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THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH
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DUMBLAND (2002)
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One is tempted to appropriate Jean-Luc Godard's oft-misquoted "The cinema is Nicholas Ray" in discussing the origins of David Lynch, whose blossoming sophistication unwittingly paralleled that of film itself. From the magic lantern-style innovation of his sculpture installation Six Men Getting Sick to the fixed camera placements of The Alphabet to the rudimentary narrative of The Grandmother (whose heavy's freakishly accentuated jawline transforms his countenance into that of a snarling villain in the "Perils of Pauline" mode) to, finally, the total aesthetic compromise of the shot-on-video The Amputee, the first few entries contained on "The Short Films of David Lynch" imply that there is only one destiny for the medium, whether its evolution is spread out over a century or concentrated in the time it takes for an artist to develop a conscience. If most film students go through a similar rite of passage, there's often an attendant, ineffable impatience with primitive techniques in undergrad films that's absent in Lynch's early work.
 Kurt Vonnegut likes to credit artist friend Saul Steinberg with the observation that some artists respond to the history of art where others respond to life itself. As a director, Lynch obviously falls into the latter category--or used to (in recent years, he's grown comfortable with tipping his cinematic influences): a true iconoclast, his interest in moviemaking began not with an interest in film, per se, but with a eureka moment in which he saw one of his paintings tremble and decided to make one that intentionally moved. (Given all that can be traced back to this bolt of lightning, is Lynch Frankenstein or the monster?) That first piece, 1967's Six Men Getting Sick, was a feat of engineering, a 40-second 16mm animation projected continuously onto life-size casts of Lynch himself with the aid of a specially-rigged take-up spool. The DVD, alas, offers a pale simulation of the original exhibit (a four-minute/six-revolution loop backed by wailing sirens), and in and of itself the self-explanatory clip is hardly innovative--the theme of purging being a cliché among beginning animators and experimental filmmakers alike. As archaeology, though, it's fascinating to see traces of John Hurt's Elephant Man prosthesis in Lynch's Francis Bacon figures (see above).
Next comes The Alphabet (1968, 4 mins.). Inspired by a nightmare the niece of then-wife Peggy Lynch had during which she loudly recited the alphabet in her sleep, it predates "Sesame Street" by one year but leaves the same queasy aftertaste as one of their abstract interstitials. (When people call the lame "Sesame Street" satire "Wonder Showzen" subversive, I wonder what, exactly, they think it is subverting, since I remember that show as my earliest exposure to vampires and homosexuality.) Having learned her ABCs over the course of a tormented slumber, the little girl in the film (Peggy herself) wakes up and spews blood--a metaphorical menstruation signalling the death of childhood and all that that implies. That The Alphabet can be read as a pre-emptive apologia, a lament for the systematic homogenization of the human mind that fosters the impulse to rationalize dream logic, rescues it from triteness. If I didn't know better, I'd guess that a certain William Friedkin movie about demonic possession took liberal amounts of inspiration from its imagery.
Like The Alphabet, The Grandmother (1970, 34 mins.) unfolds largely in a claustrophobic bedroom, juxtaposing a pasty-faced child against its inky walls. (With a back-to-back viewing of the two comes the revelation that David Lynch was making J-horror long before it became fashionable in America.) From its rich sound design (this was Lynch's first collaboration with Alan Splet) to its use of opticals, the AFI-funded The Grandmother is the more technically accomplished of the two, but its aesthetic unity to the previous film somehow validates it in a way that the inflated budget does not: it shows Lynch to be principled enough to go about his idiosyncratic routine in public view. The piece, which opens with a Terry Gilliam-esque animation depicting the immaculate conception of a man, a woman, and--paradise interruptus--their son (whose funereal attire makes him a blueprint for "Twin Peaks"' Pierre Tremond), finds the boy cultivating an imaginary friend, the titular grandmother, to cope with the punishments--some of which, it's implicit, are of a sexual nature--heaped on him for repeatedly wetting the bed. (This crone idolatry is another curiously Japanese touch.) As Lynch vehemently denies having any emotional scars that would account for his preoccupation with domestic violence (upon the release of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, he received scores of letters from female survivors of incest asking how he knew), I prefer to think of it as a manifestation of artist shame.
Perhaps the most curious thing about the film is how easy it is to follow. Lynch was notoriously resistant to structure during his tenure at the AFI, claiming ignorance of basic narrative techniques. And yet, however avant-garde they might be, The Grandmother and even The Alphabet are somewhat archetypal (not only does reciting the alphabet song impose an arc, but Lynch also follows the girl's restless sleep through to its logical end), suggesting that something Lynch's future collaborator Frank Herbert once said about the human inability to conceive of a truly alien life-form applies to fiction, too.
If 1973's grimly funny The Amputee (5 mins./4 mins.) is comparatively formless, it sets a template for the collisions of melodrama and grotesquerie--that dichotomy of banality and disgust--with which Lynch would eventually become synonymous. Catherine "The Log Lady" Coulson appears as a legless woman sitting in a chair composing a florid missive (communicated via Yuban coffee commercial-style voiceover ("You have never understood Jim")) while an increasingly ineffectual nurse (Lynch himself) changes the dressing on her stumps. Whipped up as test footage for a pair of video stocks, The Amputee was taped twice (by Frederick Elmes) and synched to sound on the fly, and I found myself preferring the first attempt for reasons that boil down to subtle variations in modulation.
Fifteen years passed before Lynch returned to the short film medium. Commissioned for French TV by legendary producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier, The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988, 26 mins.) represents a quantum leap forward in terms of professionalism, but by the same token it's a less personal, nay, soulful lark than The Amputee. Here, Lynch recycles the iconography of the western serial to comic effect as deaf cowpoke Dusty (Harry Dean Stanton) and his ranch hands (Jack Nance and Tracey Walter) try to ascertain the origin of a gibberish-spouting interloper (Frederic Golchan) in a beret by rummaging through his belongings. Bottles of wine, baguettes, and an Eiffel Tower knick-knack offer no clue, but a plate of French fries...that cinches it. The film's Zen pitch was then new to Lynch, transforming his characteristic dirge-like pacing into something drolly laconic whilst paving the way for cherry pie jokes and The Straight Story alike. In the context of this collection, however, The Cowboy and the Frenchman is both a gratifying change of pace--the novelty song on an otherwise gloomy mix tape--and a jarring anachronism, as all the transitional groundwork (including his amassing of a stock company, many of whose performers are present here) was laid in features.
Rounding out "The Short Films of David Lynch" is Lumière, an excerpt from 1995's Lumière et compagnie, for which dozens of world-class directors paid homage to the cinema's centennial (moreover, its humble beginnings) by shooting 52-second films on one-perf stock using the Lumière Brothers' own hand-cranked, wooden camera. You'd think Lynch would take this license to express himself in purely visual terms and soar, but the restrictive conditions (including the prohibition of artificial light) ultimately prove too dogmatic. Concerning the Laura Palmer-like discovery of a dead youth, it's an escalating series of images--culminating, more or less, in a tableau morbide of demons orbiting a naked woman suspended in a water tank--that would have more potency were it not so incongruous. Could be worse, of course: it could be Guy Maddin.
Still, it makes you wonder if Lynch doesn't occasionally abuse the benefit of the doubt--and "Dumbland" pretty much confirms that he does. A puerile caprice I dare say sometimes crosses the line from personal into private filmmaking, "Dumbland" ("The Absurd Animated Comedy") consists of eight short episodes Flash-animated in the crude style of Lynch's weekly comic strip "The Angriest Dog in the World" for DavidLynch.com. Call it Sketches of Frank Booth: each instalment finds a Tor Johnson-esque husband and father verbally and/or physically pummelling all those who kindle his delicate fuse. It starts out Lynchian enough with "The Neighbor" (3 mins.), in which our protagonist admires his one-armed (mais oui!) neighbour's shed, farts, curses the sudden appearance of a noisy helicopter ("Fuck you you motherfucking helicopter!"), and learns that the shed houses a duck, while the literally bugfuck final episode, "Ants" (5 mins.), offers not only symmetry of a sort (the titular insect nearly as prominent a fetish in Lynch's work as amputees), but also redemption in the form of the main character's Tenant-like cosmic comeuppance. But in-between is a lot of free-floating neanderthal rage less "absurd" than it is hostile, and the cumulative effect is akin to watching porn, or an Adam Sandler movie: you'll laugh, you'll get your rocks off, and afterwards you'll feel dead inside.
Brief, optional video introductions from Lynch--which appear to have been recorded at the tail of his Eraserhead commentary--append all six titles on Absurda's "The Short Films of David Lynch". (Therein, he does little more than place each film on a professional timeline.) The fullscreen, DD 2.0 stereo presentations proper are presumably optimal renderings of uniformly challenging material; although the 35mm The Cowboy and the Frenchman looks and sounds the best out of all of them, because it was finished on video it has the fuzziness of most late-'80s dramatic television. Picture calibration tools round out the disc. Though "Dumbland"'s whites run way too hot, the heavily-windowboxed 1.33:1 image beats watching it over the Internet. The Absurda platter's accompanying DD 2.0 stereo audio is LOUD.-Bill Chambers
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 David Lynch makes documentaries of the human subconscious. He captures--in a deadpan, almost scientifically-objective way--the processes through which we assimilate and interpret machine-fed data, replicating in that sense the sort of Pop aesthetic of Warhol's ilk without the snarky sense of milk-fed superiority. Take the cultural cues in his work: the Rockwellian Americana he essays in Blue Velvet; the Bauhaus by way of Antoni Gaudi of Dune; or the late-Hitchcock identity puzzles he rejiggers in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive--both commonly seen as satires of what they represent but more accurately described, perhaps, as simple, uncommented-upon representations of what a lower layer of consciousness might consider to be unadorned gospel. Call the best moments of his best films Expressionism of the Id. (Mulholland Drive could be Vertigo shot by Hitch's bile and libido, unchained and unembarrassed.) Lynch's pictures are the very opposite of pretentious: they're unguarded images projected directly from a place of null intentionality. If the aim of art is to touch the sublime, to strum the thread of the collective unconscious that binds us each to each, as it were, then Lynch becomes a figure like Rainer Maria Rilke or William Blake or Beethoven--or in filmic terms, like Luis Buñuel or Carl Theodor Dreyer or moments of Sergio Leone. It seems romantic to discuss Lynch in this way (at the least, it seems to elevate the artist to deity), but a film like Eraserhead should be spoken of in terms of collective unease rather than as the pinhole of universal narrative confusion. It's impossible to "get" a film that's not directed at the part of the head that understands things in a logical context; this is a film that couldn't exist without other films, making it, like the fetal horror that comprises its moral compass, a product of impossible parentage, vulnerable to the most intimate--and futile--of investigations. You can take it apart, but you're not going to figure out where all that dread came from in its dissection. The "answer" to the picture is that it evokes a nightmare state and does so without either a hint of intentionality or, astonishingly, the use of broadly recognizable archetype. The film isn't a Jungian exercise, though it's presented in a visual language that would require a Jungian scholar to systemize. It uses a different language altogether, you could say, and it's a tongue from which an unexamined part in each of us is able to ken some measure of visceral--more to the point, sexual--meaning. The importance of Lynch as an artist is that he seldom tries to impose sense on his pictures, which is not to say that his films are surreal (they're as goofily, ominously straight as Andrew Wyeth or Grant Wood as they are surreal, after all). His decision to allow instinct full rein on his projects is the quality that makes something as apparently conventional as The Elephant Man take on the fuzzy weight of an unrelieved (and unrelievable) existential fog.
Eraserhead opens with the familiar--or, rather, the familiar after a fashion--with images of sticks, holes, wet, and sperm. Prefacing the film like the world's most literal strip of leader, sperm falls in the wet in the centre of a hole (the same hole that will be stepped in a few minutes later? Does the fetus at the middle of the picture get tracked home on the bottom of a shoe?). A glimpse of our hero Henry (Jack Nance), his mouth open to release said sperm like God and His word, engenders industrial landscapes positioned like monochrome Miro paintings. If I find myself referring to works and artists from other media whenever I talk about David Lynch, I think that speaks to a certain inarticulateness his work inspires, causing me to grasp at similar experiences from other parts of my makeup. It's just a step away from me trying to draft personal tragedy and triumph into the conversation. We see a photograph (a woman, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart), missing her head) pieced together in a nest and then the woman is made flesh next to an address (2416), the sum of which, à la Hitchcock's "Eve" numbers in North by Northwest, is thirteen. Fruitful to speculate that on one level, Eraserhead is about methods of procreation, whether they be the filmmaker and his film, the dreamer and the dreamed (as Adam dreams Eve to find her flesh), the bitch and her litter (insensate), the prostitute (transactional), the fetus (the Keatsian deflation horror of consummation), or anything else. It's the world seen through the mindless, turbid eye of a penis.
On another level, there's the idea that Eraserhead is a grand, meticulously metered comedy of manners that subverts conventions of social interaction by introducing, baldly, the subject of bodily humours in all their repellent, matter-of-fact glory. As is the film itself in many ways, the stink and wet of the body impolitic is absolutely frank and unapologetic. When the mother (Jeanne Bates) of Mary X--Henry's best shot at a mate and, we presume, the woman who bore their suspiciously calf-like child--makes a move on Henry by chewing on his neck, look at how Lynch frames the discovery sequence, with Mary X isolated by a curved pipe. It's a reconfiguring of the nuclear family dynamic emerging from the traditional courtship ritual, presented in a way that's not much different from a million other relationship comedies featuring a slovenly but well-meaning young man wooing the girl, meeting the parents, having the baby, waking up with it at night, not getting sex, and getting left. Eraserhead is The Graduate--except there's a stage behind the radiator, Katharine Ross turns out to be a bad mommy, and the baby is hideously deformed. I like the scene where Henry takes his infant's temperature, not because it's a strange thing to do with a sick baby, but because the image of this thing with a thermometer in its mouth is hilarious. Again, it's not surreal, exactly, because what else would you do with an ailing child? (The juxtaposition of images is not in itself absurd.) And yet there's a strong feeling of personal, existential crisis, because although the child is repulsive, it mewls like a baby and our instinct is to protect it. You feel for Henry's dilemma, and that's funny.
Appearing in 1977 but in the works on and off for five years, the picture fits with the paranoia films of that decade, too, as another detective story with a hero left with no answers and at the mercy of a vast machinery about which he knows less than he did when he started. More insidious than some of its contemporaries, however, Eraserhead agitates its audience into the same sort of doomed, Quixotic, Oedipal quest for answers as that of Night Moves' Harry Moseby, The Conversation's Harry Caul, and The Parallax View's Joe Frady. (It says something remarkable that the detective movie with the happiest ending of the seventies might be All the President's Men, a document of one of the headwaters of the many broken-down, appalled films of the decade's latter half.) Watching Eraserhead and its series of doors opening, curtains (legs, labias) parting, and slow demonstrations of that Lynchian hallmark of performances within performances (ultimate reminders of the power of images and of how the medium of film trumps disbelief), one finds oneself castrated along with Henry. The image of decapitation evocative always of being emasculated (with the further use of poor Henry's noggin being an instrument that children use to erase mistakes), there is the gathering sense throughout the picture and the experience of the same of gradual, inexorable diminishment into insignificance. A retreat into the lizard brain and a surrender to the nihilism of entropy.
The fallacy, as suggested by Lynch, is that audiences engage in a willing suspension: when art works, there's nothing voluntary about the engagement of the viewer. Eraserhead is a masterpiece of involuntary reactions within and without, the product of an artist at ease with the messages buried in the scattering of his entrails yet somehow able to equate a mushroom cloud with a tree growing from a bedside table with the haircut of his protagonist without a hint of self-consciousness. It's a product of the Jungian Shadow: neither bad nor good, just unexamined--and the discomfort we feel with the film indicates that the truths contained in Eraserhead, whatever they may be, are as surely true as they are unexamined.
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| 1.85:1 DVD capture: Eraserhead |
Through Subversive Cinema, Absurda makes Eraserhead available for the first time outside of Lynch's website in a stunning 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer sourced from 2003's frame-by-frame restoration. Save for a few minutes now and again (mainly an exterior of a factory set) that exhibit the ravages of age and zero-budget production, the picture is breathtaking in its contrasts of lights and darks. It's clear to see the hand of the creator (well-established in a variety of media), giving credence to Blake's theory of "infernal method." Meanwhile, the DD 2.0 stereo audio is muddy and cantankerous, as intended. The root and supplemental menus feature a deleted scene from the film of Henry trying to free his pants cuff from the wire leash of a mummified cat carcass (it's beautiful, perversely)--you have to watch it for a while before you're allowed to select anything, and though you'd think that'd be maddening, it's a nice way to prepare for the picture. Also included is the feature-length "Stories" (85 mins.), which sees Lynch, propped up behind a microphone, spinning production myths in his peculiar Midwestern drawl in much the same way that Werner Herzog spins his with a Bavarian accent. I don't know how much of this to take seriously (such as when talk turns to his DP being the reincarnate of an ancient space pilot), but it's fun viewing. A forty-second trailer of flashes from the picture is almost as disquieting as the film itself and rounds out the keepcase presentation.-Walter Chaw
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
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DVD GRADES:
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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
89 minutes
MPAA
Not Rated
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.85:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English Stereo
CC
No
Subtitles
None
DVD-9
Region One
Subversive/Absurda
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Published: June 29, 2006
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