Review: 'David Lynch: His Work, His World'

Over the course of a lovely but tiring seventeen years of Psychobabbling I've scaled way back on writing anything but reviews here. So I allowed a big, awful milestone to pass without much more than changing the banner at the top of this page. I'm talking about the death of David Lynch, my favorite artist, one who was so versatile, open, and willing to tap into dreams and nightmares, so old-fashioned hardworking, that he has been nothing short of the biggest creative inspiration in my own life. 

I got my start as a writer when my article on the role of dream worlds in Lynch's work was published in the final issue of the Twin Peaks fanzine Wrapped in Plastic way back in 2005. Although I've since published a couple of books, and even got to work on one of them with one of my top music heroes, Dave Davies, the biggest thrill of my career was seeing my name on the cover of Wrapped in Plastic beneath those of Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, star Catherine Coulson, writer Bob Engels, editor Mary Sweeney, and David Lynch. 

Review: 'Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel'

Harry Dean Stanton was a mass of contradictions. He was the quintessential character actor who saw himself as a leading man. He was an unshakable atheist who sometimes identified himself as a Buddhist. He was a loner who often found himself at the center of hard carousing. He was the bitter product of a mother who abandoned him but would not acknowledge a man who claimed to be his son. 

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 349

The Date: September 13

The Movie: Wild at Heart (1990)

What Is It?: David Lynch makes his version of a rom-com by dropping Nick Cage as an outlaw Elvis impersonator and Laura Dern as his beloved Peanut into a 1965 Thunderbird and onto a nightmare road where they encounter private dicks, black angels, car-wreck victims, Tweety Bird-voiced bar flies, and Dern’s real-life mom Diane Ladd as the wickedest witch of a mom in North Carolina.

Why Today?: Today is National Peanut Day.

Review: “Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery” Blu-Ray: Part 1

After months of anticipation for "Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery" —and years of anticipation for the mythic deleted scenes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me— I finally own my very own solution to the many mysteries bubbling up from the darkest little town on Earth. While delving into the jam-packed blu-ray set is nothing short of a thrill for the Peaks Freak, it’s a challenge for the reviewer and downright frustrating for the Peaks Freak/reviewer because there’s just so damn much of it. So I am going to try something a little different here, and instead of trying to sum up all it entails in a single post, I’m going to give this home entertainment event the attention it deserves by beginning a series of reviews each focusing on a small patch of “The Entire Mystery”. This may take some time, especially since I really want to savor the HD-restored series. Sorry, but no binge watching for me. Plus, “Twin Peaks” is an autumnal show and I absolutely refuse to watch it during the hot, sticky summer, so I won’t even get started with that until September. The extras, however, are fair game.

Ten Outstanding Performances in David Lynch Works

David Lynch a master of conjuring uncanny, dreamy atmosphere, of terrifying viewers with films that aren’t quite horror movies, of blending genres into swirling nightmares that defy pat analysis. This is the stuff of which the term “Lynchian” is made. But let’s not forget that he is also an expert conductor of actresses and actors, and he has superb taste in them despite his cheeky use of specimens like Billy Ray Cyrus every now and then. The emotional and logical demands of a David Lynch script require remarkably talented interpreters and very often result in thoroughly unique, flat-out stunning performances. Here are ten of the greatest.

1. Jack Nance as Henry Spencer in Eraserhead

Jack Nance would deserve a place on this list if for nothing but his commitment. Eraserhead famously took five years to make as Lynch kept running out of money. That meant Nance had to both remain in character for five years and wear Henry Spencer’s—ummm—distinctive hair style for five years. Nance’s work in the film is far more than that though. With a bare minimum of dialogue, he relies on his subtly expressive face and masterfully controlled body language to convey the real emotion roiling away beneath Henry’s placid surface as he contends with his monstrous, mocking baby. The slightest smile conveys a flash of fatherly pride, the upturn of eyebrows conveys his despondency with his lot in life, his restful expression at the end of the film let’s us know that he finally feels loved, and it is a most moving climax. And when Nance does speak, his choked delivery draws out the film’s humor and sadness with expert balance. Lynch regards Nance as one of the most expert actors with whom he’s ever worked and handed roles in almost all of his films to Nance until the actor’s death in 1996.

2. Freddie Jones as Bytes in The Elephant Man

Review: 'Wild at Heart' Blu-Ray

1990 was a wild year for David Lynch. That’s when he and Mark Frost revolutionized TV with “Twin Peaks”, shocking a passive viewing public with more bizarre humor, cinematic atmosphere, graphic violence, and red-hot sexiness than it had ever seen on the little screen. The vibrations “Twin Peaks” sent out into world—making possible such future series as “The X-Files”, “The Sopranos”, and “Mad Men”—were so intense that we sometimes forget that ’90 was also the year Lynch had a breakthrough on the big screen when he won his first Palme d’Or with his adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart. It is significant that both pieces came out in the same year, because both Wild at Heart and “Twin Peaks” share steamy pulp-romance sensibilities, post-modern humor, pure surrealism, and lots of cast members. Both were also rejected by a fickle public as quickly as they were embraced, TV viewers losing interest in the second season of “Twin Peaks” and critics increasingly deciding that Wild at Heart was too self-referential and self-conscious. That’s always a misinformed way to approach a David Lynch film as he may actually be our least self-conscious, most purely intuitive filmmaker. Despite its nods to such pop-culture touchstones as The Wizard of Oz and Elvis Presley, Wild at Heart really follows a Rock & Roll rhythm all its own, and though it shares similarities with “Twin Peaks”, it diverges from that show and Gifford’s novel in its refreshing hopefulness. It is a film that completely believes that love can survive in a world that’s “wild at heart and weird on top.” While words like “weird” and “ironic” are overused in describing David Lynch’s movies, one word that isn’t is “sweet,” and Wild at Heart is ultimately a really sweet movie—even with its head-smashing murder, toilet seduction, severed-hand snatching dog, gross self-decapitation by shotgun, and close up of puke on a motel room carpet. Hey, it’s sweet, but it’s still a David Lynch movie.

Wild at Heart first came out in a pretty spiffy DVD edition by MGM in 2004, with a nice selection of extra features and refurbished sound and vision personally overseen by Mr. Lynch. The disc’s vibrant clarity was a revelation after so many years spent watching the film’s absolutely wretched incarnation on VHS. Ten years later, MGM has apparently decided that a breakthrough movie by perhaps the greatest living director is not worth putting out on blu-ray, so it passed Wild at Heart off to Twilight Time. It also passed along all of the extra features from its old DVD, which appear on the new blu-ray in standard definition. These are all worth a rewatch, especially for Diane Ladd’s interview. Her explanation for Marietta Fortune painting her face with lipstick is impassioned and it makes perfect sense of one of the film’s craziest scenes. The only new extras are a booklet essay (the cover of which is one of the sexiest movie stills I’ve ever seen) and Twilight Time’s standard isolated music and effects track. It would have been really nice to get those 75 minutes of deleted scenes that Lynch released on his Lime Green set in 2008, but I’m assuming Lynch personally owns that footage since his company Absurda released that DVD box and it wasn’t MGM’s to hand out. Oh, well.

The main draw of this new disc is obviously the blu-ray upgrade. No new tinkering has been performed, but the remastering of the old DVD was sharp enough that it has made the transition to high-def very well. There are some white specks here and there, but if this is the best we’re ever going to get Wild at Heart on home video, I have no complaints.

Get Wild at Heart on blu-ray at screenarchives.com here.