David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

7(using MacLachlan perfectly this time — since the role of Jeffrey actually calls for potato-faced nerdiness — plus Eraserhead ’s Jack Nance and Dune ’s Dean Stockwell and Brad Dourif, none of whom has ever been creepier, plus using Dallas ’s Priscilla Pointer and everything’s Hope Lange as scary moms…)

8TIDBIT: HOW LYNCH AND HIS CINEMATOGRAPHER FOR BV FILMED THAT HELLACIOUS FORCED “JOYRIDE” IN FRANK BOOTH’S CAR, THE SCENE WHERE FRANK AND JACK NANCE AND BRAD DOURIF HAVE KIDNAPPED JEFFREY BEAUMONT AND ARE MENACING HIM INSIDE THE CAR WHILE THEY’RE GOING WHAT LOOKS LIKE 100+ DOWN A DISMAL RURAL TWO-LANER: The reason it looks like the car’s going so fast is that lights outside the car are going by so fast. In fact the car wasn’t even moving. A burly grip was bouncing madly up and down on the back bumper to make the car jiggle and roll, and other crewpeople with hand-held lamps were sprinting back and forth outside the car to make it look like the car was whizzing past streetlights. The whole scene’s got a claustrophobia-in-motion feel that they never could have gotten if the car’d actually been moving (the production’s insurance wouldn’t have allowed that kind of speed in a real take), and the whole thing was done for about $8.95.

9(sex scenes that are creepy in part because they’re exactly what the viewer himself imagines having sex with Patricia Arquette would be like)

10(a stilted, tranced quality that renders the sex scenes both sexually “hot” and aesthetically “cold,” a sort of meta-erotic effect you could see Gus Van Sant trying to emulate when he had the sex scenes in My Own Private Idaho rendered as series of complexly postured stills, which instead of giving them Lynch’s creepy tranced quality made them look more like illustrations from the Kama-Sutra )

11(And as an aside, but a true aside, I’ll add that I have had since 1986 a personal rule w/r/t dating, which is that any date where I go to a female’s residence to pick her up and have any kind of conversation with parents or roommates that’s an even remotely Lynchian conversation is automatically the only date I ever have with that female, regardless of her appeal in other areas. And that this rule, developed after seeing Blue Velvet , has served me remarkably well and kept me out of all kinds of hair-raising entanglements and jams, and that friends to whom Tve promulgated the rule but who have willfully ignored it and have continued dating females with clear elements of Lynchianism in their characters or associations have done so to their regret.)

12Lynch’s influence extends into mainstream Hollywood movies, too, by the way. The surfeit of dark dense machinery, sudden gouts of vented steam, ambient industrial sounds, etc., in Lynch’s early stuff has clearly affected James Cameron and Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam has taken to the limit Lynch’s preoccupation with blatantly Freudian fantasies ( Brazil ) and interpenetrations of ancient myth and modern psychoses ( The Fisher King) .

And across the spectrum, in the world of caviar-for-the-general art films, one has only to look at Atom Egoyan or Guy Maddin’s abstruse, mood-lit, slow-moving angst-fests, or at the Frenchman Arnaud DesPlechin’s 1992 La Sentinelle (which the director describes as “a brooding, intuitive study in split consciousness” and which is actually about a disassociated med-student’s relationship with a severed head), or actually at just about anything recent that’s directed by a French male under 35, to see Lynch’s sensibility stamped like an exergue on art cinema’s hot young Turks, too.

13(This isn’t counting Dune , which was in the dreadful position of looking like it wanted to have one but not in fact having one.)

14I know I’m not putting this well; it seems too complicated to be put well. It has something to do with the fact that some movies are too scary or intense for younger viewers: a little kid, whose psychic defenses aren’t yet developed, can be terribly frightened by a horror movie that you or I would regard as cheesy and dumb.

15The way Lost Highway makes the idea of head-entry literal is not an accident.

16 (Premiere magazine puts its writers in extremely snazzy hotels, by the way. I strongly doubt all hotels in LA are like this.)

17I know things like this sound like a cheap gag, but I swear I’m serious. The incongruous realism of cheap gags is what made the whole thing Lynchian.

18Mary Sweeney is one of Lost Highway ’s three producers. Her main responsibilities seem to be the daily rushes and the rough cut and its storage and organization. She was Lynch’s editor on Fire Walk with Me .

19(One Lost Highway crewperson described Scott Cameron as “the Mozart of stress,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.)

20(not “Third Assistant,” for some firmly established reason)

21(= Robert Loggia)

22(= Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all mashed together and then emptied of some vital essence. He’s not particularly tall, but he looks tall in Lost Highway ’s footage because he has extremely poor posture and David Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest Lord of the Flies , in which he was bland and essenceless but not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected as a homeless kid in Where the Day Takes You (like how does a homeless kid manage to have fresh mousse in his hair every day?) and really good in a surly bit part in Mr. Holland’s Opus .

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.)