by Greg Olson
A rebel for the cause of unbridled free expression, Hopper stormed through life wolfing down booze and drugs, and romancing every starlet he could get his hands on. Hopper’s compulsion to maintain a militantly antiestablishment stance kept hurting his career: He couldn’t resist alienating the very people who could help him. He wrote, “Jimmy Dean once pulled a switchblade and threatened to murder his director. I follow his style in art and life.” Hopper’s former wife, Brooke Hayward, recalls, “We’d go to these parties where you’d have the crème de la crème of Hollywood, and he’d tell them that when he ran things heads were going to roll, they’d be in chains.”
Lynch calls the 1960s “the decade of change,” an era in which America was divided against itself: young against old, those who hated the Vietnam War against those who supported it, the counterculture against the establishment. While Lynch was painting in his studio, Dennis Hopper was walking with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in the Alabama Freedom March for African American civil rights and being spat on by southern bigots who called him “a nigger-loving Communist.”
Though Hopper’s mind was engulfed in drugs, rage, and paranoia, the excess and chaos of his life spawned the landmark American film Easy Rider, which he directed, co-starred in, and co-wrote. Made for only $350,000, the movie tapped into the archetypal American myth of the promise of the open road, which had been sung by everyone from the first explorers and pioneers to Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and Jack Kerouac. (In 1990, Lynch would join the freedom-loving road chorus with Wild at Heart.) Unlike Lynch’s artwork, Easy Rider was consciously, overtly political, and it expressed the mindset of many baby boomer–generation youth who celebrated peace and free love and railed against the corporate warmongers who were napalming babies in the jungles of Vietnam. The film asks a wrenching question that haunts us today: How can each of us be free and make American the way we want it to be without hurting each other and trampling on each other’s freedom?
Easy Rider made the brooding Hollywood outsider Dennis Hopper wealthy, famous, and instantly reclassified as “a creative genius.” His film changed the face of the movie business. Graying studio executives began catering to the “youth market” by hiring twenty-year-old “do-your-ownthing” filmmakers, and soon even the top-level-management ranks surged with younger blood. Hopper was given free reign to make his magnum opus, The Last Movie, a heavy-handed treatise against Hollywood/American imperialism presented in a boldly deconstructed narrative that turned off critics and audiences in droves. Hopper was once again exiled from Hollywood, and his professional and personal life spiraled down into drug addiction and psychotic hallucinations.
Hopper was absolutely out of control, and his friends stepped in and got him into a detoxification program. Actor Dean Stockwell, whose career had been revitalized after he played the traitorous Dr. Yueh in Lynch’s Dune, was instrumental in helping his comrade stay clean and sober, one day at a time.
Lynch had put Hopper on his first list of possible actors to play Frank Booth, but the director figured that if even half the stories about the legendary rebel and crazy man were true, he’d best leave him alone. Still, he’d heard that Hopper had cleaned up his act in recent months, that his searing talent was no longer compromised by scrambled brain chemistry. One day, the director’s phone rang, and Hopper’s intense voice declared, “I’ve got to play this part, David, because I am Frank.”37 Impressed and shaken by the actor’s unorthodox audition, Lynch said to the assembled cast and crew, “My God, he just told me that he is Frank. I don’t know what he meant by that. Maybe he’s right for the part, but how are we going to have lunch with him?” They decided to risk it.
Once the world saw Blue Velvet and experienced the blast-furnace power, frightening, sadistic perversity, and commanding authenticity of Hopper’s Frank Booth, word got around about the actor having said “I am Frank,” and once again he had some explaining to do. “I understand Frank very well. I was known to abuse people when drunk or high, but not exactly in this way. I’ve also played a lot of sex games, but I’m more a masochist than a sadist.” For Brooke Hayward, Frank Booth’s behavior was a portrait of “the way you would have seen Dennis behaving” in the 1960s.
Whatever the origin and history of the ferocity that Hopper brought to Frank Booth, Lynch was thrilled to have captured it with his camera. And Hopper was excited to be playing “perhaps the most vicious person who has ever been on the screen.” The actor credited Lynch with helping him reach his peak of frenzy: “David kept me up really high, pushing all the time. He insisted I keep playing it at a high level. I love what I do in the film, and I love what David did with me.” Hopper admitted that just a few months earlier that he “would have taken cocaine” to achieve his riveting acting effects, but now he was deeply gratified to be enjoying the sober life and drawing upon the pure, unadulterated streams of his talent. Lynch and company learned that having lunch with Dennis was no strain at all.
Hopper’s old pal Dean Stockwell rounded out Blue Velvet’s cast as the flamingly suave drug dealer Ben, and Lynch completed his technical crew by bringing in his longtime friend and sound-design maestro Alan Splet. Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy would have to sing a couple of nightclub numbers, so the director hired composer Angelo Badalamenti to coach her vocal performances. Lynch had such a positive rapport with the genial, rotund music man that he engaged Badalamenti to score the entire film, thus beginning a creative “marriage” that has included the director’s every movie, TV, and stage production through Mulholland Drive. Badalamenti wrote a beautiful melody to accompany Jeffrey and Sandy’s falling-in-love scene and Lynch was inspired to pen lyrics for it, thus opening up another avenue of self-expression that the director would pursue in the future. The resulting song, “Mysteries of Love,” needed just the right person to sing it, and the ethereal-voiced Julee Cruise was given the job, initiating still another of Lynch’s longtime artistic partnerships.
After Dune’s ultimately frustrating and dispiriting three-and-a-half years of inflated gigantism, making Blue Velvet felt like an intimate homecoming to Lynch. As with Eraserhead, the director was working with a smallish budget and an extended family of friends and collaborators, and he knew that the vision that reached the screen would be his alone. He was regaining his creative confidence after the Dune debacle, as Kyle MacLachlan recalls, “David was able to say, ‘this Blue Velvet material comes from me; I’m going to trust that it’s right.’” Lynch’s Blue Velvet dream was unique, but, as with Dennis Hopper’s road-tripping Easy Rider, it tapped into a primal, potent American myth.
For the country’s early, colonizing settlers, America was the frontier, a world of limitless space in which they could move about, build, worship as they pleased, and reap the bounty of their new land. Ordinary, common folks could chart their own course in this rural paradise, but as wave after wave of immigrants washed ashore and industrialized cities began to sprout, the frontier of wide-open promise and possibility kept elusively advancing westward. In 1890, newspapers from coat to coast delivered a traumatic shock to the American psyche: According to the latest census, the frontier was officially and forever closed. As more people jammed into cities, the urban areas expanded their boundaries and crowded out the wild, unsettled land. Cities pulsed to the oppressive beat of machines, and lived on a schedule of mechanized time, rather than the cycles of nature. An alfresco, neighbor-to-neighbor democracy was replaced by institutionalized government, blue skies became sooty gray, and the crime statistics worsened every year.
But there remained enclaves of rural hope and freedom, places that struck a perfect balance between the secure comforts of civilization and the spirited call of the wilderness. Small towns preserved the agrarian pursuits and free-ranging roots of the American experience. Sure, we’ve got cars and newfangled tractors and telephones, but in our hearts we know that the frontier starts right out where Maple Drive ends. The town grown-ups and kids all know each other, we leave our doors unlocked, and solve little problems in the front-porch twilight and tackle big ones at the town meetings. We jump right in to help in a crisis, but otherwise we let each other be. We’re a tight community of ruggedly individualistic souls, not a cheek by-jowl lonely crowd of strangers rat-racing after the almighty dollar in some skyscraper metropolis. Smelling fresh-cut wheat on the wind is more valuable than all the Mercedes-Benz exhaust fumes in the world.
In the American mind, there is a sun-dappled line of continuity that stretches from the earliest settlers’ idealized New England image of a village in the seventeenth-century wilderness; to Sarah Orne Jewett’s romanticized Tales of New England (1879); to Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), whose town is “one, big, jolly family”; to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938); to the Andy Hardy movies of the 1930s and 1940s; to William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy (1943); to Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations of the 1950s and 1960s; and to the wholesome TV and movie small-town fun of The Andy Griffith Show, The Waltons, Happy Days, American Graffiti, and Back to the Future of recent decades. The national imagination warms to the idea of small towns as repositories of tranquility, virtue, and bedrock democracy. However, for centuries, our psyches have also conjured dank and shivery forces of fear and evil waiting to seize us in shady, bucolic lanes.
The early Puritan settlers felt that they had found God’s country in America, but they brought their Old World Devil with them. The sect had broken away from England’s Anglican Church, an institution that, the Puritans believed, was woefully blind to the essentially corrupt nature of human beings and the Christ-ordained biblical manner in which fallen souls should properly worship. The benighted sinners could only attain the bliss of divine grace by strictly following God’s written laws. The Puritans were masters at projecting their own dark psychic shadows onto convenient scapegoats. In 1692, Betty Parris, the daughter of sin-and-Satan-obsessed clergyman Samuel Parris, began to position her body in strange postures and speak words that no one could understand. Soon, five of Betty’s girlfriends were suffering feverish fits in which it felt like insects were crawling beneath their skin, and seeing visions of wild animals with manlike faces (it seems Lynch’s intuitive urge to portray insects and animalistic humans as agents of evil taps into an ancient archetype). The parson’s daughter singled out Tituba, a black West Indian slave woman, as their tormentor. Tituba confessed to having made a pact with the Devil, whom she said was a tall man dressed in black who rode through the air on a stick. Witch-hunt hysteria gripped Salem, and the town locked up 150 bedeviled suspects, twenty of whom were put to death before the town’s malignant mass-delusion passed.
It wasn’t just the newly arrived European Americans who were seeing fearsome apparitions in the deep woods. The indigenous Native Americans, who the newcomers would tragically slaughter and displace from the lands that were the center of their universe, believed that mischievous and maligned spirits dwelled beyond the comforting glow of their cooking fires. In all cultures and eras, the ancient part of our psyches that fears being eaten by something bigger than us, that trembles at the seasonal death of the sun and the sudden, unaccountable deaths of our crops and our tribe-mates, stimulates our imaginations to produce images and scenarios of natural and supernatural predatory dangers. As a serpent slithered into Adam and Eve’s garden, agents of darkness crept into even the most idyllic small settlements where human beings dwelled.
Some early European American settlers felt the Native Americans were void of humanity, and conjured up the image of the evil Indian, which the nineteenth-century’s James Fenimore Cooper applied so forcefully in The Last of the Mohicans (and which he balanced against a host of beneficent and admirable Native Americans).
Caucasians were more than capable of haunting their own wilderness settlements, of course, and the souring of the pastoral dream began in earnest. Mark Twain detailed the emptiness of Mississippi village life in Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915) reveals people thwarted and wasted by the repressiveness and hypocrisy of their small-town home. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) examines the lives of misfits whose dreams and gifts are bigger than their narrow-minded little town. In Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, the town seems founded on the principle of “dullness made God”46 and is a place lacking in “beauty and strangeness,”47 qualities that Lynch sees everywhere. A town in the book (1940) and film (1942) King’s Row was “a good place to raise your children,”48 as well as for delving into insanity, murder, suicide, incest, euthanasia, unnecessary amputation, and embezzlement. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), chaos comes to sunny Santa Rosa, California, in the form of big-city Uncle Charlie, a killer of women, whose train pulls into the station spewing a monstrous black cloud of smoke as though, Hitchcock says, “the devil is coming to town.”49 So forces of darkness can come from the outside and invade a town, as also happens with the outer space–spawned seed pods of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)—or the roots of malevolence can have been here forever, ancient as the roots of grass.
Blue Velvet’s sense of lurking darkness is very close to that of Ray Bradbury’s 1946 story The Night, in which a small-town boy approaches a dreaded ravine. “Here and now, down there in that pit of jungled blackness is suddenly all the evil you will ever know. Evil you will never understand. All of the nameless things are there. Later, when you have grown you’ll be given names to label them. Meaningless syllables to describe the waiting nothingness. Down there in the huddled shadow, among thick trees and trailed vines, lives the odor of decay. Here, at this spot, civilization ceases, reason ends, and a universal evil takes over.” Bradbury continues,
There are a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins is the small town’s music, with no lights but many shadows. Oh the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life is a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, are threatened by an ogre called Death.
We hear Bradbury’s “reedy . . . minor-key violins” in the sinuous Badalamenti music that accompanies Jeffrey’s mystery-seeking night walks around Lumberton. Lynch’s devouring insects hidden beneath a perfect lawn are “all the evil you will ever know,” churning beneath giant grass blades as in “that pit of jungled blackness.” The nameless “disease” with which men poison Dorothy’s psyche and make her want to die is the “meaningless syllables to describe the waiting nothingness.”And Jeffrey’s town, like all the other towns, is full of “shuddering and wonder,” so much fear and awe that his only response can be to exclaim, “It’s a strange world.”
In Ray Bradbury’s 1920s Waukegan, Illinois, childhood, there was an actual spooky ravine. Visiting it as an adult with grown daughters, he found that this shadow zone was as deep, dark, and mysterious as ever. As Bradbury grew up, his indelible boyhood image of the ravine became the serpent in the small-town garden of his writing. David Lynch also carried with him a childhood image of paradise poisoned. The artist’s childhood in the town of Spokane, Washington was
“Good Times On Our Street.” It was beautiful old houses, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building forts, lots and lots of friends. It was a dream world, those droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America the way it was supposed to be. But then on this cherry tree would be this pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions and millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer and it’s all red ants.
The wounded tree has a special resonance for Lynch since his father was a research scientist who probed beneath tree bark seeking pockets of invasive disease to study. As the director once said of his daughter, Jennifer, who was launching her fledgling foray into surrealistic filmmaking: “The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.” And like his father, Lynch digs beneath the surface of external appearances to explore deeper realities, the hidden life within all things. The diseased tree convinced young Lynch that “there is a goodness like those blue skies and flowers and stuff, but there is always a force, a sort of wild pain and decay, accompanying everything.” These childhood recollections show that the director’s consciousness was working on Blue Velvet a long, long time before it became a typed script. The bleeding tree is Lynch’s Bradbury ravine: that oozing bark, those ants.
The years in which young David Lynch so carefully observed those ants swarming on his small-town-backyard cherry tree were part of a golden decade. America had saved the free world from the Nazi and Japanese hordes, and the economy was booming. Young families with a single wage-earner could afford a house with all the newest appliances, a car, and vacations. The divorce rate barely registered on a graph, women were pregnant, and people felt no guilt about smoking cigarettes, eating cheese and charbroiled beef, and stomping on the gas pedals of their low-gas-mileage, highhorsepower, V8-powered cars, those big beautiful Detroit vehicles with voluptuous curves to rival Marilyn Monroe’s. She and Elvis Presley were the iconic Queen and King of an era that gave birth to rock and roll music, drive-in movies, sleek modern houses, and a playful, future-imagining, optimistic sense of design and color. We weren’t involved in any wars that were our fault, schoolkids respectfully minded their teachers, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin were the stuff of pulp fiction, not streetcorner business deals, and we learned our family values from Dr. Spock and TV’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, and Father Knows Best. The possibility of realizing the age-old, land of plenty American Dream quickened hearts from coast to coast.
For the baby boomers, the largest generation in United States history, the golden dream of the 1950s was soured by the harsh realities of becoming adults in the 1960s. With a burgeoning sense of social conscience, young Americans saw their beloved President Kennedy gunned down and our military involvement in what seemed to be an immoral, genocidal war against Southeast Asians in Vietnam escalate. Carefree playtime was over: You could get drafted and die. Many young men didn’t want to fight in a war they didn’t believe in, a euphemized “conflict” that their father’s generation of 1950s military-industrial, corporate empire-builders had blundered into and were perpetuating and lying about. The cadre of young folk was so big that it spawned its own youth culture, whose folkways were shaped as a reaction against the older generation’s traditionalist establishment: To hell with those bland old 1950s, when the civil rights of African Americans and homosexuals were grievously ignored, when witch-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy imagined a Communist hiding under every bed, and people liked blond-wood furniture and pink and turquoise, for God’s sake. We’re going to stand Ozzie and Harriet on their ears. We’re gonna grow our hair long and sleep in the park and ditch school and pop pills and live life instead of punching a time clock like those squares in suits. We’re gonna fuck who we want when we want, we’re gonna trash the dean’s office until the university gives us the curriculum we want, we’re gonna march until we stop the war, we’re never gonna trust anybody over thirty.
In the 1970s, as the ignoble, soul-killing war finally ground to a halt, the counterculture and their semi-rebellious sympathizers gradually quieted down and were subsumed into mainstream life. The rift between generations narrowed and it became all right to relax and love America again, to embrace Mom and apple pie and hang up that Norman Rockwell print, though it was damnably hard to warmly welcome home the boys who had fought in the jungles. Having faced numerous national traumas in their early adulthoods, the grown-up baby boomers competed fiercely for jobs, realized that their standard of living was never going to even equal that of their parents, became walking definitions of the phrase “stressed out,” and began to look back at the 1950s as though that time was a lost secret garden.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, filmmakers began to portray the 1950s and pre-Kennedy-assassination 1960s with a yearning, misty-eyed reverence: American Graffiti (1973), Grease (1978), Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Rock musicians, who had stuck it to the establishment throughout the 1960s, now declared that “It’s Hip to be Square.”65 Young Americans were being monogamous and having families again, buying cookbooks full of 1950s favorites like Pepsi-Cola cake, and plunking down big money for thirty-year-old blond coffee tables shaped like boomerangs.
Lynch’s approach to the 1950s in Blue Velvet is very subtle; there are no artifacts in evidence, no wall-to-wall greatest hits soundtrack. He’s not climbing aboard some retro-chic bandwagon, nor is he viewing earlier decades from a distanced, ironic, hipper-than-then stance, putting postmodernist quotation marks around the past. The flood of sweet imagery that flows in the film’s opening seconds comes straight from Lynch’s heart. The artist never repudiated the 1950s over the intervening decades; those weren’t protest-song lyrics he was penning on Bob’s Big Boy napkins, they were sketches of atomic-age furniture. The loyal Lynch lived by Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s words, “Be true to your school,”66 and he never stopped loving the decade that enveloped his idyllic Spokane, Washington, childhood. The director’s earliest days are on his mind as he opens the film with his personal red tulip–white fence–blue sky American flag.
The director has said of his boyhood home life, “Yeah, it was like in the fifties.” And his experiences were so glowing that he recalls them in idealized images. “There were a lot of advertisements in magazines where you see a well-dressed woman bringing a pie out of an oven, and a certain smile on her face, or a couple smiling, walking together up to their house, with a picket fence. Those smiles were pretty much all I saw.”
In Blue Velvet, Lynch accomplishes the feat of suggesting the decade with his characters’ attitudes and behavior, the sense of a kindly, mannerly social contract that binds neighbor to neighbor in a network of peace and safety. The director follows his flowers-fence-sky image with two more that show we’re in a safe place for children: an old-fashioned fire truck, charming because it’s small and coasts down a residential street, with the fireman smiling and waving in slow motion and a white-and-black Dalmatian sitting on the outside running board; and, in slow motion, a gray-haired woman stands in the street at a school crossing, a red stop sign in one hand and gesturing with the other for the parade of little ones to keep progressing across the intersection. Drifting by slowly and joined by gentle dissolves, these images are like dreamy memories of the director’s, and our own, American past. Both shots are comforting, for they show us agents who strive to keep destructive forces from harming people, and we’re painfully aware that menacing powers are at work in our and Lynch’s world: a fire truck would really come in handy in Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks. There’s even the sense that Blue Velvet’s toylike fire truck is protecting our childhood innocence and love of playful fun, for the Dalmatian on the running board subliminally reminds us of good ol’ Uncle Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. And, speaking of family, Lynch next shows us Mom sipping coffee and watching TV in the living room, and Dad wearing his sunglasses out on the lawn watering the garden with a hose. Everything is in its proper place and all is right with the world.
Looking at Lynch’s Blue Velvet script, the tone he’s attempting is evident in the words on page 1: “clean, sweet, clean, clean happy, safely, gorgeous, happy, sparkling, light.” Then things change: “SUDDENLY, dark, GETTING DARKER, ominous, black, LOUD HISSING.” The archetypal Lynchian struggle between light and darkness has begun. In his script, the director shows his gift for creating fraught imagery as he writes in a shot in which the lawn-watering man’s neighborhood and its sheltering dome of blue sky are reflected in a close-up of his dark glasses, thus tainting the good and cherished world we’ve seen so far with shadow. However, this image isn’t in the director’s film: it was probably too technically difficult to get the effect of a whole neighborhood reflected in the dark glasses. Instead, Lynch begins his shift to a darker tone with the two-shot scene in which Mom is watching TV (the television set is one of those 1950s-style big, dark wooden boxes on four legs that stands in the middle of the living room). He cuts from Mom, relaxing on the sofa and lifting her coffee cup to her lips, to a shot of the TV, on which we see a black-and-white close-up of a hand holding a pistol and advancing from right to left (toward Mom) in the TV set frame. Lynch chooses and films the images in this opening montage with such care and precision that we pay rapt attention to the details that our eyes are drinking in. The pistol looms as a major signifier: danger is advancing on Mom; evil has entered the house of Blue Velvet. And the garden. Dad’s enjoying his watering routine, but his green hose gets caught on a bush, putting a disruptive kink in the water flow. The soundtrack thus far has consisted of Bobby Vinton singing the favorite “Blue Velvet,” in which the lead voice speaks of his intense love for a woman in blue velvet, and how their love blossomed, yet she left suddenly, leaving the man with his warm, melancholy memories and a vision of blue velvet seen through the veil of his tears. With the introduction of Dad, Lynch, with sound maestro Alan Splet, lightly mixes in the hissing of the watering hose and, when the kink is added, stresses an unsettling rumbling. Wayward water sprays from the unsound connection between hose and tap, and the rumbling intensifies as the kinked watering system is put under near-bursting pressure. Then, at the moment Bobby Vinton sings “like a flame burning brightly,” referring to him and his Blue Lady’s lost love, Dad slaps the back of his neck as though he’s been bitten by an insect, and falls to the ground, making choking sounds as he’s wracked by a massive seizure. Here’s “a flame burning brightly” that the fire truck and its smiling fireman could never put out.
In this opening montage, Lynch does an almost subliminal manipulation of sound to further disquiet us. Beginning with the first shot of the tulips and fence, the director cuts to the next shot right on the beat of Bobby Vinton stressing a word or starting the next verse of his song. This harmonious pattern remains unbroken for eight shots/song passages, until the pressured throbbing of Dad’s hose shatters the visual-aural rhythm that our senses, without our being consciously aware of it, have grown accustomed to. Once Dad is stricken, Lynch doesn’t return to that regular rhythm that’s been linked to the preceding happy times in this sequence.
Following Lynch’s poetics, the TV gun pointing at Mom is Dad’s imminent seizure, the throbbing water in the kinked hose is the blood beginning to burst the vessels in his head. A family and, metaphorically, a town, have been stricken with chaos. A few wooden stakes linked with string, which form the layout for some garden project, define a precisely right-angled, 90-degree-cornered grid pattern on Dad’s lawn. Now the lawn’s presumptive master lies writhing uncontrollably within the neat, schematic design he tried to impose upon nature.
The next shot in Blue Velvet’s opening sequence is one of the most amazing images in Lynch’s entire body of work. Dad lies shuddering and gurgling on the ground, his hand rigidly gripping the hose and holding its nozzle near his groin, so it looks like he’s peeing or ejaculating into the air. A small orange-and-white dog is standing with its front paws on Dad’s thigh, growling and snapping at the water that spurts from the nozzle. With the horizontal man, hose, and dog large in the shot’s foreground, a little toddler comes wobbling straight forward toward the incredible spectacle in front of him. With the groin shooting fluid, Lynch foreshadows the wildly unbounded sexual energies that will course through his film. The playfulominous dog is the classic Lynchian nemesis, the embodiment of unleashed animalistic impulses. The child is, perhaps, the one who was looking up at those beautiful red tulips next to the white fence. Or maybe it’s Lynch’s memory of himself as a young watcher, taking in the phenomenon of the pained human being trembling on the ground, the beautiful spraying water, the frolicking dog, and learning that, as Jeffrey says later in the film, “It’s a strange world.”
The opening sequence ends with the famous camera’s point-of-view shots of Dad’s formerly aimed, now random, water spray falling onto the huge, close-up grass blades; diving through and beneath this jungle, and plunging into a glossy black pool of seething forms, beetles chattering and devouring until the end of time. In a passage of bravura filmmaking, Lynch has taken us from the innocent red tulips of small-town serenity to the hungry, gaping mouth of hell, in two minutes of screen time. And, true to his love of contrasting, balanced dualities, the trip has been exactly one minute light, one minute dark. Jeffrey Beaumont is the young man who will bridge the worlds of sunshine and shadow, and discover that both realms compose the elemental core of his being. Whereas Dune’s Paul Atreides was pursuing a preordained path to self-knowledge which the viewer could surmise before Paul did, Jeffrey and the audience are on equal footing in a world of living mystery. Our minds and senses become as abuzz with alertness as Jeffrey’s are. If external and internal Mystery is one of Blue Velvet’s key themes, then Family is the other. Lynch’s opening montage has introduced us to another of his households with big problems.
Tom Beaumont (Jack Harvey), the lawn-watering man gravely stricken, is Jeffrey’s father, and his hospitalization forces his son to leave his college studies and come home to run the small family hardware store. Jeffrey is now the man of the house that he shares with his mother (Priscilla Pointer) and chatty Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay). It’s a lot of new responsibility for a youth not that many years past boyhood. And, walking through a vacant lot grass field to see his father after Tom’s seizure, Jeffrey does a boyish thing, stopping to throw a rock at a distant shack and some debris. It’s a warm spring day but Jeffrey wears what a grown-up male (and David Lynch) would wear, a black suit with an unbuttoned beige-gray shirt (which Lynch would button): his rock-tossing and attire emphasize his boy-man status. Before he heaves his rock, Jeffrey stands for a second with his back to us as he regards the tawny grassland, assuming a pose that Lynch’s heroes have exhibited in The Grandmother, The Elephant Man, and Dune. The energy the watcher puts into his looking compels us to tip forward in our seats, as though the scene had a hidden message to tell us. This repeated image is the way Lynch the artist sees himself: a figure in black contemplating a murmuring world. Jeffrey’s surroundings will have to speak to him, for his father cannot. At the hospital, Tom Beaumont lies in bed, his head immobilized within a torturous framework of metal rods. Pushing a button device at his throat, he tries to talk, but like many Lynchian characters (and, sometimes, the director himself), he can’t get the words out. Father and son can only touch hands and shudder together on the verge of tears. Like all young children, Lynch had troubling thoughts of his parents getting gravely sick or dying, and Blue Velvet’s stricken-father theme may reflect an experience Lynch had when he was eight. Walking through his idyllic smalltown Idaho neighborhood, Lynch “saw a boy my age sitting in the bushes crying. I didn’t know this boy, but I asked him what was wrong, and he said his father died. It just killed me. I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat with him for a while.”
Lynch continues his doubling ways and has Jeffrey pass by that grass field again. Needing to blow off his sadness, he stops and throws more rocks this time. Jeffrey’s first field scene was accompanied by Angelo Badalamenti’s low-key jazz music, but now Lynch subtly stresses the human hearing function by filling the soundtrack with the chirping and buzzing of birds and insects (the film’s totemic symbols of, respectively, good and evil, innocence and experience). His ears absorbing the sounds of both light and dark forces, Jeffrey makes a discovery that tips his world toward shadowed realms. A human ear lies in the golden grass, as though it is an entryway leading down underground, where dark insect appetites pounce and devour. Lynch now fills our ears with a high insectoid singing as his camera studies this object that he has created with painterly care and detail. The pale ear, roughly severed from a living person, is smudged with a little dirt and some gray-green splotches of decay, a few blackhairs sprout from its top curve, and small brown ants crawl and feed near the central black hearing canal opening. The artist has spoken of the abstract beauty that he sees in objects that consensus reality deems to be repulsive, the way our preconceived associations about an object color our perception of it. “Take an old used Band-Aid in the street. It’s got some dirt around the edges and the rubber part has formed some little black balls, and you see the stain of a little blood and some yellow on it, a little ointment. It’s in the gutter next to some dirt and a rock and a little twig. If you were to see a photograph of that not knowing what it was, it would be unbelievably beautiful.”
Lynch himself no doubt finds the ear aesthetically pleasing, just as he loves rusty, old, moldering factories in real life but, as with the negative, threatening way he portrays heavy industry on the screen, he knows that most viewers will be shocked and frightened by the severed skin and he uses it for that effect. Jeffrey is fascinated by his find; he only winces slightly as he picks up the ear with his fingers and slips it into a paper bag. This is a bold meeting of live and dead flesh that eclipses Jeffrey’s more self-protective approach in the script, where he uses a twig to push the ear into his sack. The young man has a need to touch the quick of death as well as life, and his journey has begun.
Lynch the artist knows that our alert senses can transport us into experiences of profound discovery. “If Jeffrey hadn’t found the ear, he would have walked on home, and that would’ve been the end of it. But the ear is like an opening, a little egress into another place, a ticket to another world that he finds.” The director gives many of his heroes such tickets. The Grandmother’s Boy finds the bag of seeds that will grow his loving Granny, Eraserhead’s Henry enters his apartment’s radiator and embraces Heavenly Love. When Dr. Treves meets The Elephant Man’s John Merrick, both of their lives change, and when Merrick rests his head on his pillow, he merges with his lost mother for eternity. For Dune’s Paul Atreides, a spaceship to the desert planet is the first step to becoming Master of the Known Universe. When Sailor and Lula blast off in Wild at Heart’s Thunderbird convertible, they begin a high-octane trip through Hell and Heaven. And Laura Palmer’s plastic-wrapped corpse leads Twin Peaks into deep earthly and cosmic mysteries. Lynch adds that, in Blue Velvet, the ear “draws Jeffrey into something he needs to discover and work through.” The youth needs to become a man, to experience the hot, wet rawness of sex and violence and evil that’s hidden within his chaste little town, to be fully conscious that he has the capacity for both light and darkness within his own soul, and to then resolutely choose the righteous path. By day, the ear is a naturalistic object that Jeffrey dutifully takes to Detective Williams (George Dickerson) at the Lumberton Police Department, a clue that launches a careful combing of the grass field where Jeffrey found it. There, investigators lay out a gridwork of string lines like the one in the Beaumonts’ garden where Jeffrey’s father collapsed: human design again trying to put a frame around chaos. But by night, as Jeffrey walks dark neighborhood streets with rustling trees arching overhead, Lynch makes the ear a passageway into the youth’s primal psychosexual adventures. With his shirt now buttoned to the top like Lynch’s, Jeffrey’s form dissolves into a shot of the ear, which the camera approaches ever closer, dissolving through the archway of the hearing canal into the curving inner passageway of the organ as the soundtrack roars with a pressurized hissing. Lynch then dissolves this interior penetration into Jeffrey arriving at the arched doorway of Detective Williams’ house, where he’s welcomed in by Mrs. Williams (Hope Lange). The first thing we see inside the house is the arching, golden oval frame in which rests the cherished smiling photograph of the Williamses’ golden daughter, Sandy. These five shots, subliminally joined by the echoing arched forms, are a hypnotic example of the way Lynch wants to “float” us into the experience of his films, to carry us on a flow of imagery that feels like our own dream.
Like Lynch’s father, Donald, Detective Williams has a homey innersanctum office, and he ushers Jeffrey in. Jeffrey may have gained access to Williams’ private domain, but the policeman says he can’t say anything more about the case until it’s “sewed up.” The youth literally twitches with curiosity and, carried away by his romantic view of crime fighting, says it must be “great” to be a defective, but the seasoned cop, who’s actually seen the worst the world has to offer, somberly adds, “And horrible, too.” The message to Jeffrey, courteously delivered: Leave this dirty business to the big boys.
Jeffrey, mannerly as any well-brought-up kid in a 1950s TV show, says goodnight to the Williamses and asks them to say “hi” to Sandy.
Once again, as in the grass field, Lynch puts Jeffrey in the position of “if he hadn’t found the ear, he would have walked on home, and that would’ve been the end of it,”76 but the severed flesh keeps echoing. As the youth leaves the Williamses’ door and heads up the sidewalk, he hears the night speak to him in a disembodied female voice: “Are you the one who found the ear?” The voice is behind Jeffrey, and he turns toward it with the same motion that Henry in Eraserhead turned to find his love, the Lady in the Radiator, in a transcendent flood of light. Jeffrey sees only blackness and the hint of a weeping willow branch stirring upper left. Then, in one of Lynch’s most gorgeous images, a faint, pale form materializes out of the dark, getting larger and taking on color as it approaches and becomes the teen angel, Sandy, golden hair falling down her long neck, bared collarbone framed by a pink dress, an unsmiling wisdom on her slightly parted lips. Lynch frames Sandy’s approach from the waist up so that we don’t see her walking; she truly does float into Jeffrey’s life. The director has spoken of his admiration for the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882–1967), and the way that Lynch and his cinematographer Frederick Elmes make Sandy positively glow against the night reflects Hopper’s technique of frontlighting objects and people that are standing before a looming darkness. Elmes’s color photography for Lynch’s films has occasionally been criticized by prosaic viewers for inconsistency: Some passages are super bright, others almost indiscernibly murky. The reason, of course, is that these shifting tonal moods create the atmosphere that the director is after. As Elmes once put it, “David and I spend a lot of time figuring out how dark is dark.”
Jeffrey answers Sandy’s “Did you find the ear?” with a question of his own: “How did you know?” She continues to float in his mind as an agent of mystery as she replies, “I just know, that’s all,” and steps ahead on the sidewalk. Jeffrey, of course, follows her lead. They both acknowledge that her father said not to talk about the case, but the allure of the unknown makes them circumvent the rules. Lynch builds on the deadpan severed-ear humor that Detective Williams unconsciously expressed (“when the case is sewed up”) by having Sandy say about the case, “I don’t know much but bits and pieces; I hear things.” Sandy, like lead characters in The Grandmother, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Twin Peaks, has an upstairs bedroom. For most of these people, the house’s upper regions, which symbolically correspond to the mind’s higher consciousness, are places of deliverance from earthly trials, though Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer endures abusive terrors up under the eaves. Sandy’s room gives her knowledge; it’s situated above her father’s office, so police-business details filter up through the floor. In Lynch’s world, sometimes two people in a room can’t make out each other’s words, but on occasion the invisible can speak.
The communication between Sandy and Jeffrey is certainly flowing freely; there’s an immediate bond of sympathy and trust between these two solitary nightwalkers who have found each other. She tells him that she keeps hearing her father mention a woman singer who lives in an apartment near Jeffrey’s house and the field where he found the ear. To this moment, Jeffrey’s equation of mystery had been simple and inert, with no place to go: It was just him and the ear. Suddenly, the beautiful woman at his side has given the equation a thrilling triangulation that vivifies it with open possibility; now it’s Jeffrey, the ear, and this nameless singer. He is moved to sigh with the night wind, “It’s a strange world, isn’t it,” and Sandy, his perfect complement, answers, “Yeah.” As with a couple who’s been together a long time, she anticipates his next thought: “You want to see the building where she lives, don’t you?”
excerpt from the book: David Lynch: Beautiful Dark / Greg Olson
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by Greg Olson
(Blue Velvet)
David Lynch was lost. He fastened the top button of his white shirt every morning, but tendrils of panic and confusion snaked their way into his chest. How could his second attempt at sustaining a marriage be slowly withering? How could Dune turn out so bad? He couldn’t understand how his thoughts and feelings, which he seemed to know so well, could be so at odds with each other, so scrambled. He experienced the way “you can play tricks on your mind, or your mind can play tricks on you, and it keeps you from seeing what’s really happening. I don’t know.”
Lynch continued to reside with Mary and Austin, but his soul needed to find a home. In The Grandmother, Eraserhead, and The Elephant Man, the director provided the flagging, downtrodden spirits of his heroes with a locus of solace and creative growth. Even Paul Atreides, who had to exchange his lush home world for a barren desert, found on Dune a place and people that nurtured and expanded his being. The director needed to go where, as Robert Frost said, “When you go there, they have to take you in.” A place where the voices of criticism and failure would fade into the silence of his inner peace. Where he could rediscover the ideas and reveries and sudden insights that had guided him to so much good work in the past, and know that he was following the true and only path of his art.
Lynch once said, “If you cut my father’s leash, he’d run straight into the woods,” where he had spent so much time communing with nature and studying the diseases that blighted healthy plants. Well, now the director was free of the leash that, if Dune had been successful, would have bound him to the task of making two mega-epic sequels. In his imagination, Lynch joined his father and headed for the trees. His mind dwelt in the Northwest lumbertown realm of his Spokane, Washington, and Sandpoint, Idaho, childhood, in the comforting innocence and security of the 1950s. Lynch didn’t want to get on a jet and fly across the country to the actual towns of his youth, for if he saw the real locations “too clearly it would destroy the imaginary picture” that had formed so evocatively in his head. And it would be Dino De Laurentiis, of all people, who would help him go home again.
The mogul had established his De Laurentiis Entertainment Group operation 200 miles south of Lynch, Mary, and Austin’s Virginia home, in Wilmington, North Carolina. How perfect that the production family and the director of the calamitous Dune would shake hands on another deal in the treacherous hurricane country near Cape Fear. Lynch wasn’t afraid to work with Dino again since he had comprehended the lesson of his threeand-a-half-year Dune ordeal: “The right of final cut is crucial.” Lynch would be getting a much-reduced director’s fee and a production budget one-tenth the size of Dune’s. But for the first time since Eraserhead, he would be filming a story that sprang totally from his own subconscious; he would pick his own crew and actors and locations, and, as when he stood in front of one of his paintings, only he would know when the film was complete, and there it would end.
Lynch’s Dune producer, Raffaella De Laurentiis (looking back from 2003), realized that due to the monstrous size of the production, the pressures of time and meeting budgets, “David had to give up his creative freedom.” (Lynch also had a problem with the way Raffaella, while working on Dune, was simultaneously producing Richard Fleischer’s Conan the Destroyer on nearby Mexican soundstages. Once, when she left Lynch to visit Fleischer, David’s face went white with anger.) She remembers that after Dune Lynch “said he’d never do another big movie, and he never has. He’s been really happy doing smaller films: he’s found his niche, the thing he loves doing.” Blue Velvet would begin (or reinstitute, á la Eraserhead) Lynch’s felicitous outpouring of human-scale, deeply personal cinema.
Like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet would be synthesized from the substance of Lynch’s life. The director’s first feature film was built upon his experience of Philadelphia as an urban hell; his queasiness about procreation and fear of fatherhood and the freedom-restricting responsibilities of family life; his dealing with the fact of his own daughter, Jennifer, being born with clubfeet; and his belief in the powers of spirit and imagination to deliver us from earthly turmoil. Blue Velvet would portray the artist’s base and lofty obsessions.
Having suffered the dilution and disintegration of his personal vision while toiling on Dune, Lynch sighed with relief as he returned to his primal first principles in Blue Velvet. The famous, iconic opening image of the film, in which the low-positioned camera looks up at red tulips bobbing against a white picket fence with blue sky beyond is, for former Spokane tyke Lynch, specifically “a child’s view”8 of an archetypal red-white-and-blue American tableau. Not only would Lynch’s small-town roots be displayed in his new film, but this very private man would expose, and own up to, one of his own transgressive daydreams. “I always had this fantasy of sneaking into a girl’s room, hiding, and observing her through the night.”
There have been secrets in the director’s films from the earliest days: The Grandmother’s Granny hidden up in the attic, where she and the Boy share a clandestine life removed from his abusive parents; Eraserhead Henry’s intimate bond with the Lady in the Radiator, a private treasure he keeps from his wife; The Elephant Man’s sweet and cultured soul, which is masked by the brutish monstrosity of his deformed flesh; and the concealed cosmic truth that Dune’s Paul Atreides is the prophesied messiah. Secrets aplenty, but, beginning with Blue Velvet, Lynch will forcefully make secrets and mysteries the declared subject of his work, something that his characters both live out and talk about. The elusive director, with unconscious selfrevelatory humor, acknowledged his fascination with hidden verities in the year of Blue Velvet. When asked if he was secretive, the director responded, “That’s a possibility, yeah.”
Lynch had carried around his fantasy of spying on a girl in her room at night since the early-1970s time of Eraserhead. Like a magnet, this story element attracted bits of the director’s imagination over the years. Jeffrey, the young man who was the girl-watcher, would see a puzzle piece from a murder mystery in her room. In a field, he would find a severed ear that would take him to the police. He would become involved with the policeman’s pure-hearted daughter, then also the darkness-tainted woman he had spied on. He would make a fearsome night journey from innocence to experience, discover that his tranquil town has a noxious underside, battle the forces of evil, and wonder if that evil stirs within his own heart.
Since the creation of Blue Velvet’s scenario was a gradual process, Lynch had plenty of time to talk about the project with his cinematographer friend, Fred Elmes. The two had met in 1971 when they attended classes at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills, and it was Elmes who had realized on film the evocatively dark-charcoal-andebony Eraserhead imagery that brooded within Lynch’s mind. Lynch and Elmes’s hours of Blue Velvet talk proceeded from the general to the specific. What would the town look like? What do people do in this town? What’s the feeling in Dorothy’s strange apartment? What color makes it strange?
While determining the final shape of his story and its setting, Lynch set about casting Blue Velvet’s principal roles. Who better to portray Jeffrey Beaumont, an adventurous youth on the verge of manhood, than Paul Atreides himself: Kyle MacLachlan. Dune remained an emblem of negativity in Lynch’s mind but the director greatly admired his lead actor’s abilities. He felt MacLachlan possessed abundant mental and physical prowess, and projected both spiritual depth and innocence. He also knew that Blue Velvet, unlike Dune’s ponderous, magisterial narrative, had passages in which MacLachlan’s boyish zeal and quirky playfulness could shine through.
The young actor wasn’t feeling very frisky after Dune came out. The film’s failure dissolved his six-picture contract with De Laurentiis, and he fell into a dark depression in which he questioned everything he was doing. Aside from sharing Lynch’s post-Dune blues, MacLachlan agreed with his friend and director’s post-mortem of the Dune problem: Given half a chance, studio bosses will fold, spindle, and mutilate your artistic vision. Oliver Stone offered MacLachlan a leading role in the much-anticipated production of Platoon, but the actor stayed on Lynch’s wavelength and waited for Blue Velvet to gear up at its own proper time. The Platoon role turned out to be Charlie Sheen’s breakout part, but MacLachlan felt that Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey made a far more fascinating journey than the comparatively undeveloped lead character of Platoon.
Sharing Jeffrey’s journey is the immaculate Sandy, police detective’s daughter and, for Lynch, “the most beautiful, popular girl in high school." The director rhapsodizes in his inimitable way, “If you wanted to buy a bottle of innocence as a shampoo, you’d buy Sandy.” Sweet smelling and pure of heart, Sandy is nonetheless the one who facilitates Jeffrey’s Walpurgis Night trip into a lethal small-town netherworld.
MacLachlan’s film career was still in its fledgling stage, and he wanted his parents to be involved in the process he was going through, so he gave each of them a copy of Lynch’s Blue Velvet script. “I wasn’t too worried about my dad, but my mom was going through chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. She was very sensitive, very protective, and felt like her baby was getting into something that she was very concerned about. But I trusted David, and I finally said to her, ‘You’re going to have to be okay with this.’ It was about being able to say to her, ‘This is really important to me,’ and her being okay with that. She died before the film came out, ironically.”13 So for both Jeffrey Beaumont and Kyle MacLachlan, Blue Velvet was a maturing, coming-of-age experience of independence from loving parents.
Lynch had talked to just about every young actress in Hollywood and still hadn’t found his high school sweetheart. He was growing impatient and frustrated when in walked Laura Dern. Or rather, Dern was sitting on the hallway floor outside the director’s office when Lynch dropped an earthy greeting as he hurriedly strode past her, “Hey, I gotta go pee. I’ll be right back.” As Dern recalls, Lynch’s job interview technique was casual as usual. “We talked about everything, from meditation to movies to clothing designers to lumber,”and the director simply “decided he wanted me to be in the movie.”16 Lynch needed his new leading lady and leading man to get to know each other, so he initiated Dern and MacLachlan into one of his favorite rituals of creativity: lunch at Bob’s Big Boy.
Sitting in his favorite restaurant, eating the burgers and fries and milkshakes he had loved as a kid in the 1950s, and dreaming about a film that would have the feel of that cherished era, Lynch felt his post-Dune malaise start to lift. For years, the artist had sat in this clean, well-lighted place, sketching images and jotting words onto paper napkins, doodlings that became paintings that hung in galleries and collectors’ homes, and films that people throughout the world respected. As a boy, Lynch had loved “building forts”17 with “lots and lots of friends.”18 Now, after being crushed underfoot by the relatively impersonal behemoth that was Dune, the artist would, as he did with Eraserhead, be building a deeply felt film with a human-scale circle of friends. The burger griddle was hot that day at Bob’s, and Dern and MacLachlan sparked some warmth of their own, for their meeting generated a romance as well as one of the most notorious films of the 1980s.
So Lynch had found his Sandy, blonde angel of love and light, but where was Dorothy, the dark lady of pain and sorrow? In a serendipitous way, Dino DeLaurentiis would provide her. One night in New York, Lynch and a male friend were having dinner in Dino’s restaurant, Allo Allo (the words the producer uses to answer the phone). Humphrey Bogart was not the nightspot’s host, nor was Dooley Wilson playing “As Time Goes By” on the piano, but Casablanca was on Lynch’s mind as he regarded an uncommonly beautiful woman across the room, who was dining with Dino’s wife. “Would you look at her, she could be Ingrid Bergman’s daughter,” the awestruck director said to his friend. “You idiot, she is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter”20 was not only the reply, but also the answer to what Lynch needed—both as an artist and as a man.
Thirty-three-year-old Isabella Rossellini was indeed the daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) and Italian film director Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977), whose union had caused one of Hollywood’s most notorious scandals. In 1949, Bergman, at the height of her Hollywood success and near sanctification by adoring moviegoers, left America, and her husband and child, to make films with Rossellini in Italy. She divorced her spouse, married Rossellini after becoming pregnant by him, had three children with him (including Isabella), was vilified by the American media, and condemned in the halls of Congress. In the late 1950s, after divorcing Rossellini, Bergman was finally welcomed back by the American public and Hollywood moviemakers.
Isabella Rossellini—who, with her twin sister, Ingrid, was born in 1952—was insulated from the harsh winds of vilification that swirled around her mother. She enjoyed a happy childhood near Rome with lots of friends and pets and games. When it was time for the afternoon siesta she could never fall asleep, so she lay there quietly, daydreaming—sounds like a simpatico playmate for a younger David Lynch. Blessed with her mother’s moon-faced beauty (she’s been called one of the most lovely women in the history of the world), Isabella began modeling as a teenager, and she let loose her playful spirit performing on the Saturday Night Live–like Italian TV comedy The Other Sunday, for which she also filmed offbeat reports on notables such as Muhammad Ali and director Martin Scorsese. She was married to Scorsese for three years (1979–1982), acted in A Matter of Time (1976), Il Prato (1979), and White Nights (1985), and became the exclusive spokeswoman and representative image for Lancôme cosmetics. She had another short marriage, to filmmaker Jonathan Wiedemann, with whom she had a daughter, Elettra-Ingrid, in 1983.
Even before meeting Lynch, Rossellini had been swept away by his Blue Velvet screenplay. The script opened up “a world of deeper truths,” and courageously portrayed “the reality of abused women, the many layers, the horrible twists, the unclear emotions.” The character of Dorothy was an actress’s dream: a “beautiful broken doll,” a tarnished-glamour façade that masked “shadings of desperation, helplessness, madness.”
Rossellini felt a kinship with the world of Lynch’s art, and the director’s intuition was quick to recognize her as Blue Velvet’s perfect Dorothy. She seemed to embody the very words of his script: the ripe, thirty-something sexuality of a woman who has borne a child, the “beautiful full figure, dark eyes, black thick wavy hair, full red lips.” The blooming, ruddy lips that had whispered Blue Velvet into being in Lynch’s mind were now breathing and speaking before his eyes; Rossellini understood him so well. She saw Lynch as both “serene, happy, well-adjusted,” and obsessed with “the dark side, the inexplicable, the mystery.” She marveled at his intuitive ability to tap into the “strange thoughts that we all have” and blast them onto the screen with a “raw, emotional” power.
Isabella would be Dorothy on screen. And, as the director acknowledges, Kyle MacLachlan would, to some degree, be Lynch’s surrogate in the film. So while Dorothy leads the innocent Jeffrey into a realm of dark sensual experience, Lynch will find in Rossellini a kindred spirit and a lover who will crystallize his need to move beyond his second marriage.
Now who would Lynch choose to portray Frank Booth? Many Hollywood males, including Robert Loggia (Prizzi’s Honor) and singer Bobby Vinton (whose “Blue Velvet” song helped inspire Lynch’s film), dearly coveted the role. Just as children love to dress up as witches and monsters and devils on Halloween night, actors relish playing villains. Agents of the night, of tears, violence, and death, villains allow actors to express some of their own malevolent impulses, to unburden their souls in a safe, make-believe setting. In turn, members of the audience, in experiencing the actor’s and dramatist’s art, can recognize their own darkness in the villain’s devilishness and then redemptively feel it vanquished and purged by the triumphant hero’s killing stroke. Alfred Hitchcock often said that “the stronger, the more colorful the villain, the better the picture.”30 Blue Velvet would be powered by the hellish energy and twisted psyche of Frank Booth, a scary and fascinating monster who would stand alongside Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as one of the cinema’s most unforgettable villains.
But there was a possible Frank Booth who Lynch was curious about, and more than a little afraid of. Dennis Hopper was celebrated as a gifted actor, painter, photographer, and director (Easy Rider, 1969), but he was also a notorious holy terror. Hopper had starred and became friends with James Dean in the archetypal teenage-angst film Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and he seemed born to live out the moody, sensitive, explosive persona that Dean acted for the cameras. Hopper tangled with director Henry Hathaway while shooting From Hell to Texas (1958), forcing Hathaway to shoot eighty-six takes of Hopper saying a few simple lines of dialogue. After fifteen ego-clashing hours, Hathaway yelled at Hopper, “You’ll never work in this town again! I guarantee it!”
excerpt from the book: David Lynch:Beautiful Dark / Greg Olson
by Carlo Antonicelli
No Country for Old Men, a film of ruthless pessimism that graciously chiseled work by Cohen brothers, has succeeded almost perfectly to overcome the poetic sign and the content of the same book of Cormac McCarthy. A work, that of the Texan author, capable of metabolizing and representing the Zeitgeist of the time in transit, and in particular the dialect of Western civilization.
Carlo Antonicelli: I would like to start with the figure of the sculptor Bell, an elderly man who wakes up from the incarnation of the wise figure of a wise man, finds himself in front of the wondrous wickedness and violence that he does not seem to understand or want to understand. To me, it is pertinent, but anchestrating, that the one who ought to be the lover of the "healthy" values of the nation refrains from applying them as if it were overwhelmed by a louder necessity than him.
Gabriele Guerra: It does not seem to me that the position of the scribe is described as "agnostic" around the problem of the other: in the contrary, the Sheriff Bell seems to me an "ascetic" figure of radical rejection of evil. Like all ascetic figures - it suffers, like all the "saints": but the definition would lead us to an overly religious context - the sheriff knows good the evil of the world, he obviously fought him, but now has intervened a form of rethinking his own action, Which leads him to change his behavior (bottom Askesis in Greek means first and foremost "practice", and therefore there is no movement of a practical philosophy, that is, ethical), that it ceases to withdraw from any "action", but not necessarily approaching "contemplation" (which is the "Antithesis around which, as is well-known, Christian-Western ascetic practice is built).
C.A.: The same Sheriff -Bell in Western dramaturge is absolutely heterogeneous. It is not courageous, but it would be unclear. It's bipolar, "he says even unfortunate bad guys in the book, and McCarthy does not care to protect him. In the movie, but still, in the book, Bell regrets the times gone by, a mixed attitude of cynicism disenchanted toward this world. But this talk about lost tradition has not originated very early, already in the first Aristotle? How come back to common sense and the plot of this work?
G.G.: True, Bell incarnates everything in Western movies we're used to considering the "hero". But we need to look at the figure. The key to understanding his attitude is instead the "dream" telling his wife how to spin the end of the movie: his father riding overboard him, handing himself a burning torch, traveling on a road to cook a new bonfire to give way to something like a new beginning. The dialectical light/darkness on which the interpretable is built (that is, that asymptotic process that leads us to approach the "truth", which is in the depths of the story of telling), obviously articulates a problem (religious but not only) Specifically modern: the jammed with the tradition. In this regard, I do not know how to deal here with the first Aristotle, as you say; With this dialectic I meant rather a very conceptual - not archetypal - device that maybe, if anything, we find ourselves in Plato (but I prefer to refer to the testament contest, particularly to the Gospel of John). The fact is that the world is irreparably shaded in a partially illuminated and (still) obscure implies not only a dialectical, but also a moral so to speak: on the one hand, there are some who are still dominated by darkness, who do not mind and continue to this to do evil. On the other hand, those who, illuminated by the light of salvation (from the Messiah's truth), are able to see the world in the connexions (and disconnections) - an elective dialect of choice and not. But let's go back to the relationship with tradition: while the "natural" transmission chain of salvific knowledge (the lighthouse illuminating the path) involves the passage of father son, the gnostic period in which the action of the film lives, or the perception of a world impregnated with evil, causes it to become overwhelmed; and if the task of tradition had always been to repeat the same gestures, so that to make and maintain an orderly cosmos (Eliade), now it only becomes the one to interpret the message itself that in those gestures was contained. After that, it will only sit to remember the message itself and then perpetuate that message without understanding it, and so on, in a process of inexorable subtraction. In the end, the problem of the atradition is the problem of memory, as Benjamin it has condensed in the famous formula: "Death is the sanction of everything that the narrator can tell."
C.A.: Throughout the long history, Bell lives immersed in the history of his own family, relatives who like him grow older. Leaving his employability is a breakthrough in tradition, as dictated by me, but in the dream it seems that the very idea of advancing progress, the father passing by his son to light a flame of hope. More in the book Bell invokes the coming of Christ as the sole author of the present state of things. So a Palingenese, an ancient but also popular idea of rejection of the status quo, but in the dream the idea of progress towards the future, and of tempting, seems to me to be subverted in a more radical way.
G.G.:"The father who passes in front of his son" - did not think of Bell's ultimate parable of this interpretation, but gave me a progressive reading, whether it was a breakthrough, sick, in crisis - but still progress; But it seems to me that the frequent recall of the Bell of the Romance to the Christ of salvation confirms my interpretation: in the end, the "new time" inaugurated by the Advent of Christ is a time destined to subvert the pagan continuum - in this sense then the father he does not surpass his son, but simply precedes it, is literally a precursor, representing a "typological" conception of history: all those who intend to make a light of disreputability in the world must adapt to the figure of Christ, becoming his type.
C.A.: Does Bell need to present a weak dietary version? He says she is not a contemplative man, and he seems to be above the events, indeed he is always late on what is happening, is always a step backwards with respect to the violent emergencies. But Bell knows good only as a memory of good, he can not put it into practice. Is this a post-modern character in this sense? Or is it more like an amethyst tragic background?
G.G.: I will reply to you with a parable, what Gershom Scholem tells us in closing his book The Great Currents of Jewish Meditation: "When Baal-Shem [the founder of the ultimate throne of Jewish mysticism] had to fulfill some difficult task, he went to a place in the woods, he ignored and said prayers, absorbed in meditation, and everything was done according to his purpose. When, a generation later, Magogd of Meseritz found himself in front of the same task, he went to that place in the woods and said: 'We can no longer fire, but we can say prayers' - and everything went according to his wish. Another generation later, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassow had to perform the same task. He also went astray, saying, 'We can no longer ignite the fire, and we no longer know the secret meditations that enliven the prayer'. But we know the place in the wood where all this happened, and that's enough. And that was enough. But when again, another generation later, Rabbi Ysra'el of Rischin had to face the same task, sat in a golden seat in his castle, and said,: "We can no longer fire, we can not say prayers, and we no longer know the illusion in the woods, but of all this we can tell the story. And his story alone had the same deeds as the other three. " It also seems to me to be a good allegory of Bell's dream: tradition is subject to strong corrosion, a progressive reality, what remains is just the possibility of dealing with it-more importantly having lost the "strong" interpretative keys; This is, if you like, a weak, typically post-modern ethic (although I think I do not have to indulge in the Eco as an infinite semiotic game, but to think about it in the tragic nature of its "post-" . Every amletic character is a "post-character").
C.A.: We come to the character Chigurh. It is possible to understand a figure of the character, but by listening to choosing his own jokes, he parallels his action to a sort of inexhaustible dinecession. As he pulls the coin for air to end the fate of the victims. Chigurh says, "I've got a lot of money and we've come up with it." It seems to have eradicated the freedom to decide. And this is totally inhuman. Chigurh is a Knight of Revelation?
G.G.: Certainly, Chigurh is an enigmatic character. But, like the Oedipus Sphinx, it is only if he questions himself as a "character" in its entirety, while it seems to me a "function" that has only one side, or rather is dominated ('possessed') by its being function - that is to do it, like that of the Sphinx is to question Oedipus, or to put it in crisis. It is then to be asked what type of function incarnations. And in this sense it seems to me to be a very high definition of Chigurh as someone "uprooted by the freedom to decide." The question then becomes: Does Chigurh incarnate the Greek tyche, or if he prefers the inscrutable fate (the thread of the Fates), or is it rather a function necessary for the "salvation economy" evoked by Bell, or 'antipathy' of Christ, in a word Satan? It is not here, of course, to decide on the conceptual fundament - pagan or Christian - but to settle it into a philosophy of history. More concretely, Chigurh is the "diabolic" side of a fairy tale that is its "sim-bolic" moment in Bell. I mean, that while Bell intends to "hold together" the different moments of existence, grouping them in their highest ethical moment - as sanctioned by the "jump" in the symbol - Chigurh seems to me to be represented by a divisional instance, "dia-bolica" just, intending to separate the different plans of existence once and for all. As he wrote what I consider a great Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Vitiello, in his latest book: "Without the world it would hurt evil, without the multiple would not be bad. But it's bad more than negativity. Evil is the manifold not related to one, which is self-evident, nothing separate from the possible".(Reflecting Christianity, De Europa, p.244).
C. A.: Socrates said: "If you really needed what you were doing, you would not hurt; You do it because you do not know what you are doing." But even in the Gospel there is a trait that says this unknowingness approaching, which identifies the malecoline of not knowing what we are doing: "Lord, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing." Llewelyn seems to know how to make the right choices for his destiny and to justify his "small" misdeed. The evil perpetrated by Chigurh, however, is irrational, but at the same time accompanied by a rigorous ethics that leads him to kill Llewelyn's wife in the word he had given to the latter. How do you break this tragic paradox?
G.G.: It seems very important to me this aspect. To resume what I said above: Chigurh's would not call it "a strong", but rather "a rigid ethos ", that is, demonic in the sense I have illustrated; It seemed like allowed, it is the same as Terminator of all the other machines "programmed to kill". There is no paradox in this regard, but only resistance to evil by the people, like Llewelyn's wife, does not accept this logic. It is unfortunate that, unlike what is happening in the novel, his brutal assassination by Chigurh is not shown, I do not want to be explained precisely with reference to his "diabolical" ethos: a behavior that even the eye would give me refuses to see.
G.A.: Throughout this incredible story and in a sense of violence does not seem strange to let the affair come from the good action of Llewelyn that goes to bring the Mexican water to the desert? Is it just a narrative pretext?
C. G.: It does not, however, seem to be a fundamental engine of the philosophical course that we witness in the film's work: the modern world is structured around an acronymatic and methodological heterogeneous of the ends, which transforms finishing into good and vice versa. Llewelyn's good action is, in other words, a direct, conscientious way as "Socrates said", which is lurking under our eyes; the subject of the process is the conquest of power - money, success, etc., but above all: power of life and death.
G.A.: From the dramatic point of view, McCarthy has decomposed Western classic slabs, and the Cohen have borrowed the way to proceed with the book, succeeding in coinciding with the form and content of the film. The two outlaws, Llewelyne and Chigurh, never clash either with them or with the sheriff, the law is not restored, and the villain is not killed. He thinks that this destructiveness is necessary for the contemporary co-location of this work, and what is its news?
C. G.: No Country for Old Men is a great movie, because as Walter Benjamin wrote "a significant work, fonds the genre or flows; in the perfect works, the two things merge." It seems to me that all McCarthy's work witnesses to the intrinsic difficulty in this sphere, the relationship of a literary work to a certain genre - in this case the western, as you rightly recall; a difficulty that McCarthy resolves to make it explode, using the background pattern (which is the Mezzogiorno di Fuoco , as you rightly sums up) just to show the inadequacy of the present time only to show its inadequacy at the present time (if you want, it's also a great representation of the impossibility of making an epic today.). But I do not know so much about the American novelist that I may be able to produce in a disagreeable judgment on his work. Cohen brothers make a great film because they can blend the foundation and the final moment of the genre. Regarding the message it addresses to our present: I do not know how to express it - there is certainly a message inside the "specific film", as was once said, which I must first emphasize: the violence contained in this film is a sign spectacularly opposed to that of Tarantino's films; while in these the violence becomes calligraphy, distracting exercise end in itself (and thus becomes autonomous, producing an aesthetic that does not succeed in defining "fascist" - if for fascistas the aesthetic worship of violence becomes purpose to itself)), then there is continually Bell's gaze that he judges - and condemns - such an explosion of violence. Violence without Tarantino's morality is thus replaced by a morality without violence. And this seems to me to be a short message.
Gabriele Guerra was born in 1968, after graduating in Germanica at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" with a thesis on Walter Benjamin, and having pursued a research doctorate at the Freie Universität in Berlin on political syathology in some Jewish-German thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, became a professor of German literature at the University of Rome "La Sapienza".
He has written the following volumes: Das Judentumzwischen Anarchie und Theokratie. Eine religionspolitische Diskussion am Beispiel der Begegnung zwischen Walter Benjamin und Gershom Scholem, Bielefeld 2007; La forza della forma. Ernst Jünger from 1918 to 1945, Civita vecchia-Roma, 2007. He does not deal with cinema professionally, but he's just a curiosity, especially as far as his philosophical implications are concerned.
https://www.academia.edu/930925/_No_Country_for_Old_Men_._Dialogo_cinefilosofico_con_Gabriele_Guerra
Translated by Dejan Stojkovski
A 1980s science fiction script reaffirms human feelings within the networks of virtual sociality.
"There will soon be nothing more than self-communicating zombies, whose lone umbilical relay will be their own feedback image – electronic avatars of dead shadows perpetually retelling their own story.”
- Jean Baudrillard in Telemorphosis
Around 1979 the American filmmaker Robert Kramer and the French schizo-analyst Félix Guattari started working together on a film about two Italian fugitives from the Italian Autonomia Movement, Latitante. The film, which was to star Pier Paolo Pasolini's regular actress Laura Betti, was meant to be a sort of first person collective reflection on the finitude and fragility of the body, “opposing the enormous weight of things-as-they-are, systematically defined by vast power.” A film about the intimacy of resistance. Somewhere along the way the film morphed into a significantly different creature, the science fiction flick A Love of UIQ, a formal shift (sub)consciously informed by the wider political changes taking place off screen: from the grand ideological narratives of the 60s and 70s, to the videodrome mutations that would characterize countercultural developments in the 80s.
Guattari's narrative somehow bridges these two currents, borrowing the resolve from the former and the conceptual tools from the latter. The headless body of workerism with its absence of political organs prefigured some of the most politicized forms of cyberpunk and its anti-authoritarianism. Hamburg's early incarnation of the Chaos Computer Club, underground zines like Hackerfür Moskau or the British Vague, the militant sci-fi of Italy's editorial collective Un' Ambigua Utopia or the galactrotskyist novels of Mack Reynolds, YIPL or the soviet cyber-fantasy flick Kin-dza-dza (1986) and other undetected influences all seep through Guattari's unfilmed script. At the time of the first draft (1980-81), Kramer was to direct the film and Guattari himself wanted it to be produced in Hollywood. He had in fact sent a copy to Michael Philips, the producer of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Taxi Driver, who took it to be “too political” for US audiences. A second draft, still co-written with Kramer, dates back to 1983 while the final version that has just been published in English for the first time was completed by Guattari alone around 1986. Kramer himself will flirt with science-fictional tropes in his 1985 Diesel, his first and last foray into commercial filmmaking, a film that might have been aesthetically influenced by his work with Guattari, but bears none of its narrative characteristics.
A Love of UIQ reverses the spatial coordinates of science fiction from outer to inner space, from the vast stretches of faraway galaxies and star warmongering to the infinitely small interstices of molecular resistance. Guattari's unfilmed script envisions the discovery of a formless intelligence by a fugitive biologist who finds refuge with the help of an American journalist in a hi-tech squat in Frankfurt. There, along with a group of cypher-punks and techno-squatters, connection is established with this post-structural intra-terrestrial, a sort cognitive interference able to disrupt and hijack official signals (enough to seriously worry the President of the Investigation Commission into Hertzian Disturbances) as well as questioning the linear phenomenology of things. It's the infinitesimally small Universe of the Infra-Quark (UIQ). Initially shaped in pixels, via a screen, as sort of hypothetical Max Headroom from an Autonomist pirate radio, UIQ's immanent manifestations can take multiple forms. “It can take whatever form it wants, one minute it's in the sky, the next in the crowd, but it's the same thing. It can appear in a freak weather front, in radio interference, in anything...” It is the very concept of subjective identity that baffles the mysterious entity: “yours, mine, ours. You, me, you, me. You...yes I understand you. But me...Me, I'll never get it. This face on the screen is only for you. I can change it,” observes UIQ during a conversation with the person it will fall in love. It's precisely that quintessential device of narrative cinema, (heterosexual) love, that will debase UIQ's protean and boundless essence to the self-interested pettiness of jealousy and detonate a “new type of cosmic catastrophe.”
Set in the post-industrial immateriality of data among the embryos of the cognitariat, A Love of UIQ belongs to the science-fiction sub-genre of (political) contamination, somewhere between the bio-tech dystopia of Warning Sign (1985) and the semiotic horror of Pontypool (2009). Culturally and aesthetically though, the script is clearly indebted to Muscha's Decoder (1984) and F.J. Ossang's L'affaire des divisions Morituri (1985) and their politically charged atmospheres and allusions, as Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, who translated the script from French, point out in their insightful introduction. Containing no descriptions of camera movements, set or light design, the script reads remarkably agile to be written by a philosopher known for his ornate, neologistic prose. Significantly, for someone who had reclaimed the militant role of desire and confuted Freudian repression in his Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Love of UIQ is haunted by a post-human pessimism tinged with a residual confidence in the possibility of technological innovations. A distinctive touch of Parisian snobbery, if not outright classism, is evinced in the characterization of the only two working class members of the cast—“who left their provincial hometown in search of the American Dream”—to which Guattari accords, in fact, the most thankless roles. That aside, A Love of UIQ still reads as a legitimate and compelling enough attempt to explore “the rise of computerized forms of imagination and decision-making,” as well as “the digitalization of a growing number of material and mental operations” and how difficult it would have been for all this to be reconciled “with the existential territories that mark our finitude and desire to exist.” Read today, when the science fiction prophesy of Kornbluth's and Pohl's Space Merchants seems to have come true in the digital totalitarianism of Silicon Valley, Guattari's script is both outdated and timely. Outdated because the technological utopia of the early hackers generation has been co-opted and monopolized by corporate interests, but also timely because it reaffirms the centrality of human feelings within the networks of virtual sociality. Cyberpunk after all was the culmination of the progressive nearing of two previously distinct realms, the technological and the humanistic.
As fascinating as the script and the idea of a film by Félix Guattari are, one cannot help imagining how it could have actually ended up looking and feeling, especially since, by Guattari's own admission, “certain thematic elements, though essential, can only be crudely sketched” and “taking form will require a particular stylistic visual and spatial treatment that will not become apparent until shooting.” A Love for UIQ's script is in fact traversed by a palpable tension reaching towards a cinema not only able to critically elaborate the present and its realities, but to radically transfigure them.
this article is taken from:
(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 (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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Would one blush for the religiously realistic art of the cinema if we were not eaten away by an unhappy desire to change the world? But here artistic creation does not mean painting one's soul in things, but painting the soul of things.
Jean-Luc Godard, 1952.
Breathless boosted Godard to the rank of New Wave leader - along with Truffaut, his prizewinning colleague - by introducing him to critics, audiences, and fellow cineastes as a certified enfant terrible with a taste for the innovative (those jump cuts!) and the offbeat (that ambiguous ending!) rivaled by few others on the contemporary scene.
He quickly started work on The Little Soldier, his second feature. Here he continued his exploration of film-noirt errain, adding a political inflection via its protagonist: an undercover agent combating a left-wing organization during the acutely controversial war for Algerian independence. The drama puzzled many observers with its lack of political coherence, but Godard promptly explained that this was one of its most admirable qualities; his intention, after all, was to depict an ethically confused character in a film meant to seem "like a secret diary, a notebook, or the monologue of someone trying to justify himself before an almost accusing camera, as one does before a lawyer or a psychiatrist." Godard's own justifications are as problematic as the "thriller" itself - among other things, he suggests that to understand the movie one must somehow "sense" his oftenshifting "distance" from the characters - and it is tempting to write off both the film and the self-analysis as honorable failures in a still-young career. Carefully considered, though, the film and the retrospective comments show Godard's growing recognition of how conventional cinema joins other instruments of cultural control - including law and psychiatry, which he specifically names - in producing and reproducing social norms that hinder freedom and happiness. Foucault and Louis Althusser are among the philosophers who have developed this idea, and Godard rings interesting variations on it.
Moving to color cinematography and a radically different genre, Godard then wrote and directed A Woman Is a Woman, a musical shot on studio soundstages. Calling it "my first real film" and "the one I like best," he said afterward that his inspiration had been Charles Chaplin's observation that "tragedy is life in close-up, and comedy, life in long shot." Ornery as always, Godard turned this dictum on its head, attempting to make "a close-up comedy." He claimed after its highly uneven reception that it had been most popular in "countries noted for their wit," not including France, where it "didn't go down well."
His next production was "Sloth," a 15-minute contribution to the 1961 anthology film The Seven Capital Sins. Unfazed by its less-than-gracious treatment from the critical corps, of which he still considered himself an active member, he plunged swiftly into his next project: My Life to Live, the story of a young woman named Nana who becomes a prostitute - the first of several Godard heroines to take this desperate route and meets a tragic end. He began shooting on Paris locations in early 1962 and emerged a few weeks later with one of the most emotionally and intellectually rich achievements in all of New Wave filmmaking.
Before a full discussion of My Life to Live, it is worth taking a closer look at Godard's ideas and working methods in the period after Breathless launched his career. His interests certainly changed in some respects. Although his second feature recalls Breathless with its cars, travel, and skepticism toward bourgeois mores, for instance, its political themes and thriller atmosphere have little of the Beat-hipster spirit about them.
Still, one aspect of the Beat sensibility remained very much in view: improvisation. This was partly a professional tic that Godard had trouble shaking; even his first short movies had been "prepared very carefully" but "shot very quickly," as he described the process. It was also a deliberate way of maintaining the sense of immediacy that had raced through his earlier features. Although his comments on the shooting of The Little Soldier are somewhat vague, Godard appears to have begun the film by writing a partial scenario giving key moments of the story. He also decided it would take place in Geneva, perhaps because this is a "capital city of capitalism," in one critic's phrase, and perhaps because he had visited the city as a child (during stays with his mother's wealthy family) and knew the area well. Other aspects of the narrative were so uncertain that shooting lasted four times longer than the two weeks he had anticipated. Scenes were frequently written the same morning they were to be shot, as Godard wrestled with bouts of "thinking" and "hesitating" brought on by the challenge of exploring longtime interests while avoiding the "anything goes" mentality of his first feature. (Dialogue for Breathless had been dashed off the evening before scenes were shot, an almost leisurely pace by comparison!) One important scene, an interview centered on Anna Karina's character, was shot in a completely improvised style - "she didn't know in advance what questions I would ask her" - inspired by Jean Rouch, an ethnographic filmmaker who became a hero for Godard and other New Wave directors by using spontaneous cinema to explore diverse cultures and personalities. Godard's academic background was in ethnography, and while he has rarely emphasized this in comments or interviews, it attests a longlasting interest in real-time, on-the-spot probing of subjects that have caught his attention. The scriptwriting for A Woman Is a Woman was equally unorthodox. On one hand, Godard started with a "very detailed scenario" and "followed it word for word, down to the last comma." Yet while that sounds very responsible, the writing of specific action and dialogue was more of a down-to-the-wire process than ever, with Godard jotting material at the studio while the performers applied their makeup. Once again he was rediscovering a knack he shared with Kerouac: being able to weave spur-of-the-moment inspirations from a familiar material that had already been bouncing obsessively around his mind. As he described it later, "one only thinks of things [for insertion into a film] one has been thinking about for a long time." Despite his gift for improvisation, Godard realized throughout this period that there is something to be said for writing a movie before directing it. Indeed, he tried to say "never again" to spur-of-the-moment creativity as early as 1961, when The Little Soldier was completed. Since he kept sliding into last-minute shooting patterns anyway, however, he eventually decided to call this his "method" and simply live with it - arranging fiveweek shooting schedules while knowing that the actual photography would occupy only two weeks, so the rest could be devoted to thought and reflection. My Life to Live was shot over four weeks, but the entire second week was a hiatus, giving Godard time to think. This irritated his performers, who disliked hanging around an idle location with no idea when their director would decide to roll the camera again.
What he sought in this film was so unconventional that one doubts a more commonplace methodology would have proved any more efficient. While he wasn't looking for any "particular effects," he wanted to explore some of his most deeply felt themes through an approach he later called theatre-verite. By this he meant a sort of "theatrical realism" that combines the arbitrariness of stage drama - unfolding in continuous "blocks" that cannot be "retouched" by the director - with film's unique ability to capture "chance" events in a "definitive" way.
To this end, he designed scenes that would be shot one time only, in the same order as the story - itself an unusual procedure, since in standard filmmaking scenes are generally shot more than once, in a chronology different from the final movie. Then he spliced the shots together with a minimum of editing. The result of this procedure has a mood very different from the breathlessness of Breathless, the elusiveness of The Little Soldier, and the effervescence of A Woman Is a Woman. Still, the sense of spontaneity remains strong, reflecting Godard's success at making a complex and multilayered "impromptu" film "right off the bat, as if carried along, like an article written at one go." Again he used the Beat-like values of honesty and authenticity to justify his methods. "I didn't know exactly what I was going to do," he reported later. "I prefer to look for something I don't know, rather than be able to do better with something I do know." Karina felt "a little unhappy because she never really knew beforehand what she would have to do," he added. "But she was so sincere in her desire to make the film that between us we brought it off." Perhaps the strongest influence on My Life to Live is that of Bertolt Brecht, whose connection with Godard was briefly discussed in the first chapter. Brecht's spirit had suffused A Woman Is a Woman from its opening moments - when the filmmaker's cry of "Lights! Camera! Action!" rings out over the credits - and here it reaches its first full flowering in Godard's work. Brecht's great breakthrough as a dramatic theorist stemmed from a problem he faced as a politically committed playwright. The more effectively he involved spectators in the flow of his story and the psychology of his characters, he realized, the less likely they were to focus on (or even notice) the sociocultural critiques he was trying to convey. To solve this dilemma, he developed a new form of drama - the epic theater - in which various devices purposely "alienate" audience members from the show they are watching. This is meant to promote active thought instead of passive emotionalism, leading the audience to think about the drama instead of sinking into it. Brecht recognized the value of theatrical conventions, including effective storytelling, for attracting an audience and holding its attention. Therefore he found it acceptable for playwrights to illustrate points by dramatic means - assailing the evils of capitalism, say, by showing an avaricious factory owner laying off a conscientious worker who has no other way to support his hungry children. However, he also knew that if a writer crafted such a scene in a truly spellbinding way, spectators might be so consumed with worry over the worker's fate that the evils of capitalism per se would never occur to them. Hence, the practitioner of epic theater might interrupt the episode with a parade of picketers carrying signs ("The Evils of Capitalism") across the stage, or perhaps the cast would break into a song that spelled out the message in its lyrics. If done too didactically, of course, such shenanigans might alienate the audience clear out of the theater; so Brecht made his "A-effects" as entertaining and stimulating as possible. He also worked out a theory of acting that countered the introspective tendencies of Konstantin Stanislavski's influential "Method" with a "presentational" style, calling for performers to reveal their own attitudes toward the characters instead of psychologically "disappearing" into their roles. Godard had Brecht firmly in mind when he designed My Life to Live as a series of twelve scenes or "tableaux," with a self-consciously "theatrical" feel and a deliberately episodic structure. "I wanted to show the 'Adventures of Nana So-and-so' side of it," he recalled later. The division into separate tableaux, he added, "corresponds to the external view of things which would best allow me to convey the feeling of what was going on inside.... How can one render the inside? Precisely by staying prudently outside."
This is another in Godard's long list of murky clarifications, but it points to an idea that is indispensable in understanding this film and most of his others: that cinema, like painting and other visual arts, is a valuable yet problematic tool for casting light on human beings and the existential reality in which they dwell. Godard recognizes that externals are all the camera and sound recorder can grasp and that such outward signs superficial by definition - may seem sadly inadequate if one is looking for the "inner selves" of psychologically defined characters. Nevertheless, he also rejects "the Antonioni error" that claims "non-communication" is cinema's most natural subject. "I think it is wrong to say that the more you look at someone the less you understand," he said in 1962. The externals captured by cinema can be highly suggestive if one accepts the notion that inner selves are inseparable from the external actions they trace on the world around them. "A painter who tries to render a face only renders the outside of people; and yet something else is revealed," Godard says. "It's very mysterious. It's an adventure." My Life to Live was thus "an intellectual adventure: I wanted to film a thought in action - but how do you do it? We still don't know."
We still don't know, but we have been trying to find out since the early days of cinema. Another of Godard's heroes, American film pioneer D. W. Griffith, stated many times that "movies are the science of photographing thought," and while Godard brings far more philosophical sophistication to his efforts, on a fundamental level he is exploring the same set of problems faced by his illustrious predecessor. It must be remembered, however, that in seeking to film "a thought in action" it is the action more than the thought - that is, the traceable behaviorial activity more than its evanescent psychological content - that Godard takes as his main concern. This is not because he finds psychology uninteresting, but because it is more a hurdle than a stepping-stone on his road to intuiting and embracing the mysteries of being human. He signals this in an early scene of My Life to Live that stands with the most resonant moments in his work. Nana and her former husband are finishing a bumpy but not entirely unpleasant conversation by having a friendly pinball game. He mentions some school assignments that his father has been reading, and says some of them are quite remarkable. The camera makes a small but deliberate movement that isolates Nana in the center of the frame, underscoring her thoughtful attitude as she listens to a quotation from a pupil's essay: "A bird is an animal with an inside and an outside. Remove the outside, there's the inside. Remove the inside, and you see the soul." This summarizes much of Godard's cinematic and philosophical project. All movies consist of "outside" material, that is, visual and auditory records of exterior realities. Movies aspiring to "artistic" status attempt to take things a step further, going "beyond" surface representations to suggest "inner," psychological realities that cannot be directly depicted. Godard wishes to go further still, stripping away psychology in order to expose something more profound and mysterious - a "something else" that can only be approached through oxymoronic genres like theatre verite and eccentric creative processes like the one to which Godard cryptically alludes when he says the film "was made by a sort of second presence."
My Life to Live announces its structure - "a film in 12 tableaux" - at the beginning of its opening credits. True to Godard's opinion that the "greatest tableaux are portraits," it then presents a portrait of Nana/Karina's face, seen in three leisurely shots (left profile, front view, right profile) as credits continue to roll. The lighting is dark, shadowy, sad. More important, Nana/Karina is not posing prettily for the camera. Her face is quiet, yet mobile; still, yet charged with an emotional current that seems compelling even though the film has not defined it yet through word or action.
Accompanying this portrait is the first statement of Michel Legrand's remarkable music score, a series of brief passages played by a chamber orchestra. In conventional films the background score is often used to communicate a character's inner feelings to the audience, and although that certainly happens here - the music reinforces our impression that this is not a happy woman - the psychological effect is deliberately thrown off kilter by apparent mismatches between sound and picture, which seem to be following their own schedules instead of trudging along in Hollywoodstyle synchronization. The music comes and goes at unexpected times, and much of the sequence passes in silence, focusing attention on the visual image with rare intensity. This all amounts to a bold violation of classicalfilm structure - and a highly effective one, since it signals that although this movie will contain familiar elements of ordinary cinema, these will not assume their conventional roles of soothing, distracting, and entertaining the audience. Instead, each will maintain its own aesthetic integrity even as it contributes to the film as a whole. It will be up to the spectator - the active, participating, Brechtian spectator - to perceive their interrelationships and ferret out their meanings.
First tableau: A CAFE, NANA WANTS TO LEAVE PAUL. THE PINBALL MACHINE. In keeping with its strategy of separation and fragmentation, the film introduces each of its twelve scenes with a full-screen intertitle that interrupts the story and announces the main events that are about to happen. Working against traditional notions of cinematic suspense, this formal maneuver seems surprising in conjunction with a story that could have been treated as a thriller or film noir if the director had chosen.
The first scene throws the audience into even deeper Brechtian waters through its disorienting camera work. Nana and Paul, her former husband, are having a long conversation at the bar of a cafe, and everything about Raoul Coutard's cinematography is designed to make their alienation from each other not just a narrative point but a living, discomforting reality for the audience. Positioned directly behind the characters, the camera persistently films the backs of their heads, refusing the psychologically revealing facial expressions that ordinary film grammar would demand at such a moment. Their faces are occasionally visible in a mirror over the bar, but the view is distant and intermittent as the camera moves from one spot to another, often preventing even their backs from appearing together within the frame. Nana's hand touches Paul's head in a fleeting gesture near the end of their talk, and the effect is almost jarring in a scene (and a movie) where physical contact looms as a constant threat (violence, prostitution) while physical affection (caressing, embracing) is largely unknown. By starting with this Brechtian flourish, Godard introduces theatre verite as a means of engaging us with characters who do not fit any of the standard movie categories. On one hand, they are not fully developed figures inviting us to identify with them emotionally; we have little idea who they are (the husband's part in the story never becomes entirely clear) and for a long time we can barely make out what they look like. On the other hand, they are not just abstract embodiments of sociocultural types either; their main concern here - clearing the wreckage of a shattered relationship - is recognizably human and poignant. In any case, if their vagueness makes them seem elusive, our resulting curiosity leads us to focus more closely on whatever clues the scene does offer about them, and thus to enter the world of the movie all the more intently. Most impressive of all is their concreteness, the quality Godard pursued in The Little Soldier, and obviously an important trait for any filmd escribed by a term like theatre verite. Photographed almost as if they were objects that happen to be in the room, Nana and Paul are more like two-dimensional graphics than three-dimensional personalities. This is because they are not "fleshed out" psychologically, and also because of two reasons directly linked to the cinematography: (a) Their images are conveyed partly by reflections in a mirror, and (b) the camera's lateral movements (a gesture Godard will use vigorously in later works) tend to flatten space sideways instead of exploring it in depth. Still, this very two-dimensionality, brooded over by Coutard's obsessive lens, gives them a pictorial presence that effortlessly dominates the scene's black-and-white images, allowing the couple to make up in physicality what they lack (so far) in context and psychology. This is enhanced by the film's use of directly recorded sound, free of the mellifluous mixing that makes Hollywood-type sound tracks at once seductive and inauthentic. The dialogue also contributes to Godard's quest for concreteness. Answering one of Paul's inconsequential questions with a question of her own, Nana asks "What do you care?" and then repeats the phrase several times in a row. At first she might be mimicking Patricia's repetitions ("Of course. Of course? Of course!") in Breathless, and to some extent her role playing is similar; Nana once appeared in a movie with Eddie Constantine, we will learn later on, and still wishes to become an actress, which might help her navigate more effectively through life by projecting a more practiced persona. Her reiterations have less to do with performing, however, than with a desperate attempt to grasp the mercurial meanings she feels within her conflicted self - to understand her turbulent "inside" by projecting it "outside," through words and behaviors that can be held and examined like other physical phenomena. "I wanted to be very precise," she explains to Paul, lamenting the difficulty of holding onto meaning long enough to express it accurately. Paul misses the point, telling her not to "parrot" words, since she's not on a stage. "The more we talk, the less words mean," she says a little later, but the anxiety produced by her alienated emotions ("I'm fed up. I want to die") is equally lost on her companion, who accuses her of "parrot talk" again. Parrot talk it may be, but its purpose is deadly serious. Nana seizes upon the sounds of words in a compulsive effort to possess the meanings they presumably contain, and thereby to reconfirm her own sense of existence, which has been shaken by the destabilizing events in her life. Godard's camera records her plight at once dispassionately and compassionately. This approach might be contradictory in less gifted hands but is made effective by Godard's conviction that cool, attentive observation ("staying prudently outside") is a reliable route to honest concern with Nana's predicament and the social circumstances that cause it. The impersonality of the setting, the distanced placements of the camera, the repetitive rhythms of the dialogue, and the hard-edged realism of the sound combine to amplify the scene's implicit cultural critique; who wouldn't have trouble holding their lives together in such an atmosphere? At the same time they mute the melodramatic undertones that a less Brechtian filmmaker might readily have exploited. The episode concludes with the pinball game, Paul's parable of the soul, and Nana's silent gaze at a world (visible in its wintry bleakness through the window beside her) that is both more absolute and more enigmatic than her sad experiences have prepared her to expect.
Second tableau: THE RECORD SHOP. 2,000 FRANCS, NANA LIVES HER LIFE. Pursuing his agenda of foregrounding the filmmaking process - motivated partly by Brechtian politics, partly by New Wave cinephilia - Godard begins the next tableau by removing all sound during two documentarystyle shots of Paris streets. He then replaces the restless shot-to-shot editing of the cafe scene with lengthy pans, showing Nana at work as a record-store clerk. She seems less alienated here than in the cafe, and the camera's easy movements lend a supple attractiveness to the scene. They almost suggest that unremarkable working-class life might not be a terrible burden if Nana didn't long for something better, symbolized by her movie-acting ambitions.
Her uneasiness is as profound as it is perplexing, however, and her "thought in action" is too intricate and mysterious to be contained by the commonsense experiences of ordinary work in ordinary places. The limits of any merely rational approach to her existential plight (by the character or the filmmaker) are underscored when one of her coworkers reads a lengthy excerpt from a magazine story that includes the cautionary sentence, "You attach too much importance to logic." Rebelling against the prison houses of logic and language alike, Nana is determined to live her one and only life on terms of her own invention - a heroic ambition that cannot be fulfilled in the confines of a middle-class record shop that deals in exactly the sort of prerecorded, predigested sounds that Godard has rejected for the purposes of telling her story. Like the first tableau, the second concludes with Nana in a pensive pose, listening to her colleague's droning voice as Coutard's lens slips past her and focuses on the flow of city life streaming past the store window in all its crisp materiality.
Third tableau: THE CONCIERGE, PAUL. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. The beginning of the next tableau seamlessly joins the distancing of Brechtian stylistics with the psychological suspense of traditional narrative. Nana lives in an apartment complex separated from the street by a forbidding wall. She wants to enter her apartment even though she has not paid her rent, and knows the concierge will not permit her on the premises. We know nothing of this situation as the episode begins, however. Positioned inside the courtyard, the camera shows the gateway to the area, flanked by large patches of shadow cast by the wall. Nana appears in the gateway, making a conventional entrance into the scene, but abruptly turns and hops back through the entryway, disappearing from view. Immediately the same action recurs twice again, exactly as if Nana were not a character but an actress who had stepped within camera range (or onto the stage) before her scene had begun. Only after these false starts does Nana actually enter the space of the episode, where she is promptly accosted by the concierge and forced into a series of quick activities (photographed from an all-encompassing overhead angle) that make up a small catalog of performative maneuvers: a contrite apology, a sneaky grab for her key, and finally submission to her opponents. These adversaries show enough satisfaction in their little victory to remind us of the (Brechtian) point that we might be identifying with them, instead of with Nana, if Nana were not given a privileged position within the narrative.
After a nondescript meeting with Paul, who holds even less interest for her than he did earlier, Nana goes to a movie theater - and no ordinary theater, since it's not only showing a silent film made more than three decades before she bought her ticket, but also displays the film's title (The Passion of Joan of Arc) in huge neon letters, as if this were the only attraction that ever played there. The visual importance given to the title is appropriate, since while Nana seems to approach this as an everyday visit to the movies - complete with a date who seems romantically interested in her - her response to the film is profound and all-consuming, enveloping her in a set of emotions as deep as any she encounters during her story.
In a broad sense, this scene is another sign of the historically minded cinephilia that Godard shares with his New Wave colleagues; he sees nothing odd in the notion that a working-class Parisian would select a religious silent film of 1928 from her local movie listings, and he makes the most of his opportunity to fill the screen with indelible images from Carl Dreyer's masterpiece. Much more is also going on, however, as Godard cuts with a slow, steady rhythm between Dreyer's expressive close-ups and his own close-ups of Nana's transfixed, often tearful gaze.
• The scene plunges us into the heart of Nana's emotional life, allowing us not only to observe but to feel the intensity of her identification with Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who chooses to suffer an awful death rather than renounce her belief that God has a special destiny in store for her. The destiny of which Nana dreams is more modest and secular to be appearing in movies rather than watching them - but it's no coincidence that her onetime acting job with Eddie Constantine was in a picture called No Pity, a title that applies both to Joan's plight and to the fate Nana will meet at the end of her adventures. Nana's tears flow for Joan, for herself, and for a world in which the pitiless have a monopoly on power.
• The pitiless are often men. Although we are still near the beginning of Nana's story, it is already clear that men have offered little to enrich her life. Paul doesn't interest her much, Eddie Constantine is in a different orbit, and few other males appear to have much relevance for her; in later scenes they will provide more harm than help. No wonder she gazes with awe and sympathy as Joan looks into the masculine face of affliction. Ironically, the rigid grasp of this affliction is embodied by a handsome young monk who commiserates with Joan even as he reveals her fate's horrible details. The silence of the scene adds to its power, which culminates when the screen fills with a single word spelled in implacably black letters against a pulsing white background: "La mort," the death that will still Joan's mortal voice and allow her the spiritual deliverance her sufferings have earned.
• The silence of the episode derives from Dreyer's silent film, of course, but it also anticipates a scene near the end of My Life to Live when a minor character will be filmed without sound so that Godard's own postsynchronized voice can be substituted for his, mingling artistic expression with personal confession. The later scene is foreshadowed here, suggesting that Godard's personal feelings about the story he is telling - including its double nature as a theatre-verite fiction and a portrait of Karina, his wife and collaborator - are linked with the cinematic admiration and philosophical wonder that The Passion of Joan of Arc inspires in him.
• The monk, Jean Massieu, is played by Antonin Artaud, a figure of great relevance to Godard's career. A radical French theorist with extreme ideas about the morality and philosophy of art, he wrote voluminously during a long career that included forays into acting and filmmaking. He also underwent recurring bouts of schizophrenic behavior that led to long-term incarceration in an asylum. Among his most influential ideas is his call for an innovative "theater of cruelty" so deeply immersed in humanity's naked suffering that its performances would resemble the contortions of condemned prisoners burning at the stake and signaling through the flamest o onlookers at their immolation. Godard pays tribute to him twice over in My Life to Live: by incorporating his image within the film, and by doing so via the specific scene in The Passion of Joan of Arc where his character informs Joan of the tortures she will shortly have to undergo. The sight of mad, tormented Artaud with doomed, tormented Joan - two figures at once transfigured and nearly crushed by enigmatic revelations - adds greatly to the resonance of this extraordinary moment. (Godard's colleague Jacques Rivette invokes Artaud with a more sweeping gesture in his masterful film Out One: Spectre, the setting of which is identified as "Paris and its double," an obvious reference to Artaud's most famous theoretical work, The Theater and Its Double.)
• Just as Nana's double becomes the threatened and imprisoned Joan, so Karina's double becomes Maria Falconetti, who plays the heroine in Dreyer's film. Dreyer's method of filming Joan's interrogation has become famous (and infamous) in cinematic circles: By taking repeated shots of arduously dramatic moments under physically demanding conditions, he subjected Falconetti to hardships almost as difficult and unpleasant (though of course not so terrifying and interminable) as some of those that were inflicted on the real-life character she portrayed. The result is a performance that partakes, in a small but authentic way, of the awful ordeal it is meant to represent. This is theatre-verite with a vengeance, and Dreyer's comments on his use of relentless close-ups to convey Joan's anguish apply with surprising force to Godard's employment of the same device. "The records give a shattering impression of the ways in which the trial was a conspiracy of the judges against the solitary Jeanne," the Danish filmmaker notes, "bravely defending herself against men who displayed a devilish cunning to trap her in their net. This conspiracy could be conveyed on the screen only through huge close-ups that exposed, with merciless realism, the callous cynicism of the judges" and thereby moved the audience so greatly "that they would themselves feel the suffering that Jeanne endured." Godard's portrayal of Nana as a pawn ensnared by male-generated greed and power shares much with Dreyer's view of Joan as the victim of a power/knowledge network manipulated by men hoping to further certain ideological aims. Another contact point between the two filmmakers is their insistence on the material presence of the images that anchor their stories. Both want to stay in intimate touch with what critic Raymond Carney calls "the accidental and particular .. . the undeconstructable human being with a real body who is at the center of the role, and who emphatically won't be reduced to ... a mere semiotic function of a film'ss ystems of artistic expression." Godard could not have said it more directly. Neither could Dreyer, another thinker with a leaning toward Brecht-like politics and a profound sympathy for the plight of women trapped within patriarchal societies as rigidly as Joan and Nana are trapped by the hard-edged borders of their close-ups.
After the film-within-a-film concludes, Nana shakes off her date, who expresses irritation at this; he paid for her movie ticket, after all. This is a small but meaningful detail, since the man's expectation of a payoff on his investment foreshadows the commercial arrangements Nana will enter as a prostitute. It also shows the ubiquity of a sex-as-commerce ideology - the power of masculine money to command feminine sexuality - in contemporary society.
Still dreaming of a show-business career, she then meets with a man who offers to compile nude photos she can use to market her charms in the movie world; again we see the prevalence of commercial sexuality in the realm of "respectable" business, "popular" entertainment, and "responsible" self-improvement. Nana is interested, but right now she's preoccupied with getting 2,000 francs to pay her rent and get her life in order. The camera follows their conversation in another intrusive variation on "normal" cinematic style - swinging from one side to another as it frames first Nana, then her companion, then both together in a conspicuously long, fluid take. It then lingers on the empty bar after they leave, again stressing the transience of Nana's presence within a material environment that exists quite independently of her activities.
Fourth tableau: THE POLICE, NANA IS QUESTIONED. Nana sits before a window, thrown into silhouette by the glare shining through the dirty glass. Her appearance in silhouette is significant, suggesting that individuality is hard to sustain when one is hauled into an impersonal office and subjected to questioning by a near-anonymous minion of the law.
Responding to the police officer's questions, Nana tells a new tale of sadness. She admits she tried to steal 1,000 francs by placing her foot over a banknote dropped by someone on the street, but lost her nerve under a long, hard stare from the woman who lost it - a mean-spirited woman, Nana complains with fiery emotion, who had her arrested even though she returned the money. The policeman takes down her story impassively, framed by Godard as if his typewriter were more important than he is.
The most interesting visual element of the scene is a framed image, hanging on the police-station wall, showing a few male figuresu underneath what appears to be a giant-sized arm and hand stretched over their heads. This may be seen as literally the long arm of the law, signifying the power/ knowledge complex that makes all the decisions here - following its own dictates and unlikely to care about the social circumstances that have led someone like Nana into her current plight. Alternatively, it may be taken as another Artaudian allusion, this time invoking The Spurt of Blood, a dramatic work published in 1925. In this play a chaotic episode involving a prostitute and a priest climaxes with God's enormous hand reaching across the stage and setting fire to the woman's hair, whereupon she becomes "naked and hideous," bites God on the wrist, and sexually embraces a young man until the arrival of a dead girl who is dropped on the ground, "where she collapses and becomes as flat as a pancake." Godard's film will reach an ending somewhat similar to that of Artaud's scene, etched in terms that are no less abrupt and upsetting, if far more naturalistic in tone.
Also significant is the end of the episode, when the officer asks how she will now take care of herself. "I don't know," she replies. "I... I is another." Nana does not usually slide into sloppy syntax, or into the unconventional language of avant-garde literature - her second phrase is a famous one, written by Arthur Rimbaud in an 1871 letter - so we must think seriously about these hesitant words. On one level, she is manifesting the existential alienation produced by a society that sadly lacks the capacity for guiding, nurturing, and consoling its inhabitants; in such circumstances, one's self may seem almost as alien (an other) as the glaring stranger who hands you to the cops despite the need and desperation flickering through your eyes. At the same time, Karina the actress is showing both her close identification with and critical distance toward the character she plays. She achieves this double state through the Brechtian technique of not burrowing into Nana, but standing alongside her so as to "observe" her actions and "quote" her words - "staying prudently outside" in order to refract "inside" realities. Legrand's music makes a strategic return to render the moment even more dramatically effective. Note too that the purposeful lapse of grammar in Nana's unwittingly quoted sentence ("Je est un autre") again marks Godard's willful resistance of common sense - shared with Rimbaud, who called for a "systematic derangement of the senses" as a pathway to social and aesthetic liberty - as it destabilizes "correct" communication with an openness of which a child, a visionary, or a poet could be proud. Nana turns her face into profile after speaking, and the camera eye zips away into empty space an instant before fade-out. This signals the end of what might be called her "normal life." She will now become a victim of the sexual commerce that she sees as her only escape route from loneliness and fear, which surround her like Joan's rough, uncomforting cloak.
Fifth tableau: THE BOULEVARDS, THE FIRST MAN. THE ROOM. The camera tracks down a Parisian boulevard. Then we see Nana making her way down the sidewalk, and we view the neighborhood's prostitutes through her curious eyes. A man picks her up; they enter a sad-looking little room; and we observe the details of their preparations - including Nana's uncertainty about her price, which turns out to be 4,000 francs - in a long scene with quick, almost clinical editing. The tableau ends with one of the film's most agonizing scenes: another Dreyeresque close-up, as the camera moves in for a relentlessly long take of the client's attempt to kiss Nana on the mouth. She resists by swinging her face frantically from side to side, vainly trying to evade the intimacy her new trade will force on her until the end.
Sixth tableau: MEETING YVETTE. A CAFE IN THE SUBURBS, RAOUL. GUNSHOTS IN THE STREET. Nana has a sidewalk conversation with her friend Yvette, filmed from a vantage point behind Nana's head; we don't see their faces until Coutard's camera belatedly swings around when the scene is well under way. Moments later the camera makes an equally conspicuous gesture when it moves from the women on one side of a cafe to a young man named Raoul on the other, where he's pumping away at a typically Godardian pinball machine. These are elegantly Brechtian visuals, contributing to the film's narrative intelligence while discouraging facile immersion in its emotional and psychological levels. Back at their cafe table, Yvette tells Nana the story of her unhappy marriage and her entry into prostitution; the camera focuses mainly on Nana as she sympathetically listens. In an unexpected shift of tone, the film then makes a strikingly explicit statement of the existentialist viewpoint that Godard brings to this story and the issues it raises. Responding to Yvette's claim that life is depressing but it's not her fault, Nana states her belief that
we're always responsible for our actions. We're free. I raise my hand, I'm responsible. I turn my head, I'm responsible. I am unhappy, I'm responsible. I smoke, I'm responsible. I shut my eyes, I'm responsible. I forget I'm responsible, but I am. I told you, there's no escape. Everything is good. You only have to take an interest in things. . . . After all, things are what they are. A message is a message. Plates are plates. Men are men. And life is life.
It is clear from this speech that existence still precedes essence in Godard's work, and our selves are still determined by our behaviors. Nevertheless, we should not take Nana's words as a manifesto by the filmmaker, since she is expressing what might be called a pop-culture version of existentialist thought. Stated in repetitive, ritualistic phrases that frame its meaning in terms closer to religious rhetoric than logical argument, her litany has the sophistication of, say, a self-help manual or a greeting card. Godard's decision to focus on her ideas in this way reflects his perennial skepticism toward logic itself, even when logic might bolster the philosophical views to which he feels closest. The scene also renews our sense of Nana's vulnerability, revealing her need to convince herself oi her liberty even as she preaches freedom to her companion.
Left out of her statement, of course, is any hint of political awareness, with which Godard is becoming increasingly concerned as the 1960s progress. Nana may feel she bears responsibility for the conditions of her life, but the seductions of Raoul the pimp and the realities of Parisian prostitution - about to be revealed in a documentarylike scene full of facts and figures - will soon show how easily the illusions of individual choice can be shattered. Bearing out this theme, Yvette chats with Raoul while Nana listens to a foolishly romantic pop song about the simple pleasures of the poor. Happiness is a matter not of socioeconomic status, its music and lyrics suggest, but of having an attractive lover to cuddle up with between shifts on the assembly line. The illusory nature of Nana's supposed freedom is underscored by the next incident in her story. Raoul administers a "test" to determine whether she is a "lady" or a "tramp," and although she "passes" this exam laughing instead of bristling when Raoul showers her with insults - her response verifies his view of human nature as a matter of stereotypes and categories. (He starts his insults, incidentally, by accusing her of "parroting" his words - recalling the charge of artificiality and unoriginality that Paul made against her in the first tableau.) If she were truly a free agent, moreover, Nana might end her relationship with Raoul after glimpsing the book in which he records the accounts of his prostitutes, reducing them from full humanity to the degraded level of mere numbers in a ledger; yet she makes no move to reduce her involvement with this sleazy new acquaintance. It is during her glance at this book that the awful sound of gunfire bursts into the cafe from the street outside, magnifying the implicit violence of Raoul's dehumanizing trade into the explicit violence of a whole society steeped in antagonism, exploitation, and commodification of bodies and souls. The mayhem is as random as the action of Raoul's pinball machine, as inevitable as the markings on his account sheets; yet lingering naivete makes Nana as blind to its deeper meanings as the victim who staggers into the bar with blood smeared over his eyes. As if compensating for their tragic inability to see, Godard injects the gunfire's horror into the very fabric of his film, blasting frames out of Coutard's rapid pan shot in a display of jump cutting whose likes we haven't seen since Breathless. Nana makes a panicky exit as the material world closes suffocatingly in and the cinematic world blows explosively apart. Raoul will later say "some political thing" caused the madness. He will be correct.
Seventh tableau: THE LETTER, RAOUL AGAIN, THE CHAMPS-ELYSEES. Seeking a better place to ply her new trade, Nana writes to the madam of a nearby brothel. Godard uses the occasion to reinforce the link between his improvisatory theatre-verite and the human lives - fictional (Nana) and nonfictional (Karina) - that are its subjects. Peering over Nana's shoulder as she composes her letter, we witness not only the continuation of the film's story through the words she writes, but also a documentary account of Karina's physical movements as she performs an activity whose very ordinariness blurs the line between acting and simply being. Behind her, a huge photomural of the Champs-Elysees underscores the photographic nature of the scene, at once emphasizing its realism (like the photo, this movie is a lifelike account of Paris in 1962) and complicating our attempt to read it literally (this is not reality but a construction, with its own agendas and priorities).
Raoul walks up and speaks with Nana, placing her into more of the categories (ladies and tramps, profitable and unprofitable hookers, etc.) that organize life for him. "The classic letter," he says of the page she has written, relegating her carefully composed words to the lowly status of tried-and-true cliche. She asks his opinion of her, and he says she is "very good," with "great goodness in [her] eyes." She expresses surprise at this "Catholic" answer to what she thought was a simple question, but her feelings of security and authenticity have grown so shaky that she encourages Raoul's judgmental views and the social pigeonholes to which these assign her. She asks what "category of women" he places her in, and he announces that there are "three types of girl," depending on the number of "expressions" they have.
Godard films this conversation in accord with the movie's generally Brechtian tone. The camera starts with left-to-right movements from a position behind Raoul, whose head sometimes hides Nana from view. Then it changes to a position at the end of their table, shifting from one side to the other until Raoul asks Nana to smile. The camera views both of them as Nana protests and maintains her thoughtful expression; then it swings excitedly toward her as she breaks into a sudden grin. Her happiness is short-lived, as she quickly resumes her pensive look and gazes at Raoul with apprehension. They leave the cafe in a jaunty mood, though, playfully exchanging a puff of cigarette smoke during an affectionate kiss. Nana asks when their new business arrangement will begin, and Godard cuts from the photomural's daytime Paris to a shot of the city at night, enticing and forbidding in its suggestion of unknown possibilities.
Eighth tableau: AFTERNOONS, MONEY, WASHBASINS, PLEASURE, HOTELS. This tableau's title names pleasure as nothing special - just one in a series of everyday nouns, and near the end of the list at that. The tableau itself consists largely of a faux documentary on the subject of prostitution in Paris, showing places, objects, and gestures used in the trade. Bodies also appear, filmed in bits and pieces to reflect (among other things) the dehumanizing effects of impersonal sex. The busy montage is accompanied by an "informative" commentary, but rather than invoke the "objectivity" of traditional "voice of God" narration, Godard structures the voice-over as a series of answers to Nana's curious questions. One might call this a catechism for the capitalist age, especially since Nana's recent religious allusion (responding to the "Catholic" remark) is still fresh in memory.
Ninth tableau: A YOUNG MAN. LUIGI. NANA WONDERS WHETHER SHE'S HAPPY. Just as the eighth tableau consisted largely of information that most narrative films would exclude for being too dry, this one is full of Brechtian digressions that nudge us out of the story, allowing room for thought and portraying some of the uneventful "dead time" that occupies real life far more than it occupies conventional movies. We wait with Nana at a bar while Raoul confers with a friend. We wait some more while a young man fetches her a pack of cigarettes. We follow her as she dances to jazz on a jukebox, hovering near her body, and sometimes look through her eyes at the men who stare at her.
The scene's most outlandish digression takes place when Luigi, a minor character, does a comic impersonation of a child inflating and exploding a balloon; while this is an apt metaphor for Nana's ultimately tragic naivete, it is presented as a sort of vaudeville routine that deliberately postpones the story's development and again foregrounds its artificial, performative nature. Spectators may well find this frustrating, and of course that is the point. Godard's satisfaction with such devices is demonstrated by his repeated use of them - a poem delays an execution in Les Carabiniers, a lengthy joke interrupts a dramatic scene in Alphaville, a comedian's routine delays the climax of Pierrot le fou, and so on. Even the jazz that prompts Nana's dance is riddled with brief pauses (momentary rests built into the music, much as printed intertitles are built into this movie) that reinforce the film's interruptive strategy. Beneath its artfully composed shots and carefully recorded sounds, My Life to Live is built on a foundation of absence: the absence of tones during the silences in the jazz piece, the absence of words during the Joan of Arc sequence, the absence of images during each tableau's introductory title, and finally the absence of Nana, toward which the entire tragedy is wending its way.
Tenth tableau: THE STREETS, A BLOKE, HAPPINESS IS NO FUN. Nana is hooking on the street, more settled into her profession than before. Smoking, surveying the scene, and waiting for trade, she stands before a wall covered with ragged posters; a fragmented phrase directly over her shoulder reads "le zo," evoking the Greek root meaning "life." We may see this as an accident of the shot's composition, but since Godard often fills his frames with carefully selected words and syllables, we may also see it as a reference to the movie's title, and a sign that one particular "life to live" has now enveloped Nana, excluding other possibilities that may once have been available to her. Depending on our interpretation of her story, we may feel she has selected this life with her own individualistic will ("We're always responsible for our actions. We're free") or that it was subtly imposed on her by an alienated, materialistic society. Supporting the second hypothesis over the first, the fragment "zo" also suggests "zoo," a place where animals are confined for the enjoyment of other, more privileged creatures. We may also note another poster alongside Nana, promoting Hollywood star Paul Newman in his popular movie The Hustler (L'Arnaqueur), a sardonic allusion to the tenacity of hustlers and hustling in her daily round.
In any case, we observe Nana in her "cage" as she socializes with other prostitutes, and we visit a typical session with a client, watching her smoothly negotiate the price and make the rounds of nearby rooms when he asks for an additional woman. (The sound track momentarily drops away as he makes his request, weaving another subliminal silence into the texture of the film.) Arbitrarily ignored by the client, who evidently prefers the new member of his menage, she again sits in silhouette before a window as Legrand's mournful music swells. This may be considered a Brechtian interlude, undermining melodrama by pushing its conventions (sad music, romantic pose) to the breaking point; but it might also be seen as patently, even desperately heartfelt, using cliches of the Hollywood "woman's picture" to sympathize with Nana over how easily her contentment can vanish into puffs of lonely cigarette smoke. Either way, Godard is honoring two Hollywood giants here: Alfred Hitchcock, whose masterful profile shots in Vertigo and Psycho could have inspired Nana's pose, and Douglas Sirk, whose use of glass to separate isolated individuals from the plenitude of nature (as in the 1955 All That Heaven Allows) prefigures her place before a window revealing an inviting but unreachable world.
Eleventh tableau: PLACE DE CHATELET. A STRANGER, NANA THE UNWITTING PHILOSOPHER. Rapid tracking shots capture people walking down city sidewalks. Music and ambient sounds come and go. Nana enters a booth in a cafe, sees a man reading and smoking in an adjoining space, and asks if he'll buy her a drink. "Why are you reading?" she asks after a little small talk. "It's my job," the philosopher matter-of-factly answers. Nana admits that she suddenly doesn't know what to say - a recurring situation in her life - and we remember the first tableau, when she repeated a phrase many times instead of developing a thought at length. This prompted Paul's "parrot talk" insult and her own conclusion that "the more we talk, the less words mean."
As a man of words, the philosopher - played by Brice Parain, a respected scholar - would probably not agree with Nana's earlier statement about talking; but she is interested in another side of the question now, and she raises it with him. "I know what I want to say," she observes. "I think about whether it's what I mean ... but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it." The philosopher responds with a rambling account of Porthos's death in Alexandre Dumas's novel Twenty Years After. Here the dullest-witted of the Three Musketeers lights the fuse on an explosive, starts to flee, but suddenly begins wondering how it is possible for the human body to coordinate the activities used in moving; paralyzed by the paradox of unconscious action translated into conscious thought, he stands transfixed and becomes the victim of his own bomb. "The first time he thought, it killed him!" the philosopher summarizes. "Why did you tell me that story?" asks Nana with real anger. "No reason," he replies, "just to talk." This begins a lengthy conversation about the nature and purpose of language, in which certain observations and exchanges clearly reflect Godard's current preoccupations. One is Nana's repetition of her point that "the more we talk, the less words mean," coupled with a wish that people could live in silence. The philosopher says this is desirable but unattainable, for two reasons: "We must think, and for thought we need words.... To communicate one must talk - that is our life." He goes on to elaborate his notion that speech and silence are two different states of being, with the former a result (or even a rebirth) of the latter. "We swing between the two because it's the movement of life," he says. "From everyday life, one rises to a life we call superior: the thinking life. But this life presupposes one has killed the everyday, too-elementary life." Thinking and talking are basically the same - "one cannot distinguish the thought from the words that express it" - and both inhabit a separate plane from ordinary existence in the world of things. This does not mean, of course, that thought or language is isolated from falsehood and error. "Lies too are part of our quest. Errors and lies are very similar," says the philosopher; and Nana adds a bit later that "there is truth in everything, even in error." Godard certainly likes this idea, which he used to justify the "touching" confusions of The Little Soldier. Still, persistent effort and existential responsibility are needed to locate truth-through-error and benefit from it. "One must speak in a way that is right, that doesn't hurt," the philosopher goes on, adding (as Nana stares directly into the camera, signaling Godard's fascination as well as her own) that it is best if one "says what has to be said, does what has to be done without hurting or bruising." Again one hears a plea for goodfaith integrity - one of the few human qualities that can help us through the raging absurdities of our existential condition. The conversation keeps rambling along, very much on the philosopher's terms - a sentence like "Leibnitz introduced the contingent" probably means little to Nana - but spurred and sustained by his companion every step of the way. "What do you think about love?" she finally asks, as music hauntingly returns to the sound track. "The body had to come into it," the philosopher replies, and when he veers off into a series of references that Nana can only find obscure, she steers him back to her wavelength by asking, "Shouldn't love be the only truth?" No, he responds, arguing that love cannot be dependably "truth" since it is not dependably "true" but rather a matter of "bits and pieces" and "arbitrary choices"; still, with maturity one can hope to be "at one" with a lover (the words "at one" imply equality, not possession or control) in a way not possible when one is young. "That means searching. This is the truth of life," he concludes. "That's why love is a solution, on condition that it is true." It is well that the scene ends here, since the philosopher appears to be growing more pretentious and self-involved as he goes along, and Nana lacks the verbal facility to debate him effectively, much less debunk his more dubious notions. What she desires from this conversation is less the philosopher's wisdom, however, than the opportunity to journey through her own thoughts by speaking the words that embody them. She wants to test their truth by hearing their sound, and by watching them register on one of the rare acquaintances who (unlike Raoul and her clients) will listen to her seriously. What the scene offers to Godard is different but no less valuable: another chance to blur the boundaries between reality and artifice, joining fictional and nonfictional "characters" in a setting at once invented (Nana's narrative) and discovered (Karina's discourse with Parain). "We must pass through error to arrive at the truth," says the philosopher, and it would be hard to convey the rationale behind theatre-verite more concisely.
Twelfth tableau: THE YOUNG MAN AGAIN, "THE OVAL PORTRAIT." RAOUL TRADES NANA. Sitting in an apartment, the young man who fetched Nana's cigarettes in the ninth tableau holds a volume of Edgar Allan Poe's complete works, the book covering the lower half of his face. Nana is before the window. He lowers the book to converse with her - but instead of hearing their words, we read the conversation in subtitles as Legrand's ever-mournful refrain fills the sound track. They discuss trifles, revealing the comfortable nature of their relationship. Then we hear a voice as the man, apparently Nana's boyfriend now, reads from Poe; at first the screen is darkened, and as the image fades in, we again see only the upper portion of his face over the book he holds. "I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before," he reads. "It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly and then closed my eyes."
The extraordinary thing about this moment in My Life to Live is that we are hearing Godard himself - not the young actor on the screen, whose mouth is invisible behind the book - speak Poe's words by reciting the passage into a microphone outside the camera's range. "The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl," he continues. His words are accompanied by Karina's immaculately framed image, as if the movie were taking its cue directly from Poe's words. "It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner," he goes on, as Nana poses in silhouette before the window. "The arms, the bosom, and even the ends of the radiant hair melted imperceptibly into the vague but deep shadow of the background. As a thing of art, nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself." Nana now gazes toward the camera in close-up, with only a plain white wall behind her. "But it could have been neither the execution of the work nor the immortal beauty of the countenance which so vehemently moved me. Least of all could it have been that my fancy had mistaken the head for that of a living person. At length, satisfied with the true secret of its effect, I fell back within the bed. I had found the spell of the picture in a lifelikeness of expression." Nana is now in profile, sharing the frame with a small portrait reproduction tacked to the wall (not unlike Patricia's decorations in her Breathless apartment). "Is that book yours?" asks Nana, and the man - still speaking in Godard's off-screen voice - repies that he just found it in the room. Then, in an act of ventriloquism that is startling even by Godard's audacious standard, the filmmaker speaks directly to his actress-wife through the young man's persona, as if the latter had no other reason for appearing in the scene. "It's our story," he says to Nana/Karina, "a painter portraying his love! Shall I go on?" She answers affirmatively and he continues, Poe's words now transformed by their new meaning in the film-and-life that Godard and Karina share. "And in sooth, some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblance as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well." Becoming increasingly obsessed with his work, Poe's narrative goes on, the painter "turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him." When the painting was complete "save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the body again flickered up as the flame of the lamp. And then the brush was given and then the tint was placed, and for one moment the painter stood entranced before the work he had wrought. And in the next while he gazed he grew tremulous and aghast, and cried with a loud voice, 'This is indeed life itself!' and turned suddenly to regard his beloved. She was dead." Nana slowly fades to black as melancholy music swells once more.
Film critic Angela Dalle Vacche has detected a strain of "iconophobia" in Godard's work, suggesting that his obsession with images and their power results from fear and dread as well as devotion and respect. His lengthy quoting of "The Oval Portrait" supports this diagnosis, as does the silent, subtitled conversation that now resumes between Nana and the young man. A request, "I'd like to go to the Louvre," is answered with, "No, I don't like looking at pictures." An aphorism, "Art and beauty are life," is answered with a change of subject.
Turning from the arts to a more immediate concern, Nana agrees to break off with Raoul and move in with her young boyfriend. The next scene then fades in on an outdoor location as Raoul roughly pushes her across the pavement, criticizing her for not accepting "anyone who pays" as a client. "Sometimes it's degrading," she protests, still clinging to her elusive dignity. They drive off, and we see some of the places they pass from the window of Raoul's car. One is a movie theater showing Truffaut's romantic Jules and Jim, which prompts someone in the car to complain that there's always a queue when you want see a film. Another is the cast-iron sign of a business called Hell & Sons (Enfer et ses fils). As before in Godard's work, no scene is too serious for a joke to disrupt its mood and delay its outcome. The film's last joke is the ironically named Restaurant des Studios, in front of which the story ends. After a long, static shot of the street corner, the camera pans with Raoul's car as it swings into view. Coutard then positions the camera some distance from the curb to allow for smooth lateral movements, filmingt he action in a single shot marked by the flattened out, sideways space that Godard has started to favor in his cinematography. With horror, we realize that Raoul has arranged to sell Nana to another pimp. He pulls her from his car and pushes her in the other man's direction, receiving a packet of cash in return; but the money is short, and he pulls Nana back, refusing to be cheated on the deal. Deciding to destroy the merchandise if he can't drive away with it, the prospective buyer aims his gun at Nana, whose terror is conveyed with poignant force by Karina's barely controlled voice ("No! No!") and harrowingly expressive gestures. His gun fails to fire, and with a tough-guy casualness that borders on caricature ("You shoot. I forgot to load mine") he orders his lackey to finish the job. The thug's bullet smashes into Nana, and a subsequent gunshot - this one from Raoul - ends the little life she still has left to live. Raoul drives off, leaving Nana's corpse alone within the frame. Godard's camera makes a final abrupt gesture, moving sharply downward so the cold, empty street fills the lower portion of the screen. Nana's lifeless body is thus elevated to the upper portion - a faint, materialist echo of the heavenward journey that Joan of Arc might have expected from the God she faithfully served. Nana shared Joan's tears at an earlier point in this story, but Godard's final portrait of her is less redemptive (not to mention inspirational) than the opposite camera movement - upward to a finer, loftier realm - that ended Dreyer's film. Nana has passed through error, but the philosopher's words notwithstanding, it is far from clear that she has arrived at truth.
My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie). 1962. D, S - Jean-Luc Godard; P - Pierre Braunberger; Ph - Raoul Coutard; E - Agnes Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan; So - Guy Villette, Jacques Maumont; M - Michel Legrand; C - Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre-S. Labarthe, Peter Kassovitz, Laszlo Szabo. Les Films de la Plei'ade. 35mm. 85 min.
David Sterritt/The Films of Jean-Luc Godard/ Seeing the Invisible/ My Life to Live
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE © Cambridge University Press 1999 by Roberta Fornari William S. Burroughs wrote Blade Runner, a Movie in 1979. Although this short novella does not represent a turning point in his career, it is exceptional for the sharpness of its apocalyptic vision and the novelty of its presentation technique. Critical works and essays on Burroughs’s corpus, however, have not often mentioned Blade Runner, despite the fact that its futuristic vision provides an unusual showcasing of Burroughs’s political engagements, which often remain buried in other texts. From this point of view, Blade Runner is a good example of how (science) fiction goes beyond the writer’s simple presentation of facts and enters the realm of social commentary. The book/film projects the raw facts of the contemporary American political and health care systems into a possible future, in which uncontrolled diseases, overpopulation and the breakdown of law and order provide the context for a struggle for freedom. In this future, middle class, bourgeois lifestyles are attacked by anarchic values that often become individual or collective violent interventions against an established rule; violence appears as resistance to social control and as a means of liberation for both masses (selforganized groups or gangs) and individuals in order to give human beings a chance to achieve a radically new form of freedom. In this essay I will present the background and history of Blade Runner as an example of an innovative fiction-movie form and discuss the political, social and ethical implications of Burroughs’s presentation of violence, which will be shown to be highly ambivalent, both stylistically and in terms of actual political content. Stylistically, many of the descriptions of violence in Blade Runner make use of divertissement,1 a technique of textual variation that tends towards playful purposes and mockery, aiming to subvert the reader’s expectations of conventional and stylistic clichés. The informal collective violence presented in Blade Runner is often resolved through comedic slapstick interludes that invoke divertissement. These scenes, in which disorder prevails, rather than any logical, political and ideological opposition aimed at changing social values, also provide the clue to Burroughs’s ‘politics’ in Blade Runner. I argue that Burroughs’s purpose is to present a revolution that is not oriented toward the establishment of a new form of the State or society, but one that is against established social order per se, as a precondition for a radically new form of freedom and independence. The target of revolt is therefore not simply the prevailing social order, but also all forms of coercion and discipline, all forms of superimposition and moralistic values that undermine individual freedom. This critique of order and control, a key feature within all Burroughs’s works, is complemented by a strong utopian element, signaling a sometimes-tense interplay between his radical individualism and his recognition of the urgent necessity for humanity to find new methods of emancipation. The tension between these elements is also present as a stylistic feature in his refusal to use linear order and traditional storyline, so that the prominent meta-textual theme, exemplified in the ‘characters’ quest for freedom, comes to reflect, in various ways, the author’s own struggle against control.2 In Blade Runner, much of the violence and the struggle for freedom involves social forces implicated in global change, including the attempted superimposition of oppressive laws and arbitrary order and the chaos engendered by such impositions; therefore the book also functions as a prophetic announcement of the emerging conflicts surrounding globalization and its critics. BLADE RUNNER, A MOVIE: HISTORY AND BACKGROUNDWritten in 1979, in the form of a screenplay and definable as a ‘fiction film’, Blade Runner utilizes Burroughs’s typical satirical style and addresses the problems of health care, medicine distribution and the transformation of the urban social environment into an anarchic zone, as a result of the government’s inability to deal with social problems and needs. Following three defeated Health Care Acts in the early 1980s, social riots erupt as a consequence of the administration’s mistakes in coping with the problems of an overpopulated New York. Violence and social conflicts give rise to the future scenario within which the story takes place: New York looks like the aftermath of a nuclear attack—‘Whole areas in ruins, refugee camps, tent cities. Millions who have fled the city will not return. New York is a ghost city’ (BR 6th section). Beginning with the first lines of the story, the extra-diegetic narrator tells the facts to a projected character, B.J. (a ‘character’ also featured prominently in The Ticket that Exploded), in the immediacy of the present tense. He explains that this film is about different aspects of human life and social systems, and in particular about ‘overpopulation and the growth of vast service bureaucracies. The FDA and the AMA and the big drug companies are like an octopus on the citizen’ (BR 1st section). The narrator then turns to his ‘listener’, B.J.: [Y]ou are asking me to tell you in one sentence what this film is about? I’m telling you it is too big for one sentence—even a life sentence. For starters it’s about the National Health Insurance we don’t got. (BR 1st section) The distinctive performative voice in Burroughs’s novels, together with the cinematic quality of the prose, transforms the text into a series of metamorphic images of an imminent reality not far from our own. The use of cinematic technique in one of the only Burroughs works presented directly as a film script has to be understood in the context of his other experiments with such imagery. There are many features in Burroughs’s texts that have a cinematic influence and create a cinematic impression: the use of the present tense (a rhythmic verbal device typical of script descriptions and offscreen voices); the particularized descriptions of movements and acts that are veritable close-ups and long-shots (the shooting scenes in The Place of Dead Roads, the riots in Blade Runner which remind us of the similarly depicted riots in Naked Lunch); and the continuous back and forth focus on different single parts of the body, as if a camera eye was the observer and the writer only the ‘recording medium’ in the process. Through fragmentation and montage-like associations, these cinematic devices translate into words and give movement to the stillness of written language. Burroughs worked directly with film as well as with sound recording in various media projects during the 1960s. These experiments shed light on his work with verbal language as well as on his interest in the relationship between images and words. Burroughs’s work with Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and Antony Balch in London and Paris led to the short features Bill and Tony, Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups and William Buys a Parrot, based to some extent on his written works (‘Towers Open Fire’ from Nova Express). The written works created in those years are understandably the most difficult to read in terms of linear order, but they are also the most cinematic in terms of the immediacy of their imagery and the resulting dreamlike effects. The Nova trilogy and The Wild Boys, written with the cut-up method, blend science fiction and utopian fantasy with repeated images of violence, challenging conventional moral codes and requiring the reader to ‘take sides’ in the wild boys’ conflict. The use of cut-ups interrupts the process of easily connecting episodes and story lines, forcing the brain to create new connections and associative lines—as in a movie with a hectic montage. The coupling of cinematic style and technique with a satire of social conventions is well exemplified in Blade Runner, which is very loosely based on The Bladerunner, a mainstream science fiction novel published in 1974 by Alan Nourse. In an interview, Burroughs declared: ‘The idea of the underground medicine was in the book, and I got the idea from that. Then I got in touch with Nourse and he said he would be glad to have the name used because he considered it good publicity for his book’ (Skerl 1980:116). Whether the operation is a postmodern recycling process of sci-fi material or ‘solidarity between two writers’ is not important here. It is relevant, though, that Burroughs used the idea developed by another writer, transforming the story into a form that is not a movie and not exactly a script; it works as fiction but, as is often the case in Burroughs’s stories, the fiction’s political elements and implications are dreadfully similar to reality. Nourse’s book, as well as many other science fiction works (Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson, for example), deals with the future of medicine and health care as a dystopia. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, public authorities establish a system to limit population growth. National health care is free on the condition that people affected by illness agree to be sterilized. Many people reject these draconian measures and an illegal medical system is created; doctors and nurses perform underground operations. The central character of Nourse’s story is Billy, the bladerunner, who smuggles medical tools and equipment and serves as a vital connection between doctors and the people who need operations because they have been disenfranchised from the officially sanctioned system. In Burroughs’s version, the idea of underground medicine is drawn and transformed into a piece of avant-garde art and pamphlet-style divertissement, which calls attention to the general condition of humanity. The setting is New York, transformed into a sort of Interzone after riots erupt in the early 1980s against the Medicine Acts; New York City is divided into areas either patrolled by police or left, in their absence, to gangs or less-organized groups of local citizens. The first sections of the screenplay describe the background for the events of the text in 2014, the year in which the movie would supposedly take place. Events previous to 2014 generate the postatomic setting and are described by a voice that seems to emerge, by its language and rhythm, from a media broadcast (a more literary than cinematic device of telling a story): ‘This film is about America. What America was and what America could be, and how those who try to stifle the American dream are defeated.’; ‘This film is about cancer and that’s a powerful subject.’; and ‘This film is about a second chance for Billy the blade runner, and for all humanity’ (BR 1st section). The use of the metropolis as the setting for the film narrative has interesting parallels. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the metropolis has been the protagonist in many movies, a place of alienation and political control (Metropolis; Fritz Lang 1927), a postmodern locus of mysterious implication (Blade Runner, Ridley Scott 1982; Brazil, 1984 and 12 Monkeys, 1996, both by Terry Gilliam) and a virtual creation for total control over human bodies and energy (The Matrix, Andy and Larry Wachowsky 1999). Although we cannot be certain if these directors read Burroughs’s work, they were undoubtedly influenced by the pervasiveness of the zeitgeist that he tapped into. Blade Runner’s New York becomes the ‘world center for underground medicine, the most glamorous, the most dangerous, the most exotic, vital, far-out city the world has ever seen’ (BR 1st section). It is the ‘real’ city, after all, that is not very different from the idea and stereotype we receive from movies: New York is a place where ‘everything is possible’, a city that has always presented its events (fictional and real) as absolutely exceptional, and Burroughs is certainly aware of the overlapping strains of fiction and reality. The difference is that in Blade Runner, the disenfranchised population of New York City possesses a clear narrative rationale for the riots and revolts: these events are precipitated by the discontent that follows the legalization and government distribution of heroin. What Burroughs calls the ‘United States Health Service’ took over distribution through government clinics, and built up an intricate bureaucracy of corrupt police and investigators, so that ‘“[m]any people who were not addicts got on the program and made a comfortable living selling off their allowance”’ (BR 4th section). In Blade Runner’s fictional world, any attempt to regulate or impose ‘order’ marginalizes a social group, making the National Health Act as dangerous in its social effects as any other Act: Ironically, the high death rate was largely due to the government’s efforts to forestall the outbreak by strict weapon-control measures. The National Firearms Registration Act of 1982 debarred anyone with a criminal record or any record of drug addiction or mental illness, and all those on the welfare rolls, from buying or possessing any firearms of any description including air guns. This left the disaffected middle-class in possession of more firearms than any other group. (BR 4th section) This situation pushes the Percival’s Soldiers of Christ, a racist and fascist group, to attempt to take over New York and ‘slaughter all ethnic minorities, beatniks, dope-fiends’, etc. As is usual in Burroughs’s texts, warfare and riots give way to a humorous images, in this case of ‘doctors, nurses and orderlies’ fighting against the rioters with ‘scalpels saws and bedpans’ and other ready-made weapons. The Soldiers of Christ are defeated, ‘split into small groups and, abandoning their holy crusade, take to raping, looting, killing in the middle class neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan ….’ (BR 5th section). The result of the battles is a city divided into an ‘anarchic’ lower side where it is possible to be operated on and to find any drug, and the rest of the city, almost empty and abandoned, with ‘shabby open-air markets and vegetable gardens in vacant lots. Some are crowded, others virtually deserted’ (BR 3rd section). BLADE RUNNER, A MOVIE AS POLITICAL COMMENTARYBlade Runner was written while Burroughs was living in New York, and has to be understood within the political context of American society at this time. If we choose to separate these fictional scenarios from the relevant political issues, we would miss the underlying ‘ideology’ of the novel: Blade Runner warns against every attempt to disrupt the ethical value of freedom and individual choice through ‘top-down’ political intervention. The urgent need for liberation and freedom from any superimposition, and above all political control, shows an ambivalence that I will try to follow step by step in its implications. Political control in advanced industrial societies is organized through institutional authority and political structure, which together come to form the State apparatus. In order to govern and administer the public sphere the State needs control and authority over the actions of individuals and groups. The State exerts power (more or less coercive) over individuals on whom rules are imposed, and makes use of bureaucratically organized police, armed forces, public administration, education, health care and environmental management systems. Political control in modern states therefore exhibits strong tendencies toward centralization and bureaucratization, tendencies that are accompanied by increasing diffuseness of authority and operational inefficiency, giving rise to contradictions. In Blade Runner, political control has become so diffuse that its limits and contradictions arouse a disruptive diverse response: ‘grassroots’ groups of people fighting against the Health Care Acts and producing ‘outlaw’ medicine instead of universal health care, a corrupt medical lobby defending its power, and scores of individuals who struggle to survive. Helicopter view of Manhattan … Overpopulation has led to ever-increasing governmental control over the private citizen, not on the old-style police-state models of oppression and terror, but in terms of work, credit, housing, retirement benefits, and medical-care: services that can be withheld. These services are computerized. No number, no service. However, this has not produced the brainwashed standardized human units postulated by such linear prophets as George Orwell. Instead a large percentage of the population has been forced underground. How large, no one knows. These people are numberless. (BR 3rd section) The implication of the term ‘numberless’ is double since it functions first, simply, as an indefinite term (we do not know how many people live underground) and, second, as a political referent: to be numberless implies the impossibility of being cured in a hospital or in any other health care structure. ‘So America goes underground. They all make their own medicines in garages, basements, and lofts, and provide their own service […] All you need is access to the medications’ (BR 1st section). The science fiction setting of underground laboratories, flooded lower tunnels giving rise to an ‘underground Venice’, and buildings ‘joined by suspension bridges, a maze of platforms, catwalks, slides, lifts’ (BR 1st section) is common to many of Burroughs’s works (especially the ‘Interzone’ of Naked Lunch). Such imagery is not so futuristic if we compare it to the appearance of cities in developing countries, or indeed to the emergence of ‘third world’ conditions in modern, capitalist societies. We should remember that the future imagined by Burroughs is the reality of the 1980s Ronald Reagan reforms that dismantled the New Deal and Great Society social welfare initiatives. Burroughs’s fictitious premises fit the reality of recent history: By 1980, pressure had been growing to put through a National Health Act. This was blocked by the medical lobby, doctors protesting that such an Act would mean the virtual end of private practice, and that the overall quality of medical service would decline. The strain on an already precarious economy was also cited. Drug companies, fearing that price regulation would slash profits, spent millions to lobby against the proposed bill and ran full-page ads in all the leading newspapers. And above all, the health insurance companies screamed that the Act was unnecessary and could only lead to increased taxes for inferior service. (BR 3rd section) In his article ‘William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction’, Frank D. McConnell points out that science fiction is the least futuristic of popular genres, ‘attempting as it does a constant purification of the present through the neo-romance landscape of the future’ (1967:97). From this standpoint, Blade Runner represents an attempt to anticipate humanity’s future through the representation of the most dreadful risks in order to provide a ‘second chance’ for mankind to achieve a ‘stateless society’; Burroughs’s political utopia is therefore anarchic and anti-collectivist. In the story, Billy the bladerunner becomes the character who can travel back and forth in time, granting him a chance to correct his mistakes. Aside from any possible interpretation of the screenplay’s literary genre, Burroughs offers an acute and realistic vision. Solving the problems of health care and medicine distribution (especially in developing countries) has become not only a political necessity in terms of the economic satisfaction of public needs, but also one of the main points of contemporary political struggle in Western countries. The welfare state is the organ of a general redistribution of wealth among the population and is, above all, the expression of ‘big government’ that has mutated into ‘a set of despotic instruments of domination for the totalitarian production of subjectivity’ (Hardt and Negri 2001:324, my translation). As explained by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘“big government” leads the great orchestra of subjectivities transformed into commodities and establishes borders of desire and lines along which the work is being divided in the globalized order’ (324, my translation). The activities carried out by bureaucracies, private institutions with public functions and private health care firms, are all exemplars of control structures foisted upon individuals in terms of their obligation to choose only from what ‘the market offers’. But this ‘market’ tends more and more toward monopoly practices supported by big government. In reaction, Burroughs’s extra-diegetic narrator in Blade Runner asserts a supposedly anarchic, hyperbolic position that in fact expresses the values of the traditional small-scale capitalist: ‘Is this freedom? Is this what America stands for? […] We have been taught that if you put a better product on the free market, the superior product will sell’ (BR 1st section). This is not to imply, however, that Burroughs ever intended to offer a classical political position. His anarchic view has always tended to favor forms of rebellion that are far from any acceptable political solution in a sociopolitical context of organized collectivities. His micro-societies (as in The Wild Boys), his rebel groups and gangs, always border on acceptability (depending on the moral code of their opposition)—waiting to be recognized as ‘legitimate’ groups while they are opposed to mainstream society. One of the main problems in analyzing Burroughs’s political concerns lies in the fact that he always denies any political involvement, while at the same time proposing intrinsically political solutions. In his novels, Burroughs was lucidly aware of the sociopolitical landscape of the times. He saw his works not only as literary fictions seemingly detached from reality and intended as ‘hallucinations’, but also as works of futurology, dealing with the political, social and economic possibilities of a world in which individuals’ lives are increasingly controlled through specialized systems. In this evergrowing control system, the imaginative tracks of a story or novel may disturb and subvert the existing order; therefore, for Burroughs, the act of writing is an anarcho-political act. This anarchic position is perhaps a constant point in Burroughs’s views of life, and the quasi-libertarian position represented in the struggle against power and control is a typical American vision (Tanner 1971). It is, indeed, an example of a distinctively American method of disrupting order and continuity in the name of personal and individual freedom, and is reflected in both Burroughs’s style and his theoretical principles: This film is about the future of medicine and the future of man. For man has no future unless he can throw off the dead past and absorb the underground of his own being. In the end, underground medicine merges with the medical establishment, to the great benefit of both. (BR 1st section) When Jennie Skerl asked Burroughs to comment on the idea contained in these lines, he explained: ‘A man has to get beyond his conditioning, or his future is going to be a repetition, word-forword repetition. I would say that for a great percentage of people, all they do is repeat their past. They really don’t have a future at all. And it’s only by a sort of break with the past that anything new and different will emerge—which is very rare—a very rare occurrence’ (Skerl 1980:117). VIOLENCE AS FREEDOM—VIOLENCE AS DIVERTISSEMENTGenerally, the search for a new condition in Burroughs’s diegesis passes through the experience of rebellion, and more often violence. The most exemplary works in this respect are Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys and his last trilogy, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. In Blade Runner, the ‘spectacle of violence’ is supported by less serious manifestations, privileging satire and slapstick comedy. Consequently, political concerns seem to be overridden by the intrinsic fictional purpose of the story. Riots and rebellions become necessities in the overthrow of authority; individuals such as the bladerunners and the illegal doctors prefer to live in a destabilized underworld where it is possible to find drugs and weapons, to be operated on and, above all, to be free even if this freedom entails considerable risks of its own: The transplant operation is performed in a subway operating room by a delco plant. The delco is heard throughout this scene, sometimes sputtering ominously as the lights dim. All the equipment is homemade, requiring continual readjustment and tinkering. Billy goes to fetch The Hand, best operating assistant in the industry […] The Hand is a Blues addict. The Blues is a metallic variation on heroin […] Blue is twenty times stronger than heroin. (BR 13th section) The basic political element of rebellion is problematized by Burroughs, as he uses a stylistic divertissement through which ideological subversion is often denied or set apart from the seriousness of the subject matter in favor of a slapstick scene that reasserts the anarchic element essential for any (self) liberation. This ambivalence is the result of a profound political and stylistic anarchy on Burroughs’s part. All his works are rooted in this way of thinking, and denote the struggle against any superimposition of authority. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Jim McMenamin (1987:171–95), Burroughs answered the question of his ambiguous presentation of violence--‘a combination of horror, black humor, grim fascination, maybe even sympathy’—which could be related to the literary experience of both the Marquis de Sade and Franz Kafka as analyzed in The Algebra of Need by Eric Mottram (1971). Burroughs’s response to the problem of presenting violence as an exorcism or a celebration is pragmatic rather than ethical. Nonetheless his fictional world is dominated by a strong moral conception of good and evil: There’s a lot of violence in my work because violence is obviously necessary in certain circumstances. I’m often talking in a revolutionary, guerrilla context where violence is the only recourse. I feel a degree of ambivalence with regard to any use of violence. There are certainly circumstances where it seems to be indicated. How can you protect people without weapons? (McCaffery and McMenamin 1987:176) In Naked Lunch, that ambivalence is exemplified in the words and acts of Doctor Benway, perhaps Burroughs’s best achievement in terms of satirical characterization and black humor. Benway’s psychological violence presents interesting parallels with the reality and fictional representation of violence in advanced industrial societies. Violence exerted by the agencies of the State—the police, the armed forces and other empowered institutions—acquires a legal status, particularly in its ultimate iterations in the forms of capital punishment and the legitimization of war, which allows it to escape the sanctions accorded to acts of violence on the part of non-state agencies. According to Ann Norton, and following Max Weber, we may distinguish four types of violence, further differentiated by two criteria: the conformity of the violent act to extant legal or customary forms, and the individual or collective nature of the act. The first criterion distinguishes those acts that are evidently rulebound, taking place within existing structures. The second criterion considers acts that manifest a conscious participation in collective identity. The types of violence, according to these distinctions, are formal collective, informal collective, formal individual and informal individual (Norton 1993:146). War is a form of formal collective violence, whereas riots and revolts may be defined as forms of informal collective violence with an awareness that ‘all collective action is political for it reflects the participation of individuals in a common, incorporeal, entity’ (Norton 1993:146). From this standpoint we can consider that violence may also be intended as reaction to authority, in the forms of riots or revolts, sometimes limited to groups in unique circumstances. This informal collective violence will be considered ‘illegitimate’ by public or established authorities since the concept and distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ is founded by the same authority that makes the rules. From this point of view, and according to Weber, only the State can possess a monopoly on violence. Weber’s analysis defines the State as follows: ‘A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a “state” insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order’ (Mann 1986:55). Hannah Arendt, elaborating on this theme, notes that the type of violence exerted by the State or internal police actions, though labeled legitimate, should be subsumed under the euphemistic rubric ‘the exercise of authority’ (1969:4). For fiction, the approach must be different, since language, style, visual appeal and ethical implications are involved. In this context it is important to point out that Burroughs’s approach toward violence as fiction contains a deep imaginary level of fantasy that is opposed to real circumstances. It is as if Burroughs’s texts, and Blade Runner in particular, signal: This is the world we live in, this is the total power that rules our lives—this story is the response, the ultimate attempt to free human individuals. Fictional violence always expresses, in one way or another, the real violence of its social context, including the phenomenal violence reported by institutional media (television above all). The way in which accounts of violence are told and reported can be compared to the way in which violence is experienced and culturally approached. In Screening Violence, Stephen Prince explains how in some cases filmmakers cannot control the reactions of viewers to the graphic violence they put on screen (Prince 1999:1). In the case of textual violence, the impact is less ‘immediate’ and the response is more directly related to stylistic and literary devices. To read a violent scene is to pass through a process of making a mental image of that scene, a requirement that changes substantially in the sharp immediacy of cinema. In addition, movie images may be violent not only in content but also in their graphic representation of the violent act or event, depending on the director’s style and use of the camera eye. Writers often turn to satire and comedy in order to render violent representation more ‘acceptable’, as do movie directors, whose work can be hampered by both censorship and market forces. Since violence is often intrinsic to satire, it is also easier for an author to use satire as a vehicle for violence against established order without the risk of being refused or censored. The main risk, on the contrary, is the danger of misinterpretation or relegation to a genre below that of ‘serious art’. Satirical written works elicit greater acceptance and tolerance of violence because the satirical intent is tempered by a form of cultural mediation that reflects the rebellion against moral conventions. In satirical works violence often uncovers the writer’s beliefs and convictions, especially when the text’s subject matter deals with contemporary problems. Accordingly, there are two aspects to Burroughs’s use of satirical style: the first one aims at attacking arbitrary moral conventions that limit individual freedom in order to show the profound ambivalence of any form of violence, whether legitimate or illegitimate; the second one is that his satirical language can be defined, especially in some passages marked by a pamphlet style, as verbal or textual violence. As Mottram describes, Burroughs uses a language that fits with the world he experienced: [A] loveless world whose control is entirely in the hands of capitalists, doctors, psychiatrists, con men, judges, police and military, whose aim it is to perpetuate mass infantilism, apathy and dependence […] [Nausea] tends to become horror of the obscenity towards which total power necessarily grows. (Mottram 1971:43) In such a condition it is necessary to use violence to resist such totalizing iterations of power in order to recover individuality and independence. The position taken by Burroughs against capital punishment is a perfect synthesis of both a violent style of writing and the violence exerted by ‘civilized’ countries. Its satirical intent, however, is not at all symbolic, but quite literal: These sections [in Naked Lunch] are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is. As always the lunch is naked. If civilized countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with blood of human sacrifice, let them see what they actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon. (NL xli–xlii) The experience of being tortured, convicted or punished is significantly absent from Blade Runner; the scenes of violence are represented as riots and revolts in opposition to the forces of law and order. We can therefore read Blade Runner as concerned with the phenomenon of informal collective violence; riots and rebellion that may arise when public authorities, government and institutions are not present as social and democratic markers capable of improving living conditions, but when they are, on the contrary, overly intrusive in public privacy and inimical to individual freedom of choice. Blade Runner therefore addresses an ethical problem: The riots in the novella occur when the citizenry rebel against not only the welfare state and public authority, but also against the sterilization initiatives imposed upon those people who accept medical treatment. The resulting society becomes a chaotic city where power is totally corrupt, and authority has reached the worst of all possible conditions—arbitrariness. The consequence of this arbitrariness is that the average person cannot influence the actions of bureaucrats and doctors, who remain free (a dreadful freedom that Burroughs describes as equally ambivalent) to perform any kind of experiment; the environment is as chaotic as the effect it produces: Room changes and now contains a number of people, ticker tape machines, telephones, TV screens. These are highly-placed officials, bored and cynical. One is doing a crossword puzzle. Two are sniffing coke […] The bureaucrat is leafing through papers. He points to a graph on the wall. Now look at these cancer statistics. We are dealing here not just with an increase in cancer but with an increase in susceptibility to cancer… a breakdown in the immunity system. Why does a cancer or any virus take a certain length of time to develop? Immunity. Remove the immunity factor, and virus processes can be accelerated. (BR 14th section) Burroughs is ambivalent on this point: is it even desirable to want a society where violence is the only way to obtain freedom and independence? What form will a society where everything is possible ultimately assume? Is there indeed as sharp a distinction between reality and fiction as Burroughs’s cinematic writing style implies? Are we really free once we have disrupted the regime of authoritarian order? Burroughs’s ambivalence is perhaps the only viable position to assume in our civilization today, as marked by the postmodern loss of trust toward what Jean François Lyotard (1979) calls the ‘metanarratives’ and the inability to detect and understand the forms of power that regulate our lives. What Burroughs implies with his satirical style is that these forms of power are now decentralized; they have turned into an octopus-like structure disseminated across a globalized continuum. That is why he writes of ‘guerrilla’ action rather than conventional revolution or war, which often possesses a ‘legitimate’ consensus. Guerilla actions are generally illegal, and result from emergency conditions; they are self-organized, violent responses to the ‘legitimate’ violence of authority. Authorized violence, as a ‘non-emergency’ condition, can more easily assume forms that comport to the commonplace scenarios of late capital: weapons, money, media broadcasting. In this scenario of global capital embedded in Blade Runner (as well as in all Burroughs’s works), the underground forces that use informal collective violence—as opposed to formal collective violence represented by the State, the police, and so on—need to be recognized, at least on the page, as a ‘legitimate’ presence with a legitimate right to be free from the imposition of an overly intrusive power apparatus. The freedom of the bladerunner is manifest in his ability to manage and organize his own life, yet his intervention is limited to local situations. His work does not have ‘revolutionary’ connotations; it is, after all, individual intervention, or, in some cases, limited to small groups. The bladerunner is a rebel who follows a personal ethical conviction and fights against imposed order—but he is also alone, waiting perhaps to be followed by a multitude of other individuals. His freedom is also cast by Burroughs as a form of salvation: freedom to associate in ‘underground’ groups, homosexual and/or anarchic communities, and other autonomous networks outside the conservative and established social conventions. At the end of the novel, Billy achieves a meta-consciousness of his existence in a zone between the past and future, where he runs his blade haphazardly in and out of time, representing the possibilities of an undetermined future. In conclusion, Burroughs’s representation of violence forms a multilayered tapestry of sociopolitical expression formulated through disruptive and often satirical linguistic techniques that reflect ambivalence toward the use of violence bound up with the necessity for people to fight against the machination of superimposed order. In Burroughs’s text, the disruption of the standard narrative story line, verbal language and linear methods of event presentation assume a hectic visual power, and the reading process approaches a ‘pure’ cinematic experience conveyed through words: Blade Runner is a novella written in the form of a screenplay, and as such it has the features of a virtual movie. Its scenes should be imagined as movie images, running on a ‘mind screen’ imbued with a capability of creative visualization. Burroughs’s aim, after all, is to free language, structure, and individual experience from any structural superimposition of the ‘reality film’. This project is carried out through the appropriation of film devices, transposed into destructured and meta-fictional narrative, that emerge freely during the production of the reality film. The page becomes a virtual space where ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’, because whatever rules limit conventional narrative are deliberately disregarded. There are no rules that limit fantasy and fictional possibilities. Burroughs’s graphic vision of a future that extends the logic of control to such disciplinary extremes suggests its own antidote in not only the inability of control to become total, but also in the articulation of its possible expansion into the future. Burroughs’s fictional works are a form of resistance against a ‘civilization’ that harnesses human potential to the telos of the exploitation of labor, the alienation of consumption and the control of desire. It is to this concept of ‘civilization’ that Burroughs’s works—and Blade Runner in particular—offer violence as resistance and as liberation. Burroughs’s texts are the legacy of this vision, and in the age of globalization, both a warning and a blueprint. Retaking the Universe/William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, India Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England It is useless to pretend that human creatures find their contentment in repose. What they require is action, and they will create it if it is not offered by life. - Charlotte Bronte, quoted by Jean-Luc Godard, 1952 Although I felt ashamed of it at one time, I do like A bout de souffle very much, but now I see where it belongs - along with Alice in Wonderland. I thought it was Scarface. -Jean-Luc Godard, 1962 Godard's first feature traveled to English-speaking countries as Breathless, a suitably snappy title for a speedy, jazzed-up picture that hops to the rhythm of gunshots, bongo drums, and the on-the-run life-style of its hero. Its French title, A bout de souffle, points to a different meaning, however: being winded, maybe exhausted, or even at the end of breath, as the hero literally is when he collapses in the street at the end of his ultimately fatal career. Of course it's a jaunty title, but it's also an ironic, ambivalent one. In any case, it helped launch the picture - and Godard's feature filmmaking career - with a roar that still reverberates. Breathless remains his most widely known and frequently seen work. The story is based on a scenario by Francois Truffaut, a few pages long and providing a reasonably close outline of the finished film. The hero is Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a rascally Parisian who makes his living as a stealer of cars, seducer of women, and all-around rogue with lots of connections but few friends on whom he can depend in a crisis. His first act in the movie is to hot-wire a car, then drive off with hardly a backward glance at the woman who helped him pull off the job. Taking a casual joyride through the countryside, he chatters away to himself - and to us, breaking classical film's strict rule against acknowledging the camera - when he isn't playing with a pistol he's found in the glove compartment. Chased by motorcycle cops for speeding, he dodges them by pulling off the road, but gets spotted when he leaves the car to restart its engine. "Don't move or I'll shoot," says Michel, who has a flair for melodrama and a taste for cliches; but there's nothing cliched about the way Godard's camera shoots him shooting the cop: sliding down his arm to his hand, caressing the gun's slowly revolving chamber and implacably aimed barrel, cutting to the cop's falling body just as the shot rings out, then to a distant overhead view as Michel runs frantically away. Michel is clearly a man who breaks the rules when he feels like it - and so is Godard, whose innovative style made its debut with those extreme close-ups of Michel's gun followed by the manic jump cut to his getaway, seen in (alienating) long shot just when an ordinary filmmaker would have used (emotion-filled) close-ups to build the psychological identification that Godard has generally found too easy and manipulative for comfort. Back in the city, Michel gives us further glimpses of his personality and predilections: stealing from another girlfriend while her back is turned, hunting for a pal who owes him the money he needs to get out of town, playing cat and mouse with two Paris cops trying to solve the Route 7 murder he committed. Most important, he goes to the Champs-Elysees and romances Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a young American who studies at the Sorbonne and hopes to become a writer for the New York Herald Tribune, which she sells on the boulevard for pocket money. Michel makes no effort to hide his infatuation with her, but her commitment to their affair is obviously uncertain. They stroll in a lengthy traveling shot while he declares his love, complains about his troubles in Paris, and asks her to move to Rome with him when he collects his debt. She also talks about money, saying she needs her college-student status to keep her family's financial support rolling in; but mainly she banters with her boyfriend and fills the screen with sunny charm. Godard appears to be as entranced with Seberg as Michel is with the character she plays. Still, the atmosphere is not all romance and repartee. Immediately after they part, Michel walks past a movie poster that reminds us of his reckless side: "Live dangerously until the end!" it shouts, underscored by a brassy chord on the sound track. When a pedestrian gets struck by a car nearby, Michel joins the crowd leaning over his body, gazes at him intently, and crosses himself as he walks thoughtfully away, possibly thinking of his own close acquaintance with mortality. "The future. I'm interested in it," he had told Patricia a little earlier, complaining that the Tribune printed no horoscope. His uneasiness and superstition seem justified, given the instability he courts with his criminal ways. During his next date with Patricia he excuses himself long enough to violently rob a harmlesslooking man in the men's room of a club, then regales her with a tabloidworthy tale about a lawless couple. She listens with enough concentration to reveal her own interest in breaking society's rules. She also aims a bit of petty meanness toward Michel, publicly kissing an American journalist who might be valuable to her career. Later scenes reinforce the impressions of Michel and Patricia given by the film's first part. He dodges the police dragnet that closes in ever more tightly; implores Patricia for love, companionship, and sex; and tracks down the money-owing friend he's convinced is his passport to a clean getaway and a better tomorrow. She hangs out with Michel in her apartment; covers a press conference with a famous novelist; does her own detective dodging when the police connect her with Michel; and announces that she is pregnant, seeming genuinely upset when Michel receives the news with a shrug of annoyance. Later she caves in with surprising speed (or maybe not so surprising, after the pregnancy scene) when a cop confronts her and demands her cooperation. Still more surprising is her abrupt decision to phone the police and reveal Michel's whereabouts. Returning to the borrowed apartment they've been hiding in, she tells him of her betrayal, and he responds with a mixture of anger, exasperation, and fatigue. "I'm beat anyway and I just want to sleep," he tells the friend who finally shows up with his money. Soon afterward the detective guns Michel down, and he staggers up the street as if trying to escape - or catch? - the death now looming in his path. Michel expires in the middle of one last misunderstanding, trivial in itself yet important since it makes English-speaking watchers of the movie more confused than the French-speaking characters in the movie. "It's really disgusting," Michel says with his dying breath, using words ("C'est vraiment degueulasse") that clearly refer to the situation in which he and Patricia have landed; yet the film's English subtitles translate his sentence as, "You are .. . really ..., " suggesting a final insult aimed at the woman who caused this tragedy. Patricia has needed help with her French more than once during the movie, and although the word "degeuelasse" has run like a motif through the film's dialogue, she asks a stranger to translate Michel's dying words. "He said, 'You are really a little bitch,'" the stranger replies, taking the meaning from "degueulasse" (as if he had read the misleading subtitle!) that would apply had Michel used it as a noun instead of an adjective. More accurately in this case, the word means "disgusting" and even "sickening," with a hint of the "nausea" that Jean-Paul Sartre evoked in describing his existentialist view of the human condition. Michel is not insulting Patricia alone. He is reviling all that has brought them to this sorry state. The film's ending is a richly ironic coda to a tale of star-crossed lovers with an utter inability to get their signals straight. Michel dies after closing his eyes with his own hand; Patricia gazes into the camera and mumbles, "A little what? I don't understand"; and the screen fades to black as she turns her pertly coiffed head away from us, the filmmakers, and everything that's happened in the past ninety minutes. (Godard originally wanted Patricia to rifle through Michel's pockets, but in a strikingly Patricialike move, Seberg refused to carry this out.) The finale remains rich even with the garbled subtitling, but it has an extra layer of perplexity for moviegoers who share Patricia's imperfect grasp of her boyfriend's lingo. Writing some twenty years after Breathless was released, a critic observed that one of the "remarkable" things about Godard's work had always been "its closeness to the contemporary moment." Although some later films would stray from this principle, it is generally true of Godard's career, beginning with his first feature-length production. Breathless was filmed in 1959, an eventful year for French society. On the political front, agitation continued to flow from Algeria's anticolonial war, leading French President Charles de Gaulle to offer a peace plan based on the prospect of (conveniently delayed) independence if Algerian voters approved it four years after hostilities ended. In mass communications, the number of television sets in France reached 1.5 million, behind West Germany and way behind Britain but still in step with Europe's increasingly televisual culture. Elsewhere on the cultural spectrum, playwright Jean Anouilh finished Becket; or, The Honor of God, contributing to the antiauthoritarian rumbling that would gather strength in coming years. In film, Alain Resnais made his feature debut with the strikingly fresh Hiroshima mon amour, from a script by experimental novelist Marguerite Duras; more important still, Truffaut brought his first major production - The 400 Blows, a loosely autobiographical tale about growing up absurd on the streets of Paris - to the hugely prestigious Cannes International Film Festival, where he walked away with the coveted Best Director award, instantly making himself and his New Wave friends significant players in world cinema. Still, as busy as France was at the tail end of the 1950s, the eyes of Godard and his colleagues were also fixed on the United States, thanks to their ongoing fascination with Hollywood and American popular culture. Without question, 1959 was a noteworthy year on that side of the ocean too. Edward Albee's short play The Zoo Story helped bring avant-garde expressionism to popular attention in theater, just as the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's audacious Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum did in architecture. Robert Rauschenberg gave a major impetus to pop art with Monogram, perhaps the most influential of his collagelike "combine paintings." The sexually frank novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, by British author D. H. Lawrence, reached American printing presses some thirty years after authorities had banned it for obscenity. Even more pungently, Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs completed his Naked Lunch, bringing a radically disjunctive style to drugged-up subject matter that mainstream publishers would have found unthinkable a few years earlier. A more prolific Beat author, Jack Kerouac, virtually flooded the market with significant works, from the Evergreen Review essay "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose" to the major novel Doctor Sax; or, Faust Fart Three, the minor novel Maggie Cassidy, and the epic poetry cycle Mexico City Blues. All the while, directors lauded by the New Wave group were filling movie screens, making expansive use of their mature talents under the new expressive freedom made available by the continuing breakdown of Production Code censorship rules. A few examples will suffice: Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo; Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest; Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life; Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder; John Ford's The Horse Soldiers; Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome and Westbound; new pictures by Vincente Minnelli, Samuel Fuller, and Frank Tashlin; and the extraordinary Suddenly Last Summer by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had been the subject of one of Godard's first articles in the short-lived Gazette du cinema at the beginning of the decade. Godard wrote more about French films than Hollywood productions in 1959, and his ten-best list is French from start to finish. Nevertheless, he did find time to praise Sirk, applaud Anthony Mann, and give Blake Edwards a mild pat on the back in articles for Cahiers and Arts; and his general interest in American film remained strong, as his next ten-best list showed by including Hollywood pictures from Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Donen, and Fritz Lang. Explaining the Cahiers group's predisposition toward American film, critic Jim Hillier cites "the ways in which American cinema was perceived to relate to American society: it was, often enough, socially 'critical,' but critical without being directly 'political,'" a position many French artists found appealing. He also notes film historian Thomas Elsaesser's observation that French intellectuals looked to American culture for "works of fiction that could serve as creative models, representative of their own situation and embodying specifically modern tensions - between intellect and emotion, action and reflection, consciousness and instinct, choice and spontaneity." These were prominent among the tensions that preoccupied Godard, and they were chief obsessions of an American group so journalistically notorious by 1959 that Godard must have been aware of it: the aforementioned Beat Generation, a band of authors, poets, and cultural provocateurs whose influences ranged from American literature and Asian religion to France's powerful existentialist movement and, more modestly, the French movies loved by Kerouac ever since his French-Canadian upbringing in a New England town. I have written about the Beats elsewhere,7 and I invoke them here not to reindulge a personal interest but to suggest that an awareness of the Beat sensibility - a way of thinking, feeling, and being that fascinated European as well as American artists - provides important clues to the making of Breathless and its galvanizing impact on international cinema. Although he has not referred specifically to the Beats in his comments on the film, Godard's sympathy with the directness and spontaneity embodied by their work shines through numerous remarks he made during this period - in 1962, for instance, when he praised American screenwriters for employing "the kind of simplicity that brings depth." American filmmakers "are real and natural," he went on, adding that his compatriots "must find the French attitude as [Americans] have found the American attitude. To do so, one must begin by talking about things one knows.... Filming should be a part of living, something normal and natural," full of "seeking, improvising, experimenting" rather than a "mental departmentalizing [that] also corresponds to a departmentalization of social truths." Like these words, Breathless bristles with the Beat spirit, which had reached a peak of fame and influence at precisely the time when Godard set to work on his film. Of all the writers who developed and promoted that spirit, Kerouac was the one most directly in sync with Godard's artistic personality. I am not suggesting that Godard was directly influenced by Kerouac, and there is no clear evidence that he had read Kerouac's books or articles. However, both were iconoclastic thinkers with a zest for experience and ideas; both were impatient with the 1950s mindset of conservatism, consensus, and conformity; and both sought release from this questionable Zeitgeist in a torrent of creative activity that challenged sociocultural norms with a charged-up mixture of impulsiveness, irreverence, and flamboyant rejection of common sense. Central to this attitude was the concept of improvisation. Kerouac had embraced this in the novel that made him famous two years earlier: On the Road, written on long rolls of paper in nonstop bursts of "bop-trance composition." He had then shown its continuing value with The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums in 1958. Kerouac was so committed to improvisation ("first thought best thought") that he crusaded against all forms of rewriting and revising, even chiding his Beat colleague Allen Ginsberg for correcting the errors made when his fingers slipped on the typewriter keyboard. Behind his quest for spontaneous "wild form" was a conviction that living, thinking, and art making are inseparable from one another, and that only the most unmediated forms of creativity - such as his spontaneous writing and the improvised jazz that often inspired it - can capture the quicksilver flow of lived experience in all its energy, diversity, and mutability. Godard in 1959 was a somewhat more prudent and methodical artist, but his sympathies leaned in similar directions. The production history and the final form of Breathless bear this out. "I improvise, certainly, but with material which goes a long way back," he said in 1962, managing to endorse spontaneity and preparation at the same time. He is hedging his commitment to in-the-moment creativity here, of course, by acknowledging that his material has undergone much thought before being commited to celluloid; yet even this accords with Kerouac's practice, since the Beat author thought obsessively about events prior to his marathon writing sessions.10 Putting things on paper was the continuation of composition by other means. Ditto for Godard, who saw every aspect of a cineaste's life and work as part of the filmmaking process. Before the shooting of Breathless began, Godard supplemented Truffaut's scenario with a fully written beginning - featuring Patricia on her Champs-Elysees paper route - and many notes for subsequent scenes. Still worried about his lack of a completed script, he abruptly decided to rely on speed and confidence alone, reasoning that "in a single day, if one knows how to go about it, one should be able to complete a dozen takes. Only instead of planning ahead, I shall invent at the last minute." Thinking of this as "last-minute focusing" rather than full-fledged improvisation, he enlisted his cast as accomplices in the experiment but limited their contribution by filming without sound. This allowed him to supply them with their dialogue, written shortly beforehand, by simply calling it out while the camera rolled; their voices were dubbed in later, synchronized with their lip movements. In a medium far more cumbersome and collaborative than the typewritten page, Godard thus approached Kerouac's ideal of spontaneous authorship, literally speaking the film's words through the mouths of his performers. The film's quality of off-the-cuff inventiveness was further enhanced by Raoul Coutard's supple cinematography, using a hand-held Arriflex camera rather than "the usual equipment, which would have added three weeks to the schedule," as Godard later noted. One scene was shot with a camera hidden (along with its operator) in a canvas mail cart, others from a wheelchair in which Coutard was whisked around by the director.13 During the postproduction process another innovative element was added: impetuous jump cuts that replace ordinary "continuity editing" at key moments in the story. Sometimes these propel the action precipitately from one episode to another, denying the smooth transitions afforded by classical films. At other times they wipe out individual frames of an otherwise continuous scene, lending it a jagged energy. The director found his unusual filmmaking process "tiring" and even "killing," but in retrospect he justified it on grounds that recall Kerouac's love of immediacy and authenticity. "One feels that if one is sincere and honest and one is driven into a corner over doing something," he observed, referring to the breathless schedule he had set for himself, "the result will necessarily be sincere and honest." Breathless shares the Beat sensibility in content as well as form. Michel may not be a beatnik, but he has many features of a closely related type: the hipster, defined by a 1950s journalist as "an enfant terrible turned inside out," and by author Norman Mailer as "the American existentialist" who knows that in a culture threatened with extinction by war, oppression, or conformity, "the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to live without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self." This certainly sounds like Michel, who has had an excellent relationship with his rebellious imperatives since long before we met him. He accepts death's terms not in the self-conscious style of a Hollywood hero but in the casual, taken-for-granted manner of a loner whose divorce from society is so complete he may never have realized there was a choice about the matter. Thrusting away the constricting comforts and strait jacketing safety of bourgeois life, he courts instability, precariousness, and the everyday possibility of disaster as fecklessly as any jived-up hustler in any neon-flashing city of the postwar world. Although he talks a great deal, a trait shared by most Godard characters, Michel expresses his ever-shifting states of mind less through words than through gestures, body language, and a general inability to remain still. In keeping with his peripatetic nature, he shares Kerouac's view of automobiles as allies in the self-propelled movement from stifling rootedness to exhilarating liberty. His story can be traced through the cars he steals, uses, and abandons in the naive belief that freedom is a matter of physical transit - if he can just get his money and zoom to Italy, everything will be all right - rather than difficult options like political struggle and spiritual regeneration, which Godard will explore in later works. There is a sad and touching quality to Michel's unexamined faith that a different place will bring a different life. This idea has animated great migrations in the past, but it breathed its last during the 1950s, when unexplored space finally ran out and modern geography confirmed that no location on earth has some exotic property that can transform the self in ways once fantasized by Beats, hipsters, and other romantic go-getters. Michel doesn't realize this ideal is dead, and his ingenuousness helps win our affection, or at least our commiseration, despite his sometimes malevolent behaviors. Something similar goes for Kerouac's roadrunners, who are rarely models of social responsibility, and for some of Hollywood's most enduring characters - Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho, for example, who elicits our sympathy through the apparent artlessness of his personality. Michel belongs in their company. So childlike is his pursuit of Patricia's love, so unavailing are his encounters with cops and crooks, so transparent are his efforts to present a cool-and-collected image to his lowlife cronies, that one is tempted to empathize with his misadventures and minimize the very real violence he commits, with a nonchalance that would be bone-chilling if the conventions of his movie's genre didn't smooth its edges. Although he is less bluntly autobiographical than Kerouac often was, Godard also shares the Beat writer's willingness to "talk . . . about things one knows" and invest a story with material familiar from his own life. The tightly wound rhythms and mercurial riffs of Breathless echo Godard's personality as an aggressive young artist who wanted to make "the sort of film where anything goes,"16 and Michel's character - including its more menacing side - draws some of its dark power from the filmmaker's own brushes with this territory. After passing through a "shy and uncharming" adolescence, Godard as late as 1952 was known as a chronic thief (relatives and the Cahiers office were among his targets), a failed homosexual prostitute, and enough of a social misfit to be committed by his father to a psychiatric hospital for what one biographical sketch describes as "a considerable period." Godard had cleaned up his act long before his feature-filmmaking career started - his cameo appearance in Breathless ironically casts him as a nosy passerby who helps the police track Michel down! - but he had lived the downside of hipsterdom that Beat commentator John Clellon Holmes captured when he critically observed (in a quarrel with Mailer's account of hipness) that "the destiny of the nervous system, accumulating Sensation the way Faust's mind accumulated Knowledge, is inexorably violence." To be sure, Godard was never the thug Michel turns into when irritated by the stolen-car dealer he roughs up, tempted by the men's-room visitor he mugs, or - in the explosive moment that thrusts the film into high gear - threatened by the highway cop he kills. However, the filmmaker was neither innocent nor naive with regard to the more sordid possibilities of the free, unfettered life. Breathless acquires its unsettling force from this semi-insider status as well as its freewheeling performances and bold stylistics. Reflecting different aspects of Godard's personality and imagination, Patricia is many things Michel is not: a woman, a worker, a reader and writer, an American with parents back home and prospects for a respectable future. In some ways she is a dead ringer for Michel, however, beginning with her penchant for unpredictable acts and her refusal to be defined or delimited by the people around her. Peddling her papers on sunny Parisian afternoons, enrolling in the Sorbonne so her family's checks will keep on coming, juggling romances with men who couldn't be more dissimilar, she has all the appearances of a self-sufficient spirit freely inventing her identity to suit her changing whims. Still, among the things that distinguish her from Michel is a growing realization of something he grasps only in a fitful, semiconscious way: that thought and behavior are functions of each other and our interactions with the world, not of some inner essence that presides over our lives from birth to death. Common sense generally says otherwise, of course. Each of us has a unique and consistent nature, it tells us, with a coherent set of distinctive properties that last a lifetime, however much they "evolve" and "mature" along the way. We know, however, that Godard is no great friend of common sense, seeing this as a hazy substitute for real analysis and insight; and although he hadn't yet developed his views on this matter in 1959, he had his suspicions. So did some American artists, including social dissidents like Kerouac, who turned to rebellious adventure (e.g., hitting the road) and radical creativity (e.g., bop-trance writing) as escape routes from the traps of consensus-bound thinking. So did some European intellectuals, including existentialist thinkers who aimed particular criticism at the notion of "human nature" as they explored the predicament of sentient beings in a fundamentally absurd universe. Existence precedes essence, they argued, suggesting that our selves are determined by our behaviors - the choices we make and the actions we carry out - rather than the other way around. If we do have a nature, it is not fixed: It is infinitely mutable, precarious, and contingent on the circumstances in which it finds itself. In addition to being two of the most artfully developed characters in Godard's early work, Michel and Patricia are vivid embodiments of his still-coalescing ideas on this multifaceted subject, which was of urgent interest to many people as the conservative 1950s showed their first tentative signs of giving way to the tumultuous 1960s. Testifying to Godard's thoughtfulness about such existential issues is the fact that these characters represent two different perspectives on them. At issue is the problem of reconciling personal will with existence in a world that is at once intricately social, profoundly subjective, and utterly irrational in the long run. As suggested above, Michel has a groping, instinctive approach to this dilemma, whereas Patricia has a still-embryonic but somewhat more alert position. We can tell from our first glimpse of Michel's cocky, rakish persona that he sees himself as a confidently free agent with a swinging city at his fingertips, and that he's proud of his ability to cast aside convention and pursue the gratification that's his primary goal in life. The way he sees himself doesn't necessarily mesh with the way the world sees him, but one of the things Godard invites us to like about him is the fact that he doesn't particularly care what society thinks of his inner self, as long as his outer self can keep dancing through the city and having enough gangster-film adventures to distract him from worries about tomorrow. Michel is the first of many Godardian figures who don't know their own minds, or rather, who perceive at least dimly that knowing one's mind is beside the point. This is because a person's consciousness is as much a result as a cause of the things one chooses to do. Then too, the experiential reality of one's mental life may be just tenuously connected with the existential reality traced on the physical world by one's activities. When his interior and exterior lives appear to conflict in some way, Michel takes for granted that authenticity lies not in his own consciousness - split between conflicting motives and priorities, fond of deluding itself along with others - but in the real-world results of what he actually does and says. To put this in moral terms, truth and fakery are separated by thin and slippery lines, and Michel would rather exploit this fact than think about it. "There's no need to lie," he tells Patricia during their long scene in her bedroom. "Like in poker, the truth is best. The others still think you're bluffing, so you win." Godard seconds this notion by moving his camera from Michel to a drawing mounted on the wall, showing a man (beardless, young) holding a mask (bearded, old) over his face. Continuing the appearance-versus-reality motif a few moments later, Patricia says to Michel, "I want to know what's behind that mask of yours. I've watched you for ten minutes and I see nothing, nothing." She is struck by the gap between her boyfriend's external appearance - hard to ignore, since few faces are more magnetic than Belmondo's in this movie - and the interior psychology that she assumed had shaped this appearance. Indeed, she is beginning to doubt the accessibility and even the relevance of this psychological dimension, at least as a meaningful factor in her relationship with him. Patricia is in a good position to benefit from this doubt, since she has been spiraling toward the realization that her own existence is defined more by her real-world behaviors than by the unreliable stream of consciousness she carries around inside. More intellectual than Michel, and possessing an intuitiveness more refined than his comparatively gross instinctiveness, she is starting to become authentically aware - and more important, ironically appreciative - of the yawning gulf between the abstractions conjured by her mind and the actualities projected into the social sphere by her voice and body. "I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free, or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy," she tells the American journalist during their conversation over drinks, signaling a growing sense that her social and individual selves are at once habitually at odds and inextricably bound together, so tightly that they hardly have their own existences. A short while later, she elevates this philosophical glimmer into a behavioral guide. "I stayed to find out if I was in love with you or if I wasn't in love with you," she tells Michel after betraying him to the police. "And because I'm mean to you, it proves I don't love you." Rather than introspectively ponder her feelings - surely the commonsense way of charting one's emotional response to another person - Patricia has acted out her impulses and observed the results with an almost clinical curiosity, seeing the outward manifestations of her behavior as coequal with the "real self" that prompted it. Michel listens to her words with more resignation than rage. These ex-lovers are clearly two of a kind, and in her explanation he hears echoes of his own outlook on life. In addition to their similarities with each other, Patricia and Michel are refracted yet recognizable reflections of the filmmaker who (as noted earlier) speaks through them like a ventriloquist to his audience. "I see no difference between reality and an image of reality," Godard said in 1979. "I always say, 'A picture is life and life is a picture.' And when I make pictures it's making life... ,"19 Godard is discussing the interplay between his private and professional activities, but his attitude is mirrored by Michel and Patricia as they go about their day-to-day lives. Outward signs - images for Godard, actions and behaviors for Patricia and Michel - cannot be separated from the realities "behind" them, since all are interrelated parts of an endless loop. Arbitrary social rules may warp or distort this arrangement, leading to various crises - the difficulty of uniting love and work, for instance - that Godard explores and often weeps over in his later films. The main characters of his first feature are oddly in tune with it, however, and if this fails to bring them happiness (perhaps an impossible commodity in our profoundly flawed world) at least their capacity for spontaneous action lends them a measure of existential energy that merely commonsensical creatures could envy. All of which is to say that Godard and his Breathless protagonists agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald that "action is character" - and, they would add, vice versa. Michel is especially impatient with anything that threatens his extroverted approach to life, including Patricia's occasional efforts at philosophical thought. "Between grief and nothing I will take grief," she quotes from William Faulkner's book The Wild Palms, and then asks Michel which he would choose. "Show me your toes," he less than helpfully replies. It's a funny and revealing moment, and when Patricia presses him again to make Faulkner's choice, he reconfirms his dislike for introverted thinking. "Grief is idiotic," he says. "I'd choose nothing. It's not any better, but grief is a compromise. You've got to have all or nothing." Given this refusal of anything partial or incomplete, it is not surprising that the adventures of Michel and Patricia generally unfold in bursts of concrete activity, choreographed by Godard to reveal character on both individual and social levels. Some of these moments are as broadly melodramatic as one would expect in a movie dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a low-budget Hollywood studio whose lean, energetic productions Godard had admired as a young critic.20 Michel first shows his antisocial streak, for instance, by stealing a car and then abandoning the woman who helps him pull off the heist, and all this is just a prelude to his murder of the highway cop who's been sharp-witted enough to chase him down. Other revelations of character through action are subtle or almost subliminal, however. Consider the car-stealing scene, when Michel's accomplice follows the couple whose sedan Michel is about to take, and all three of these figures - the lookout and the impending victims - walk exactly in step with one another as they make their way down the Parisian sidewalk. This suggests that despite their very different places in this narrative, they are all linked components of the city's violent, unpredictable ambience. Another element linking Breathless with the hipster sensibility is the fact that the city is a vitally important character in it. I realize that calling the city a character is the sort of observation made so often by commentators - the house is a character in Psycho, the ship is a character in Battleship Potemkin, and so forth - that it has become a critical cliche. However, it suits Breathless as well as any movie I know, in part because Godard was heavily under the influence of Italian director Roberto Rossellini during the entire first stage of his career, seeing in the great neorealist's work a model for his own conviction that the relationship between character and environment is as imposing as any subject a filmmaker could hope to tackle. "He alone has an exact vision of the totality of things," Godard said of Rossellini in 1962.21 It follows that Godard's concern with place is hardly limited to the artful depiction of expressive background locations. What interests him is the way people relate to the places they are in, and conversely, the roles environment plays in determining how people move, how they present themselves to one another, how they interact with the physical world as a whole. Writing in 1965 that his sketch film "Montparnasse-Levallois" was "constructed on the actors," he immediately added that what compelled his attention was "fluidity, being able to feel existence like physical matter: it is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them. Even when they are in close-up, life exists around them. The camera is on them, but the film is not centred on them." One notes Godard's typical ambivalence as he says his film is "constructed on" yet not "centred on" the people in it. "The film is a district," he adds, "a particular time."22 Sure enough, what it conveys most vividly is not the psychology of its characters but the rhythm of their passage through a specific place at a specific moment. Much the same can be said for Breathless, which gives a similar sense of building upon characters who remain parts of a greater whole - the city they are in, and also the movie through which that city lives and breathes for us. Godard's fascination with the interactivity between individual and environment returns us again to his view of interior (character, personality, psychology) and exterior (action, behavior, image) as shifting points on a loop that defies analysis via commonsense notions of cause and effect. Cinema is an ideal arena for exploring this conundrum since, as Godard noted in 1965, in this medium "the real and the imaginary are clearly distinct and yet are one, like the Moebius curve which has at the same time one side and two, like the technique of cinema-verite which is also a technique of lying."This comment on cinema-verite - a type of documentary that presents real-world material in seemingly direct, unmanipulated form - is not as negative as it may appear, but reflects Godard's view of fiction and nonfiction as interlocked approaches to an existential world in which "truth" and "lying" can never be wholly separate modes of either communication or consciousness. The interface between them is imagination, as Godard indicates near the beginning of a much later film, the 1982 drama Passion. There a movie-director character asks for an explanation of a difficult scene on which he is working - actually a tableau based on a Rembrandt painting - and an associate replies, "It's not a lie, but something imaginary. It's never exactly the truth, but not the opposite either. It's something separated from the real world by calculated approximations of probabilities." This is consistent with Godard's comment, made shortly before Breathless went into production, that "great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as .. . great documentaries tend towards fiction. . .. One must choose between ethic and aesthetic. .. . But it is no less understood that each word implies a part of the other. And he who opts wholeheartedly for one, necessarily finds the other at the end of his journey." Navigating this journey along the Mobius strip of the imaginary is at once an exhilarating adventure and a daunting challenge. "It's pretty disconcerting, to say the least," Godard admitted in 1965. "Doubtless that is why it is difficult to say anything at all about the cinema, since .. . the end and the means are always confused" by a "double movement" that "projects us towards others while taking us inside ourselves." Like many of Godard's statements, the remarks quoted here may seem more cryptic than the phenomena they're meant to explain; but they appear to suggest that by partaking of both reality and artifice - associated with "ethic" and "aesthetic," respectively - film demonstrates the inseparability of our mental lives from our perceptions of the social world we inhabit. Godard's view of ethics and aesthetics as overlapping domains will become an explicit concern in his second feature, The Little Soldier, where the protagonist says that "ethics are the aesthetics of the future," implying that a more enlightened age will make no distinction between the imperatives of beauty and morality. At the time of Breathless, however, Godard is less interested in idealistic projections than in here-andnow experiences. His film techniques mingle the truth of fiction with the fictionality of truth - Michel and Patricia are invented yet realistic characters, Paris is an actual yet poetically expressive setting - while illustrating the power of social images to infiltrate and influence the selves that Michel and Patricia think they are inventing under their own imaginative steam. The fact that Michel and Patricia are not totally free agents is a crucial point. Godard's decision to explore existentialist issues through hipsterstyle characters and Beat-style improvisation might appear to presume that, as some existentialist thinkers argue, individuals have absolute freedom of will and may steer their destinies in unexpected directions. Godard is willing to question philosophical notions as readily as cinematic conventions, however, and he takes issue with this proposition in no uncertain terms. One of his methods is to show how both of his main characters draw key aspects of their seemingly anarchic personalities from the culture in which they live. The opening scene provides an example. It begins with Michel buried in the pages of Paris-Flirt and muttering to himself, "I'm no good. If you have to, you have to." The words catch our attention, but their meaning is vague. Then he lowers the paper and reveals his face, glowering in our direction from beneath a hat brim yanked down so far it almost covers his eyes. In order to see he has to tilt his head backward, which gives him an arrogant air, enhanced by the cigarette dangling from his mouth. Looking directly toward the camera, he surveys the scene around him and lifts his hand to his mouth, rubbing his thumb across his lips in a nervous back-and-forth motion. There's something theatrical about it, and indeed, everything about Michel seems slightly larger than life - the cut of his hat, the jut of his jaw, the burly knot of his necktie, the way he checks out his surroundings without a wasted move. Later we'll learn that his thumbto-lips gesture is borrowed from the tough-guy persona often adopted by Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart, and even now it seems obvious that Michel is performing or at least posing, playing the role of a rough-andready character who either knows every trick in the book or has his weaknesses wrapped in a huge amount of protective armor. In short, he is an actor without a theater - or with one, if we remember that all the world's a stage, especially in a modern city overflowing with potential spectators. Michel may or may not be a genuinely cool character, but his moves are definitely not those of a totally self-possessed personality. They are borrowed from one of the most obvious sources imaginable: the movies. Godard reconfirms this cultural kleptomania when he explicitly shows us that Michel is a Bogart fan. He does this through one of the film's most thoughtfully worked-out episodes, a sort of cadenza that temporarily stops the main action in its tracks. A movie theater is showing The Harder - They Fall, a 1956 prizefighting drama directed by Mark Robson; the stars are Rod Steiger, Jan Sterling, and Bogart as a down-on-his-luck sportswriter who becomes a hard-bitten press agent. Michel stands gazing at the display in front of the theater, and while numerous pictures from the movie are on view, the one that transfixes him is a standard portrait shot of Bogart in a generic movie-star pose. Godard cuts back and forth between the photo and Michel pensively removing his sunglasses, puffing his cigarette - one shot shows the picture with smoke drifting across it - and saying "Bogey" in a quiet voice. This may be childish hero worship on one level, but on another Michel is renewing contact with a wellspring of both his behavioral repertoire and his self-image as a tough, glamorous fellow who has mastered "the American attitude" as thoroughly as one of its most powerful icons. He replaces his dark glasses and moves on, and mirrored in the theater's glass facade we see the two cops who are vainly trying to tail him. The scene ends by irising out on their distant reflections, using a deliberately antique bit of cinematic punctuation to underscore the motion-picture artifice that links Michel's brief epiphany with the movie in which he himself is the star. Another sign that Michel is embedded in a web of social role-playing is his habit of making faces. Three faces, to be exact, always done in the same order: mouth wide open in a gaping yawn, mouth stretched sideways as if saying "cheese," mouth pushed frontward beneath a wrinkled brow. He does this often, teaches Patricia to do it in her bathroom mirror, and uses it for his valedictory gesture to the world in the moment before his death. Facial expressions are essential for everyday communication within a culture, and also for projecting a persona for public consumption. They mean a lot to Michel, and while these particular ones are so stylized that they're nonsensical, it comforts him to carry them around and run through the sequence now and then. He uses the Bogart gesture just as frequently, rubbing thumb across lips with a contemplative look as he thinks of favorite movies, or events of the moment, or perhaps nothing at all. Patricia is no less culturally influenced than her boyfriend. She also faces life through a series of unconsciously assumed masks, and her performative moments are even easier to read. She conspicuously compares herself with an Auguste Renoir painting, angling her head to make the likeness as close as possible. She whimsically mentions Romeo and Juliet as role models for Michel and herself. She play-acts in front of a mirror, addressing herself with a military salute and a brisk "Dismissed!" She even tries out different attitudes in the midst of a decision-making situation. When her journalist friend presumptuously tells her that "of course" she will follow his suggestion and spend more time with him, she repeats the "of course" three times with three different inflections - first mockserious, then questioning, then smugly cheerful - in a sort of vocal variation on Michel's three-part facial tic. What makes these moments significant is the way Godard uses small gestures - often whimsical and offbeat, never particularly meaningful or original - to indicate the contagiousness of the behavioral twitches we pick up from our social surroundings. Michel and Patricia are not self inventing hipsters but are molded or "spoken" by their society in a sort of cultural ventriloquism, obliquely echoed by the ventriloquism that Godard used to control the movie's dialogue. Although they are continually trying on different poses, expressions, and intonations, they must always choose from the options available to them as inhabitants of one specific milieu at one specific point in history. There is some variety within this constraint, of course - Michel has his little-boy facial twists, on one hand, and his tough-guy thumb gesture, on the other - but the constraint is nonetheless real, frustrating would-be free spirits who think they have far more psychological and spiritual autonomy than could ever be available to them. This explains why Michel is in a chronic state of fatigue, and why Patricia fairly pants to throw off her almost-a-gangster status and get into the newspaper business, where adventures are vicarious and the illusion of free will is harder to indulge and therefore far less tempting. "Language is the house man lives in," a philosophical character will say in 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, six years after Breathless. As noted in Chapter i, some thinkers consider that house a prison, and Godard would agree (at least until the later, more spiritual phase of his career) that human thought cannot effectively venture beyond the limitations of the language, verbal and nonverbal, that carries it. Michel and Patricia think they are masters of their fates, but in fact their capacity for spontaneity runs no deeper than the imitative phrases and gestures that compose their sadly circumscribed vocabularies. Try as they might to deny it, their lives are caught in roles that existed long before they arrived on the scene. Michel seems dimly aware of this when he observes that "squealers squeal, burglars burgle, killers kill, lovers love" - a catalog of character types from which he and Patricia have selected during the course of their story. Consistency matters little to them - indeed, Michel reels off that catalog in response to Patricia's hugely ironic statement that she hates informers - but it would hardly make much difference if the opposite were true. In the end, their goal in life appears to have been nothing more lofty than transforming "It seemed like a good idea at the time" from a trite rationalization into a metaphysical principle. The highest compliment one can pay them is to acknowledge that they come precariously close to succeeding. David Sterritt/The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE © Cambridge University Press 1999 by Dejan Stojkovski "The Daughter" comes bearing abstract cred as a free adjustment of Ibsen's 1884 play "The Wild Duck." It exchanges a Norwegian setting for a monetarily dispossessed country town in current Australia while holding the class-cognizant preface of a family shook by the disclosure of long-held insider facts and lies as it sets the favored few against the discouraged regular workers. PlotChristian Neilson (Paul Schneider) arrives home in Australia following a 16-year spell in the US. His dad (Geoffrey Rush) is going to wed maid (Anna Torv) and has requested that Christian be best man. Christian has liquor issues and accuses his dad for his mom's suicide, so it's nothing unexpected when contentions follow. He winds up spending the vast majority of the wedding end of the week hanging out with old youth mate, Oliver Finch (Ewen Leslie). Oliver now lives in a charmingly frail lodge in the forested areas with venerating spouse Charlotte (Miranda Otto), high school little girl Hedvig (Odessa Young) and his dad (Sam Neill), who runs a little creature asylum at the back of the house. Jealous of Oliver's apparently ideal way of life and assaulted by issues in his own particular marriage, Christian swings to drink – with sad outcomes. Old injuries are re-opened, mysteries are uncovered and concordant family life spirals into mayhem. SIMON STONE is now one of the most important playwrights in Australia. During these years he wrote and directed the texts for the most prestigious theater companies, including those of Belvoir, Melbourne, Sydney and Malthouse Theater, at home, and those of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Munich Kammerspiele, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Theatre Basel and the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in Paris, abroad. In 2011, the wild duck adaptation of Henrik Ibsen won numerous awards. In 2013 he participates in the collective film The Turning, presented at the Berlinale, with the short film Reunion, with the help of Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett. The Daughter, which is inspired by the duck wild, is the debut feature film. Screenplay: Simon Stone Photography: Andrew Commis Montage: Veronika Jenet Music: Mark Bradshaw Sound: Liam Egan Scenography: Steven Jones-Evans Costumes: Margot Wilson
by Alejandro Jodorowsky
There is a Hebraic legend which says: "the Messiah will not be a man but one day: the day when all the human beings will be illuminated "Kabbalists speak about a conscience collective, cosmic, a species of méta-Universe. And here are what for me all the DUNE project was.
Enthusiastic Admiration
To show the process of illumination of a hero, then a people, then a whole planet (which in its turn is the Messiah of the Universe since by giving up its orbit, the holy planet leaves to spread its light throughout all the galaxies)...
I did not want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes, nor Edipo with Esquilo.
There is an artist, only one in the medium of a million other artists, which only once in his life, by a species of divine grace, receives an immortal topic, an MYTH... I say "receives" and not "creates" because the works of art it's received in a state of mediumism directly of the unconscious collective. Work exceeds the artist and to some extent, it kills it because of humanity, by receiving the impact of the Myth, has a major need to erase the individual who received it and transmitted: its individual personality obstructs, stains the purity of the message which, of its base, requires to be anonymous... We know who created the cathedral of Notre-Dame, neither the Aztec solar calendar, neither the tarot of Marseilles nor the myth of Don Juan, etc.
One feels that Cervantes gave HIS version of Quixote - of course, incomplete and that we carry in the heart the total character... Christ belongs not to Mark, neither to Luke, neither to Matthew nor to John... There are many other Gospels known as apocryphal books and there are as many lives of Christ as there are believers. Each one of us has their own version of Dune, its Jessica, their Paul... I felt in enthusiastic admiration towards Herbert and at the same time in conflict (I think that the same thing occurred to him)... He obstructed me... I did not want him as a technical adviser ... I did everything to move him away from the project... I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transmit it: the Myth was to give up the literary form and to become Image...
In film, the Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight (emblem of the Atreides house being a crowned bull...) Jessica - nun of the Bene Gesserit -, sent as concubine at the Duke to create a girl which would be the mother of a Messiah, becomes so in love with Leto that she decides to jump a chain link and to create a son, Kwisatz Haderach, the saviour. By using her capacities of Bene Gesserit - once that the Duke, insanely in love with her, entrusts her with his sad secret - Jessica is inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and sees its meeting with the ovule where, by a miraculous explosion, it fertilises it. Paul had been born from a virgin; and not of the sperm of his father but of his blood...
Insane Emperor
In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite the man or the machine...
In my version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The spice continuously produces the creation of the innumerable universes.
The Baron Harkonnen is an immense man of 300 kilogrammes. he is so fatty and heavy that, to move, he must make continuous use of antigravitational bubbles attached at his limbs... His delusion of grandeur does not have limits: he lives in a palace built like a portrait of itself... This immense sculpture is drawn up on a sordid and marshy planet... To enter the palace, one must wait until the colossus opens the mouth and draws a tongue from steel (landing strip...).
At the end of the film, the wife of the Count Fenring leaps towards Paul, who has already become Fremen, and she slices his throat. Paul while dying says: "Too late, one cannot kill me... because...
- Because, Jessica with the voice of Paul continues, to kill the Kwisatz Haderach, you would have to also have killed me... "And each Fremen, each Atreides speaks now with the voice of Paul: "I am the collective man. He who shows the way "
Reality changes quickly. Three columns of light spout out of the planet. They mix. Plunge in the sand of planet: "I am the Earth which awaits the seed!" the spice is desiccated. The ground trembles. Water drops form a pillar surrounded by fire.
Silver filaments emerge from spice. Create a rainbow. They form in a water cloud, produce a red "lava". Then vapour. Clouds. Rain. Rivers. Grass. Forests. Dune becomes green. A blue ring surrounds planet now. It is divided. It produces more and more rings. Dune is now a world illuminated, which crosses the galaxy, which leaves it, which gives it lightly - which is Consciousness - to all the universe.
Truths Alchemists
To conceive this final sequence of transmutation of the matter, I was likely to come into contact with true alchemists... Mysterious beings (one of them seemed to be more than one hundred of years, an advanced age which however enabled him to move with an energy of young teenager) which approached me because Dune could be a philosopher stone, the stone which changes into gold all other metals... In this sequence, they described what really occurs when they manage to transform, in their alchemical furnaces, the matter...
For the "guerrilla" war that Paul and Fremen carry out against the imperial army, I had been lucky to contact a guerrilla expert from South America... He had fought in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Center-America... His invaluable experience brought to the scenario a martial reality...
When Jessica becomes the supreme Mother of the Fremen and must pass through ceremonies of initiation, learn medicine from the wizards and contact other dimensions of reality, I knew the magic medicine of gipsies through Paul of Dune, already deceased... And the ceremonial of the mushrooms hallucinogens and miraculous operations by the Pachita witch, a being who had much more capacities than so-called Filipinos surgeons.
My son Brontis, who was to play Paul, was initiated at nine years of age by a legendary bodyguard - Jean-Pierre Vigneau - to the combat with the knife (of real engagements), karate, the art of archery... He received lessons from an almost true mental - Michel de Roisin - who had an encyclopaedic brain... I remember to have seen him give to Brontis a lesson on the fable the Cicada and the Ant which lasted more than fifteen days... Through the verses, he described a whole time and its civilisations.
With the production, I crossed the Sahara. I wanted to film Dune in Tassili while facing with the actors, the thousands of extra and the technical teams, torrid heats and the dryness to obtain true lunar landscapes... The Algerian government was very interested in the project.
Once, the Divinity agreed to say to me in a lucid dream: "Your next film must be Dune." I had not read the novel. I lifted myself to a height of six o'clock in the morning and as an alcoholic who awaits the opening of the bar, I waited until someone opens the bookshop to buy the book. I read it off a feature without me stopping for drinking or eating. At midnight exactly, the very same day, I finish the reading. At one minute past midnight, I called from New York, Michel Seydoux in Paris... He would be the first of the seven samurai that it was necessary for me to have for the immense project. Michel was for me a young man (26 years) without experience in the cinema, but his company Camera One had bought the rights for the Holy Mountain, my last film and had distributed very well it... He had said to me: "I will want to produce a film with you". I did not know much about him but by an intuition which today surprises me, by seeing it, in spite of his youth, I see in him the largest producer of the time... Why? Mystery... And I was not mistaken. When I say to him that I wanted that he buys the rights for Dune and that the film should be international because it would exceed the ten million dollars (fabulous sum for the time: even Hollywood did not believe in science fiction films, 2001 would be unique and unpassable), he did not stumble: "OK. We'll be in Los Angeles in two days to buy the rights ".
He had not read the book... I think that he did not read it yet because the prose of Herbert annoyed him... And one could buy the rights - easily because Hollywood found the book unrealizable with the screen and non-commercial... Michel Seydoux gave me unlimited power and an enormous financial support: I could create my team without an economic problem.
3,000 Drawings
I needed a precise script... I wanted to carry out the film on paper before filming it... These days all films with special effect are done as that, but at the time this technique was not used. I wanted a draughtsman of comic strips who has the genius and the speed, who can be used to me as a camera and who gives at the same time a visual style... I was by chance with my second warrior: Jean Giraud alias Moebius (at the time he had not made Arzach, nor The Airtight Garage). I say to him: "If you accept this work, you must all give up and leave tomorrow with me to Los Angeles to speak with Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey)". Moebius asked for a few hours of think about it.
The following day, we left for the United States. It would take too a long time to tell... Our collaboration, our meetings in America with the strange ones illuminated and our conversations at seven o'clock in the morning in the small coffee which was in the bottom of our workshops and which by "chance" was called Café the Universe. Giraud made 3000 drawings, all marvellous... The script of Dune, thanks to his talent, is a masterpiece. One can see living the characters, one follows the movements of the camera. One visualises cutting, the decorations, the costumes... All that with, each time, some features of the pencil... I was behind his shoulders by asking him for the various points of view... By putting in a scene the "actors", etc One filmed...
For the third warrior I required a clever dreamer who can draw the space ships in a different way than that of American films:
"I do not want that the man conquers space
In the ships of NASA These concentration camps of the spirit These gigantic freezers vomiting the imperialism These slaughter of plundering and plunder This arrogance of bronze and thirst This eunuchoid science Not the dribble of transistorised and riveted hulls The divine one The delirious one The superb one CHAOS UNIVERSAL I want magical entities, vibrating vehicles To prolong to be to it abyss Like fish of a timeless ocean. I want Jewels, mechanics as perfect as the heart Womb-ships anterooms Rebirth into other dimensions I want whore-ships driven By the sperm of passionate ejaculations In an engine of flesh I want rockets complex and secret, Humming-bird ornithopters, Sipping the thousand-year-old nectar of dwarf stars... "
This is why I wrote to Christopher Foss, an English draughtsman who illustrated covers of science fiction books... Like Giraud, he had never thought of the cinema... With a great enthusiasm, he left London and settled in Paris... This artist, with the ships which he produced for Dune, marked the cinema. He could produce semi-alive machines which could be metamorphosed with the colour of the stones of space... He could produce "thirsty battleships dying century after century in a star desert awaiting the alive body which will fill their empty tanks of subtle secretions of its heart..."
Metaphysical horror
After I found Giger, a Swiss painter whose catalogue Dalí had shown me... His art declining, sick, suicidal, brilliant, was perfect to carry out the Harkonnen planet... He made a project of castle and planet which really touched with the metaphysical horror. (later, he carried out the sets and the monster of Alien.)
For the special effects, thanks to the capacity which Michel Seydoux gave me, I was able to refuse Douglas Trumbull... I was unable to swallow his vanity, his airs of business leader and his exorbitant prices. Like a good American, he played to scorn the project and tried to complexes while making us wait while speaking with us at the same time as with ten people on the telephone and finally by showing us superb machines which he tried to improve. Tired of all this comedy, I left to research a young talent. It is said to me that in L.A. it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. I saw in a modest festival of cinema by science fiction amateurs, a film made without means that I found marvellous: Dark Star.
I contacted the boy who had made the special effects: Dan O' Bannon. I was almost with a wolf child. Completely out of conventional reality, O'Bannon was for me a real genius. He could not believe that I can entrust a project as significant as Dune to him. He was obliged to believe it when he received his plane ticket for Paris. I was not mistaken: Dan O'Bannon wrote later the scenario of Alien and a good number of other films with great success.
With Jean-Paul Gibon, who was the executive producer of Camera-One and who liked the project as much as us, we left for England to seek the musician. A vital aspect for me: each planet had its style of music, for example, a group as Magma could carry out very well the warlike rates/rhythms of Harkonnens which would be able to crystallize the beauty of planet of sands with its mystery and its relentless forces, the strange symphony of the rings of the giant worms.
Virgin Records accepted us and offered Gong, Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream to us. At this time, I say: "And why not Pink Floyd?" The group at that time had such success that almost all regarded that as an unrealizable idea. I had the chance, thanks to my film El Topo, known by these musicians. They happily agreed to receive us in London with the Abbey Road studios where Beatles had recorded their success. Jean-Paul Gibon was very agreeably surprised that the group would see us. Me, at that time, I had already almost lost my individual conscience. I was the instrument of a miraculous work, where all could be done. Dune was not with my service, I was, as the samurai that I had found, with the service of the work. They were recording Dark Side of the Moon. While arriving, I did not see a group of large musicians realising its masterpiece, I see four young people guys devouring steak and chips. Jean-Paul and me, standing in front of them, were to wait until their voracity is satisfied.
In the name of Dune, I was taken of a holy anger and I left while slamming the door. I wanted artists who can respect a work of such an importance for the human conscience. I think that they did not expect that. Surprised, David Gilmour ran behind us by giving excuses and made us attend the last mixing of its disc. Which ecstasy!... After one attended their last public concert where thousands of fanatics acclaimed them. They wanted to see The Holy Mountain. They saw it in Canada. They decided to take part in the film by producing an album which was going to be called Dune made up of two discs. They came to Paris to discuss the economic part and, after an intense discussion, one arrived at an agreement. Pink Floyd would make almost all the music of the film.
100,000 Dollars An Hour
With the best music on our side, I started to seek the actors. I had seen Charlotte Rampling in Zardoz. I wanted her for Jessica. She refused the role. She wanted at that time to make two or three commercial films, the love of life interesting her more than art. David Carradine came to Paris, interested by the role of Leto.
The actor that I wished for most was Dalí: for the role of the insane Emperor... Which adventure!... The Emperor buffoon, seemed to me it, could be played only by one man of the great delirious personality of Dalí. To New York, with Michel Seydoux and Jean-Paul Gibon, I arrived at our hotel, San Régis and in the hall, I see cited El Salvador Dalí. I guess that it is indelicate to approach him immediately and the following day I called him by telephone. I speak Spanish. Dalí had not seen my films but friends spoke to him about them with enthusiasm. He invites me to a very private surrealist exposure and promises to leave me the invitation under the door. At six o'clock in the evening, I found the invitation for two people. Dalí said to me to be there to 7 O'clock exactly. I arrive with Michel Seydoux five minutes late. At seven hours five, Dalí is not there anymore. He came, he got out of its car, made a one minute circuit in the room then left.
A taxi is travelled by and when arriving at the hotel, by chance, I am with Dalí again in the hall. I take an appointment for the following day in the bar of the hotel and I leave.
This night, I choose to dine at a French restaurant and by chance, I find a few steps from of our table is El Salvador Dalí who dines with his friend Amanda Lear, I say to him: "It is the objective chance". He answers me: "It is more than that. One will speak tomorrow!" the following day, I find him in the bar of the hotel San Régis. Dalí agrees with much enthusiasm the idea to play the Emperor of the galaxy. He wants to film in Cadaquès and to use as throne a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins. The tails will form the feet and the two open mouths will be used one to receive the "wee", the other to receive the "excrement". Dalí thinks that it is of terrible bad taste to mix the "wee" and the "excrement". It is said to him that I will need him for seven days... Dalí answers that God made the universe in seven days and that Dalí, while not being less than God, must cost a fortune: 100,000 dollars an hour. Perhaps that while arriving at the set he will decide to film each day more than one hour for the same price. The only condition is to have the Emperor on the throne scatological. He does not want to read the script: "My ideas are better than yours". He wants to choose his court among his friends, wants to say what he wants and moreover, at the time to sign the contract, will condescend to make my gift of three ideas that I will have the right to use or not.
The Daliesque happening will cost us 700,000 dollars. I ask him for a time, one night, to make a decision and I leave. That night, I tear off a page of a book on the tarot; there is a reproduced card: Hanged Man. I write a letter to him by saying to him that the film cannot pay him 700 000 dollars, but which I will try to convince my producer to use him three days for 300,000 dollars.
The following day, I send the letter to Dalí. He will give us his response in Paris. In Paris, Dalí invites us by telephone to meet it with the Meurice hotel. There is the surprise of not being alone with him: there is a score of people, merchants, models, fine young men, a lady which one calls the King and who is virile, an enormous Dutchwoman who will pose so that Dalí combs her sex, a character who claims to be the grandson of the pétomane (the man which, in 1900, played in the music-halls, and whom Dalí says to us that he did with his bottom what Tino Rossi could not do with his throat). I do not have the chance of speaking with the painter because he takes us along to a dinner and it is at this dinner that Dalí wants to speak to me about a film. In a way, I prepare a small questionnaire: how does an Emperor die? How is his palace? How does he get dressed? Etc.
In the festival where I find Mick Jagger, Nathalie Delon, Johnny Hallyday and other celebrities, Dalí shows its enthusiasm for the role of the Emperor and when I give him my questionnaire while saying to him: "I came prepared". It answers me: "Me also". From a pocket he pulls the drawing of the toilet made with the two dolphins: "It is completely necessary to see the Emperor making wee and excrement". I ask him whether it is ready to show his sex and his anus and he says to me that not and that he would like to be doubled, that he wants only that he is seen situated.
Dalí was known as to regard my card as a contract. He was touched by the image of the Hanged Man and said: "I see the Hanged Man with his hair like roots in the ground and outgoing, by the bottom, a column of sh*t with a capital linking it with the sky". A few days later, the grandson of the pétomane invites us to give us the appointment in Barcelona. But Dalí calls me before again inviting me to lunch and speak about his role. He does not want to be directed (put in a scene). He wants to do what he wants. I ask him: "If I were a rich person owner and that I said to paint me what you would like yourself, but in the octagonal shape of the table, you would do it? "
Dalí: "Yes". Me: "Then, it is possible to work together, I will direct you while asking you questions (the form) and you will answer me as you want with actions". Amanda Lear
Dalí accepts. Me, I think that the battle will be formidable. It will be necessary that I find questions which have only one answer. And, it will be necessary that I envisage his answers as failures.
For example, if I ask how will be equipped the Emperor, it is quite possible that he answers me: "In the 20 century, Dalí will be regarded as God, as today is Christ. The Padishah Emperor will be equipped like Dalí ". If I ask him how will be his palace, he could answer me: "Like a reproduction of the old station of Perpignan". If he gives me these two answers, it could kill Dune and it should be said to him that there is a limit: Dalí cannot interpret Dalí. The idea of a similar play authentically seems to me surrealist and I am more than ever ready to work with the painter without taking account of the words of Amanda Lear who, in an aside with the dinner, tempted by the idea to play Irulan, the daughter of the emperor, says to me that the Master is a saboteur by masochism, that finally he always likes the things which fail. A screenplay writer who made a film for the TV with Dalí said to me that he is unpredictable up to the point to choosing to be filmed in obscure corners, although have spent all the day to light sets, he refuses at the last second to put his feet there. That gives me the idea to light the day of filming with Dalí not only the set but also the corridors, the toilets, the roofs, all. If I do not have dark corners, this battle will be gained. It says to me that for him, my card with the image of the Hanged Man is his contract. To Barcelona, we arrive one late hour. Before going to see him, I decide to face the problem by telephone. I speak with the descendant about the pétomane: "Listen to Sir, do not waste time, we cannot offer Dalí 300,000 dollars. We have 150,000 dollars. If he is not interested, I set out again to Paris. If the business interests him, call us in ten minutes ".
At the end of ten minutes, the small pétomane calls us: "Come, Dalí awaits you".
Dalí, this time, is relatively alone. Amanda Lear is there with two secretaries. who starts by playfully scorning him, saying: "Dalí is like a taxi, as time passes the more expensive it is, and you, as time passes, the less you want to pay". I have finally time to introduce Jean-Paul Gibon to him who will defend the interests of Michel Seydoux. I try to reason him. It is difficult and for us almost impossible to film in Cadaquès, that must be done in Paris. For 150,000 dollars, I want three days and not an hour and half of filming. I would like to also make a polyethene puppet, his counterpart, to use it like his double in the film. Dalí is put in anger: "I will have you like rats! I will film in Paris, but the set will cost you more than the landscapes of Cadaquès and the framework of my museum. Dalí costs 100,000 dollars the hour! " He is calmed and agreed to the idea of being reproduced out of plastic if after the film I give this sculpture to his museum. I decide to definitively finish the contract the following day. I discuss it with Jean-Paul Gibon and I conclude that it is impossible to haggle with Dalí. I meditate lengthily and I make this final decision: I reduce the role of Dalí to a page and half of script. I accept his price, 100,000 dollars the hour, but I take it only for only one hour. The remainder, I will film it with his double robot. Dalí cannot be allowed either to reconsider its price. I went to see him. I give him the small page and half, and Dalí accepts the proposal because his honour is secure. He will be the most expensive paid actor in the history of cinema. He will earn more than Greta Garbo. Dalí, with enthusiasm, shows me his bed with the sculpture of a dolphin. A workman is already there taking the design of the dolphin to make the toilet. As much for Dalí as for me, the tarot card of the Hanged Man, on which I wrote some words acted as the contract. Dalí likes the aristocracy and like any man of noble spirit, he respects his word. With the signature of the contract, I celebrate with a great dinner where Dalí is named Chevalier of Crayfish. He makes me sit by his side and, likewise, he makes sit Pasolini. During all the dinner, he introduces food on the end of his fingers into the mouth of Pasolini. I worry because I want to be the first to have Dalí as actor and I were astonished to discover with us another director. Amanda Lear says to me: "You should not worry. Pasolini is only here to request the permission to use a tableau of Dalí for the poster of his film Les Cent-Vingt Journées de Sodome. Dalí requires 100,000 dollars from him. Dalí likes that one fights for him ". Not Enough Hollywood
Me, I liked to fight for Dune. Almost all the battles were won, but the war was lost. The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Its message was not "enough Hollywood". There were intrigues, plundering. The storyboard circulated among all the large studios. Later, the visual aspect of Star Wars resembled our style. To make Alien, they invited Moebius, Foss, Giger, O'Bannon, etc. The project announced to American the possibility of carrying out science fiction films to large spectacle and out of the scientific rigour of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Dune project changed our life. When it was over, O'Bannon entered a psychiatric hospital. Afterwards, he returned to the fight with rage and wrote twelve scripts which were refused. The thirteenth one was Alien. Like him, all those who took part in the rise and fall of the Dune project learned how to fall one and one thousand times with savage obstinacy until learning how to stand. I remember my old father who, while dying happy, said to me: "My son, in my life, I triumphed because I learned how to fail".
Translated from the supplement "DUNE LE FILM QUE VOUS NE VERREZ JAMAIS" in Métal Hurlant 107. by Dejan Stojkovski
Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender, and Anthony Kiedis in the film. (Courtesy of Van Redin/Broad Green Pictures) Song to Song should be Terrence Malick's paean to indie rock. The New Hollywood legend invested years archiving SXSW and other Austin music celebrations for the motion picture, standing out as truly newsworthy as right on time as 2011 for a scene in which Christian Bale probably beat bongos with Fleet Foxes. Its three principle characters work in the music business, recording artists join A-rundown on-screen characters in its cast, a lot of its move makes put at live exhibitions, its soundtrack highlights Julianna Barwick and Sharon Van Etten, and a seven-inch record enhances its publication. In any case, notwithstanding all that, Song to Song is not by any stretch of the imagination about indie rock—and not on account of neither the bongo scene nor Malick's recording of Arcade Fire and Iron and Wine made the cut. In spite of the fact that there are a lot of artists close by to loan validity, this story has so little to do with human expressions of songwriting and playing out, its subjects should be venture financiers. Past the rock'n'roll window dressing, Song to Song ends up being simply one more minor departure from Malick's most loved subject—the force of affection and deep sense of being to rise above the life-harming condemnations of desire and ravenousness—and not an extremely successful one, at that. The film starts with an admission: “I was desperate to feel something real. Nothing felt real,” Rooney Mara's Faye reviews, in one of Malick's trademark whispery voiceovers. Over a montage that incorporates shots of men pummeling their bodies together in a celebration's sloppy circle pit, she trusts that she'd been searching out vicious sex. “I wanted to live,”" she demands. “Sing my song.” Faye is, truth be told, a youthful vocalist and musician, in spite of the fact that the state of her yearnings isn't altogether evident until halfway through the film. She trusts that a section level employment with a marvelously affluent music-industry macher named Cook (Michael Fassbender) will be her ticket to achievement. We watch them go to bed together. “I thought he could help me, if I paid my dues...” she intones. At that point love intercedes. Faye falls for another artist, BV (Ryan Gosling), and Cook starts making him a star—a procedure that happens solely offscreen. Be that as it may, she and Cook covertly proceed with their issue, even as the obligations of aspiration and longing unite each of the three. The triumvirate goes to Mexico, where Faye has an epiphany that her sentiment with BV is the genuine article. Nobody catches the enchantment of a world saw through the perspective of fixation on more brilliant lit poignance than Malick's long-lasting cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. Be that as it may, the sparkle blurs once Faye and BV settle down together. Based on a putrefying lie (and sketchy business bargains), none of these connections can last. As each of the three characters proceed onward to new darlings and keep pursuing notoriety, cash, or defiled obscurity, Malick's most loved question flies up: can a presence characterized by endeavoring and battle, as opposed to genuine romance and amicability with the universe, continually bring satisfaction? His true to life proclamation, 2011's The Tree of Life, exhibited the strained, aggressive "method for nature" and the open, serene "method for beauty" as two oppositely inverse ways to deal with life. On the off chance that you've seen that film, Song to Song's moan so anyone can hear unspoiled closure couldn't in any way, shape or form astound you. Considering that Malick went to such extremes to completely arrange his most recent story inside the Austin music scene, it's peculiar that he couldn't be tried to compose Faye and BV's improvement as artists—as opposed to as truly, youthful vehicles for a purposeful anecdote about the risks of aspiration—into the script. We scarcely observe them perform. On the off chance that you coordinated it, you may find that the camera waits longer on grateful shots of Mara's uncovered waist than on scenes of any character engaging a crowd of people. The substantial cast of genuine artists is frustratingly underutilized, as well. Lykke Li and a neighborhood Austin vocalist, Dana Falconberry, both have little parts that could simply have been filled by non-artists. Malick's celebration film is overwhelmed by mosh-pit and backstage shots. Each once in temporarily, an unmistakable face (Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, Big Freedia) seems to administer a piece of apparently unscripted knowledge, in a rose open air green room or at a gathering. Of these cameos, just Patti Smith gets considerable screen time. In the midst of an ocean of desperate Malickian platitudes (“I love the pain. It feels like life”), her appearance on her better half Fred "Sonic" Smith's demise involve a portion of the film's just discourse that feels honest to goodness and particular. At a certain point, she says essentially, "I thought I would be with him for whatever is left of my life, however he kicked the bucket," and it's sufficient to make you ache for an entire narrative of specialists' appearance on misfortune. Malick fans who likewise esteem unrecorded music will without a doubt go into Song to Song aching to see him channel the practically religious nature of those exhibitions—to watch Lubezki's euphoric camera raise the blemished music-celebration encounter so that those sweltering evenings look as heavenly on the screen as they do in decade-old recollections. Terrence Malick's extraordinary fixation is natural greatness. That he would make a motion picture about music however disregard to catch the way it helps us confine from our regular distractions, and reach some drive more noteworthy than ourselves, just appears like a missed open door. It's not by any means reasonable for reprimand an executive for neglecting to make the film you wish he'd made. Malick's restricted learning of the recording business is likewise difficult to disregard. Cook is either a noteworthy name honcho who does the greater part of his own generation or an outside the box supervisor with access to a private fly. Parties for what is, probably, the SXSW swarm too nearly take after the poolside big name bacchanals of Malick's past film, Knight of Cups. One components a stripped lady canvassed in sushi, a scene Lubezki is upbeat to zoom in on, yet not one you're probably going to witness at any Jansport-supported industry blender. It couldn't be clearer—or more crazy—that the executive sees Austin and Hollywood as practically tradable. What is most intolerable about Song to Song's portrayal of music and the general population who make it, however, is that it's rationally poor to the point of pietism. Malick outlines Smith, Iggy, and the other effective craftsmen he spotlights as sages. He soundtracks his compulsory shots of nature's glory with beautiful tunes that run the range from traditional to exemplary shake. In the meantime, he infers that Faye and BV can just lead satisfying lives once they move their concentration from their vocations to each other. Be that as it may, what makes them so not quite the same as the craftsmen Malick loves, other than their childhood and absence of experience? In their own, sui generis ways, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop were both eager, youthful strivers once. To suggest generally is to bend reality into an oversimplified, self-serving children's story—which is to state, the main sort of story Malick still appears to be equipped for telling. The outcome is a beyond reconciliation film that praises an existence spent making (and, yes, advancing) music and expels it as a diversion at the same moment. Tune to Song offered Malick the opportunity to convolute the nature-versus.- effortlessness paired he set up in The Tree of Life and has since reiterated into the Wonder and Knight of Cups, an accumulation of vignettes about a lamenting screenwriter that has similarly as meager to say in regards to the estimation of inventive work. Imagine a scenario where there is some component of beauty in taking after motivation. Consider the possibility that making music—or any sort of craftsmanship—can be both a demonstration of affection and demonstration of aspiration. Or, on the other hand, hello, imagine a scenario in which there is more than only one approach to carry on with a decent life. Rather than developing Malick's rationality, Song to Song essentially repeats it for a fourth time. To be honest, it's agonizing to watch an once-splendid producer waste his time this way, planting simple ethical quality plays inside coolly startling cleanser musical shows just as persuaded that his gathering of people still hasn't consumed the not-especially complex go up against power he's invested years selling. Perhaps it is Malick's own innovative gridlock that has made him so disinclined to publicly ponder what it means to make art. Review : Roger Ebert The film “Pi” is a study in madness and its partner, genius. A tortured, driven man believes (1) that mathematics is the language of the universe, (2) nature can be expressed in numbers, and (3) there are patterns everywhere in nature. If he can find the patterns, if he can find the key to the chaos, then he can predict anything--the stock market, for example. If the man is right, the mystery of existence is unlocked. If he is wrong, the inside of his brain begins to resemble a jammed stock ticker. The movie, written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a study in mental obsession. His hero, named Maximillian Cohen, lives barricaded behind a triple-locked door, in a room filled with high-powered, customized computer equipment. He wants nothing to do with anybody. He writes programs, tests them, looks for the pattern, gets a 216-digit bug, stomps on his chips in a rage, and then begins to wonder about that bug. Exactly 216 digits. There is a theory among some Jewish scholars, he learns, that the name of God has 216 letters. The movie is shot in rough, high-contrast black and white. Max, played by Sean Gullette, is balding, restless, paranoid and brilliant. He has debilitating headaches and nosebleeds. Symptoms of high blood pressure--or of the mental torment he's putting himself through. He's suspicious of everyone. The friendly Indian woman next door puts food by his door. He avoids her. He trusts only his old teacher, Sol (Mark Margolis). They play Go, a game deeper than chess, and Sol tells him to stop with the key to the universe business, already. He warns that he's spinning away from science and toward numerology. Not everybody thinks so. His phone rings with the entreaties of Marcy (Pamela Hart), who works for a high-powered Wall Street analysis firm. They want to hire him as a consultant. They think he's onto something. He has predicted some prices correctly. At the deli, he runs into a Hasidic Jew named Lenny (Ben Shenkman), who seems casual and friendly but has a hidden mission: His group believes the Torah may be a code sent from God and may contain God's name. Of course if one finds the mathematical key to everything, that would include God, stock prices, the weather, history, the future, baseball scores and the response to all moves in Go. That assumes there is a key. When you're looking for something that doesn't exist, it makes you crazier the closer you get to it. The seductive thing about Aronofsky's film is that it is halfway plausible in terms of modern physics and math. What was numerology a century ago now has now been simplified into a very, very vast problem. Chaos theory looks for patterns where common sense says there are none. A computer might be able to give you the answer to anything, if (1) it is powerful enough, and (2) it has all the data. Of course, you might need a computer the size of the universe and containing everything in it, but we're talking theory here. “Pi” is a thriller. I am not very thrilled these days by whether the bad guys will get shot or the chase scene will end one way instead of another. You have to make a movie like that pretty skillfully before I care. But I am thrilled when a man risks his mind in the pursuit of a dangerous obsession. Max is out on a limb. There are hungry people circling him. He may be on to something. They want it, too. For both the stock market people and the Hasidic cabal, Max's formula represents all they believe in and everything they care about. And then there is a level at which Max may simply be insane, or physically ill. There are people who work out complicated theories involving long, impenetrable columns of numbers. Newspapers get envelopes filled with their proofs every day. And other people who sit in their rooms, wrapping themselves in the webs of chess or numbers theory, addicted to their fixes. And game players, gamblers, horseplayers--people bewitched by the mirage of a system. The beautiful thing about mathematics is that you can't prove it except by its own terms. There's no way to put some math in a test tube and see if it turns purple or heats up. It sits there smugly in its own perfect cocoon, letting people like Max find anything he wants in it--or to think that he has. On its 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, the Berlinale Film Festival presented a film on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. "The Young Karl Marx" is directed by Haitian-born Raoul Peck. Raoul Peck, born 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, has been working as a film director for many years. He experienced childhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo (some time ago Zaire), the US and France, before concentrate monetary building and film. Two decades prior, he likewise went about as Haiti's minister of culture. As a director, Raoul Peck is an energetic and mutable ability. He has been making movies for near 30 years, and he's ideal amidst his most seismic minute with "I Am Not Your Negro," his looking reflection on James Baldwin, which has struck a more profound, more extensive harmony than anybody may have foreseen. In 2000, Peck made an electrifying dramatization about Patrice Lumumba, the main equitably chose pioneer of the Congo, that was the silver screen's most insightful (and anguishing) investigation of imperialism: what it is, the means by which it works, why its legacy is so difficult to shake off. In spite of the title, it is not precisely about the youthful Karl Marx, more about Marx's manly relationship with the youthful Friedrich Engels. Given the powerful nearness of his better half Jenny, they for a microsecond practically debilitate to end up distinctly the Jules et Jim of the Revolutionary left. Peck sets aside his greatest joke, or upset de cinéma, for the very end. After a stark motion picture highlighting men in top caps and lamb cleave hairs, the end credits detonate in a rambunctious and even euphoric montage of political occasions in the twentieth century – Che, the Berlin Wall, Ronnie and Maggie, Nelson Mandela, the Occupy development – to the backup of Bob Dylan. No Stalin or Lenin or gulags or Erich Honecker in the montage, however. Marx is played by August Diehl: worn out, wild with outrage and destitution, dependent on shoddy stogies, ruining for a contention and a battle. Engels, played by Stefan Konarske, is the rich child whose father is a factory proprietor, with a dandy-ish way of dress and a sentimental aura, similar to a youthful Werther who isn't pitiful however amped up for the expected triumph for the average workers. They meet adorable. Marx frowns on being presented; he recalls the youthful Friedrich from a prior experience, strutting and entitled, for all the world as though he had created the class battle. The chippy youthful bruiser conflicts with the haughty puppy. Be that as it may, the ice breaks: Engels respects the clearness of Marx's material considering; Marx is an enormous enthusiast of Engels' earth shattering investigation of the English common laborers. Together, they breathe in the new thinking noticeable all around, thoughts for which Pierre Proudhon (enticingly played by Olivier Gourmet) is halfway capable. Removed by the French, Marx escapes to London with Engels where they are welcome to join the communist clique League of the Just, and loan scholarly and methodological thoroughness to their outreaching development. In any case, the break with Proudhon encourages them both, and in marginally entryist style, Engels at long last announces to its paralyzed yearly congress that the League of the Just is to be reconstituted as the Communist League. This is a film which adheres to a philosophy that people contending about speculations and ideas – while additionally occasionally furiously dismissing the thought of minor reflection – is very intriguing. What's more, Peck and Bonitzer pull off the extensive trap of making it intriguing: helped by great exhibitions from Diehl and Konarske, in spite of the fact that a genuine defect is the film's relative absence of enthusiasm for their accomplices: Jenny, played by Vicky Krieps, and millworker Mary Burns (Hannah Steele) with whom Engels is infatuated: it is a fairly careless relationship. There is a strained minute when Marx and Engels chance over a well off plant proprietor who is a companion of Engels' plutocratic father: Marx coldly provokes him with his routine of misusing youngster work and says that the market constrain that requests this is not a law of nature, but rather a matter of artificial "relations of generation". The man answers sneeringly that this expression sounds like "Hebrew" to him. The activity of the motion picture continues at an unfaltering, extreme rate: a weight cooker rhythm, which regardless of the occasional yelling and shouting, does not shift much. Be that as it may, you can see Marx noticeably maturing from his mid-20s to the verge of 30, depleted by the introduction of socialism and the organization of his Communist Manifesto. It shouldn't work, however it does, because of the knowledge of the acting and the stamina and centralization of the written work and directing. Peck stages the movie with the sort of stodgy middlebrow skill that, before long, can wear you out; he doesn't commit glaring errors, however he never agitates the apple truck. Also, perhaps that is on the grounds that he's lost, in his way, in a perspective of Marx that is too naturally sentimental. The film is taking care of business when Karl gets concrete about what his theory implies — like his campaign against kid work. However it purchases too effectively into Marx's idealistic (and profoundly common) see that the class framework is an arrogance forced by the oppressor, and that the endeavor to attempt and even out everything is essentially the higher astuteness. Close to the end, there's an exemplary cheesy biopic minute when Marx and Engels are stating "The Communist Manifesto," chiseling the sentence that peruses "An apparition is frequenting Europe — the ghost of Communism… " The heaviness of the words never feels unconstrained; it accompanies a Great Books seal of endorsement. Be that as it may, then, startlingly, the end credits play over clasps of news film from the twentieth century, with Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" impacting on the soundtrack. That is absolutely the sort of dauntlessness this safe and somewhat dull motion picture could have utilized a greater amount of. However in the event that Peck is stating that Marxism is having a moment of comeback, the twentieth century (not at all like the nineteenth) isn't an extraordinary commercial for it. Slick effects and steady-cam shots are replaced with uneven lighting and somewhat jarring camera moves more commonplace in home movies, but in Lynch’s hands, it never feels amateurish. It’s an experience that resides somewhere between a fictional movie and a one-man documentary. It’s cinema for a new age. Although the confrontational avant-garde aspects of Inland Empire will deter the majority of the movie-going public, it’s a film that will rekindle the hope of important cinema in those who have come to feel that cinema is dead. “What is Inland Empire about?” It’s the inevitable, make or break question that everyone asks, and it’s a question that is asked before and after most of David Lynch’s films. Inland Empire is no different; in fact, it’s Lynch at his most extreme and inspired. Don’t let the seemingly incoherent story fool you, there are layers upon layers of meaning that will be unfolding for years to come. The difficulty of Inland Empire, and Lynch himself, is that he does not make any concessions for his audience. The audience has to work for every plot detail and metaphor, which is not a simple task when watching a filmmaker who knows more about making films than most of us will ever know about watching them. On the surface, Inland Empire is about the duality of acting. Laura Dern plays an actress who lands a huge role opposite Justin Theroux, who plays a hot-shot, womanizing actor. As Dern becomes consumed by her character and her relationship, both professionally and personally, with Theroux, she begins to lose sight of where the fictional character stops and reality begins. Lynch loves to play with our assumptions and knows that an audience’s attention is caught up in the moment, moments like a rehearsal read-through between Dern and Theroux. We know that they are actors and they are rehearsing but halfway through, something changes. We begin to believe their character, their dialogue. The line between what we know is false and cinematic reality no longer exists. It’s that simple assumption that Lynch plays with for the duration of the film. Just as Dern doesn’t know when she’s acting in the film within the film or when she is just being, we don’t either. While Lynch is commended for crafting a film that skews the lines of cinematic reality so well, it wouldn’t have worked without a powerful performance from Dern. She is believable even when we don’t know who the hell she is. The confusion of realities penetrates Dern's story to the point where Lynch is remarking on the condition of The confusion of realities permeates Dern’s story to the point where Lynch is commenting on the state of his own film. In the most avant-garde aspect, three rabbit/human hybrids sit in a living room and engage in fairly obtuse dialogue, at which point a ridiculous laugh track interrupts the conversation. These scenes are more supplementary to the film, rather than essential to the brunt of the story. While the dialogue does provide some insight into character motives, these scenes are more of a commentary on us, the audience. When faced with a moment that seems absurd and pointless, we laugh and write it off. Instead of trying to determine what the filmmaker is saying, we chalk everything up to absurdity and rob it of its meaning. However, Inland Empire is not a film that should be dismissed or panned. It is a film that demands your intelligence, attention and patience. Although the absurdity is humorous at times, the tone of the film is deadly serious. In one swift, three-hour move, Lynch wipes away the meaninglessness of Hollywood movies and reveals the importance of cinema by shooting Inland Empire completely on consumer grade, digital video cameras – cameras that you could walk into a store and buy. Slick effects and steady-cam shots are replaced with uneven lighting and somewhat jarring camera moves more commonplace in home movies, but in Lynch’s hands, it never feels amateurish. It’s an experience that resides somewhere between a fictional movie and a one-man documentary. It’s cinema for a new age. Although the confrontational avant-garde aspects of Inland Empire will deter the majority of the movie-going public, it’s a film that will rekindle the hope of important cinema in those who have come to feel that cinema is dead. The Winner for Best Foreign-Language film on the 89th Academy Award, Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman is an amazing, dimly clever, unobtrusively wrecking human show from the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the event that you know Farhadi's work – and on the off chance that you don't, seek out About Elly, A Separation and The Past — you know you're in the hands of a noteworthy film artist. He is not one to underline the importance of his movies. He tosses crowds into the thick of things and abandons us to parse its significance. It's a compliment Hollywood films rarely afford us. The Salesman starts with what seems like an earthquake the ground begins to shake at an open to looking habitation Tehran, splits all of a sudden show up in the dividers, and the cheerfully wedded Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) need to escape into the road. The most up to date film from Iran's lord of the local potboiler, Asghar Farhadi, is as quietly and deliberately told as his different works, however to start, he allows himself one evident visual analogy. Emad and Rana's coexistence will break apart at the scenes, apparently all of a sudden, similar to a pitiless demonstration of god. In fact, it isn't a seismic tremor that inconveniences the couple's home, but nearby construction. In any case, they need to incidentally move to another, shabbier condo, where the past inhabitant has left a significant number of her belonging. They're at the same time assuming the lead parts in a neighborhood creation of Death of a Salesman, that sanctioned work on the myth of American exceptionalism. Be that as it may, Farhadi is not hoping to draw some undeniable parallel between Arthur Miller's play and the lives of this couple. Or maybe, he needs to investigate the startling velocity with which strife can upset our ordinary lives, and the oblivious need we have to slip into more outsized parts. The Salesman is an ordinarily twisting film for Farhadi, one that transforms from a peaceful family dramatization to a serene story of vengeance, and is all the more amazing for how consistently it executes that move. Farhadi won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2011 for A Separation, which took after a white collar class Iranian couple's endeavor to separate, and the different familial and court inconveniences that then assaulted them. Farhadi's true to life style could mercifully be portrayed as saving—the score is insignificant, the camerawork lacking adornment, the visuals entirely verité. At the point when Farhadi slices to the couple's arranging of Death of a Salesman, the overstated set behind them, adorned with neon signs publicizing gambling clubs and knocking down some pins, appears to be all the more startling and cartoonish—a firmly limited culture's perspective of a despicably outgoing area. That idea of extroversion is the thing that starts to destroy Emad and Rana's relationship. While practicing Death of a Salesman, one of the male on-screen characters can scarcely remain in character at seeing a female performing artist in the part of Miss Forsythe, who is suggested to be a whore. Indeed, even the general thought of an on-screen character professing to be such a man feels like sci-fi to him, and he can't resist the urge to snicker at it. In any case, fiction edges into reality for Emad and Rana, who discover that their new flat's past occupant was likewise shocking. The couple's new neighbors recall her as "a lady with a great deal of associates" and who carried on with a "natural life," however Emad and Rana are edgy to abstain from examining the subject. Their lives appear to be generally euphoric: Their relationship is glad, and Emad is a darling teacher at a neighborhood secondary school. That peace is irritated when a customer of the previous inhabitant calls at the couple's condo and fights with Rana when he understands she's not who he's searching for. This activity unfurls altogether off-screen, while Rana is home alone. She can't recognize her aggressor, nor does she need to address it with the police, anxious of the judgment that may take after, out of line or no. It's an irritating circumstance, yet not a disastrous one—a split in the divider, as opposed to a break in the establishment. In any case, it's sufficient to send Emad looking for requital, a journey that will offer no assistance to his shaken spouse (who doesn't need the make a difference to spill out into the general population eye), however may in any case fulfill his own anguish about neglecting to secure her. Farhadi is the best kind of political filmmaker—one who centers his stories around everyday family matters and convincing household dramatizations, whose works work to a disaster by annoying the littlest societal standards. In The Salesman, you can feel Farhadi (who composed and coordinated) putting his finger on the scale marginally with the film's enormous plot bend, then giving Emad's own delicate manliness a chance to do the rest. The pressure in The Salesman all relies on this one episode of mixed up personality and brief brutality, one that can't be fixed or repaired. There is no more amazing heightening in transit, no encounter with the previous occupant who has accidentally brought on this chaos (she remains a character just talked about, an original as simple to envision as the one the on-screen characters in Death of a Salesman chuckle at). As tense as Emad's revenge mission gets, The Salesman still misses the mark concerning the overwhelming statures Farhadi has hit with his best movies (alongside A Separation, the splendidly adjusted About Elly, additionally featuring Alidoosti, is an indispensable work). The Salesman's decision, while holding, feels to some degree pat, concentrating on an encounter that wraps things up too perfectly and immediately, regardless of the possibility that Emad and Rana's marriage remains profoundly pained. As the film goes on and Emad feels promote castration and fierceness, Hosseini plays him as physically troubled by the unsolved wrongdoing, marginally more stooped over, with somewhat of a disheartened rearrange. It's then, at last, that watchers can truly observe some Willy Loman in him.
Director: Oren Moverman
Writers: Herman Koch (novel), Oren Moverman (screenplay) Stars: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Steve Coogan
The Dinner" has an infectious environment of aggravation. Written and directed by Oren Moverman, and adapted from the best-selling novel by Herman Koch (first published in the Netherlands in 2009) the film eventually slips from the class created by "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Two couples collect for an "enlightened" party — supper and beverages, discussion that begins off as generally courteous. Be that as it may, as the night wears on, they uncover themselves (or perhaps peel themselves, layer by layer) until the shrouded viciousness at the center of their politeness stands exposed.
The last time this was attempted in a movie in Roman Polanski’s “God of Carnage” (2011), the organizing was OK, however the play itself was terrible — a chain of creations that just got loopier. Koch's novel is a significantly all the more enthralling work, and Moverman, the talented director of "Bulwark" and "The Messenger," is a wise naturalistic actor who knows how to depict the power of mental harm without overhyping it. "The Dinner" has the dismal verve of a thriller: It begins off as a motion picture around four individuals eating at an irrationally favor eatery, however it jumps into flashbacks, deviations, enthusiastic byways. It's still, on a basic level, an invention, yet a dubious and riveting one, and it has a modest bunch of exceedingly full things to say in regards to benefit, family, maladjustment, and a general public in which not caring at all — about anybody — has started to advance into a respectable perspective. Driven by a quartet of powerhouse exhibitions, "The Dinner," if given the correct taking care of, could discover a specialty among forte market moviegoers who like their bloodletting presented with a complex sting.
The film moves the activity from the book's Amsterdam setting to an anonymous American city, however it holds the plan of a novel that has spellbound perusers around the globe. Paul Lohman (Steve Coogan), the focal figure, and furthermore the most harried and nervous, is a scathing skeptic, a previous secondary school history instructor who believes he's a washout (for this situation, a self-satisfying prediction). To him, the Battle of Gettysburg isn't only a section of war — it's a similitude forever. Paul experienced childhood in the shadow of his more seasoned sibling, the good looking happy hander Stan (Richard Gere), a U.S. congressman who's amidst what resembles an effective keep running for senator. The two men are meeting, alongside their spouses, at one of those madly rich goal eateries in which nourishment is dealt with as a postmodern work of art. This specific foundation is housed in a manor — inside, it's altogether shined wood and extravagant love seats, shot with a sugary candlelit sentimental sparkle by the immense cinematographer Bobby Bukowski.
Prior to the get together, we look in on Paul and his better half, Claire (Laura Linney), with the goal that we can change in accordance with the lethal mind of his singing masochistic skepticism. Coogan has constantly played characters with a comic edge, however here it isn't recently his English pronunciation that is gone, supplanted by a sort of hindered American obtuseness; the wisps of diversion have been dissolved down also, into something excessively dull, making it impossible to be snickered at. Paul is the sort of pill who stakes everything on his "uprightness," which implies that he's continually saying what he accepts, regardless of the possibility that that implies putting down everybody around him. He supposes he's talking astringent truths, in any case he's quite recently dragging everybody into his give in of miserablism. His 16-year-old child, Michael (Charlie Plummer), has only disdain for him, and his significant other treats him like an injured winged animal who needs consistent tending. One's reaction to "The Dinner" will depend on whether you go for Coogan's cut, antagonistic execution, which some may discover mannered. I thought it was attractive: a legitimate representation of a destroyed soul — and one who, as we learn, has gone too far (and reasonably) into mental illness.
In the restaurant, Paul can't quit making splits about the servile servers, the foo-foo ludicrousness of the dishes (a live garden presented with rosemary from Oregon, sauce spilled out of gourds). He's ideal, as it were, to stick this playpen of the one percent, but on the other hand he's a marginal head case who utilizes his social study protectively, to prevent himself from existing at the time. Moreover, the genuine strain gets from the circumstance they've all met up to discuss. It needs to do with their children, who on a current tanked evening moved toward an ATM corner with a frail vagrant dozing inside and accomplished something, awful. The way the film crawls up to this occasion may appear to be hokey, aside from that the occurrence, in its easygoing dread, is very valid. Moverman abandons it to the group of onlookers to sort out that Michael is truly showcasing his dad's fury.
So what, precisely, is to be finished? Michael, alongside his cousin, carried out a wrongdoing, however would it be advisable for them to be uncovered and rebuffed, or ought to the wrongdoing be concealed, even as a mysterious video clasp of it (with their characters covered) goes up on YouTube? The sensational force of "The Dinner" is that the film declines to descend on either side, and that makes the open deliberation a capturing one. It's Stan, the government official committed to open picture, who imagines that all must be uncovered; he's out to cleanse, in a single killer blow, the disease of his family. However, the ladies think in an unexpected way: his better half, Katelyn, played by Rebecca Hall as a trophy spouse who knows she's a trophy wife (and appears to be all the more thoughtful as a result of it), and is not going to surrender all that she wedded this man of force for; and Claire, played by Linney in a dynamite execution, as a cherishing lady of primal maternal nature who is likewise stunning in her self-daydream.
"The Dinner" is a representation of the shrouded garbage, and even the bunches of craziness, that can gone through the most "ordinary" of families. There's absolutely a touch of gimmickry in the film's plan — the way that it's a celebrated four-hander, in which these troubled grown-ups play reality amusement with their own particular souls. However Moverman parities the potential for staginess with his streaming artistic bravura; he continues astounding you, and he gives the dramatization a dash of toxin style. His last film, "Time Out of Mind" (featuring Gere as a vagrant), had more humankind that narrating vitality, yet "The Dinner" denote an arrival to shape for a producer who's a shrewd master at uncovering the obscurity in his characters' hearts and getting the group of onlookers to feel that, yes, it's their murkiness as well.
In the Summer of 2016, while the film was in after generation, the Saltwater group endured an excruciating blow, the loss of their courageous Writer/Director, Lise Swenson. Her passing fortified our set out to guarantee this film achieved fruition and that Swenson's last work was imparted to the world. Saltwater is an excellent full length film created with exceptional understudy and group responsibility. Our group financing efforts have had the effect between a pipe dream and getting this film made. If it's not too much trouble help us pull together the last subsidizes guarantee an effective celebration chief and a promising future for Swenson's work coming to past San Francisco. Under the thick dark mist and rain billows of a San Francisco winter, Jenny's wedding approaches. She loves her life partner, yet is nervous about something she can't exactly put her finger on. At that point she finds an old photo of her grandma in her wedding dress, and everything appears to become alright. She knows she should get hitched in that dress. Jenny's feelings of dread and doubst touch off into a fanatical trip to her repelled close relative's home at the Salton Sea, an earth crushed and long overlooked excursion spot, looking for the dress. In the blasting parched warmth of this crushed scene, and in the midst of heaps and heaps of three eras of her family's accumulating, Jenny seeks; searching for the dress, searching for her family's past, and searching for herself. In the shine of the betray there is no place to stow away and Jenny is compelled to settle on a portion of the hardest choices of her life with the goal that she can understand her future. Not exclusively is Saltwater remarkable in its substance, utilization of fascinating areas, and its dedication to brilliant, low spending plan filmmaking, it is likewise exceptional in that it is an affirmed coordinated effort of City College of San Francisco's Cinema Department. As a Cinema Department educator, veteran producer and the author/chief of Saltwater, Swenson proposed the joint effort, which was endorsed by the school toward the finish of Fall Semester 2011. The program began in the Spring Semester 2012 with 15 staff assistants. Through the span of making this film, more than 75 understudies partook in the entry level position! The embodiment of the coordinated effort is that the greater part of the second string positions for all periods of generation were enlisted and secured from CCSF's gifted and yearning understudy body. To promote our instructive objective, the greater part of the lead team positions were filled by industry experts who specifically regulated the understudies, giving them significant hands-on understanding and direction, in the specialty of filmmaking. This coordinated effort made our vision of low spending plan, high creation esteem filmmaking a reality, while permitting Swenson to tutor and instruct the up and coming era of movie producers all through all periods of generation. Outwardly, Saltwater discovers its character in the interaction between its two profoundly differentiating situations: the stark and unusual brilliance of the Salton Sea, and the terrible yet hyper-dynamic luxuriousness of San Francisco. This story is told as much through the statement of these areas as it is through the performing artists. Acclaimed and skilled cinematographer, Frazer Bradshaw, is shooting on an Epic, guaranteeing that we take full favorable position of the artistic capability of both areas. |
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