“Let me just say I hope you’re not planning to compromise him or us or the film in any way.”
trivia tidbit
Laura Dern’s soft blond hairstyle as Sandy in Blue Velvet is identical to Charlotte Stewart’s soft blond hairstyle as Mary in Eraserhead.
14 a section that’s a mix of extrapolations from other sections and is impossible to come up with a unified heading for
The word postmodern is admittedly overused, but the incongruity between the peaceful health of his mien and the creepy ambition of his films is something about David Lynch that is resoundingly postmodern. Other postmodern things about him are his speaking voice — which can be described only as sounding like Jimmy Stewart on acid — and the fact that it’s literally impossible to know how seriously to take what he says. This is a genius auteur whose vocabulary in person consists of things like “Okey-doke” and “Marvy” and “Terrif” and “Gee.” After the last car-filming run and then the return to Base Camp, as people are dismantling cameras and bounces and the unbelievably alluring Chesney is putting the afternoon’s unused film under a reflective NASA blanket, Lynch three times in five minutes says “Golly!” Not one of these times does he utter “Golly!” with any evident irony or disingenuity or even the flattened affect of somebody who’s parodying himself. (Let’s also remember that this is a man with every button on his shirt buttoned and highwater pants: it’s like the only thing missing is a pocket protector.) During this same tri-”Golly!” interval, though, about fifty yards down the little hypotenal road the catering trailer’s on Mr. Bill Pullman, who’s sitting in a big canvas director’s chair getting interviewed for his E.P.K., 30 is leaning forward earnestly and saying of David Lynch both: “He’s so truthful — that’s what you build your trust on as an actor, with a director” and: “He’s got this kind of modality to him, the way he speaks, that lets him be very open and honest and at the same time very sly. There’s an irony about the way he speaks.”
Whether Lost Highway is a. smash hit or not, its atmosphere of tranced menace is going to be really good for Bill Pullman’s career. From movies like Sleepless in Seattle and While You Were Sleeping and (ulp) Casper, I formed this view of Pullman the actor as a kind of good and decent but basically ineffectual guy, an edgeless guy; I always thought of him as kind of a watered-down version of the already pretty watery Jeff Daniels. 31 Lost Highway—for which Pullman has either lost weight or done Nautilus or both (he has, at any rate, somehow grown a set of cheekbones), and in which he’s creepy and tormented and plays jagged, haunting jazz saxophone under a supersatured red-and-blue spot, and in which his face contorts in agony over the mutilated corpse of Patricia Arquette and then changes more than once into somebody else’s face — is going to reveal edges and depths in Pullman that I believe will make him a true Star. For the E.P.K. he’s in a tight all-black jazz musician’s costume, and his makeup, already applied for a night scene in a couple hours, gives his face a creepily Reaganesque ruddiness, and while various kinds of crepuscular bugs plague the E.P.K. interviewer and cameraman and sound guy these bugs don’t seem to come anywhere near Pullman, as if he’s already got the aura of genuine stardom around him, the kind you can’t quite define but that even insects can sense — it’s like he’s not even quite there, in his tall chair, or else simultaneously there and somewhere primally else.
Ms. Patricia Arquette has been bad in everything since True Romance without this fact seeming to have hurt her career any. It’s hard to predict how audiences will react to her in Lost Highway. This is a totally new role(s) for her, as far as I can see. Her most credible performances to date have been as ingenues, plucky characters somehow in over their head, whereas in Lost Highway she herself is a part of the over-the-head stuff Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty get plunged into. Lost Highway’s female lead is the kind of languid smoky narrow-eyed Incredibly-Sexy-But-Dangerous- Woman-With-Mindblowing- Secrets noir-type role that in recent years only Body Heats Kathleen Turner and Miller’s Crossings Marcia Gay Harden have pulled off without falling into parody or camp. From the footage I saw, Arquette is OK but not great in Lost Highway. She vamps a lot, which is apparently the closest she can come to Sexy But Dangerous. The big problem is that her eyes are too opaque and her face too set and rigid to allow her to communicate effectively without dialogue, and so a lot of the long smoky silences Lynch requires of her come off stiff and uncomfortable, as if Arquette’s forgotten her lines and is worrying about it. Even so, the truth is that Patricia Arquette is so out-landishly pretty in the film’s rough-cut footage that at the time I didn’t notice a whole lot aside from how she looked, which, seeing as how her Duessa-like character basically functions as an object in the film, seems OK, though I’m still a little uncomfortable saying it. 32
Lost Highway will also, I predict, do huge things for the career of Mr. Robert Blake, 33 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. 34 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.