When I first saw Lost Highway in 1997 it seemed to crystalize my love of David Lynch films and a new understanding of narrative and ambiguity that still defines a cinematic ideal for me. In my neck of the woods there was one screening of the film, as I remember, for one week at 9:30pm, and after that there was no more Lost Highway. After two spellbinding hours I remember turning to my partner and saying "this had better end now, or another two hours from now," and I wasn't entirely sure which it would be.
Seeing Lost Highway again at The David Lynch Retrospective (The Return) this past April at the Music Box in Chicago, presented in a beautiful print with an audience of Lynch enthusiasts, was a much-needed communal balm. Over the last couple of years, my partner and I have revisited Wild at Heart and Mullholland Drive as a result of the increased volume of double-features and mini-at-home-festivals brought on by pandemic life, but the Music Box retrospective was a reminder that the cinema is where Lynch films live. As with the late-Kubrick retrospective that the Box did a few years back, the experience of watching with an audience of devotees has a simultaneous reverence and strangeness--in other words, there are few disruptions and general focused attention, but always the likelihood that someone will cackle maniacally or a bit excessively at some inexplicable moment (during the Kubrick retrospective, the guy who found Eyes Wide Shut way too funny). And, sure, a little strangeness is more than welcome at a Lynch retrospective, and while I was only able to see three full screenings--Dune, Eraserhead, and Lost Highway--it felt like the perfect cross-section of Lynch's work, and each one of these films held new discoveries for me.
Lynch's works are definitely high on the list of films most suited for a retrospective because of their seeming ability to shift in what they reveal, both indelible and unforgettable in their initial impact, and never quite the same when you return to them. For someone with such a distinct directorial signature, each film I caught at the retrospective struck me as a point of evolution in relation to the parameters of the specific project, and I think the case could be made that it's Lynch's nature to evolve from film to film. Dune has received endless comparisons recently in light of the recent Denis Villeneuve adaptation, but I'm less interested in speaking to that than the power the film has retained since my only other look at it theatrically, when I was around 12. Not only is the film as thrilling as it was then, it's richness of design is far more present for me, as is it's overall relationship to all the Lynch output since then. Dune feels a piece with Lynch's visual aesthetic in a few ways, especially in the quality of the special effects, which will no doubt be wrongly perceived by new viewers as looking dated, but, in fact, are entirely in line with Lynch's stylistic choices in regards to effects. Most recently, you need only look at Twin Peaks: The Return to see a similar two-dimensional play with effects, often taking on the feeling of cut-and-paste collage, an aesthetic that also runs through Lynch's sensibility as a painter. For a film that is considered by some to be the least Lynch-like due to the misleading reputation it has for being a big budget sell-out, this screening was a reminder that Dune could only be the product of Lynch's vision, and is one of the more grand expressions of that vision, even if the film carries with it significant flaws or cracks in the overall construction that threaten to bring the whole thing crashing down. In fact, Dune is one of those rare films whose flawed construction only make it more fascinating, and whose risky choices still set it apart from most big budget science fiction, particularly in the diffuse quality of the voice-over narration and wonderfully excessive design elements. The relentless way in which some incredible, often expensive-looking bit of costume or set design is present even in brief transitional scenes brought to mind the glorious and grotesque design excesses of von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress. Like von Sternberg, Lynch's vision is singular, and even though he has expressed in the press how displeased he is with Dune, it remains one of the few times we have seen such a vision supported by that level of finance and creative freedom.
Eraserhead is the first feature-length film by David Lynch, a project grown from a body of short films that followed an aspiration in line with many of the great experimental filmmakers: to make paintings that move. Eraserhead still feels more in line with the shorts that precede it, which are all bound more tightly to Lynch's work as a painter/sculptor/builder and liver of the "art life": Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), 1967; The Alphabet, 1968; The Grandmother, 1970; The Amputee, 1974. At the same time, Lynch has recently returned to films that carry that same painterly aesthetic with short works like Fire (Pozar) and The Adventures of Alan R., both from 2020, available for viewing alongside his daily video output on the David Lynch Theatre youtube channel. While Lynch's artistic signature emerges in various ways that resonate across decades of work, Eraserhead might be my favorite of his films for the way we see Lynch's cinematic voice emerging with such ecstatic visual and sonic energy. The particular vibe of Eraserhead is unrepeatable, as it carries with it the special quality of something hand-made out of creative necessity, which likely fueled it's reputation as the progenitor of the midnight movie phenomenon. Lynch famously had great difficulty with putting all the design and performance elements of Eraserhead in place, an ongoing project that filmed over a span of years, and somehow still manages to feel so controlled and confined, and still plays like an hysterical dream from inside one of Lynch's sculpted paintings.
One insightful look into the production woes and unique experience of making Eraserhead was the truly special Q&A after the retrospective screening with Charlotte Stewart who plays Mary in the film, and regaled us with truly charming tales of shooting TV westerns like Bonanza and Gunsmoke, drinking with Jim Morrison, and running back and forth from the set of Eraserhead to the set of Little House on the Prairie. Stewart has lived an actor's life, but, as she reminded us, is not someone who ever gets recognized, which made the uproarious an adoring reception she received at the Music Box all the more special.
Lost Highway is Lynch in the late 90's, and I've always felt like Mullholland Drive a few years later somewhat overshadowed this quintessential work. The film has always read to me as the most visually representative of Lynch's approach to narrative and mystery. Lost Highway has the most effective use of space in all of Lynch films, whether it be the negative space of the walls in Fred and Renee's muted apartment, alternately appearing to be a place unfamiliar to Fred as he disappears and reappears from it's dark passages, or the dark of the road that stretches out ahead, divided only by the yellow line relentlessly rushing forward like a deranged film strip. Lost Highway is a deranged noir, as sexy and violent as Lynch as ever been, with the fearless performance of Patricia Arquette at it's smoldering center, and maybe one of the most bizarre collection of actors he's ever assembled (which is saying something), featuring an unforgettable Robert Loggia as a reincarnation of Lynch's evil archetype Frank Booth, and a supporting cast that includes Jack Nance, Gary Busey, Henry Rollins, Jack Kehler, Giovanni Ribisi, Marilyn Manson, Richard Pryor, and Robert Blake. At the center of it all is the two-headed monster portrayed by Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty, who both seem to understand how much the language of the script--written by Lynch and collaborator Barry Gifford, who also penned Wild at Heart and two episodes of Hotel Room--should be less spoken than seethed like exhaust. Another primary character in the film is the looming specter of experimental pioneer Maya Deren, who, like Blake's Mystery Man, appears and disappears throughout the film, in the landscape and imagery surrounding the Madison's home, and in the splintering of characters that echoes her films Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land.
To be honest, my 1997 experience with Lost Highway was not entirely regained at the retrospective, but that pursuit is a foolish one, of course, and the way the audience experience rejuvenated the film in 2022 made up for the way in which the chaos of it all might wear a bit thin by film's end. And of course, it's that particular, chaotic pitch that is Lynch's ideal, and Lost Highway still feels like a film in search of a rare audience in terms of how far down the road it asks you to travel. That road is still dark and mysterious, and not for everyone.
Inland Empire is not a film I expected to see re-released, and it's even lower on the list of Lynch films I thought would receive a restoration. Back in 2006 I attended a conference at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa on "Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain" featuring Lynch, physicist John Hagelin, and pop icon Donovan. My students and I were fortunate enough to spend a somewhat private hour with Lynch to discuss his work and ask any questions, which was a huge honor, but in the intervening years it's been interesting to piece together how he talked about feeling liberated creatively by digital video and about the low resolution quality of the Sony cameras he had been shooting with, only to later realize that he was talking about what would become Inland Empire. It was because of how enamored Lynch was then of that "lo-res" digital patina that I was struck by how fully he's embraced the recent restoration. It probably speaks to my misunderstanding of restoration more than anything, but wasn't the point for Inland Empire to wear it's digital brush strokes with pride, so to speak? Wouldn't restoring it compromise the desired look? Here's Lynch speaking to the film's new print:
"So because we were shooting with the Sony PD150 it was low-res, then it was up-ressed with that day’s technology, and now things have progressed—we’ve got this AI thing going towards it with algorithms, or whatever they use—and lo and behold: I saw now this… ๐๐๐๐กโ coming. ๐ต๐๐๐ข๐ก๐ฆ coming. Deeper colors. More focus. Richer look. It was a ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐. It was so beautiful. And then in sound, these new technologies for cleaning dialogue. Both those things were utilized for this restoration. So it is a ๐๐ข๐โ ๐๐๐ก๐ก๐๐ Inland Empire because of this modern technology, but it’s the ๐ ๐๐๐ in another way. Same ideas and being true to the same ideas.”
Again, Lynch is nothing if not continually evolving, continually embracing new possibilities and technologies, and there may be no better reminder of that than Inland Empire. I was able to see the new restoration a few weeks after the Music Box retrospective, and, in Lynch's terms, it really was "so beautiful." While this is the first time I was able to see Inland Empire in the cinema, the film does look richer, and as a contrast to the potential at-home experience, the unbroken, solid 3-hour running time is definitely most effective digested as a whole. If you are a fan of what he was doing with the construction of Twin Peaks: The Return, especially, a revisit to Inland Empire is essential in following Lynch's technique across projects. The film earns it's reputation as, perhaps, the most difficult of Lynch's work, but this has to be understood with the way in which his creative process was evolving in relation to the quick shooting and ease of movement the digital medium allowed him. Instead of taking time to build a script around a central idea, Lynch and his crew built scenes as they came, often shooting very quickly, with probably the most genuinely Surrealist disregard for narrative cohesion that Lynch has ever embraced. I realize that many see all of Lynch's work as a full-on disregard for narrative cohesion, and it is, but Inland Empire is undeniably on another level in this regard, even splicing in his earlier short film Rabbits as part of the overall "story." It's not difficult to imagine Rabbits as part of a Cabaret Voltaire program, circa 1916, and one way to read the shadowy, labyrinthian, Hollywood studio vortex of Inland Empire is in kinship with the anti-art impulses of those Dada and Surrealist movements re-born as an aggressive screed against a whorey industry (perfectly punctuated by Lynch's nomination campaign for Laura Dern via a large sign and a cow). But, it may be surrealist impulse that most hinders Inland Empire in the end, literally. The credit sequence, which fulfilled Lynch's desire to introduce a monkey, a one-legged person, and a man sawing a log, all filmed along with some newly introduced dancers mouthing the words to Nina Simone's "Sinnerman," is maybe my least favorite moment in all of Lynch's work. It might be my personal affinity for that particular Simone track, but the whole scene is poorly calibrated beyond doing a disservice to that great piece of music, though I guess it's easy enough to opt out of the credit sequence should I visit Inland Empire again, especially since the three hours that precede have become more captivating with each viewing.
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