My favorite David Lynch movie is “The Straight Story” (1999), maybe because it’s set in Iowa, or at least, because it starts in Iowa, which happens to be where I’m from. It begins with aerial images of a cornfield, a grain elevator, a main street, quintessential small town Iowa Chamber of Commerce stuff but quintessential small town Iowa chamber of commerce stuff with a purpose. Because it’s the next shot, craning down toward a house, and then in closer on a window, evoking how Lynch gets under that conventional surface to see what’s really under there. Lynch’s work was often classified as strange, or weird, and so much was made of “The Straight Story’s” G-rating, as if Lynch, once famously described by Mel Brooks as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” was finally just being Jimmy Stewart from Earth. But you can imagine Lynch reading a news clipping of the real-life Alvin Straight journeying 240 miles from Iowa and Wisconsin aboard a riding lawn mower to see his ailing brother and thinking, hey, that’s kinda weird. Because small town Iowans, I can tell you from experience, are a little weird and I say that with all the love in my heart. Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight embodied Midwestern stoicism, but he also hinted at the mysteries and passions humming underneath, the kind many might reflexively assume small town Iowans lack. “The Straight Story” ends not with a long conversation between the two brothers but them looking up at the stars in the sky instead and it makes me think of going home and sitting on the deck with my dad and looking up at the stars in the sky and knowing that in sometimes saying nothing you are able to still say it all.
That ending might have been closer to Lynch than we realize. In interviews he often derided unnecessary conversation and adamantly refused to explain his movies which in their surrealist sensations often screamed out for explanations. I loved this about him. Indeed, somewhere along the way I realized that if a movie had a director’s Q&A afterwards, I never wanted to stay for it lest their explanation ruin my interpretation. Lynch, bless his heart, left it up to each and every one of us. He apparently directed a pilot episode for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” all the way back in 1984 that never saw the light of day because it was too, well, Lynch. It’s not so much the existence of this unaired pilot that intrigues me as it is Lynch being associated with “Star Trek” at all. Because if I wanted to try to describe the experience of watching Lynch movies, I might say it was the closest any of us were ever going to get to being dematerialized into pure energy in those moments between being beamed from one place to another by Scotty. What’s the “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” scene in “Mulholland Drive” if not all the b.s. of the movie business suddenly giving way to the moment when a movie emotionally teleports you to another planet? But look at me, interpreting. Lynch’s movies could baffle me, and his movies could mesmerize me, and his movies could do both at once, and a few of his movies I just plum did not like even if more often than not his movies left me with something I would never forget. Any time I sit down to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie, and I watch more of them than I should, Crispin Glover in “Wild at Heart” is not far from my mind.
I had been working at the Cobblestone 9 movie theater for about five months when “Lost Highway” was released. It was too arty for a multiplex, frankly, and therefore relegated to theater one, like a room, to quote Elaine Benes, “where they bring in POWs to show them propaganda films.” Even so, a few of the other concessionists and I would time our breaks to go up to theater one and leave our bodies for a few minutes by watching the scene where Robert Blake goes up to Bill Pullman at the party and tells Pullman to call him at his home where, sure enough, Blake answers the phone despite being right there in front of Pullman, as evocative of Lynch’s delightful, demented interdimensionality as anything. That was the movie, that was the scene, that made me want to go and find out what David Lynch was all about. In fact, upon learning he died yesterday at the age of 78, I was surprised that when I got home, I didn’t get a phone call from Lynch saying hey from wherever or whatever is on the other side. He wouldn’t have told me what it was like, of course. I’d have to wait and figure that out for myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment