A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (27 page)

1992

David Lynch’s
Lost Highway,
written by Lynch and Barry Gifford, featuring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty. Financed by CIBY 2000, France.
©1996 by one Asymmetrical Productions, Lynch’s company, whose offices are right next door to Lynch’s own house in the Hollywood
Hills and whose logo, designed by Lynch, is a very cool graphic that looks like this:

Lost Highway
is set in Los Angeles and the desertish terrain immediately inland from it. Actual shooting goes from December ’95 through
February ’96. Lynch normally runs a Closed Set, with redundant security arrangements and an almost Masonic air of secrecy
around his movies’ productions, but I am allowed onto the
Lost Highway
set on 8–10 January 1996. This is not just because I’m a fanatical Lynch fan from way back, though I did make my pro-Lynch
fanaticism known when the Asymmetrical people were trying to decide whether to let a writer onto the set. The fact is I was
let onto
Lost Highway
’s set because of
Premiere
magazine’s industry juice, and because there’s rather a lot at stake for Lynch and Asymmetrical on this movie (see Section
5), and they probably feel like they can’t afford to indulge their allergy to PR and the Media Machine quite the way they
have in the past.

I have absolutely no idea. I rarely got closer than five feet away from him and never talked to him. One of the minor reasons
Asymmetrical Productions let me onto the set is that I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview
somebody and saw no real point in trying to interview Lynch, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch
emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed while
Lost Highway
was in production, because when he’s shooting a movie he’s incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little
attention or brain-space available for anything other than the movie. This may sound like PR bullshit, but it turns out to
be true—e.g.:

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. I am not kidding.
This is on 8 January in West LA’s Griffith Park, where some of
Lost Highway
’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. Lynch is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the
Base Camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee-drinker, apparently pees
hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take him to run down the Base Camp’s long line
of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first sight of Lynch is only from the
back, and (understandably) from a distance.
Lost Highway
’s cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch’s urinating in public, and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable
way, sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.

“The Honeywagon.”

Eraserhead
(1977),
The Elephant Man
(1980),
Dune
(1984),
Blue Velvet
(1986),
Wild at Heart
(1989), two televised seasons of
Twin Peaks
(1990–92),
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
(1992), and the mercifully ablated TV program
On the Air
(1992).

Has directed music videos for Chris Isaak; has directed the theater-teaser for Michael Jackson’s lavish 30-minute “Dangerous”
video; has directed commercials for Klein’s Obsession, Saint-Laurent’s Opium, Alka-Seltzer, the National Breast Cancer Campaign,
¹
and New York City’s new Garbage Collection Program. Has produced
Into the Night,
an album by Julee Cruise of songs cowritten by Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, songs that include the
Twin Peaks
theme and
Blue Velvet
’s “Mysteries of Love.”
²
Had for a few years a weekly
L.A. Reader
comic strip, “The Angriest Dog in the World.” Has cowritten with Badalamenti (who’s also doing the original music for
Lost Highway) Industrial Symphony
#1, the 1990 video of which features Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern and Julee Cruise and the hieratic dwarf from
Twin Peaks
and topless cheerleaders and a flayed deer, and which sounds pretty much like the title suggests it would—
IS
#
1
was also performed live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1992, to somewhat mixed reviews. Has had a bunch of gallery shows
of his Abstract Expressionist paintings, reviews of which have been rather worse than mixed. Has codirected, with James Signorelli,
1992’s
³
Hotel Room,
a feature-length video of vignettes all set in one certain room of an NYC railroad hotel, a hoary mainstream conceit ripped
off from Neil Simon and sufficiently Lynchianized in
Hotel Room
to be then subsequently rip-offable by Tarantino
et posse
in 1995’s
Four Rooms
. Has published
Images
(Hyperion, 1993, $40.00), a sort of coffee-table book consisting of movie stills, prints of Lynch’s paintings, and some of
Lynch’s art photos (some of which art photos are creepy and moody and sexy and cool and some of which are just photos of spark
plugs and dental equipment and seem kind of dumb
⁴
).

With the smash
Blue Velvety
a Palme d’Or at Cannes for
Wild at Heart,
and then the national phenomenon of
Twin Peaks
’s first season, David Lynch clearly established himself as the U.S.A.’s foremost avant-garde / commercially viable avant-garde
/ “offbeat” director, and for a while there it looked like he might be able single-handedly to broker a new marriage between
art and commerce in U.S. movies, opening formula-frozen Hollywood to some of the eccentricity and vigor of art film.

Then 1992 saw
Twin Peaks
’s unpopular second season, the critical and commercial failure of
Fire Walk with Me,
and the bottomlessly horrid
On the Air,
which was euthanized by ABC after six very long-seeming weeks. This triple whammy had critics racing back to their PC’s to
re-evaluate Lynch’s whole oeuvre. The former subject of a
Time
cover-story in 1990 became the object of a withering ad hominem backlash, stuff like the
LA. Weekly
’s
:
“Hip audiences assume Lynch must be satiric, but nothing could be further [sic] from the truth. He isn’t equipped for critiquing
[
sic
] anything, satirically or otherwise; his work doesn’t pass through any intellectual checkpoints. One reason so many people
say ‘Huh?’ to his on-screen fantasies is that the director himself never does.”

So the obvious “Hollywood Insider”-type question w/r/t
Lost Highway
is whether the movie is going to rehabilitate Lynch’s reputation. This is a legitimately interesting question, although,
given the extreme unpredictability of the sorts of forces that put people on
Time
covers, it’s probably more realistic to shoot for whether
LH ought
to put Lynch back on top of whatever exactly it was he was on top of. For me, though, a more interesting question ended up
being whether David Lynch really gives much of a shit about whether his reputation is rehabilitated or not. The impression
I get from rewatching his movies and from hanging around his latest production is that he doesn’t, much. This attitude—like
Lynch himself, like his work—seems to me to be both admirable and sort of nuts.

According to Lynch’s own blurb on the title page of the script’s circulating copy, it’s

A 21st Century Noir Horror Film

A graphic investigation into parallel identity crises

A world where time is dangerously out of control

A terrifying ride down the lost highway

which is a bit overheated, prose-wise, maybe, but was probably put there as a High-Concept sound-bite for potential distributors
or something. The spiel’s second line is what comes closest to describing
Lost Highway,
though “parallel identity crises” seems like kind of an uptown way of saying the movie is about somebody literally turning
into somebody else. And this, despite the many new and different things about
Lost Highway,
makes the movie almost classically Lynchian—the theme of multiple/ambiguous identity has been almost as much a Lynch trademark
as ominous ambient noises on his soundtracks.

However concerned with fluxes in identity his movies are, David Lynch has remained remarkably himself throughout his filmmaking
career. You could probably argue it either way—that Lynch hasn’t compromised/sold out, or that he hasn’t grown all that much
in twenty years of making movies—but the fact remains that Lynch has held fast to his own intensely personal vision and approach
to filmmaking, and that he’s made significant sacrifices in order to do so. “I mean come on, David could make movies for anybody,”
says Tom Sternberg, one of
Lost Highway
’s producers. “But David’s not part of the Hollywood Process. He makes his own choices about what he wants. He’s an
artist.”

This is essentially true, though like most artists Lynch has not been without patrons. It was on the strength of
Eraserhead
that Mel Brooks’s production company hired Lynch to make
The Elephant Man
in 1980, and that movie earned Lynch an Oscar nomination and was in turn the reason that no less an ur-Hollywood-Process
figure than Diño De Laurentiis picked Lynch to make the film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s
Dune,
offering Lynch not only big money but a development deal for future projects with De Laurentiis’s production company.

1984’s
Dune
is unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch’s career, and it’s pretty darn bad. In some ways it seems that Lynch was miscast
as its director:
Eraserhead
had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast and crew.
Dune,
on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history, and its production staff was the size of a small
Caribbean nation, and the movie involved lavish and cutting-edge special effects (half the fourteen-month shooting schedule
was given over to miniatures and stop-action). Plus Herbert’s novel itself is incredibly long and complex, and so besides
all the headaches of a major commercial production financed by men in Ray-Bans Lynch also had trouble making cinematic sense
of the plot, which even in the novel is convoluted to the point of pain. In short,
Dune
’s direction called for a combination technician and administrator, and Lynch, though as good a technician as anyone in film,
⁵
is more like the type of bright child you sometimes see who’s ingenious at structuring fantasies and gets totally immersed
in them but will let other kids take part in them only if he retains complete imaginative control over the game and its rules
and appurtenances—in short very definitely
not
an administrator.

Watching
Dune
again on video you can see that some of its defects are clearly Lynch’s responsibility, e.g. casting the nerdy and potato-faced
Kyle MacLachlan as an epic hero and the Police’s resoundingly unthespian Sting as a psycho villain, or—worse—trying to provide
plot exposition by having characters’ thoughts audibilized (w/ that slight thinking-out-loud reverb) on the soundtrack while
the camera zooms in on the character making a thinking-face, a cheesy old device that
Saturday Night Live
had already been parodying for years when
Dune
came out. The overall result is a movie that’s funny while it’s trying to be deadly serious, which is as good a definition
of a flop as there is, and
Dune
was indeed a huge, pretentious, incoherent flop. But a good part of the incoherence is the responsibility of De Laurentiis’s
producers, who cut thousands of feet of film out of Lynch’s final print right before the movie’s release, apparently already
smelling disaster and wanting to get the movie down to more like a normal theatrical running-time. Even on video, it’s not
hard to see where a lot of these cuts were made; the movie looks gutted, unintentionally surreal.