A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (56 page)

⁴⁶
( = Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate students who want to write fiction or poetry professionally)

⁴⁷
(I’m hoping now in retrospect this wasn’t something Lynch’s ex-wife did …)

⁴⁸
(e.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Vachaud)

⁴⁹
This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop psychology, might be termed the Unintentional Fallacy.

⁵⁰
(i.e. “in-spired,” = “affected, guided, aroused by divine influence” from the Latin
inspirare
, “breathed into”)

⁵¹
It’s possible to decode Lynch’s fetish for floating/flying entities—witches on broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good Witches, angels dangling overhead—along these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in Wand owl=Darkness in
TP
: the whole point of these animals is that they’re mobile.

⁵²
(with the exception of
Dune
, in which the good and bad guys practically wear color-coded hats—but
Dune
wasn’t really Lynch’s film anyway)

⁵³
This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews of both
Blue Velvet
and
Twin Peaks
.

⁵⁴
(which most admiring critics did—the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch in the
New York Times Magazine
)

⁵⁵
(Not to mention ignoring the fact that Frances Bay, as Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, standing right next to Jeffrey and Sandy at the window and making an icky-face at the robin and saying “Who could eat a bug?” then—as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen the movie like eight times—proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it’s not a bug she puts in her mouth it’s a tidbit sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure Lynch means
something
by having her do it right after she’s criticized the robin for its diet. (Friends I’ve surveyed are evenly split on whether Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this scene—have a look for yourself.) )

⁵⁶
As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying and exciting. This is why the colors are so lush and the
mise en scène
so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited by the scene but because he—like us—is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time.

⁵⁷
(prematurely!)

⁵⁸
I don’t think it’s an accident that of the grad-school friends I first saw
Blue Velvet
with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie—the two who said they felt like either the movie was really sick or they were really sick or both they and the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie’s artistic power but declared that as God was their witness you’d never catch them sitting through
that
particular sickness-fest again—were both male, nor that both singled out Frank’s smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy’s nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying “
You re like
me” as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal moviegoing history.

⁵⁹
Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And the series’ second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode, the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I actually preferred
Twin Peaks
’s second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on
national TV
).

⁶⁰
This is inarguable, axiomatic. In fact what’s striking about most U.S. mystery and suspense and crime and horror films isn’t these films’ escalating violence but their enduring and fanatical allegiance to moral verities that come right out of the nursery: the virtuous heroine will not be serial-killed; the honest cop, who will not know his partner is corrupt until it’s too late to keep the partner from getting the drop on him, will nevertheless somehow turn the tables and kill the partner in a wrenching confrontation; the predator stalking the hero/hero’s family will, no matter how rational and ingenious he’s been in his stalking tactics throughout the film, nevertheless turn into a raging lunatic at the end and will mount a suicidal frontal assault; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. The truth is that a major component of the felt suspense in contemporary U.S. suspense movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and character elements in order to engineer the required massage of our moral certainties. This is why the discomfort we feel at “suspense” movies is perceived as a pleasant discomfort. And this is why, when a filmmaker fails to wrap his product up in the appropriate verity-confirming fashion, we feel not confusion or even offense but anger, a sense of betrayal—we feel that an unspoken but very important covenant has been violated.

⁶¹
(not to mention for being (from various reviews) “overwrought,” “incoherent,” “
too much
”)

¹
Comprising Washington, Montreal, LA, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, New Haven, and Long Island, this is possibly the most grueling part of the Association of Tennis Professionals’ yearly tour, with three-digit temperatures and the cement courts shimmering like Moroccan horizons and everyone wearing a hat and even the spectators carrying sweat towels.

²
Joyce lost that final to Thomas Enqvist, now ranked in the ATP’s top twenty and a potential superstar and in high-profile attendance here at Montreal.

³
Tarango, 27, who completed three years at Stanford, is regarded as something of a scholar by Joyce and the other young Americans on tour. His little bio in the
1995 ATP Player Guide
lists his interests as including “philosophy, creative writing, and bridge,” and his slight build and receding hairline do in fact make him look more like an academic or a tax attorney than a world-class tennis player. Also a native Californian, Tarango’s a friend and something of a mentor to Michael Joyce, whom he practices with regularly and addresses as “Grasshopper.” Joyce—who seems to like pretty much everybody—likes Jeff Tarango and won’t comment on his on-court explosion at Wimbledon except to say that Tarango is “a very intense guy, very intellectual, that gets kind of paranoid sometimes.”

⁴
Title sponsors are as important to ATP tournaments as they are to collegiate bowl games. This year the Canadian Open is officially called the “du Maurier Omnium Ltée.” But everybody still refers to it as the Canadian Open. There are all types and levels of sponsors for big tennis tournaments—the levels of giving and of commensurate reward are somewhat similar to PBS fundraising telethons. Names of sponsors are all over the Canadian Open’s site (with variations in size and placement corresponding to levels of fiscal importance to the tournament), from the big FedEx signs over the practice courts to the RADO trademark on the serve-speed radar display on the show courts. On the scarlet tarp and the box seats all around the Stadium and Grandstand Courts are the names of other corporate sponsors: TANDEM COMPUTERS/APG INC., BELL SYGMA, BANQUE LAURENTIENNE, IMASCO LIMITÉE, EVANS TECHNOLOGIES INC., MOBILIA, BELL CANADA, ARGO STEEL, etc.

⁵
Another way to be a sponsor: supply free stuff to the tournament and put your name on it in really big letters. All the courts’ tall umpire-chairs have a sign that says they’re supplied by TROPICANA; all the bins for fresh and unfresh towels say WAMSUTTA; the drink coolers at courtside (the size of trash barrels, with clear plastic lids) say TROPICANA and EVIAN. The players who don’t individually endorse a certain brand of drink tend as a rule to drink Evian, orange juice being a bit heavy for on-court rehydration.

⁶
Most of the girlfriends have something indefinable about them that suggests extremely wealthy parents whom the girls are trying to piss off by hooking up with an obscure professional tennis player.

⁷
The term “seeding” comes from British horticulture and is pretty straightforward. A player seeded First is expected statistically to win, Second to reach the finals, Third and Fourth the semis, etc. A player who reaches the round his seed designates is said to have “justified his seed,” a term that seems far more rich in implications and entendres. Serious tennis is full of these multisemiotic terms—“love,” “hold” and “break,” “fault,” “let” as a noun, “heat,” “moon,” “spank,” “coming in,” “playing unconscious,” and so on.

⁸
Except for the four Grand Slams, no tournament draws all the top players, although every tournament would obviously like to, since the more top players are entered, the better the paid attendance and the more media exposure the tournament gets for itself and its sponsors. Players ranked in the world’s top twenty or so, though, tend to play a comparatively light schedule of tournaments, taking time off not only for rest and training but to compete in wildly lucrative exhibitions that don’t affect ATP ranking. (We’re talking
wildly
lucrative, like millions of dollars per annum for the top stars.) Given the sharp divergence of interests between tournaments and players, it’s not surprising that there are Kafkanly complex rules for how many ATP tournaments a player must enter each year to avoid financial or ranking-related penalties, and commensurately complex and crafty ways players have for getting around these rules and doing pretty much what they want. These will be passed over. The thing to realize is that players of Michael Joyce’s station tend to take way less time off; they try to play just about every tournament they can squeeze in unless they’re forced by injury or exhaustion to sit out a couple weeks. They play so much because they need to, not just financially but because the ATP’s (very complex) set of algorithms for determining ranking tends to reward players for entering as many tournaments as they can.

And so even though several of the North American hard-court circuit’s tournaments are Super 9’s, a fair number of top players skip them, especially European clay-court players, who hate Deco Turf and tend to stick to their own summer clay-court circuit, which is European and comprises smaller and less lucrative tournaments (like the Dutch Open, which is concurrent with the Canadian and has four of the world’s top twenty entered this year). The clay-courters tend to pay the price for this at the U.S. Open, which is played on hard sizzling Deco Turf courts.

⁹
There is here no qualifying tournament for the Qualies itself, though some particularly huge tournaments have meta-Qualies. The Qualies also have tons of wild-card berths, most of whom here are given to Canadian players, e.g. the collegian that Michael Joyce is beating up on right now in the first round.

¹⁰
These slots are usually placed right near the top seeds, which is the reason why in the televised first rounds of major tournaments you often see Agassi or Sampras smearing some totally obscure guy—that guy’s usually a qualifier. It’s also part of why it’s so hard for somebody low-ranked enough to have to play the Qualies of tournaments to move up in the rankings enough so that he doesn’t have to play Qualies anymore—he usually meets a high-ranked player in the very first round and gets smeared.

¹¹
Which is another reason why qualifiers usually get smeared by the top players they face in the early rounds—the qualifier is playing his fourth or fifth match in three days, while the top players usually have had a couple days with their masseur and creative-visualization consultant to get ready for the first round. If asked, Michael Joyce will detail all these asymmetries and stacked odds the same way a farmer will speak of poor weather, with an absence of emotion that seems deep instead of blank.