A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  To be frank, it’s almost impossible for me to separate predictions about how good Balthazar Getty’s going to be in Lost Highway from my impressions of him as a human being around the set, which latter impressions were so uniformly negative that it’s probably better not to say too much about it. For just one thing, he’d annoy hell out of everybody between takes by running around trying to borrow everybody’s cellular phone for an “emergency.” I’ll confess that I eavesdropped on some of his emergency cellular phone conversations, and in one of them he said to somebody “But what did she say about me?” three times in a row. For another thing, he was a heavy smoker but never had his own cigarettes and was always bumming cigarettes from crewpeople who you could tell were making about 1% of what he was making on this movie. I admit that none of these are exactly capital offenses, but they added up. Getty also suffered from comparison with his stand-in, who was apparently his friend and who always stood right near him, wearing an identical auto-shop jumpsuit with “Pete” sewn in cursive on the breast and an identically gruesome ersatz carbuncle on his forehead, and who was laid back and cool and very funny—e.g. when I expressed surprise that so much time on a movie set was spent standing around waiting with nothing to do, Balthazar Getty’s stand-in was the one who said “We actually work for free; it’s the waiting around we get paid for,” which maybe you had to be there but in the context of the mind-shattering boredom of standing around the set all day seemed incredibly funny.

  OK, fuck it: the single most annoying thing about Balthazar Getty was that whenever David Lynch was around Getty would be very unctuous and over-respectful and asskissy, but when Lynch wasn’t around Getty would make fun of him and do an unkind imitation of his distinctive speaking voice (w/r/t which see below) that wasn’t a very good imitation but was clearly intended to be disrespectful and mean.)

  23 Eleven trailers, actually, most of them from Foothill Studio Equipment Rentals of Glendale and Transcord Mobile Studios of Burbank. All the trailers are detached and up on blocks. The Honeywagon is the fourth trailer in the line. There are trailers for Lights, Props, ‘F/X, Wardrobe, Grippish stuff, and some for the bigger stars in the cast, though the stars’ trailers don’t have their names or a gold star on the door or anything. The F/X trailer flies a Jolly Roger. Hard grunge issues from the Lighting trailer, and outside a couple other trailers tough-looking crewpeople sit in canvas chairs reading Car Action and Guns and Ammo. Some portion of the movie’s crew spends just about all their time in Base Camp doing various stuff in trailers, though it’s hard to figure out just what they’re doing, because these crewpeople have the kind of carny-esque vibe about them of people who spend a lot of time with their trailers and regard the trailers as their special territory and aren’t particularly keen on having you climb up in there and see what they’re doing. But a lot of it is highly technical. The area closest to daylight in the back of the Lighting and/or Camera-Related trailer, for example, has tripods and lightpoles and attachments of all lengths and sizes lined up very precisely, like ordnance. Shelves near the tripods have labeled sections for “2 X MIGHTY,” “2 X 8 JUNIOR,” “2 X MICKEY MOLES,” “2 X BABY BJs,” on and on. Boxes of lenses in rows have labels like

  LONG PRIMES A FILTS/4 X 5/DIOPS WIDEPRIMES

  50mm “E” T2 4’ SPC 200- 108A 30mm “C” T3 4’

  75mm “E” T2 4’ B FILTS 4X5 40mm “E” T2 3.5’

  100mm “E” T2 4’

  24 LAFD inspectors were all over the set, glaring at you if you lit a cigarette, and nicotinic conditions were pretty rugged because Scott Cameron decreed that people could smoke only if they were standing near the sand-filled butt can, of which there was apparently only one, and David Lynch, a devoted smoker of American Spirit All-Natural cigarettes, tended to commandeer the butt can, and people who wanted to smoke and were not near Lynch pretty much had to chew their knuckle and wait for him to turn his back so they could steal the can.

  25 After absorbing so much about it from the media, actually visiting Los Angeles in person produces a curious feeling of relief at finding a place that actually confirms your stereotyped preconceptions instead of confounding them and making you loathe your own ignorance and susceptibility to media stereotype: viz. stuff like cellular phones, rampant pulchritude, the odd ambient blend of New Age gooeyness and right-wing financial acumen. (E.g., one of the two prenominate people named Balloon, a guy who wore Birkenstocks and looked like he subsisted entirely on cellulose, had worked out an involved formula for describing statistical relationships between margin-calls on certain kinds of commodity futures and the market value of certain types of real estate, and had somehow gotten the impression that I and/or Premiere magazine ought to be interested in describing the formula in this article in such a way as to allow Balloon to start up a kind of pricey newsletter-type thing where people would for some reason pay large amounts of money for access to this formula, and for the better part of an afternoon he was absolutely unshakable, his obtuseness almost Zen—like a Lynchian bus-station wacko with an advanced degree from the L.S.E.—and the only way to peel him off me was to promise on my honor to find some way to work him and his formula into this article, an honor-obligation I’ve now fulfilled, though if Premiere wants to take the old editorial machete to it there’s not really any way I can be held responsible.

  (By the way, in case you think I’m lying or exaggerating about having met two unconnected persons named Balloon on this visit, the other Balloon was part of a rather unaccomplished banjo-and-maraca street duo on the median strip just outside the lavish deserted mall across the street from the gorgeous balcony that was too narrow and hazardously fenced to step onto, and the reason I approached this Balloon was that I wanted to know whether the wicked welts on his face-and-neck-area were by any chance from errant quarters or half-dollars thrown at him from speeding cars, which they turned out not to be.) )

  26 (looks like a blank canvas or stunted sail, helps concentrate light where they want it)

  27 It’s unclear whether this is her first name or her last name or a diminutive or what. Chesney is dressed in standard grunge flannel and dirty sneakers, has about 8 feet of sun-colored hair piled high on her head and held (tenuously) in place with sunglasses, and can handle an anamorphic lens like nobody’s business.

  28 (There’s one young guy on the crew whose entire function seems to be going around with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels and Windexing every glass surface blindingly clean.)

  29 ( = “Computer-Generated Images,” as in Jumanji)

  30 I.e. “Electronic Press Kit,” a bite-intensive interview that Lost Highway’s publicists can then send off to Entertainment Tonight, local TV stations that want Pullman-bites, etc. If the movie’s a huge hit, the E.P.K.’s can then apparently be woven together into one of those Behind the Scenes at the Making of Thus-and-Such documentaries that HBO seems to be so fond of. Apparently all name stars have to do an E.P.K. for every movie they make; it’s in their contract or something. I watched everybody’s E.P.K. except Balthazar Getty’s.

  31 (Pullman’s turn as the jilted con man in The Last Seduction had some edge to it, but Pullman seems to have done such a good acting job in that one that few people realized it was him.)

  32Premiere magazine’s industrial juice or no, I wasn’t allowed to watch footage of the porn videos both her characters frolic in, so I can’t evaluate the harder-core parts of her performance in Lost Highway. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the porn videos survives the final cut and the M.P.A.A.’s humorless review. If much of what the videos are rumored to contain appears in the final Lost Highway, Arquette may win a whole new kind of following.

  33 R. Blake, born 1933 as Michael James Gubitosi in Nutley, New Jersey, was one of the child stars of Our Gang, was unforgettable as one of the killers in In Cold Blood, etc.

  34 Dennis Hopper’s last powerful role before Blue Velvet had been the 1977 Apocalypse Now, and he’d become a kind of Hollywood embarrassment. DaFoe had been
sort of typecast as Christ after Platoon and Last Temptation, though it’s true that his sensualist’s lips had whispered menace even on the cross.

  35 And Richard Pryor’s in the movie as Richard-Pryor-the-celebrity-who’s-now-neurologically-damaged, not as a black person.

  36 Dean Stockwell’s Ben in Blue Velvet was probably technically gay, but what was relevant about Ben was his creepy effeminacy, which Frank called Ben’s “suaveness.” The only homoerotic subcurrent in Blue Velvet is between Jeffrey and Frank, and neither of them are what you’d call gay.

  37 (There were also, come to think of it, those two black hardware store employees (both named Ed) in Blue Velvety but, again, their blackness was incidental to the comic-symbolic issue of one Ed’s blindness and the other Ed’s dependence on the blind Ed’s perfect memory for hardware-prices. I’m talking about characters who are, like, centrally minorityish in Lynch’s movies.)

  38 (Wholly random examples:) Think of the way Parker’s Mississippi Burning fumbled at our consciences like a freshman at a coed’s brassiere, or of Dances with Wolves’ crude, smug reversal of old westerns’ “White=Good & Indian=Bad” equation. Or think of movies like Fatal Attraction and Unlawful Entry and Die Hard I-III and Copycat, etc., where we’re so relentlessly set up to approve the villains’ bloody punishment in the climax that we might as well be wearing togas. (The formulaic inexorability of these villains’ defeat does give the climaxes an oddly soothing, ritualistic quality, and it makes the villains martyrs in a way, sacrifices to our desire for black-and-white morality and comfortable judgment … I think it was during the original Die Hard that I first rooted consciously for the villain.)

  39 (solipsism being not exactly the cheery crackling hearth of psychophilosophical orientations)

  40 For somebody whose productions are supposed to be top-secret, Lynch and Asymmetrical seem awfully tolerant about having functionless interns and weird silent young people hanging around the Lost Highway set. Isabella Rossellini’s cousin is here, “Alesandro,” a 25ish guy ostensibly taking photos of the production for an Italian magazine but in fact mostly just walking around with his girlfriend in a leather miniskirt (the girlfriend) and grooming his crewcut and smoking nowhere near the butt can. Plus there’s also “Rolande” (pronounced as an iamb: “Rolande” ; my one interchange with Rolande consisted mostly of Rolande emphasizing this point). Rolande is an incredibly creepy French kid with a forehead about three feet high who somehow charmed Lynch into taking him on as an intern and lurks on the set constantly and does nothing but stand around with a little spiral notebook taking notes in a dense crabbed psychotically neat hand. Pretty much the whole crew and staff agrees that Rolande’s creepy and unpleasant to be around and that God only knows what the tiny precise notes really concern, but Lynch apparently actually likes the kid, and claps him avuncularly on the shoulder whenever the kid’s within reach, at which the kid smiles very widely and then afterward walks away rubbing his shoulder and muttering darkly.

  41 Lynch’s best-known painting, entitled Oww, God, Mom, the Dog He Bited Me, is described by Lynch in his Time cover-story this way: “There’s a clump of Band-Aids in the bottom corner. A dark background. A stick figure whose head is a blur of blood. Then a very small dog made out of glue. There is a house, a little black bump. It’s pretty crude, pretty primitive and minimal. I like it.” The painting itself, which is oddly absent from the book Images but has been published as a postcard, looks like the sort of diagnostic House-Tree-Person drawing that gets a patient institutionalized in a hurry.

  42 (not even the Lynch-crazy French film pundits who’ve made his movies the subject of more than two dozen essays in Cahiers du Cinéma—the French apparently regard Lynch as God, though the fact that they also regard Jerry Lewis as God might salt the compliment a bit …)

  43 (q.v. Baron Harkonen’s “cardiac rape” of the servant boy in Dune’s first act)

  44 Here’s one reason why Lynch’s characters have this weird opacity about them, a narcotized over-earnestness that’s reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern trailer parks. The truth is that Lynch needs his characters stolid to the point of retardation; otherwise they’d be doing all this ironic eyebrow-raising and finger-steepling about the overt symbolism of what’s going on, which is the very last thing he wants his characters doing.

  45 Lynch did a one-and-a-half-gainer into this pitfall in Wild at Heart, which is one reason the movie comes off so pomo-cute, another being the ironic intertextual self-consciousness (q.v. Wizard of Oz, Fugitive Kind) that Lynch’s better Expressionist movies have mostly avoided.

  46 ( = Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate students who want to write fiction or poetry professionally)

  47 (I’m hoping now in retrospect this wasn’t something Lynch’s ex-wife did …)

  48 (e.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Vachaud)

  49 This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop psychology, might be termed the Unintentional Fallacy.

  50 (i.e. “in-spired,” = “affected, guided, aroused by divine influence” from the Latin inspirare, “breathed into”)

  51 It’s possible to decode Lynch’s fetish for floating/flying entities—witches on broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good Witches, angels dangling overhead—along these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in Wand owl=Darkness in TP: the whole point of these animals is that they’re mobile.

  52 (with the exception of Dune, in which the good and bad guys practically wear color-coded hats—but Dune wasn’t really Lynch’s film anyway)

  53 This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews of both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.

  54 (which most admiring critics did—the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch in the New York Times Magazine)

  55 (Not to mention ignoring the fact that Frances Bay, as Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, standing right next to Jeffrey and Sandy at the window and making an icky-face at the robin and saying “Who could eat a bug?” then—as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen the movie like eight times—proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it’s not a bug she puts in her mouth it’s a tidbit sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure Lynch means something by having her do it right after she’s criticized the robin for its diet. (Friends I’ve surveyed are evenly split on whether Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this scene—have a look for yourself.) )

  56 As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying and exciting. This is why the colors are so lush and the mise en scène so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited by the scene but because he—like us—is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time.

  57 (prematurely!)

  58 I don’t think it’s an accident that of the grad-school friends I first saw Blue Velvet with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie—the two who said they felt like either the movie was really sick or they were really sick or both they and the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie’s artistic power but declared that as God was their witness you’d never catch them sitting through that particular sickness-fest again—were both male, nor that both singled out Frank’s smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy’s nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying “ You re like me” as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal moviegoing history.

  59 Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And the series’ second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode, the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and pa
rt of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks’s second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV).