David Lynch, 1946–2025

lynch.jpg

Photo by Frank Connor from The Elephant Man: The Book of the Film (1980).

I feel at a loss for words on this occasion, Lynch’s films have been a continual presence in my life since I saw The Elephant Man in 1981. I’d actually been thinking of watching some of them again, maybe even having a full-on Lynch season the way I did in 2018 when I watched everything in sequence, from his early shorts through to Twin Peaks: The Return which at the time had just been released on disc.

A few random thoughts:

• My first sighting of Eraserhead was on the big video screens at the Hacienda in Manchester in late 1982. Claude Bessy used to play clips from his video collection, all of them silent because a DJ was usually playing music at the same time, so you’d end up seeing confusing, contextless shots from films like A Clockwork Orange, Shogun Assassin, various Andy Warhol films, and so on. I got to see Eraserhead in full shortly after this at a proper cinema on a double-bill with George Romero’s The Crazies. The Romero was fun but the Lynch was a doorway to another world.

lynch3.jpg

Photo from Lynch on Lynch (1997).

• Anyone writing about Lynch’s early features, especially Eraserhead, ought to mention sound designer Alan Splet. Lynch himself was always full of praise for Splet; the pair worked on the soundtracks together but Splet had a unique way of processing sounds which is all over the early films from The Grandmother on. You can gauge Splet’s sonic invention by watching The Black Stallion, a Lynch-less film for which Splet won an Oscar, where the sounds of panting horses are stranger than anything in any other film about horses or horse-racing. If you were familiar with Splet’s weirdness then his absence from Wild at Heart was a significant loss; Randy Thom is a good sound designer but he’s not in the same league. As Paul Schütze noted in his Splet obituary for The Wire in 1995, the soundtrack of Eraserhead is one of the foundations of the whole “dark ambient” genre of music.

• Some favourite Splet moments in Lynch’s films: the industrial sounds that accompany Treves’ walk through the East End in The Elephant Man; the visit from the Guild Navigator at the beginning of Dune; Jeffrey’s dream in Blue Velvet.

• For all the times I’ve watched Blue Velvet I still don’t know what that thing is hanging on Jeffrey’s bedroom wall.

• Lynch films are dog films.

• It was difficult not to feel like a Lynch hipster in 1990 when the world at large was forced to confront Lynch’s imagination via Twin Peaks and (to a lesser extent) Wild at Heart. We had to endure a year of people who’d spent the past decade ignoring Lynch’s films offering their opinions, along with inane comments such as “But does he have anything to say?” It was a relief when Fire Walk With Me came out and drove away the lightweights. I remember Kim Newman pointing out in his Sight and Sound review that the Twin Peaks prequel was more of a genuine horror film than many films explicitly labelled as such. The same could be said of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

lynch2.jpg

• I was pleased that Lynch was invited to contribute to the Manchester International Festival in 2019; I got to see some of his paintings and also buy Twin Peaks badges and Lynch postcards. Best of all, however, was the two weeks or so when his face was peering out of posters at tram stops and (as he is here) gazing down on pedestrians in my local high street. I’ve mentally tagged that pole as The David Lynch Lamp Post ever since.

Okay, maybe not so lost for words after all…

• Elsewhere:
(offline) Lynch on Lynch (1997), edited by Chris Rodley. 270 pages of interviews which aren’t always very revealing but which still contain a wealth of detail and anecdote about the making of the films. Also a fair amount of discussion about his paintings and other artworks.
(online) 46 issues of Wrapped in Plastic, the Lynch fan magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Lynch dogs
42 One Dream Rush
Through the darkness of future pasts
David Lynch window displays
David Lynch in Paris
Inland Empire

The ghost at the window

bava1.jpg

I’ve been taking advantage of the Spook Season to finally watch some of the horror films that I’ve known about for decades but never managed to see until now. Among the collection has been Ishiro Honda’s fungal nightmare, Matango (1963), and the Poe-themed Spirits of the Dead (1968), one of those Italian anthology films that proliferated in the 1960s, this one featuring episodes directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. Still to come is Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi’s ghost film.

curse.jpg

Topping the list was Curse of the Dead (1966), another ghost film directed by Mario Bava. Ten years ago I wrote a post about a black-and-white still from Bava’s film (see above) which has proved surprisingly popular, finding its way onto a number of book and record covers. The still is one of many that fill the pages of Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973), and had intrigued me long before I started to notice its use elsewhere. Gifford, however, wasn’t much help when trying to find out more about the film itself. Curse of the Dead is one of the few films that he doesn’t discuss in his book, and its title compounded the mystery when nothing with that name was listed in film guides. The problem turned out to be one that plagues horror films, especially the older variety, whereby a film’s title changes each time it crosses a national border. Gifford was using the British name given to something originally released in Italy as Operazione Paura (Operation Fear). Curse of the Dead is rather vague—it would suit any number of other films—but it’s preferable to the Italian one, which makes it sound like a spy thriller, and far better than the other alternatives. Since America dominates the film business it’s usually the American title, Kill, Baby, Kill, that you see this one listed under, a typical piece of overkill (so to speak) from US distributors AIP. In Germany it was released as The Thousand Eyes of Dr Dracula, a ridiculous play on Fritz Lang’s final Dr Mabuse film.

bava2.jpg

Curse of the Dead.

Whatever the title, Bava’s film is well worth seeking out. The story concerns a doctor who arrives at a small Carpathian village to perform an autopsy on a young woman who has died in mysterious circumstances. The death is one of several that have blighted the village, all caused by a blonde ghost girl whose appearance at night—always dressed in white, and playing with a bouncing white ball—seals the doom of anyone who encounters her. A story that in other hands might be rote and predictable (hello, Hammer Films) is anything but, thanks to Bava’s visual artistry and inventiveness in the face of a severely limited budget. Halfway through the film the narrative logic dissolves into an extended nocturnal investigation punctuated by remarkable dreamlike moments, notably a scene in which the doctor ends up chasing himself through a succession of doors in identical rooms twenty-five years before Agent Cooper did something similar in Twin Peaks. The “Carpathian” exteriors are mostly Italian countryside, filmed in a mountain village whose ruined nature adds a great deal to the atmosphere. As for the intriguing hands-at-the-window moment, I was prepared to be disappointed by its eventual appearance but Bava makes it a key moment after teasing us with other shots like the one above, showing spectral hands and faces at windows.

fellini.jpg

Toby Dammit.

Bava’s ghost (or a version of her) reappeared two years later in the Fellini episode of Spirits of the Dead, a detail I’d forgotten about until this week. Fellini’s Toby Dammit is the best part of the anthology feature but the Poe story he was adapting, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, doesn’t involve any blonde ghost girls. Terence Stamp is the title character, playing an actor rather like himself who succumbs to an alcohol-fuelled breakdown while being flattered and harassed by fans, paparazzi and a gallery of grotesques from the Italian film business. The ghost haunting him for inexplicable reasons is less a homage than an outright theft (she even has a bouncing white ball), something that apparently dismayed Mario Bava, understandably so after the problems he had to get his own film made. That said, Toby Dammit still carries a spooky charge even if Fellini’s spectre is a poor relation to Bava’s, with the whole episode playing like a particularly nightmarish out-take from 8 1/2.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Juliet of the Spirits
A Pictorial History of Horror Movies by Denis Gifford
Design as virus 14: Curse of the Dead

Weekend links 431

eckman-lawn.jpg

Postcard collage by Alex Eckman-Lawn.

• “He deserves to be a major figure not only in the history of Japanese music, but in popular music writ large.” Geeta Dayal on Haruomi Hosono, a musician whose solo albums from the 1970s are reissued this month by Light In The Attic.

Erica X Eisen reviews Black Light: Secret Traditions in Art since the 1950s, an exhibition of occult art at the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Centre. Related: Gary Lachman‘s talk from the same exhibition.

• Mixes of the week: Jesús Bacalão’s Light Entertainment Programme 2, Secret Thirteen Mix 265 by Alexander Tucker, and FACT Mix 672 by Rian Treanor.

Whenever horror is criticised, it is criticised for staging a dark carnival of physicality. Perhaps the only sort of media we moralise more than we do horror is that other mainliner of bodily response, pornography.

Horror’s historical ghettoisation has meant that weightier, smarter horror reliably gets labelled as something else. The finest films of our current golden age have been dubbed “elevated horror” and “post-horror”. In literary circles, works of horror seen as sufficiently cerebral get relabelled “Gothic”. It’s certainly true that great horror is always about more than gore. But we should be careful not to gentrify the genre by cleansing it of everything but the philosophy.

MM Owen on the perennial attractions of a perennially despised genre

• “Netflix is a woeful service,” says Jeremy Allen who prefers DVD/Blu-ray to streaming video (as do I). Related: The problem with film aspect ratio on Netflix.

• The Thought Gang album, a Twin Peaks-related collaboration between David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti from 1993, will be released next month.

Tangerine Dream: Sound From Another World: a TV documentary from 2016. In German but with auto-translated subtitles.

The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales by John Locke.

Haute Macabre Staff Favorites: Tarot Decks

First Light (1980) by Harold Budd & Brian Eno | Blue Light (1993) by Mazzy Star | Black Light (1994) by Material

Lynch dogs

angriestdog.jpg

Last year I decided that rather than watch the new series of Twin Peaks via whatever dubious downloads were available, I’d wait until the whole thing was released on disc. Last weekend I finally pressed “play” on the first episode, but prior to this I’d spent the past couple of months working through David Lynch’s filmography, from his earliest shorts to Inland Empire. I also watched a couple of episodes from the first two seasons of Twin Peaks (the pilot and the final episode of season two).

Watching a director’s collected works used to be a difficult thing without an obliging repertory cinema or TV channel. In the days when the BBC and Channel 4 (UK) still treated cinema as an art form we were given seasons of films by Orson Welles, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Altman and many others. When was the last time a (non-Swedish) television channel showed all of Bergman’s films, I wonder? It was memories of watching an Altman season that led me to spend the summer of 2016 watching all of the director’s films from That Cold Day in the Park (1969) through to A Prairie Home Companion (2006), 33 films in all. I followed this with a viewing of nearly all the Hitchcock films that are currently available on blu-ray. Watching a director’s oeuvre in this manner makes you notice things that seem less obvious when the same films are viewed in isolation: the recurrent use of actors becomes more notable, while themes, obsessions and directorial tics make themselves more apparent.

David Lynch shares with Altman and Hitchcock a compulsion for using the same actors from one film to the next, but I’d not noticed before how often dogs appear in his films. So that’s what this post examines, some of the canine moments from his feature films. Since I didn’t watch the whole of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks they’re omitted from this listing (unless you know of a dog in any of the episodes) while some of  Lynch’s minor works such as the short-lived On the Air series, and one-offs such as The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988), I either haven’t seen for years or haven’t seen at all.

The Grandmother (1970)

grandmother.jpg

The Grandmother not only introduces the elderly woman/suited boy pairing that recurs later in the Twin Peaks mythos, but it also establishes the canine theme when the boy’s parents are shown mewling and barking like dogs. Whatever other qualities dogs may possess, Lynch is drawn to the disturbing and often threatening nature of the sounds they make.

Eraserhead (1977)

eraserhead.jpg

The potential for threat is reinforced in Eraserhead when Henry is startled by barking dogs on his way to visit Mary. The only dogs that appear before the camera are the puppies and their mother on the floor of Mary’s home.

Continue reading “Lynch dogs”

Weekend links 361

f1x-2.jpg

The Future Vol.2 (2016) by f1x-2.

• One of the notable things about the reaction to the original series of Twin Peaks was the way in which Americans were astonished that something so outré could be allowed on television. Here in the UK the response was a little more subdued; we had, after all been spoiled for years by The Prisoner, Sapphire and Steel, and numerous odd and challenging dramas by Dennis Potter and others. Pre-dating all of these was The Strange World of Gurney Slade (1960), a six-part series starring Anthony Newley that was unprecedented in its Surrealism. Andy Murray looks back at the series, and at the rest of Newley’s career.

Andrew Dickson on Peter Ackroyd whose latest book, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day, is published later this month.

Alyona Sokolnikova on a Soviet vision of the future: the legacy and influence of Tekhikia – Molodezhi (Technology for the Youth) magazine.

You know who weren’t cops? All the radicals and queers and artists and dreamers that were there while I grew up, my mom and dad’s old friends from New York and the wider bohemian world, the actors and the drag queens and the dilettantes and the ex junkies and the current junkies, the kind of queer people who wouldn’t get caught dead getting married, the people who actually made the “old New York” of the myth into what it was. They were smart and they were funny and they were tougher than I can imagine and they were possessed of an existential commitment to the idea that life is complicated and so we shouldn’t be quick to judge. They were tolerant, in the true sense, even while they were tireless advocates for actual justice. […] Now we’re Rudy Giuliani, trying to get offensive art pulled off the walls. Now we’re the book burners. Now we’re the censors. Now we attack the ACLU for defending free speech. Now we screech about community morals. Now we’re the prison camp screws. That’s us. Me, I could never be one of the good ones. Never. I can never live up to that ideal. I know I’m not good enough. I know when the judgment day comes, I go down. And so I decline. You can decline, too.

Planet of Cops by Freddie deBoer, or how inflexible morality makes everyone a cop

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 601 by Dark Entries, Secret Thirteen Mix 221 by Eli Keszler, and XLR8R Podcast 490 by Ben Lukas Boysen.

• At Dangerous Minds: Punk, Patti Smith, William Burroughs & capitalism: A “conceptual conversation” with RE/Search’s Vale.

Emily Wells on the strange, irreverent worlds of Down Below and The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington.

Rick Poynor on Mike Halliwell’s montages based on JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition.

• “Why are the British so scared of cannabis?” asks Professor David Nutt.

Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978) by Arthur Evans.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jacques Rivette Day.

Designing Penguin Modern Classics

Future Dub (1994) by Mouse On Mars | Future Proof (2003) by Massive Attack | Future (2004) by Alva Noto