A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (33 page)

Lost Highway
will also, I predict, do huge things for the career of Mr. Robert Blake,
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who’s been cast seemingly out of nowhere here as The Mystery Man. The choice of Blake shows in Lynch the same sort of genius
for spotting villain-potential that led to his casting Hopper as Frank Booth in
Blue Velvet
and Willem DaFoe as Bobby Peru in
Wild at Heart
, an ability to detect and resurrect menacing depths in actors who seemed long ago to have lost any depths they’d ever had.
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Gone, in
Lost Highway
, is the sensitive tough-guy of
Baretta
and the excruciating self-parody of Blake’s stoned appearances on
The Tonight Show
; it’s like Lynch has somehow reawakened the venomous charisma that made Blake’s 1967 performance in
In Cold Blood
such a sphincter-loosener. Blake’s Mystery Man is less over-the-top than was Frank Booth: The M.M. is himself velvety, almost
effete, more reminiscent of Dean Stockwell’s horrific cameo than of Hopper’s tour de force. Blake is also here virtually unrecognizable
as the steroidic cop who said things like “Dat’s the name of dat tune” on ’70s TV. Lynch has him many pounds lighter, hair
shorn, creamed and powdered to a scotophilic pallor that makes him look both ravaged and Satanic—Blake here looks like a cross
between the Klaus Kinski of
Nosferatu
and Ray Walston on some monstrous dose of PCP.

The most controversial bit of casting in
Lost Highway
is going to be Richard Pryor as Balthazar Getty’s boss at the auto shop. Meaning Richard Pryor as in the Richard Pryor who’s
got the multiple sclerosis that’s stripped him of 75 pounds and affects his speech and causes his eyes to bulge and makes
him seem like a cruel child’s parody of a damaged person. In
Lost Highway
, Richard Pryor’s infirmity is meant to be grotesque and to jar against all our old memories of the “real” Pryor. Pryor’s
scenes are the parts of
Lost Highway
where I like David Lynch least: Pryor’s painful to watch, and not painful in a good way or a way that has anything to do
with the business of the movie, and I can’t help thinking that Lynch is exploiting Pryor the same way John Waters likes to
exploit Patricia Hearst, i.e. letting the actor think he’s been hired to act when he’s really been hired to be a spectacle,
an arch joke for the audience to congratulate themselves on getting. And yet at the same time Pryor’s symbolically perfect
in this movie, in a way: the dissonance between the palsied husk on-screen and the vibrant man in our memory means that what
we see in
Lost Highway
both is and is not the “real” Richard Pryor. His casting is thematically intriguing, then, but coldly, meanly so, and watching
his scenes I again felt that I admired Lynch as an artist and from a distance but would have no wish to hang out in his trailer
or be his friend.

Except now for Richard Pryor, has there ever been even like
one
black person in a David Lynch movie?
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There’ve been plenty of dwarves and amputees and spastics and psychotics, but have there been any other, more shall we say
culturally significant minorities? Latins? Hasidim? Gay people?
³⁶
Asian-Americans?… There was that sultry oriental sawmill owner in
Twin Peaks
, but her ethnicity was, to say the least, overshadowed by her sultriness.
³⁷

I.e. why are Lynch’s movies all so
white?

The likely answer involves the fact that Lynch’s movies are essentially apolitical. Let’s face it: get white people and black
people together on the screen and there’s going to be an automatic political voltage. Ethnic and cultural and political tensions.
And Lynch’s films are in no way about ethnic or cultural or political tensions. The films are all about tensions, but these
tensions are always in and between individuals. There are, in Lynch’s movies, no real groups or associations. There are sometimes
alliances, but these are alliances based on shared obsessions. Lynch’s characters are essentially alone (Alone): they’re alienated
from pretty much everything except the particular obsessions they’ve developed to help ease their alienation (… or is their
alienation in fact a consequence of their obsessions? and does Lynch really hold an obsession or fantasy or fetish to be any
kind of true anodyne for human alienation? does the average fetishist have any kind of actual
relationship
with the fetish?) Anyway,
this
kind of stuff is Lynch’s movies’ only real politics, viz. the primal politics of Self/Exterior and Id/Object. It’s a politics
all about religions, darknesses, but for Lynch these have nothing to do with testaments or skin.

Patricia Arquette owns a brand-new maroon Porsche, which Porsche must be very special to her because she seems to be in the
freaking thing all the time, even driving it the 200 feet between her trailer and the set in Griffith Park, so that the crew
always has to move carts full of equipment out of the way to let her pass, yelling at one another to be careful of Patricia
Arquette’s beautiful car’s paint job. Plus Arquette always has her stand-in with her in the car—they’re apparently close friends
and go everyplace together in the maroon Porsche, from a distance looking eerily identical. Patricia Arquette’s husband is
Mr. Nicolas Cage, who worked with Lynch on both
Wild at Heart
and the video of
Industrial Symphony #1
.

“The question for Bill and Balthazar is what kind of woman-hater is Fred [-dash-Pete]? Is he the kind of woman-hater who goes
out with a woman and fucks her and then never calls her again, or is he the kind who goes out with a woman and fucks her and
then kills her? And the real question to explore is: how different are these kinds?”

If you will keep in mind the outrageous kinds of moral manipulation we suffer at the hands of most contemporary directors,
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it will be easier to convince you that something in Lynch’s own clinically detached filmmaking is not only refreshing but
redemptive. It’s not that Lynch is somehow “above” being manipulative; it’s more like he’s just not interested. Lynch’s movies
are about images and stories in his head that he wants to see made external and complexly real. (His most illuminating statement
about the making of
Eraserhead
involves “the exhilaration he felt standing in the set of Mr. and Mrs. X’s apartment and realizing that what he had pictured
in his mind had been exactly recreated”).

It’s already been observed that Lynch brings to his art the sensibility of a very bright child immersed in the minutiae of
his own fantasies. This kind of approach has disadvantages: his films are not especially sophisticated or intelligent; there
is little critical judgment or quality-control-type checks on ideas that do not work; things tend to be hit-or-miss. Plus
the films are, like a fantasy-prone little kid, self-involved to an extent that’s pretty much solipsistic. Hence their coldness.
³⁹

But part of the involution and coldness derives from the fact that David Lynch seems truly to possess the capacity for detachment
from response that most artists only pay lip-service to: he does pretty much what he wants and appears not to give much of
a shit whether you like it or even
get
it. His loyalties are fierce and passionate and almost entirely to himself.

I don’t mean to make it sound like this kind of thing is wholly good or that Lynch is some kind of paragon of integrity. His
passionate inwardness is refreshingly childlike, but I notice that very few of us choose to make small children our friends.
And as for Lynch’s serene detachment from people’s response, I’ve noticed that, while I can’t help but respect and sort of
envy the moral nerve of people who truly do not care what others think of them, people like this also make me nervous, and
I tend to do my admiring from a safe distance. On (again) the other hand, though, we need to acknowledge that in this age
of Hollywood “message” films and focus-group screenings and pernicious Nielsenism—Cinema By Referendum, where we vote with
our entertainment-dollar either for spectacular effects to make us feel something or for lalations of moral clichés that let
us remain comfortable in our numbness—Lynch’s rather sociopathic lack of interest in our approval seems refreshing/redemptive
(if also creepy).

Asymmetrical Productions’ headquarters is, as mentioned, the house next door to Lynch’s house. It really is a house. In the
yard outside the door are a department store swingset and a Big Wheel on its side. I don’t think anybody really lives there;
I think it gets treated as an annex to Lynch’s own house and that Lynch’s children’s play spills over. You enter A.P.HQ through
a sliding glass door into what is the house’s kitchen, with a Mannington tile floor and a dishwasher and a fridge with witty
magnets on it, plus there’s a kitchen table where a college-age kid is sitting working diligently at a laptop, and at first
it all looks like some ur-domestic scene of a college kid home at his folks’ house for the weekend or something, except when
you come closer you start to notice that the kid’s got a scary haircut and a serious facial tic, and what he’s doing on the
laptop is cueing a still-frame shot of the brunette Patricia Arquette’s mutilated corpse against some set of coded specs on
a clipboard that’s propped against his Boynton mug of coffee. It’s unclear who the kid is or just what he’s doing or whether
he even gets paid to do it.
⁴⁰

As in much of the Hollywood Hills, Asymmetrical’s street is more like a canyon, and people’s yards are 80° slopes with ice-plant
lawns, and the HQ’s entry/kitchen is actually on the house’s top level, so that if you want access to the rest of the house
you have to go down a vertiginous spiral staircase. This and various other stuff satisfies reasonable expectations of Lynchianism
w/r/t the director’s working environment. The HQ’s bathroom’s Cold knob doesn’t work and the toilet seat won’t stay up, but
on the wall next to the toilet is an incredibly advanced and expensive Panasonic XDP phone with what looks like a fax device
attached. Asymmetricale receptionist, Jennifer, a statutorily young female who’d be gorgeous if she didn’t have Nosferatic
eyeshadow and cadet-blue nail polish on, blinks so slowly you have to think she’s putting you on, and she declines to say
for the record what music she’s listening to on her headphones, and on her desk next to the computer and phones is one copy
of Deleuze and Guittarri’s
Anti-Oedipus
and one copy each of
Us
and
Wrestling World
. Lynch’s own office—way below ground, so that its windows must look out on solid earth—has a big solid gray door that’s closed
and looks not only locked but somehow
armed
, such that only a fool would try the knob, but attached to the wall right outside the office door are two steel boxes labeled
OUT and IN. The OUT box is empty, and the IN contains, in descending order: a 5,000-count box of Swingline-brand staples;
a large promotional envelope, with Dick Clark’s and Ed McMahon’s pointillist faces on it, from the Publisher’s Clearinghouse
Sweepstakes, addressed directly to Lynch at Asymmetrical’s address; and a fresh shrink-wrapped copy of Jack Nicklaus’s instructional
video
Golf My Way
. Your guess here is as good as mine.

Premieres
industry juice (plus the niceness of Mary Sweeney) means that I am allowed to view a lot of
Lost Highway
’s rough-cut footage in the actual Asymmetrical Productions editing room, where the movie itself is going to be edited. The
editing room is off the kitchen and living room on the house’s top level, and it clearly used to be either the master bedroom
or a really ambitious study. It has gray steel shelves filled with complexly coded canisters of
Lost Highway
’s exposed film. One wall is covered with rows of index cards listing each scene of
Lost Highway
and detailing technical stuff about it. There are also two separate KEM-brand flatbed viewing and editing machines, each
with its own monitor and twin reel-to-reel devices for cueing up both film and sound. I am actually allowed to pull up a padded
desk chair and sit there right in front of one of the KEMs’s monitor while an assistant editor loads various bits of footage.
The chair is old and much-used, its padded seat beaten over what has clearly been thousands of hours into the form-fitting
mold of a bottom, a bottom quite a lot larger than mine—the bottom, in fact, of a combination workaholic and inveterate milkshake-drinker—and
for an epiphanic moment I’m convinced I’m sitting in Mr. David Lynch’s own personal film-editing chair.

The editing room is dark, understandably, its windows first blacked out and then covered with large Abstract Expressionist
paintings. These paintings, in which the color black predominates, are by David Lynch, and with all due respect are not very
interesting, somehow both derivative-seeming and amateurish, like stuff you could imagine Francis Bacon doing in jr. high.
⁴¹

Far more interesting are some paintings by David Lynch’s ex-wife that are stacked canted against the wall of Mary Sweeney’s
office downstairs. It’s unclear whether Lynch owns them or has borrowed them from his ex-wife or what, but in
Lost Highways
first act, three of these paintings are on the wall above the couch where Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette sit watching
creepy invasive videos of themselves asleep. This is just one of David Lynch’s little personal flourishes in the movie. The
most interesting of the paintings, done in bright primaries with a blunt blocky style that’s oddly affecting, is of a lady
in a tank-top sitting at a table reading a note from her child. Superimposed above this scene in the painting is the text
of the note, on what is rendered as wide-rule notebook paper and in a small child’s hand, w/ reversed e’s and so on: