Seduction Cinema: DAVID LYNCH

It was a while coming before I'd post here on David Lynch. I think Lynch is just one of those artists who must mean so much to so many that it's hard to say anything new about him, or to articulate exactly what he means if you're really passionate about him. Thankfully, this weekend I came across David Foster Wallace's brilliant Lynch essay in his collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He basically gets at exactly what I think is brilliant about Lynch. He places him in a context of contemporary cinema, where it's easy to underestimate Lynch's broad influence. And he says some very important things about Lynch’s work and irony.

You can find the essay HERE. I am going to start posting what I think are really hot, non-academic, speculative and personal essays on film here on the blog. You can find those in the Links section, and I’ll usually notify you when I put one up.


A few words about that Foster Wallace essay. The most important part of the essay comes when Foster Wallace says that Lynch is a filmmaker who wants to give the viewer an experience, not deliver a point with his cinema. He calls him a "contemporary Expressionist", going on to say that his movies "brought home to us--via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of--that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious, that the unconscious's true medium wasn't verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern or Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true." I thought this was very interesting. Lynch's attention to color, speech rhythms, space, patterns and opposites, light, volume and pitch, sound, and contradictions of character create dissheveled, jarring experiences that aren't always pleasant. His movies seem deliberately intuitive. They're not hard to follow, really. Like any dream--you get swept up and go along for the ride. Lynch's ability to manufacture a world is embedded distinctly in the distinction of his personality. He is so distinctly himself, like so many auteurs, that his cinema seems to be an almost direct translation. When describing INLAND EMPIRE to the press, he said it was about “a woman in trouble”. Sometimes I think that filmmakers should just over-simplify everything and just say, plotwise, what their work is about at the most kindergarten level. It’s a brilliant approach.

Because Lynch notoriously doesn't like to describe his work. He prefers that you just experience it. You can see, for example, in this "Mashed In Plastic" youtube trailer (an upcoming release of his soundtracks, genius collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti), that words can speculate or be signs placed on top of Lynch's work, but can't possibly get at the heart of the idea. Lynch's work takes you into a world. Often his worlds are full of trouble. Lynch's worlds aren't moralistic. They really don't judge. He puts spectators into a position of seduction. Evil is a constant presence and we see why it seduces. Getting into trouble is intoxicating. We see that theme over and over again, with Laura Palmer, Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, and Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive. It's not an Aleister Crowley notion--it's not evil is better, or more true. I think with Lynch, in the simplest sense possible, it's that bad things are intoxicating, rapturous, exciting, and seductive. In a sensuous way. Color and sound seduce. Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive—all follow an unexplained, mysterious bad idea. But the confusion of the idea, it’s good and bad components is necessary. I don’t think Lynch wants to confuse. He wants you to see how good and bad co-exist, how they’re both necessary in cinema. How thrilling they can be. Evil is an important aspect of the imagination. It allows us room to dream.

What You Mess with When You Mess With Star Trek

by Guest Contributor Nathan Schneider


The trailer for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie came out last week. My RSS feed lit up, as they say, like a Christmas tree. No fewer than three Facebook messages arrived to inform me of the fact (from not-trekkie friends who are sympathetic to my plight). "It raped my childhood" was a popular reaction on the blogs. With each day, more trickles out—scene screenings, rumors, interviews, hints. The movie doesn't even open till May. We're given six months to stew in anticipation or dread.

The trailer starts with a young, buck-toothed James Tiberius Kirk on a farm in Iowa. Something's happening. He jumps into a car—yes, a car, as in a 20th century car, when this is supposed to be the future! Rrrg. He tears off in it, chased by a motorcycle cop, and is about to run over a cliff (in Iowa?) when he jumps out and grabs onto the ledge, narrowly escaping doom, etc. Thank goodness at least the cop's motorcycle levitates. After that, a bunch of starship action scenes with young Kirk and young Spock flash before our eyes, and then it's over. Horrible.

Really? What's so wrong about that? Let me try to explain.

More than anything else quite has, Star Trek dictated the way that I see the world. My metaphysics (resplendent science), anthropology (good and frenetically curious at heart), and eschatology (technology will make everything awesome), are all, in the main, Roddenberrian. Gene Roddenberry was the L.A. cop-turned screenwriter who invented the first Star Trek series and midwifed The Next Generation into being just before his passing. That was the one, with Jean-Luc Picard and the helm, that did me in. Specifically, seasons 3 thru 6 1/2.

It hit at a very formative moment, some lucky sweet-spot between 4th and 6th grade, when puberty must have been all in the brain because nothing had happened yet in the body. But as soon as something did happen in the body, I dropped Captain Picard like a dead cat and picked up the more chick-friendly electric guitar. One day, I actually went to Goodwill and gave away every last bit of my hundreds of dollars in merchandise.

Gene "the Great Bird of the Galaxy" Roddenberry died in 1991. By '95, his beatific vision of the future had fallen into total disrepair. At first, I liked that fact that with each passing year there were more space battles and more interspecies wars. But then there started to be money. Picard always said humans were beyond that. The third series, Deep Space Nine wore on, it became clear that they came at the cost of everything good and true, in my book. Two other series, Voyager and Enterprise, stunk. The last full-length picture was the worst movie ever made.

For a time, I was hopeful. A few weeks ago, Abrams was quoted saying, "It was important to me that optimism be cool again." But soon it became clear what that meant. "This is a treatment of Star Trek with action and comedy and romance and adventure, as opposed to a rather talky geekfest." No, thank you. Spoken like a closet Star Wars fan. Confirmed: "[Abrams] was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie 'that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.'"

I had to come to a realization: the brand is a lie. Or the franchise, or the saga, or whatever. Probably they all are.

Let me tell you: I've been to a few Star Trek conventions in my day. Wander through them, and it is plain to see when each person caught the bug. Why? Because they're dressed like a character of whatever period makes them feel warm and fuzzy. '60s Kirk or '80s Kirk? Data or Spock? We're all umbrella-ed under this single Star Trek™ package, but each carrying separate experiences. Now, I want to finally accept that those can never quite come again, whatever the promises of Paramount Pictures or of fan-made episodes.

It's like Spock once said: "If we were to assume these whales as ours to do with as we please, we would be just as guilty as those who caused their extinction." (The whales are our experiences, big as whales, in the aquariums of our lives.)

I can't possess or re-possess what Star Trek has done; it possesses me. I can only let it get worse with equanimity and protect my childhood from the inevitable rapists.

A Sign of the Times: Paul Morrissey’s FLESH

Paul Morrissey’s Flesh starts out with a typical Warholian shot: a prolonged four-minute shot of a beautiful guy sleeping as the radio plays some Wednesday morning surf-agogo tunes. In fact, after the first ten minutes, I had to double-check to see that it wasn’t Warhol who directed it. It’s a movie about a guy, played by the effortlessly talented Joe Dallesandro, who hustles on the streets of Manhattan in order to get by and support him and his wife. This simple scenario, like some Cassavete’s films, allows for Morrissey to shoot a slice-of-life, that’s it. It’s a genius, understated film that, in an unprentious and unassuming way, captures a sense of the times, how people’s attitudes towards modern life were changing in 1968.

On the surface, at first, it almost seems that the film was made by one of Warhol’s factory hipsters, just having fun. It’s choppy, in some places seems unfinished, and has the feel that it was made on-the-spot. Yet Morrissey wasn’t the hipster type. He was one of the only 9-to-5’ers hanging out in Warhol crew during the Factory days. In fact, he was downright conservative. Quoting from Gary Morris’ 1996 featurette on Morrissey in Bright Lights Film Journal:
“Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Morrissey, probably irrelevant to the brilliance of the films, is his political profile. Yes, the maker of Trash, Flesh, and Heat is a right-wing, reactionary, Catholic Republican! Writer Maurice Yacowar has quoted him as follows: "Without institutionalized religion as the basis, a society can't exist. All the sensible values of a solid education and a moral foundation have been flushed down the liberal toilet in order to sell sex, drugs, and rock and roll." Whew! Since it's impossible to reconcile these knuckleheaded views with Morrissey's unique body of work (which could never have been made in the kind of fascist theocracy he seems to desire), I mention it merely for the convenience of completists.”
His devout Catholic religious views might make a film trilogy like Flesh, Trash and Heat almost idiosyncratic. If a film like Flesh doesn’t glamourize a certain on-the-street lifestyle of street hustling and casual and frivolous relationships (it doesn’t), it does seem to be made of someone in the know of that lifestyle—it doesn’t seem to be made by an outsider.

The film is shot in vignettes and spans only a day in hustler Joe’s life. Morrissey shoots it in an amateur style—there’s no carefully set-up shots, it could’ve been shot over the course of a week. The film is edited in a way so that, between shots, there’s a flash. The amateur style of the film almost makes it seem more genuine, more candid. The dialogue is casual, there isn’t much “acting”. It almost seems like Morrissey just wanted to depict a day where a guy goes hustling again for his wife, so she can pay for the abortion of her best friend. In a perfectly original way, the day becomes a web of associations of many people’s attitudes about sex. A scholar, a tranny, a factory girl hipster, a young Ivy league prostitute, a married john—they all have their say.

Films shot in this manner have an edge and a shape that’s truly inspired. Morrissey’s ability to take characters straight out of Warhol’s Factory and let them simply “be” on screen is quite enough. It’s an example of a director standing back and having faith in the selection of his actors. Each person selected for the film would be impossible to be played by anyone else. This is probably because Morrissey set out to shoot something that wasn’t quite fiction and wasn’t quite documentary. Contemporary filmmakers take note: Flesh was a sign of the times.

Cassavetes' FACES

Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) is a raw blow. You watch it, and you see that this is the meaning of indie cinema. Not Miramax nowadays. Not any of the schlock being put out by smaller distribution outlets owned by the Studio Big Five. Cassavetes did it on a dime. His production team was as tight as possible, with no unnecessary baggage. The film has the grit and honesty you find lacking in a lot of American so-called independent works these days. This is a film that’s dealing with people who hurt, and how they deal with their hurt—often impulsively, with sex, booze and emotionally abusing those they love. It is a film where people have trouble saying things. And it demands to be imperfect.

I was impressed by the film’s ruggedness. You don’t care when, in the beginning, during a drunken, seemingly improvised scene between Gena Rowlands and John Marley and a heavily inebriated friend—you don’t care that the dialogue almost seems made up, that the sound is awful, and the location of the recorder keeps changing, that the location of the lights keep changing (important with film). Continuity goes to the crapper. The editing is choppy. Like Dogme filmmakers would explore nearly thirty years later, Cassavetes cuts for the open wound. And laughter. This is, in many ways, a film about the laughing face.


Because a laughing face can conceal it’s pain. Laughter can affirm and laughter can degrade. Laughter, in most cases, with this film, is a mode of forgetting. Cassavetes shoots his characters laughing at parties while they are cheating on their wives, laughing when they are being hurt, laughing when they are almost dead from alcohol poisoning, laughing when they are sick and exhausted and thrown aside by others. It seems like a perfect approach, what any true filmmaker would do. You approach the idea through something as broad as faces laughing, and wrap the brutally simplistic plot around that: man unhappy with his wife goes off to party with his hooker one night, and the wife engages in similar debauchery.

“The hardest thing for a film-maker, or a person like me…is to find people…who really want to do something…They’ve got to work on a project that’s theirs.” Cassavetes once said. His method of production was non-hierarchical, and his stories depended not so much on a narrative with characters that could clearly articulate their emotions, but on the authenticity and complexity of individual emotional expression. Faces rolls with the punches. It gives us people with problems, and it doesn’t strive for any sort of resolution. His interests in human failure, authenticity, and the complexity of love and relationships would in many ways agressively confront the neatly-packaged, well-produced story lines and affairs that still occur in Hollywood films.