A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  In a strange way, though, Dune actually ended up being Lynch’s “big break” as a filmmaker. The version of Dune that finally appeared in the theaters was by all reliable reports heartbreaking for him, the kind of debacle that in myths about Innocent, Idealistic Artists In The Maw Of The Hollywood Process signals the violent end of the artist’s Innocence—seduced, overwhelmed, fucked over, left to take the public heat and the mogul’s wrath. The experience could easily have turned Lynch into an embittered hack (though probably a rich hack), doing f/x-intensive gorefests for commercial studios. 6 Or it could have sent him scurrying to the safety of academe, making obscure plotless l6mm.’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd. The experience did neither. Lynch both hung in and, on some level, gave up. Dune convinced him of something that all the really interesting independent filmmakers—Campion, the Coens, Jarmusch, Jaglom—seem to steer by. “The experience taught me a valuable lesson,” he told an interviewer years later. “I learned I would rather not make a film than make one where I don’t have final cut.”

  And this, in an almost Lynchianly weird way, is what led to Blue Velvet. BV’s development had been one part of the deal under which Lynch had agreed to do Dune, and the latter’s huge splat caused two years of rather chilly relations between Dino & Dave while the latter complained about the final cut of Dune and wrote BV’s script and the former wrath-fully clutched his head and the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group’s accountants did the postmortem on a $40,000,000 stillbirth. Then, sort of out of nowhere, De Laurentiis offered Lynch a deal for making BV, a very unusual sort of arrangement that I’ll bet anything was inspired by Lynch’s bitching over Dunes final cut and De Laurentiis’s being amused and pissed off about that bitching. For Blue Velvet, De Laurentiis offered Lynch a tiny budget and an absurdly low directorial fee, but 100% control over the film. It seems clear that the offer was a kind of punitive bluff on the mogul’s part, a kind of Be-Careful-What-You-Publicly-Pray-For thing. History unfortunately hasn’t recorded what De Laurentiis’s reaction was when Lynch jumped at the deal. It seems that Lynch’s Innocent Idealism had survived Dune, and that he cared less about money and production budgets than about regaining control of the fantasy. Lynch not only wrote and directed Blue Velvet, he cast it, 7 edited it, even cowrote the original music with Badalamenti. The sound and cinematography were done by Lynch’s cronies Alan Splet and Frederick Elmes. Blue Velvet was, again, in its visual intimacy and sure touch, a distinctively homemade film (the home being, again, D. Lynch’s skull), and it was a surprise hit, and it remains one of the ’80s’ great U.S. films. And its greatness is a direct result of Lynch’s decision to stay in the Process but to rule in small personal films rather than to serve in large corporate ones. Whether you believe he’s a good auteur or a bad one, his career makes it clear that he is indeed, in the literal Cahiers du Cinema sense, an auteur, willing to make the sorts of sacrifices for creative control that real auteurs have to make—choices that indicate either raging egotism or passionate dedication or a childlike desire to run the whole sandbox, or all three.

  trivia tidbit

  Like Jim Jarmusch’s, Lynch’s films are immensely popular overseas, especially in France and Japan. It’s not an accident that the financing for Lost Highway is French. It’s primarily because of foreign sales that no Lynch movie has ever lost money (though it took a long time for Dune to clear the red).

  6a more specifically—judging by the script and rough-cut footage—what Lost Highway is apparently about

  In its rough-cut incarnation, the movie opens in motion, driving, with the kind of frenetic behind-the-wheel perspective we know from Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. It’s a nighttime highway, a minor two-laner, and we’re moving down the middle of the road, the divided centerline flashing strobishly just below our perspective. The sequence is beautifully lit and shot at “half time,” six frames per second, so that it feels like we’re going very fast indeed. 8 Nothing is visible in the headlights; the car seems to be speeding in a void; the shot is thus hyperkinetic and static at the same time. Music is always vitally important to Lynch films, and Lost Highway may break new ground for Lynch because its title song is actually post-’50s; it’s a dreamy David Bowie number called “I’m Deranged.” Away more appropriate theme song for the movie, though, in my opinion, would be the Flaming Lips’ recent “Be My Head,” because get a load of this:

  Bill Pullman is a jazz saxophonist whose relationship with his wife, a brunette Patricia Arquette, is creepy and occluded and full of unspoken tensions. They start getting incredibly mysterious videotapes in the mail that are of them sleeping or of Bill Pullman’s face looking at the camera with a grotesquely horrified expression, etc.; and they’re wigging out, understandably, because they regard it as pretty obvious that somebody’s breaking into their house at night and videotaping them; and they call the cops, which cops show up at their house and turn out in best Lynch fashion to be just ineffectual blowholes of Dragnet-era clichés.

  Anyway, while the creepy-video thing is under way there are also some scenes of Pullman looking very natty and East Village in all-black and jamming on his tenor sax in front of a packed dance floor (only in a David Lynch movie would people dance ecstatically to abstract jazz), and of Patricia Arquette seeming restless and unhappy in a kind of narcotized, disassociated way and generally being creepy and mysterious and making it clear that she has a kind of double life involving decadent, lounge-lizardy men, men of whom Bill Pullman would doubtless not approve one bit. One of the creepier scenes in the movie’s first act takes place at a decadent Hollywood party held by one of Patricia Arquette’s mysterious lizardy friends. At the party Bill Pullman is approached by somebody the script identifies only as “The Mystery Man,” who claims not only that he’s been in Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s house but that he’s actually there at their house right now, and he apparently is, because he pulls out a cellular (the movie’s full of great LA touches, like everybody having a cellular) and invites Bill Pullman to call his house, and Bill Pullman has an extremely creepy three-way conversation with the Mystery Man at the party and the same Mystery Man’s voice there at his house. (The Mystery Man is played by Robert Blake, which by the way get ready for Robert Blake in this movie—see below.)

  But so then, driving home from the party, Bill Pullman criticizes Patricia Arquette’s decadent friends but doesn’t say anything specific about the creepy and metaphysically impossible conversation he just had with one guy in two places, which I think is supposed to reinforce our impression that Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette are not exactly confiding intimately in each other at this stage of their relationship. This impression is further reinforced in some creepy sex scenes in which Bill Pullman has frantic wheezing sex with a Patricia Arquette who just lies there blank and inert and all but looking at her watch. 9

  But then so the thrust of Lost Highways first act is that a final and climactic mysterious video comes in the mail, and it shows Bill Pullman standing over the mutilated corpse of Patricia Arquette—we see it only on the video. And then Bill Pullman’s arrested and convicted and put on Death Row.

  Then there are some scenes of Bill Pullman on a penal institution’s Death Row, looking about as tortured and uncomprehending as any noir protagonist ever in the history of film has looked, and part of his torment is that he’s having terrible headaches and his skull is starting to bulge out in different places and in general to look really painful and weird.

  Then there’s this scene where Bill Pullman’s head turns into Balthazar Getty’s head. As in the Bill Pullman character in Lost Highway turns into somebody completely else, somebody played by Lord of the Flies’s Balthazar Getty, who’s barely out of puberty and looks nothing like Bill Pullman. The scene is indescribable, and I won’t even try to describe it except to say that it’s as ghastly and riveting and totally indescribable as anything I’ve seen in a U.S. movie.

  The administration of the penal institution is understandably nonplussed when they see Balth
azar Getty in Bill Pullman’s cell instead of Bill Pullman. Balthazar Getty is no help in explaining how he got there, because he’s got a huge hematoma on his forehead and his eyes are rolling around and he’s basically in the sort of dazed state you can imagine somebody being in when somebody else’s head has just changed painfully into his own head. The penal authorities ID Balthazar Getty as a 24-year-old LA auto mechanic who lives with his parents, who are apparently a retired biker and biker-chick. Meaning he’s a whole other valid I Dable human being, with an identity and a history, instead of just being Bill Pullman with a new head.

  No one’s ever escaped from this prison’s Death Row before, apparently, and the penal authorities and cops, being unable to figure out how Bill Pullman escaped, and getting little more than dazed winces from Balthazar Getty, decide (in a move whose judicial realism may be a bit shaky) to let Balthazar Getty just go home. Which he does.

  Balthazar Getty goes home to his room full of motorcycle parts and Snap-On Tool cheesecake posters and slowly gets his wits back, though he still has what now looks like a wicked carbuncle on his forehead and has no idea what happened or how he ended up in Bill Pullman’s cell, and he wanders around his parents’ seedy house with a facial expression that looks the way a bad dream feels. There are a few scenes of him doing stuff like watching a lady hang up laundry while an ominous low-register noise sounds, and his eyes look like there’s some timelessly horrific fact that’s slipped his mind and he both wants to recall it and doesn’t want to. His parents—who smoke dope and watch huge amounts of TV and engage in a lot of conspiratorial whispering and creepy looks, like they know important stuff Balthazar Getty and we don’t know—don’t ask Balthazar Getty what happened… and again we get the feeling that relationships in this movie are not what you would call open and sharing, etc.

  But it turns out that Balthazar Getty is an incredibly gifted professional mechanic who’s been sorely missed at the auto shop where he works—his mother has apparently told Balthazar Getty’s employer, who’s played by Richard Pryor, that Balthazar Getty’s absence has been due to a “fever.” At this point we’re still not sure whether Bill Pullman has really and truly metamorphosized into Balthazar Getty or whether this whole turning-into-Balthazar-Getty thing is taking place in Bill Pullman’s head, a sort of prolonged extreme-stress pre-execution hallucination à la Gilliam’s Brazil or Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” But the evidence for literal metamorphosis mounts in the movie’s second act, because Balthazar Getty has a fully valid life and history, including a girlfriend who keeps looking suspiciously at Balthazar Getty’s hellacious forehead-carbuncle and saying he “doesn’t seem himself,” which with repetition stops being an arch pun and becomes genuinely frightening. Balthazar Getty also has a loyal clientele at Richard Pryor’s auto shop, one of whom, played by Robert Loggia, is an extremely creepy and menacing crime-boss-type figure with a thuggish entourage and a black Mercedes 6.9 with esoteric troubles that he’ll trust only Balthazar Getty to diagnose and fix. Robert Loggia clearly has a history with Balthazar Getty and treats Balthazar Getty with a creepy blend of avuncular affection and patronizing ferocity. And so on this one day, when Robert Loggia pulls into Richard Pryor’s auto shop with his troubled Mercedes 6.9, sitting in the car alongside Robert Loggia’s thugs is an unbelievably gorgeous gun-moll-type girl, played by Patricia Arquette and clearly recognizable as same, i.e. as Bill Pullman’s wife, except now she’s a platinum blond. (If you’re thinking Vertigo here, you’re not far astray. Lynch has a track record of making allusions and homages to Hitchcock—e.g. BV’s first shot of Kyle MacLachlan spying on Isabella Rosselini through the louvered slots of her closet door is identical in every technical particular to the first shot of Anthony Perkins spying on Janet Leigh’s ablutions in Psycho—that are more like intertextual touchstones than outright allusions, and are always taken in weird and creepy and uniquely Lynchian directions. Anyway, the Vertigo allusion here seems less important than the way Patricia Arquette’s Duessa-like doubleness acts as a counterpoint to the movie’s other “identity crisis”: here are two different women (for a while) portrayed by what is recognizably the same actress, while two totally different actors portray what are simultaneously the same “person” (for a while) and two different “identities”)

  And but so when Balthazar Getty’s new blue-collar incarnation of Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s apparent blond incarnation of Bill Pullman’s wife make eye-contact, sparks are generated on a scale that lends the hackneyed “I-feel-I-know-you-from-somewhere” component of erotic attraction whole new fresh layers of creepy literality. Then there are some scenes that fill in the new blond Patricia Arquette incarnation’s seedy history, and some scenes showing how deeply and ferociously attached to the blond Patricia Arquette Robert Loggia is, and some scenes that make it abundantly clear that Robert Loggia is a total psychopath who is most definitely not to be fucked around with or snuck around behind the back of with the girlfriend of. And then we get some scenes showing that Balthazar Getty and the blond Patricia Arquette are—Getty’s forehead-carbuncle notwithstanding, apparently—instantly and ferociously attracted to one another, and then some more scenes where they consummate this attraction with all the heavily stilted affectless vigor Lynch’s sex scenes are famous for. 10

  And then there are some more scenes that reveal that Robert Loggia’s character also has more than one identity in the movie, and that at least one of these identities knows both the decadent, lounge-lizardy, mysterious friend of Bill Pullman’s deceased wife and the Mephistophelian Mystery Man, with whom Loggia begins making creepy and ambiguous threatening phone calls to Balthazar Getty’s home, which Balthazar Getty has to listen to and try to interpret while his parents (who are played by Gary Busey and an actress named Lucy Dayton) smoke pot and exchange mysterious significant looks in front of the TV.

  It’s probably better not to give away too much of Lost Highway’s final act, though you maybe ought to be apprised: that the blond Patricia Arquette’s intentions toward Balthazar Getty turn out to be less than honorable; that Balthazar Getty’s carbuncle all but completely heals up; that Bill Pullman does reappear in the movie; that the brunette Patricia Arquette also reappears, but not in the (so to speak) flesh; that both the blond and the brunette P. Arquette turn out to be involved (via lizardy friends) in the world of porn, as in hardcore, an involvement whose video fruits are shown (at least in the rough cut) in so much detail that I don’t see how Lynch’s movie is going to escape an NC-17 rating; and that Lost Highway’s ending is by no means an “upbeat” or “feel-good” ending. Also that Robert Blake, while a good deal more restrained and almost effete than Dennis Hopper was in Blue Velvety is at least as riveting and creepy and unforgettable as Hopper’s Frank Booth was, and that his Mystery Man is pretty clearly the devil, or at least somebody’s very troubling idea of the devil, a kind of pure floating spirit of malevolence à la Twin Peaks’s Leland/“Bob”/Scary Owl.

  6b approximate number of ways Lost Highway seems like it can be interpreted

  Roughly 37. The big interpretive fork, as mentioned, looks to be whether we are meant to take the sudden unexplained shift in Bill Pullman’s identity straight (i.e. as literally real within the movie), or as some Kafka-esque metaphor for guilt and denial and psychic evasion, or whether we’re to see the whole thing—from invasive videos through Death Row through metamorphosis into mechanic, etc.—as one long hallucination on the part of a natty jazz saxophonist who could very much benefit from some professionally dispensed medication. The least interesting possibility seems to be to the last, and I’d be very surprised if anybody at Asymmetrical will want Lost Highway interpreted as one long psychotic dream.

  Or the movie’s plot could, on still another hand, simply be incoherent and make no rational sense and not be conventionally interpretable at all. This won’t necessarily make it a bad David Lynch movie: Eraserhead’s dream-logic makes it a “narrative” only in a very loose, nonlinear way, and
large parts of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me make no real sense and yet are compelling and meaningful and just plain cool. Lynch seems to run into trouble only when his movies seem to the viewer to want to have a point—i.e. when they set the viewer up to expect some kind of coherent connection between plot elements—and then fail to deliver any such point. Examples here include Wild at Heart—where the connections between Santos and Mr. Reindeer (the Colonel Sandersish-looking guy who commissions hits by pushing silver dollars through hit men’s mail slots) and the Harry Dean Stanton character and the death of Lula’s father are intricately set up and then don’t go anywhere either visually or narratively—and the first half hour of Fire Walk with Me, which concerns the FBI investigation of the pre-Palmer murder of another girl, and sets us up to think it’s going to have important connections to the Palmer case, and instead is full of odd cues and clues that go nowhere, and is the part of the movie that even pro-Lynch critics singled out for special savagery.

  Since it might bear on the movie’s final quality, be apprised that Lost Highway is the most expensive movie Lynch has ever made on his own. Its budget is something like sixteen million dollars, which is three times Blue Velvet’s and at least 50% more than either Wild at Heart’s or Fire Walk with Me’s.