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:
Dear Mom I keep having my fish dream. They bite my face! Tell dad I dont take naps. The fishes are skinny an mad I miss you. His wife makes me eat trouts and anchovys The fishes make nosis they blow bubbels. How are you [unreadable] you fine? don’t forget to lock the doors the fishes [unreadable] me they hate me.
Love form
DANA
In the painting, what’s moving is that the text of the note is superimposed such that parts of the mother’s head obscure the words — those are the “[unreadable]” parts. I do not know whether Lynch has a child named Dana, but considering who the artist is, plus the painting’s child’s evident situation and pain, it seems both deeply moving and sort of sick that Lynch would display this piece on a wall in his movie. Anyway, now you know the text of one of Bill Pullman’s objets, and you can get the same kind of chill I got if you squint hard enough in the movie’s early interior scenes to make the picture out. And you’ll be even more chilled in a later interior scene in Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s house, a post-murder scene, in which the same three paintings hang above the sofa but are now, without any discernible reason or explanation, upside down. The whole thing’s not just creepy but personally creepy.
trivia tidbit
When Eraserhead was a surprise hit at festivals and got a distributor, David Lynch rewrote the cast and crew’s contracts so they would all get a share of the money, which they still do, every fiscal quarter, in perpetuity. Lynch’s A.D. and P.A. and everything else on Eraserhead was Catherine Coulson, who was later the Log Lady on Twin Peaks. Plus Coulson’s son, Thomas, played the little boy who brings Henry’s ablated head into the pencil factory. Lynch’s loyalty to actors and his homemade, co-op-style productions make his oeuvre a veritable pomo-anthill of interfilm connections.
trivia tidbit
It is very hard for a hot director to avoid what Hollywood mental-health specialists term “Tarantino’s Disorder,” which involves the sustained delusion that being a good movie director entails that you will also be a good movie actor. In 1988 Lynch actually starred, with Ms. Isabella Rossellini, in Tina Rathbone’s Zelly and Me, which if you’ve never heard of it you can probably figure out why.
9a the cinematic tradition if s curious that nobody seems to have observed Lynch comes right out of (w/ an epigraph)
It has been said that the admirers of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari are usually painters, or people who think and remember graphically. This is a mistaken conception.
— Paul Rotha, “The German Film”
Since Lynch was originally trained as a painter (an Ab-Exp painter at that), it seems curious that no film critics or scholars 42 have ever treated of his movies’ clear relation to the classical Expressionist cinema tradition of Wiene, Kobe, early Lang, etc. And I am talking here about the very simplest and most straightforward sort of definition of Expressionist, viz. “Using objects and characters not as representations but as transmitters for the director’s own internal impressions and moods.”