David Lynch: When Dreams Go Bad
The release date has been put back ad infinitum, but finally it looks as if
David Lynch’s latest film Inland Empire is due for release in Australia
later this month, on the big screen where it very much belongs. While an epic
in lo-fi imagery – Lynch shot the film in grainy video on a much smaller budget
than his previous films – it’s a classic ‘through the rabbit hole’ experience
that we have come to know and love from this eccentric, iconoclastic filmmaker.
In our ever-increasing commercial and conservative cinema environment - where
‘art house’ films like Inland Empire struggle to secure not only distribution
but cinema exhibition - DVD is becoming increasingly important. Not only has
DVD become an archive where films that might otherwise be lost are preserved,
it’s also the way that many of us now discover and access more ‘challenging’
and obscure work by important artists such as David Lynch.
Lynch’s first feature
Eraserhead (1977) took five years to make. It took even longer to come
to home video then DVD. Lynch made it in poverty while at film school.
Eraserhead was one of the pioneering Midnight Movies of the 1970s,
playing for months at a time in the cult late night sessions all around the
world. To this day it remains one of the strangest of the strange movies, a
film about a man trapped in a dead end job, in a dead end marriage, a tiny flat
and an industrial landscape. Renowned for its superb black & white images (by
brilliant cinematographer Freddie Elmes), and stunning atmospheric soundscape
(by the late Alan Splet), Eraserhead is a film that gets into your unconscious
and stays there, never to be quite understood yet never to be forgotten either.
Lynch admits
Eraserhead was partly born from his neuroses and fears surrounding
becoming a parent for the first time. His next film was born from something a
little less complex; a producer’s desire to hire the ‘next big director’. Mel
Brooks had acquired the rights to make
The Elephant Man novel into a movie and had seen
Eraserhead at a late night show. Impressed by Lynch’s artistry and
single-minded vision, Brooks took a punt and hired him to bring John Merrick’s
tough life story to life on the big screen. Lynch brought his nightmare
aesthetic into what could only be described as a kind of nightmarish fairytale
‘biopic’. It was the break Lynch needed – starring
John Hurt,
Anthony Hopkins,
John Gielgud and Brooks’ wife
Anne Bancroft,
The Elephant Man (1980) was recognised with eight Academy Award
nominations including one for Best Director. Lynch was now on the map in
mainstream Hollywood.
But success often comes at a price and it did for Lynch. Uber-producer Dino De
Laurentiis hired Lynch to direct big budget science fiction epic
Dune (1984), a film that Lynch subsequently took his name off after the
picture was taken from him and re-cut without his approval. It also put him off
working inside big-budget Hollywood for life. While Lynch felt compromised –
and the book’s fans revolted against his interpretation of Frank Herbert’s
revered novel – he did forge some key creative partnerships that have continued
over the course of his career, namely with actors
Kyle MacLachlan (who would work with Lynch in
Blue Velvet and TV series
Twin Peaks), Everett McGill (Twin Peaks), and Brad Dourif and Dean
Stockwell, both of whom starred in his next, career-defining film,
Blue Velvet (1986).
The 1980s are widely seen as the nadir decade in American cinema, but its
reputation was saved with films like
Blue Velvet Lynch courageously took on the “American dream” and
resolutely turned it into what it really is/was; the American nightmare. The
‘white picket fence’ had never looked – or sounded – so ominous as it did in
Blue Velvet. Shadowy figures in invade homes, kidnap kids, hold
families to ransom and emotionally torment those who believe in the natural
‘order of things’. Normalcy is reviled, chaos rules and only the most evil
thrive this sordid tale about small town middle America.
But there are heroes too, who valiantly maintain their belief in love,
compassion and the way things are ‘supposed’ to be…
Blue Velvet is a mystery and a love story set inside a horror film.
It’s also an homage to The Wizard Of Oz where Dennis Hopper plays the Wicked
Witch,
Kyle MacLachlan the Good Witch, and Isabella Rossellini ‘Dorothy’. But
in this version of the story no matter how many times Dorothy clicks her
together she’ll never get to go home…
- Megan
Megan Spencer has spent way too much of her life in the dark, all for a good
cause though - watching movies as a professional film critic. For the last six
and a half years she has been serving the ever-increasing hunger for film and
DVD reviews as radio triple j's resident film critic, and a year ago joined the
new line up of long-running SBS-TV film review program, The Movie Show.
Every now and then she pops up into the light to make her own films,
documentaries (her latest is 'Fantastic Brutality', a documentary about an
obsessed wrestling fan, to be released next year). She has also written about
film for many publications including J-Mag, Limelight, Inside Film Magazine and
the Age Green Guide.
And the impossible question to ask a film critic: what's her favourite film?
"Blue Velvet would be at the top of the list, so would Fight Club... But then
again American In Paris makes me cry every time."
Megan has also been part of the Foxtel's Project Greenlight Australia as an
on-air panelist and judge.
