But then so about like once an hour everybody’s walkie-talkie starts crackling, and then a couple minutes later Lynch and the actual shooting team and cars come hauling back in to Base and everybody on the crew springs into frantic but purposeful action so that from the specular vantage of the roadside cliff the set resembles an anthill that’s been stirred with a stick. Sometimes the shooting team comes back just to change cars for a shot: the production has somehow acquired two identical black Mercedes 6.9’s, and each is now embellished with different kind of filmmaking attachments and equipment. For a particular shot inside the moving Mercedes, some of the grips construct a kind of platform out of reticulate piping and secure it to the hood of the car with clamps and straps, and then various other technicians attach a 35mm Panavision camera, several different complicatedly angled mole and Bambino lights, and a 3’ × 5’ bounce 26 to various parts of the hood’s platform. This stuff is locked down tight, and the 2nd Asst. Cameraperson, a breathtaking and all-business lady everyone addresses as “Chesney,” 27 fiddles complexly with the camera’s anamorphic lens and various filters. When sunlight off the Mercedes’s windshield becomes a problem, 28 the Director of Photography and the camera guy in the especially authentic-looking pith helmet and Chesney all huddle and confer and decide to brace a gauzy diffusion filter between the camera and the windshield.
The camera truck is a complex green pickup whose side door says it’s the property of Camera Trucks, Unltd. The back part has three tiers for gear, lights, a Steadicam, a video monitor and sound feed, and then little seats for David Lynch and the Director of Photography and a camera operator. When it’s back at Base, technical crewpeople converge on the truck in clusters of entomological-looking avidity and efficiency.
During the crews’ frantic activity—all of it punctuated with loud bullhorn commands from Scott Cameron—the technicians from the camera truck and the stand-ins from the cars take their own turns standing around and talking on cellulars and rooting through the baskets of corporate snacks on the snack table looking for stuff they like; i.e. it’s their turn to stand around and kill time. The exterior driving-shots all have stand-ins in the cars, but usually when the shooting team returns to Base the actual name actors will emerge from their trailers and join the roil. Robert Loggia in particular likes to come out and stand around chatting with his stand-in, who’s of the same meaty build and olive complexion and has the same strand-intensive balding pattern and craggy facial menace as Loggia, and of course is identically dressed in mobster Armani, so that from the distance of the roadside cliff their conversation looks like its own surreal metacommentary on parallel identity crises.
David Lynch himself uses the down-time between takes to confer with A.D.’s and producers and to drink coffee and/or micturate into the undergrowth, and to smoke American Spirits and walk pensively around the Mercedeses and camera truck’s technical fray, sometimes holding one hand to his cheek in a way that recalls Jack Benny. Now 50 years old, Lynch still looks like an adult version of the kind of kid who gets beat up a lot at recess. He’s large, not exactly fat but soft-looking, and is far and away the palest person anywhere in view, his paleness dwarfing even the head-shop pallor of the lighting and F/X guys. He wears a black long-sleeved dress shirt with every possible button buttoned, baggy tan Chinos that are too short and flap around his ankles, and a deep-sea fisherman’s cap with a very long bill. The tan cap matches his pants, and his socks match both each other and his shirt, suggesting an extremely nerdy costume that’s been chosen and coordinated with care—a suggestion that with Lynch seems somehow endearing rather than pathetic. The sunglasses he wears on the camera truck are the cheap bulgey wrap-around kind that villains in old Japanese monster movies used to wear. The overstiff quality of his posture suggests either an ultradisciplinarian upbringing or a back brace. The general impression is that of a sort of geeky person who doesn’t especially care whether people think he’s geeky or not, an impression which equals a certain kind of physical dignity.
Lynch’s face is the best thing about him, and I spend a lot of time staring at it from a variety of perspectives as he works the set. In photos of Lynch as a young man, he looks rather uncannily like James Spader, but he doesn’t look like James Spader anymore. His face is now full in the sort of way that makes certain people’s faces square, and it’s pale and soft-looking—the cheeks you can tell are close-shaved daily and then moisturized afterward—and his eyes, which never once do that grotesque looking-in-opposite-directions-at-once thing they were doing on the 1990 Time cover, are large and mild and kind. In case you’re one of the people who figure that Lynch must be as “sick” as his films, know that he doesn’t have the beady or glassy look one associates with degeneracy-grade mental trouble. His eyes are good eyes: he looks at his set with very intense interest, but it’s a warm and full-hearted interest, sort of the way you look when you’re watching somebody you love doing something you also love. He doesn’t fret or intrude on any of the technicians, though he will come over and confer when somebody needs to know what exactly he wants for the next set-up. He’s the sort who manages to appear restful even in activity; i.e. he looks both very alert and very calm. There might be something about his calm that’s a little creepy—one tends to think of really high-end maniacs being oddly calm, e.g. the way Hannibal Lecter’s pulse rate stays under 80 as he bites somebody’s tongue out.
13 what several different members of the crew and production staff, some of whom have been to film school, have to say about Lost Highway
“David’s idea is to do this like dystopic vision of LA. You could do a dystopic vision of New York, but who’d care? New York’s been done before.”
“It’s about deformity. Remember Eraserhead? This guy’s going to be the ultimate Penishead.”
“This is a movie that explores psychosis subjectively.”
“I’m sure not going to go see it, I know that.”
“It’s a reflection on society as he sees it.”
“This is a sort of a middle ground between an art film and a major studio release. This is a hard niche to work in. It’s an economically fragile niche, you could say.”
“This is his territory. This is taking us deeper into a space he’s already carved out in previous work already—subjectivity and psychosis.”
“He’s doing a Diane Arbus number on LA, showing the slimy undersection of a dream-city. Chinatown did it, but it did it in a historical way, as a type of noir-history. David’s film’s about madness; it’s subjective, not historical”
“It’s like, if you’re a doctor or a nurse, are you going to go buy tickets to go see an operation for fun in your spare time, when you’re done working?”
“This film represents schizophrenia performatively, not just representationally. This is done in terms of loosening of identity, ontology, and continuity in time.”
“Let me just say I have utmost respect—for David, for the industry, for what David means to this industry. Let me say for the record I’m excited. That I’m thrilled and have the utmost respect.”
“It’s a specialty film. Like The Piano, say. I mean it’s not going to open in a thousand theaters.”
“‘Utmost’ is one word. There is no hyphen in ‘utmost.’ ”
“It’s about LA as hell. This is not unrealistic, if you want my opinion.”
“It’s a product like any other in a business like any other.”
“It’s a Negative Pick-Up. Fine Line, New Line, Miramax—they’re all interested.”
“David is the Id of the Now. If you quote me, say I quipped it. Say ‘“David is the Id of the Now,” quipped______, who is the film’s ______.’”
“David, as an artist, makes his own choices about what he wants. He makes a film when he feels he has something to say. The people who are interested in his films… some [of his films] are better than others. Some are perceived as better than others. David does not look at this as his area of concern.”
“He’s a geni
us. You have to understand this. In these areas he’s not like you and me.”
“The head-changings are being done with makeup and lights. No CGIs.” 29
“Read City of Quartz. That’s what this film’s about right there in a nutshell.”
“Some of [the producers] were talking about Hegel, whatever the hell that has to do with it.”
“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.
15 addendum to (14) re Lynch and race
Except now for Richard Pryor, has there ever been even like one black person in a David Lynch movie? 35 There’ve been plenty of dwarves and amputees and spastics and psychotics, but have there been any other, more shall we say culturally significant minorities? Latins? Hasidim? Gay people? 36 Asi
an-Americans?… There was that sultry oriental sawmill owner in Twin Peaks, but her ethnicity was, to say the least, overshadowed by her sultriness. 37
I.e. why are Lynch’s movies all so white?
The likely answer involves the fact that Lynch’s movies are essentially apolitical. Let’s face it: get white people and black people together on the screen and there’s going to be an automatic political voltage. Ethnic and cultural and political tensions. And Lynch’s films are in no way about ethnic or cultural or political tensions. The films are all about tensions, but these tensions are always in and between individuals. There are, in Lynch’s movies, no real groups or associations. There are sometimes alliances, but these are alliances based on shared obsessions. Lynch’s characters are essentially alone (Alone): they’re alienated from pretty much everything except the particular obsessions they’ve developed to help ease their alienation (… or is their alienation in fact a consequence of their obsessions? and does Lynch really hold an obsession or fantasy or fetish to be any kind of true anodyne for human alienation? does the average fetishist have any kind of actual relationship with the fetish?) Anyway, this kind of stuff is Lynch’s movies’ only real politics, viz. the primal politics of Self/Exterior and Id/Object. It’s a politics all about religions, darknesses, but for Lynch these have nothing to do with testaments or skin.
interconnected trivia tidbits: what kind of car Patricia Arquette has, whom she’s married to, etc.
Patricia Arquette owns a brand-new maroon Porsche, which Porsche must be very special to her because she seems to be in the freaking thing all the time, even driving it the 200 feet between her trailer and the set in Griffith Park, so that the crew always has to move carts full of equipment out of the way to let her pass, yelling at one another to be careful of Patricia Arquette’s beautiful car’s paint job. Plus Arquette always has her stand-in with her in the car—they’re apparently close friends and go everyplace together in the maroon Porsche, from a distance looking eerily identical. Patricia Arquette’s husband is Mr. Nicolas Cage, who worked with Lynch on both Wild at Heart and the video of Industrial Symphony #1.
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