In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch

by Thomas Ligotti

  By the time of the filming of Hunchback, many of the players in the Elephant Man’s drama were long buried. It had been almost twelve years since Treves’s short essay on the man (and Treves’s subsequent death), and would be nearly thirty years before Ashley Montagu would publish his pioneering (but seriously flawed) study of Merrick. No doubt Hatton’s journalistic training served him well in bridging this long historical gap. As he learned more, he became convinced that this story remained untold only through accident, perhaps even fear. The story of Joseph Merrick was his story, the story Hatton was meant to tell, even if it wasn’t exactly his story. But it wasn’t until 1944’s The Pearl of Death that Hatton finally commanded some amount of attention from producers.

  Hatton had by then been working on the idea for what he called John Merrick: The Elephant Man for four years, ever since he had a copy of Treves’s memoirs mailed to him by a female fan—herself an acromegalic—from Merrye Olde England. This slender document, barely twelve pages, was all he had to go on for source material. But if any man could empathize with Joseph Merrick, Rondo Hatton was that man. He felt competent to fill in the caesurae Treves had left with his own experiences as an unwilling sideshow.

  Despite, or rather because of, a great deal of opposition from William Goetz, the head of International Pictures, the studio that was in the process of merging with Universal, Hatton was given the go-ahead to develop his John Merrick: The Elephant Man and his choice of an assistant to flesh out his spec script. Hatton chose an assistant he was already familiar with, though he hadn’t known it at the time: Agnes Lambright, E.D. Lambright’s daughter. Agnes would have been just about ten years old when Hatton left Tampa for California, and he hardly remembered her—at twenty-two, she had grown into quite a beauty. In headshots taken from about that time, Agnes (her professional name was Agnes LaVert, which helps to explain why Hatton didn’t recognize her) is a dark-haired and slightly cherubic young woman, with piercingly blue eyes and delicate features, like a young Ingrid Bergman.

  Goetz had executive producer Ben Pivar put Hatton’s office at the very top of the writer’s building, in an attic up a spiral staircase that had formerly served as a storage locker for promotional materials of movies that never got released under the Universal Pictures name. The room had been chosen because Goetz heard that it would be difficult for Hatton to reach; his arthritic joints and tender feet had already forced The Brute Man’s director, Jean Yarbrough, to cut a couple of scenes of The Creeper escaping the police up a building’s fire escape. As painful as it was for him, though, Hatton climbed up to the rooftop office every day after shooting of The Brute Man wrapped, to bring his labor of love to consummation.

  When Agnes was done working on her current script (A Double Life, 1947, directed by George Cukor), she would join Hatton in the little attic office, and the two would write and run lines to see if what they had written worked. Hatton’s first draft of John Merrick was Hollywood heresy: a movie about a physically deformed man with a hideous illness who gets progressively worse and then dies, all without setting foot outside of the hospital, the script was not merely eschewing the formula, but making a mockery of it. The project had only been approved out of pique at the studio’s incoming chief, and the pair knew they would need a miracle—or a star bigger than Hatton—to get the studio’s green light for the finished picture. Hatton suggested building up one of the nurses into a love interest, a role Hollywood’s starlets would salivate over, a Beauty to Merrick’s Beast, or, as she would become, a Miranda to his Caliban.

  Silvera hadn’t told Hatton about Merrick’s reason for building the model, if he even knew of it, so Hatton had no idea that such a nurse, the nescient Miss Green, had actually existed; in his memoir, Treves had barely acknowledged Merrick as a sexual being, treating his amorous inclinations as a bit of a joke, like love between chimps or children. But it wasn’t much of a stretch for Hatton to write in a friendly and sympathetic nurse who Merrick might fall in love with; after the assuasive balm of time alone with Agnes, even enacting made-up scenarios, Hatton understood the power of such ministrations.

  In the script, the nurse’s name is “Agatha,” a name that the real Joseph Merrick could only have stumbled in pronouncing. Drafts of the script show that a number of lines had to be shortened and simplified to detour around Hatton’s own worsening speech impediment. But if the man he was playing would have had trouble with the name, Hatton was proud that he could still speak it, for the time at least.

  Hatton and Agnes took their script to producer Pivar, who had been instructed to keep the film in pre-production for as long as he could so that Goetz could kill it when he took over the front office. The two only got through the opening three set-ups before Pivar tore their lovingly wrought composition into confetti and told them that the pitch was maybe a half-good one, maybe, but everything they had down on paper was A Farewell to Arms with an ugly guy in the Gary Cooper role. Where the hell in all of this was the Elephant Man, where was the goddamn monster, for crying out loud?

  People like monsters. They need somebody to root against. Here, you got them rooting for the monster. Who wants that? Nobody wants to see Frankenstein Falls in Love and Dies. Get back to work, and bring me Frankenstein, not Shakespeare. Know how much business we did on Frankenstein? A hell of a lot more than we ever did on Antony and Cleopatra.

  Hatton did the best he could to save his doomed film. No matter what the studio wanted, Hatton would not let Merrick become just another stupid monster, another Creeper, and Pivar relented a little—Merrick could be sympathetic, sure, but the picture would need at least one “boffo” chase scene with Merrick at one end and a crowd at the other. The picture should end not with Merrick’s pitiful real-life death, but with the accidental death of Treves at the hands of Merrick, and Merrick’s escape from the Hospital into Liverpool Station, a frightened and outraged mob in pursuit. Hatton reluctantly agreed.

  Perhaps persuaded by his partner, Hatton then asked that Agnes be cast opposite him in the Agatha role. Pivar agreed to Agnes in the role of Agatha, but only if Hatton would change her character’s name to Chartreuse. Pivar insisted on the change because “Agatha” was too close to “Agnes”—the rubes writing the columns in the papers would only get confused. Reading the changes with Agnes in their office, Hatton could not help stumbling at the new name of his paramour. A perfectionist by nature, Hatton would stop his line reading, hung up on the name, and go back over it until he got it right. The fifth time he read the line, “I choose you, Chartreuse,” a chore on the best of Hatton’s days, his labor was interrupted by a call: at the insistence of the board, Pivar had previewed the new version at the latest development meeting, and the picture was a go. Agnes was in, as the nurse Chartreuse, but the studio execs couldn’t see Hatton in the lead role. The guy could barely say the lines. Plus, the picture needed a star. The board wanted somebody more like Lon Chaney, Jr.—what about Lon Chaney, Jr.? Hatton could still direct, of course, but he would need an assistant, say, George Waggner, the man who had directed Chaney in 1941’s Man Made Monster. Hatton survived the phone call and calmly relayed the news to Agnes, but her reaction evidently finished what Pivar hadn’t. The paramedics who arrived on the scene couldn’t negotiate the spiral staircase with their stretcher, and Hatton’s body eventually had to be lowered by rope from the attic’s window into the studio’s backlot while the entire cast and crew of She-Wolf of London waited and watched.

  Monsters of Universal

  The Brute Man was never released by Universal. Goetz sold the film to PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation) for less than Universal had spent producing it. PRC released The Brute Man as the bottom of a double bill with The Mask of Diijon, starring Erich von Stroheim; its posters promoted the movie with the tagline “The Face of Evil.” PRC’s press agents told newspapers that Hatton’s disfigurement was the result of a German mustard gas attack, but with the Potsdam Conference over a year old, Jingoism did little to boost the picture’s popularity. In an
other bid for business, the film’s English distributor successfully lobbied to have a new rating (“H” for “Horrific”) assigned to the film, but not even the prurience of spectacle could attract viewers turned off by the film’s evident exploitation of its star. The Brute Man performed worse than any of Hatton’s previous “Creeper” pictures, and the film stock was eventually reclaimed by PRC. Image’s 1999 DVD release of the film was made from a badly scratched print that had to be spliced with footage from a second-generation videocassette (itself apparently made from an archive-quality workprint which could not be located by the DVD’s producers), resulting in a dim print somehow missing three minutes from the picture’s original run-time. Image’s degraded print had evidently been found in the storage closet of a long-closed third-run house in Cleveland, Ohio, on a shelf mixed in with the first three reels of another third-run classic, Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

  William Goetz dismantled the profitable “Monsters of Universal” series and discontinued all so-called B-features in favor of what he characterized as “serious” films, movies like The Killers, and The Naked City. John Merrick was struck from the studio’s project list, and Agnes Lambright was taken off the studio’s payroll. Within four years, though, Goetz was out at Universal and the studio was back to making schlock, with a run of Abbot and Costello movies, the surprise hit Francis the Talking Mule, and Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequel, Return of the Creature.

  In 1971, Universal joined Paramount in creating Cinema International Corporation, which distributed the studios’ films. The two were soon joined by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the whole enterprise was broken up by MGM’s 1981 purchase of United Artists, which had its own distribution arm already in place. One of the last films CIC distributed was Paramount’s The Elephant Man, which grossed more than 50 million dollars worldwide, or ten times its budget. Based on this success, its director, David Lynch, was asked to direct an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune for De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, a company whose most famous production to that point was a 1976 remake of RKO’s King Kong. Generally panned, this version of King Kong found a surprising defender in film critic Pauline Kael, who characterized it as “the story [of] the loneliest creature in the world—the only one of his species—finding the right playmate,” and went on to write, “We might snicker at the human movie hero who felt such passion for a woman he’d rather die than risk harming her, but who can jeer a martyr ape. . . . It’s a joke that can make you cry.”

  TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME

  BLAKE BUTLER

  David Lynch is eating breakfast in bed. He is eating Oreos by twisting the top off of each cookie and scraping the white icing out of the center with his finger. He transfers the icing to the headboard of the bed where it sticks and globs together. It is mushed in corners, smeared on wood. He plans to eat the icing later, all at once, so he can fill his entire mouth.

  David Lynch is tired. The blood in his legs is getting old. When he closes his eyes, he sees trees on fire. He does not want to have to think.

  Some of the icing is coming loose and falling between the headboard and the mattress or getting gummed into the sheets. David Lynch is concentrating on the crackle of the cookie, the crunch against his tongue.

  When he fits the whole husk of a full black cookie edge-up against the roof of his mouth, he can remember things he didn’t know that he remembered. He remembers a girl with a firm handshake. He remembers saw teeth against glass.

  Beside him in the bed I am sleeping with my mouth open. I am wearing a blonde bouffant wig, lipstick and rouge. I have been sleeping a long time. I flip and wriggle and tug the sheets off of David Lynch’s legs. He has on dark blue socks with garters. He has something unintelligible scribbled on his right knee.

  Above the bed is a chandelier.

  The chandelier is affixed to the ceiling, and in the ceiling there is a crack. By following the crack with one’s eye, one can see that it perfectly bisects the bedroom. The crack is ended only by the wall, as if suggesting that it continues elsewhere.

  David Lynch crunches the Oreos with his mouth open. He smacks his lips and tongue against his palate. The sound does not stir my sleeping. There is gauze stuffed in my ears. The gauze is bloody, gunked with black.

  I am talking in my sleep, though not quite loud enough to be understood.

  Finished with one row of Oreos, David Lynch stands up over the bed and begins to do deep-knee bends. Each time he stands fully, he bumps his head against the chandelier. Each time the chandelier stirs, the crack in the ceiling tickles open a little further. Plaster dust rains into the bed sheets. It intermingles with the cookie crumbs. David Lynch begins to sing. He sings: At last, my love has come along, my lonely days are over, and life is like a song. His voice is strong and enthusiastic. His brow is furrowed. He is excited. He exercises more vigorously, while continuing to disturb the lighting fixture. A small wound develops in his hair. Blood runs down his forehead; the same color as my blood. It drips down his face onto his nightclothes—blue silk boxers, a wife-beater, a dead corsage. It drips on the mattress. It drips on me.

  Though still asleep, I begin to sing along. I sing in harmony, taking the higher key.

  The ceiling begins to crackle.

  David Lynch is sweating. His fists are clenched. He deep-knee bends so hard it shakes the bed. The frame begins to groan. It sounds briefly like a woman. The bedroom door comes open.

  A white horse enters. It comes in only far enough to show its head. It stands in the doorframe looking. It reveals its gums and whinnies. It shakes its hair. The hair has bugs.

  The horse moves slightly further into the room revealing a small man on the horse’s back. He is riding without a saddle, facing backwards, face concealed. He has on a cowboy hat and bright spurs and a long scar on his neck. He spits on the carpet. He lights a cigar and puts the match out on his tongue. He begins to sing. He takes the lower harmony with our sing-song. His voice is beautiful, like a woman’s. It makes the whole room seem to quiver.

  The main crack in the ceiling has now split into several other minor cracks. It has spread over the whole room. The feet of chairs and sofa and coffee tables can be seen poking through the plaster. The chandelier is hanging lower, with its wires gone loose. The lighting flickers. It hisses, pops. The glass arms of the fixture rest against David Lynch’s back, making him stoop.

  David Lynch puts a piece of sugar-free peppermint gum in his singing mouth.

  I am asleep. I am dreaming of summer. I am in a swimming pool up to my neck. I sip from a glass of iced tea and shave my mustache with a straight razor, both hands full. There are several children in the pool kicking. They kick so hard it’s like the pool’s a-boil.

  I have an Oreo in my mouth, soft and runny, sucked wet with saliva and great need.

  The room is raining dust now. The bed is covered under. The pile slowly builds until I am also covered under.

  The horse’s eyes are bright blue.

  David Lynch continues deep-knee bending. He shakes and grins and groans. He chews the gum so rough his teeth go loose and begin to fall out of his mouth. With each loss he begins to shake a little harder, spasms, until he can’t control his arms. He can’t control his eyes or fingers. The ceiling has sunk down several feet. He stoops further and continues shaking. Blood is running from his lips and nose. It pours out of him like a faucet. The sweat beads in his hair.

  The ceiling is so low now in the doorframe that the horse has to lie down. It rolls onto its side with the cowboy still positioned on its back. It crushes the cowboy’s right leg. The bones break loudly, popping, spraying dust. The cowboy doesn’t scream. He has already smoked the cigar down to a stump. He continues to smoke until he burns his fingers. His lips. His tongue. He and the horse gently wriggle on the floor.

  The dust is pouring in so fast now that soon the horse and cowboy are also buried. David Lynch is up to his waist. He is still singing the same song. Under the dust, you can stil
l hear both muffled harmonies. The chandelier is ripping holes in his back. The dust is piling higher. The ceiling is still sinking.

  He blows a bubble with the sugar-free gum. Inside the bubble there is blood. Inside the bubble there are bits of Oreo cookie. There are teeth. There is the song.

  David Lynch blows more air into the bubble. The pink bubble grows and grows and does not pop. He blows the bubble bigger. He blows until there is no room left to blow. The bulbs in the chandelier glow faintly through the pink film until they are crushed and sputter out.

  In the darkness, there is a voice. It is the horse, speaking in horse tongue. The language is transmitted in subtitles, small white text on pure black: Oh, at last, the stars above are blue. My heart was wrapped up in clover, the night I looked at you. I found a dream that I can speak to. A dream that I can call my own. I found a thrill to press my cheek to, a thrill that I have never known.

  HIPSTER HUNTER

  JEFF BURK

  A dark screen. Silence, then a loud gong sounds. A quote in white text fades in.

  Text: It was the best of fucking times; it was the worst of fucking times.

  – Frank Booth

  Cut to black. Fade in on an extreme close-up of bright green grass. Camera slowly pans back and a crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon can comes into view. We can hear the sound of shoes pounding on pavement. Someone is running.