With the exception of the taut opening section, I thought this rather arbitrary and silly when I saw it upon its initial home video release. And the inclusion of Marilyn Manson kept me from revisiting it for the better part of a decade.
Now, with the hindsight of Mulholland Dr and some recent Twin Peaks-watching, I find it a far more satisfying and intelligible experience, with lots of Lynchian themes in full blossom and a handful of excellent performances. It’s no small feat to coax a good turn from a limp fish like Bill Pullman, but actors like Patricia Arquette and Robert Loggia are given the rare opportunity to show off their chops. Arquette in particular does some fine Naomi Wattsing, especially in her notorious stripping-at-gunpoint scene, in which she morphs from a girl in peril to a femme fatale in a single shot.
Still, Mulholland Dr is, for me, the far superior film with many of these themes more fully realized and a more forceful splicing of the generic with the bizzare. And the last shot of Lost Highway seems to be totally unnecessary.
The Region 1 DVD is awful.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: BMG DVD
29 Apr 2006 7:36 PM | Comments (6)
For the record, Bill Pullman was pretty great in the Zero Effect. Personally, I think Mulholland Dr. would have been far better as the TV series it was initially intened to be. The Nancy Drew amnesia plot device in the first half of the film and Lynch’s vision of L.A. both would have lent themselves better to serialization.Looking at the characters like Billy Ray Cyrus’s sensitive homewrecker Gene, Michael J. Anderson’s ominous film executive Mr. Roque, Ann Miller’s aging-maven landlady Coco Lenoix, I can’t help but feel like we lost a fresh and extensive indictment of Los Angeles a la West’s Day of the Locust. The sequence with the homeless man behind the Winkies dumpster reminded me of what it felt like reading Mike Davis’s City of Quartz. All I’m trying to say is that the film feels weaker to me than Lost Highway, because the loose ends held over from the Mulholland Dr’s initial life as an extended pilot are just too promising. Here’s a tangent hypthetical: I propose that David Lynch is basically just Ed Wood except that he started out with art films instead of pornography?
I find the comparison between Lynch and Wood appalling, though you present an interesting theory. Is Lynch pornographic? For me, there seems to be a certain voyeuristic aura to many of his films, typified by Kyle MacLachlan’s unintentional Blue Velvet peep show. It’s not that Lynch derives joy from gratuity—rather, his camera seems to be a slow drip into the sheltered world of his characters, which happens to be blatantly lewd and disturbing. We’re privy to the immoral underside of human nature; there is no sugar coating, no happy facade to hide the dark reality. I find the same deep, unnerving ambience in the films of David Cronenberg and Sam Peckinpah, especially the latter’s Straw Dogs. Some call it pornography; most people call it art.
One of the things I really love about David Cronenberg is that I can actually believe that he’s an intellectual from both his interviews and his films. The Marshall McLuhan-esque theorist in VideoDrome, the sexual politics of The Fly. Really great, dense material. [haven’t seen too much Peckinpah, but he’s in my netflix queue]. I think that the hypothetical I proposed may have been misworded. I really have no ‘moral majority’ beef with Lynch’s mise en scène. What I object to is treatment of his films as particularly deep. Don’t get me wrong: I love watching them and appreciate Lynch very much in the same way David Foster Wallace does in his Lost Highway essay [collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again]. However, like DWF, I can’t seem to shake the posibility that David Lynch is a compulsive-moviemaker/idiot-savant who has little interest in doing anything except putting his personal visions and dreamscapes on celluloid without any serious conception of audience or social statement what-so-ever. This is particularly disturbing if you buy that old arguement a la Pervert in the Pulpit that David Lynch has a crypto-Conservative social agenda. So, yeah it’s art, but I actually do get a lot of the same emotional responses from watching Glenn or Glenda. Imagine what would have happened in some alternate universe if that had won a palme d’or. Ed Wood with pretense and European financial backers and an able retinue of golf-clapping film critics. Think of the striking visuals he would have produced: his signature stock footage dissolves over visceral, sfx-created sex change operations now artistically unencumbered by the economics of stag reel production, Spaceships with all Angora interiors, An opportunity to indulge in the Orson Welles-level narrative complexity and cinematic verve he aspired to, etc., etc. [Bear in mind that I’m aware of the bit of sophistry in this argument.]
For the past week I’ve had the pleasure of reading Marshall Fine’s biography of Sam Peckinpah, Bloody Sam, and many of the arguments you make about Lynch—compulsive filmmaking, lack of social commentary, ambiguous cultural responses—were also made about the infamous Californian. Over time (mostly after he died), people began to realize that Peckinpah’s intentions with Straw Dogs and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia weren’t just to shock and disgust us; he was commenting on our pathetic nature and repressed, animalistic instincts, and how we’re destined to become what we abhor. I find the same with Lynch and Cronenberg—immense public disapproval because their films aren’t entirely understood—but where Peckinpah and Cronenberg might goad their audience with winks and nudges, Lynch doesn’t seem to. Which is why I appreciate Lynch more that most directors. He sees where people expect a film to go and takes the other path, and along the way he adds a baby made from a cow fetus (allegedly) and Dean Stockwell singing “In Dreams” into a worklight. (For the record, I love all three directors above, and I think American cinema would be a stale and dire industry without them.)
One veiwing of Straw Dogs later: agreed.
I was really disappointed to hear the comment about Mulholland Drive and the “Nancy Drew amnesiatic effect”. I came to this page via Rotten Tomatoes concerning Lost Highway. The commentary is great – really steeped in a deeper film history than i possess, but wonderful and full of insight. Except where it concerns Mulholland Drive.
If you really believe it’s a “Nancy Drew amnesiatic effect” or that Lynch care about nothing except “putting his personal visions and dreamscapes on celluloid without any serious conception of audience or social statement what-so-ever”, you are really cheating yourself from enjoying a great masterpiece. This movie is an emotional masterpiece quite apart from its structure, but then on repeated viewings to discern the underlying structure and realize you get both emotional and structural masterpiece is such an incredible viewing experience. It only makes it more interesting and definitely creepier on successive screenings!
Please, i implore you, because this movie offers so much, if you don’t “get it” in terms of the structure (not necessarily all of the symbolism – i certainly believe some of the embedded symbolism is left open for wonderful interpretation, like the homeless guy and the puzzle box), do yourself a huge favor and watch this again until you get it. You won’t be sorry.
Matthew D. Phelan
7 May 2006
7:50 PM