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.
In a strange way, though, Dune actually ended up being Lynch’s “big break” as a filmmaker. The version of Dune that finally appeared in the theaters was by all reliable reports heartbreaking for him, the kind of debacle that in myths about Innocent, Idealistic Artists In The Maw Of The Hollywood Process signals the violent end of the artist’s Innocence — seduced, overwhelmed, fucked over, left to take the public heat and the mogul’s wrath. The experience could easily have turned Lynch into an embittered hack (though probably a rich hack), doing f/x-intensive gorefests for commercial studios. 6 Or it could have sent him scurrying to the safety of academe, making obscure plotless l6mm.’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd. The experience did neither. Lynch both hung in and, on some level, gave up. Dune convinced him of something that all the really interesting independent filmmakers — Campion, the Coens, Jarmusch, Jaglom — seem to steer by. “The experience taught me a valuable lesson,” he told an interviewer years later. “I learned I would rather not make a film than make one where I don’t have final cut.”
And this, in an almost Lynchianly weird way, is what led to Blue Velvet. BV’s development had been one part of the deal under which Lynch had agreed to do Dune, and the latter’s huge splat caused two years of rather chilly relations between Dino & Dave while the latter complained about the final cut of Dune and wrote BV’s script and the former wrath-fully clutched his head and the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group’s accountants did the postmortem on a $40,000,000 stillbirth. Then, sort of out of nowhere, De Laurentiis offered Lynch a deal for making BV, a very unusual sort of arrangement that I’ll bet anything was inspired by Lynch’s bitching over Dunes final cut and De Laurentiis’s being amused and pissed off about that bitching. For Blue Velvet, De Laurentiis offered Lynch a tiny budget and an absurdly low directorial fee, but 100 % control over the film. It seems clear that the offer was a kind of punitive bluff on the mogul’s part, a kind of Be-Careful-What-You-Publicly-Pray-For thing. History unfortunately hasn’t recorded what De Laurentiis’s reaction was when Lynch jumped at the deal. It seems that Lynch’s Innocent Idealism had survived Dune, and that he cared less about money and production budgets than about regaining control of the fantasy. Lynch not only wrote and directed Blue Velvet, he cast it, 7 edited it, even cowrote the original music with Badalamenti. The sound and cinematography were done by Lynch’s cronies Alan Splet and Frederick Elmes. Blue Velvet was, again, in its visual intimacy and sure touch, a distinctively homemade film (the home being, again, D. Lynch’s skull), and it was a surprise hit, and it remains one of the ’80s’ great U.S. films. And its greatness is a direct result of Lynch’s decision to stay in the Process but to rule in small personal films rather than to serve in large corporate ones. Whether you believe he’s a good auteur or a bad one, his career makes it clear that he is indeed, in the literal Cahiers du Cinema sense, an auteur, willing to make the sorts of sacrifices for creative control that real auteurs have to make — choices that indicate either raging egotism or passionate dedication or a childlike desire to run the whole sandbox, or all three.
trivia tidbit
Like Jim Jarmusch’s, Lynch’s films are immensely popular overseas, especially in France and Japan. It’s not an accident that the financing for Lost Highway is French. It’s primarily because of foreign sales that no Lynch movie has ever lost money (though it took a long time for Dune to clear the red).
6a more specifically — judging by the script and rough-cut footage — what Lost Highway is apparently about
In its rough-cut incarnation, the movie opens in motion, driving, with the kind of frenetic behind-the-wheel perspective we know from Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. It’s a nighttime highway, a minor two-laner, and we’re moving down the middle of the road, the divided centerline flashing strobishly just below our perspective. The sequence is beautifully lit and shot at “half time,” six frames per second, so that it feels like we’re going very fast indeed. 8 Nothing is visible in the headlights; the car seems to be speeding in a void; the shot is thus hyperkinetic and static at the same time. Music is always vitally important to Lynch films, and Lost Highway may break new ground for Lynch because its title song is actually post-’50s; it’s a dreamy David Bowie number called “I’m Deranged.” Away more appropriate theme song for the movie, though, in my opinion, would be the Flaming Lips’ recent “Be My Head,” because get a load of this: