David Lynch - Classic or Dud

i've been on a huge lynch kick recently. i'm certainly not a pro (haven't even seen inland empire or lost highway yet), but i'm putting together a 2013 david lynch summer series where we watch almost ALL of his work, chronologically, across 13 weeks. gathering together the tangent ephemera - the angriest dog in the world comic strip, essays, the Morricone-esque song by early 70s prog group Tractor that features about 2/3 of the way through The Grandmother - has been a treat! i'm trying to identify the most lynchian drink possible to serve up each night - PBR? certainly not heineken, that would be a faux pas.

Coffee

http://www.counterpointcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/david-lynch-coffee-021.jpg

coffee's a great call but it's going to be 8pm on a weekday for most of these screenings. and decaf is...unacceptable.

Awesome fan vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRFJNpAff_A&list=PLWL_UigKlz-nU4XObLsLNGK45wZrtaqup&index=1

PBR is prolly the way to go.

lol at the coffee commercial tribute.

if anyone else has links to anything lynch, post 'em here! before, in between, and after screenings i'm planning on showing things like commercials, music videos, etc.

I just read this Film Quarterly piece on The Straight Story and it, well, blew my mind. A completely different brilliant take...

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker dismissed The Straight Story as a "comic coda to Lost Highway." Although the film is clearly not comic at its heart, it does, like its predecessor, use one story to mask another, more sinister, one. Lost Highway's protagonist Fred represses all memory of having murdered his wife in a jealous rage; he only glimpses himself howling over her dismembered corpse on grainy videotape, and, in the film's second half, re-imagines his story as a pulpy film noir with himself as the unwitting dupe of his wife (reincarnated as a femme fatale)--instead of as the villain he truly is. (As he tells two detectives in the film's first half, "I like to remember things my own way.") Similarly, Alvin Straight never brings himself to tell the straight story of his own past; he tells, instead, incomplete and disguised versions of it to the strangers he meets, hears echoes of it in the stories they tell him, and sees distorted reenactments of it in one scene after another.

The real story of The Straight Story turns out not to be very straightforward at all, but involuted and hidden--buried, as in Lost Highway, within the ostensible narrative like a repressed memory. This movie is about how a mean drunk named Alvin Straight lost his daughter's children to the state because he let one of them get burned in a fire. This is the only way the film makes sense as a unified whole, as anything other than the meandering picaresque most reviewers thought it was. Alvin Straight is riding his mower with its wagon all those hundreds of miles along highway shoulders not on an errand of forgiveness, but as an ordeal of atonement. There is darkness here beneath the bright autumn colors, and evil concealed in Alvin's heart. There is the history of a family destroyed by alcoholism and abuse. There is fire and death.

Is this all really unexpected? The Straight Story is a David Lynch film, after all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioKyxGkBRro

His great sitcom Rabbits, as seen in Inland Empire is a good choice.

love that FQ piece, alex. it's been so long since i saw the straight story (during its theatrical run) that i can't now remember whether or not that reading occurred to me. either way, it's fascinating and makes me want to watch the film again.

sorry, alex elvis

I haven't seen Rabbits yet (or Inland Empire!), but it's on my viewing schedule for night #11, along with Dumbland, Boat, Lady Blue Shanghai and I Touch a Red Button.

and thanks for the link to that Straight Story review E T! i've only seen it once, in high school in some lazy May afternoon class when the students no longer want to learn and the teacher no longer wants to teach. i had no idea who david lynch was and thought it was some nauseating family friendly disney shit. definitely can't wait to watch it again with a new angle.

love the one minute film Lynch made with a restored Lumiere camera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFGroZJnklY

^ yeah, i remember that being the standout piece. just watched it again, still astounding. one shot!

Yeah wow

that's "Premonitions Following an Evil Deed", right?

i remember how pissed off i was at the greenaway one in that series, he used all sorts of cuts and post effects and stuff

Going to watch Straight Story again this week.

yeah that's definitely an interesting take and has made me keen to see it again. cheers for the link.

You definitely need to show his early animations. "Six People Getting Sick" and "The Alphabet". This is a good source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Films_of_David_Lynch

Plus "The Cowboy and the Frenchman" is on it, which I remember was pretty funny.

I have my full list of viewings in a text file at home (god, i just realized i'm getting old because a teenager probably would have put it on google drive or something. my flesh...is decaying...my face...the wrinkles widen...*close-up of flame*), but the first night is going to be Six People Getting Sick, The Alphabet, The Grandmother, the Amputee, and then Eraserhead. I'm trying to straight-up chronological, as much as I can. Once it gets into the 90s and 2000s I'm going to have to be a little bit more selective, though. It's already at 13 nights, 2+ hours each, and that's with leaving out some things.

My main dilemma is whether to show the pilot ep. of Twin Peaks (American version), pilot episode (Intl. version that has the weird grafted on "ending"), or Fire Walk with Me.

I'm already planning on showing a few related clips (the coffee commercials, maybe the SNL sketch with Kyle MacLachlan and Phil Hartman doing a hilarious Leland), so showing both the pilot episode + Fire Walk with me would be overkill.

but but but you gotta! both the pilot and fwwm are essential documents, much more so than the related ephemera.

i don't know why i'm worrying about it anyway, by the 7th night of the series it's just going to be me, alone

I'm kinda leaning toward the Pilot only, and maybe just the American version. The thing is, both Fire Walk with Me and the intl. version of the pilot would reveal the Bob/Leland connection, and that might the entire show for people who haven't seen it yet.

fair enough. fwwm is probably my least favorite of lynch's feature length films, so if you gotta cut one...

Missing words in my posts, case log #2134:

forgot to include the word "ruin" between "might" and "the entire show"

so, i'm still working my way through his oeuvre, chronologically. last night was Hotel Room (1993), next week is Lost Highway.

Hotel Room. made for HBO, 3 episodes (the first two are 30 minutes, the last is 40). Lynch directed the first and last. Each episode takes place in the same hotel room (and the outside hallway), but with a different cast (except for the bellboy, who is the same age and has the same appearance even though the three episodes span 60 years of time). The middle episode has some random director that they brought in at the last minute, and it's not worth mentioning. the first is compelling in its own way and has a really nice performance from harry dean stanton.

but the third episode, "black out"...very much worth watching. it takes place in 1936, and crispin glover is just fantastic in it. he plays a husband from oklahoma that's shepherding his mentally disturbed wife in a trip to NYC to visit a doctor. they talk and talk. it's wonderful. check out the first episode if you have time, but if not, invest 40 minutes in this, it's worth it if you're a lynch fan (skip to 53:40 for the third episode):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI_I6ewm-FY

and if you're concerned about the quality of the video/audio, the youtube clip is about as good as it gets. it was released on VHS only, never on DVD (at least in the US), and it's long out of print.

alicia witt is so fuckin good in that

This doc is pretty good (NB: I'm only 10 mins in):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td5u4gW0g54

that lumiere short is seriously one of the most impressive things he's done, and the best short in that "lumiere and company" film for sure. i also fondly recall the one by idrissa ouedraogo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bFITC5Kb5g

xpost

great doc! I hadn't seen that one before. It is interesting to see Lynch asked some difficult questions and get challenged on some of his answers.

is that the one where he talks about "the eye of the duck"?

I don't like wind on my collarbone.

xpost it is!

That eye of the duck stuff is amazing. Slow and fast rooms. "Maybe an empty room is 2. A person is a 7. Fire/electricity takes it up to 9..."

You guys, that is just standard TM talk... :-\

what's TM?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_Meditation

Does TM really talk about the eye of the duck?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s

i imagine that's pretty much the level of discourse you're going to get at those TM conferences that david lynch frequents

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03d114j/The_Sound_of_Cinema_The_First_Time_with_David_Lynch/

nice show about sounds which influenced him as he grew up.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnsD7gJIgAAMgyq.jpg

DL on Eraserhead and Philly

It was a film that was inspired by the city of Philadelphia, and it’s an industrial world. It’s a smokestack-industry world. It’s factory-worker homes tucked away out of time. It has a certain feel, and the sounds have to marry to that feel, and [sound editor] Alan Splet and I just would work until we got the thing to feel correct.

I went there a couple of years ago, and the city is completely different. It felt very normal to me, not like it was then. It was brighter and cleaner and it had graffiti. And graffiti has ruined the world....

It’s defaced the beauty of the architecture, and you can’t film anywhere without the patinas on the bricks on the buildings. It’s been ruined. It happened in all the places I already love, like factories and railroad lines and bridges. All these places have been so badly defaced.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/david-lynch-interview-eraserhead-midnight-movies.html

“Not that it should surprise anyone who’s seen how Lynch depicts ostensibly idyllic small-town America, but the director’s avowed love for his adoptive hometown is hardly reflected in his work.” In “Muted Golden Sunshine: David Lynch’s Los Angeles,” a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Nordine considers Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/muted-golden-sunshine-david-lynchs-los-angeles#

i was surprised that thom andersen didn't address any of those films in his "Los Angeles Plays Itself"

there's definitely a current in lynch's work that rhymes with the whole Reaganite "morning in America" stuff even though surface readings of e.g. Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks would seem to indicate the opposite. but Lynch seems to consistently conflate poverty, filth, and moral rot in a way that could be read as reactionary.