A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  16 Patricia Arquette’s description of the central challenge for Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty w/r/t the “motivation” of Lost Highway’s metamorphosing protagonist (whose name when he’s Bill Pullman is “Fred” and when he’s Balthazar Getty is “Pete”)

  “The question for Bill and Balthazar is what kind of woman-hater is Fred [-dash-Pete]? Is he the kind of woman-hater who goes out with a woman and fucks her and then never calls her again, or is he the kind who goes out with a woman and fucks her and then kills her? And the real question to explore is: how different are these kinds?”

  11a why what David Lynch wants from you might be a good thing

  If you will keep in mind the outrageous kinds of moral manipulation we suffer at the hands of most contemporary directors, 38 it will be easier to convince you that something in Lynch’s own clinically detached filmmaking is not only refreshing but redemptive. It’s not that Lynch is somehow “above” being manipulative; it’s more like he’s just not interested. Lynch’s movies are about images and stories in his head that he wants to see made external and complexly real. (His most illuminating statement about the making of Eraserhead involves “the exhilaration he felt standing in the set of Mr. and Mrs. X’s apartment and realizing that what he had pictured in his mind had been exactly recreated”).

  It’s already been observed that Lynch brings to his art the sensibility of a very bright child immersed in the minutiae of his own fantasies. This kind of approach has disadvantages: his films are not especially sophisticated or intelligent; there is little critical judgment or quality-control-type checks on ideas that do not work; things tend to be hit-or-miss. Plus the films are, like a fantasy-prone little kid, self-involved to an extent that’s pretty much solipsistic. Hence their coldness. 39

  But part of the involution and coldness derives from the fact that David Lynch seems truly to possess the capacity for detachment from response that most artists only pay lip-service to: he does pretty much what he wants and appears not to give much of a shit whether you like it or even get it. His loyalties are fierce and passionate and almost entirely to himself.

  I don’t mean to make it sound like this kind of thing is wholly good or that Lynch is some kind of paragon of integrity. His passionate inwardness is refreshingly childlike, but I notice that very few of us choose to make small children our friends. And as for Lynch’s serene detachment from people’s response, I’ve noticed that, while I can’t help but respect and sort of envy the moral nerve of people who truly do not care what others think of them, people like this also make me nervous, and I tend to do my admiring from a safe distance. On (again) the other hand, though, we need to acknowledge that in this age of Hollywood “message” films and focus-group screenings and pernicious Nielsenism—Cinema By Referendum, where we vote with our entertainment-dollar either for spectacular effects to make us feel something or for lalations of moral clichés that let us remain comfortable in our numbness—Lynch’s rather sociopathic lack of interest in our approval seems refreshing/redemptive (if also creepy).

  17 the only part of this article that’s really in any way “behind the scenes”

  Asymmetrical Productions’ headquarters is, as mentioned, the house next door to Lynch’s house. It really is a house. In the yard outside the door are a department store swingset and a Big Wheel on its side. I don’t think anybody really lives there; I think it gets treated as an annex to Lynch’s own house and that Lynch’s children’s play spills over. You enter A.P.HQ through a sliding glass door into what is the house’s kitchen, with a Mannington tile floor and a dishwasher and a fridge with witty magnets on it, plus there’s a kitchen table where a college-age kid is sitting working diligently at a laptop, and at first it all looks like some ur-domestic scene of a college kid home at his folks’ house for the weekend or something, except when you come closer you start to notice that the kid’s got a scary haircut and a serious facial tic, and what he’s doing on the laptop is cueing a still-frame shot of the brunette Patricia Arquette’s mutilated corpse against some set of coded specs on a clipboard that’s propped against his Boynton mug of coffee. It’s unclear who the kid is or just what he’s doing or whether he even gets paid to do it. 40

  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.”

  Certainly plenty of critics have observed, with Kael, that in Lynch’s movies “There’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche… because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.” They’ve noted the preponderance of fetishes and fixations in Lynch’s work, his characters’ lack of conventional introspection (an introspection which in film equals “subjectivity”), his sexualization of everything from an amputated limb to a bathrobe’s sash, from a skull to a “heart plug,” 43 from split lockets to length-cut timber. They’ve noted the elaboration of Freudian motifs that tremble on the edge of parodie cliché—the way Marietta’s invitation to Sailor to “fuck Mommy” takes place in a bathroom and produces a rage that’s then displaced onto Bob Ray Lemon; the way Merrick’s opening dream-fantasy of his mother supine before a rampaging elephant has her face working in what’s interpretable as either terror or orgasm; the way Lynch structures Dunes labrynthian plot to highlight Paul Eutrades’s “escape” with his “witch-mother” after Paul’s father’s “death” by “betrayal.” They have noted with particular emphasis what’s pretty much Lynch’s most famous scene, Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through a closet’s slats as Frank Booth rapes Dorothy while referring to himself as “Daddy” and to her as “Mommy” and promising dire punishments for “looking at me” and breathing through an unexplained gas mask that’s overtly similar to the O2-mask we’d just seen Jeffrey’s own dying Dad breathing through.

  They’ve noted all this, critics have, and they’ve noted how, despite its heaviness, the Freudian stuff tends to give Lynch’s movies an enormous psychological power; and yet they don’t seem to make the obvious point that these very heavy Freudian riffs are powerful instead of ridiculous because they’re deployed Expressionistically, which among other things means they’re deployed in an old-fashioned, pre-postmodern way, i.e. nakedly, sincerely, without postmodernism’s abstraction or irony. Jeffrey Beaumont’s interslat voyeurism may be a sick parody of the Primal Scene, but neither he (a “college boy”) nor anybody else in the movie ever shows any inclination to say anything like “Gee, this is sort of like a sick parody of the good old Primal Scene” or even betrays any awareness that a lot of what’s going on is—both symbolically and psychoanalytically—heavy as hell. Lynch’s movies, for all their unsubtle archetypes and symbols and intertextual references and c, have about them the remarkable unself-consciousness that’s kind of the hallmark of Expressionist art—nobody in Lynch’s movies analyzes or metacriticizes or hermeneuticizes or anything, 44 including Lynch himself. This set of restrictions makes Lynch’s movies fundamentally unironic, and I submit that Lynch’s lack of irony is the real reason some cinéastes—in this age when ironic self-consciousness is the one and only universally recognized badge of sophistication—see him as a naïf or a buffoon. In fact, Lynch is neither—though nor is he any kind of genius of visual coding or tertiary symbolism or anything. What he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own “internal impressions and moods” are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography—in other words, Lynch is sort of G. W. Pabst with an Elvis ducktail.

  This kind of contemporary Expressionist art, in order to be any good, seems like it needs to avoid two pitfalls. The first is a self-consciousness of form where everything gets very mannered and refers cutely to itself. 45 The second pitfall, more complicated, might be called “terminal idiosyncrasy” or “antiempathetic solipsism” or something: here the artist’s own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come off as just too particular to him alone. Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and “personal expression” is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.

  It’s the second pitfall that’s especially bottomless and dreadful, and Lynch’s best movie, Blue Velvet, avoided it so spectacularly that seeing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me. It was such a big deal that ten years later I remember the date—30 March 1986, a Wednesday night—and what the whole group of us M FA Program 46 students did after we left the theater, which was to go to a coffeehouse and talk about how the movie was a revelation. Our Graduate M FA Program had been pretty much of a downer so far: most of us wanted to see ourselves as avant-garde writers, and our professors
were all traditional commercial Realists of the New Yorker school, and while we loathed these teachers and resented the chilly reception our “experimental” writing received from them, we were also starting to recognize that most of our own avant-garde stuff really was solipsistic and pretentious and self-conscious and masturbatory and bad, and so that year we went around hating ourselves and everyone else and with no clue about how to get experimentally better without caving in to loathsome commercial-Realistic pressure, etc. This was the context in which Blue Velvet made such an impression on us. The movie’s obvious “themes”—the evil flip side to picket-fence respectability, the conjunctions of sadism and sexuality and parental authority and voyeurism and cheesy ’50s pop and Coming of Age, etc.—were for us less revelatory than the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic felt: they felt true, real. And the couple things just slightly but marvelously off in every shot—the Yellow Man literally dead on his feet, Frank’s unexplained gas mask, the eerie industrial thrum on the stairway outside Dorothy’s apartment, the weird dentate-vagina sculpture 47 hanging on an otherwise bare wall over Jeffrey’s bed at home, the dog drinking from the hose in the stricken dad’s hand—it wasn’t just that these touches seemed eccentrically cool or experimental or arty, but that they communicated things that felt true. Blue Velvet captured something crucial about the way the U.S. present acted on our nerve endings, something crucial that couldn’t be analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic principles or workshop techniques.