A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial senses of being comfortable or linear or High-Concept or “feel-good.” You almost never in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to “entertain” you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. 14 The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish (we’re defenseless in our dreams, too).

  This may, in fact, be Lynch’s true and only agenda: just to get inside your head. 15 He sure seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there. Is this “good” art? It’s hard to say. It seems—once again—either ingenious or psychopathic.

  12 one of the relatively picayune Lost Highway scenes I got to be on the set of

  Given his movies’ penchant for creepy small towns, Los Angeles might seem an unlikely place for Lynch to set Lost Highway, and at first I’m thinking its choice might represent either a cost-cutting move or a grim sign of Lynch having finally Gone Hollywood.

  LA in January, though, turns out to be plenty Lynchian in its own right. Surreal/banal juxtapositions and interpenetrations are everyplace you look. The cab from LAX has a DDS machine attached to the meter so you can pay the fare by major credit card. Or there’s my hotel’s 16 lobby, which is filled with beautiful Steinway piano music, except when you go over to put a buck in the piano player’s snifter or whatever it turns out there’s nobody playing, the piano’s playing itself, but it’s not a player piano, it’s a regular Steinway with a weird computerized box attached to the underside of its keyboard; the piano plays 24 hours a day and never once repeats a song. My hotel’s in what’s either West Hollywood or the downscale part of Beverly Hills; two clerks at the registration desk start arguing the point when I ask where exactly in LA we are. The argument goes on for an absurdly long time with me just standing there.

  My hotel room has unbelievably fancy and expensive French doors that open out onto a balcony, except the balcony’s exactly ten inches wide and has an iron fence with decorations so sharp-looking you don’t want to get anywhere near it. I don’t think the French doors and balcony are meant to be a joke. There’s an enormous aqua-and-salmon mall across the street, very upscale, with pricey futuristic escalators slanting up across the mall’s exterior, and yet I never in three days see a single person a- or descend the escalator; the mall is all lit up and open and seems totally deserted. The winter sky seems smogless but unreal, its blue the same supersaturant blue as Blue Velvet’s opening’s famous sky.

  LA has a big city’s street musicians, but here the musicians play on median strips instead of on the sidewalk or subway, and patrons throw change and fluttering bills at them from their speeding cars, many with the casual accuracy of long practice. On the median strips between the hotel and David Lynch’s sets, most of the street musicians were playing instruments like finger-cymbals and citterns.

  Fact: in my three days here for Premiere magazine I will meet two (2) different people named Balloon.

  The major industry around here seems to be valet parking; even some of the fast food restaurants here have valet parking; I’d love to have the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills concession on maroon valet sportcoats. A lot of the parking attendants have long complicated hair and look sort of like the Italian male model who’s on Harlequin Romance covers. In fact pretty much everybody on the street seems ridiculously good-looking. Everybody is also extremely well- and fashionably dressed; by the third day I figure out that the way to tell poor and homeless people is that they look like they dress off the rack. 17 The only even marginally ravaged-looking persons in view are the hard-faced Latin guys selling oranges out of grocery carts on whatever median strips aren’t already taken by cittern players. Supermodels can be seen running across four-lane roads against the light and getting honked at by people in fuchsia Saabs and tan Mercedeses.

  And it’s true, the big stereotype: from any given vantage at any given time there are about four million cars to be seen on the roads, and none of them seems to be unwaxed. People here have got not only vanity license plates but vanity license-plate frames. And just about everybody talks on the phone as they drive; after a while you get the crazy but unshakable feeling that they’re all talking to each other, that whoever’s talking on the phone as they drive is talking to somebody else who’s driving.

  On the first night’s return from the set, a Karmann-Ghia passed us on Mulholland with its headlights off and an older woman behind the wheel holding a paper plate between her teeth and still talking on a phone.

  So the point is Lynch isn’t as out of his filmic element in LA as one might have initially feared.

  Plus the location helps make this movie “personal” in a new way, because LA is where Lynch and his S.O., Ms. Mary Sweeney, 18 make their home. Corporate and technical headquarters for Asymmetrical Productions is the house right next door to theirs. Two houses down on the same street is the house Lynch has chosen to use for the home of Bill Pullman and brunette Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway’s first act. It’s a house that looks rather a lot like Lynch’s own, a house whose architecture could be called Spanish in roughly the same way Goya could be called Spanish.

  A film’s director usually has a number of Assistant Directors, whose various responsibilities are firmly established by Hollywood convention. The First Assistant Director’s responsibility is the maximally smooth ordered flow of the set. He’s in charge of coordinating details, shouting for quiet on the set, worrying, and yelling at people and being disliked for it. This allows the director himself to be kind of a benign and unhassled monarch, occupied mostly with high-level creative concerns and popular with the crew in a kind of grandfatherly way. Lost Highway’s First Assistant Director is a veteran 1st A.D. named Scott Cameron, who wears khaki shorts and has stubble and is good-looking in a kind of unhappy way. 19 The Second Assistant Director is in charge of scheduling and is the person who makes up the daily Call Sheet, which outlines the day’s production schedule and says who has to show up where and when. There’s also a Second Second Assistant Director, 20 who’s in charge of interfacing with the actors and actresses and making sure their makeup and costumes are OK and going to summon them from their trailers when the stand-ins are done blocking off the positions and angles for a scene and everything’s ready for the first string to come on.

  Part of the 2nd A.D.’s daily Call Sheet is a kind of charty-looking précis of the scenes to be shot that day; it’s called a “One Line Schedule” or “One Liner.” Here is what January 8’s One Liner looks like:

  (1) Scs 112 INT MR. EDDY’S MERCEDES /DAY/ 1 pgs

  MR. EDDY21 DRIVES MERCEDES, PETE22 LISTENS FOR CAR TROUBLE.

  (2) Scs 113 EXT MULHOLLAND DRIVE /DAY/ ⅛ pgs

  MR. EDDY TAKES THE CAR FOR A CRUISE, INFINITI MOVES UP FAST BEHIND THEM

  (3) Scs 114 EXT MR. EDDY’S MERCEDES /DAY/ ⅛ pgs

  MR. EDDY LETS INFINITI PASS AND FORCES IT OFF ROAD

  These car-intensive scenes are, as was mentioned, being shot in Griffith Park, a roughly Delaware-sized expanse out in the foothills of the Santa Monicas. Imagine a kind of semi-arid Yellowstone, full of ridges and buttes and spontaneous little landslides of dirt and gravel. Asymmetrical’s advance team has established what’s called a Base Camp of about a dozen trailers along one of the little roads between Mulholland and the S
an Diego Freeway, 23 and Security has blocked off areas of several other roads for the driving scenes, burly guys with walkie-talkies and roadie-black T-shirts forming barricades at various places to keep joggers and civilian drivers from intruding into the driving shots or exposing the production to insurance liability during stunts. LA civilians are easygoing about being turned back from the barricades and seem as blasé as New Yorkers about movies being filmed on their turf.

  Griffith Park, though lovely in a kind of desiccated, lunar way, turns out to be a thoroughgoingly Lynchian filming environment, with perfu-sive sunshine and imported-beer-colored light but a weird kind of subliminal ominousness about it. This ominousness is hard to put a finger on or describe in any sensuous way. It turns out that there’s a warning out that day for a Santa Ana Wind, a strange weather phenomenon that causes fire hazards 24 and also a weird but verifiable kind of high-ion anxiety in man and beast alike. LA’s murder rate is apparently higher during Santa Ana Wind periods than any other time, and in Griffith Park it’s easy to confirm that something’s up atmospherically: sounds sound harsher, smells smell stronger, breathing tastes funny, the sunlight has a way of diffracting into spikes that penetrate all the way to the back of the skull, and overall there’s a weird leathery stillness to the air, the West-Coast equivalent of the odd aquarial stillness that tends to precede Midwestern thunderstorms. The air smells of sage and pine and dust and distant creosote. Wild mustard, yucca, sumac, and various grasses form a kind of five-o’clock shadow on the hillsides, and scrub oak and pine jut at unlikely angles, and some of the trees’ trunks are creepily curved and deformed, and there are also a lot of obstreperous weeds and things with thorns that discourage much hiking around. The texture of the site’s flora is basically that of a broom’s business end. A single red-tailed hawk circles overhead through the whole first day of shooting, just one hawk, and always the same circle, so that after a while the circle seemed etched. The road where the set is is like a kind of small canyon between a butte on one side and an outright cliff on the other. The cliff affords both a good place to study the choreography of the set and, in the other direction, a spectacular view of Hollywood to the right and to the left the S.F. Valley and the Santa Monicas and the distant sea’s little curved rind of blue. It’s hard to get straight on whether Asymmetrical chose this particular bit of Griffith Park or whether it was simply assigned to them by the LA office that grants location-licenses to movies, but it’s good tight cozy site. The whole thing forms a rough triangle, with the line of Base Camp trailers extending down one small road and the catering trailer and salad bars and picnic tables for lunch spread out along a perpendicular road and a hypotenusally-angled larger road between them that’s where the actual location set is; it’s the c2 road with the set that’s got the great hill and cliff for viewing.

  Basically what happens all morning is that Robert Loggia’s sinister black Mercedes 6.9 and the tailgating Infiniti and the production’s big complicated camera truck will go off and be gone for long stretches of time, tooling back and forth along the same barricaded mile of what is ostensibly Mulholland Drive while Lynch and his Director of Photography try to capture whatever particular combinations of light and angle and speed add up to a distinctively Lynchian shot of people driving. While the car-filming is going on, the other 60 or so members of the location crew and staff all perform small maintenance and preparatory tasks and lounge around and shoot the shit and basically kill enormous amounts of time. There are, on location today, grips, propmasters, sound people, script people, dialogue coaches, camera people, electricians, makeup and hair people, a First Aid guy, production assistants, stand-ins, stunt doubles, producers, lighting technicians, on-set dressers, set decorators, A.D.’s, unit publicists, location managers, costume people with rollable racks of clothes like you see in NYC’s Garment District, continuity people, script people, special effects coordinators and technicians, LAFD cigarette-discouragers, a representative of the production s insurance underwriter, a variety of personal assistants and factota and interns, and a substantial number of persons with no discernible function at all. The whole thing is tremendously complex and confusing, and a precise census is hard to take because a lot of the crew look generally alike and the functions they perform are extremely technical and complicated and performed with high-speed efficiency, and when everybody’s in motion the set’s choreography is the visual equivalent of an Altman group-dialogue, and it takes awhile even to start picking up on the various distinguishing cues in appearance and gear that allow you to distinguish one species of crew personnel from another, so that the following rough taxonomy doesn’t start emerging until late on 9 January:

  Grips tend to be large beefy blue-collar guys with walrus mustaches and baseball caps and big wrists and beer-guts but extremely alive alert intelligent eyes—they look like very bright professional movers, which is basically what they are. The production’s electricians, lighting guys, and F/X guys, who are also as a rule male and large, are distinguished from the grips via their tendency to have long hair in a ponytail and to wear T-shirts advertising various brands of esoteric hi-tech gear. None of the grips wear earrings, but over 50% of the technical guys wear earrings, and a couple have beards, and four of the five electricians for some reason have Fu Manchu mustaches, and with their ponytails and pallor they all have the distinctive look of guys who work in record- or head-shops; plus in general the recreational-chemical vibe around these more technical blue-collar guys is very decidedly not a beer-type vibe.

  The male camera operators, for some reason, tend to wear pith helmets, and the Steadicam operator’s pith helmet in particular looks authentic and armed-combat-souvenirish, with a fine mesh of coir all over it for camouflage and a jaunty feather in the band.

  A majority of the camera and sound and makeup crew are female, but a lot of these, too, have a similar look: 30ish, makeupless, insouciantly pretty, wearing faded jeans and old running shoes and black T-shirts, and with lush well-conditioned hair tied carelessly out of the way so that strands tend to escape and trail and have to be chuffed out of the eyes periodically or brushed away with the back of a ringless hand—in sum, the sort of sloppily pretty tech-savvy young woman you can just tell smokes pot and owns a dog. Most of these hands-on technical females have that certain expression around the eyes that communicates the exact same attitude communicated by somebody’s use of the phrase “Been there, done that.” At lunch several of them wont eat anything but bean curd, and they make it clear that they don’t regard certain grips’ comments about what bean curd looks like as in any way worthy of response. One of the technical women, the production’s still-photographer—whose name is Suzanne and is fun to talk to about her dog—has on the inside of her forearm a tattoo of the Japanese character for “strength,” and she can manipulate her forearm’s muscles in such a way as to make the ideogram bulge Nietzscheanly out and then recede.

  A lot of the script people and wardrobe people and production assistants are also female, but they’re of a different genus—younger, less lean and more vulnerable, without the technically savvy self-esteem of the camera/sound women. As opposed to the hands-on women’s weltschmerzian cool, the script and P.A. females all have the same pained “I-went-to-a-really-good-college-and-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life” look in their eyes, the sort of look where you know that if they’re not in twice-a-week therapy it’s only because they can’t afford it.

  Another way to distinguish different crewpeople’s status and function is to look at what kind of personal communication gear they have. The rank-and-file grips are pretty much the only people without any kind of personal communicative gear. The rest of the hands-on and technical crew carry walkie-talkies, as do the location manager, the people in touch with the camera truck, and the burly guys manning the road’s barricades. Many of the other crew carry cellular phones in snazzy hip-side holsters, and the amount of cellular-phone talking going on more than lives up to popular stereotypes about LA and cellulars. 25 Th
e Second A.D., a young black lady named Simone whom I get to interact with a lot because she’s always having to inform me that I’m in the way of something and need to move (though she isn’t ever crabby or impolite about it), has an actual cellular headset instead of just a holstered cellular phone, though with Simone the headset isn’t an affectation: the poor lady spends more time conferring on the phone than any non-teenage human being I’ve ever seen, and the headset leaves her hands free to write stuff on the various clipboards she carries around in an actual clipboard-holder.

  The set’s true executive class—line producer, unit publicist, underwriter, D.R—have personal pagers that sometimes will all sound at once but just slightly out of synch, producing in the weird ionized Santa Ana air a sound-blend that fully qualifies as Lynchian. And that’s how you can tell people apart telecommunicationally. (The exception to every rule is Scott Cameron, the 1st A.D., who bears with Sisyphean resignation the burden of two walkie-talkies, a cellular phone, a pager, and a very serious battery-powered bullhorn all at the same time.)