trivia tidbit: what movie people on location sets call the special trailer that houses the bathrooms
“The Honeywagon.”
3 entertainments David Lynch has created/directed that are mentioned in this article
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).
4 other renaissance-mannish things he’s done
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 ).
5 this article’s special focus or “angle” w/r/t Lost Highway, suggested (not all that subtly) by certain editorial presences at Premiere magazine
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.
6 what Lost Highway is apparently about
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.
7 last bit of (6) used as a segue into a quick sketch of Lynch’s genesis as a heroic auteur
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.”