twisting and falling from many bullet hits, accidentally lodges the barrel of his shotgun under his chin and blasts his own head off into the sky. The committee objected to the specific visual of Bobby’s head tearing away from his shoulders, so Lynch simply added a puff of shotgun smoke to obscure the few milliseconds in which his villain’s flesh is rent asunder. The image still explodes with the shocking surprise of what Lynch calls Bobby’s “bad accident,”4 but even without the smoke, it would be eclipsed for visceral impact by the censor-approved moment when Sailor takes Bobby Ray Lemon’s battered head in his hands and smashes it again and again against the white marble floor. A moment which fully engages our kinesthetic senses through its use of hands performing a task, and which still, years after it was filmed, causes even some Lynch fans to moan and look away from the screen. Wild at Heart generated a strongly mixed critical and audience response. Lynch’s themes and aesthetics were becoming recognizable, familiar, and predictable, and since his characteristic fascinations and concerns were too unsettling for many viewers to cope with, he began to be blamed for being David Lynch. Millions celebrated the well-known artistic personalities of Alfred Hitchcock, Jane Austen, and Tom Clancy, but the dark, twisted vein of human psychology and behavior that Lynch tapped into was too disturbing to contemplate. Word began to spread that the film was a harrowingly sick and violent experience, so many moviegoers stayed away. Even some Lynch appreciators felt that the film’s narrative was too fragmented, its characters and their actions too cartoonishly exaggerated: Wild at Heart didn’t flow hypnotically and hint at deep, cosmic mysteries. But other viewers understood that Lynch intended his film to be an aggressively blaring recitation of lurid tabloid headlines, not a softly murmuring, half-hidden mystical text. They felt the director had painted a passionate, accurate portrait of American malaise, and were charmed and moved by Sailor and Lula’s ability to, as Lynch put it, “find love in hell.” Some filmmakers were clearly thrilled and inspired by the movie’s fugitives-on-the-run road trip, it’s lowlife atmosphere and raw-nerve violence and sex; Wild at Heart echoes in the work of Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, and in films like Keys to Tulsa, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, Truth or Consequences, N.M., Love and a .45, American Strays, and A Life Less Ordinary. Some commentators, who’d been storing up negative feelings about Lynch’s boundary-pushing art, launched their attacks after Wild at Heart came out. The director was accused of victimizing African Americans, as though it was inconceivable that the knife-wielding Bobby Ray Lemon could be a black man in this Southern tale. And those who could overlook the complex, partly erotic, partly violational nature of Lula and Bobby Peru’s embrace, found it easy to brand Lynch as a cinematic perpetrator of violence against women. Those screaming “Misogynist!” found it best not to mention that, balanced against Lula’s confrontation with Bobby, seven men were killed and an eighth fellow beaten up. And some damned Lynch for indulging himself with “gratuitous violence,” ignoring the fact that the director’s mayhem was integral to the plot, revealed character, and had meaningful consequences for those who practiced it. Between Wild at Heart’s opening and the start of Twin Peaks’ second season, people exchanged heated words about Lynch, the film brought in lukewarm revenues, and the director released a fifty-minute video called Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted. In 1989, Lynch wrote the lyrics and composer Angelo Badalamenti (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart) did the music for an album of songs performed by Julee Cruise, who, in the Twin Peaks pilot, had tenderly sung, “I long to see you, to touch you, to love you, forever more” as angry bikers and townies traded blows on the dance floor. When, in the autumn of 1990, New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music asked Lynch to stage a live performance piece for them, he called in his two musical collaborators and put on his thinking cap. With only two weeks in which to prepare something, Lynch had to “make stuff up real fast,”5 and this exercise in spontaneous creativity stimulated him to merge aspects of his painting, music, film, and television work into a hybrid world. As in one of Lynch’s paintings, the structural stage-setting elements would remain unchanged throughout the performance, and the composition he created clearly evoked his canvases. Out of a rusty darkness emerged vertical factory towers left and right; a horizontal pipe, electrical wires, and a high-flying string of black bomber planes spanned the stage; steam and smoke filled the air; and blond Julee Cruise, suspended by a wire 60 feet above the stage, floated like one of the artist’s pale oil-painting stick figures in the center of a murky space. An echo of Wild at Heart is present in the form of Nicolas Cage (Heartbreaker) and Laura Dern (Heartbroken Woman), who have a painful phone conversation that ends their relationship, as though Lynch was visualizing the downbeat conclusion of Gifford’s book that the director chose not to use in his film. After this sad introduction (“I can’t do it no more, I gotta go”; “Please don’t go, please, please”) we experience the Heartbroken Woman’s inner emotional turmoil as sung by Julee Cruise (Dreamself of the Heartbroken Woman) and enacted by stage performers. Lynch’s lyrics evoke the violent aspects of his films as the Heartbroken Woman sings “I fell for you baby like a bomb, now my love’s gone up in flames”; “You should’ve shot me, baby, my life is done”; “I hear those sirens scream my name.” As her anguish projects the pain of her lost romanticsexual relationship, a bare-breasted woman wearing only black panties writhes within the prison-bar-like structure of the phallic stage-set tower, and she continues her tormented dance in that symbolic site of youthful American passion, the back seat of an old car. Lynch is fascinated by darkness, as both a state of physical reality and a spiritual-moral condition, and he often announces its arrival through his characters’ words or his cinematic mise-en-scène. Here the Brokenhearted Woman’s “Now it’s dark,” whispered as she floats alone in the blackness high above the stage, signifies the depth of her grief and depression as she cries in song, “Where are you? Come back in my heart.” In her world of pain, “Shadows fall so blue,” recalling Blue Velvet’s shadowy Dorothy Vallens, the singer of melancholy nightclub songs who was known as “the Blue Lady.” Lynch’s Blue Velvet script emphasized that Dorothy wanted to kill herself and was terrified of “Falling . . . falling so low.”6 Now, suddenly, the Brokenhearted Woman plummets to the stage, as though acting on a suicidal impulse. Some men put her body in the car’s trunk and close the lid (“My heart was stuffed in a trunk”). She has indeed fallen so low, but Lynch knows that light glimmers within darkness. Interspersed with the Brokenhearted Woman’s sad songs, the director has presented images of regeneration. Michael J. Anderson, who plays the red-suited little Man from Another Place, dancing and talking backward in Twin Peaks, here appears as a red-suited Lumberjack who saws and saws and saws on his log. Another example of surrealistic Lynchian time-stretching, the Lumberjack’s focused concentration is a metaphor for an artist dedicated to his work. But, as Lynch has experienced in his own life, someone disrupts the Lumberjack’s sawing and he retreats from his task, only to come back on stage with a single lit light bulb, showing that his resilient soul and inspiration still glow. And at another point in the performance, a dead deer, raw and red from having been skinned, is brought back to life when some men pass lights over its body, with the Lumberjack shining the biggest and brightest light of all. The Brokenhearted Woman enjoys a hopeful rebirth to the light when the car trunk opens and she sings an up-tempo number (“I want you, Rockin’ back inside my heart”) accompanied by dancing debutantes and showgirls. And she recounts a happy memory of a woodsy day spent with her man that’s right out of Twin Peaks, or Lynch’s Northwest youth. The couple has a picnic by a lake, walks among the trees, builds a comforting fire at night, kisses and cuddles, feels a wind come up, and hears an owl call. The woman “thought our love would last forever,” but in Lynch’s world the wind can suddenly turn cold, and her song-and-dance number dissembles in panic as the bombers high above the stage start to drop their payload. This setback on the Brokenhearted Woman’s road to recovery exemplifies Lynch’s characteristic bad-things-happen-when-timesseem-good rhythm, and reflects the natural ebb and flow of the human grieving-healing process. Always able to surprise us, Lynch has his planes drop not bombs, but an array of doll babies suspended on wires, their hair blond, their faces charred black. These infants are both the children that the woman and her departed lover will now never have, and the blonde woman’s own disfigured and scattered sense of herself. But reintegration is still possible, for Lynch shows us one of the dolls with a clear, unscarred face as the woman begins her final song. This doll image appears on a TV monitor as the director once again stresses that there can be a number of simultaneous views of reality. At the conclusion of Industrial Symphony No. 1, the Brokenhearted Woman’s crisis of loss and sorrow is not over. She still yearns for her love to “Come back and stay, forever and ever,” but she’s able to see beyond the prison of her intimate pain: “The sun comes up and down each day, the river flows out to the sea.” Working through her suffering in her dream, the woman is touched with sudden grace, for the air in which she floats, which once rained charred babies now fills with twinkling silver cosmic dust. Her immersion in this field of shimmering particles recalls Henry in his dust cloud at the end of Eraserhead and John Merrick’s mother in her sea of stars in The Elephant Man, and affirms Lynch’s belief in spiritual transcendence. Even a hell of hurt can pass away, for, as the Brokenhearted Woman sings in her final words, “The world spins.” The small-town boy from the Northwest who’d been scared of the New York subway had grown into an artist who explored a woman’s emotional agonies on the New York stage. Industrial Symphony No. 1 confirmed Lynch’s commitment to the inner life of his characters: The original title of Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman, Inside His Head, would fit most of the director’s fictions. And this time he made it perfectly clear which parts of his work were waking and dreaming reality (the lovers’ break-up phone talk preceded the Brokenhearted Woman’s dream). Lynch’s first, and, so far, only stage production was well attended (Jodie Foster was in the house) and was received with varying measures of enthusiasm, respectful appreciation, skepticism, and repudiation. The director’s daughter, Jennifer, was sitting in the audience, and heard someone say, “David Lynch should never show his face in public again!” Lynch did show his face at the Emmy Awards ceremony in September, and he had to make it a brave one, for Twin Peaks lost in twelve of its nominated writing, directing, and acting categories, picking up what felt like token statuettes for editing and costume design. During the evening Lynch gamely commented that since he always enjoyed the theater of the absurd, he felt right at home. Still, it was troubling that the industry which, a few months earlier, said it was eager to travel into Lynch’s imaginative new realms was now content to celebrate programs of status-quo, formulaic mediocrity. Lynch’s visage may have been staring out from the cover of every Time magazine in the land, but maybe masses of Americans were not in sync with the visionary auteur’s unique sensibility. One part of the country more than any other was on Lynch’s wavelength and eagerly awaited Twin Peaks’ second season return: the Northwest region centering on Seattle. Lynch and his Agent Cooper, Kyle MacLachlan, had both been raised in this upper-left corner of America, and the eerie, chilly wind that crept through the show’s pilot episode and set the atmospheric tone for the series was filmed and recorded in the dark forests surrounding Seattle. Strange small-town characters brooded, and evil denizens lashed out, in this region where more serial killings went unsolved than anywhere else in the United States. And Lynch’s almost religious love of coffee drinking was appreciated in Seattle, where one of its myriad coffeehouses is called The Church of Caffeine and sports a Coffee Saves (instead of Jesus Saves) neon sign. In the period that Twin Peaks rose to national prominence, Seattle’s grunge music scene, with its roaring-chainsaw guitar sound, lumberjack flannel shirts, and screams of teenage anger, torment, and fear, sent waves of raw, evergreen energy thrashing through the pop-culture zeitgeist. At one point, there were more than a thousand rock bands playing in and around Seattle, and some of their names sounded like descriptions of Lynch’s world: Screaming Trees, Malfunkshun, Room Nine, Dead Moon, Deranged Diction, Shadow, Dinette Set, The Throbbing Continum of Dirge, Love Battery, Mystery Machine. One crisp fall day just before the start of Twin Peaks’ second season, a sleek silver tour bus with no writing on it except for North Carolina plates glided into this Northwest bastion of shredded-metal rock and roll. The bus whispered to a stop in front of Seattle’s Backstage, a funky little club in the blue-collar Scandinavian neighborhood of Ballard, and onto the sidewalk hopped Julee Cruise. Her T-shirt, jeans, and motorcycle jacket were well suited to the capital of grunge, but at her single-performance appearance that night she would be wrapped in David Lynch’s imagination, and wear a pale-blue, angelic dress that perfectly matched her short, Kim Novak– esque platinum blonde 1950s haircut. With her high, ethereal voice singing of gossamer melancholies, yearnings, and ecstasies, while her body was subdued in a trance of subtle gestures, Cruise’s performance was the antitheses of grunge’s explosively loud, semi-coherent yelp and frenzied stage presentation. And yet many of the young people who flocked in to see Cruise’s show were dressed and groomed as though they were heading for a headbanger’s ball. Cruise’s concert was in no way connected to the ABC TV network, but the presence of the young and the hip in her audience showed that the Twin Peaks phenomenon was luring in exactly the demographic that the television executives were aiming for. Whether or not these eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds would buy the sponsors’ products was an open question best left to the bean counters—what really mattered was that, in the six months since Twin Peaks debuted, a cult had formed around the show and the world of David Lynch. So what if the series had lost all those Emmys and was not embraced by plodding mainstream viewers? Their rejection was a badge of honor worn proudly by that select, smart, and imaginative group who absorbed and interpreted Twin Peaks’ most miniscule nuances and shared a sense of community based on their powers of observation and appreciation, and their collective special knowledge. Julee Cruise’s concert had the aura of a secularly religious ritual. Totemic steaming coffee urns and tall sacks of donuts provided the communion sacraments, and Cruise sang the beloved, familiar hymns of the BadalamentiLynch canon. To hear the ominous and rapturous notes of Badalamenti’s music vibrate the air the audience breathed was a thrilling experience, and Cruise masterfully enacted the shifting moods of Lynch’s lyrics. During the instrumental introduction to one of her sad ballads, some heretic male yelled out, “Hey Julee, why don’t you set your dress on fire?” From the calm center of her being Cruise smiled slightly and said, “Maybe next time” in the slow cadence of the song she was about to launch. The silenced man was not excommunicated: Twin Peaks was a place that tolerated eccentric outbursts, and, lord knows, fire walked there. Finally, after much anticipation, the opening, two-hour episode of Twin Peaks’ second season aired on September 30, 1990. When Mark Frost had written and directed the first-season finale there was a good chance the show would not be renewed, so he made episode 8 an everyone’s-injeopardy ultimate cliffhanger. Now, in episode 9, knowing that they have twenty-three hours to fill, Lynch and Frost begin to chart the course for their saga’s future. Fully aware that his audience is dying to know who killed Laura Palmer, Lynch begins his direction of episode 9 in a maddeningly perverse vein, with the shot-and-bleeding Agent Cooper, who’s lying on the floor, having a full five minutes of dialogue exchange with the world’s oldest, and slowest, bellhop (Hank Worden). As in a bad dream, the bellhop seems unable to register the fact that Cooper has three blood spots on his white shirt (which resemble the two eyes and gaping mouth of Lynch’s drawing Three Figures On A Stage and his painting I See Myself). As the director once again stretches time out to absurd lengths, Cooper, though in dire straits, remains true to his character and politely signs the tab for the warm milk he ordered and exchanges the thumbs-up with the ancient man. Just as Lynch had had visions of Blue Velvet’s standing, yellow-jacketed dead man and Twin Peaks’ Log Lady well before he realized them on screen, he had foreseen a giant interacting with Cooper, and the director has his Giant (Carel Struycken) appear to the wounded FBI man after the bellhop leaves. Along with the Log Lady’s log, Sarah Palmer’s visions, Cooper’s Tibetan rock-throwing divination method and his dream of the Man Form Another Place and Laura in the Red Room, the Giant is another agent who will aid Cooper with knowledge from out beyond the boundaries of Aristotelian logic. Before vanishing, the Giant tells Cooper of three things that will come true: “There is a man in a smiling bag,” “The owls are not what they seem,” and “Without chemicals, he points.” In the movies, being shot even once in the stomach-chest area, let alone three times like Cooper, constitutes a certain death sentence. (Witness Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense: his single gunshot wound is the strongest early clue that he’s a ghostly presence for the remainder of the film.) Yet Cooper, citing the restorative powers of the will, gets operated on, taped up, and works on the Laura Palmer case for thirty-six hours without sleeping. (Because of Cooper’s multiple middle-body wounds, some Twin Peaks analysts hypothesize that the rest of the series is the dream of the dead FBI man.) The agent’s working-wounded zeal fits perfectly with Lynch and Frost’s conception of Cooper as a man of extraordinary powers of mind who’s a scholar of Asian cultures in which spiritually evolved people can control their own heart rate and blood pressure. Cooper is, endearingly, both a semi-superman and a fellow who needs a giant’s help, who makes some discoveries through blind luck and is fallible. The three bullets pierced his flesh because he rolled up his bulletproof vest to scratch his stomach. And, as the Giant tells him, “You forgot something.” For one thing, Cooper didn’t find Audrey’s note about her going to the One-Eyed Jack’s brothel, where’s she’s now entrapped, barely escaped having sex with her unknowing father (thanks to a hastily grabbed mask and feigned shyness), and is expected to be ready to service “everyone.” Cooper couldn’t forget the note he never found, but what has slipped his mind is the killer’s name that Laura whispered in his ear in his dream. Episode 9 underscores Cooper’s harmony with, and affection for, the town’s people and their caring, humane values, He takes the time to listen and give comfort to Ed Hurley (Everett McGill), who’s distraught over his wife Nadine’s suicide attempt. And he does his best to defend his new friends against the relentless sarcastic onslaughts of big-city cynic and forensics whiz Albert Rosenfeld (Miguel Ferrer), who feels that the townsfolk are at the barnyard level of the evolutionary scale. As Twin Peaks’ second season starts, Lynch and Frost keep Cooper true to form, but introduce changes for other characters. Laura’s usually sunny and cheerful cousin Maddy shakes with terror when she envisions a red shape spreading across the Palmer’s living room carpet, a foreboding abstraction of horrors to come that’s like the dark cloud shape that drifts across Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s living room before Lost Highway’s hell breaks loose. And Leland is a transformed man, his hair having turned white over night (a sign of encounters with the supernatural in The Sixth Sense) and his zeal for singing lighthearted songs has increased to manic proportions. Lynch and Frost, knowing that Leland (while he’s playing host to the evil spirit BOB) is their killer, have him behave like a man possessed even in benign social situations. They cannily link Leland’s debut as the white-haired living-room singer with Maddy’s scary rug-stain vision, thus subliminally prefiguring a stunning future encounter between uncle and niece. And they introduce the theme of Leland’s eventual redemption by having him sing “We’re heading ’cross the river, wash your sins away in the tide, It’s oh so peaceful, on the other side.” Lynch and Frost show how a powerful metaphysical aura can haunt a concrete object when the wholesome Donna Hayward puts on Laura’s dark glasses and becomes an unsmiling, cigarette-smoking femme fatale type, who Sheriff’s Office Receptionist Lucy barely recognizes when she comes to visit James Marshall in jail. Under the sway of Laura’s darker, BOB-influenced shadow self, Donna exhibits a raw, uncharacteristically animal-like sexual appetite for James, hungrily kissing him through his cell bars and closing her teeth on his finger. And usually belligerent bad boy Bobby Briggs and his upright, no-nonsense career-military father, Major Briggs, reveal surprising new depths as the father brings his son to the verge of tears when he tells him of his vision. In his mind’s eye, the major had seen Bobby “living a life of harmony and joy,” and by sharing this idyllic prophecy with his son, he is bestowing a loving gift, though the major touchingly remains true to his formal, military-man demeanor by ending the scene with a handshake rather than a hug. It’s characteristic of Lynch’s fictions that the verbal imagery of the major’s happy-family vision is delineated in terms of a household and a homecoming. In this episode, Lynch and Frost keep alive the poetic sense that the whole town of Twin Peaks is an empty home without Laura, and that her spirit has not settled down peacefully. As psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby surmises that Laura wanted to die, to let herself be killed (an idea that Lynch will fully explore in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), we see her dead, gray-blue face superimposed over his. And young Harriet Hayward (Jessica Wallenfels) recites a poem in which she’s seen Laura off “in the dark woods.” Audrey, too, is far from home, and all her family clout and impish chutzpah can’t help her escape from One-Eyed Jack’s brothel. Trying to impress Cooper and aid his investigation, she’s gone dangerously under-the-covers. Afraid, and confused as to why he hasn’t come to rescue her (the note he didn’t find), she poignantly prays to the deity she loves with all her highschool heart, “Special Agent, can you hear me Special Agent?” Lynch and Frost conclude episode 9 in an atmosphere of free-floating distress and menace, a mood that is one of Twin Peaks’ key characteristics. This afternoon, Cooper laid out a step-by-step overview of the known facts concerning Laura’s murder, declaring that Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault were her partners in rough sex and drug use, but not her killers, and pointing toward a shadowy “third man” who took Ronette Polaski and Laura to the abandoned train car, where Ronette escaped and Laura bled her life away. Now the midnight hour is dark with something more than night: Audrey prays for deliverance from her flesh-world trap, the Giant troublingly tells the sleeping Cooper that he forgot something, and at the hospital a terrifying vision invades Ronette’s coma. Anyone needing to be convinced of Lynch’s powers as a filmmaker should take a look at the final moments of episode 9. The director shows us different dread-inducing shots of empty hospital corridors, with no comforting doctors or nurses in sight. Each hallway image has its own distinct, low-level humming sound, and as Lynch’s camera starts to move down one of the corridors and pick up speed, the tone becomes higher, as though the point of view of an unstoppable, space-penetrating force was going into overdrive. This incoming-force viewpoint then glides up to Ronette’s bed and slips into her mind, where she dwells in a house of horror: the ugly black derelict train car in which Laura is being killed. During the ten hours of Twin Peaks that have led up to this moment we have both longed to see and been afraid to watch the scene of Laura’s murder. When it comes, it has a great impact, for it seems to answer the call of all the sad emotion poured out over her loss at the beginning of the series. The subjective viewpoint of the hallway-penetrating force, which has been our view, becomes BOB racing toward us in slow motion, as Lynch implies that there’s a bit of BOB in all of us. His long hair flaps back from his ears like gray bird wings (“The owls are not what they seem”), and his grimacing-grinning mouth bares the teeth of his bestial appetite. Lynch presents Laura’s murder as a nonexploitive, though definitely harrowing, abstraction. In blackness illuminated by lightning-like flashes, we see short, chaotically random-feeling bursts of imagery: Laura’s ruddy face screaming, BOB raising his joined hands high and plunging them down to strike the body that we can’t see below the frame line. Laura’s now-pale face lying still, the “FIRE WALK WITH ME” note written in blood, BOB tossing back his head to scream-growl three times above his victim, emitting a chilling sound that mixes an animal’s roar of bloodlust satisfied with the pained voices of multiple souls in torment. While we experience Ronette’s nightmarish vision we see her thrashing and screaming in her hospital bed, one of the long line of Lynch’s characters who’s tormented in bed (or in a horizontal position) that stretches back to 1968’s The Alphabet. By showing us the privileged sight of Laura’s murder, (something that Agent Cooper will never see), Lynch and Frost underscore the savagery of the evil that’s loose in Twin Peaks, and sensitize us to be more afraid than ever of anything to do with BOB. They may not have tied the Laura Palmer case up in a neat bow in the first episode of season 2, but they have shown us her killer—or at least one of his forms. But is BOB such a bad guy? The challenging sport of interpreting Twin Peaks was very popular as the second year debuted, and seasoned Los Angeles Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg insisted that BOB was trying to resuscitate Laura by pounding on her chest. Greg Olson/ David Lynch/ Beautiful Dark
Lost Highway
In the world of 1993, Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer, was getting ready to launch her debut feature film, Boxing Helena. Her father had been making movies all her life (her crying voice enlivens The Alphabet, made in 1968, the year of her birth), and some of her earliest happy memories were of being surrounded by the actors and technicians making Eraserhead in the first years of the 1970s. While growing up, Jennifer helped out on the sets of some of her father’s films, and had been entrusted to write The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, the bestselling book which created details of Laura’s character, and story elements, seminal to the evolving shape of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Sheryl Lee told Jennifer that she “studied the diary like a bible” while making the film).
After the Twin Peaks cycle ended, Jennifer wrote a screenplay from a story she developed with Philippe Caland. It’s a story that David Lynch said was “sick” and that he would never film himself; and a story that, when Jennifer’s mother, Peggy, described it to her friends, they said, “Why would any viewers want to submit themselves to that?” Boxing Helena tells the tale of a surgeon who’s crazy about a woman who despises him, and after she’s in a car crash he amputates her arms and legs and keeps her captive in his house, enshrined on a throne-like box. Madonna, at a time in her career when she was interested in exploring daring, taboo themes, was interested in playing Helena, but she backed out before the start of production. Then Kim Basinger got cold feet after she said she would be Helena on screen. Jennifer, believing in a “Screw me once, it’s your fault; screw me twice, it’s my fault” philosophy, joined with her producers in bringing legal action against Basinger, and won her case, forcing the actress to pay $7.4 million for breach of contract. As Jennifer says, Madonna and Basinger had been “vocal about their bravery and how little the role frightened them. People aren’t real big on recognizing that one of the bravest things you can say is that you are afraid. I owe Madonna and Kim for showing me some colors of people I didn’t know existed.” Jennifer offered the part to Sherilyn Fenn, whose alluring, vixenish charm had made Twin Peaks’ Audrey Horne’s journey from mischievous highschool girl to fledgling woman so compelling. Jennifer knew Fenn was right for the role when Fenn “came up to me and said, ‘I’m terrified of it—and that’s why I want to do it.’ I strongly felt she could execute the material with honesty.” With Fenn on board as Helena, and Julian Sands eager to play the surgeon, Jennifer and cinematographer Frank Byers, who shot all of TV’s Twin Peaks (except the pilot), began filming scenes. When David Lynch saw the finished movie he said to Jennifer, “How did you learn how to do that?,” knowing that he and Peggy had had a profound effect on their daughter’s sensibility and ability to design and build an arduous project. Peggy visited the production while the film was being made, and was “stunned that Jennifer was so calm and commanding; it was like she was born to do it.”
In 1993, Lynch and Peggy found themselves in a position that David’s parents, Sunny and Donald, had been in in 1970: watching a film (Boxing Helena) that their child had made, in which a mother and father were portrayed in a scathingly negative light. As Lynch says, his mom and dad were “very upset” by The Grandmother’s Mother and Father, who made life hell for their Boy: Sunny and Donald “wondered where all this stuff came from.” In The Grandmother Lynch wasn’t saying that his parents, like those in the film, victimized him with emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual violence. But in his fiction he was forcefully communicating core dynamics of his psychological self: I’m sensitive; I have extraordinary perceptions that inspire me to make things; Don’t fence me in—let me be free to hear and respond to my muse’s call. Lynch and his parents had been acting out this psychodrama in the years before The Grandmother, generating family tension while going back and forth about David’s obsessional need to be an artist. Even if it was not Lynch’s conscious intention to jolt his parents, he made The Grandmother an anti-authoritarian cry for independence.
Even when Lynch and his parents were having their differences, they all loved each other, and even though Jennifer’s parents separated and divorced, and David didn’t live in her house anymore, she never doubted his love for her. But she still ached with the pain of her playful and imaginative father not being as available as he had been during the first six years of her life. It’s hard to read the first scene of Jennifer’s film as not being a portrait of David Lynch. Lynch has said he’d have enjoyed being a doctor, and we see a little boy, Nick Cavanaugh, approach his doctor father’s study door, which has a Lynchian red curtain. The boy pokes his head in and softly says, “Daddy.” We only see the back of the father’s head—he doesn’t turn to face his son, and bluntly says, “Not now, I’m working.” In Lynch’s work, his art, he explores deep within the human interior, and Nick’s father is poring over an X-ray of someone’s insides. After seeing Boxing Helena Lynch said, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” and Jennifer’s film dwells on a theme that’s central to almost every Lynch picture: “The home is a place where things can go bad.” If Nick’s father is too busy to spare a moment for his son, his mother is aggressively rejecting, striking him, not telling people that she has a child, and not minding that Nick knows she’s cheating on daddy. Sensitive young Nick is perfectly situated to grow up with a warped psychosexual nature. His father shows him how to be remote and unavailable, and his mother, who’s sometimes nude while she berates him, links eroticism with being shunned in the boy’s mind. So where does Nick turn for emotional connection and sustenance? In the world of the Lynches, to art, of course. A focal point within the Cavanaughs’ opulent mansion is a white Venus de Milo statue (reminding us of the one in Twin Peaks’ Red Room), to which Nick is obsessionally attached. For Jennifer the statue is significant because, unlike Nick’s parents, it looks lovingly at Nick and doesn’t move away from him or strike him. After Nick grows into manhood (Julian Sands) and assumes his father’s position as a master surgeon, he’s able to love people, but only in the twisted way he learned at home. As Nick’s father was with him, he’s lukewarm and evasive toward Anne (Betsy Clark), who really cares for him, while he’s desperate to win the affection of the unattainable Helena (Sherilyn Fenn), who, like his mother, is sensual, hostile toward him, and would rather spend time with her lovers.
In Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a young man hides in a woman’s closet and watches her have sex with Ray, a psychotically domineering man, and Jennifer has Nick climb a tree outside Helena’s apartment and watch her have sex with a possessive macho stud (there’s a ruddy David Lynch–style curtain on the window). Jennifer emphasizes the intensity of Nick’s Helena-fixation by having him spy on her while he’s neglecting Anne, who fixed dinner for him at his house hours ago.
Nick’s parents have died, but he chooses to live in the big old house of his tormented youth, alone with his dear Venus de Milo statue. Nick once had a one-night-stand with Helena, but now she wants nothing to do with him. He lies to her and uses manipulative tactics to get her to his house, where he offers her food and passionate Puccini opera music. Like David Lynch and many of his fictional characters, Nick is a romantic who believes in the supremacy of love’s healing power. Jennifer Lynch and Julian Sands sympathetically portray Nick as a pubescent boy in an adult’s body, a man whose emotional-erotic development has been stunted through no fault of his own. His perceptions seem blinded by his overwhelming need for Helena to be the object of all the unexpressed love he’s stored up over the years, for she’s clearly a shallow, mean-spirited, vindictive woman—or does Nick feel his ardor can call forth a warmly amorous, caring aspect of her nature that she doesn’t even know she has? Before the film presents a major dramatic development it establishes Nick as a Lynchworld guy who’s wild at heart and follows his dreams, but who’s dangerously close to being a pathetic stalker (Blue Velvet: “Are you a detective or a pervert?”). After Nick lures Helena to his house, she explodes with anger, and while running away is hit by a truck, thus galvanizing Nick into acting out his light and dark emotions in extreme forms. Helena’s legs are crushed by the truck, and instead of taking her to the hospital, Nick keeps her in his house and operates on her, removing her ruined limbs (we see none of this). Nick cuts himself off from the world outside, centering his life on Helena, who’s his unwilling prisoner. The Venus de Milo is still visually prominent in his house, and for Jennifer, Nick is an artist “moulding Helena into something that doesn’t make him afraid and doesn’t go away,”48 like the statue he’s always worshipped. And to be exactly like Nick’s statue, Helena’s arms have to come off. Jennifer’s mother, Peggy, grew up looking daily at her mother’s Venus de Milo statue, and in adolescence found the figure titillating: “Because she had no arms, she couldn’t cover her breasts; she couldn’t stop someone from touching them.”49 But Nick isn’t interested in forcing himself on Helena—he wants her to love him. Now, at last, Nick, the adoring, perverse artist, has completed his creation: beautiful in a dress as white as the Venus’s marble, armless, legless, and never in physical pain, Helena sits as the centerpiece of Nick’s idealized composition, a devotional altar surrounded by white flowers. Nick’s parents never wanted or needed him, and Helena certainly doesn’t want him, but now she must depend on him to provide everything she needs to stay alive. It’s interesting to note that David Lynch, who grew up in an intact, undivided family unit that came to feel “claustrophobic”50 to him, made early films about characters who feel trapped by their families and need to escape the physical presence, dependencies, and demands of others. While Jennifer, an unplanned child who’s the product of a broken home, made a film whose main character finds bliss being cocooned with a person who needs him every hour of every day and night. (A few years after creating Boxing Helena, Jennifer had a daughter to whom she is an attentive, devoted mother.) Like her father, Jennifer is adept at burrowing beneath surfaces. Nick may have sculpted Helena into his living Venus de Milo goddess, but this is a flesh and blood woman with a mind of her own who angrily engaged Nick in dialogues that tear at the roots of his psychosexual dysfunction. Her clear-sighted rage sees and speaks aloud his fear of “women, me, yourself, everything.” It would take Helena craving his tender touch on her aroused body to complete his growing-up process. Nick doesn’t say this but the tension of his primal need agitates the air. Helena senses it and returns it; she wants to “feel like a woman again,” and she kisses him with awakened desire. Yes, everything we’ve seen after Helena got hit by the truck has been Nick’s dream. He visits Helena’s hospital room and finds her sleeping peacefully, with all her limbs intact. The film’s conclusion takes a final measure of Nick’s psychosexual health. He wakes with a woman, presumably Anne, sleeping next to him. It seems Nick’s psychodrama sessions with Helena in dreamland have purged his painful, toxic feelings for his mother by letting him act them out with mother-surrogate Helena, thus freeing him from being emotionally stuck in childhood. He’s truly a grown-up now, who knows he’s worthy of healthy love and able to give it, so he can accept Anne, the one who’s consistently loved him, as his appropriate partner. But Helena’s pre-accident lover, Ray, bursts in and attacks Nick, and just as the Venus statue is falling to crush Nick, he hears Helena say, “I need you; I love you”—and then he wakes up, in the hospital.
Blue Velvet is one of Jennifer Lynch’s favorites of her father’s films, in which the light and dark aspects of its male protagonist’s (Jeffrey) psyche are stimulated by, respectively, Sandy and Dorothy. Boxing Helena’s Nick, like Jeffrey, takes a trip into a netherworld, experiences his own capacity to act out transgressive impulses, and learns to choose the path of light. At the end of Blue Velvet Jeffrey is resolutely with Sandy, but, given Lynch’s understanding of human complexity, might he not still be tempted by Dorothy? In Blue Velvet’s final shot, we see Dorothy, the film’s battered Dark Mother figure, for the first time in daylight, reunited with her kidnapped son and looking peaceful, yet on the soundtrack her voice hauntingly sings, “I still can see blue velvet through my tears.” Jennifer beautifully evokes this complex, “yes . . . but” mood of conscious/subconscious dissonance in Boxing Helena’s final shot. Nick, having left Anne sleeping in bed, goes to the Venus de Milo statue and touches his forehead to the marble woman’s forehead (the intimate closeness of two heads is a David Lynch trademark), as his inner voice shows that Helena is still deeply on his mind: “I’m still haunted by my love for her. Those dreams. . . .”
After Boxing Helena came out, Jennifer Lynch seemed to have a target on her back. No matter which way she turned, she was vilified. Some accused her of not having the courage of her convictions by having Nick’s physical reshaping and imprisonment of Helena be just a dream, hence trivializing and negating half of her film. While others felt that even treating Helena’s mutilation in a dream was a misogynistic sin that set the women’s movement back decades. Jennifer responded that “the only way I would make this film is if it were a dream: I want no part of a movie that condones the act of removing a woman’s arms and legs as the way to get her to love you.” As David Lynch discovered in The Grandmother when he portrayed the imaginary act of the Boy killing his abusive parents in an animated vision, Jennifer knew that she could best confront the raw, gruesomely intense psychological and physical issues that intrigued her in passages that were one step removed from cinema-verité naturalism. Her father’s films had taught her that onscreen all states of consciousness (waking reality, dreams, fantasies, memories) are capable of communicating resonant, meaningful emotions to the viewer. The woman and man who brought Jennifer into the world were artists who venerated the inner life, and Jennifer says,
I was raised to base a tremendous amount of value on my dreams. Dreams aren’t just little things you have at night; they’re what’s going on inside you. The fact that people may or may not feel that I copped out at the end of the film has everything to do with how much respect they have for their subconscious. If you’re not paying attention to the voice inside you, there’s some kind of denial happening there. I don’t consider my dreams prophecies, but I don’t ignore them. It was a tremendous gift for me, as a child, that nobody put fences around my imagination.
This last sentence echoes Lynch’s praise of his parents for giving him art-making materials and not forcing him to stay inside the lines when he was drawing on a piece of paper as a boy. Some critics wondered if Boxing Helena’s bitter portrayal of Nick’s parents as rejecting and unavailable was Jennifer’s way of sending a message to David and Peggy. If, on some level, she was expressing animus toward her parents, as her father may have been doing toward his folks in The Grandmother, it shows the value of art as a pressure-release valve for calming and dissipating the artist’s negative emotions, albeit in a public way.
Lynch’s response to Jennifer’s film was warm and supportive. He turned to Catherine Coulson, who’d been part of Jennifer’s extended family ever since the Eraserhead production days twenty years earlier, and voiced his fatherly pride and praise in artistic terms: “Cath, she’s round as a ball.” Jennifer was thrilled that “he totally digs my movie.” No matter how the world reacted to Boxing Helena, Jennifer knew, as her father does, that realizing your vision the way you want to is the true reward of making art. The film’s story was a personal one for Jennifer, allowing her to express her adult feelings about voyeurism, intimacy, sex, love, emotional freedom, and dependence. She began working on her Boxing Helena concept six years before making the film, at age nineteen, but the story also touched the vulnerable little girl within her. For as a child, wearing braces on both legs because of being born with clubbed feet, she had gazed lovingly at the Venus de Milo statue in her maternal grandmother’s house. Like Jennifer, the marble figure’s limbs were “not perfect, but she was still so, so beautiful.”
In the months following Boxing Helena’s release, denunciation, and burial, David Lynch finally felt that his book, Images (for which he began to compile materials in 1991), was ready for publication. Composed of scenes from his films and Twin Peaks, and some of his paintings, drawings, and photographs, the 192 pages contain rare examples of his non-screenplay writing. The book’s cover is primal Lynch: a color photo of a couch in front of flowered curtains, a mundane domestic tableau into which intrudes a ghostly mystery—a vertical cloud of white smoke that floats above the furniture. A sourceless something that shouldn’t be in the house nonetheless occupies its space.
Opening the book, Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through the louvered slits of Isabella Rossellini’s closet door leads us to the control room of Dune’s evil Baron Harkonen, then on to Laura Palmer and Cooper in Twin Peaks: Fire walk With Me’s Red Room, to a big close-up of Isabella Rossellini in Wild at Heart and, finally, to the two-page-filling icon of Laura Palmer’s dead face with its plastic shroud. Lynch has compelled our attention with his mysterious cover, and then Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks’ magician who longs to see and Lynch’s surrogate who, in Blue Velvet acts out the director’s personal closet-hiding voyeuristic fantasy, leads us into successively intimate rooms, and progresses to the deep enigma of life, death, and secrets coded in Laura’s cold face. Lynch has designed his book as a journey that, like his films, shows us images and ideas that move him, and then concludes with a mystery undiminished in power: the white smoke from the book’s cover still floating in the living room of his mind. Rossellini in Wild at Heart and, finally, to the two-page-filling icon of Laura Palmer’s dead face with its plastic shroud. Lynch has compelled our attention with his mysterious cover, and then Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks’ magician who longs to see and Lynch’s surrogate who, in Blue Velvet acts out the director’s personal closet-hiding voyeuristic fantasy, leads us into successively intimate rooms, and progresses to the deep enigma of life, death, and secrets coded in Laura’s cold face. Lynch has designed his book as a journey that, like his films, shows us images and ideas that move him, and then concludes with a mystery undiminished in power: the white smoke from the book’s cover still floating in the living room of his mind. Before Lynch takes us back through his film and TV career, from most recent to earliest, he shows us his self-portrait, a pale, simple clay figure with arms and legs that dwindle down to no hands and feet. The image displays a modest genital bulge and has a huge, almost torso-sized, faceless head that is half-eaten by black ants. Insects: those troubles, confusions, and bad thoughts that can plague the head can also eat away at the house, the supposed sanctum of safety and sanity, as Lynch’s 1990 painting Ants in My House indicates. The title of a 1992 drawing done the year Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was released could sum up the desperate state of Laura Palmer’s head and homelife: Bugs Are in Every Room—Are You My Friend? (In the film a sobbing, traumatized Laura, who’s beginning to believe that her father and BOB are one, asks Donna, “Are you my best friend?”) Always a man who likes to get down to first principles, Lynch groups some of his black-and-white photographs in Industrial and Organic categories. The Industrial shots focus on the factories he loves, the powerful machines that keep our familiar world humming along (a number of the shots relate to electrical energy). Rather than showing us clean, bright, new machines, Lynch exercises his fascination for textured surfaces by presenting aged equipment in dimly lit spaces where the entropic forces of rust, dirt, gravity, and corrosive liquids are at work. Decay and dissolution are built into the world Lynch sees, and he records their beauty. Even his Organic section includes mostly subjects that are not alive: a weathered cat corpse almost indistinguishable from the earth, an oyster shell, the fake bloody head that pops off Henry’s shoulders in Eraserhead, a medical specimen jar containing an amputated foot.
And speaking of severed body parts, we finally get to see Lynch’s fabled Fish Kit and Chicken Kit, which are photographs of messily dissected dead animals that are arranged and labeled on white paper bearing instructions for their assembly (“Place finished fish in water, Feed your fish, Watch your fish swim, Clean and scrub your room”56; “If assembled properly your chicken will either lay eggs or automatically wake you very early in the morning”).57 The grisliness of these torn-apart-animal photos is mediated by their being monochromatic, but they can still be an off-putting aesthetic experience: when Laura Dern was working with Lynch, her father, hip actor Bruce Dern, was appalled when the director gave him a Chicken Kit image as a gift. We can only imagine the public outrage that would result if Lynch had used a dog or cat as his subject.
For Lynch, the glistening internal organs, wings, fins, tails, beaks, and bodily fluids arranged on white paper are intriguing visual abstractions, and the process of segmenting the wholeness of nature and examining it with great care evokes the scientific methods of his tree-researching father. Like author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who, in Frankenstein (1818), wrote of a man piecing together human body parts to make a living being, Lynch is fascinated by the primal force that gives animal tissue life: the spark of electricity. An invisible flow of electrons enables us to think and move, it pulses within plants and animals and sings in the stars. It’s possible to learn specifically how and why electricity is such a universal motivating factor, but Lynch chooses to see it as a mysterious force, a poetic principle that he allies with both dark (Ronnie Rocket, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) and luminous (the Blackout episode of Hotel Room) aspects of human nature. He devotes ten pages of his book to close-up black-and-white photographs of spark plugs and their component parts, which are accompanied by text detailing the interrelationship of electrodes, insulators, and spark gaps. The words are scientifically precise (the gap between two wires must be .015 to .025 inches), yet the overall impression of this section is mystical. In Lynch’s pictures, the spark plugs and their parts are held by human hands, thus imaging the linkage of inorganic and organic energy. And because the spark plug material is presented in the context of an artist’s book, the gleaming wires, ceramic rods, steel circle, and triangular gap-adjuster seem like esoteric tribal power implements which, when combined under the proper spell, enable 3,000 pound metal living rooms on wheels to transport people down wondrous highways. Lingering in the realm of electrical fascination, Lynch devotes two pages to photographs of car-engine distributor caps, black plastic domes pierced by nine holes through which wires carry the igniting charge to the spark plugs. The distributor is another vital component that facilitates the mysterious invisible flow of electrical energy, but it may also intrigue Lynch with its form and numerical message: eight symmetrically arrayed holes in a circle surrounding a central ninth. This mundane plastic product bears the pattern of a mandala, the ancient circular symbol that unites all opposing dualities in a transcendent universal wholeness. It also signifies the number nine, which Lynch has placed in Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, and Hotel Room, and which symbolically represents ultimate truth, for no matter what other number you multiply it by, you always get nine (by numerological mystic addition):
9 × 247 = 2,223 (2+2+2+3 = 9);
9 × 248 = 2,232 (2+2+3+2 = 9); 9 × 12,345 = 111,105 (1+1+1+1+5 = 9).
Aside from the textbook-like spark-plug dissertation, Lynch’s prose contributions to Images consist of lightly humorous character dialogues that introduce the distributor and spark-plug topics (“Pete Wants To Speak To Bob,” “Old Doug Talks To Billy”59) and a 900-word paragraph called “Meaningless Conversations.” Having the feel of a stream-of-consciousness notation dense with ideas that poured out too fast for normal punctuation, this section mentions familiar Lynchian preoccupations: “several abstract somewhat hidden emotional tendencies . . . positive and negative forces . . . a vital link between the subconscious and superconscious minds . . . the much argued over proposition that one cannot tolerate the existence of two or more intensely opposing ideas at one point in time . . . knowledge of the truths behind the all-pervading essence which is unending . . . the long journey toward understanding,”61 “abstractions associated with the laws of nature,” and “the dark and evil forces which would have us living forever in confusion.” This philosophical declamation segues into passages of imagistic brilliance: “Sometimes in the evening a feeling of the type which haunts young children in the forest will come in on a dark wind and all the light will fade leaving a low sound penetrating the eyes which follow the dark shapes running for safe nests just out of reach of small white teeth.” A foresty, haunting wind, an animalistic threat accompanied by a low droning sound—we are clearly in Lynch territory. Next, he provides an autobiographical-sounding section: “the home which will remind us of the red cookie jar and the smiles dancing around it in the golden afternoon while the pipe puffs out clouds of smoke from the mouth of the father with an axe to cut wood growing on the tall mountains.” What’s surprising about Lynch’s writing is not the vivid simplicity of these descriptions, but the convincingly academic-speak tone of the material that surrounds them: “which therefore can only be considered as actual structures with two separate and distinctly different qualities as we have seen when one or more intensely varying energies become associated with the higher levels of perceptible phenomena.”66 Could you run that by me again? In Lynch’s fictions, sonic barriers and distortions can curtail human communication, and here he shows us that even clearly rendered words can diminish meaning and understanding. He concludes his book’s prose section with an archetypal image of head-invasion, in which dental disease can “fester and transfer negative energies to the once quiet and peaceful mind giving it over to strange and unproductive thinking.” Along with “people trying to find love in hell,”68 these words constitute the most concise summation of his themes that Lynch has voiced.
Senseless confusion and chaos threaten the precious human mind in Lynch’s book, but the artist counters their entropic power with properly installed automobile distributors, fresh spark plugs, proper dental care, and Ricky Boards. We’ve previously noted Lynch’s appreciation of the serenity-inducing sparseness of Japanese domestic interiors, and how he keeps his own home meticulously clean and uncluttered. And he’s spoken of how symbolically manipulating the elements of life through art gives the artist an illusory, but nonetheless sanity-preserving, sense of control. Ricky Boards and Bee Boards are Lynch’s notion of how a Japanese artist might organize the maddening swirl and swarm of existence into neat four-by-five rows of collected dead flies and bees (some real, some drawn) with individual name tags (Ricky, Ronnie, Chuck, Sid) mounted on white paper or wood. Out in the world, as in Blue Velvet, brutal insectoid energy may gnaw at the roots of beautiful gardens, but in the artist’s studio, Lynch is their whimsical master. The image of mounted bugs also contains a loving echo of Lynch’s childhood, when his scientist father took him into the magical woods and showed him trees and insects that he had labeled. There is much darkness and some light in Lynch’s work, and often a complex, ambiguous blending of the two. Images’ fourteen pages of blackand-white dental hygiene photographs, if viewed without their reassuring captions (“Next the hygienist uses the tools to scrape the plaque off all the teeth”69), look as torturous as they are therapeutic. (Lynch doesn’t state this in Images, but he had “soft, bad teeth as a kid,”and spent a lot of time in the dentist’s chair; his dental hygiene photos can be seen as his homage to Dr. Chin of Santa Monica, “the greatest dentist in the world.”) In general, the photographs in Images make a stronger impression than Lynch’s paintings. (Catherine Coulson’s beautiful black-and-whites of the years-long Eraserhead production are outstanding, and among other wonders, show us the white Nair foam mound with a black mouse tail protruding from it that indicates the Lynch-legend stripping of hair from a dead rodent is in progress.) The paintings, which in person have a great deal of surface interest and texture, lose impact when reproduced on the page: three 42" x 48" canvases are reduced to 2 1/2" x 2 1/2" squares, thus hampering Lynch’s intention to open up “a huge, big world”72 of viewerparticipating interpretation. In general, the paintings show large blackish or grayish color fields in which recognizable forms (a human figure, a head, fish, cloud, building, tower, rectangles, triangles, biomorphic shapes) are rendered semi-legible by bold brush strokes. We can admire Lynch’s compositions, which feel like undesigned, intuitive outpourings, and appreciate the paintings’ subtle color modulations, and get a hint of the works’ surface detail and layered depth, but the book format in which the paintings are presented keeps us from dreamily floating into these particular worlds of the artist’s imagination. Lynch’s drawing, being much smaller (11" x 14") than his paintings in their original state, fare better in book form. Consisting of a few black ink lines and strokes on a white paper background, the drawings have a free, loose, naïve feeling that suggests a child’s work. Amidst the seemingly casually applied lines, blots, and smudges we recognize the rough, primitively rendered shapes of a house, rectangle, dog, fish, gun, and electrical outlet that are like fragments of a world that’s deconstructed or not put together yet. With his Ricky Boards and Bee Boards, Lynch organized chaos by giving individual names to particular insects from the swarm of an anonymous crowd. (He’s spoken of feeling disquieted because many people in the world know a lot about his life while they remain nameless, unknown quantities to him.) Various words (Pin Dog Wind, Wood Fly Ammo, Fish Hot Bandaid, Monkey), rendered in a coarse, unrefined printing style, are also part of his drawings’ picture plane, but since they don’t match up with any recognizable images, there’s a sense of dislocated reality as though a child were trying to figure out which words match parts of the world he sees. This feeling of dissociation also projects Lynch’s belief that there are unclassifiable realities beyond words. Lynch’s Images book is an engaging sampler of his themes and aesthetics that shows the wide range of his creative expressions, though the best way to become immersed in the flow of his unique mind is to watch and listen to his moving images on a movie or TV screen.
During the artist’s 1992–1997 cinematic dry spell, Americans had a chance to revisit or discover Twin Peaks when the Bravo cable network broadcast the entire series starting on Halloween night, 1993. Bravo obviously reached fewer homes than ABC, but they were pleased with the audience response to the show and have rebroadcast it a number of times over the years. Lynch showed his abiding love for the series’ imaginative world by shooting some short introductory prologues for Bravo that featured his dear friend Catherine Coulson as the Log lady: she of the fire-killed husband and the oracular log, conduit of visions and messages from beyond our immediate sensory sphere. Margaret Lanterman sits before her boarded-up fireplace, cradling her log and speaking words that Lynch wrote, short philosophical-poetic passages that shun the dense verbal convolutions of Images’ “Meaningless Conversations.” “Where there was once one, there are now two. Or were there always two? What is a reflection? A chance to see two. Where there are chances for reflection there will always be two or more. Only when we are everywhere will there be just one.” In the series’ final episode, the Red Room shows us that the singular Laura, Leland, and Cooper indeed do have two aspects. And if we had truly enlightened powers of sight we would see that all manifestations of being, even seemingly opposing entities like Cooper and BOB, are each part of the universe’s single primal consciousness: the One masquerading as the world’s manifold forms, most of which aren’t wised up enough to realize they’re all the same being. The Hindu-based teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation movement, which Lynch has practiced since 1973, certainly struck a resonant, long-lasting chord in the artist: In December 1999, he said that the Maharishi was the most important man of the twentieth century.
As the 1990s approached their finale, Lynch tried to launch a new film project. Dream of the Bovine, according to co-writer Robert Engels (Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), concerned “three guys who used to be cows. They’re living in Van Nuys, trying to assimilate their lives. Trying to live with us. They look like people, but they’re cows. They do cowlike behavior. They like to watch cars drive by the house and stuff.” Since the early 1990s, Lynch had a three-picture deal with French industrial magnate Francis Bouygues’ company CiBy 2000, which financed Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Lynch thought his agreement with CiBy meant that it would automatically fund whatever project he proposed, but, perhaps gun shy over Fire Walk With Me’s abysmal performance, the company passed on Dream of the Bovine and nixed a couple of the director’s other movie ideas. Lynch’s lawyers eventually pointed out to him that a “play or pay” clause had been violated and that this was an actionable offense. The court ruled in Lynch’s favor, so one afternoon he found himself $6.5 million richer. As usual, Lynch used this money to further his Art Life and pay the salaries of his professional associates, rather than to indulge in the Hollywood high life. Lynch kept his hand in the film game by lending his name to Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb (“A David Lynch presentation”). Robert Crumb, who now lives in France, was America’s most brilliant and notorious underground comic book artist of the 1960s and 1970s, who used his artistic gifts to satirize uptight, militaristic, corporate-suburban American society and to portray the full-tilt counterculture boogie of cross-racial kinship, rampant drug use, and polymorphous sexual expression. Lynch was happy to endorse Crumb’s obsession with artistic freedom (“he doesn’t have any responsibility to paint pretty pictures of people!” 74). And he was fascinated by Crumb’s two brothers, whose emotional and behavioral extremity, their social-outsider strangeness and quirky humanity, are qualities that Lynch of the Norman Rockwell childhood has always been attracted to, and which propel his fictions. Lynch and his love, Mary Sweeney, produced Michael Almereyda’s 1995 independent feature Nadja, in which Dracula’s daughter (Elin Lowensohn) stalks the nocturnal streets of contemporary Manhattan. Lynch appears in a cameo as a tousle-haired, unsmiling morgue attendant who is suspicious when Lowensohn comes calling. In Nadja, Lynch dwelt in the realm of the dead and undead, and in the 1992–1997 period of his real life, he suffered the loss of three members of his professional family. Prop man Frank Silva who, thanks to a flash of Lynch’s intuition, had been catapulted from film crew anonymity to international fame for his chilling portrayal of BOB in Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, was living with his girlfriend in the greater Seattle area in the mid-1990s. He had fallen in love with the Northwest, and was occasionally hired to meet with thrilled Twin Peaks tour groups of often-Japanese travelers. He would grimace and growl like BOB and then become his naturally warm, good-humored, and outgoing self, posing for pictures, signing autographs, and telling behind-the-scenes stories for hours. During the August 1995 Twin Peaks Festival, actor Michael J. Anderson (The Man From Another Place) and some fans drove to Frank’s apartment and tried to get him to join in the weekend’s fun, but he begged off, saying he wasn’t feeling too well. On September 13, this lean and physically active man died of a heart attack, and was buried in his Northern California hometown. Frank’s incarnation of BOB’s otherness and ravenous evil was so convincing that he scared even seasoned viewers of movie and TV horror. It is a measure of the mystery and art of acting that Frank always maintained he didn’t recognize BOB as being part of himself. “During the series I had a rough time watching it. It really disturbed me. And it still disturbs me when I see it, but I also know that that’s not me.”
Lynch also lost Francis Bouygues, the Parisian industrialist who had championed and financed his cinematic vision, and who had visited the Fire Walk With Me production at the Mar T Café in rural North Bend, Washington, gamely and elegantly wearing an ascot around his neck and a tweed jacket in the Indian Summer heat. In the period after Bouygues’ death, his company affirmed their intention to maintain their late leader’s financial-backing deal with Lynch.
For Lynch the hardest death to accept was the tragic slaying of his friend Jack Nance, the man who labored for six years to brilliantly incarnate the character of Henry Spencer in Eraserhead (1976), hence giving cinematic shape to the raw fears and moody ruminations of Lynch’s own psyche. Nance, also, was not a stranger to darkness in his off-screen life. Before meeting Lynch in 1970, he had performed for eight years with the prestigious American Conservatory Theater, toured in children’s theater, and starred in the acclaimed, politically radical West Coast production of Tom Paine. With his quizzical, impish, intense expressions, his warm grin, and drawling speech that gave words an emphatic stretching, he was a gifted actor and a lovable human being. But Nance had a tendency to be as dedicated to the bottle as he was to his craft. As a young man beginning his acting career in Dallas, Nance thought, “This is not half bad. I can drink, and I’ll never have to get a job!” In the seven years after Eraserhead, Nance did more drinking than working. His marriage to Catherine Coulson broke up, and he scraped by doing menial odd jobs, slept in rented rooms as bleak as Henry Spencer’s, and even lived on the street for two years. More than once Lynch pulled his friend up out of the gutter, and Nance credited the Eagle Scout with saving his life, as Lynch had previously done for the illness-stricken Catherine Coulson. Lynch found good, small parts for Nance to play in Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1987), Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992, cut out of the released version), and Lost Highway (1997), and gave him the memorable, continuing role of Pete Martell in TV’s Twin Peaks (1989–1991). Nance also did solid work for directors Dennis Hopper, Ken Russell, and Wim Wenders, and appeared in low-budget genre films. In the spring of 1991, when Twin Peaks’ TV run was drawing to a close, Nance took a chance on love and married Kelly Van Dyke, the spirited daughter of TV funnyman Jerry Van Dyke (brother of Dick), who was also, like Nance, a recovering alcoholic. During the course of their marriage, Nance discovered that Kelly was still abusing booze and tranquilizers, and during one of Nance and Kelly’s high-volume fights she told him that she’d secretly been staring in X-rated sex films. With the happy prospect of his new marriage soured, Nance told friends that he and Kelly were going to divorce. While on a movie location in a remote part of California, Nance was on the telephone with Kelly when she threatened to kill herself. Their frantic conversation was cut off when a big storm knocked out the phone lines, and Nance was terrified that Kelly might think he’d purposefully hung up on her. Sure enough, Kelly was found dead, dangling at the end of a nylon cord tied to a ceiling plant hanger. So now not only was Nance’s wife tragically dead, but he had to live with the possibility that she might have been pushed over the edge by believing that he didn’t care enough to talk to her anymore. Lynch was always there to listen if his old friend wanted to share his troubles or elations, but oftentimes Nance preferred to be alone with his thoughts, out where the vibrant blue of Pacific ocean and sky merged, piloting a little sailboat with “nobody around to complain when I light up a cigar.” Once Lynch and Nance went on an archeological expedition and found, in the industrial part of Los Angeles, the mammoth concrete wall with the gaping square aperture into which Nance as Henry Spencer had disappeared in the beginning of Eraserhead. Revisiting the site that launched them both into the cinematic history books, the actor and his director retraced Henry’s steps, walking into the shadowy mouth, pausing to feel the chilling darkness, and emerging back into the bright sunlight.
When Nance attended the 1995 Twin Peaks Festival in Seattle, he was lit up with the high spirits of being appreciated for all his good work and the simple fact of being his own unique self. As usual, I presented the festival’s film night at the Seattle Art Museum, and when I first shook hands with Nance he excitedly said, “I hear you’re going to show The Grandmother.” When Nance first met Lynch and the director tried to interest him in playing the lead role in Eraserhead, Nance was confused by the unorthodox project’s “weird world and strange characters.” Lynch, not wanting to lose the man who he knew would make a perfect Henry Spencer, projected a 16mm print of The Grandmother for Nance to show him what his cinematic style looked like on the screen, rather than the printed script page. Nance, jolted by the film’s fierce, dark poetry, said watching it was “like sitting in the electric chair for thirty-four minutes!” Awestruck by the artistry of Lynch’s fictional universe, Nance felt that “suddenly there was nothing more in the world I wanted to do than Eraserhead.”
I was proud to be the one providing Nance with his second viewing of The Grandmother since Lynch showed it to him twenty-five years earlier, and before the lights went down in the packed auditorium, he gave me a big wink. Nance and the audience had a good time with the film, but during the feature presentation of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me I passed through the museum’s cavernous lobby and saw Jack sitting by himself on a bench. “Taking a breather?” I asked. The film was heading into the harrowing passages in which Laura Palmer tries to numb the pain of her torn heart and endangered soul with a steady diet of illicit drugs, promiscuous sex, and a conclusive choice of death. Perhaps Jack’s late wife’s own descent into similar abuse that ended in death was heavy on his mind as he replied, “I just can’t stand to watch her go.” Before Nance showed up in 1997’s Lost Highway, he joined Lynch, his former wife, Catherine Coulson, and Charlotte Stewart (Mary X) for an Eraserhead reunion that was filmed by Lynch’s boyhood friend Toby Keeler and included in Keeler’s excellent Lost Highway/world-of-Lynch documentary, Pretty as a Picture. As the four reminisced on the grounds of Beverly Hills’ Greystone Mansion, where they’d toiled six years for the sake of art in the early 1970s, each showed the signs of passing years, but Nance seemed truly wizened: pale, white-haired, and walking with a cane after having suffered two strokes. At age fifty-three, he was only three years older than Lynch, but he looked like he was in his late sixties. Still, Nance’s dry humor was as alive as ever as he reminded his laughing comrades of the days when the Eraserhead makers had grown their own crop of potatoes to help keep body and soul together. “When we harvested them they were the size of little pinto beans. Little bitty ‘pea-taters,’ we called them. They were small, but there was a bunch of them, and we made little bitty French fries.” As twenty-somethings, Lynch and Nance, with meager financial resources and a surfeit of talent and imagination, had crafted a film that made them both pop-cultural icons, and Pretty as a Picture showed the two now middle-aged men repeating an idiosyncratic gesture of mutual respect and love that spanned thirty years. As Lynch said “Great to see you, Jack,” the two stood side by side, each with a hand on the small of the other’s back, and made a fast patting motion. Many many pats on the back from one to the other, in the fast rhythm of the beating of a small animal’s heart. In the mid-1990s, Nance was living alone in a South Pasadena apartment. On December 29, 1996, he told a friend that he got what he deserved when two young Latino men beat him up after he “mouthed off” to them at a Winchell’s Donut House. When Nance’s friend checked on him the next morning, he found the actor dead. The investigating detective recognized Nance and said, “Jack left me with a mystery. He’d probably appreciate the shit out of that.” And a mystery it remains, for Nance’s death is still unsolved.
Greg Olson/David Lynch - Beautiful Dark
Lost Highway
Throughout the seven installments On the Air, no matter who wrote or directed them, there are flashes of Lynch’s sensibility. Characters on the show love (and sometimes nervously spill) coffee, and chew Chiclets gum (perhaps this is the gum that Twin Peaks’ Man From Another Place tells Cooper is going to “come back in style”). A woman traumatized by being on TV has a seizure in which she repeats “I forgot my purse; I forgot my purse,” recalling dying car accident victim Sherilyn Fenn in Wild at Heart (“My purse is gone; my purse is gone”). Fenn, like a number of Lynch’s female victims, had blood in and around her mouth; as The Lester Guy Show’s jittery makeup man tries to apply Betty’s lipstick before the big premiere, he gives her mouth area a similar red-stained look. The lipstick that crazily strays beyond its proper bounds also reminds us of madwoman Marietta’s lipstick face-painting fit in Wild at Heart. In one episode Betty, carrying a cloth sack, walks among a group of white ducks and says, “Who wants corn?,” recalling us of the corn manna that Fire Walk With Me’s entities BOB and Mike revere. And, also recalling Lynch’s Twin Peaks film, we see Betty wearing a white-winged angel costume, which underscores her role as a secular agent of goodness. Episode 6 finds Budwaller making a disparaging remark about guest magician the Great Presidio, whose grasp on reality seems tenuous, and whose words would fit perfectly in a film Lynch hadn’t even written yet (1997’s Lost Highway): “As far as I can ascertain, he thinks he’s an auto mechanic.” Presidio makes us think of BOB when he voices his fear of “a shadow walking the earth” and “the dog of transformation.” Presidio appears to be a charlatan, but to everyone’s surprise, he’s a true wizard who makes Lester Guy vanish and reappear in Akron, Ohio, where the episode ends with the repeating industrial-pounding sound of Eraserhead.
Episode 7, co-written by Lynch with Robert Engels, is the most thematically interesting of the series, and gives On the Air a felicitous conclusion. By now, we know that Lynch loves the 1950s (specifically, he would like to live in 1956) and that he’s attracted by the decade’s melding of two polar qualities: the square and the hip, Eisenhower and Elvis, Norman Rockwell and Jackson Pollack, the Eagle Scout and the Northwest Surrealist. We recall the artist’s 1950s childhood when, nestled within a safe and nurturing family and a reassuringly stable sense of the world at large, he yearned for a counterbalancing power of disruptive wildness to manifest itself. Experiencing a broader spectrum of life as he grew up, Lynch learned that forces of transformation, disintegration, violence, and pain do dwell inside places and people. A tension between a secure status quo and the impulse to violate boundaries and limitations vitalizes Lynch’s creative expressions and shapes the way he likes to live: relaxed, yet alert within a supporting framework of ritualized habits and controlled occurrences, from which he can launch his consciousness to the farthest reaches of imagination and subconscious inspiration. The Surrealists of the early twentieth century opened up this fertile artistic territory, listening to their inner voices and seeing with their mind’s eye. In episode 7 of On the Air Lynch reverently evokes the names Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, avant-gardists with whom he is “very happy to be a fellow traveler.” There’s plenty of chaos-producing transgressive energy coursing through the series’ first six episodes, but it’s all generated by the establishment culture of which The Lester Guy Show and the ZBC network are a part. On the Air’s last installment brings in something new: a beatnik counterculture element that introduces the spirit of art—and being—without limits. Into the studio comes a personification of Lynchian mystery dressed in a black leotard, the Woman With No Name (surely she is full of secrets). In her clothing of seamless night, she is clearly a member of 1950s Beat culture, but she also evokes the image of Irma Vep, the feline nocturnal criminal in French director Louis Feuillade’s landmark serial Les Vampires (1915–1916), who, with her black tights and brazen villainy, thrilled and inspired the young Surrealists. The Woman With No Name performs her uninhibited free-form dance to the untamed squawks and wails of the jazz group The Void, who are like abstract expressionist artists aggressively applying sounds instead of paint. Especially frenzied is the playing of the saxophonist, who, along with that earlier episode reference to an auto mechanic, foreshadows two of Lost Highway’s (1997) main characters. This installment of On the Air is the only one with a strain of true darkness, and contains the sole passage of sinister music that Badalamenti wrote for the show, which accompanies the inventor of the Voice Disintegrator’s boast that his machine could “start World War III in a matter of hours” by scrambling communications at the United Nations building. Lester Guy, of course, plans to use the infernal machine to obliterate Betty’s sweet singing and shoot down her rising star. (We note that in a 1966 episode of TV’s Batman, a show familiar to On the Air’s baby boomer creators, Catwoman wreaks havoc with her “Voice Eraser”25 machine.) This episode also reveals that hard-to-understand director Gochktck has a shoe fetish, and he thinks that the “beatnik” woman dancer is actually a “bootmaker,” so he falls headover-heels for her. The menacing Voice Disintegrator and Gochtck’s kinky sexuality establish a decidedly Lynchian tone, to which the director adds a coffee ritual (a white and an African American technician keep calling each other “my good friend” as they obsess over their java: “It’s very fresh!”), some wood (Lester Guy hides a microphone in a wooden planing tool to record Betty’s voice), and an anxious and despondent heroine (Betty is distressed because she can’t remember her mother’s first name).
Present in every episode, and introduced on the premiere that Lynch directed and co-wrote, is a character that personifies Lynch’s fascination for altered states of perception and consciousness. Blinky (Tracey Walters) the soundman has a condition called Bozeman’s Simplex that makes his visual field 25.62 times wider than ours. In our realm, he’s virtually blind and he navigates by touch and the help of his friends. But, beginning with episode 1, Lynch set the precedent of giving us a momentary peek at the world through Blinky’s extraordinary eyes. What we saw were a toy Santa Claus figure, a fuzzy toy dog, and a female doll. Blinky is an adult studio technician, not a toy salesman, so these images indicate the childlike innocence of his inner nature. The Santa Claus image reminds us of Wild at Heart Lula’s disturbed cousin Dell (Crispin Glover), who we saw wearing a Santa suit all year round and bemoaning the fact that “trust and the spirit of Christmas” are being destroyed by aliens from outer space. For Lynch, trust, love, the Christmas spirit, and the sincere goodness of a child’s viewpoint, are defenses against devouring forces outside and within us.
The impoverished art student who playfully dangled paper clips and colored bits of paper over his daughter Jennifer’s crib matured into an artist who reveres the freshness and wonder of the child’s world. Lynch began Blue Velvet with the viewpoint of a little person with young eyes looking up at swaying flowers and a white picket fence, in Lost Highway twenty-yearold Pete gazes over his backyard fence at a child’s wading pool and rubber duck, and The Straight Story’s (1999) middle-aged Rose regards a child’s pale rubber ball rolling down the sidewalk outside her window as night falls. The “child things” in Lynch’s work don’t always project a sunny mood, but usually they connote a sense of joy and unpolluted promise, as does the ten seconds of stop-motion animation the director crafted for a 1991 Japanese TV program about Twin Peaks. This snippet of film, which has never been shown in the United States, marks Lynch’s first return to animation since the days of Six Figures Getting Sick (1967; moving drawings), The Alphabet (1968; drawings and live action), and Eraserhead’s (1976) perky live-action worm. The Japanese segment shows familiar Twin Peaks touchstones (a piece of pie, a cup of coffee, a donut, two pine cones, Cooper’s mini tape recorder) happily circling around on a Double R Diner table top, while red and green Christmas ball ornaments dangle and dance above, with the parade of objects being accompanied by an orchestration of Twin Peaks music that includes jingling sleigh bells. The playful spirit of benevolent fellowship that informs Lynch’s gesture toward his Japanese fans also infuses his conclusion of On the Air.
Viewing the show’s first six episodes, we’ve laughed at the characters’ vanities, egomaniacal rants, venal schemes, general foibles, shortcomings, and penchant for making big mistakes, and have recognized them as our own. As he did in Wild at Heart, Lynch is showing the mass of humanity to be an unruly, messy, and confused lot, but human nonetheless. He has spoken of the way art-making helps one shape the chaos of life into a manageable form, and he illustrates his point in the finale of On the Air. As usual when The Lester Guy Show is broadcasting live, pandemonium reigns. Lester and Betty are dressed in 1920s flapper-era beach costumes for their big number, which fell apart when he tried to use the Voice Disintegrator on her and ended up reducing his own song to a croaking warble. Discombobulated Betty, still plagued by the fact that she can’t recall her mother’s name, stumbles onto the stage where The Woman With No Name is gyrating to wild saxophone sounds. Betty incongruously starts to sing her 1920s song, which involves the words “the good ship Queen Mary”—and she suddenly remembers that Mary is her mother’s name. Betty’s art has led her to the truth she’s been seeking, and it’s allowed Lynch to dramatically highlight the name of his lady love, Mary Sweeney, on national TV.
Betty and the beatnik (the square and the hip, the old-fashioned flapperstyle entertainer and the cutting-edge performer) have shared Lynch’s On the Air stage, and now he makes room for Gochktck to express his erotic fixation. The Lester Guy Show director, joined by ZBC owner Zoblotnick himself, zealously deposits armloads of shoes at the feet of the Woman With No Name as though bringing offerings to a goddess. Then, after Lynch thoroughly emphasizes Gotchtck and Zoblotnick’s obsessive passion for footwear, Gotchktck declares his love for the “beatnik” (“bootmaker”). Then, while perennial loser Lester Guy is being consoled by his loving assistant and Betty is off calling her mother, Lynch leaves us with an egalitarian, everyone is included, Peaceable Kingdom finale. Labor and management, technicians and performers, all crowd onto The Lester Guy Show stage. Like children playing with their parents’ over-sized footwear, they put their hands inside shoes and raise them high overhead, swaying in unison with the Woman With No Name’s dance as the saxophone plays on into the night. Gochktck, his heart overflowing, signs off with a final, double-meaning pronouncement: “There’s no business like shoe business!” In On the Air, as he did with Wild at Heart, Lynch shows us how messy and unpredictable life can be, though here he conveys the message with goofy humor rather than torture, murder, sexual power plays, and fatal accidents. The show is a decidedly good-natured work that corrals the darkness of human nature within a comic context, and it once again allows Lynch to express his respect for feminine wisdom. When everything’s going wrong in episode 1, golden-haired Betty saves the day with her sunny, asong-can-solve-any problem philosophy, which recalls Twin Peaks’ Gordon Cole’s (played by Lynch) credo, “Let a smile be your umbrella.” Betty’s tradition-revering character is also linked to hearth, home, and family-loving values. The concluding episode’s black-tressed Woman With No name incarnates the lunar feminine aspect, the undomesticated wild woman who, through the spontaneous movements of her body, expresses the flow of what she feels in the night air. Betty sang On the Air’s first love song, the Woman With No name leads its final dance, and so Lynch again honors both squaresville and the avant-garde, the twin poles of his worldview.
However, it seemed as though there were not that many people still interested in having David Lynch show them the world as he saw it. When ABC only broadcasted three, out-of-sequence episodes of On the Air and hastily ended the series, there was no protest movement calling for its return. Whereas when the network shifted Twin Peaks’ schedule back and forth and put the show on hiatus for a time, they were flooded with angry phone calls, faxes, and letters. In the summer and fall of 1992, Lynch learned that the populace didn’t care much for his TV show or his film (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), which was in theaters for just barely six weeks and lost an average of 60 percent more business each successive week of its release. The picture made just more than $4 million, which was less than its production cost and roughly equivalent to what a highly successful film would take in for a portion of a day’s ticket sales on its opening weekend.
The general climate of Lynch’s underappreciation spread still wider when, in his birthday month of January 1993, the pay-TV cable network HBO presented Hotel Room, the fledgling effort of Lynch’s own production company, Asymmetrical. This three-story, ninety-minute omnibus was executive-produced by Lynch and his friend Monty Montgomery, who helped produce Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, and Industrial Symphony No. 1. Lynch directed episodes 1 (Tricks) and 3 (Blackout), both written by Wild at Heart novelist Barry Gifford, while director James Signorelli staged author Jay McInerney’s (Bright Lights, Big City) episode 2 story, Getting Rid of Robert. Each of the tales takes place in the same room of New York’s Railroad Hotel during a different decade. Hotel Room’s introduction, narrated by Lynch’s voice, defines the show’s concept in mystical-poetic terms. Mankind “captured” the “space for the hotel room” from the undefined flow of time, “gave it shape, and passed through.” And in passing through, people sometimes “found themselves brushing up against the secret names of truth.” Lynch, in his art and life, believes that there are abstract, hidden truths that can be easier sensed and felt than verbally named. And if verities are too glaringly obvious, he will use the eraser of his imagination to keep them floating, powerful, magical: something you inhale from the air rather than read as a computer printout. Tricks, set in 1969, is a challenging piece that requires that the viewer be an intuitive detective, as Lynch’s works often do. Gifford’s tale, in which Moe (Harry Dean Stanton) brings a prostitute (Glenne Headly) to the room, where he is later surprised by the arrival of his acquaintance Lou (Freddie Jones), fits perfectly with Lynch’s characteristic preoccupations. From 1968’s The Alphabet onward, the artist has shown a fascination for shifting realities and a fluid, boundary-crossing sense of human identity, the idea that this can also be that, that surface seeing can be misleading. In The Alphabet a voice tells us to “remember, you are dealing with the human form,” while we read an image of a face (a mouth beneath a nose) that is actually a face upside-down, with a false nose positioned on its chin: Lynch addresses the human form by shaping it with his art. The Grandmother’s Boy sprouts a strange botanical form from his shoulders and, in Eraserhead, Henry’s head pops off and is replaced by the wailing head of his burdensome mutant baby. The Elephant Man’s John Merrick is perceived to be a monstrous sideshow freak and a refined English gentleman, while his benefactor, Dr. Treves, sees himself as both a good and a bad man. Dune’s Paul Atreides feels himself to be a normal young man, but he is nonetheless inexorably becoming the messiah of an ancient prophecy. Blue Velvet’s Sandy isn’t sure if Jeffrey is “a detective or a pervert” as the wholesome youth starts living life on the dark side of town. Wild at Heart’s Sailor and Lula hide their shadow sides from each other, and in Industrial Symphony No. 1 a lovelorn woman (Laura Dern) grieves in a song cycle performed by her Dream Self (Julee Cruise). Twin Peaks shows masked identities, secret lives, and intruding supernatural dimensions to be as plentiful as fir trees. And in Lynch and Mark Frost’s unproduced script One Saliva Bubble, four main characters and thirty-five Texans and Chinese acrobats find that their identities have accidentally taken up residence in each other’s bodies. Lynch’s hotel room signals that it too will be a place where one’s self and sense of reality change and transform, for its number 603, which numerically adds up to nine—the nine that becomes six that becomes nine in the symbolic, eternal yin-yang cycle. Tricks is the first project Lynch staged that he did not write or co-write, but since he co-executive produced and directed it, and hence endorsed every word that is spoken, I will refer to him as the one guiding our experience of the piece. From the first moment that Moe and the prostitute Darlene walk into room 603, Lynch establishes the theme of doubled reality and identity. Moe calls her Arlene instead of Darlene, and he says things twice (“Okay, okay,” “Right, right,”; “You, you need to use the bathroom?”) He turns on a lamp with a two-stage motion, reaches for the room-service phone twice, and is disappointed that the room has single beds instead of a double. Moe and Darlene are rather wan and grey characters, whose life force is at low ebb. Lynch has brilliantly visualized them and room 603 (with its grey walls, carpets, and bedspreads, and sparse, outmoded furniture) to evoke the mood of melancholy and inertia that permeates the paintings of American artist Edward Hopper (1883–1967), whom the director greatly admires. Hopper portrayed transient lives momentarily frozen in interiors and landscapes that connoted a lonely stasis, a spiritual limbo. The name “Railroad Hotel” is probably an homage to Hopper’s famous painting House by the Railroad, and we note that room 603 displays photographs of speeding streamlined locomotives that comment ironically on the lives of hotel visitors who are going nowhere. We recall that Lynch, in Eraserhead and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, used the sound of a passing train to symbolize an elusive freedom for both Henry and Laura Palmer, who are trapped in a hellish existence. Moe and Darlene are half-heartedly going through the motions of a john and a hooker about to transact business when a vital burst of energy knocks on the door. It’s Moe’s acquaintance Lou, whose arrival agitates and angers Moe, as he indicates in his double-speak way: “What’s Lou doing here, doing here now?” Lou, looking like a vibrant, lascivious Santa Claus with his bushy white hair and beard, takes control of the room and walks all over Moe, drinking his bourbon and fucking the woman he’s paid for, as Lynch focuses on Moe’s woebegone face and we hear Lou’s grunts of sexual exertion. A palpable tension between the two men remains in the air, but the balance of power shifts back and forth as they talk about Lou’s late wife, Felicia, and Moe brings up the Hollywood star Martine Mustique who, in this multiple-identity matrix, was really named Rema De Duguide, and who played the role of the Great Voukovara.
We learn that Moe, Lou, and Darlene are vulnerable human beings who have each suffered losses, but the exact nature of Moe and Lou’s decadeslong antagonistic-yet-companionable relationship, with its strong half-defined emotions, remains tantalizingly mysterious. Everything the men say to each other seems to have an undefined double meaning, and Darlene says that they’re playing some strange kind of game she’s never seen before. Her notion that what Moe and Lou are engaged in is less than serious enrages Moe, and suddenly an unspoken threat of violence, even death, hangs over Darlene, who manages to slip out of the room when the maid comes to the door. Back inside the room, the men fraternally share the bottle of bourbon and say, “That was close,” and “It could have happened,” meaning, we almost got caught; we might have killed her. While Moe tells a story about the single occurrence of good luck in his life, Lou clandestinely slips a wallet into Moe’s coat. Then, saying “Are you coming? . . . Don’t wait too long,” Lou departs. Lynch fades in on a shot of Moe sleeping on one of the beds and being woken by a pounding on the door. It’s the police, who find Lou’s identification cards in the wallet, but with Moe’s picture on them. As the police get ready to haul him off to jail for the murder of Felicia, the bewildered and anguished Moe repeats himself: “No, no, I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”
In Lynch’s work vivid worlds full of places, people, situations, and engaging, compelling emotions exist within the human mind. Eraserhead’s Henry can have encounters with the woman of his dreams that thrill both him and us while lying on his bed. For Lynch, dreams, visions, and intuitions can communicate at least as much truth as waking reality, and our intuition tells us that Moe and Lou are one and the same person. Moe is a cautious man with a heart condition who has nonetheless murdered his wife, Felicia, and perhaps Martine Mustique, who was found dead in her bathtub. Moe’s mind is unable to accept the fact that he perpetrated dark deeds, so it creates Lou, who mocks Moe’s heart trouble, goes about lustfully indulging his appetites and has the unrealistic, superhuman ability to intuit all the details of Darlene’s downward slide in life without ever having met her. The scenes we’ve seen with Moe, Darlene, and Lou have been a psychodrama that Moe has been living out while sleeping a boozy sleep in room 603. Perhaps earlier he did have a session with a prostitute, just him and her, but he experienced it as a situation in which the Lou part of his nature was a major player. The state of being in which Moe was interacting with a despised part of himself that was still him accounts for the curious, knowing looks between the two men and their edgy, yet comradely exchanges, and it explains why Moe angrily tells Darlene “Felicia was my wife” while Lou’s in the bathroom: Moe’s inner drama sees Felicia as wife to both the good and bad aspects of himself. Lynch gives us a visual clue that Lou is an imaginary part of Moe’s psyche when he shows Moe and Darlene, who are talking to Lou, reflected in a mirror in which Lou does not appear. Lynch being Lynch however, he suspends us in a moment of perfect ambiguity, for the shot is angled so that if Lou was in the room he might be just barely too far to the left to be reflected. Lynch and writer Barry Gifford are intently focused on drawing the viewer’s imagination and intellect into their tricky cinematic puzzle box, and this twenty-six-minute episode of Hotel Room, as we shall see, introduces a particular identity-mixing dynamic that the two creators will explore at feature-length in 1997’s Lost Highway. One of Lynch’s artistic objectives is to probe the psychological depths of his characters, so it’s understandable that he would leave the direction of Hotel Room’s second episode, Getting Rid of Robert, to someone else (James Signorelli). This story, penned by Jay McInerney, the celebrated chronicler of Manhattan yuppiedom, inhabits an urbane world of socialclimbing golddiggers, catty comments, and cutting ironies that is foreign to Lynch’s sensibility. Set in 1992, this episode brings together bitchy Sasha (Deborah Unger) and self-absorbed Robert (Griffin Dunne) for a tryst in room 603. Before they arrive, we learn that they’ve both been cheating on each other. Director Signorelli, in order to herald the battle of the sexes that’s about to commence, cuts to a close-up of a bronze sculpture of two wrestlers grappling. It’s hard to imagine Lynch including such an obvious this-is-a-symbol moment in his own work. Sasha fully intends to initiate a break up with Robert, but he surprises her by saying he’s through with her and her egomaniacal emotional terrorism. This sudden power shift in the room throws Sasha off balance, and, rather than being cast as the loser, she tells Robert she’ll change her behavior in order to keep him. But his mind’s made up, he’s leaving, and to keep him from walking out the door, Sasha picks up a fireplace poker and smashes in the back of his head (cut to a still larger close-up of the sculpted wrestlers). In a dark variation on the classic screwball comedy theme of a couple’s verbal and physical combat actually being an expression of their affection for each other, Sasha says “You really hurt me,” Robert apologizes, and they start to kiss passionately. The only problem is that the contents of his head just won’t stop seeping out onto the tasteful beige carpet. This, their final, perverse embrace is the closest thing to love one can find in the mean-spirited world of Getting Rid of Robert, which serves as a black-comedy social-satire interlude before Lynch concludes Hotel Room with the masterful Blackout. Lynch’s direction of Barry Gifford’s story, like Getting Rid of Robert, also presents a couple under emotional duress, but unlike the Jay MacInerney– James Signorelli entry, Blackout employs a hypnotic stylistic simplicity that gently reveals the deep-rooted cause of its lovers’ disquietude. It’s a hot, muggy night in 1936, and all the lights are out in New York City. Danny (Crispin Glover), a young man from a small Oklahoma town, brings Chinese food back to room 603, where his wife, Diane (Alicia Witt), waits for his return with just a few candles glimmering in the black air surrounding her. Beyond this tale’s literal darkness, Blackout explores the primarily Lynchian theme of the absence of light in the human soul. When we first see Diane, she’s holding her hand over her eyes to shield them from Danny’s bright flashlight beam, but she’s also trying to keep a past horror from registering and being retained in her mind’s eye. It’s immediately clear to us that something is not right with Diane; her grasp of reality is tenuous as she muddles the time scheme of events in her and Danny’s seventeen married years and wonders if he’s been speaking Chinese and if it’s a Chinese doctor she’ll be seeing tomorrow, to which her patient husband replies, “The only thing Chinese is this food. Danny speaks slowly, carefully choosing his words as he talks to Diane, as though he’s speaking to a child; and with her almost plump, smooth, fleshy face and full lips, she suggests a very young, innocent person new to the grown-up world, yet her wide, unblinking eyes are haunted by too much experience. In the eerie darkness, Danny looks at his wife as he talks to her, but her gaze trails off into her own inner reality: She’s one of Lynch’s living mysteries who commands our attention as we try to understand and soothe her. The first nine minutes of the half-hour Blackout are a textbook example of the director’s ability to create a floating, mesmerizing journey for the viewer. We’re entranced by the two people speaking softly, cryptically in the blackened room, their words almost subliminally supported by Angelo Badalamenti’s spellbound musical tones. We’re gripped by the ancient power of storytelling as Diane speaks of walking by the black waters of a nocturnal lake (Did this really happen; is it a dream she had?). Then, after pausing for a rapt sixteen seconds, she says, “I saw you on the other side of the lake,”—and suddenly screams out, “And I shouted, Danny, Danny, but it wasn’t you.” Diane’s panicky outburst shows the severity of her psychological torment, and we feel the terror of a woman wandering like a lost child within her own mind. But Lynch, by having Diane suddenly half-rise from the stable sitting position she’s established, and lurch toward Danny as she screams his name, makes us fear Diane herself: She becomes a startling presence of true Otherness. The fearsome spectacle of Diane’s mental anguish gives a full measure of the burden Danny gladly, but wearily bears in living with and trying to help this woman he loves so much. Like a detective, he tries to decipher the clues of dislocated sentences and strange images she presents so that he can map a pattern of cogent narrative that will help guide her home. One of Lynch’s “special people”27 with an extraordinary consciousness, Diane has visions that are at once mystical, poetic, and reality based. She speaks of a Chinese fish that jumped up from the black waters of a lake and spoke to her of Danny and their “five perfect girls.” We, like Danny, see that the Chinese fish comes from their earlier talk about Chinese food, and the nighttime lake setting recalls the many evenings they spent at Lake Osage back home. But what of the five girls, for Diane insists, “Danny, these are our children; don’t you recognize them?” Gently, he leads her back to the terrible truth she’s trying so hard to separate herself from through dissociative denial and fantasy. The couple once had a child, a baby boy they nicknamed Danbug, who drowned in Lake Osage while they were preoccupied making love on the shore. What tragedy, to have the loving act of intimacy that produced their child also metaphorically snuff out its present and future. This trauma was compounded by the pitiless attitude of townsfolk who said Diane wasn’t responsible enough to mother children, and the medical fact that she could never have any more. So, her vision of her and Danny’s five girls was both a healthy rebuke to their neighbors’ condemnatory stance and a sad defiance of her physical inability to conceive again. Diane felt that the whole unspeakable mess “stuck in my brain like a knife” (still another Lynchian head trauma), thus distorting her rational thought process. Pain, sorrow, and shame are her constant companions, even though she tries to bury them beneath her conscious mind, and Lynch stages a beautiful poetic association between the thought of Diane and Danny’s drowned baby and the blackness-reflecting mirror in Room 603 which, framed left and right by two burning white candles, is like an altar to their loss. Barry Gifford’s spare writing, Lynch’s economical, unshowy direction, and the subdued performances of Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt present this highly emotional material in an unsentimental, Midwestern-dry idiom that gives certain dramatic moments great force—as when the almost otherworldly Diane jerks her hand out to touch Danny’s shoulder and says, “I couldn’t live without you, Danny, I . . . I really couldn’t.” Diane felt that the whole unspeakable mess “stuck in my brain like a knife” (still another Lynchian head trauma), thus distorting her rational thought process. Pain, sorrow, and shame are her constant companions, even though she tries to bury them beneath her conscious mind, and Lynch stages a beautiful poetic association between the thought of Diane and Danny’s drowned baby and the blackness-reflecting mirror in Room 603 which, framed left and right by two burning white candles, is like an altar to their loss. Barry Gifford’s spare writing, Lynch’s economical, unshowy direction, and the subdued performances of Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt present this highly emotional material in an unsentimental, Midwestern-dry idiom that gives certain dramatic moments great force—as when the almost otherworldly Diane jerks her hand out to touch Danny’s shoulder and says, “I couldn’t live without you, Danny, I . . . I really couldn’t.” The couple can never produce another child, but Danny labors day and night to achieve the rebirth of his wife, to bring the mind and body he loves into a healthy balance and restore Diane to herself and to him. He’s tried as hard as he can to find the bright side of their travails, but he feels desperate and “useless.” He’s afraid that part of her wants to keep wandering in the dark, for she says of their blacked-out hotel room, “I could get used to this.” Danny knows that she already has. Still, maybe the New York doctor can work miracles. Like so many of the people in Lynch’s work, Diane and Danny are in danger of being overwhelmed by a world of trouble and confusion: They are in need of deliverance and grace. Now, on top of everything else, Diane has a burning fever, but she wants Danny to kiss her anyway as she lies on the bed. He hasn’t been afraid to confront the dis-ease of her mind, and he doesn’t shy away from her body, leaning down to touch his lips to hers. Their kiss signifies the reestablishment of the erotic circuit between them that was sundered by the death of their love’s child—and at this moment, the lights come on. Even the bed headboard’s carved art-nouveau plant forms, which are now illuminated, herald growth and renewal. Like tender shoots turning toward the nurturing light, Danny pulls Diane off her sickbed and to the window, where their faces glow with reflected brilliance. He says, “Look, Di, the whole city’s lit up,” and, her smile mirroring his, she says the word that has brought light to her world like a benediction: “Danny!”
This ending, in which rays of transcendent love brighten benighted lives with an exaltation of hope, is spiritual kin to the conclusion of The Grandmother, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and On the Air, and speaks to Lynch’s optimistic belief in the intervening power of goodness. Danny and Diane’s illumination especially recalls the moment in Blue Velvet when Jeffrey, having extinguished Frank Booth’s evil energy with a bullet, pauses with his loving Sandy in an apartment hallway. Like Danny and Diane, they kiss beneath the glow of a regular ceiling-mounted light source, but as Lynch fades the scenes in both films, he bathes his lovers in a supernaturally bright, poetic light that comes from all directions at once.
Hotel Room displayed Lynch’s ability to compellingly direct material bounded by the parameters of a single stage set, as in one of those special stage-curtained areas within his other films and artworks, where certain moments and dramas are given special attention. The HBO program also found Lynch exploring favorite, primal themes like the fluidity of human identity and the conjunction between anxiety, eroticism, and death. Lynch and his co-producer, Monty Montgomery, conceived Hotel Room as an ongoing series, but HBO confined it to the one, low-rated installment. In a period of just seven months, Lynch had to cope with the fact that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, On the Air, and Hotel Room were deemed to be critical and financial failures. Naturally, it was painful to have work he put so much of himself into rejected by the masses who had celebrated him not so long ago. But, following the lead of many of his fictions, he philosophically concluded that rebirth follows death, and set about bringing himself back to creative life. Instead of feeling trapped and blocked, he realized that he had the freedom and the expressive talent to travel some avenues other than feature films and television shows.
In the five years between Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and Lost Highway (1997), Lynch felt honored to exhibit his paintings, drawings, and photographs in solo shows at galleries, museums, and city halls in Valencia, Spain; Paris; twice in Los Angeles; and in four Japanese cities including Tokyo. Despite his meager performance in the film-revenue grosses department, his reputation as a cinematic artist remained high. Prestigious international firms sought him out to shoot their commercials, which helped maintain a positive cash flow for Lynch, Mary Sweeney, and little Riley, and kept Asymmetrical Productions, housed in a compact former home next to his own Hollywood Hills abode, busy.
It’s fascinating to see how the director’s advertisements bear the brand of Lynch as well as the name of the particular product. In “Opium” for Yves Saint Laurent, he emphasizes the dreamy interior of a private sensual experience by gliding his camera into the black opening of a perfume bottle and dissolving through a wavy dark curtain of Asian plum blossoms, to focus in close-up on a woman titling her head back with eyes closed and touching her perfumed fingers to her throat as Angelo Badalamenti’s music climaxes. For Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume, Lynch interpreted four short, romance-themed quotes from the fictions of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and Gustave Flaubert, and he managed to work Twin Peaks actors Heather Graham, Lara Flynn Boyle, and James Marshall into his mix. A couple kisses against a field of stars, a pining lover’s eye fills with a huge tear as lightning flashes, we hear a wind of mystery, and, as we’ve seen so often in Lynch’s work, lovers touch and hold each other’s faces as they kiss (D. H. Lawrence: “To gather him in by touch”). The artist’s love of Southern California’s modern architecture is even in evidence, as we note the Mayan brick walls of a Los Angeles Frank Lloyd Wright house behind the Obsession bottle. Mystery and revelation permeate Lynch’s work, and in “Reveal,” for the American Cancer Society, a pleasant-looking sixty-year-old woman with a neutral expression strips to her brassiere to encourage older women to have mammograms, her blouse’s mother-of-pearls buttons reflecting the brilliant blue of her eyes. “The Wall” for Adidas athletic shoes shows a male runner’s head distorting as he strains at his task and, via a close-up of his ear, we go inside to see his red-pink cells laboring hard. Lynch dives his camera down the man’s screaming throat, where fires burn and, after the runner bursts through a literal wall, he serenely strides along in the clouds. Another Lynchian character has persevered and gone from hell to heaven. A young woman’s head floats in the clouds after “breaking free” from her cold, thanks to Alka-Seltzer Plus. And in “Sun, Moon, Stars” (for Karl Lagerfeld’s new perfume), Darryl Hannah is in two places at once, both dreamily wishing while looking skyward, and floating among the stars, her pale hair and dress streaming in a gorgeous flow of celestial images that dissolve from one to the next. Lynch employs earthier motifs in “Instinct of Life,” which heralds Jil Sanders’ masculine eau de toilette fragrance. We see the director’s favorite red curtains, a candle blowing out in a Now-It’s-Dark moment, and the linkage of human and bestial energy as a man and a black panther race through the night. favorite red curtains, a candle blowing out in a Now-It’s-Dark moment, and the linkage of human and bestial energy as a man and a black panther race through the night. The extended, sixty-second commercial Lynch filmed for Giorgio Armani’s perfume Gio is the director’s personal favorite, and it contains this apolitical artist’s most blatant political statement. Lynch has lived in Los Angeles since 1970, and he dearly loves his adopted hometown, but his acute perceptions can’t help but notice its troubling fault lines. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fear and animosity clouded the air as racial tensions approached the flash point. Gang warfare and drive-by shootings were commonplace; many Asians, African Americans, and whites regarded each other with mistrust. The police beating of black motorist Rodney King reinforced prejudices on both sides of the color line, and the trial of the officers who wielded the clubs galvanized intense emotions. It was during this time of charged racial feelings that Lynch shot the Armani commercial (in black and white), which is driven by the question “Who is Gio?”
Another Lynchian woman of mystery, she moves in a social circle of wealth and taste, turning heads wherever she goes, being photographed by the paparazzi, and kissing various men. Universally adored, she seems to have it all, but her moody eyes often gaze right or left out beyond her immediate environment, looking for something more to complete her life, or perhaps seeing something she’s trying to forget. She often wears a subdued expression, but she really comes alive in an extended music club sequence in which, as Lynch says, “all races and religions are getting along so fantastically.”30 Gio and a huge multiethnic group of musicians, dancers, and photographers all swing and sway to a hot salsa beat in a production number of harmonized opposites that recalls On the Air’s big beatnik-shoe-dance-number finale that unified the disparate factions of the Zoblotnick Broadcasting Company. Ironically, Lynch shot his Gio dance scene, which anticipates the spirit of Rodney King’s famous and haunting question, “Can’t we all just get along?,” on the very night that the L.A. riots broke out. Earlier in the day, the California judicial system dismissed the men who beat King with a slap on the wrist, and by nightfall there was rampant looting and property destruction in the ghettos of the South Central neighborhoods. What Lynch calls “the strangeness”31 quickly spread around town and soon “they were setting fire to Hollywood Boulevard”32 and there were “five thousand fires burning.”33 The artist has spoken of how he found the “drastically out of control”34 feeling of the L.A. unrest “very unnerving.”35 Lynch’s art tells us how deeply he understands the human capacity for physical and emotional violence, but to see so many people acting out their darkest impulses was a very scary and saddening sight. In the middle of his commercial’s happy dance, Lynch cast a brooding shadow over the scene, as Angelo Badalamenti’s synthesizer strikes a somber note and Gio’s wistful gaze, for the first time, looks right at us. When evoking Gio’s melancholy, Lynch may have had the real-life supermodel Gia Carangi (1960–1986), at one time a $10,000-a-day Vogue model, in mind. An international fashion- and party-world sensation, Gia was wracked with emotional pain, slid into heroin addiction, and was one of the first American women to die of AIDS.
Lynch revisited the world of Twin Peaks in four thirty-second commercials for Japan’s popular Georgia Coffee. Only shown in Japan, each segment works as an independent episode in which Agent Cooper enthusiastically endorses pop-top cans of Georgia Coffee and gives a hearty thumbs-up gesture. Taken together, the four segments tell a story about Cooper’s efforts to locate Isami, a missing young Japanese woman, and reunite her with her boyfriend, Ken. Cooper’s investigation is aided by the TV series’ Officer Hawk, Deputy Andy, receptionist Lucy, and the Log Lady, and the segments include familiar motifs such as cherry pie, Cooper saying “Damn fine coffee,” a taxidermy deer head on a conference table, and the Log Lady switching the lights on and off. Lynch was concerned that portraying the Twin Peaks realm in a light-hearted vein might destroy its somber, hypnotic magic, but Cooper manages to give us a dark thrill when, surrounded by a nocturnal forest, he soberly intones, “The Black Lodge is not in this world.”
Greg Olson/David Lynch - Beautiful Dark
Lost Highway
In mid-to-late 1990, when Twin Peaks had the world fascinated and David Lynch appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the “Czar of Bizarre,” his creative partner, Mark Frost, observed that the rest of us had finally caught up with Lynch’s quirky sensibility and were in sync with it. However, the hostile and indifferent responses to the director’s 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me showed just how quickly the majority of Lynch watchers could change direction and revile and reject his deeply felt artistry.
In our flavor-of-the-month culture, home of the incredibly shrinking attention span, our ears are filled with blaring sound bites, our eyes and brains made dizzy by assaultive images edited at quantum speed. We build up celebrities, worship them, then reject them in record time. By the summer of 1992, Lynch was no longer “a hot topic” in the public mind, but it was nonetheless shocking that Time, Newsweek, and the popular TV filmreview show Siskel and Ebert at the Movies did not deign to say one word about Lynch’s new film. Some critics, however, did have plenty to say, the majority of which was resoundingly negative. Roger Ebert, writing about Fire Walk With Me after seeing it at Cannes, called it a “shockingly bad film, simple-minded and scornful of the audience.” People magazine’s Tom Gliatto characterized it as “a nauseating bucket of slop.” Interview viewed it as “an ill-structured, lurid, shock-crazy prequel to a once-popular saga. This is torture.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman judged the movie to be “a true folly—almost nothing in it adds up.” And the esteemed Vincent Canby of the New York Times added it up thusly: “It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be.” Some reviewers, such as David Baron of New Orleans’ The Times-Picayune, attacked Lynch as fervently as they did his film: “This is the latest lurid monstrosity by the nation’s most repellant director. It is as gratuitous as it is ugly,” containing “sophomoric insights” that reveal only “the banality of Lynch’s vision.” Al Strobel, who plays BOB’s one-armed former consort, Mike, has an eloquent response to the attack-dog critics. “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is hard to look at if you’re not prepared to look at a work of art. It’s like going to a gallery and seeing extremely expressionistic paintings when you were expecting English landscapes. This was more a piece of art than a movie. The juxtaposition of horror and beauty has an elevating sense that brings out things in your mind and in your heart and in your soul like a very fine piece of art does. The critics didn’t see that, and that makes me angry.” No one in our Christian-majority society even gave Lynch credit for having a biblical angel figure prominently in his film, as he presciently anticipated the angel-adoring pop-culture trend that culminated in the Broadway hit Angels in America, TV’s Touched By An Angel, and millions of white-winged commercial items. Lynch’s Presbyterian roots still influence his art, despite his chapter-and-verse embrace of Hinduism and the Hinduistic endings of his original Dune script and unproduced Ronnie Rocket screenplay. Like many baby boomers, Lynch takes spiritual nourishment from both Western and Eastern traditions. Compared to the dearth of TV coverage that has greeted Lynch’s post–Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me films, it’s amazing to see the hours that Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and MTV devoted to Fire just before it was released. Lynch, Dana Ashbrook, Sheryl Lee, and James Marshall went on TV talk shows separately to generate positive buzz for the film, and Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan were interviewed together on Good Morning America. This joint appearance of the director and his cinematic alter ego made Lynch fans buzz, because MacLachlan’s strangely minimal participation in the movie spawned the idea that there was some creative discord, even a rift, between the two old friendly collaborators. But everything seemed harmonious as Lynch and MacLachlan sat sideby-side in a Hollywood café having pie and coffee and fielding Good Morning America’s questions, beaming their Twin Peaks-is-still-cool message out to as many million viewers as used to see their show. The interviewer, a blonde woman named Chantal, noted that there was a lot of coffee and pie in the world of Twin Peaks. Lynch replied in classic, deadly serious form: “In the Northwest where I grew up, coffee is extremely important. And pie is extremely important. And people have pie and coffee, sometimes together.” After chuckling at Lynch’s furrowedbrow earnestness, Chantal asked if he was ready to take a lot of heat for the sexual violence in his film, and he replied, “I live in an oven, that’s how much heat I’m going to take,” to which MacLachlan responded with a sympathetic laugh. As she concluded the interview, Chantal noted that “You two have such a great relationship: do you finish each other’s sentences?” Lynch and MacLachlan looked into each other’s eyes, and the quick-witted Lynch said, “Yes . . .” expecting MacLachlan to complete the sentence with “we do.” But MacLachlan didn’t get it, and said, “I think we did from the start.” Lynch prompted him again, “Yes we.” MacLachlan still didn’t supply the “do,” and Lynch said, “He’s rusty; I haven’t seen him in awhile.”
In the summer of 1992, Lynch received a second critical and audience drubbing for his and Mark Frost’s ABC TV series On the Air. Premiering in June, this was a comedy that chronicled, according to Lynch, the wacky trials and tribulations of “a fourth- or fifth-rate”23 1950s New York TV network (Zoblotnick Broadcasting Company) trying to put on a weekly variety program, The Lester Guy Show. Since the 1950s was the age of live TV broadcasting, many unexpected, absurdly humorous happenings foil the best-laid plans of ZBC president Buddy Budwaller (Miguel Ferrer, Twin Peaks’ acid-tongued FBI forensics wizard, Albert Rosenfield). He must cope with nervous, ineffectual producer McGonigle (Marvin Kaplan) and bumbling director Gochktck (David L. Lander), nephew of ZBC owner Zoblotnick (Sydney Lassick), who, with his uncle, speaks with a barely intelligible eastern European accent (“scream” sounds like “scram”) that has to be translated and subtitled. Crossing over from the world of Twin Peaks to join the new Lynch/Frost production were writers Robert Engels and Scott Frost and directors Lesli Linka Glatter and Jonathan Sanger (producer of The Elephant Man). Lynch also brought in his longtime friend, and early painting buddy, set designer, director, and former brother-in-law, Jack Fisk. Fisk filmed episodes 3 and 7 of On the Air, but viewers only got to see 3, since ABC shifted the series from Wednesday night to Saturday (the graveyard evening that helped kill Twin Peaks) and only broadcast three episodes (1, 3, and 5) of the seven installments that Lynch/Frost filmed.
As with Twin Peaks, ABC lost faith in the latest Lynch/Frost product after an initial burst of high enthusiasm, though with On the Air the network’s attitude shift happened at relatively lightning speed. ABC committed to On the Air at the moment of the Twin Peaks cycle in which the zeitgeist was buzzing about the enchanting, groundbreaking show and its mastermind creators. The network was happy to give Lynch and Frost a new stage on which to enact their imaginative and profitable visions. But by the time On the Air was ready to hit the air the Twin Peaks craze was dead, the show had been cancelled, and the advance word from the May 1992 Cannes Film Festival was that Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was a stillborn atrocity. Nonetheless, buoyed by positive reviews from TV Guide and Variety, ABC debuted On the Air with an episode written by Lynch and Frost and directed by Lynch. In a half hour dense with frenetic events and slapstick behavior, the director explored some familiar themes in a comic context. In his own life, Lynch the longtime visual artist warmed up gradually to the process of communicating verbally, and in his fictions he often portrays the difficulty people have in understanding each other and correctly comprehending information. There is a flurry of words in the air at the Zoblotnick Broadcasting Company, but much confusion. Most people in the studio can’t follow what the thickly accented director Gochktck says, and sweet, slow-on-the-uptake Betty (Marla Rubinoff), Lester Guy’s co-star, speaks non sequiturs as her brain grasps only fragments of concepts while she strains to see the whole picture. In past works, Lynch has often shown chaos intruding into a person’s home and head, and as The Lester Guy Show enacts a domestic scene for the live cameras, it happens again. The little play is supposed to show Betty, playing a married woman, ironing clothes in her kitchen, and the then greeting her secret lover, played by Lester Guy (Ian Buchanan, Twin Peaks’ haberdasher Dick Tremayne), at the window. They are surprised by Betty’s enraged husband, who bursts into the room and shoots Guy, who then dies at Betty’s feet while she mourns, “Oh, I loved him so!” In episode 1, Lynch employs the same narrative dynamic he used at the beginning of Blue Velvet, in which he first showed us a perfect world and then revealed everything that could go wrong with it. The Lester Guy Show’s domestic scene played smoothly in rehearsal, but when the future of the underdog network depends on it and the show is being performed live, everything falls apart. Framing the opening, show-within-the-show image with the theatrical curtains he loves, Lynch shows us smiling Betty in her all-white kitchen, recalling the smiling-housewife homey tableaus that Lynch saw in 1950s magazine as a child, and in his own family’s kitchen. Young Lynch had longed for some force or occurrence to disrupt the wholesome sameness of his domestic life, and in On the Air, as he’s done in most of his fictions, he introduces such an element. Beyond foregrounded Betty, deep in the scene, we see an older man who shouldn’t be there, squatting with his back against the kitchen cabinets. We laugh, because the man is an unexpected, incongruous factor juxtaposed with the unsuspecting Betty, who’s blithely smiling to the cameras and doesn’t know the man is behind her. The image yields humor, but it is also disturbingly Lynchian: The man, a distressed look on his face, his aged body frozen in a strange position, his purpose a mystery, contributes a suspended moment of disquieting surrealism. The fellow turns out to be a prop man whose suspenders are caught in a cabinet door, and when he tries to run out of the scene the rubberbandlike straps stretch and spring him through the air like a cartoon character. This action causes a fluffy white dog to fly through the air and Lester Guy, for some reason hanging upside-down from a rope tied around his ankles, to suddenly swing into the center of the tableau instead of appearing at the window to talk to Betty. Swaying back and forth in his inverted position, Guy dispiritedly mouths his lines (“Our brief moment of happiness is over”) as the audio engineer miscues a cacophony of discordant sounds. This is all hilariously funny, but as half the stage lights go out and the upside-down Lester Guy becomes an eerie black shape and Betty’s husband fires his gun again and again, Lynch gives the tableau a sinister edge that blends Dadaist theater of the absurd with film noir. Earlier the director had evoked the atmospherics of noir as Guy opened his show playing the role of a lonely nocturnal stroller traversing a night-city backdrop accompanied by the midnight-saxophone sound of an Angelo Badalamenti theme. This poetic-mood moment is a touch of pure Lynchness, as is the first thing we see in On the Air’s opening credits: a neon sign representing flashing lightning bolts of electricity pulsing against the deep darkness of a cosmic star field.
Another Lynchian passage occurs early in the kitchen scene when the timing’s all wrong and poor Betty is left with minutes of dead air to fill. Grown-up Betty has the kind of childlike sensitivity and capacity for wonder that Lynch admires; her sweetness of soul reminds us of John Merrick in The Elephant Man. Director Gochktck, faced with the prospect of dimbulb Betty having to wing it, pronounces the situation “A nightmare.” But she, like other of Lynch’s angelic women, faces adversity with grace and wisdom. Invoking her mother, as Merrick did, she pulls out her good-luck music box and sings a schoolyard-simple song that recalls the little ditty of beneficence and happy promise that the Lady in the Radiator sang to beleaguered Henry in Eraserhead. As Betty’s music box tinkles and her words ring out (“The bird in the tree / It sings merrily / With a tweedle dee for you / A tweedle dee for me”), Lynch links her song with the lighting bolt sign flashing against the night sky, the red lights on the ZBC phone bank happily lighting up, and old grannies at home smiling dearly, as though a benign force was making the whole world hum. Of course, a few seconds later, Lester Guy swings into the scene upside down and chaos continues to reign at the ZBC studio. Everyone, from the network president to the producer and director, to the soundman and Lester Guy himself, thinks the show was an absolute disaster. Their willful attempts to control reality and shape it to their liking have failed miserably; they are defeated and depressed. But Betty, with her pure, childlike vision, her ability to follow her intuition and ride the wild wave of spontaneous occurrence, sees the evening differently: “That was fun!” This is certainly the view of Lynch and Frost and also, it turns out, that of ZBC owner Zoblotnick, whose necessarily subtitled words are piped through the studio, and end episode 1: “WE HAVE A HIT!”
The ZBC may have inadvertently created a crowd-pleaser, but ABC, alarmed by the underwhelming ratings performance of On the Air’s first episode, decided to show less than half of the installments that Lynch/Frost had produced. Thankfully, all seven episodes are available on tape and disc, and show the program following the perfect-rehearsal/disastrous-broadcast dynamic set up in episode 1. The emotional-dramatic thread linking the weekly explosions of physical comedy is Lester Guy’s jealousy of Betty, who becomes America’s TV sweetheart overnight. Guy, an effete, egotistical, washed-up, minor movie star who pompously puts on grand airs, resents the fact that Betty is showered with love and acclaim for just being her own simple self. Surely, it is unfair, unjust, that his protean talents and sophisticated charm are not recognized and celebrated. Guy is English, so once again in American fiction, an elitist foreigner has been trumped by a homegrown innocent. But Guy is a trouper, and he mounts various schemes to sabotage Betty’s rise to stardom and remain the sovereign monarch of his own show. However, in the moralistic world of On the Air, Guy is born to lose, and his plans (infiltrating Betty’s dinner with Mr. Zoblotnick, rigging a quiz show on which she appears, ruining her singing with a Voice Disintegrator) suffer humorous reversals of fortune that cast him as the fall guy. The universe of On the Air is a cartoonish, make-believe place, where a stagehand can fall from a high platform, dust himself off, and continue his business, and where one answered phone makes a quacking sound and another, which has an angry boss on the other end of the line, shoots flames. The burning air bursting from the receiver has no metaphysical Fire Walk With Me significance, just as the show’s characters naturally lack the resonant depths of Agent Cooper, Laura, Leland, and BOB. Still, the power of Lynch’s aesthetic is so strong and transferable that seeing Miguel Ferrer as Buddy Budwaller (whose verbally abusive manner easily reminds us of Ferrer’s Albert Rosenfield on Twin Peaks) holding a phone that’s flaming makes part of our brain think, “Oh my god! BOB’s calling!”
Greg Olson/ David Lynch - Beautiful Dark
Only violence helps where violence rules.
- Bertolt Brecht
At the beginning of Weekend, as described in the published edition of Godard's screenplay, "we find ourselves in the penthouse of a Paris apartment block, looking out through some french windows to a terrace with green trees beyond. Two men, Roland and a Friend, are seated outside, chatting, a table laden with drinks in front of them." This sounds like the first-act setting for some thoroughly traditional play or movie. The location is comfortable, even luxurious, and the people appear to be members of the privileged classes enjoying their privileges, as Hollywood director George Cukor once described some of his characters. Entering this world, our first reaction might be pleasurable envy, as we settle back for two hours of vicarious enjoyment with a movie whose very title signifies leisure, diversion, and respite from workaday cares.
We are in for a bumpier ride than the screenplay's bland description lets on, however, and Godard signals this promptly. The movie's first printed words are not the title but a bizarre label: A FILM ADRIFT IN THE COSMOS. The first sounds evoke not the cozy routines of bourgeois living but the cacophony of modern society - the roar of traffic, the hum of conversation, the insistent ringing of a phone - in all its multitudinous complexity. Soon the movie will offer another enigmatic self-description, A FILM FOUND ON A SCRAP HEAP. Only after a burst of dialogue about death ("Wouldn't it be great if both of them died . . .") and chaos ("Did you know that seven people got killed ...") will the title finally appear, in this startling form- printed in the red, white, and blue colors of the French and American flags.
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END WEEK END
WEEK END WEE K END WEEK EN D WEEK END WE EK END WEEK E ND WEEK END W EEK END WEEK
The movie's way of presenting its title merits consideration, since it carries a number of meanings relevant to the picture as a whole. For spectators who saw it in 1967, when it was new, an obvious reference point would have been the pop-art style being catapulted to prominence by Andy Warhol and others who shared (like Godard) a refusal to draw boundaries between rarified conceptualism and earthy materialism. Pop prides itself on absorbing the products and processes of commodity culture, defamiliarizing them through rhythmic repetition and self-referential irony, and transforming them into art objects that are mechanical embodiments of and critical commentaries on the relentlessly productive society from which they emerged.
The title frame of Weekend announces its pop affinities in two major ways. One is the use of red, white, and blue as its (literally) primary colors. These colors have become hopelessly hackneyed - almost invisible, one might say - through their use in national flags; yet they carried a major expressive punch during a decade when politically alert individuals were ratcheting up their skepticism toward governments that wrapped these hues around themselves as they pursued imperialistic policies, jingoistic wars, and other ill-founded projects. Leftists like Godard were increasingly repulsed by manifestations of brute nationalism in France and also in the United States, which had inherited one of France's most tragic colonial follies (the effort to keep Vietnam under Western control) and carried it to extremes that even moderate politicians were beginning to reject in the second half of the 1960s. Godard was drawn to the red-white-and-blue with a sort of morbid fascination, using the colors with aggressive irony in La Chinoise and other works. This was at once an aesthetic gesture (in themselves, the colors are a vivacious trio) and a sarcastic commentary on current events in the sociopolitical sphere. The title frame also evokes the assembly-line aesthetic of pop, which rejects the once-sacred notion that art must have "unique" or "special" properties - a sort of "aura," in philosopher Walter Benjamin's term - if it is to be considered genuine or authentic. The mid-1960s saw a great flowering of cultural production that chose not to hide or camouflage its mass-manufactured origin but revealed and even flaunted the mechanized processes that produced it. Godard was very interested in this development, which both excited his aesthetic imagination and suggested a new departure point for his escalating critique of the culture industry - as in his 1968 film One Plus One, also known as Sympathy for the Devil, which chronicles the creation of a Rolling Stones rock recording, with emphasis on the calculated, repetitive labor that goes into it. Godard readily included theatrical cinema in his expanding list of cultural products that were being deprived of their souls by commercialization and commodification; indeed, not long after Weekend he renounced commercial film altogether, pouring his energy into a search for alternative modes of production, distribution, and exhibition. The design of the Weekend title, stamped out repetitiously and mechanically in a sleek parody of industrial chic, joins additional elements in that movie and other recently made Godard films - the pop-music recording session in Masculine/Feminine, the ad-slogan party scene in Pierrot le fou, the landscape of commercial products in 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, and many more - to provide a vivid foretaste of his ultrapolitical phase, which would begin with Le Gai Savoir the following year.Finally, the title reflects an important aspect of Godard's artistic method: his habit of putting words and pictures into productive competition with each other. With its eye-catching design and runaway multiplicity, the WEEKEND logo captures the spirit of an age that often values quantity over quality. Equally important, it captures Godard's growing fascination with cinema that "disassembles language into images and makes language out of images," as Angela Dalle Vacche describes the process. He knew that all movies turn images into language; one of his first published articles praised Soviet cinema for giving "the idea of a shot... its real function of sign," that is, for integrating visual material into a languagelike structure with a recognizable "grammar." Doing this equation in the opposite direction, the WEEKEND title card turns language into image, since its verbal meaning is considerably less striking than its shape, color, and overall visual impact. In addition to this double operation - language becoming image and vice versa - Godard gives both image and language a distinctly rhythmic function in many portions of Weekend, often using them to provide more of a "musical" pulse than a "literal" set of meanings. His collagelike conjunctions of the verbal, the visual, and the musical demonstrate his wish to throw different systems of communication into eccentrie new configurations that may (he hopes) produce meanings and ideas not available via more traditional routes. Along with his affection for Brechtian devices and pop-art irony, this ambition explains the frequent out-of-the-blue wordplay that fills the screen in Weekend - reappearances of the title, pointless reminders of the day and hour, vague indications of Godard's underlying agenda for a scene, and so on. Most interesting are the typographical blocks that attack conventional language head-on: "ANALYSIS" and "FAUX TO GRAPH Y," for instance. These point up similarities between Godard and provocateurs in two radical French movements of the 1950s and 1960s: the Situationist International and its predecessor, the Lettrist International, which proclaimed the limitations of logic by seeking to liberate the letters of the alphabet (innocent building blocks) from the words and sentences (ideological tools) that imprison and control them. Godard was not a card-carrying member of these groups, which have roots in the earlier surrealist and dada movements; indeed, his allegedly "pretentious pseudoinnovations" were attacked more than once in the Internationale Situationniste journal published by Guy Debord and company. Nevertheless, his films often share the Lettrist mixture of deadpan whimsy and dead-serious outrage, and his characters have a frequent habit of spray-painting their slogans onto the scrubbed facades of polite society, a practice the Situationists themselves honed into a fine art during the late 1960s.
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Weekend reached the screen in 1967, when the era known as the sixties was approaching its European climax. Social unrest and political protest were on the upswing, and many French dissidents expected full-fledged insurrection against a capitalist-imperialist order they despised.
These hopes were disappointed the following year, when revolt fizzled and the powers-that-be reasserted their dominance; but the electricity of the period was still building as Godard went into production on increasingly radical films like 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, with its subversive critique of capitalism and its discontents, and La Chinoise, with its wry look at Marxian alternatives to commonsense norms. Weekend is perhaps the most explosive of these movies; yet while Godard clearly wished to carry the cinematic and political implications of his earlier work to new extremes, he was not quite ready to throw off all traces of traditional moviemaking. What places Weekend among his most exciting films is the fact that within it we see the most drastic transition of his career - from liberal skeptic to radical mutineer - gathering speed and energy before our very eyes. The growing urgency of this transition appears to be an integral part of Godard's plan for the film, as it builds from its chatty opening in a bourgeois apartment to its ferocious finale in a decimated countryside. The deceptively conventional beginning hints at the craziness to come, since its main reference points in Hollywood cinema are derived from the film-noir cycle of the 1940s and 1950s, which specialized in tales of intrigue, treachery, and betrayal. Many self-respecting noirs might have inspired the dialogue between our heroine, Corinne, and a friend who's visiting her and Roland, her husband:
FRIEND: Wouldn't it be great when Roland drives your father home if both of them died in an accident?... Did he get his brakes fixed?
CORINNE: No. I managed to make him forget. FRIEND: Did you know seven people got killed last Sunday at the Evreux junction? CORINNE: Yeah, that would be great. . . .
And here is Roland on the telephone, a few moments later: "Listen, you're not to phone me here any more. It's dangerous. ... I've got to be cautious after those sleeping pills and the gas.... She may be dumb, but she'll start getting suspicious. . . . Anyway, the main thing is for her old man to croak. Afterwards, when Corinne's got the money, we'll deal with her.... Of course I love you...."
Has this movie stumbled into some outlandish den of iniquity where civilized values have inexplicably been forgotten? Quite the opposite: Civilized values aren't what they used to be, and for Godard, the violenceprone household of Corinne and Roland catches the spirit of the late 1960s as well as Ozzie and Harriet Nelson's home represented aspects of the previous decade. In an age when greed and belligerence have overtaken the Western world at large, people like Corinne and Roland hardly stand out from the crowd. Rather than simply preaching this proposition, Godard weaves his disturbing vision into the substance of the film itself. This clarifies further why he punctuates the action with those jarring, disruptive blocks of typography. In other ways, too, he surrounds the story with signs of social disjunction and dysfunction. The first such outbreak comes between Corinne's conversation and Roland's phone call, when two motorists have a furious fight after their cars collide on the pavement below. This introduces automobiles as the film's main symbolic objects, embodying the materialism and aggression of a society being crushed by its own fetishized commodities. Important too is the look and feel of the brawl as Godard presents it. As filmed from the apartment's balcony, it would appear pointless and absurd even if it weren't so wildly hyperactive (the Three Stooges were never more frenetic) and so wildly out of proportion to the trivial fender-bender that prompted it. The movie is still in its opening moments, but already we see that the sociocultural center cannot hold, human relations are falling apart, and mere anarchy is being loosed upon a world that indeed seems adrift in the cosmos. Weekend might be too volcanic to watch if it kept up this pace indefinitely. It shows signs of subsiding as Roland's phone call concludes with a (visual) fade to black and a (verbal) riff that repeats his last words with the inanity of a broken record, recalling Nana's repetitive "parrot talk" in My Life to Live. The following scene has a very different rhythm, with ramblingly long takes and a numbingly long speech by Corinne to her stillnameless friend. The film has not settled down as much as first appears, however, and "numbing" doesn't quite describe Corinne's monologue. Prompted by her friend's curiosity, she sits on a tabletop in her underwear and interminably describes a small-scale orgy she had with two companions, Paul and Monique, at their home. The beginning of her speech might have been lifted from an ordinary melodrama: "He started in the Mercedes. . . . We necked for a long time in the parking lot...." Then the scene being described changes to Paul's place and Monique enters the tale, adding a new layer of perversity: "She asked me if I didn't think her ass was too big ... and she turned round, spreading her legs open. . .. She asked me to describe them...." Her voice stays as flat as the table she's sitting on, making wild statements and banal ones in the same affectless tone. Is this some new kind of sociopolitical critique or just a dose of oldfashioned pornography? Godard's later film Numero deux asks this question explicitly about its own content, and the answer turns out to be both. The same goes for Weekend, where the ironic absurdity of Corinne's monologue grows increasingly clear, culminating in a round of carnivalistic sex (e.g., Corinne masturbating while Monique squats in a dish of cat milk) that eventually peters out in what can only be called an anticlimactic climax:
FRIEND: Did all this really happen or was it a nightmare?
CORINNE: I don't remember. FRIEND: I adore you, Corinne; come and excite me.
Fade to black. Whether all this "happened" or not is moot, of course, since Corinne's words pack a sensationalistic punch regardless of any "real" past events. What matters about the scene is that it escalates Godard's war against the tyranny of images. Convinced more than ever that show business is bad for us, he now wants to undermine the very idea of cinematic spectacle. He does this through a sort of verbal flank attack, combining contradictory elements - prurient speech and puritanical picture - that throw movie-sex conventions into a deliberate muddle. (Adding to the irony is the fact that Corinne is played by Mireille Dare, widely known for sexy roles in commercial films. Roland is played by Jean Yanne, a more conventional choice. Many other characters have no fictional names within the film, incidentally, and are called by the names of the performers who portray them - e.g., the revolutionary leader is called Kalfon after the actor Jean-Pierre Kalfon.)
The tactics of this scene are based on Godard's conviction that a basic strategy of commercial film (in keeping with the commodity system as a whole) is to stimulate our visual appetites, then gratify this artificial desire by providing the material it has teasingly promised. This is built into the most common pattern of movie editing, where "eyeline match" shots alternate between someone looking and what the person sees. The same strategy is behind almost every kind of narrative scene, from sophisticated suspense sequences (What will the outcome be?) to exploitative sex episodes (What will we see next?). The sound track is usually limited to a supporting role, designed to make the visual tease more alluring and the eventual payoff more gratifying. Determined to thwart such manipulative uses of film, Godard has pioneered a provocative (and highly Brechtian) approach that turns image and sound into equal partners, each with its own aesthetic and expressive integrity. Democratized like this, sight and sound have new freedom to interact in unexpected ways, challenging our analytical powers instead of lulling us into passive spectatorship. This is why Corinne's monologue cannot be called gratuitous, to borrow a favorite term of would-be censors. While its subject cries out for pictures, Godard's refusal to supply them makes us keenly aware of (a) how effective movies are at sparking superficial desires, and (b) how much more interesting it can be when a filmmaker calls sardonic attention to these instead of pandering to them on the screen. If show business is bad, how about a cinema that doesn't show? Weekend returns to its film-noir roots as Corinne and Roland begin the journey that dominates the movie's fractured story. Jumping into their Facel convertible, they start for the distant town of Oinville, where they hope to pin down Corinne's inheritance and speed the demise of her father so they can collect it - each dreaming of the other's death, meanwhile, so the loot won't have to be shared. They don't get out of the parking lot, however, before encountering more of the slapstick-style buffoonery that punctuated the opening scene. Roland bumps his car into a parked sedan, leading to a quarrel with the owner's little boy, who pockets a bribe and calls his mother anyway. She arrives in a rage; Roland and Corinne fend her off with a paint gun; she retaliates with a blitz of tennis balls; and her husband joins in with a shotgun as their son shouts, "Bastard! Shitface! Communist!" Godard labels the episode with a blue intertitle reading "SCENE FROM PARIS LIFE," as if this were a nineteenth-century literary vignette. His view of urban living is plain: Honore de Balzac meets Moe, Larry, and Curly. On the road at last, Corinne and Roland promptly run into one of the most bravura sequences in any Godard film: a cinematically stunning traffic-jam scene that brings together many of his most original and subversive ideas. Automobiles are central to this scene, and it is interesting to note how the metaphorical meaning of cars has shifted in Godard's value system. In the early Breathless they represented a Beat-style dream of liberation via speed, flexibility, elusiveness. They played a more somber role in My Life to Live, introducing Nana to the sad pavements she would walk, and carrying her to the lonely street where pimps would gun her down before speeding away to safety. Weekend veers even more sharply in this cynical direction, paralyzing cars altogether by cramming them into a self-suffocating gridlock so devoid of action and energy that the movie itself almost stops moving.
The scene begins as Corinne and Roland steer their Facel down a country road that's backed up with cars as far as the eye can see. Godard's camera runs parallel to the road, gliding along the shoulder at about the same pace as the convertible. Since everything takes place on the roadway, the action seems stretched and flattened into a two-dimensional spectacle, as shallow as the society that has allowed everyday life to degenerate so badly.
Sound also plays a key part in the scene, filling the air with horn honks so loud and persistent that they lose any potential meaning as greetings or warnings. This is cacophony as sheer self-assertion, blaring away with no regard for purpose or utility; yet it conveys a bitter sort of beauty all the same, celebrating its own belligerence with a heedless panache recognized by critic Pauline Kael when she described the horns as triumphant, "like trumpets in Purcell." In addition to its metaphoric value, the noisiness also serves a clever cinematic function - counterpointing the flatness of the image with a direct assault on the audience's eardrums, stamping the scene's immediacy on our bodies as we experience it. This goes on for hours of narrative time, as Roland maneuvers his Facel through the tie-up with even more edginess and impatience than most of his fellow drivers show. The panorama that he passes, and that Godard captures on film, amounts to a microcosm of social activity: On view are recreation (card playing, a chess match), sports (ball tossing, sailboat rigging), culture (book reading, radio listening), personal hygiene (relaxing, urinating), and so forth. The most arresting images are two that stand out for their own pictorial value as well as the fact that Coutard's camera gives them a bit of extra attention. One shows a traveling menagerie including monkeys, lions, and a llama staring back at us with the calm assurance of a creature that knows its dignity and integrity are leagues above those of the Homo sapiens so chaotically surrounding it. The other is a gigantic Shell Oil tank truck. It greedily sucks up screen space with its intimidating bulk and aggressive red-and-yellow colors; yet it's even more stymied than the other vehicles, stuck in a nose-to-nose stalemate with a white Fiat headed in the opposite direction on the same stretch of roadway. This is a prototypical Godardian symbol, transforming the personal car crash that climaxed Contempt into a socioeconomic car clash (Shell vs. citizen) with darkly comic undertones. Many arguments, insults, and altercations later, Roland and Corinne finally approach the end of the congestion and discover its cause: a horrifying accident that has left wrecked vehicles and mangled bodies strewn along the street. Not surprisingly, our heroes couldn't care less. They zip past the catastrophe, turn off the main highway, and enter a rural area that holds forth the possibility of a calmer, cooler atmosphere. Roland wrecks the calm about two seconds later, bowling over a trash can as the Facel screeches into a town square and careens up to the curb. We know by now that such reckless behavior is normal in the Weekend world, but more tumultuous upheaval is about to transpire. No sooner has the Facel lurched to a stop than we hear an off-screen crash between a farmer's tractor and a Triumph sports car holding a young woman, who survives the accident, and her wealthy boyfriend, who does not. Roland and Corinne ignore this ruckus, discussing instead what will happen to their plan if Corinne's father uses his "little Japanese tape recorder" to dictate an updated will. "Why have we been sweating it out for the past five years, putting poison in his mashed potato every Saturday?" whines Corinne, dismayed that her work might come to nothing. "Did you see the Triumph?" she adds, finally acknowledging the collision that just occurred. "If only that could have been Mommy and Daddy, it would have made everything a whole lot easier."
Like many film-noir couples, Corinne and Roland have a strained relationship; but at least they share a middle-class background, which saves them from the class warfare that explodes between the tractor-driving farmer and Juliet, the surviving sports-car passenger. The personal rage displayed by these two is so great that their shouting match seems at first like mere emotionalism. There is no mistaking the gender-based inflections and class-coded subtexts of the insults they hurl at each other, however, and Godard underscores this political dimension with on-screen labels - all in bold blue letters. Juliet fiercely belittles the farmer: "It makes you sick that we've got money and you haven't.... You're pissed off because we fuck on the Riviera and you don't.... I bet you don't even own [your tractor] and it belongs to one of those rotten unions or some fucking cooperative. ..." The farmer shows more political intelligence, but bogs down in ideological argument: "If it weren't for me and my tractor, the French would have nothing to eat." Juliet trumps him with "You big lump of shit!" and other colorful yelps.
ss
SS STRUGGLE THE CLASS STRUGGLE
With its unhappy premise and outrageous dialogue, this episode is an uneasy blend of tragedy and farce, leaving us uncertain how to respond. Piling on more ambiguity, Godard inserts an incongruous shot of Juliet posing with an advertising billboard (flanked by a brassiere ad and an Esso tiger) wearing a pensive expression on her face. Later, when the farmer launches into a reasonable-sounding criticism of Roland's awful driving, a similar cutaway shows three men we've never seen before, perhaps bystanders listening to the argument, or perhaps Brechtian intruders who are not part of this story at all. Subsequent shots show a smiling man, his girlfriend, and another fellow in a baseball cap. The published Weekend screenplay assumes these figuresa re watching the fight between Juliet and the farmer, but their stiff, apathetic poses suggest complete separation from the narrative. In any case, these shots serve the same purpose as the movie's full-screen titles, disrupting what might otherwise be an absorbing - and therefore morally unacceptable - melodramatic scene.
Godard finishes off any lingering traces of normal melodrama with a sardonic plot twist. Arguing so fiercely that they come to blows, Juliet and the farmer appeal to Corinne and Roland as witnesses of the fatal crash. Roland scoots his convertible past them with scarcely a nod, naturally infuriating them - and radicalizing them, to the point where they instantly unite against the outrageous couple. "You can't leave just like that! Aren't we all brothers like Marx said? Bastards! Bastards!" hollers the farmer. Juliet's parting shot at the motorists is far more scandalous - "Jews! Filthy rotten stinking Jews!" - but the farmer sympathizes without hesitation, wrapping an arm around his erstwhile enemy and escorting her from the scene. By satirizing anti-Semites and Communists in almost the same breath, Godard proves he is far from the party-line Marxist for which some critics still mistook him in 1967. Indeed, this scene shows his skepticism toward all parties in the "ss CLASS STRUGGLE," including the oftenidealized working class. The screen then fills with FAUX TOGRAPHY in blue letters, and all the dislocated strangers from the preceding episode pose neatly before the billboard. Roland is there too, comforting himself over Corinne's momentary absence by embracing Juliet, still covered with blood from her recent accident. What's going on here? The answer is murky, and again that is precisely Godard's point. All we know for certain is that strange days are increasingly upon us.
Together again, Roland and Corinne are confused as well. Red and blue numbers tick off kilometers as their Facel zooms along a country road, bringing them closer to their destination but hardly reducing their hostility toward each other.
"When did civilization begin?" asks Corinne, taking a break from their bickering. Her question seems slightly odd, since their surroundings are rural, not conspicuously "civilized" in the way an urban setting would be. What she is discovering - along with us in the audience - is that Weekend findst he countryside more conducive to true civilization than the city or suburbs. This is not because "nature" carries some essential grace, a la Rousseau, but because its comparative distance from the power/knowledge networks of mainstream society makes it a productive place for romantic outlooks, Utopian daydreams, and revolutionary experiments. This outlook defines "civilization" in an ornery way, suggesting that the bursts of rural anarchy in this increasingly anarchic story are more civil and refined than the suburban milieu Roland and Corinne have left behind. Weekend is an ornery movie, however, and Godard - whose passionate love of the natural world will radiate through the postpolitical landscapes of later films - sees the countryside as an appropriate place to unleash the purgative powers of his growing sociocultural rage. The characters we meet in this rural "civilization" are like the "uncivilized" protagonists in Band of Outsiders two years earlier. "They have neither the mentality of thieves [nor] of capitalists," Godard metaphorically described the Outsiders figures." They're like animals. They get up in the morning. They have to find a bird to kill so they can eat at noon, and another for the evening. Between that, they go to the river to drink. And that's it. They live by their instincts, for the instant. The danger would be to make a system of it." Later in Weekend we will spend harrowing time with people who have made a system of it, and "dangerous" is a mild word for the results. For now, Corinne is still trying to fathom the previous scene. "I don't understand," she gripes, referring to the farmer's comment about Marx calling all people brothers. "It wasn't Marx," replies Roland, "it was Jesus - another commie." For once, Godard has put a coherent thought into Roland's muddled mind, recalling that Marx and Jesus shared certain notions about genuinely "civilized" life. Corinne has already lost interest, though. "Even if it's true," she asks, "who cares? We're not living in the Middle Ages." Her fleeting philosophical moment gives way to a series of highway encounters, as jarring and fractured as the traffic-jam scene was prolonged and hypnotic. Quick-cutting vignettes show furious battles with other motorists, complete with biting, hitting, hair pulling, and outrageous insults. Civilization may exist alongside the roadway, but on the asphalt a Three Stooges mentality remains alive and well. Corinne's casual question about entering civilization gathers more ambiguity as Weekend proceeds, since evidence suggests that everybody involved (i.e., the characters in the film and the audience watching it) is leaving an old, familiar world and sliding into a new, disorienting mode of existence. While this new realm is superficially the same as the one it replaces, rational structures and reasonable controls seem mysteriously missing. Godard finds this both exhilarating and terrifying, and encourages us to experience it with the same ambivalent wonder. Lest we underestimate how drastically the movie's world has changed, the next scene makes this so evident that even the most resistant spectator must recognize its radicalism and confront its implications. The convertible roars down a country road in a teeming rainstorm. A woman, decked out in a red raincoat and white boots, waves for it to stop alongside an accident site with two smashed-up cars. She asks for a ride, and Roland responds by checking out her body, even lifting her raincoat to inspect her derriere. (This echoes Michel's evaluation system for hitchhikers in Breathless; the woman puts up with it as normal masculine behavior.) Deciding she meets his specifications, Roland motions her toward the Facel's back door. However, like many a hitchhiker, she has a companion waiting nearby, and he now crawls from one of the wrecks, wearing a coat that matches hers and carrying a slender tree branch in one hand. He demands a ride in the opposite direction; when Roland demurs he fires a gun, brandishes his leafy stick, and prods Roland through a U-turn, just as a lion tamer would put a circus animal through its paces. Filled to capacity with its four passengers, the Facel heads back in the direction whence it came, and the scene gives way to a full-screen intertitle that changes as we watch:
THE
ANGEL THE EX ANGEL THE EXTERMIN ATING ANGEL
This is a typical Godardian joke, making a film-buffr eference to Luis Bufiuel's masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (1962), about a dinner party that spirals into chaos when the guests discover they are incapable of leaving. By invoking its title in his own movie, which takes a similar dark pleasure in confrontations between the ordinary and the inexplicable, Godard cleverly cannibalizes its blend of existentialist angst and surrealist drollery. He also injects another Brechtian break into the story's continuity (already shaky), and foreshadows a supernatural/religious element in the episode about to unfold. Claiming to be the product of "buggery" between God and Alexandre Dumas, the hitchhiker-hijacker may be the angel of Godard's film, but he certainly doesn't seem like one. Jammed in the back seat, he uses his pistol to keep Roland and Corinne under control - not that other motorists pay any attention to their yowls for help - and snaps pictures of them with a camera. Corinne asks about the photos, and he answers that they are "for the Ministry of the Interior," explaining that "even God has His police." Roland parries that he and Corinne have nothing to fear, since they are married, which legalizes their sex acts. The ensuing dialogue reveals a feminist awareness that is surprisingly strong for a film produced in 1967, when the modern feminist movement was just beginning to pick up speed:
HITCHHIKER: Tell me your name, lady.
CORINNE: My name is Corinne Durand. HITCHHIKER: No it's not. That's your husband's name. What's yours? CORINNE: My maiden name is Corinne Vitron. HITCHHIKER: No, that's your father's name. What's yours? CORINNE: What? My name? Well, I ... HITCHHIKER: That just shows you. You don't even know who you are.
This critique of patriarchal power, which traverses the kinship system to gain control of identity itself, is followed by a reference to language and religion. "Christianity is the refusal to know oneself," the hitchhiker says. "It's the death of language."
Language and religion are such significant topics for Godard that we should pause to see how their relationship has been evolving in his films. He set forth his deep respect for language in My Life to Live, seeing it as a precondition of thought itself. Another slant on this appears in Masculine/Feminine, made a year before Weekend, when the main characters watch a pornographic film showing a woman being abused by a man who communicates in grunts and barks. The brutality of this scene, one critic suggests, derives "as much from the absence of language as ... from the man's rape of the woman." Also significant is an observation by one of the Masculine/Feminine characters that the porno movie is presented in its "original language." Combining these elements - "absence of language" and "original language" - with the idea that "language is the house man lives in," as 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her stated, it follows that the "original language" must be "no language, man before language, a beast."10 At this stage in his career, Godard apparently sees language as a progressive medium for "purifying sexuality from brutality and violence," in critic Yosefa Loshitzky's words. This means that a force like Christianity, bringing "death of language" and "refusal to know oneself," is limiting and destructive. Godard will change his mind in eighties and nineties films like Hail Mary and Nouvelle Vague, seeing the "original language ... no language, man before language" not as bestial, but as blessed and inspired; yet Weekend, in its own obstreperous way, already points in this direction. Although the obnoxious hitchhiker does not make a very appealing prophet, he has a definite mission to perform: "I am here to proclaim to these modern times the end of the grammatical era and the beginning of an age of flamboyance in every field," he announces, "especially the movies." Since this is an accurate summary of Weekend itself, we are evidently watching not just a movie but an annunciation - a scruffy, belligerent, chaotic annunciation, but flamboyant enough to suggest that the grammatical era may indeed be having its apocalypse even as we watch.
Godard is no less determined than the hitchhiker to jettison commonsense stylistics. Accordingly, he continues the intruder's scene with an increasingly eclectic melange of images and sounds. Trying to impress Roland and Corinne with his semidivine nature, the hitchhiker offers them "whatever you want" in return for a ride to London; to prove his worthiness as a credit risk, he performs a hilariously trite magic trick, conjuring up a white rabbit under the dashboard. Corinne responds with equally hilarious ambivalence, squealing "Shit! A miracle!" as she hauls the animal into the open. Realizing they've stumbled on a gold mine, she and Roland deluge the hitchhiker with their wish list, and it's just the sort of mindlessly materialistic catalog this pair would be expected to dream up: a large Mercedes, a Saint-Laurent evening dress, a Miami Beach hotel, a headful of blond hair, a fleet of Mirage IV aircraft "like the yids used to wipe out the wogs," and a weekend with James Bond - a prospect that turns both Corinne and Roland on. Less of a lowlife than he appears, the hitchhiker refuses to gratify the couple, although his reason is unclear. "Is that really all you want?" he asks, not specifying whether he is disappointed by their materialism or by the banality of their demands.
So far, Weekend has been a bitter parody not only of film noir but also of Hollywood's cultishly popular road-movie genre. Now it becomes more of an action picture, as Corinne snatches a pistol from the hitchhiker's companion and helps Roland chase them across a grassy field. The genre and tone of the picture then become indeterminate for a moment, as the hitchhiker runs toward a wrecked car, raises his hands, and demands silence, like a patriarch in some old Cecil B. DeMille epic. He appears to be working up another miracle, and Godard accomplishes it for him, cutting to a shot nearly identical to the first, except that the characters are surrounded by a huge flock of sheep that has materialized out of nowhere - or rather, out of Bunuel's film The Exterminating Angel, which ends with a similarly mysterious image of sheep swarming through a public place for no earthly reason. Grabbing the gun in this confusion, the hitchhiker chases Roland and Corinne back to their Facel, yelling "Vade retro! Go home!" Are we under the Exterminating Angel's spell? If so, who embodies this apparition? It could be the hitchhiker, who has performed two miracles; it could be Godard, who actually accomplished these, using tacky miseen-scene tricks (the rabbit) and extravagant montage feats (the sheep) that recall Hollywood's version of biblical supernaturalism; or it could be the Spirit of Intertextualism, presiding over Godard's clamorous call for a cinema as cluttered, tumultuous, and flamboyant as his own moral imagination.
Speeding along in their Facel again, Roland and Corinne pilot the car like infantry soldiers battering their way through hostile territory. Honking and hollering, they force a bicyclist, another small auto, and a pedestrian off the road, meanwhile swerving into a couple of near-collisions and running over a hapless chicken. Scrambling the movie's time sense as much as its geographical bearings, Godard propels us prematurely into the next scene with lightning-quick flash-forwards, showing a horrific accident engulfed in flames and smoke. We then plunge into this purgatory as Roland drags himself from under the pileup, while Corinne screeches her agony in one of the movie's most savagely satirical moments. "Help! My Hermes bag!" she shrieks in infinitely mournful tones, oblivious to the horror and suffering (including Roland's bloodstained condition) all around her.
Narrative time, space, and consistency - the chronotope of the movie - continue to bend and wobble as Roland and Corinne trudge along a path after their catastrophic crash. Striding with them is none other than Louis Antoine Leon de Saint-Just, a major figure of the French Revolution, dressed in eighteenth-century clothing and reading from a book in stentorian tones:
Freedom, like crime, is born of violence ... as though it were the virtue that springs from vice ... fighting in desperation against slavery.... The struggle will be long and freedom will kill freedom. ... Can one believe that man created society ... in order to be happy and reasonable therein? No! One is led to assume that, weary of the restfulness and wisdom of Nature, he wishes to be unhappy and mad. I see only constitutions that are backed by gold, pride, and blood, and nowhere do I see ... the fairness and moderation that ought to form the basis of the social treaty.
These words clearly relate to Godard's radicalized social philosophy, lamenting the human strife bred by capitalist vices of greed and competition, which have corrupted the natural world. They also relate to Godard's filmmaking strategy, whereby the virtue of freedom - that is, a liberated cinema - must be born from a violent, take-no-prisoners assault on "slavery" to classical style and conventional narrative. Since the kind of filmmaking represented by Weekend is all but unprecedented, Godard's audience must decide whether he and his troops are winning this battle on our behalf, or whether "freedom is killing freedom" in a political-aesthetic skirmish that may prove Pyrrhic at the final fade-out.
Slicing the film's continuity into more collagelike fragments, intertitles reading "SU ND AY" and "STORY FOR MONDAY" appear in confusing alternation. Saint-Just leaves the screen, then returns long enough to repeat his last words. A new pan shot of Roland and Corinne makes two false starts before proceeding beyond its first few frames; and though Saint-Just has indeed gone, the actor who portrayed him (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is still around, now playing a young man who opens the sequence with an offscreen cry: "I'm calling out in the emptiness." These words may sound like another outburst of angst and absurdism, but the fellow is merely singing a message to friends from a conveniently placed phone booth. (An intertitle has labeled this portion of the movie FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO WEEKENDS WITH DE GAULLE, and the two characters played by Leaud embody this chronotopic leap.) Roland and Corinne soon arrive and, as we might expect, patience at public telephones is not among their virtues. Roland pesters the man to finish. The singing man persists, altering his lyrics ("I'm afraid I've got to hang up now/There's some people outside, they can't wait") to suit the circumstances. Roland prods him by climbing into his Honda and starting its motor. The young man buzzes out of the phone booth, and another slapstick struggle ensues, which he wins, using a jack handle and tire as a sword and shield. Roland and Corinne limp into the next scene among burning and exploding cars, asking directions from corpses scattered along the roadside. "These buggers are all dead," says Roland, with his usual degree of compassion. The next sequence requires only one false start before it actually begins: a glimpse of countryside that immediately fades, then reappears as Roland and Corinne arrive. We are DU COTE DE CHEZ LEWIS CARROLL, as a blue intertitle soon informs us, and the scene's mood of wry parody echoes the tone of Carroll's fiction - although its whimsical blend of literary references (Blake, Brecht, Bronte) goes far beyond the dramatis personae of Wonderland. Roland and Corinne meet two characters on this stretch of road: Emily Bronte, perusing a book as she strolls, and Tom Thumb - or Gros Poucet, his French equivalent - reading from pieces of paper pinned to his clothing, as though he were a child who might otherwise lose them. In the background is a gate that serves no real purpose, since there is no fence alongside it; the words "No Entry" are inscribed across the top. Perhaps this was suggested by William Blake's poem "The Garden of Love," which describes a garden once filled with flowers but now a domain of graves, tombstones, black-gowned priests "binding with briars my joys and desires," and a newly built chapel with "Thou shalt not" written over its door.
The first words Tom recites are taken from Brecht, telling of a time when the German-born playwright was robbed - in Los Angeles, the moviemaking capital "where dreams are for sale" - but kept quiet about the incident since a fellow immigrant was responsible. This anecdote suggests a tellingly ambivalent attitude toward stateless or nomadic individuals, on one hand, and the malaise of materialistic social systems, on the other. Tom has a pebble collection, and Emily helps him build it up with bits of stone found alongside their path. Meanwhile she converses with Roland and Corinne, answering their inquiries about the road to Oinville with a philosophical counterquestion ("Are you looking for poetic or concrete information?") and the dubiously relevant observation that "physics does not yet exist, only individual physical sciences. Perhaps they're not yet physical, even." The scene rambles on like this for a long time, establishing at great length how unable these characters are to communicate on even the simplest level. The travelers keep asking for directions, but the literary figures refuse to budge from their more abstract interests: Emily reels off nonsensical syllogisms, which one critic connects with the Logician's irrelevant exercises in Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play Rhinoceros; meanwhile Tom portentously denounces "the real thieves, the big ones," whose sociopolitical crimes bring "night" and make "the world ... full of horror." One could almost sympathize with Roland and Corinne, whose questions seem reasonable enough to deserve reasonable answers. Godard appears to be satirizing hyperintellectuality that loses touch with human needs.
Once again, though, Corinne and Roland eventually cross the line between understandable frustration and sheer viciousness. A little earlier in the scene, Roland had directed anger not only at Emily and Tom but at Weekend itself, complaining that the movie is "crap ... full of crazy people." Corinne now assaults Emily with the argument that "this isn't a novel, it's life. A film is life!" The travelers then physically attack the English author and her friend. Emily moves to escape, panting, "We must cover the flowers with flames,w e must stroke their hair, we must teach them to read." Savagely parroting her - "So you want to cover the flowers with flames!" - Roland sets her dress on firew hile Corinne holds her from running away. Emily shrieks off-screen as the killers gaze in her direction, and their words reiterate Godard's insistence on blurring all distinctions between the realities of fiction and the fictions of reality:
CORINNE: We are beasts. We have no right to burn anyone, even a philosopher.
ROLAND: Can't you see they're only imaginary characters? CORINNE: Then why is she crying? ROLAND: I don't know. Let's go. CORINNE: We're not much more than that ourselves.
Corinne's attitude seems close to compassionate for a moment, but the reality of the feral violence she and Roland have committed is underscored by a close-up of Emily's blazing remains. It is not far-fetched to associate this fiery death with the slash-and-burn destructiveness of the war in Vietnam - always on Godard's mind during this phase of his career - and with the self-immolation used by some courageous protestors to denounce that war. (One such was a short-lived character in Masculine/Feminine.)
Tom ends the scene with a long recitation summing up Brecht's pessimism about a society that relegates artistic and intellectual activity to the status of culture-industry commodities:
I said to myself, what's the use of talking to them?. .. All they're looking for is cheap knowledge they can sell for a high price.. . . They don't want to be oppressed, they want to oppress. They don't want progress, they want to be first. They will submit to anyone as long as he promises that they can make the laws. What can one say to them, I wondered? Then I decided, this is what I will say to them:
And the scene fades into darkness, suggesting the inability of literary words or cinematic images to ameliorate such evils. If the goal of the oppressed is not to eliminate oppression but merely to take control of its operations, what solution can there be but an end to laws, controls, and social systems of all sorts? Yet such anarchy could carry an exorbitant price of its own, as Weekend will show as its grim progress continues.
Since the movie's chaos and mayhem have now approached combat-field intensity, it is hardly surprising to read the next intertitle, in red and blue letters: ONE TUESDAY IN THE IOO YEARS WAR. Next comes a close-up of a common worm on a patch of muddy earth. On the sound track, Roland and Corinne chant an assessment of the human race that seems particularly accurate with regard to themselves:
ROLAND: We don't know anything.
CORINNE: Yes, we are entirely ignorant of our own natures. ROLAND: As ignorant about ourselves as about this worm. CORINNE: Both of us are enigmas. ROLAND: And whoever denies this is the most ignorant of the ignorant.
To the extent that this is a self-analysis by our troublesome protagonists, few moviegoers are likely to argue with it.
Roland and Corinne are resting in another rural field, rousing themselves only when they spot some spiffy clothing on a corpse in another of the horrific auto wrecks that still litter the story. Corinne says her mother has surely changed the all-important will by now, but Roland has not given up. "We'll just have to torture her to make her change her mind," he says. "I remember when I was a lieutenant in Algeria, they taught us a trick or two." They pause so Corinne can hail a big yellow truck by lying in the street with her trousers off and her legs open, giving "on the road" a smarmy new meaning. Godard's interest in Brechtian digressions has not diminished, and now the title MUSICAL ACTION introduces a scene with more of the former than the latter. After agreeing to help the truck driver in return for a ride, Roland and Corinne wind up at a farmyard piano recital, where their new acquaintance plays a Mozart sonata with rough-hewn sensitivity. (Different critics have come up with different motivations for this episode: One says the musician is a piano salesman demonstrating his product; another finds the scene a satire on the French government's policy of bringing culture to the people.) Coutard's camera travels in an elegant circular movement, contrasting the crispness and concision of Mozart's musical patterns with discursive, modernistic visuals. The piano's conspicuously displayed brand name - Bechstein, a ready-made echo of Brechtian - reminds us that commodification pervades the world of high as well as low culture. Meanwhile, various people we haven't seen before stand, roam about, and listen to the performance, caught almost casually by the roving camera. (A recognizable one is Anne Wiazemsky, a new Godard collaborator and love interest who will become a star in some of his later films.) Speaking as he plays, the pianist (Paul Gegauff, a New Wave screenwriter) criticizes his own talent, praises the teacher (Artur Schnabel) under whom he studied, and deplores the social injustice that allowed the sublime Mozart to die a pauper's death. Surprisingly for a Godard character - especially in a wildly innovative film like this one - he also attacks the forms of contemporary music that reject classical harmonic structures. Mozart composed "the sort [of music] you listen to," he says, adding that "the sort of music people don't listen to is so-called serious modern music. Let's face it, almost nobody goes to hear it." Ironically, it's hard to hear Gegauff when a passing airplane almost drowns out his voice, but he makes a valid point when he notes that much modernist music (in the atonal, twelve-tone, and aleatory styles) have never attracted large audiences. Still, we might expect a tradition-questioning radical like Godard to consider the public's indifference to "difficult" and "obscure" music a tragedy of laziness rather than a sign of populist common sense. Instead the pianist states that "the real modern music" is built on Mozart's ideas, and that alternative routes have led only to "the biggest damn disaster in the whole history of art." Do these words reflect the filmmaker's opinions, or are they a spontaneous outgrowth of this movie's explosively dialogic nature? As usual with Godard, the answer is both. He is obviously no enemy of modernist cinema (e.g., Rivette, Straub-Huillet) that diverges as sharply from Hollywood classicism as modernist music (e.g., Schonberg, Cage) diverges from the eighteenth-century sonata; ditto for Godard's predilections in painting (e.g., Picasso) and literature (e.g., Faulkner). Nonetheless, his musical taste is undeniably steeped in the traditional; examples abound, from the Beethoven quartets in First Name: Carmen to the Mozart pieces in Breathless and the very title of For Ever Mozart. Be this as it may, Gegauff finishes his ruminations with a revealing remark. "He rarely tackled Mozart," the pianist says of his teacher, "be cause he used to say Mozart was too easy for children and beginners, and too difficult for virtuosos." This comment prefigures an aesthetic turn Godard will take immediately after Weekend, in such movies as Le Gai Savoir and One Plus One, which contain passages of mise-en-scene so spare and stylized that they're almost cartoonish. A child might indeed think too little goes on in such scenes, whereas an adult unfamiliar with Godard might find the material esoteric and demanding. In all, it appears Gegauff is speaking for Godard's growing interest in uniting simplicity and sophistication. If one more clue is needed that Gegauff is close to Godard's heart in some ways, it might be the cigar-smoking habit the pianist shares with our tobacco-prone filmmaker - and blames for the clinkers he hits on his keyboard!
THE WEEK OF 4 THURSDAYS reads the next disorienting title, as Roland and Corinne bid farewell to the pianist and his yellow truck. They continue on their journey, taking turns giving each other piggyback rides. Time travels fast as another title, ONE FRIDAY FAR FROM, takes them past three onlookers who identify themselves as "gli attori italiani della coproduzione," that is, Italian actors in the co-production. Roland steals a jacket from a car-crash corpse, and Corinne plops down for a rest after her last turn as a piggyback chauffeur. A young man roars up in a sports car, and his companion asks Roland the provocative question, "Are you in a film or are you for real?" Roland replies that they are "in a film," and the driver shouts, "Liars!" as he takes off down the road.
More depressed than ever, Corinne hops into a ditch and announces that she must sleep or die. Roland advises her to do the latter, then sits to smoke a cigarette. A wandering derelict happens along, asks Roland for a light - holding a flaming match, Roland says he doesn't have one - and then asks Roland if that is "his girl" in the ditch. Roland won't dignify him with an answer, so the derelict lowers himself into the trench and rapes Corinne so savagely that the sound track fills with her cries of pain and pleas for help. This scene would be horrifying even if Godard did not present it with such matter-of-fact casualness; yet Roland sits impassively, not bestirring himself until another car comes rolling down the road. He approaches the well-to-do woman in the back of the American sedan and asks if Oinville is on her route. The matron responds by asking, "Would you rather be fucked by Mao or Johnson?" Roland gives the wrong answer ("Johnson, of course") and the woman calls him a "dirty fascist" as her chauffeur drives on. Roland resumes his seat, the wanderer emerges from the ditch, and the camera gets bored with the dull-eyed glances they exchange, tracking down the road until both characters disappear from view. Reversing its course a few moments later, it travels back to show Corinne rejoining Roland, clearly bruised by the assault but fairly impassive all the same. She asks another passing motorist about Oinville, interrupted by a particularly bizarre intertitle series
oo
o o oo AND CHOCOLATE FOOTIT AND CHOCOLATE
- and gets asked a question in return, "Who attacked first: Israel or Egypt?" Corinne's answer, "Those bastards the Egyptians," is evidently incorrect, and the driver calls her an "ignorant fool" as he departs. The pair resume their piggybacking, and Roland cheats shamelessly, counting out his allotted number of steps (ten per turn) much faster than he actually walks.
Of all the incongruous elements in this scene, the questions asked by the passing motorists seem particularly out of place; yet they serve a serious purpose, joining the movie's faux film-noir parody to more explicitly political interests. The next scene carries this further, foreshadowing the imminent "radical phase" of Godard's career so vividly that we can almost see it being born. Another truck heaves into view (a garbage truck this time, but yellow like its predecessors), and the workers on board offer Roland and Corinne a ride. The travelers pitch in to help the laborers, trudging along a path carrying loads of garbage and trash. Not an enthusiastic helper in the best of times, Corinne soon drops her load in a heap. Roland does better, managing to dump his garbage into the truck. Tired and hungry, he searches for something edible amid the mess, then asks one of the truckers - they are an Arab and a black man - for "just a bite" of his over sized sandwich.
This modest but distinctly human gesture opens the film's most voluble, didactic, and confrontational journey into the twin territories of power and ideology, expanding Godard's challenge to conventional spectacle with an extravagantly Brechtian interlude meant to drive an enormous wedge between our craving for entertainment and what little is left of the movie's linear narrative. Roland's request for a morsel of food leads his black acquaintance to take a hearty bite of sandwich for himself, pause thoughtfully for a moment, then hand Roland a scrap that he eagerly accepts. Roland asks for more, but the laborer takes another large bite for himself and observes that the crumb Roland just ate was appropriate for him - since it "represented exactly the same proportion of my sandwich as the proportion of its overall budget that the U.S. gives the Congo." Corinne shows up with a load of trash, dumps it into the truck with Roland's help, and follows his example by asking the Arab for something to eat. He teases her and demands a kiss. When she begins to eat a scrap he's given her, he strikes her, saying he is "applying the law which the big oil companies apply to Algeria." Sharing the meager bite she has extracted from the Arab, she and Roland ask what law he is invoking. "The law of the kiss and the kick in the ass," the Arab answers. "Just because you're underprivileged doesn't mean you have to be mean!" retorts Corinne, as a blue title appears:
WORLD
3
Once again, Godard is refusing to idealize or sentimentalize the working class, which can clearly be as arbitrary and bullying as its more privileged sociocultural cousins.
"My black brother will now express my views," says the Arab, and we watch him devour his sandwich while his companion delivers a long, discursive speech. Africa is experiencing a new wave of optimism, the black worker says. This is not the result of any new bounty on nature's part, nor is it the outcome of "less inhuman" or "more benevolent" behavior by the people who once brought colonial oppression to the continent. Rather, he continues, political and military actions by the African masses are what have improved the region's morale. He then compares the exploitation of Africa to the "physical and spiritual liquidation" brought to Europe by Nazi terror, and he calls for native Africans to combat "the French, English, and South African manifestations of this evil" while also staying on the lookout for other possible outbreaks. "We, the African people, declare that for more than a hundred years the lives of two hundred million Africans have been held cheap or denied, haunted continually by the spectre of death," he goes on. Hope lies not with "the good will of the imperialists" or "the mechanical development of ... natural resources," but with the "hands and brains" of the people as they set in motion "the dialectics of the continent's liberation." This is quite a declamation, and it is worth quoting at length for two reasons. For one, it expresses precisely the sort of political ideas that Godard - prone to ideological "confusion" as recently as The Little Soldier in 1960 - now sees as useful tools for improving our badly damaged world. It also escalates his recently instituted campaign against the tyranny of images. Not only does the movie stop in its tracks for this long monologue, but we don't even get to see the speaker as he speechifies; instead we watch the Middle Eastern worker eat his sandwich, an unseductive sight if ever there was one. This view is relieved only by a couple of quick flashbacks - one to the hitchhiker prodding Roland and Corinne with his branch and pistol, the other to Saint-Just reciting in the countryside. Although both flashbacks seem calculated more for rhythmic impact and alienation value than for conveyance of any specific message, it is noteworthy that the nasty-hitchhiker flash back takes place just as the African likens colonialism to Nazism, and that Saint-Just appears when the speaker mentions "the dialectics of [a] continent's liberation." Hardly coincidental, these juxtapositions point up the carefully calibrated method underlying the apparent madness of this movie. The same polemical pattern then repeats itself as the African introduces his Arab companion, chews his sandwich in close-up, and listens while an even longer oration takes place. Again it begins with one of the men saying the other will speak for him; but whereas the black man's statement applied to black Africans and Arabs alike, the Arab's speech pleads the cause of black people quite specifically. He begins with an attack on "nonviolent men" and "pacifists," perhaps influenced by the militant career of African-American leader Malcolm X, whose life had been cut short by assassination (just when his work was turning in a more nonviolent direction) two years before Weekend was made. Declaring that "a black man's freedom is as valuable as that of a white man," the speaker claims that freedom cannot be won through "nonviolence, patience, and love." On the contrary, the "war" between black people and "the United States and its friends" can only be resolved through guerrilla fighting. Black partisans are already present in such "strategic points" as factories, fields,a nd white homes, he adds. Sabotage against transportation, communication, and technological networks will "bring the West to its knees by ruining it economically," but economics is only part of the story. Also needed are "bloodthirsty" deeds inspired by Vietcong tactics, carried out with Molotov cocktails and other low-end weapons deployed by black Americans who learned modern guerrilla methods in Vietnam. Viewers who already know the ending of Weekend may find a particularly grim fascination in the Arab's monologue when he calls for absorbing the power of white American society - infiltrating its strategic areas, learning its combat techniques, understanding its transport and communication systems - in order to turn this potency against the enemy that created it. In metaphorical terms, appropriating and reversing an adversary's strength amounts to "anthropophagy," or cannibalism; in political terms, this includes what film scholar Robert Stam calls "a devouring of the techniques and information of the super developed countries ... in an effort to struggle against colonialist domination." Weekend will reach its riotous finale in a burst of cannibalism, as outrageously gruesome and exhilaratingly subversive as anything in Godard's career, which is itself partly dedicated to cannibalizing the conventional cinema. Ultimately, cannibalism is the carnivalesque link between theoretically minded guerrillas like the African and the Arab, on one hand, and self-serving goons like Corinne and Roland, on the other. These characters occupy very different places on the revolutionary spectrum, but all are products of a sociopolitical system that breeds its own devourers with ironic ease and efficiency.
Another blue title -
CID THE OCCIDENT DENT
- evokes the Western world flanked (trapped?) by history and biology: medieval heroics (El Cid) on one side, material presence (dent = teeth, the body's only visible bones) on the other.
Working together now, the African and the Arab offer a refresher course in Marxist sociology, identifying civilization (in a different sense than that used earlier in the film) as the basic condition of group oppression. "To be civilized means to belong to a class society," the African intones, "to a reality full of contradictions" that lead inevitably to slavery, serfdom, and exploitation. The characters continue in this vein, tracing society's movement from savagery to barbarism, from tribal confederation to military democracy. The scene closes with Friedrich Engels's idea that Western social evolution can be understood through the study of certain Native American cultures, which had "reached the final stages of their independent histories" and were about to start "their history as a class society" when the Columbian invasion changed their path forever. Much of this tirade is accompanied by the blandest possible images: close-ups of the African eating his sandwich, or Roland and Corinne resting, smoking, listening. This portion of Weekend prefigures Godard's strategies in the Dziga-Vertov Group period, when he will put even more energy into inverting commercial film'sp reference for spectacle over substance, diversion over discourse, visual seductiveness over verbal significance. Still, the images grow more restless as the episode proceeds, and more material from elsewhere in the movie intrudes on the speechifying. Words about destroying the established order are accompanied by a flashback to the bloody ending of the traffic-jam scene, a vision of society choked by self-generated contradictions. Words about capitalistic greed summon another traffic-jam image, juxtaposing the car of Roland and Corinne with an old-fashioned horse and cart. Words about "private property, the monogamous family, and the state" bring back the parking-lot fight from the beginning of the film. Words about social evolution are paired with Roland and Corinne walking a road that has become a corridor of twisted, flaming automobiles. A description of ancient military democracies is counterpointed by surreal Exterminating Angel material. As Native American societies are mentioned, we see Tom Thumb's recitation over Emily Bronte's smoking ashes. Perhaps most important, the Arab's talk about Iroquois and Seneca cultures is accompanied not by a flashback but by a flash-forward, showing a rifle-bearing young woman; she could be a traditional American Indian, or a hippie from the 1960s. Sharing the screen are two similar figures, one sitting near a river and one dancing to music we cannot hear. This ideologically complex, cinematically daunting scene then concludes in a surprisingly conventional way: As the garbage truck continues through the countryside, Roland and Corinne realize they have arrived in Oinville at last! Jumping from the trash, they run happily toward the village, bickering over who'll have the first bath. Conventionality soon vanishes again, however, WEEKEND flashes three times in blue letters, and Roland worries that he and Corinne have missed the death of Corinne's dad. The scene changes to a bourgeois bathroom, with Corinne in the tub and a painting of a nude woman on the wall. (This is another instance of the interaction among art-painting-reality cinema that Godard has explored through similar framing in most of his previous films, and as critics have noted, it perpetrates a mischievous irony by contrasting the unseen breasts of Corinne - played by Dare, a sexy movie star - with the visible breasts of the "respectable" nude hanging behind her.) Roland tells Corinne that her mother is reneging on the "5050 split" of her father's estate, and Corinne fumes at getting so little return after enduring so much aggravation. "She won't get away with it," the dutiful daughter vows.
The scene changes again, sort of, as the camera jumps to exterior shots while the sound track stays with Corinne and Roland in the bathroom. We see a sunny Oinville view complete with a peaceful road, a small-town church, a billboard with a gasoline ad, and a second street with a bit of traffic. Blue titles invoke Balzac again -
LIFE IN THE / SCENE FROM
LIFE IN THE PROVINCES
- and remind us that we are still watching A FILM ADRIFT IN THE COSMOS and A FILM FOUND ON A SCRAP HEAP. What we hear during this sequence is Corinne trying to get Roland's attention as she continues her bath and he reads at length (another common Godard mannerism) from a borrowed book.
At first this appears to be another purely Brechtian digression, since nothing could be more irrelevant than the "just-so story" that Roland recites - about a hippopotamus who asks God for permission to live in the water, promises not to eat the fish who dwell there, and agrees that "every time I want to shit I'll spread the shit out with my tail, so you can see for yourself there aren't any fish bones in it." The fable acquires deeper meaning when Roland reads a commentary on it, however:
By day, the hippopotamus is a completely different creature. At least the night conceals his astonishing display of ugliness - his bulging eyes, his gigantic mouth, his misshapen body, his absurdly short legs, and his grotesque tail. Perhaps, from a hippopotamus's point of view, this represents the acme of beauty, but I am not a hippopotamus. I look upon him not only as the most ungainly beast of all, but also as an infinite abyss of stupidity. I would not have dwelt at such length on the disgust that this horrible creature inspires in me were it not for my conviction that the servile way in which he accepts collective life is the most abject side of his nature.
The first section of this paragraph includes a catalog of (animal) body parts, as if Godard were parodying the lists of (human) body parts we encounter in several of his earlier films - either spoken by characters (e.g., Patricia in Breathless, Camille in Contempt) or constructed by the camera (e.g., the opening of A Married Woman, the brothel scenes of My Life to Live), However, the most striking aspects of the hippo inventory are its savagery, its gratuitousness, and its lack of charity toward what is, after all, a dumb animal that cannot help its appearance or the reactions it may inspire in others. The quotation suggests a nightmarish reversal of romantic notions (the felicities of nature, the bounties of physical beauty) that have crept into otherwise tough-minded Godard films like Pierrot le fou and Masculine/Feminine. Beyond this, the latter part of the passage ("the servile way in which he accepts collective life . . .") constitutes a bitter attack on the (metaphorical) ugliness of any creatures that fail to question the premises of their social and political surroundings. Near the end of Weekend, the revolutionary Kalfon will utter a key line: "We can only overcome the horror of the bourgeoisie with even more horror." Roland's hippopotamus embodies both kinds of horror in all their unreflective ugliness.
So does the flayed rabbit that Corinne's mother fetches from Flaubert the butcher, as her daughter and son-in-law vainly beg her to share her late husband's estate; and so does the mother herself, after Roland and Corinne strangle and stab her to death. Mother and rabbit wind up in equally awful shape on the patio floor, and Godard depicts this appalling outcome through a close-up of the rabbit bathed in pale red blood from an unseen source - perhaps the slashed-up body of Corinne's mom, as she screams bloody murder on the sound track. This scene is an extraordinarily risky mixture of parody, grotesquerie, and flat-out gruesomeness, staging the homicide as a burst of mayhem that's almost farcical in its exaggeration - Roland starts to garrote the mother while Corinne hacks her with a huge knife that pumps up and down behind some bushes, recalling the detective's murder in Psycho - followed instantly by the sickening sight of the blood-drenched rabbit. (The rabbit shot is an unusual sort of synecdoche, inverting that trope's ordinary purpose of allusiveness and discretion.) Rarely has any filmmaker thrown audiences such a stunning onetwo punch of contradictory emotional cues in such a hypercondensed period of time. Faced with the familiar Hollywood problem of how to dispose of the corpse, the parricides consider some solutions associated with celebrity killers of the past - burning her a la Dr. Petiot, who conducted a sort of private Holocaust in Nazi-occupied France, or following the example of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, another of the film's Edgar Allan Poe references. Finally they settle on an ideal method for Weekend: stashing the cadaver in a burning accident site along the highway. Chortling over their perfect crime and cooing their affection for each other, they incinerate their victim by setting fire to a plane-and-car wreck, which explodes as they scurry into the Oinville woods. The film's moody, repetitive music roars its ambiguous response.
From the beginning, everything about Weekend has been more Brechtian and clinical than personal and engaging. Few spectators are likely to walk away from it with vivid memories of facial expressions, vocal intonations, or psychological details. Even in this context, however, the film's last portion is shot in ways that seem conspicuously distanced and removed, with the camera placed in "incorrect" positions very far from the action; it appears determined not merely to discourage but to prevent the possibility of emotional rapport between characters and audience. Remember the long-distance shot of Michel after the cop killing in Breathless, multiply this several times over, and you have some sense of the detachment enforced by Godard's camera style here.
The characters don't get any more appealing, either. In the forest they have just entered, Roland and Corinne ask directions from the first person they meet (they are lost again, hunting for Versailles this time), and he answers by hiding his face with a novelty postcard and squeaking its birdtwittering soundbox at them. This is less than helpful, as is the red-andblue intertitle that appears at the same moment
FL/FL/FL
s so
Later this cryptogram will be filled out with white letters to identify the Seine and Oise Liberation Front - an imposing name, although rendered less impressive by an implacable white X crossing it out.
The postcard man, Yves, disappears into the woods, and we return to Roland and Corinne as they barge into a family picnic, grabbing food and drink from the group. Yves then reappears with his girlfriend, Isabelle, and a second accomplice; the latter two are dressed like hippies, but armed with submachine guns - an interesting mixture of "love generation" and "guerrilla underground" iconography, evoking the 1960s era in contradictory ways. They terrorize the family, stealing its provisions and torching its car. Then they slaughter the husband, wife, and child with Yves's gun, and hustle a remaining picnicker, Louis, into the woods along with Roland and Corinne. If one knew this picnic-massacre scene only from reading the screenplay, one might imagine a Hollywood-style episode fraught with drama and emotion. Godard defuses any potential suspense or pathos, however, rendering it as bizarre and uninviting as the postcard-man who introduces it by twittering an idiotic consumer gimmick. Alienation devices continue to proliferate with stepped-up energy and frequency - in the unpredictable editing, the mise-en-scene and sound (e.g., the drums at which Kalfon and Yves thrash away in their countryside lair), and the full-screen titles (usually bearing historical and literary references) that intrude on the action more jarringly than ever. We have passed the point of no return on our journey into the film's new "civilization," and we have no more chance than Roland and Corinne of changing our minds and returning to the social order we left behind. At least we are here voluntarily, which is more than Roland and Corinne can say as they plod farther into the wilderness, with guns at their backs and increasingly weird company by their sides. Their new revolutionary companions include Yves and Isabelle, who abducted them; Gerald, who wears a butcher's apron and hails the kidnapped Louis as an old friend from the Ethiopian war; Kalfon, evidently the leader of the group; and Ernest, a guerrilla chef with a bloodstained hat on his head and a huge butcher knife in his hand. Isabelle greets him by pushing the abducted girl in his direction and saying, "You can fuck her before you eat her if you want." Ever discreet, the camera spares us more of this episode by panning to Isabelle strolling away and Yves whacking his drums. Fade to black. Such is life at the Seine and Oise Liberation Front, where revolutionaries radio one another with cinematic code names ("Battleship Potemkin calling The Searchers") while Louis reminisces about wartime sex and Ernest drops eggs on a heap of cadavers. The scene is repellent and incoherent by the standards of "normal" filmmakers like Eisenstein or Ford, the directors alluded to by the radio codes. It makes sense, however, if we view it in terms of the carnivalistic "grotesque body" tradition that critic Mikhail Bakhtin has traced through Western art and literature (Rabelais, Dostoevsky, etc.) for centuries - a tradition that challenges ruling-class decorum (and power) by cultivating impropriety, incongruity, and unruliness in outrageous tales governed by boisterous impulses that are as profoundly human as they are wildly excessive. To be sure, the carnivalism of Weekend is as dark and dystopian as it comes; yet this tradition provides many precedents for the uproarious vulgarities that litter the movie, from Corinne's early monologue to Ernest's sick activities in the outdoor kitchen. One thing the Seine and Oise Liberation Front wants to liberate us from is the notion of "decency" and "discipline" that bourgeois society uses to keep our anarchic bodies under suffocating control. To liberate our potential for great, glorious creativity, however, is also to unchain our capacity for frightful, terrifying evil. The tension between these aspects of the human condition is as fundamental as that between rationality and emotion, ego and id, conscious thought and unconscious desire. Godard signals his recognition of these tensions by punctuating the Liberation Front scene with the title TOTEM AND TABOO, borrowed from Sigmund Freud's late study of primal human impulses, including the desires for incest and murder. Freud links the repression of these urges with feelings of dread and guilt, and with the growth of social prohibitions surrounding sex and food - the very activities that are mixed so indecorously in this film's most outlandish moments. Bringing the increasingly mad fusion of sex, food, and death to a deliberately barbaric climax, the Liberation Front scene serves a double purpose. First, it unmasks the abhorrent urges that dwell in all human hearts, prompting repressions and denials that evolve into the psychosexual norms of civilized society. Second, it argues that a "return of the repressed" might readily occur if the social order were attacked with enough vigor by forces believing that, in Kalfon's words, the "horror of the bourgeoisie" can be dislodged only by "even more horror." Some revolutionary thinkers of the 1960s believed exactly that. Godard's own stance appears to be deeply ambivalent, divided between excitement over cinema's ability to unveil society's foul secrets, and genuine disgust at the putrescence that crawls into view when civilization's rock is overturned. (This ambivalence is itself a carnivalistic attitude, openended and flexible rather than closed-minded and determined.) The scene culminates when Corinne's weirdly comic speech near the beginning of the film, about a kitchen-counter sex party with orgasms amid eggs and milk, is transformed into nightmarish farce as Ernest places ritualistically broken eggs and then a massive fish between the open thighs of a captive woman. While this is perhaps the most pointedly repulsive moment in all of Godard's work, it serves at least two purposes that justify its ferocity. For one, it pungently exposes the flamboyant irrationality of the libidinal energies held tenuously in check by social convention. For another, it points to male sexuality as a primary breeding ground for those energies, and for the aggression and violence they produce. Since the words TOTEM AND TABOO put this portion of Weekend into explicitly Freudian territory, we must remember the insistence of psychoanalytic theory that castration anxieties (acquired in childhood and never successfully shaken) are at the root of countless male behaviors aimed at assuaging subconscious feelings of lack, inadequacy, and fear. By this view, Ernest is grotesquely repairing the "universal wound" of the "castrated" female, replacing the missing phallus with materials whose size and shape (fish, eggs) identify them as obvious dream symbols for the male organs that these revolutionaries are desperate to reclaim. The fact that a woman helps Ernest reminds us that victimized classes are often complicit in their own oppression - a point that will shortly be reinforced when Corinne switches from guerrilla hostage to active member of the marauding band.
Full-screen titles become more plentiful than ever as Weekend continues its journey to the end of the revolutionary night. Four appearances of TOTEM AND TABOO are followed by LIGHT IN AUGUST, another in Godard's long string of Faulkner homages. (At this stage in Godard's career it is worth noting that Faulkner's work steered a similar course between high-art experimentation, a la Absalom, Absalom!, and gut-stirring melodrama, a la Sanctuary.) LIGHT IN AUGUST is also a punning reference to one of Godard's favorite filmmakers, Auguste Lumiere, whose last name translates into English as "light." Lumiere's statement that cinema is "an invention without a future" is ironically inscribed on a projection-room wall in Contempt; it seems apt that Godard invokes his name in this portrait of what appears to be a society without a future.
Back in the narrative, the guerrillas move stealthily through the overgrown countryside with their hostages, and suddenly Roland makes an unexpected bid to escape, charging away from the startled group. This move has a certain dramatic impact, but one is hard-pressed to say whether Roland's motive is courage or cowardice, since the camera keeps its strict Brechtian distance, denying us the psychological information that a classical film would heap upon us at such a moment. A female guerrilla - none other than Juliet, the upper-class woman who clashed with the tractor-driving farmer many episodes ago - aims her rifle in his direction. Kalfon intercedes, not to save Roland but to kill the fleeing captive himself, using a carefully aimed slingshot. Roland yowls in his death agony as Juliet prods Corinne along with her rifle. The story has reached a decisive juncture - the demise of a major character - but in keeping with its hallucinatory tone, this turning point is tossed out in an off-screen moment, purposely abrupt and absurd. The next red intertitle announces THERMIDOR, the eleventh month of the new calendar established during the French Revolution as part of its effort to institute a new era in human history. (Thermidor ran from late July to the middle of August, by the old calendar, so the chronology of Weekend shows a sort of fever-dream consistency by placing LIGHT IN AUGUST and THERMIDOR next to each other.) We now see the mortally injured Roland as he lies bleeding near the path, and a brief off-screen dialogue assures us that his violent death will have no more dignity than his disreputable life -
CORINNE: Why have you opened his stomach?
ERNEST: Because it's the best part.
Corinne responds, "How horrible," and it is now that Kalfon utters his epigram about mobilizing excesses of horror to defeat the horror of the bourgeoisie.
The group marches on as time marches on, indicated by more red and blue intertitles -
• SEPTEMBER MASSACRE: A policeman dies in a gunfight with a female guerrilla.
• SEPTEMBER MASSACRE again: Two men slaughter a pig (in real, unsimulated footage) with a sledgehammer and butcher knife; Juliet levels her rifle at one of the men as he subsequently kills a goose. • PLUVIOSE, a winter month in the Revolution's calendar: Kalfon returns by boat to the guerrilla camp; Claude paints the naked body of a woman tied to a tree as Louis placidly watches; Ernest putters in his bloodspattered kitchen. • OCTOBER LANGUAGE, alluding to the October Revolution and Eisenstein's film October: Claude makes radio contact with a distant ally ("Johnny Guitar calling Gosta Berling") while perusing a book. • OCTOBER LANGUAGE again: Crashing rhythms from the camp's drums accompany a spoken manifesto; its length and declamatory style recall the African and Arab speeches given earlier.
This manifesto is recited by Kalfon as he thwacks away at the drums. Much of it is a salute to the ocean, of all things, phrased in conspicuously flowery language. Like the pianist's barnyard concert, this scene works partly as a Brechtian interruption, and partly as a poetic interlude with sly implications for the film's polemical meaning. The speaker describes himself as a "monster whose face you cannot see," insisting that he is "not a criminal" despite his "hideous" soul. He then mixes panegyrics to the sea ("on first sight of you, a breath as full of sadness as the soft murmur of the wind blows through the soul") with statements conveying a somber vision of humanity:
Those who love you never fail to be reminded, sometimes unawares, of man's rude beginnings when he first learned the pain which has never left him since. ... I suppose that man only believes in his own beauty out of vanity, but in fact suspects that he is not truly beautiful. Otherwise, why would he look with such contempt upon the faces of others made in his image? ... In spite of the ocean's depth, the depth of the human heart is on a whole different scale. Psychology has a long way to go. . . . Tell me if you house the Prince of Darkness . . . O Sea . . . for I will rejoice to hear that hell is so close to mankind. . . .
He concludes, "I cannot go on, for I feel the moment has arrived to return to the harsh land of men.. . . Let us make a supreme effort and, conscious of our duty, fulfill our destiny on this earth. ..."
This peculiar yet oddly passionate discourse stirs memories of earlier scenes: Roland's hippopotamus recitation, which also evokes a pathetic "monster," and the garbage-truck episode, where the Arab's words about Indian tribes spark a flash-forward to Juliet strolling with other guerrillas while Kalfon drums and declaims. It seems odd for Weekend to detour into a poem about the ocean - once again, interruption for its own sake appears to be at work - but Godard's social, political, and metaphysical concerns shine intermittently through its rambling language about humanity's "pain," the "contempt" we show toward one another, and the possibility of a nearby "hell" holding justice for our "harsh land" unless we finally take control of our destinies. Fade-out to darkness and silence.
Brechtian style and melodramatic content join again in the next scene, which provides still another example of potentially stirring action-film material deliberately drained of emotional and psychological appeal. Kalfon forces Corinne onto a lonely roadway, planning to exchange her for another hostage. This plot development strongly resembles the climax of My Life to Live, which also shows a domineering man turning a vulnerable woman into a salable commodity. As in the earlier film, the deal goes violently sour, but this time it is Kalfon's accomplices Isabelle and Valerie who are killed, while Corinne makes a panicky escape. Blue intertitles (ARIZONA JULES) punctuate the mayhem, which includes much gunfire and frantic running. The camera then frames the fatally injured Valerie in close-up as she sings a childish song with the unchildish theme of human isolation: "Although one may be suffering agonies/Still to others all may seem right." Her helplessness begins to stir our sympathy, but her lyrics remind us that ordinary feelings are rarely adequate to the complex interplay of reality and illusion in human affairs:
With a broken heart one can still smile,
Apparently indifferent, When the last word has to be written, In a novel that comes to a bad end.
Valerie dies after breathing the finalw ords in a barely audible voice. Three identical titles - FAUX RACCORD, meaning "mismatch" or "discontinuity" - then interrupt a sequence that is not discontinuous at all but coherently depicts Valerie's death, Kalfon's parting kiss, and his flight with Corinne in another flurry of gunshots. (It is also possible that Godard actually sees this sequence as "discontinuous," since its linear construction seems downright weird in this context, surrounded as it is by the wired-up disintegration of Weekend in its final throes, FAUX RACCORD might also refer to the incongruous kiss between living Kalfon and dead Valerie, or simply to the interruption of an action scene with static intertitles.)
The penultimate title - VENDE MIAIRE, the Revolutionary calendar's first month - indicates that considerably more time has rushed by. Corinne has joined Kalfon and the others in their camp. We see a close-up of Kalfon's fist, clenched in a popular 1960s salute that combines the threat of force with the assertion of solidarity; and we hear his voice in a final expression of revolutionary rage. "When your foot slips on a frog, you feel disgusted," he says. "But when you scarcely touch the human body, the skin of your fingers splits like scales of mica under hammer blows." He opens his fist to reveal a tiny frog; then we see him sitting near Corinne, bedecked in full guerrilla-style regalia. "Just as a shark's heart beats for an hour after its death," he continues, "our insides keep stirring through and through long after we make love." Corinne is baffled by Kalfon's caustic metaphors; in the film's last extended speech he clarifies his vision of
the boundless horror that people feel for others of the species. ... I know there is probably a more terrible affliction than the swollen eyes that come from meditating on the strangeness of human nature, but I have yet to discover it.
All the while, Ernest has been working away at his kitchen fire. Now he scurries over to Kalfon and Corinne with big hunks of meat, which they grab and start gnawing without hesitation. Their closing dialogue, spoken in respectable tones that would suit a well-laid table in a Parisian bistro, ranks with Godard's most memorable:
CORINNE: Not bad. KALFON: Yes, we mixed the pig with the remains of the English tourists. CORINNE: The ones in the Rolls? KALFON: That's right. There should be left-overs of your husband in there, too. CORINNE: When I'm finished, Ernest, I wouldn't mind a bit more.
Thus does capitalism become cannibalism, in the course of a ninety-fiveminute movie about a middle-class weekend on the byways of provincial France.
The conclusion of Weekend is outrageous by any reasonable standard, and so are many elements of the mix-and-match melange building up to it; yet such confrontational stuff is hardly unprecedented in the tradition of subversive cinema. Stam calls attention to anticolonial Brazilian films, for example, which stir up "orgies of clashing allusions and citations" in a spirit of "creative disrespect and irreverence," producing a boisterously chaotic mood in which "dominant cinema is made to war against itself" while the sardonic filmmaker "stands aside and ironizes."13 Such an artist becomes a carnivalistic cannibal, devouring alien materials - like the Hollywood-style ingredients in the early scenes of Weekend - that become increasingly unrecognizable as the movie digests them and appropriates their energy.
"The logic of carnival is that of the world turned upside down," writes Stam, citing Bakhtin's observation that carnivalesque satire treats death as a cheerfully grotesque affair "surrounded by food, drink, sexual indecencies and symbols of conception and fertility." Weekend operates on precisely this principle, albeit a ferociously cynical version of it. Godard mocks every sort of power, from middle-class privilege to working-class indignation and revolutionary outrage. As for the place of death in this cannily skewed portrait of our all-too-familiar world, Valerie's dying song is less an affirmation of human dignity than a recognition of life's ultimate absurdity; and Roland's demise is scarcely noticed before his bones turn up in Ernest's potpourri, which his wife proceeds to gobble up with the gusto of a hungry picnicker. This is surely a "civilization" turned upsidedown and inside-out, wherein life and death, beauty and horror, reality and illusion become heedlessly confounded with their opposites. The purpose of these inversions and contaminations is to shake us into a brutal new awareness of how tragically our real-world civilization has gone astray. Indeed, so wrenching are the film's extremes - scrambling fundamental elements of narrative and characterization to the point where they all but dissolve under the strain - that a term like "carnivalesque" may seem too neat and manageable to account for them. Cultural theorist Julia Kristeva defines another level of radical creativity when she argues that "abjection" picks up where "apocalypse and carnival" leave off. By dictionary definition, the "abject" means that which is low, wretched, base; by abject expression, Kristeva means utterances fostering a heightened awareness that "the narrative web is a thin film constantly threatened with bursting." When divisions between subject-object and inside-outside are called into question, the narrative may lose its linearity and enter a new stage in which "it proceeds by flashes, enigmas, short cuts, incompletion, tangles, and cuts." Eventually the fiction's highly stressed infrastructure "can no longer be narrated but cries out or is descried with maximal stylistic intensity (language of violence, of obscenity, or of a rhetoric that relates the text to poetry)." This describes Weekend, and other works of Godard's revolutionary phase, with great accuracy. "If one wishes to proceed farther still along the approaches to abjection," Kristeva adds, "one would find neither narrative nor theme but a recasting of syntax and vocabulary - the violence of poetry, and silence." Small wonder that Godard ends Weekend with a final blue title that evokes a final enigmatic silence:
END OF STORY
END OF CINEMA
David Sterritt/The Films of Jean-Luc Godard/ Seeing the Invisible/ My Life to Live
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