A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (54 page)

¹²
Octavio Paz,
Children of the Mire
, Harvard U. Press, 1974, pp. 103–118.

¹³
This professor was the sort of guy who used “which” when the appropriate relative pronoun was the less fancy “that” to give you an idea.

¹⁴
If you want to see a typical salvo in this generation war, look at William Gass’s “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense” in the 10/11/87
New York Times Book Review
.

¹⁵
In Bill Knott’s
Love Poems to Myself, Book One
, Barn Dream Press, 1974.

¹⁶
In Stephen Dobyns’s
Heat Death
, McLelland and Stewart, 1980.

¹⁷
In Bill Knott’s
Becos
, Vintage, 1983.

¹⁸
White Noise
, pp. 12–13.

¹⁹
Martone,
Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List
, Indiana U. Press, 1990, p. ix.

²⁰
Leyner,
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
, Harmony/Crown, 1990, p. 82.

²¹
Mark Crispin Miller, “Deride and Conquer,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 193.

²²
At Foote, Cone and Belding, quoted by Miller—so the guy said it in the mid-’80s.

²³
A similar point is made about
Miami Vice
in “We Build Excitement” Todd Gitlin’s own essay in his anthology.

²⁴
Miller in Gitlin, p. 194.

²⁵
Ibid., p. 187.

²⁶
Miller’s “Deride…” has a similar analysis of sitcoms, but Miller ends up arguing that the crux is some weird Freudio-patricidal element in how TV comedy views The Father.

²⁷
Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,”
American Poetry Review
, reprinted in the
Pushcart Prize
anthology for 1987.

²⁸
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”
New Left Review
#146, Summer 1984, pp. 60-66.

²⁹
Pat Auferhode, “The Look of the Sound,” in good old Gitlin’s anthology, p. 113.

³⁰
Miller in Gitlin, p. 199.

³¹
Greil Marcus,
Mystery Train
, Dutton, 1976.

³²
Hyde, op. cit.

³³
White Noise,
p. 13.

³⁴
A term Gitlin uses in “We Build Excitement.”

¹
(I haven’t yet been able to track down clips of the N.B.C.C. spots, but the mind reels at the possibilities implicit in the conjunction of D. Lynch and radical mastectomy….)

²
“M.o.L,” only snippets of which are on
BV
’s soundtrack, has acquired an underground reputation as one of the great make-out tunes of all time—well worth checking out.

³
(’92 having been a year of simply manic creative activity for Lynch, apparently)

⁴
Dentistry seems to be a new passion for Lynch, by the way—the photo on the title page of
Lost Highway’
s script, which is of a guy with half his face normal and half unbelievably distended and ventricose and gross, was apparently culled from a textbook on extreme dental emergencies. There’s great enthusiasm for this photo around Asymmetrical Productions, and they’re looking into the legalities of using it in
Lost Highway’
s ads and posters, which if I was the guy in the photo I’d want a truly astronomical permission fee.

⁵
(And
Dune
really is visually awesome, especially the desert planet’s giant worm-monsters, who with their tripartitely phallic snouts bear a weird resemblance to the mysterious worm Henry Spencer keeps in the mysterious thrumming cabinet in
Eraserhead.
)

⁶
Anybody who wants to see how the Process and its inducements destroy what’s cool and alive in a director should consider the recent trajectory of Richard Rodriguez, from the plasma-financed vitality of
El Mariachi
to the gory pretension of
Desperado
to the empty and embarrassing
From Dusk to Dawn
. Very sad.

⁷
(using MacLachlan perfectly this time—since the role of Jeffrey actually calls for potato-faced nerdiness—plus
Eraserhead
’s Jack Nance and
Dune
’s Dean Stockwell and Brad Dourif, none of whom has ever been creepier, plus using
Dallas
’s Priscilla Pointer and everything’s Hope Lange as scary moms…)

⁸
TIDBIT: HOW LYNCH AND HIS CINEMATOGRAPHER FOR
BV
FILMED THAT HELLACIOUS FORCED “JOYRIDE” IN FRANK BOOTH’S CAR, THE SCENE WHERE FRANK AND JACK NANCE AND BRAD DOURIF HAVE KIDNAPPED JEFFREY BEAUMONT AND ARE MENACING HIM INSIDE THE CAR WHILE THEY’RE GOING WHAT LOOKS LIKE 100+ DOWN A DISMAL RURAL TWO-LANER: The reason it looks like the car’s going so fast is that lights outside the car are going by so fast. In fact the car wasn’t even moving. A burly grip was bouncing madly up and down on the back bumper to make the car jiggle and roll, and other crewpeople with hand-held lamps were sprinting back and forth outside the car to make it look like the car was whizzing past streetlights. The whole scene’s got a claustrophobia-in-motion feel that they never could have gotten if the car’d actually been moving (the production’s insurance wouldn’t have allowed that kind of speed in a real take), and the whole thing was done for about $8.95.

⁹
(sex scenes that are creepy in part because they’re exactly what the viewer himself imagines having sex with Patricia Arquette would be like)

¹⁰
(a stilted, tranced quality that renders the sex scenes both sexually “hot” and aesthetically “cold,” a sort of meta-erotic effect you could see Gus Van Sant trying to emulate when he had the sex scenes in
My Own Private Idaho
rendered as series of complexly postured stills, which instead of giving them Lynch’s creepy tranced quality made them look more like illustrations from the
Kama-Sutra
)

¹¹
(And as an aside, but a true aside, I’ll add that I have had since 1986 a personal rule w/r/t dating, which is that any date where I go to a female’s residence to pick her up and have any kind of conversation with parents or roommates that’s an even remotely Lynchian conversation is automatically the only date I ever have with that female, regardless of her appeal in other areas. And that this rule, developed after seeing
Blue Velvet
, has served me remarkably well and kept me out of all kinds of hair-raising entanglements and jams, and that friends to whom Tve promulgated the rule but who have willfully ignored it and have continued dating females with clear elements of Lynchianism in their characters or associations have done so to their regret.)

¹²
Lynch’s influence extends into mainstream Hollywood movies, too, by the way. The surfeit of dark dense machinery, sudden gouts of vented steam, ambient industrial sounds, etc., in Lynch’s early stuff has clearly affected James Cameron and Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam has taken to the limit Lynch’s preoccupation with blatantly Freudian fantasies (
Brazil
) and interpenetrations of ancient myth and modern psychoses (
The Fisher King)
.

And across the spectrum, in the world of caviar-for-the-general art films, one has only to look at Atom Egoyan or Guy Maddin’s abstruse, mood-lit, slow-moving angst-fests, or at the Frenchman Arnaud DesPlechin’s 1992
La Sentinelle
(which the director describes as “a brooding, intuitive study in split consciousness” and which is actually about a disassociated med-student’s relationship with a severed head), or actually at just about anything recent that’s directed by a French male under 35, to see Lynch’s sensibility stamped like an exergue on art cinema’s hot young Turks, too.

¹³
(This isn’t counting
Dune
, which was in the dreadful position of looking like it wanted to have one but not in fact having one.)

¹⁴
I know I’m not putting this well; it seems too complicated to be put well. It has something to do with the fact that some movies are too scary or intense for younger viewers: a little kid, whose psychic defenses aren’t yet developed, can be terribly frightened by a horror movie that you or I would regard as cheesy and dumb.

¹⁵
The way
Lost Highway
makes the idea of head-entry literal is not an accident.

¹⁶
(Premiere
magazine puts its writers in extremely snazzy hotels, by the way. I strongly doubt all hotels in LA are like this.)

¹⁷
I know things like this sound like a cheap gag, but I swear I’m serious. The incongruous realism of cheap gags is what made the whole thing Lynchian.

¹⁸
Mary Sweeney is one of
Lost Highway
’s three producers. Her main responsibilities seem to be the daily rushes and the rough cut and its storage and organization. She was Lynch’s editor on
Fire Walk with Me
.

¹⁹
(One
Lost Highway
crewperson described Scott Cameron as “the Mozart of stress,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.)

²⁰
(not “Third Assistant,” for some firmly established reason)

²¹
( = Robert Loggia)

²²
( = Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all mashed together and then emptied of some vital essence. He’s not particularly tall, but he looks tall in
Lost Highway
’s footage because he has extremely poor posture and David Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest
Lord of the Flies
, in which he was bland and essenceless but not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected as a homeless kid in
Where the Day Takes You
(like how does a homeless kid manage to have fresh mousse in his hair every day?) and really good in a surly bit part in
Mr. Holland’s Opus
.

To be frank, it’s almost impossible for me to separate predictions about how good Balthazar Getty’s going to be in
Lost Highway
from my impressions of him as a human being around the set, which latter impressions were so uniformly negative that it’s probably better not to say too much about it. For just one thing, he’d annoy hell out of everybody between takes by running around trying to borrow everybody’s cellular phone for an “emergency.” I’ll confess that I eavesdropped on some of his emergency cellular phone conversations, and in one of them he said to somebody “But what did she say about
me?
” three times in a row. For another thing, he was a heavy smoker but never had his own cigarettes and was always bumming cigarettes from crewpeople who you could tell were making about 1% of what he was making on this movie. I admit that none of these are exactly capital offenses, but they added up. Getty also suffered from comparison with his stand-in, who was apparently his friend and who always stood right near him, wearing an identical auto-shop jumpsuit with “
Pete
” sewn in cursive on the breast and an identically gruesome ersatz carbuncle on his forehead, and who was laid back and cool and very funny—e.g. when I expressed surprise that so much time on a movie set was spent standing around waiting with nothing to do, Balthazar Getty’s stand-in was the one who said “We actually work for free; it’s the waiting around we get paid for,” which maybe you had to be there but in the context of the mind-shattering boredom of standing around the set all day seemed incredibly funny.