David Lynch's features, ranked

For October's favorite director ranking, I thought I would choose one of my two favorite directors of horror films that are not exactly horror films. (The other is Roman Polanski, whom I bumped last month to cover Tony Scott and who will receive his spotlight later this month.) Lynch's work digs under the image of postwar American society—parenthood, bourgeois suburbia, the glamor of Old Hollywood—to find the terror beneath, which is itself usually rooted in grotesque exaggerations of classic pulp. Lynch exists always in the past and on the forefront, sublimating noir and melodrama of the '40s and '50s into an ambitious, massively influential television program and an exploratory use of the capabilities of DV. Nearly all of his 10 features are great, and despite the occasional characterization of his work as weird for its own sake, they reward multiple viewings rather than suffer from them. A year ago, it would not have occurred to me to rank Lynch among my favorite filmmakers, but after viewing and revisiting the gems below, he now sits near the top of my list.

10. Dune

You know you're in for a mess when the director credit not only lists "Alan Smithee" but reads "A Alan Smithee Film" rather than "An Alan Smithee Film." Dune, in theory, might have been perfect for Lynch to explode the scope of his weirdness on blockbuster scale. Instead, it is a work of profound soullessness, weighed down at every turn by impersonal sets and a dreary slog of expositional dialogue. To mention that the film has expositional dialogue, though, is to suggest it ever has dialogue of any other kind. Indeed not, and the endless tedium (not to mention bewilderment) of listening to every single character explaining every single thing in excruciating, unnecessary detail offers no respite from the big emptiness of the sub-Star Wars production design. The best that can be said of the whole affair is that Lynch himself clearly must have endeared himself with some of the actors, as performers like Kyle MacLachlan and Dean Stockwell would return for later, better films.

9. The Elephant Man

Had Dune been a commercial success and a fulfilling project for Lynch, would the rest of his career departed from this smash sophomore effort rather than the magnificent mulligan that was Blue Velvet? If works in the mawkish, stilted vein of The Elephant Man might have been the true groundwork for a commercially successful Lynch, it is hard not to be glad the director soon moved far away from this brand of filmmaking. Buoyed by two strong performances by Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt, The Elephant Man nevertheless suffers for its oppressively static construction, suffocating in a way that could be intentional but does not matter either way because it saps the film of any impact. Occasionally, Lynch cuts away to the roaring underbelly of the hospital where Hopkins makes Hurt a glorified prisoner, and these jarring blasts of noise and symbolic imagery, like the jolts in Haydn’s “Surprise,” are the cleverest, most engaging bits of the whole work.

8. The Straight Story

Moving past the aforementioned two stinkers, ranking Lynch’s filmography becomes nearly impossible, as the remaining eight features are all of exceptional quality and striking vision. That is true even of this stylistic departure, a movie so pared down from Lynch’s usual weirdness that practically everyone sees the title more as an admission on the director’s part than a description of the subject. Yet the most remarkable aspect of The Straight Story is not the absence of Lynch’s weirdness but its application toward a positive, even wholesome narrative. Try not to fall in love with Alvin Straight, the old, broken man forced to take the oddest transportation imaginable to see his even more decrepit brother. Filled with an assortment of endearing characters but powered by Richard Farnsworth’s quiet, real performance, The Straight Story is not an outlier in Lynch’s canon so much as the uncovered heart that pumps blood through even his most despairing work.

7. Blue Velvet

One of the greatest films of the 1980s, Blue Velvet got Lynch back on track after two disappointing Hollywood features threatened to kill his early promise. Refining Eraserhead’s psychological surrealism into a broader social portrait of weirdness, Blue Velvet peeked out from the freakish individuals that dotted earlier work to suggest that society itself was twisted. In light of what came after this, Lynch’s first feature-length immersion into the underworld of Rockwellian suburbia seems relatively conventional, gas-huffing psychopath Hopper and icy, Golden Oldies voguer Stockwell included. This may be Lynch’s most satiric work: MacLachlan and Dern blatantly look too old to be in high school (probably intentional, as Dern looks younger in Wild at Heart, made four years later). Meanwhile, Hopper’s sadistic relationship with Isabella Rosselini’s tormented torch singer, however frightening, is absurdist farce, Frank regressing to infancy as he bites her blue robe and slides his hand up her (Freudian) slip. A gaudy, and gauzy, counterpoint to visions of middle class Shangri-La in Reagan’s America.

6. Eraserhead

For some, Lynch never topped this 1977 feature debut, made with the AFI's assistance and surely the greatest student film ever made. With an impressive grasp of film technique, young Lynch set about breaking all the rules he understood so innately. The sound design and carefully ordered but...off mise-en-scène establish Lynch’s stylistic foundations and his penchant for drawing almost unbearable tension from ordinary objects. In fact, take out all the grotesque people and effects Lynch inserts into the film and you still get one of the most chillingly effective horror films of all time. No wonder Stanley Kubrick studied it so judiciously when making The Shining, another movie in which interiors are the true villain.

5. Lost Highway

Noirish elements creep into many of Lynch’s films, but none dives into the genre’s black soul like Lost Highway, which seems to take the POV of film noir itself. Of particular note to Lynch, who has often given the most weight and nonjudgmental affection for his women characters, is the misogyny subtly put on parade in the movie’s shape-shifting narrative. The extended middle section, filled with all the seedy details that riddle Lynch’s sub-suburban nightmares, is the self-justifying projection of Bill Pullman’s character, who murders his frigid wife in paranoid delusion and attempts to run away from himself for the rest of the film and the cycle it promises to restart at the end. Plenty of filmmakers have had fun with the femme fatale archetype, but Lynch suggests that it is a fabrication by men to justify their own sexism, so that even the woman who refuses to be a victim is made a victim of male thought control. Through it all, Lost Highway makes the case for David Lynch coming the closest of perhaps any filmmaker to even partially replicating the effect of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another work about sexual guilt that it always morphing and yet fundamentally cyclical.

4. Mulholland Dr.

Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks won Lynch legions of fans he spent the ‘90s gradually bleeding out, their interest in his trippy surrealism hitting the wall when they saw in his first three ‘90s movies how far Lynch could go with that style. The Straight Story won back some acclaim but seemed a departure more than a comeback. Then came Mulholland Dr. Collecting all the aspects of his ‘90s movies that appeared in such raw form, Mulholland Dr. distills all the weirdness into easily the director’s most focused work. Lynch repurposes the obliterating guilt of Lost Highway; into a cloud of denial over unrequited love and, perhaps worse, the realization of one’s lack of talent. As such, this poisoned love letter to Hollywood may be Lynch’s most tongue-in-cheek film, but as filtered through Naomi Watts’ performance and the lush formalism that meshes with its hazy dreamscape, it is also one of his most gripping and affecting.

3. Wild at Heart

I figured out Wild at Heart when Nic Cage’s character upstaged a show by speed metal band Powermad and led the group in a sudden cover of Elvis Presley. Up to that point, Wild at Heart is a mad jumble of freaks cranked up to 11 to show all Lynch’s post-Blue Velvet admirers what they were in for. It is still all of that after this moment, of course, but this scene acts as a skeleton key that reveals the film as a swirling collage of 20th century pop culture, where Elvis and Wild One-era Brando flow in and out of thrash metal and gaudy snakeskin. It also revamps The Wizard of Oz and reworks it to make dull, repressive home life the evil force it always should have been in that story and the thought of permanently escaping it the greatest wish one could ask from a ruler who could grant anything. Nic Cage has never been more attuned to the subject matter of one of his movies, and Lynch has never so casually touched metal to a raw nerve.

2. INLAND EMPIRE

The Joycean aspects of David Lynch’s filmmaking reach their pinnacle with INLAND EMPIRE, in which the temporal simultaneity of Wild at Heart and Möbius-strip cycles of Lost Highway are laid together, joined by mortar made from the ground-up shards of Lynch’s entire filmography. Lynch’s other films contain tendencies of Finnegans Wake, but this is the full thing: a basic plot rendered insensible and inexplicable through a stacking of time, space, even dimensions of reality into one simultaneously, flowing moment. Trading Irish national guilt for American pulp and a sense of complicity in the misogynistic exploitation he abhors, Lynch delivers perhaps his ultimate statement on the bonds of abuse that ground our loftiest fantasies, and how he perpetuates that as much as anyone. Laura Dern handles the constant slip between realities and places better than anyone could be reasonably expected to do, and Lynch finds in DV the smeary grime he wanted film to have all along. Indeed, INLAND EMPIRE, with its raw lighting and expansiveness of visual scope, is perhaps the quintessential visualization of digital as a different method of image capture than film, not merely in the ease of shooting but how that image is programmed and saved.

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

If one views Fire Walk With Me solely as a narrative link to Twin Peaks, it will seem an unnecessary (and unnecessarily obtuse) rehash of a story we all know. Laura Palmer’s inevitable death, and the sufficient piecing together of her life’s horrors on the series proper, admittedly saps the tension of the piece. As an emotional landscape, however, the film displays Lynch at his best. Featuring an early, half-formed bifurcated structure that Lynch would later refine, Fire Walk With Me opens with the director’s most abstract, surreal, alienating humor before switching gears to plunge into the heart of the depravity and despair that lurks beneath the surface of all Lynch’s films. As the director ignores the wishes of fans and throws out narrative closure for the sake of honing in on a detail they already know, he provides a more resonant sense of emotional clarity to the show for those paying attention. No other Lynch film so plainly makes the case that the director’s schtick isn’t just easy, cynical irony. He really cares about his characters, even—especially—when he puts them through the worst hell.

Butter (JimField Smith, 2012)

Butter is an unfunny, arrogant satire that tries to skewer the Midwest but exists so far outside the realm of reality that it says more about the ignorance of its makers than its targets. This is a film written with such hyperbole that the actors conflict with the roles they play by virtue of being human beings, bringing a basic sense of human decency to such wafer-thin stereotypes. Occasionally, it gets a laugh in spite of itself, but Butter is so condescending and superior that it mainly just made me feel angry at those who thought it was clever enough to fund.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Cars: Modal Verbs for Prohibition - CAN'T - TO BE NOT ALLOWED TO

Take a look at the rules for the race that will take place in the movie segment. Try to match the rule and its meaning.

1. No pushing

2. No shoving

3. No bumping

4. No cheating

5. No spitting

6. No biting

7. No maiming

8. No road rage

9. No lolly gagging

10. No road hogging

11. No back stabbing

12. No oil slicking

( ) no idly wasting time

( ) no useless slow driving

( ) no saying bad things behind their backs

( ) no letting oil on the road

( ) no using of physical force to remove the opponent

( ) no pushing rudely

( ) no hitting

( ) no behaving dishonestly

( ) no insulting

( ) no using of teeth to hurt the opponent

( ) no mutilating

( ) no aggressive behavior on the road

Watch the movie segment now and then rewrite the rules, using CAN'T and NOT ALLOWED TO.

Ex: 1. You can't push / You're not allowed to push

2.............................................

3............................................

4............................................

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - CARS


WORKSHEET


Answer key:

Ex I

9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Musketeer Mania

I've got not one but two (sadly not three) pieces on Musketeer movies freshly up on the Internet. One is a discussion between myself and the lovely Allison from NerdVampire on Peter Hyams' simultaneously underrated and very appropriately rated 2001 feature, The Musketeer. Wire fu meets swashbuckling in this gratingly scripted but finely lensed POS. Check out our discussion here.

The other is on the deliciously, ludicrously scripted and gorgeously lensed Paul W.S. Anderson feature, The Three Musketeers. I gave this a positive, if somewhat backhanded, review after its theatrical release last year, but the severity with which I now treat Anderson's talents can be directly traced back to my fondness for this sailpunk take on the novel, with its beautiful, vast interiors, coherent action, and even a sly bit of satire or two. My full review can be found at Spectrum Culture.

Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)

Rian Johnson's Looper takes great pains to head off any in-depth discussion of the paradoxes and metaphysical nightmares associated with time travel narratives. This is true even when the protagonist, the hired killer Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a conversation with his 30-years-older self (Bruce Willis). "We'll be here all day, making diagrams with straws," Old Joe says to Young Joe by way of warning. After a while, Looper largely lets its genre trappings fall to the wayside, leaving behind its references to over-mined sci-fi classics and newer hits. "The movies you're copying are copying other movies," Young Joe's boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), says of the young man's wardrobe, but it could also be seen as a chiding the director takes to heart for his film.

Take time travel out of the scenario, though, and even the denser, more classically sci-fi first act of the film could still run under the same circular title. Young Joe's life moves in endless repetitions. As a hired gun employed by future mobsters looking to dispose of their enemies in the past (where bodies are harder to track, especially if they technically do not exist), Joe's life follows a set pattern. Be at the right place on-time, blast the target when it suddenly appears, collect his money and go party. Joe saves most of his money for the early retirement people in his line of work receive, but as Johnson's montage of Joe's routine speeds up under the influence of the cleaner's drug use and dispassion, it becomes evident that retirement may prove more debilitating for him than his profession. Not that he will get to find out, however, when his final target, himself, manages to overpower his younger self and threatens to create a whole new timeline. Imagine how weird this would be if the director didn't try so hard to avoid time talk.

Johnson has built a name for himself as a visually dynamic shooter, and his stylistic flourishes are certainly welcome among the more impersonal, incomprehensible mega-blockbusters. In an early scene, he amps up the sensory experience with a sudden camera stutter and explosion of volume when Joe drops drugs into his eye and blinks. The camera is then set a-reeling, the spartan visual setup accompanying the pulpy, mercifully terse expositional introduction giving way to swooning, arcing movements around the decayed urban shell of 2042 Omaha. The best and most disturbing play on the time-travel angle involves the fate of Joe's friend and colleague, Seth (Paul Dano), who helps set everything in motion by failing to kill his own future self and revealing to Joe how horrifying the punishment for this failure is. He does not even see the worst of it, which the audience gets to view via the future self, whose escape attempt is thwarted when his extremities start slowly, terrifyingly disappearing as his past self is brutally changed. Editing maintains a consistent sense of clarity and flow, never using the time-travel story as an excuse to confound. This is true even of the shots that blend the alternate timelines of the two Joes and the memories the older one has and wishes to protect as his younger self's path is drastically altered by his refusal to die according to plan.

The one memory Old Joe treasures most also acts as his motive for carrying out a mission to alter the future by dealing with a monster in its infancy. Without going too far into this sudden story development, suffice to say it readily recalls The Terminator, down to a shot of a gun-toting Willis kicking in a residential door and stalking inside that comes right out of James Cameron's film. This change of pace introduces a deep moral element into the film to fill the gaps where, in other films, more time-travel play might go. Teased as a warped action film, Looper instead devotes its time to the morality of killing an innocent before it can grow into a mass-murderer, and whether such actions work or merely exacerbate the problem.

Where the film stumbles is in its middle passage, after Old Joe's mission has been made clear but before he realizes which of his small list of targets is the person he wants to terminate. Trading the rotted city for open fields, Looper abruptly, and by the admission of its maker, looks to Witness as a key inspiration. But where Peter Weir's film maintained the overall level of tension by altering its source from corrupted cops hunting one of their own to the friction between the honest, modern cop and the Amish community in which he hides. Looper only sporadically transfers over its own suspense, but it also places that tension into a vessel that clangs against the time-travel story with a whole other issue that throws off the film's momentum. This shifted focus on mutation, though somewhat grounded in brief sights of low-powered telekinesis being used by arrogant showboats in the city, is never meshed credibly with the rest of the story and comes off as tacked-on rather than fluid.

Nevertheless, Johnson manages to spin even this awkward addition into a positive, using it to probe questions of the impermanence of the future and the question of whether love can be as powerful a method of saving lives as a disposal of evil. Emily Blunt makes a powerful impression as the rural mother who takes in Young Joe and could expose him to that which Old Joe wishes to eradicate. Her performance is all the more so affecting because she never makes clear whether her care is sufficient to alter the future. But then, Looper does not suggest that only one person's love can hold back the darkness, nor does evil exist in a vacuum. If the film's middle act lags, it almost makes up for it with the ending, in which an evil is attacked, but perhaps not the one you would think. The final act is motivated by love, but then so is much of the horrific content of the film, from Old Joe's vendetta to the emotional instability of the figure who could grow up to be a tyrant. Because of this, Looper does not leave the audience with a tidy, thrilling high but a morally unsure, emotionally devastating conclusion. If nothing else, it shows a willingness to try to be something other than "awesome," which has weighed down so many summer films in recent years.

Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

Hail Mary follows logically from his previous 1980s work even as it marks one of the biggest departures of his always shifting career. The director's "return to cinema" demonstrated a director not returning to filmmaking (he never left that, even if he did become more of a videographer) but returning to cinema as something he believed could change the world. Though such films as Passion and Every Man for Himself use the fragmentary, analytical techniques Godard picked up with video experimentations, they also displays a return to aesthetic beauty for its own sake, poetic evocation given equal weight to the held-over Marxist theory.

But Hail Mary goes one further. Godard strips the film of the political underpinnings that inform nearly all of his films from the mid-'60s (and a few that date back even earlier) to this point, instead turning to matter of the corporeal and incorporeal. In retelling the story of the virgin birth, Godard breaks down the layers of deification and mythos surrounding the story to examine what such an occurrence would mean to the young virgin, to her relationship with Joseph (Thierry Rode), and to her sudden obligation to sacrifice her corporeal desires and wishes to serve something greater. Godard still employs dialectic, but here it focuses entirely on matters of existence, the split between the body and the soul.

Naturally, Godard portrays this dichotomy through the conflict of image and sound. We see Marie (Myriem Roussel) in plain naturalism: watching her play on her high school basketball team and lightly brush aside the sexual advances of her lover. Over such scenes, however, Godard plays Bach and Dvorak, art made in the service of God doubling as His voice singing from her soul. Cutaways to pillow shots of nature—including recurring shots of the phases of the moon that come to represent Marie—poeticize the image, but otherwise the director maintains an honest appraisal of the woman and her figure that always grounds the soaring, sacred beauty of the music.

That Godard films Roussel and her frequently nude body with such straightforward, matter-of-fact openness represents a step forward in his always contentious views of women. One of Godard's most recognizable thematic tics—the elevation of the female prostitute as the ultimate symbol of capitalism and its commodification of everything up to and including the body—made up such a fundamental part of his canon that the director's renewed interest in the topic coincided with that vaunted return to film. But the cut-up manner in which he filmed women's bodies, simultaneously reflecting and critiquing the male gaze as a materialist fetish, is nowhere in sight in Hail Mary. Instead, he films Roussel's body on its own terms, as an instrument of sex and life-bearing. And when Joseph and, less sinisterly, Marie's gynecologist, attempt to invade that body, Godard does not frame their gropings as Marxist analogy but physical reality. As if to further delineate this method from the director's usual style, Hail Mary occasionally cuts away to a teacher and his female student debating matters of sex and religion in theoretical abstracts, their conclusions of the impossibility of Marie's conception hilariously useless when juxtaposed with that impossibility happening before our eyes.

Yet if Hail Mary frames its subject in the most pared-down, apolitical manner of Godard's career to this point, it also emerges one of his most evocative, and humorous. When the Lord needs something a bit more blunt than Bach to communicate, he sends a messenger, here identified as "Uncle" Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste), who looks less like an angel than a vagrant suspiciously toting around a young child. His dubious legitimacy adds an element of extreme discomfort to his instruction on God's will, but he can also be farcical, as when he responds cryptically to a taxi driver and his child companion chides, "That's not your line, Uncle Gabriel!" Shots of women toying with Rubik's cubes make for amusing interludes whose obviousness morphs into density as Godard holds the shots. A placid montage of close-ups inside of flowers would be an almost Hitchcockian visual pun were labias not already so prominently on display, therefore allowing the images to exist as poetic, sumptuous art for its own sake. Joseph's frustrated lack of sexual access gives an insight into how the Biblical Joseph might have reacted to his wife's news, but might his pent-up aggression be an indication of what the "real" Mary might have faced?

Before one can ponder that too long, however, Godard shows Marie gaining the upper hand in their relationship, eventually converting Joseph to the cause of raising the son of God and leaving her untouched. But even this domination comes at a price. Dutifully putting her faith into the idea of bearing a child as a virgin, Marie nevertheless reflects upon what the elevation of her spirit means for the body "I am a soul imprisoned by a body," she says in voiceover, though if she sees her corporeal shell as limiting for her spiritual growth into a goddess, she also recognizes that her beatification will strip her of her natural sexuality. My favorite insight into this aspect of Marie's reflection comes from Christopher Long in a brief review appended to DVDBeaver's analysis New Yorker Video's DVD of the film. He brings up a connection to Roman Polanski's seminal horror film Rosemary's Baby, about a woman bearing Satan's child. Long notes that carrying God's baby could be as harrowing as the devil's, but not why: Polanski's film served as a twisted allegory for women being forced to carry their rapists' children to term, but does Marie have any more say in being the Lord's vessel than Rosemary does being Lucifer's? Polanski plays this for unrelenting terror, but Godard finds elegiac mourning in it. As Marie says right before the film ends on a close-up of her lipstick-rimmed mouth hanging open in the vague memory of desire, "I am of the Virgin, and I didn't want this being. I only left my imprint on the soul who helped me. That's all." In maintaining a platonic relationship with Joseph, Marie retains her independence. In entering into a "sexual" relationship with God, that independence is eradicated. Viewed through that perspective, the story of the Virgin Mother becomes one of subjugation, not exultation.

Head Games (Steve James, 2012)

Steve James' weakest feature almost doesn't even feel like a James film at first, presenting a straightforward call to increased safety in sports to reduce the rising number of concussions. But as James and his subjects uncover a sickening level of self-justification and obfuscation on the part of sports organizations looking to maximize the playing time (and, therefore, profit margin) of their players, Head Games emerges as something more classically "Jamesian." In peeling back the layers, the director starts to live up to his usual quality, and if nothing else, Head Games is proof that when James acquiesces to play by convention, he can still make a fine, probing work.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.