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Never Seen It: Mars McKay Watches David Lynch’s Dune

Mars McKay is a Memphis-based, experimental horror filmmaker and the host of Black Lodge’s monthly LBGTv Queer Cinema Night. The avid cinephile had never seen David Lynch’s infamous 1984 adaptation of Dune. We attended a sold-out 40th anniversary screening of the film at Malco Paradiso, then retired to Houston’s bar for cocktails and debriefing. Coincidentally, while we were discussing Dune, we saw Memphis director Craig Brewer, who joined the conversation while he was waiting for his table. 

Mars McKay: Hello, how you Dune?

Chris McCoy: What do you know about Dune, the David Lynch version from 1984? 

MM: I have been trying to avoid everything at all costs! Well, I’m currently reading the book to prepare for Dune and Dune 2

CM: How far along are you in the book? 

MM: I am about halfway through, and according to my friends, I’m about where the first Villeneuve movie ends. The David Lynch, I hear, is very polarizing. When people start talking about it to me, I’m like, Uhuh, no. I want to go in with as unbiased and opinion as I can. So all I know is what I know from reading the book.

CM: What’s your attitude towards David Lynch?

MM: Oh, I love him. Love him. I’m not the biggest fan of Eraserhead, but Mulholland Drive! [makes chef’s kiss gesture] Which, I got my theories about … but I love his work.

137 minutes later …

CM: Okay, Mars. You are now a person who has seen David Lynch’s Dune. What did you think? 

MM: I’m definitely smiling from air to ear right now.

CM: Yes, you are! 

MM: My favorite character, the one I got the most hyped for, was Pug Atreides 

CM: Yes! The Battle Pug!

MM: Battle Pug! 

CM: We’re going to be out there shooting lasers at each other, so let’s take pugs into battle with us!

MM: Pugs can be ferocious! 

CM: And it’s Patrick Stewart who carries the pug into battle!

MM: It was my favorite part of the movie — me and the guy sitting next to me with The Thing t-shirt. He and I were like, “Is that Captain Picard?”

CM: With hair! 

MM: I, of course, was super on board with the presentation, the translation from the book to the movie, through the first half, up until the point where they start developing the relationship between Paul and Chani. After that, I was like, this feels rushed now. I loved it, though!

CM: It feels rushed because it is rushed. Here we are, about 90 minutes in, and we’re just now in the desert, meeting the Fremen, you know?

MM: In the book, that’s like 350 pages. 

CM: Yeah. Because there’s all that world-building. 

MM: Which I love. 

CM: Me too. But I think the real problem with adapting Dune is all the world building. At some point, you’re going to have to explain the thousand-year selective breeding program the Bene Gesserit witches were running to develop the ultimate psychic super-being, the Kwisatz Haderach, to a theater full of over-caffinated 12-year-olds. It’s a super complex narrative that doesn’t adapt easily. 

MM: The white savior narrative, Paul as the messiah, is intentional. The Bene Gesserit went from planet to planet planting those myths. 

CM: They did it on purpose. 

MM: That’s something that was not addressed in the film at all. But it’s so ingrained in Fremen culture, their priesthoods connect. They already have their own Reverend Mother, and when she dies, Lady Jessica just steps in there and takes over. 

CM: It was all a setup by the Bene Gesserit to create their chosen one …

MM: … and then the first thing the Chosen One does is turn on them. 

CM: Right. 

MM: He doesn’t want to do it. 

CM: The real message of Dune is, “‘Don’t have Chosen Ones, they’ll always turn on you.” 

MM: You could say it’s predetermined.

MM: One thing I really didn’t like about the movie was Paul’s sister, Alia the little kid. I haven’t gotten to that part of the book yet, but every scene she was in just made me a little uncomfortable. Like, just something about the way she’s shown.

MM: But overall, I really liked it. The first thing I said to you when it was over was, “I don’t understand why this gets so much hate.” But the last half does feel rushed, kinda cramped. 

CM: I’m reading A Masterpiece in Disarray, which is a book about the making of Dune. Dino De Laurentiis produced it. He got David Lynch on board, and then said, “My daughter, Raffaella, you will produce it!” And she kinda didn’t know what she was doing. 

MM: So, it was the financials. Speaking of David Lynch’s cameo …

CM: That was amazing! I’d never noticed that before! 

MM: I didn’t realize it at first until you were like, “That’s David Lynch!”

CM: He’s the poor guy in the Spice Harvester going, “Hey guys, can you come get us before the worm eats us?” 

MM: He’s got that voice. 

CM: So Lynch, obviously, was not the right guy for the job, but I don’t know that there was a right guy for the job. There’s no way that you remotely do that story justice in two hours. It’s a long movie!

MM: It was two and a half hours. 

CM: At one point it’s like, “For the next two years, there’s this giant war …” Well, that’s usually what we see in movies — stuff that’s important to the plot! 

MM: I liked having Lynch as the director. It’s wild to see him do a space fantasy. I loved the dreamy elements within it, when Paul’s seeing the visions after ingesting spice. The visions are just fantastic. 

CM: That’s David Lynch’s wheelhouse, you know? And there’s a lot of it in the book.

MM: They probably looked at that stuff and said, “Let’s get Lynch!” 

CM: George Lucas tried to get Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi. Can you imagine? 

MM: I don’t think that would have worked at all. 

CM: After he was nominated for Best Director with The Elephant Man, he was a hot commodity around Hollywood for a while. He turned down Jedi because he wanted to do something that wasn’t an established vision, and did this instead.

 MM: The Elephant Man is one of my favorites of his. People go from Eraserhead to Blue Velvet, and I’m like, “Don’t skip Elephant Man!” 

CM: The psychedelia is impeccable. But what this story needed was a good editor, and I’m not talking about a good film editor, I’m talking about a good story editor. And that just wasn’t happening. 

MM: That was my only qualm with it. The pacing at the end where it just felt kind of like doing a visual, as opposed to the way stretched out first half. I was super happy to see that ’cause I’m really loving the book. But seeing that presented and then all of a sudden, the moment the whole stuff with Chani happens, it just felt like it’s trying to squeeze into pants that are too tight. 

CM: She’s the one who draws him into Fremen society, and their whole relationship is nothing. 

MM: Chani is a nothing character, and I hate that because in the book, she’s, immediately depicted as … not aggressive but …

CM: … Assertive.

MM: Assertive and a bit ferocious. But it was the Eighties, and I see a lot of, “We have two attractive leads here, let’s just throw them together.” I also felt like the way Lady Jessica’s presented is not nearly as freaking badass as she is in the book. If I met her in real life, I would be terrified. The Bene Gesserit, I envision them as very intense and intimidating. 

CM: You know who was great, though? Stilgar. Javier Bardem plays him in Villeneuve Dune, and he’s fine, but Lynch’s guy [Everett McGill], he is the bomb. His voice is just perfect when he says “Usul” and “Maud’Dib.” 

MM: Yeah, but when he’s first introduced, he goes, “I’m Stilgar,” and then he does that weird coughing thing. I was trying hard not to laugh. 

MM: The moment I saw Kyle MacLachlan as Paul, especially with the early, young, 15-year-old Paul, I was like, yeah, this is him. He’s so boyish, I even wondered, how long did it take to film this? Because he looks older by the end of it. He looks more distinguished.

CM: It was such hell to film, I think, that everybody like looked older by the time it was over.

Around this time, Craig and Jodi Brewer showed up in Houston’s bar. They joined the conversation with us as they waited for their table. 

Craig Brewer: Have you ever seen the David Lynch Dune? 1984? 

Jodi Brewer: I don’t think I have. I’ve probably seen clips. 

CB: Sting’s in it. 

MM: I’m not gonna lie. Sting’s hot. He’s got tiny nipples, but he’s hot. 

CM: It’s like prime, Police-era, yoga-body Sting. He’s nearly-naked, and has a knife fight with Kyle MacLachlan. 

JB: That’s hot. 

CB: So hot. 

CM: Mars, would you recommend people watch David Lynch’s Dune

MM: Absolutely. But I think you should temper your expectations. I think a lot of people are very excited about the Villenueve version coming up. But my recommendation would be doing what I’m doing, and reading the book first 

CM: Honestly, it made more sense to you because you’re reading it. If you didn’t have that background, some of it would just be noise to you. 

MM: That’s why I say read the book. I do think that, the only frustrating element was, if I had not read the book, I would be lost. I feel like I’m just pushing the book now, but …

CB: It’s great! The book is amazing! It was one of my father’s favorites.

MM: The book made me appreciate the movie so much more. And so I am very excited about the Villenueve version.

CM: He really sticks closer to the book, and he can stretch out and tell the story. 

CB: I hope he sticks the landing. 

CM: The Lynch Dune is like a beautiful mess. When Lynch is on, he’s on. 

MM: This is going in the collection of movies that I love by him now.

CM: If you want to see David Lynch with an enormous budget just going nuts, it works great. But if you’re looking for a coherent movie that makes sense the same way Star Wars makes sense — which is basically what Lynch was signed up to do — no. 

MM: No, it does not. But Dune is not Star Wars. 

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David Lynch’s Eraserhead Is Still Weird

Jack Nance in Eraserhead

So here’s the thing about David Lynch: He’s weird.

Some people look at Lynch’s work, like Twin Peaks or Lost Highway, and say, “He’s just doing a bunch of random stuff. Anyone could do that!”

And those people are wrong. Lynch’s imagery isn’t random. It comes from deep inside a person deeply devoted to Trancendental Meditation, who has spent a lifetime cultivating and exploring the mysteries of the subconscious. Does he always know exactly how the images he creates fit together to create a whole? Probably not. But he knows that they DO fit together, somehow. Lynch’s films are the closest we get to a pure expression of dream logic in the waking world.

His first film, made in the early 1970s while he was living in a converted stable at the American Film Institute, was called Eraserhead. The plot, such as it is, concerns a man named Henry Spencer (Jack Nance, who would go on to play Pete Martell in Twin Peaks) who finds himself a father to a baby that is either grossly deformed or an alien. Or possibly a demon. Or possibly the embodiment of all the guilt, shame, and awfulness buried in the subconscious of this not very ordinary man who just happens to have David Lynch’s signature haircut.

Like I said, it’s weird. It’s probably the weirdest film preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Film Registry as culturally significant. And it makes no apologies for being weird. It’s really best to just sit back and let the images flow over you, then talk about them to your therapist later.

You have the rare opportunity to watch Eraserhead on the big screen tonight, August 29th, at Crosstown Theater. It’s a bargain at $5 for one of the most insane (or possibly sane on another level) films ever made.

David Lynch’s Eraserhead Is Still Weird

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Cinematic Panic Film Festival Brings The Weird

When you think of “film festival fare,” what usually comes to mind are sincere indie dramas, light language comedies, and earnest documentaries about social issues. But that’s not what’s on the marquee for Memphis’ newest festival, Cinematic Panic.

Black Lodge Video was a Cooper-Young institution for 15 years. As anyone who frequented the place can recall, there was always a few film freaks hanging around in the store watching selections from its vast video catalogue. You never knew what you were going to see on the vintage big-screen projection TV.

Since the Lodge shut down its original location four years ago, co-owner Matt Martin has been on a frustrating and seemingly quixotic quest to bring it back to life. Last year, it was announced that they had finally found a new home. The bigger and better Black Lodge would relocate in a storefront at 405 N. Cleveland. The completely new space will include not only the legendarily huge video collection for rent, but also an arcade with new and vintage video games, and a combination movie theater and music venue in the back.

Evil Dead

Once the new Black Lodge was in operation, Martin says he envisioned a weekly event called Cinematic Panic that would be in the spirit of the old days of cinephiles daring each other to watch the unwatchable. “The idea was to show the most weird, off-putting, bizarre, uncategorizable movies I could find.”

But while he was helping Memphis filmmaker Chad Allen Barton with the Piano Man Pictures Roadshow, a touring retrospective of films created by the collective, Martin says Barton suggested changing the concept. “He said something that struck me: If you do it every week, the shock loses its power.”

Barton and Martin set out to try something new: a film festival dedicated to outré cinema. They scheduled the first Cinematic Panic festival for October, when the new Black Lodge was scheduled to be completed, and called for submissions. “We wanted to see what we can find here locally, and as far as our reach can muster,” says Martin. “That turned out to be global.”

From Beyond

Barton says they were unprepared for the more than 300 submissions they got from all over the world. It was an avalanche of the kind of movies that rarely get screenings in conventional festivals outside of midnight slots. “Everybody wants to be Sundance,” says Lodge co-owner Danny Grubbs.

“We’re underneath Sundance,” says James Blair, Lodge partner and chef who is designing the menu for the new kitchen. “We’re in the sewers of Sundance. That’s where you’ll find us.”

Last House On The Left

Martin says movies intended to unsettle have been around the beginning of cinema. “What does Edison first shoot for? A version of Frankenstein. Shock and horror has been a staple of fiction since drawings on the cave. We look back at the Edison stuff, or look at Nosferatu, or “Un Chien Andalou” by Dali and Buñuel. These are all films that were trying to explore the newly created concept of cinema, and asking, how far can this go? Can we shock and terrify with just images and sound? The answer, of course, was a resounding yes.”

But the Black Lodge team was dealt setback after setback as they tried to create the new space. “We’ve been panicking for a year and a half at this point,” says Blair.

‘Return of the Flesh Eating Film Reels’

Grubbs says the construction is “80% done.” The 6,000-square-foot space lacks internal walls, but the floors, plumbing, bathrooms, and other critical systems are already complete. When it became apparent that the store would not be complete in time for the scheduled film festival, the team did some soul searching and decided to stage it as a pop up event in the cavernous space as a thank you to the Black Lodge faithful. “People have waited a long time, patiently, for the new Lodge to be built,” says Martin. “We don’t get to be public about its development very often. We knew everybody was anxious, so we decided to give them a glimpse. Come inside the space and watch movies on this massive screen. Get a feel for what the Lodge is going to do.”

Running five days starting Wednesday, October 24th, Cinematic Panic is jam-packed with classic weirdness and new strangeness. To set the tone, the first night will feature Videodrome, David Cronenberg’s landmark mashup of body horror and mass media theory, as well as David Lynch’s little seen 2002 “sitcom” Rabbits which stars Naomi Watts as a humanoid rabbit.

Cinematic Panic Film Festival Brings The Weird

Other werid classics screening include Todd Solondz’s 1998 black comedy Happiness, Peter Jackson’s perverse puppet show Meet The Feebles, the 1986 H.P. Lovecraft adaptation From Beyond, Sam Rami’s groundbreaking comedy horror Evil Dead, and a pairing of Last House On The Left and Audition. “[Last House On The Left] is a brutal film by anyone’s standards,” says Martin. “It’s a difficult watch. But it’s 40 years old, and as relevant as ever with its comments on assault and sexual trauma. It’s one of the films that changed horror from the old school world of monsters and castles to the monsters next door to you. Then we chose Audition because of the role reversal of female as tormentor.”

Memphis made movies include two features: Barton’s satire Lights, Camera, Bullshit and Jim Weter’s 2012 At Stake: Vampire Solutions. Among the 101 short films are John Pickle’s “Return of the Flesh Eating Film Reels,” and works by several Memphis filmmakers, including Ben Siler and Laura Jean Hocking.

Joe Finds Grace

Eight features will screen in competition, including Joe Finds Grace, a film Barton describes as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes on a road trip of self-discovery.”
There’s no jury, so winners of the short and feature competition will be determined purely by audience reaction.

The snacks Blair has prepared fit with the festival’s “I dare you” theme, such as chocolate covered grasshoppers and fermented Japanese string beans. There will be musical performances scattered in with the films, and Saturday night after Evil Dead, the festival will transform into the popular Black Lodge Halloween show, headlined by Negro Terror.

Grubbs says after the festival is over, they plan to finish construction and hope the new Black Lodge will be fully operational by the end of the year. This will be the first of many Cinematic Panic festivals. “We’ve got eight projectors, so we could do multiple screens in the future if we wanted to,” says Grubbs.

“No. No.” says Barton. “Please. No.”

Cinematic Panic runs from Wednesday, October 24 to Sunday, October 28 at 405 N. Cleveland. Schedule available here.

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2017: The Year In Film

In America, it was the worst of times, but inside the multiplex, it was the best of times. Mega-blockbusters faltered, while an exceptional crop of small films excelled. There was never a week when there wasn’t something good playing on Memphis’ big screens. Here’s the Flyer‘s film awards for 2017.

Worst Picture: Transformers: The Last Knight
There was a crap-flood of big budget failures in 2017. The Mummy was horrifying in the worst way. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales sank the franchise. There was an Emoji Movie for some reason. What set Michael Bay’s nadir apart from the “competition” was its sneering contempt for the audience. I felt insulted by this movie. Everyone involved needs to take a step back and think about their lives.

Zeitgiestiest: Ingrid Goes West
In the first few years of the decade, our inner worlds were reshaped by social media. In 2017, social media reshaped the real world. No film better understood this crucial dynamic, and Aubrey Plaza’s ferociously precise performance as an Instagram stalker elevates it to true greatness.

Most Recursive: The Disaster Artist
James Franco’s passion project is a great film about an awful film. He is an actor dismissed as a lightweight doing a deep job directing a film about the worst director ever. He does a great job acting as a legendarily bad actor. We should be laughing at the whole thing, but somehow we end up crying at the end. It’s awesome.

Overlooked Gem: Blade Runner 2049
How does a long-awaited sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, directed by one of the decade’s best directors, co-starring a legendary leading man and the hottest star of the day, end up falling through the cracks? Beats me, but if you like Dennis Villaneuve, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, smart scripts, and incredible cinematography, and you didn’t see this film, rectify your error

Best Scene: Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land
The most successful superhero movie of the year was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Midway through the picture, our hero leads a company of soldiers across a muddy World War I battlefield. Assailed on every side by machine gun fire and explosions, Wonder Woman presses on, never wavering, never doubting, showing the fighting men what real inner strength looks like. In this moment, Gal Gadot became a hero to millions of girls.

Best Memphis Movie: Good Grief
Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking’s documentary Good Grief rose above a highly competitive, seven-film Hometowner slate at Indie Memphis to sweep the feature awards. It is a delicate, touching portrait of a summer camp for children who have lost loved ones due to tragedy. Full disclosure: I’m married to one of the directors. Fuller disclosure: I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the success of this film.

MVP: Adam Driver
Anyone with eyes could see former Girls co-star Adam Driver was a great actor, but he came into his own in 2017 with a trio of perfect performances. First, he lost 50 pounds and went on a seven-day silent prayer vigil to portray a Jesuit missionary in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Then he was Clyde Logan, the one-armed Iraq vet who helps his brother and sister rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Stephen Soderberg’s Logan Lucky. Finally, he was Kylo Ren, the conflicted villain who made Star Wars: The Last Jedi the year’s best blockbuster.

Best Editing: Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s heist picture is equal parts Bullitt and La La Land. In setting some of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed to a mixtape of sleeper pop hits from across the decades, Wright and editor Jonathan Amos created the greatest long-form music video since “Thriller.”

Best Screenplay: The Big Sick
Screenwriter Emily V. Gordon, and comedian Kumail Nanjiani turned the story of their unlikely (and almost tragic) courtship into the year’s best and most humane comedy.

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Sylvio Bernardi, Sylvio
In this hotly contested category, 2014 winner Caesar, the ape commander of War For The Planet Of The Apes, was narrowly defeated by a simian upstart. Sylvio, co-directed by Memphian Kentucker Audley, is a low-key comedy about a mute monkey in sunglasses (played by co-director Albert Binny) who struggles to keep his dignity intact while breaking into the cutthroat world of cable access television. Sylvio speaks to every time you’ve felt like an awkward outsider.

Best Performance (Honorable Mention): Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch referred to his magnum opus as an 18-hour film, but Twin Peaks is a TV series to its core. The Return may be the crowning achievement of the current second golden age of television, but without MacLachlan’s beyond brilliant performance, Lynch’s take-no-prisoners surrealism would fly apart. I struggle to think of any precedent for MacLachlan’s achievement, playing at least four different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, whose identity gets fractured across dimensions as he tries to escape the clutches of the Black Lodge.

Best Performance: Francis McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sometimes the best film performers are the ones who do the least, and no one does nothing better than Francis McDormand. As the mother of a murdered daughter seeking the justice in the court of public opinion she was denied in the court of law, McDormand stuffs her emotions way down inside, so a clenched jaw or raised eyebrow lands harder than the most impassioned speech.

Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Lady Bird is destined to be a sentimental, coming-of-age classic for a generation of women. But it is not itself excessively sentimental. Greta Gerwig and star Saoirse Ronan are clear-eyed about their heroine’s failings and delusions as she navigates the treacherous psychic waters of high school senior year. Gerwig, known until now primarily as an actor, wrote and directed this remarkably insightful film that is as close to perfection as anything on the big screen in 2017.

Best Picture: Get Out — In prepping for my year-end list, I re-read my review for Get Out, which was positive but not gushing. Yet I have thought about this small, smart film from comedian Jordan Peele more than any other 2017 work. Peele took the conventions of horror films and shaped them into a deeply reasoned treatise on the insidious evil of white supremacy. Sometimes, being alive in 2017 seemed like living in The Sunken Place, and Peele’s film seems like a message from a saner time.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Dreamer And The Dreamed: Grappling With The Final Mysteries of Twin Peaks

25 years after an unresolved cliffhanger left FBI Agent Dale Cooper trapped in the well-appointed corner of the spirit world known as the Black Lodge, fans of Twin Peaks were ecstatic at the potential for resolution in Twin Peaks: The Return. The 18 hour series on Showtime, written by Twin Peaks creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, and entirely directed by Lynch, who is undeniably one of America’s greatest living filmmakers, delivered all that and more. The story sprawled far beyond the confines of the Washington logging town that gives the series its name to become an examination of the troubled soul of America. Lynch used the opportunity to chase tangents, empty out his dream journals, and create some of his most startling and beautiful images.

Twin Peaks: The Return did turn out to be unlike any other television series in history. But last Sunday’s series finale—which may very well be the final Lynch we see—has turned out to be incredibly divisive, alienating a significant chunk of the online fanbase who were primed to see evil vanquished and good triumphant. Instead, they got an ending that, at first glance, is ambiguous at best. If you haven’t watched Parts 17 and 18, I advise you to stop reading this right now, go watch the episodes, and then get back to me while you’re still scratching your head over, as Jim Belushi’s Bradley Mitchum says, “What the hell just happened?”
                                                                             

This. This just happened.

Ready? Here we go.

Twin Peaks is sometimes talked about like its a sui generis creation, but it’s not. Lynch and Frost’s original intention was to simultaneously spoof and pay homage to soap operas. The thing about soap operas is, they don’t end. The three longest running scripted shows in television history are Guiding Light, As The World Turns, and General Hospital, all classic daytime soap operas which ran for decades. These shows, and the prime time soaps they eventually birthed such as Dallas, Dynasty, and Santa Barbara—and their descendants Empire and This Is Us—perfected the art of seeming like they have plots that are going somewhere, but never actually going anywhere. They never resolved a story line unless an actor died or the character involved was no longer popular, probably because it became obvious their story was going nowhere. Peaks was meant to be the same way. Lynch never intended to tell us who killed Laura Palmer. The mystery was intended to be the background to all of the other weird goings on in the town, a canvas of fake suspense on which Lynch would paint surreal images. By definition, Peaks can never have a satisfying ending.

And yet, in episode 17, Lynch and Frost do give us the satisfying ending we’ve been craving. Agent Dale Cooper returns to Twin Peaks with his full consciousness restored. His evil doppleganger, Mr. C., is killed by Lucy, and BOB, the demon from the Black Lodge that feeds on the suffering of humanity is dispatched into the void by what we thought was a throwaway character with a green garden glove. It’s all very soapy, right down to the sometimes intentionally wooden acting styles. But just we reach resolution, with all of characters lined up like a group photo and Cooper giving them all their goodbyes (“I’ll see you at the curtain call!”), something very curious happens. Lynch, who has made incredible use of transparencies and double exposures throughout the show, superimposes the image of an unmoving close up of Cooper’s face over the scenes of the wrap up. It’s as if Cooper were standing outside the world, watching the scenes transpire.

Twin Peaks has always been meta fiction, meaning a story that is, on some level, self aware that it’s a story. In the original two seasons, the characters watched a soap opera called Invitation To Love that mirrored the events on the show. But Peaks had another meta element: The spirit world, consisting of The Black Lodge, The White Lodge, the red-curtained Waiting Room, and in The Return, a washed out realm of lonely towers and industrial looking infrastructure that may or may not have some metaphysical relationship to the boiler room of the Great Northern Hotel.

A glimpse into the spirit world of Twin Peaks. Pictured, a giant teapot that used to be David Bowie.

Agent Cooper and his partners in the Blue Rose task force—which not coincidentally include Director Gordon Cole, played by the actual director David Lynch—sought to solve the supernatural mysteries of Twin Peaks by mystical means. They wanted to break through the barrier between their world and the spirit world of the Lodges. Their inquiry goes beyond a series of murders, insurance fraud, and Canadian human traffickers to question the nature of reality itself.

During The Return’s end game, multiple characters, including Cooper and Audrey Horne, ask variations on the question “Is it all a dream? Who is the dreamer?” For the people of Twin Peaks, the answer is yes, it is all a dream. They’re characters on a TV soap opera called Twin Peaks, which was dreamed up by David Lynch and Mark Frost. The Lodges and the mysterious towers and industrial infrastructure of spirit world are a deeper layer of reality where time is meaningless and cause follows effect. The spirit world is the writers’ subconsciousness, the unseen infrastructure of consciousness, and therefore creation, from whence creativity flows. It is the land of archetype, race memory, and metaphor. Why was Agent Cooper immobile in the Black Lodge for twenty five years? Because he wasn’t on television. His show did not exist, so he was not needed, like a puppet on a shelf.

Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the Black Lodge.

In the course of The Return, Cooper moved back and forth across the boundary between the worlds. He was split in three parts, changed identities, and lived whole lives. By the time he defeated his evil doppleganger and was made whole, he had gained mastery over the Black Lodge magic. He was able to move freely back and forth between the worlds and even create a doppleganger of his own, a benign spirit which he sent to live out his life as husband and father to Dougie Jones’ long suffering wife and child. He was a character who had gained the power of a writer. During the “finale” in the Twin Peaks sheriff’s office, Cooper finds himself both participating in the soap opera and yet outside it at the same time. His face superimposed over the regular show in progress is like a reflection of our own faces on the screen as we watch the show unfold.

All stories begin in a world in balance, until something happens, called the inciting incident, that unbalances the world. The ultimate goal of all protagonists is to return the fictional world to some kind of balance, be it the old balance or a new balance. Stories always involve change. In Twin Peaks, the inciting incident is the night Laura Palmer didn’t come home after being gang raped and murdered by the demon Bob who was possessing her father Leland Palmer. Cooper’s primary motivation has always been to restore balance to the world, and as a character in the soap opera Twin Peaks, the ultimate expression of restoring balance to the world is to undo the inciting incident. Cooper is not just bringing justice to Laura’s killers and banishing the evil Bob into the Black Lodge for good. He’s using Lodge magic to go back in time to stop her from being killed in the first place. He’s rewriting the show. From the perspective of a character on a soap opera, Cooper has achieved the power of the gods.

For a time in Part 18, we are literally back in the old Twin Peaks. Cooper inserts himself into scenes from Fire Walk With Me, intercepts Laura while she wanders deep in the woods, and tries to lead her to her mother’s home. But he is only partially successful. Laura’s hand slips from his grasp, and her screams echo in the dark primeval forest.

Then the show goes back to the opening scenes from the pilot, but there’s a difference. We see Laura Palmer’s body disappear from the beach where it was found. Pete Martell goes fishing, but never finds the corpse wrapped in plastic.

But Cooper’s job is not yet done. He must find Laura Palmer and return to her mother’s house. He sets out with Diane, who similarly has just returned from captivity in the Lodge, to once again break through the veil of reality, find where Laura Palmer’s character manifested itself after Cooper lost her in the woods, and return her to her mother’s house. After a long night drive full of dread, the pair finally consummate their relationship in a long love scene that starts out tender and then, as so many Lynch scenes do, veers off into the dark and disturbing.

Kyle MacLachlan as Agent Dale Cooper and Laura Dern as Diane prepare to go all the way in search of Laura Palmer.

When he awakens the next morning, Diane is gone. There’s a note by the bed addressed to Richard. Cooper has once again changed identities. After a bravado scene in a truck stop where Cooper takes on three violent truckers, he manages to find Laura Palmer in Odessa, Texas. Only it’s not Laura Palmer—it’s the same actress as Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), but she says her name is Carrie. When the two drive cross country to Twin Peaks, and knock on the door of Sarah Palmer’s house, they are greeted by a stranger. She’s never heard of Laura Palmer, or Sara Palmer. Significantly, the woman in the house is played by the actual owner of the house in the real world of 2017. Bewildered, Cooper asks, “What year is this?” Then, Sara Palmer’s voice floats in out of the either, calling Laura’s name. and Sheryl Lee as Carrie screams her otherworldly scream as the layers of reality all come crashing in on each other.

Cooper became aware he was living in a dream, and sought to take control of his story by psychically traveling into what he thought would be “the real world”. But in the end, he was just a creature of imagination, the dreamed instead of the dreamer. He could not escape the confines of his story, and ended up trapped in another story, with another, worse version of Laura Palmer.

Agent Cooper leads Carrie (Sheryl Lee) towards their fate during the climax of Twin Peaks: The Return.

In less sure hands than David Lynch, this could have been a disaster. But this is not Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, where everything good that happened was revealed to be a dream of a dying man. That was a writer abusing his power and betraying the audience. The seeds of this ending have been there all along, in a hundred small clues, and in the general tone of meta fiction that has been Twin Peaks operating space since it began. Cooper’s adventures have not been in vain. In the end, he is revealed to be a creature of story, inseparable from the narrative that defines his role in the world. Even his awareness that he is trapped in a dream is not enough to break him out of it, into the real world, because there is no “real” world. There are only dreams within dreams.

If this seems like a cop out, Lynch fleeing from meaning because he doesn’t have any good way to end his soap opera, consider this: Late last year, a man named Edgar Welsh shot up Comet Ping Pong pizzeria with an assault rife because he was absolutely convinced that the basement of the pizza joint was a torture chamber where Hillary Clinton and her evil Democrat cronies sexually molested children. In fact, there was no torture chamber—there wasn’t even a basement. But even when he was shown that there was no basement, Welsh still refused to understand that he had been deceived by a false narrative. He only said, “Maybe the intel wasn’t 100%.”

But it’s not just Welsh. The nation’s fourth largest city is underwater after an unprecedented flood, the West Coast is in the grips of a record heat wave that has left millions of acres of forest literally in flames, and as I write this, a category five hurricane is approaching Florida. All of these facts are entirely consistent with the theory of anthropomorphic climate change, and indeed events like these have been predicted by climate scientists for decades. And yet the president of the United States denies the fact of climate change, preferring instead to believe comforting lies dreamed up by the marketing departments of oil and gas companies. He would rather live in a dream than face reality. We’re all trapped in our dreams, our narratives, the stories we tall ourselves, and the stories others tell us. It’s how we make sense of the world, and even if those dreams turn out to not resemble the real world very much, we try to stick with them. When we’re forced to face the chaos and uncertainty of the “real world”, which is to say, we’re forced outside of our narratives, we find ourselves facing the horror of lost meaning, screaming like Laura Palmer.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Twin Peaks and American Gods Bring Surrealism To TV

Last Sunday night may have been the weirdest night in the history of American television.

Kyle MacLachlan as Agent Dale Cooper lost in the Black Lodge in the revival of Twin Peaks.

Surrealism and Dada emerged as art movements in the wake of the horrors of World War I. Two centuries after the Enlightenment promised to solve the world’s problems with science and reason, Dada artists took a look at a world tearing itself apart with industrialized slaughter, threw up their hands, and said “screw it.” Their abandonment of rational thought for carefully considered nonsense was an act of nihilism: “The world is ending. Let’s party!” Surrealism, which was initially elucidated by critic Andre Breton in 1924’s Surrealist Manifesto, shared Dada’s skepticism of skepticism itself, but put a more hopeful spin on it. Maybe the problems with human consciousness that led to World War I was because we had divorced our subconscious. Images and ideas that reached beyond the conscious mind could reunite the warring halves of ourselves and lead to a more enlightened and psychologically healthy future.

Since the beginning of film and television, artists have sought to use the medium of moving pictures to explore the fantastical edges of the human mind. At the turn of the last century, filmmaker Georges Meliés made major breakthroughs in special effects while bringing to life fantasies like “A Trip To The Moon” One of television’s first big hits was The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s anthology series which brought strange morality tales to American audiences weekly for five years in the early 1960s. A true surrealist would claim Meliés as one of their own before The Twilight Zone. Serling dabbled in all aspects of the fantastic, but at his heart he was a science fiction writer. His abiding point of view was that reason cut with compassion can save us. In scripts like the classic “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”, the real threat the community is not the titular monsters, but ignorance, bigotry, and fear—all of which can be cured by rationalism. Meliés, on the other hand, was concerned only with the creation of incredible images far outside what he or any other viewer had ever experienced in real life. Even when he was adapting Jules Verne, the dean of modern science fiction writers, Meliés didn’t care about science.

Twin Peaks and American Gods Bring Surrealism To TV (3)

Perhaps ironically, our current age of big-budget, prestige television has opened opportunities for Surrealists to spread their wings. There’s plenty of magic in Game Of Thrones, but that’s full-on high fantasy. Magical realism, the South American literary movement that combines social realism with fantastic visions from the subconscious, has had a big influence on shows as diverse as Deadwood, Six Feet Under and even Breaking Bad, and the supernatural elements of horror have brought us visually stunning moments on shows like American Horror Story. But the Starz adaptation of Neil Gaimen’s novel American Gods is twenty first century TV’s first dive into full bore, capital-S Surrealism.

Twin Peaks and American Gods Bring Surrealism To TV (2)

Gaiman’s story of Shadow Moon, a psychologically dislocated ex-con who finds himself caught up in a war between old gods like Odin and Anubis and new gods like Media and Technology, has been challenging literary taxonomy since its 2001 release. (It was, for a time, held up as an example of a subgenre dubbed “mundane fantasy”, until people realized no one wanted to read mundane fantasies.) In the hands of director and showrunner Brian Fuller, it has blossomed into the weirdest trip on the flat screen. Surrealism tries to tap into dream logic. The characters may not follow real world rules, but there’s a sense they are doing things that make sense to them, because they’re motivated by forces you can’t see. When Bilquis, the African fertility goddess stranded in America, ends her sexual encounters by absorbing men and women into her vagina, you have trouble believing what you’re seeing, but there’s no question she has a damn good reason for doing it. There is an underlying order to this seeming chaos, you just don’t know what it is yet.

Yetide Badaki as the fertility goddess Bilquis in American Gods.

Fuller and Gaimen’s search for images and ideas to illustrate the psychic undertow of everyday life, they are practicing pure surrealism. The show has found an unexpectedly large audience during the Sunday evening prestige TV time. Starz has announced a second season for the expensive show after only four episodes. But last Sunday night, they were upstaged by America’s greatest living surrealist. 25 years after it was ignominiously canceled, Twin Peaks returned to Showtime with David Lynch at the helm.

Twin Peaks originated as a half-parody, half homage to the excesses of American soap operas. But Lynch, who is an avid practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, is much more in touch with his subconscious than most directors. The strange images and ideas that seeped into the seemingly mundane murder mystery that was the original Twin Peaks were interpreted as mysteries that needed to be solved by the minds of American audiences raised on police procedurals. When they figured out the mysteries weren’t meant to be solved by their conscious minds, audiences drifted away in 1991. The final episode of the original series, one of the greatest and most surreal hours of television ever produced, was originally viewed only by the Lynchian cultists who had held on once Laura Palmer’s murderer was prematurely revealed.

Twin Peaks and American Gods Bring Surrealism To TV

The two hours of the third season of Twin Peaks that premiered last Sunday gave the audience a taste of what they had been missing. This is not the story of a sleepy Northwestern town full of quirky characters. This is the unfiltered product of Lynch’s TM practice, a direct line into the subconscious mind of one of America’s great film directors. Of the multiple storylines that emerged out of the incredibly dense episode called “Return”, the strangest and most compelling is the glass box. Located somewhere in New York, the nondescript building hides a secret room with a glass box inside. A dopy young man is hired to watch the box, in which nothing special is happening, and record every second of that nothing with high speed cameras. It’s a little like video artist Nam Jun Paik’s sculpture Buddha Watching TV, only much more sinister.

Nam Jun Paik’s 1974 sculpture TV Buddha.

When our young man is distracted from his normally fruitless observations, something horrible manifests in the box, and then breaks free to kill him. Later, the appearance of Dale Cooper in the box suggests it is a portal into the spirit world, or the subconscious, that Twin Peaks calls The Black Lodge.

The mysterious glass box in New York from Twin Peaks ‘Return’.

Dada and Surrealism grew out of a time of uncertainty and discontent with the status quo. In the wake of World War I, it felt like the world had stopped making sense, and the art movement reflected that. That a new American surrealism would find traction in the mass media of 2017 suggests a similar mood has gripped us, and Americans are staring into the glass box, seeking answers where none are forthcoming.

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Film Features Film/TV

Eraserhead

On October 6th, David Lynch and Mark Frost confirmed via Twitter that their enormously weird, enormously influential television series Twin Peaks will return in 2016 for a nine-episode run on Showtime. (Just in time, too; hard-core fans of the show will remember Laura Palmer assuring Agent Cooper “I’ll see you…again in 25…years” during the 1991 series finale.) This is great news. But two years is a long wait for anyone itching to return to the Log Lady’s land of backwards-talking dwarves and damn fine coffee.

Look on the bright side, though: you now have plenty of time to sink into the Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray/DVD release of Lynch’s 1977 film Eraserhead.

Lynch’s feature-length debut is a landmark of artisanal filmmaking so funny, weird, and terrifying that it renders most of his subsequent film and television work (which includes Twin Peaks, as well as masterpieces like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire) safe and conventional in comparison. For five years, Lynch was in up to his elbows on Eraserhead; he wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film, and he also served as its production designer, special-effects creator, and sound-effects co-engineer. Lynch has described the world he put on film with pride and affection as “A little, unknown, twisted, almost silent lost spot where little details and little torments existed. And people were struggling in darkness. They’re living in the fringelands, and they’re the people I really love.”

Eraserhead‘s narrative is thin and slippery, but that’s okay — the story accounts for maybe 10 percent of the movie’s slab-like density. It begins on (and possibly inside) a meatball-shaped meteorite floating in space. Or maybe it begins in the mind of Henry (Jack Nance), whose face is superimposed over the opening images; whether Eraserhead is a realistic depiction of an alternate universe, a collection of Henry’s dreams and visions, or some combination of the two, is often suggested but never resolved.

After a series of seemingly disconnected cosmic images, including the first glimpse of a scarred man working some levers who’s listed in the closing credits as the “Man in the Planet,” the film returns to some semblance of earth. Henry officially enters the picture here, looking over his shoulder as if pursued by a nameless, implacable fear. His pants are too short; his hair is too tall. His walk has a jabbing, slapstick-comedy cadence that accentuates his wide-eyed, lobotomized-inmate stare. Whether moving or standing still, he is fear enfleshed.

Henry stiff-legs his way through a howling night-town where language and verbal communication are nearing complete collapse. The invisible pressures associated with coherent speech derange everyone he meets: a dinner with his girlfriend (Charlotte Stewart) and her parents (Allen Joseph and Jeanne Bates) begins with innocuous pleasantries like “I’m very pleased to meet you.” But soon dad is raving about the chickens he’s prepared (“Strangest damn things. They’re man-made…Smaller than my fist!”) and mom is cornering Henry and demanding that she tell him whether he has had “sexual intercourse” with her daughter.

After she sniffs and nuzzles Henry’s neck for a while, mom gives him some life-altering news: “There’s a baby at the hospital.” The rest of the film unfolds as a black-comic domestic docudrama about one couple’s attempt to raise an infant — if that’s what you want to call the gasping, gagging, long-necked thing on the table whose baby-dinosaur head looks like a peeled sweet potato coated with liquid soap. Mary’s insistence that “They’re still not sure it is a baby” doesn’t exactly clear matters up.

The story works best as an echo chamber for the film’s finely orchestrated wallops of sound and texture. In Eraserhead, ambient domestic noise and room tones assume ominous dimensions; Lynch and sound designer Alan R. Splet expose the artificial silence of most cinematic spaces by amplifying the hiss, whine, and buzz of urban industrial living. Organ chords crash into quiet scenes like drunken party guests to heighten the dread. And how about all that barely-visible stuff in Henry’s apartment — moth-eaten blankets, crackling floor lamps pilfered from Victor Frankenstein’s lab, and lampshade-like plants growing out of mounds of compost, hair, and lint.

Maybe the Eraserhead package shouldn’t even have a DVD inside. Like James Agee’s ideal copies of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it should be stuffed with “fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.”