text:
1 what movie this article is about
David Lynch's Lost Highway, written by Lynch and Barry Gifford, featur-
ing Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty. Financed by CIBY
2000, France. GI996 by one Asymmetrical Productions, Lynch's com-
pany, whose offices are right next door to Lynch's own house in the Hol-
lywood Hills and whose logo, designed by Lynch, is a very cool graphic
that looks like this:
Lost Highway is set in Los Angeles and the desertish terrain immedi-
ately inland from it. Actual shooting goes from December '95 through
February '96. Lynch normally runs a Closed Set, with redundant security
arrangements and an almost Masonic air of secrecy around his movies'
productions, but I am allowed onto the Lost Highway set on 8- 10 Janu-
ary 1996. This is not just because I'm a fanatical Lynch fan from way
back, though I did make my pro-Lynch fanaticism known when the
Asymmetrical people were trying to decide whether to let a writer onto
the set. The fact is I was let onto Lost Highway's set because of Premiere
magazine's industry juice, and because there's rather a lot at stake for
1 A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 147
Lynch and Asymmetrical on this movie (see Section 5), and they prob-
ably feel like they can't afford to indulge their allergy to PRand the Media
Machine quite the way they have in the past.
2 what David Lynch is really like
I have absolutely no idea. I rarely got closer than five feet away from him
and never talked to him. One of the minor reasons Asymmetrical Pro-
ductions let me onto the set is that I don't even pretend to be journalist
and have no idea how to interview somebody and saw no real point in
trying to interview Lynch, which turned out perversely to be an advan-
tage, because Lynch emphatically didn't want to be interviewed while
Lost Highway was in production, because when he's shooting a movie
he's incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little
attention or brain-space available for anything other than the movie.
This may sound like PR bullshit, but it turns out to be true - e.g.:
The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of
his movie, he's peeing on a tree. I am not kidding. This is on 8 January
in West LA'S Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highways exteriors and
driving scenes are being shot. Lynch is standing in the bristly underbrush
off the dirt road between the Base Camp's trailers and the set, peeing on a
stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee-drinker, apparently
pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the
time it'd take him to run down the Base Camp's long line of trailers to
the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my
first sight of Lynch is only from the back, and (understandably) from
a distance. Lost Highways cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch's
urinating in public, and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense
or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you'd ignore a child's alfresco
trivia tidbit: what movie people on location sets call the
special trailer that houses the bathrooms
"The Honeywagon."
148 David Foster Wallace
3 entertainments David Lynch has created/directed that are
mentioned i n this article
Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Vel-
vet (1986), Wild at Heart (1989), two televised seasons of Twin Peak
(1990-92), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), and the mercifully
ablated TV program On the Air (1992).
4 other renaissance-mannish things he's done
Has directed music videos for Chris Isaak; has directed the theater-
teaser for Michael Jackson's lavish 30-minute "Dangerous" video; has
directed commercials for Klein's Obsession, Saint-Laurent's Opium,
Alka-Seltzer, the National Breast Cancer Campaign,' and New York
City's new Garbage Collection Program. Has produced Into the Night,
an album by Julee Cruise of songs cowritten by Lynch and Angelo
Badalamenti, songs that include the Twin Peaks theme and Blue Velvet's
'Mysteries of L~ve.''~ Had for a few years a weekly L.A. Reader comic
strip, "The Angriest Dog in the World." Has cowritten with Badalamenti
(who's also doing the original music for Lost Highway) Industrial Sym-
phony + I , the 1990 video of which features Nicolas Cage and Laura
Dern and Julee Cruise and the hieratic dwarf from Twin Peaks and top-
less cheerleaders and a flayed deer, and which sounds pretty much like
the title suggests it would - IS+ 1was also performed live at the Brook-
lyn Academy of Music in 1992, to somewhat mixed reviews. Has had a
bunch of gallery shows of his Abstract Expressionist paintings, reviews
of which have been rather worse than mixed. Has codirected, with James
Signorelli, 1992'sj Hotel Room, a feature-length video of vignettes all
(1 haven't yet been able to track down clips of the N.B.C.C. spots, but the mind reels
at the possibilitiesimplicit in the conjunction of D. Lynch and radical mastectomy. . . .)
* "M.o.L,"only snippets of which are on BVs soundtrack, has acquired an under-
ground reputation as one of the great make-out tunes of all time - well worth
checking out.
('92 having been a year of simply manic creative activity for Lynch, apparently)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 149
, set in one certain room of a NYC railroad hotel, a hoary mainstream
I conceit ripped off from Neil Simon and sufficiently Lynchianized in
Hotel Room to be then subsequently rip-offable by Tarantino et posse
in 1995's Four Rooms. Has published Images (Hyperion, 1993, $40.00),
a sort of coffee-table book consisting of movie stills, prints of Lynch's
paintings, and some of Lynch's art photos (some of which art pho-
tos are creepy and moody and sexy and cool and some of which are
just photos of spark plugs and dental equipment and seem kind of
5 this article's special focus or "angle" w/r/t Lost Highway,
suggested (not all that subtly) by certain editorial
presences a t Premiere magazine
With the smash Blue Velvet, a Palme &Or at Cannes for Wild a t Heart,
and then the national phenomenon of Twin Peaks's first season,
David Lynch clearly established himself as the U.S.A.'s foremost avant-
garde / commercially viable avant-garde / "offbeat" director, and for a
while there it looked like he might be able single-handedly to broker
a new marriage between art and commerce in U.S. movies, opening
formula-frozen Hollywood to some of the eccentricity and vigor of art
Then 1992 saw Twin Peaks's unpopular second season, the critical
and commercial failure of Fire Walk with Me, and the bottomlessly hor-
rid On the Air, whichwas euthanized by ABC after sixverylong-seeming
weeks. This triple whammy had critics racing back to their PC's to re-
evaluate Lynch's whole oeuvre. The former subject of a Timecover-story
Dentistry seems to be a new passion for Lynch, by the way - the photo on the title
page of Lost Highway's script, which is of a guy with half his face normal and half un-
believably distended and ventricose and gross, was apparently culled from a textbook
on extreme dental emergencies. There's great enthusiasm for this photo around Asym-
metrical Productions, and they're looking into the legalities of using it in Lost High-
way's ads and posters, which if I was the guy in the photo I'd want a truly astronomical
permission fee.
150 David Foster Wallace
in 1990 became the object of a withering ad hominem backlash, stuff
like the L.A. Weekljs: "Hip audiences assume Lynch must be satiric,
but nothing could be further [sic] from the truth. He isn't equipped
for critiquing [sic] anything, satirically or otherwise; his work doesn't
pass through any intellectual checkpoints. One reason so many people
say 'Huh?' to his on-screen fantasies is that the director himself never
So the obvious "Hollywood Insider3'-type question wlrlt Lost High-
way is whether the movie is going to rehabilitate Lynch's reputation.
This is a legitimately interesting question, although, given the extreme
unpredictability of the sorts of forces that put people on Time covers,
it's probably more realistic to shoot for whether LH ought to put Lynch
back on top of whatever exactly it was he was on top of. For me, though,
a more interesting question ended up being whether David Lynch re-
ally gives much of a shit about whether his reputation is rehabilitated
or not. The impression I get from rewatching his movies and from
hanging around his latest production is that he doesn't, much. This at-
titude - like Lynch himself, like his work - seems to me to be both
admirable and sort of nuts.
6 what Lost Highway i s apparently about
According to Lynch's own blurb on the title page of the script's circulat-
ing copy, its
A 21st Century Noir Horror Film
A graphic investigation into parallel identity crises
A world where time is dangerously out of control
A terrifying ride down the lost highway
which is a bit overheated, prose-wise, maybe, but was probably put there
as a High-Concept sound-bite for potential distributors or something.
The spiel's second line is what comes closest to describing Lost Highway,
though "parallel identity crises" seems like kind ofan uptown way of say-
ing the movie is about somebody literally turning into somebody else.
And this, despite the many new and different things about Lost High-
way, makes the movie almost classically Lynchian -the theme ofmulti-
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 151
ple/ambiguous identity has been almost as much a Lynch trademark as
ominous ambient noises on his soundtracks.
7 last bit of (6) used as a segue into a quick sketch of Lynch's
genesis as a heroic auteur
However concerned with fluxes in identity his movies are, David Lynch
has remained remarkably himself throughout his filmmaking career.
You could probably argue it either way -that Lynch hasn't compro-
misedlsold out, or that he hasn't grown all that much in twenty years
of making movies -but the fact remains that Lynch has held fast to
his own intensely personal vision and approach to filmmaking, and
that he's made significant sacrifices in order to do so. "I mean come
on, David could make movies for anybody," says Tom Sternberg, one
of Lost Highway's producers. "But David's not part of the Hollywood
Process. He makes his own choices about what he wants. He's an
This is essentially true, though like most artists Lynch has not been
without patrons. It was on the strength of Eraserhead that Me1 Brooks's
production company hired Lynch to make The Elephant Man in 1980,
and that movie earned Lynch an Oscar nomination and was in turn
the reason that no less an ur-Hollywood-Process figure than Dino De
Laurentiis picked Lynch to make the film adaptation of Frank Herbert's
Dune, offering Lynch not only big money but a development deal for
future projects with De Laurentiis's production company.
1984's Dune is unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch's career,
and it's pretty darn bad. In some ways it seems that Lynch was miscast
as its director: Eraserhead had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-
to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast
and crew. Dune, on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets
in Hollywood history, and its production staff was the size of a small
Caribbean nation, and the movie involved lavish and cutting-edge spe-
cial effects (half the fourteen-month shooting schedule was given over
to miniatures and stop-action). Plus Herbert's novel itself is incred-
ibly long and complex, and so besides all the headaches of a major
commercial production financed by men in Ray-Bans Lynch also had
David Foster Wallace
trouble making cinematic sense of the plot, which even in the novel
is convoluted to the point of pain. In short, Dune's direction called
for a combination technician and administrator, and Lynch, though as
good a technician as anyone in film,5 is more like the type of bright
child you sometimes see who's ingenious at structuring fantasies and
gets totally immersed in them but will let other kids take part in them
only if he retains complete imaginative control over the game and its
rules and appurtenances - in short very definitely not an adminis-
Watching Dune again on video you can see that some of its de-
fects are clearly Lynch's responsibility, e.g. casting the nerdy and potato-
faced Kyle MacLachlan as an epic hero and the Police's resoundingly
unthespian Sting as a psycho villain, or -worse -trying to provide
plot exposition by having characters' thoughts audibilized (wl that
slight thinking-out-loud reverb) on the soundtrack while the camera
zooms in on the character making a thinking-face, a cheesy old de-
vice that Saturday Night Live had already been parodying for years
when Dune came out. The overall result is a movie that's funny while
it's trying to be deadly serious, which is as good a definition of a
flop as there is, and Dune was indeed a huge, pretentious, incoher-
ent flop. But a good part of the incoherence is the responsibility of De
Laurentiis's producers, who cut thousands of feet of film out of Lynch's
final print right before the movie's release, apparently already smell-
ing disaster and wanting to get the movie down to more like a nor-
mal theatrical running-time. Even on video, it's not hard to see where
a lot of these cuts were made; the movie looks gutted, unintentionally
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
(And Dune really is visually awesome, especially the desert planet's giant worm-
monsters, who with their tripartately phallic snouts bear a weird resemblance to
the mysterious worm Henry Spencer keeps in the mysterious thrumming cabinet in
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 153
Maw Of The Hollywood Process signals the violent end of the artist's
Innocence - seduced, overwhelmed, fucked over, left to take the pub-
lic heat and the mogul's wrath. The experience could easily have turned
Lynch into an embittered hack (though probably a rich hack), doing
flx-intensive gorefests for commercial studios.6 Or it could have sent
him scurrying to the safetyof academe, making obscure plotless 16mm.'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 Vel-
vet. BVs 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 BVs 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 Dune's 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% con-
trol over the film. It seems clear that the offer was a kind ofpunitive 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 reac-
tion 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
Anybody who wants to see how the Process and its inducementsdestroywhat's cool
and alive in a directorshould consider the recent trajectory ofRichardRodriguez,from
the plasma-financedvitality of El Mariachi to the gory pretension of Desperado to the
empty and embarrassing From Dusk to Dawn. Very sad.
154 David Foster Wallace
not only wrote and directed Blue Velvet, he cast it,7 edited it, even
cowrote the original music with Badalamenti. The sound and cinema-
tography were done by Lynch's cronies Alan Splet and Frederick Elmes.
Blue Velvet was, again, in its visual intimacy and sure touch, a distinc-
tively 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, es-
pecially 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
(using MacLachlan perfectly this time -since the role of Jeffreyactually calls for
potato-faced nerdiness -plus Eraserhead's Jack Nance and Dune's Dean Stockwell
and Brad Dourif, none of whom has ever been creepier, plus using Dallas's Priscilla
Pointer and everything's Hope Lange as scary moms. . .)
I A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
flashing strobishly just below our perspective. The sequence is beauti-
folly 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 De-
ranged." A way 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 unspo-
ken 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 wig-
ging 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
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),
A DISMAL RURAL TWO-LANER: The reason it looks like the car's going so fast
is that lights outside the car are going by so fast. In fact the car wasn't even moving.
A burly grip was bouncing madly up and down on the back bumper to make the car
jiggle and roll, and other crewpeople with hand-held lamps were sprinting back and
forth outside the car to make it look like the car was whizzing past streetlights. The
whole scene's got a claustrophobia-in-motion feel that they never could have gotten
if the car'd actually been moving (the production's insurance wouldn't have allowed
that kind of speed in a real take), and the whole thing was done for about $8.95.
David Foster Wallace
and of Patricia Arquette seeming restless and unhappy in a kind of nar-
cotized, 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, be-
cause 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 Pa-
tricia 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 impres-
sion that Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette are not exactly confiding in-
timately 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 ofhis torment
(sex scenes that are creepy in part because they're exactly what the viewer himself
imagines having sex with Patricia Arquette would be like)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 157
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 non-
plussed when they see Balthazar 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 irnag-
ine 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 IDable human being, with an identity and a history, instead ofjust
being Bill Pullman with a new head.
No one's ever escaped from this prison's Death Row before, appar-
ently, 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
158 David Foster Wallace
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 profes-
sional 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 hal-
lucination A 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 his-
tory, including a girlfriend who keeps looking suspiciously at Balthazar
Getty's hellacious forehead-carbuncle and saying he "doesn't seem him-
self," which with repetition stops being an arch pun and becomes genu-
inely frightening. Balthazar Getty also has a loyal clientele at Richard
Pryor's auto shop, one of whom, played by Robert Loggia, is an ex-
tremelycreepy and menacing crime-boss-type figure with a thuggish en-
tourage 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, ex-
cept now she's a platinum blond. (If you're thinking Vertigo here, you're
not far astray. Lynch has a track record ofmaking allusions and homages
to Hitchcock - e.g. BVs first shot of Kyle MacLachlan spying on Isa-
bella 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
I here seems less important than the way Patricia Arquette's Duessa-like
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
doubleness acts as a counterpoint to the movie's other "identity crisis":
here are two different women (for a while) portrayed by what is recog-
nizably the same actress, while two totally different actors portray what
are simultaneously the same "person" (for a while) and two different
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 in-
carnation's seedy history, and some scenes showing how deeply and fe-
rociously attached to the blond Patricia Arquette Robert Loggia is, and
some scenes that make it abundantly clear that Robert Loggia is a total
psychopathwho 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 - in-
stantly 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.lO
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, mys-
terious friend of Bill Pullman's deceased wife and the Mephistophelian
Mystery Man, with whom Loggia begins making creepy and ambigu-
ous 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 Highways
lo (a stilted, tranced quality that renders the sex scenes both sexually "hotnand aes-
thetically "cold,"a sort of meta-erotic effect you could see Gus Van Sant trying to
emulate when he had the sex scenes in My Own Private Idaho rendered as series of
complexly postured stills, which instead of giving them Lynch's creepy tranced quality
made them look more like illustrations from the h a - S u t r a )
160 David Foster Wallace
final act, though you maybe ought to be apprised: that the blond Patri-
cia 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 Velvet, 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
a la Twin Peaks's Leland/"Bob"/Scary Owl.
6b approximate number of ways Lost Highway seems like it can
be interpreted
Roughly37. The big interpretive fork, as mentioned, looks to be whether
we are meant to take the sudden unexplained shift in Bill Pullman's iden-
tity 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 hallucina-
tion 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
Or the movie's plot could, on still another hand, simply be incoher-
ent and make no rational sense and not be conventionally interpret-
able 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
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 161
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 in-
clude 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 in-
vestigation 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
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.
But so it is, at this point, probably impossible to tell whether Lost
Highway is going to be a Dune-level turkey or a Blue Velvet-caliber
masterpiece or something in-between or what. The one thing I feel I can
say with total confidence is that the movie will be: Lynchian.
8 what Lynchian means and why it's important
An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a
particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane
combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment
within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of
those Potter Stewart-type words that's definable only ostensively - i.e.
we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian,
but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim's various anatomies neatly
separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and
David Foster Wallace
Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in
Boston, where the deacon of a South Shore church gave chase to a vehi-
cle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver
with a high-powered crossbow, was borderline-Lynchian.
A domestic-type homicide, on the other hand, could fall on vari-
ous points along the continuum of Lynchianism. Some guy killing
his wife in and of itself doesn't have much of a Lynchian tang to it,
though if it turns out the guy killed his wife over something like a per-
sistent failure to refill the ice-cube tray after taking the last ice cube
or an obdurate refusal to buy the particular brand of peanut butter
the guy was devoted to, the homicide could be described as having
Lynchian elements. And if the guy, sitting over the mutilated corpse of
his wife (whose retrograde '50s bouffant is, however, weirdly unmussed)
with the first cops on the scene as they all wait for the boys from
Homicide and the M.E.'s office, begins defending his actions by giv-
ing an involved analysis of the comparative merits of Jif and Skippy,
and if the beat cops, however repelled by the carnage on the floor,
have to admit that the guy's got a point, that if you've developed
a sophisticated peanut-butter palate and that palate prefers Jif there's
simply no way Skippy's going to be anything like an acceptable fac-
simile, and that a wife who fails repeatedly to grasp the importance
of Jif is making some very significant and troubling statements about
her empathy for and commitment to the sacrament of marriage as a
bond between two bodies, minds, spirits, and palates . . . you get the
For me, Lynch's movies' deconstruction of this weird "irony of the
banal" has affected the way I see and organize the world. I've noted since
1986 that a good 65% of the people in metropolitan bus terminals be-
tween the hours of midnight and 6:00 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian fig-
ures - flamboyantly unattractive, enfeebled, grotesque, freighted with
a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances. Or we've all seen
people assume sudden and grotesque facial expressions - e.g. like when
receiving shocking news, or biting into something that turns out to be
foul, or around small kids for no particular reason other than to be
weird -but I've determined that a sudden grotesque facial expression
won't qualify as a really Lynchian facial expression unless the expression
is held for several moments longer than the circumstances could even
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
possibly warrant, is just held there, fixed and grotesque, until it starts to
signify about seventeen different things at once.1
trivia tidbit
Bill Pullman's distended and long-held expression of torment as he
screams over Patricia Arquette's body in Lost Highway is nearly identi-
cal to the scream-face Jack Nance wears during Eraserhead's opening's
conception montage.
9 Lynchianism's ambit i n contemporary movies
In 1995, PBS ran a lavish ten-part documentary called American Cinema
whose final episode was devoted to "The Edge of Hollywood and the
increasing influence of young independent filmmakers - the Coens,
Jim Jarmusch, Carl Franklin, Q. Tarantino et al. It was not just unfair
but bizarre that David Lynch's name was never once mentioned in the
episode, because his influence is all over these directors. The Band-Aid
on the neck of Pulp Fiction's Marcellus Wallace -unexplained, visually
incongruous, and featured prominently in three separate set-ups - is
textbook Lynch. So are the long, self-consciously mundane dialogues
on pork, foot massages, TV pilots, etc. that punctuate Pulp Fiction's
violence, a violence whose creepylcomic stylization is also resoundingly
Lynchian. The peculiar narrative tone of Tarantino's films - the thing
that makes them seem at once strident and obscure, not-quite-clear in
a haunting way -is Lynch's tone; Lynch invented this tone. It seems to
(And as an aside, but a true aside, I'll add that I have had since 1986 a personal rule
w/r/t dating, which is that any date where I go to a female's residence to pick her up
and have any kind of conversation with parents or roommates that's an even remotely
Lynchian conversation is automatically the only date I ever have with that female, re-
gardless of her appeal in other areas. And that this rule, developed after seeing Blue
Velvet,has served me remarkably well and kept me out of all kinds of hair-raising en-
tanglements and jams, and that friends to whom I've promulgated the rule but who
have willfully ignored it and have continued dating females with clear elements of
Lynchianism in their characters or associations have done so to their regret.)
David Foster Wallace
me fair to say that the commercial Hollywood phenomenon that is Mr.
Quentin Tarantino would not exist without David Lynch as a touch-
stone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewer's deep-brain core.
In a way, what Tarantino's done with the French New Wave and with
Lynch is what Pat Boone did with Little Richard and Fats Domino: he's
found (rather ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive
and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's
smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reser-
voir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch-chatter, creepily
otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from dec-
ades past, is Lynch made commercial, i.e. faster, linearer, and with
what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e. "hiply")
In Carl Franklin's powerful One False Move, the director's crucial de-
cision to focus only on the faces ofwitnesses duringviolent scenes - i.e.
to have the violence played out on watching faces, to render its ef-
fect as affect - is thoroughgoingly Lynchian. So is the relentless, noir-
parodic use of chiaroscuro lighting in the Coens' Blood Simple and The
Hudsucker Proxy and in all Jim Jarmusch's films, especially Jarmusch's
1984 Stranger Than Paradise, which, in terms of cinematography,
blighted setting, wet-fuse pace, heavy dissolves between scenes, and a
Bressonian style of acting that is at once manic and wooden, is all but
an homage to Lynch's early work. Other homages you've maybe seen
include Gus Van Sant's use of a quirky superstition about hats on beds
as an ironic plot engine in Drugstore Cowboy, Mike Leigh's use of in-
congruous parallel plots in Naked, Todd Haynes's use of a creepy ambi-
ent industrial-thrum score in Safe, and Van Sant's use of surreal dream
scenes to develop River Phoenix's character in My Own Private Idaho.
In this same M.O.P. Idaho, the German john's creepy Expressionist lip-
synch number, where he uses a hand-held lamp as a microphone, is a
more or less explicit reference to Dean Stockwell's unforgettable lamp-
synch scene in Blue Velvet.
Or take the granddaddy of in-your-ribs Blue Velvet references: the
scene in Reservoir Dogs where Michael Madsen, dancing to a cheesy '70s
tune, cuts off a hostage's ear. This just isn't subtle at all.
None of this is to say that Lynch himself doesn't owe debts - to
Hitchcock, to Cassavetes, to Bresson and Deren and Wiene. But it is to
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
say that Lynch has in many ways cleared and made arable the contempo-
rary "anti-Hollywood" territory that Tarantino et al. are cash-cropping
right now.12 Recall that both The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet came
out in the 1980s, that metastatic decade of cable, VCRs, merchandis-
ing tie-ins and multinational blockbusters, all the big-money stuff that
threatened to empty the American film industry of everything that
wasn't High Concept. Lynch's moody, creepy, obsessive, unmistakeably
personal movies were to High Concept what the first great '40s noir films
were to toothy musicals: unforeseen critical and commercial successes
that struck a nerve with audiences and expanded studios' and distribu-
tors' idea ofwhat would sell. It is to say that we owe Lynch a lot.
And it is also to say that David Lynch, at age 50, is a better, more
complex, more interesting director than any of the hip young "rebels"
making violently ironic films for New Line and Miramax today. It is
particularly to say that - even without considering recent cringers like
Four Rooms or From Dusk to Dawn - D. Lynch is an exponentially bet-
ter filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows
that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and
desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. This is why
violence in Lynch's films, grotesque and coldly stylized and symbolically
heavy as it may be, is qualitatively different from Hollywood's or even
anti-Hollywood's hip cartoon-violence. Lynch's violence always tries to
mean something.
l 2 Lynch's influence extends into mainstream Hollywood movies, too, by the way.
The surfeit of dark dense machinery, sudden gouts of vented steam, ambient indus-
trial sounds, etc., in Lynch's early stuff has clearly affected James Cameron and Terry
Gilliam, and Gilliam has taken to the limit Lynch's preoccupation with blatantly Freud-
ian fantasies (Brazil) and interpenetrations of ancient myth and modern psychoses
(The Fisher King).
And across the spectrum, in the world of caviar-for-the-general art films, one has
only to look at Atom Egoyan or Guy Maddin's abstruse, mood-lit, slow-moving angst-
fests, or at the Frenchman Arnaud DesPlechin's 1992 La Sentinelle (which the director
describes as "a brooding, intuitive study in split consciousness" and which is actually
about a disassociated med-student's relationship with a severed head), or actually at
just about anything recent that's directed by a French male under 35, to see Lynch's
sensibility stamped like an exergue on art cinema's hot young Turks, too.
166 David Foster Wallace
9 a a better way to put what i just tried to say
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut
off;David Lynch is interested in the ear.
10 re the issue of whether and i n what way David Lynch's
movies are "sick"
Pauline Kael has a famous epigram to her 1986 New Yorker review of
Blue Velvet she quotes somebody she left the theater behind as saying
to a friend "Maybe I'm sick, but I want to see that again." And Lynch's
movies are indeed - in all sorts of ways, some more interesting than
others -"sick." Some of them are brilliant and unforgettable; others
are jejune and incoherent and bad. It's no wonder that Lynch's critical
reputation over the last decade has looked like an EKG: it's sometimes
hard to tell whether the director's a genius or an idiot. This is part of his
If the word sick seems excessive to you, simply substitute the word
creepy. Lynch's movies are inarguably creepy, and a big part of their
creepiness is that they seem so personal. A kind way to put it is that Lynch
seems to be one of these people with unusual access to their own uncon-
scious. A less kind way to put it would be that Lynch's movies seem to be
expressions of certain anxious, obsessive, fetishistic, Oedipally arrested,
borderlinish parts of the director's psyche, expressions presented with
very little inhibition or semiotic layering, i.e. presented with something
like a child's ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness. It's
the psychic intimacy of the work that makes it hard to sort out what
you are feeling about one of David Lynch's movies and what you are
feeling about David Lynch. The ad hominem impression one tends to
carry away from a Blue Velvet or a Fire Walk with Me is that they're really
powerful movies but that David Lynch is the sort of person you really
hope you don't get stuck next to on a long flight or in line at the DMV
or something. In other words a creepy person.
Depending on whom you talk to, Lynch's creepiness is either en-
hanced or diluted by the odd distance that seems to separate his movies
from the audience. Lynch's movies tend to be both extremely personal
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 167
and extremely remote. The absence of linearity and narrative logic, the
heavy multivalence of the symbolism, the glazed opacity of the charac-
ters' faces, the weird ponderous quality of the dialogue, the regular de-
ployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterlyway scenes are
staged and lit, and the overlush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence,
deviance, and general hideousness are depicted -these all give Lynch's
movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cinkastes view as more
like cold and clinical.
Here's something that's unsettling but true: Lynch's best movies are
also his creepiestlsickest.This is probably because his best movies, how-
ever surreal, tend to be anchored by strongly developed main charac-
ters - Blue Velvet's Jeffrey Beaumont, Fire Walk with Me's Laura, The
Elephant Man's Merrick and Treeves. When his characters are suffi-
ciently developed and human to evoke our empathy, it tends to cut the
distance and detachment that can keep Lynch's films at arm's length,
and at the same time it makes the movies creepier -we're way more
easily disturbed when a disturbing movie has characters in whom we
can see parts of ourselves. For example, there's way more general ich-
ness in Wild at Heart than there is in Blue Velvet, and yet Blue Velvet is
a far creepierisickerlnastier film, simply because Jeffrey Beaumont is a
sufficiently 3-D character for us to feel about/for/with. Since the really
disturbing stuff in Blue Velvet isn't about Frank Booth or anything Jeffrey
discovers about Lumberton but about the fact that a part of Jeffrey him-
self gets off on voyeurism and primal violence and degeneracy, and since
Lynch carefully sets up his film both so that we feel alflw Jeffrey and
so that we (I, anyway) find some parts of the sadism and degeneracy he
witnesses compelling and somehow erotic, it's little wonder that I find
Lynch's movie "sick" - nothing sickens me like seeing on-screen some
of the very parts of myself I've gone to the movies to try to forget about.
Wild at Heart's characters, on the other hand, aren't "round or 3-D.
(This was apparently by design.) Sailor and Lula are inflated parodies of
Faulknerian passion; Santo and Marietta and Bobby Peru are cartoon
ghouls, collections of wicked grins and Kabuki hysterics. The movie it-
self is incredibly violent (horrible beatings, bloody auto wrecks, dogs
stealing amputated limbs, Willem DaFoe's head blown off by a shotgun
and flying around the set like a pricked balloon), but the violence comes
off less as sick than as empty, a stream of stylized gestures. And empty
168 David Foster Wallace
not because the violence is gratuitous or excessive but because none of
it involves a living character through whom our capacities for horror or
shock could be accessed. Wild at Heart, though it won at Cannes, didn't
get very good reviews in the US.,and it wasn't an accident that the most
savage attacks came from female critics, nor that they particularly dis-
liked the film's coldness and emotional poverty. See for just one exam-
ple Film Comment's Kathleen Murphy, who saw Wild at Heart as little
more than "a litter of quotation marks. As voyeurs, we're encouraged to
twitch and giggle at a bracketed reality: well-known detritus from pop-
culture memory, a kind of cinematic vogue-ing that passes for the play
of human emotions." (This was not the only pan-job along these lines,
and to be honest most of them had a point.)
The thing is that Lynch's uneven oeuvre presents a whole bunch of
paradoxes. His best movies tend to be his sickest, and they tend to derive
a lot of their emotional power from their ability to make us feel complicit
in their sickness. And this ability in turn depends on Lynch's defying a
historical convention that has often served to distinguish avant-garde,
"nonlinear" art film from commercial narrative film. Nonlinear movies,
i.e. ones without a conventional plot, usually reject the idea of strong
individual characterization as well. Only one of Lynch's movies, The El-
ephant Man, has had a conventional linear narrative.13 But most ofthem
(the best) have devoted quite a lot of energy to character. 1.e. they've had
human beings in them. It may be that Jeffrey,Merrick, Laura et al. func-
tion for Lynch as they do for audiences, as nodes of identification and
engines of emotional pain. The extent (large) to which Lynch seems to
identify with his movies' main characters is one more thing that makes
the films so disturbingly "personal." The fact that he doesn't seem to
identify much with his audienceis what makes the movies "cold," though
the detachment has some advantages as well.
trivia tidbit w/ respect to (10)
Wild at Heart, starring Laura Dern as Lula and Nicolas Cage as Sailor,
also features Diane Ladd as Lula's mother. The actress Diane Ladd hap-
l3 (This isn't counting Dune, which was in the dreadful position of looking like it
wanted to have one but not in fact having one.)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 169
pens to be the actress Laura Dern's real mother. Wild at Heart itself,
for all its heavy references to The Wizard of Oz, is actually a pomo-
ish remake of Sidney Lumet's 1959 The Fugitive Kind, which starred
Anna Magnani and Marion Brando. The fact that Cage's performance
in Wild at Heart strongly suggests either Brando doing an Elvis imita-
tion or vice versa is not an accident, nor is the fact that both Wild at
Heart and The Fugitive Kind use fire as a key image, nor is the fact that
Sailor's beloved snakeskin jacket - "a symbol of my belief in freedom
and individual choice" - is just like the snakeskin jacket Brando wore
in The Fugitive Kind. The Fugitive Kind happens to be the film ver-
sion of Tennessee Williams's little-known Orpheus Descending, a play
which in 1960, enjoying a new vogue in the wake of Lumet's film ad-
aptation, ran Off-Broadway in NYC and featured Bruce Dern and Di-
ane Ladd, Laura Dern's parents, who met and married while starring in
this play.
The extent to which David Lynch could expect a regular civilian
viewer of Wild at Heart to know about any of these textual and organic
connections is: 0; the extent to which he cares whether anybody got it or
not is apparently: also 0.
11 last bit of (10) used as a segue into the issue of what
exactly David Lynch seems to want from you
Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then
dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to
it, letting it dominate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the
tranced distance from the screen, the being able to see the people on
the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people
on the screen being so much bigger than you, prettier than you, more
compelling than you, etc. Film's overwhelming power isn't news. But
different kinds of movies use this power in different ways. Art film is
essentially teleological: it tries in various ways to "wake the audience
up" or render us more "conscious." (This kind of agenda can easily de-
generate into pretentiousness and self-righteousness and condescending
horsetwaddle, but the agenda itself is large-hearted and fine.) Com-
mercial film doesn't seem like it cares very much about an audience's
170 David Foster Wallace
instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film's goal is to "entertain,"
which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the movie-
goer to pretend he's somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and
more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just
more entertaining than a moviegoer's life really is. You could say that
a commercial movie doesn't try to wake people up but rather to make
their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will
forkover money to experience it -this seduction, a fantasy-for-money
transaction, is a commercial movie's basic point. An art film's point is
usually more intellectual or aesthetic, and you usually have to do some
interpretive work to get it, so that when you pay to see an art film you're
actually paying to do work (whereasthe only work you have to do wlrlt
most commercial film is whatever work you did to afford the price of
the ticket).
David Lynch's movies are often described as occupying a kind of
middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they re-
ally occupy is a whole third different kind of territory. Most of Lynch's
best films don't really havemuch ofa point, and in lots ofways they seem
to resist the film-interpretive process by which movies' (certainlyavant-
garde movies') central points are understood. This is something the Brit-
ish critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch's movies are
"to be experienced rather than explained." Lynch's movies are indeed
susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretations, but it would be
a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies' point is "film-
interpretation is necessarily multivalent" or something -they're just
not that kind of movie.
Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial senses of
being comfortable or linear or High-Concept or "feel-good.'' You al-
most never in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to "enter-
tain" 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 unspokenlun-
conscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies.
This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious con-
tract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and neces-
sarily) 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
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
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,
This may, in fact, be Lynch's true and only agenda: just to get in-
side 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 psycho-
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. Surreallbanal juxtapositions and interpenetrations are everyplace
you look. The cab from LAX has a DDS machines attached to the me-
ter so you can pay the fare by major credit card. Or there's my hotel's16
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
l 4 I know I'm not puttingthis well; it seemstoo complicatedto be putwell. It has some-
thing to do with the fact that some movies are too scary or intense for younger viewers:
a little kid, whose psychic defenses aren't yet developed, can be terribly frightened by
a horror movie that you or I would regard as cheesy and dumb.
l5 The way Lost Highway makes the idea of head-entry literal is not an accident.
l6 (Premiere magazine puts its writers in extremely snazzy hotels, by the way. I
strongly doubt all hotels in LA are like this.)
172 David Foster Wallace 1
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 I
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 decorationsso sharp-looking you don't
want to get anywhere near it. I don't think the French doors and bal-
conyare meant to be a joke. There's an enormous aqua-and-salmonmail
across the street, very upscale, with pricey futuristic escalators slanting
up across the mail'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 totallydeserted. The winter sky seems smoglessbut 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 Premieremagazine 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/BeverlyHills 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-
l7 I know things like this sound like a cheap gag, but I swear I'm serious. The
incongruous realism of cheap gags is what made the whole thing Lynchian.
1 A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 173
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 li-
cense 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 un-
shakable feeling that they're all talking to each other, that whoever's talk-
ing 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, be-
cause LA is where Lynch and his S.O., Ms. Mary Sweeney,18 make their
home. Corporate and technical headquarters for Asymmetrical Produc-
tions 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 popu-
Mary Sweeney is one of Lost Highway's three producers. Her main responsibilities
seem to be the daily rushes and the rough cut and its storage and organization. She
was Lynch's editor on Fire Walk with Me.
174 David Foster Wallace
lar with the crew in a kind of grandfatherlyway. Lost Highway's First As-
sistant 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 pr6-
cis 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 1 1 2 INT MR. EDDY'S MERCEDES /DAY/ 1 pgs
19 (One Lost Highway crewperson described Scott Cameron as "the Mozart of stress,"
whatever that's supposed to mean.)
20 (not "Third Assistant,"for some firmly established reason)
21 (= Robert Loggia)
22 (= Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe
to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all
mashed together and then emptied of some vital essence. He's not particularly tall,
but he looks tall in Lost Highway's footage because he has extremely poor posture and
David Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a
Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford
Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest Lord of the Flies, in
which he was bland and essencelessbut not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected
as a homeless kid in Where the Day Takes You (like how does a homeless kid manage
to have fresh mousse in his hair every day?)and really good in a surly bit part in Mr.
Holland's @us.
To be frank, it's almost impossible for me to separate predictions about how good
Balthazar Getty's going to be in Lost Highwayfrom my impressions of him as a human
being around the set, which latter impressions were so uniformly negative that it's
probably better not to say too much about it. For just one thing, he'd annoy hell out
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 175
(2) Scs 113 EXT MULHOLLAND DRIVE /DAY/ Vs pgs
(3) Scs 114 EXT MR. EDDY'S MERCEDES /DAY/ Vs pgs
These car-intensive scenes are, as was mentioned, being shot in Grif-
fith 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. Asym-
metrical'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 San Diego freeway,*3 and Security has blocked off areas of sev-
of everybody between takes by running around trying to borrow everybody's cellular
phone for an "emergency." I'll confess that I eavesdropped on some of his emergency
cellular phone conversations, and in one of them he said to somebody "But what did
she say about me?"three times in a row. For another thing, he was a heavy smoker but
never had his own cigarettes and was always bumming cigarettes from crewpeople who
you could tell were making about 1% of what he was making on this movie. I admit
that none of these are exactly capital offenses, but they added up. Getty also suffered
from comparison with his stand-in, who was apparently his friend and who always
stood right near him, wearing an identical auto-shop jumpsuit with "Pete" sewn in
cursive on the breast and an identically gruesome ersatz carbuncle on his forehead,
and who was laid back and cool and very funny - e.g. when I expressed surprise that
so much time on a movie set was spent standing around waiting with nothing to do,
Balthazar Getty's stand-in was the one who said "We actually work for free; it's the
waiting around we get paid for," which maybe you had to be there but in the context
of the mind-shattering boredom of standing around the set all day seemed incredibly
OK, fuck it: the single most annoying thing about Balthazar Getty was that when-
ever David Lynch was around Getty would be very unctuous and over-respectful and
asskissy, but when Lynch wasn't around Getty would make fun of him and do an un-
kind imitation of his distinctive speaking voice (wlrlt which see below) that wasn't a
very good imitation but was clearly intended to be disrespectful and mean.)
23 Eleven trailers, actually, most of them from Foothill Studio Equipment Rentals of
Glendale and Transcord Mobile Studios of Burbank. All the trailers are detached and
up on blocks. The Honeywagon is the fourth trailer in the line. There are trailers for
Lights, Props, FIX, Wardrobe, Grippish stuff, and some for the bigger stars in the cast,
though the stars' trailers don't have their names or a gold star on the door or anything.
The FIX trailer flies a Jolly Roger. Hard grunge issues from the Lighting trailer, and
176 David Foster Wallace
era1 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 ex-
posing the production to insurance liability during stunts. LA civilians
are easygoing about being turned back from the barricades and seem as
blase 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 sub-
liminal 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 hazards24 and also a weird but verifiable kind of high-ion
anxiety in man and beast alike. LA'S murder rate is apparently higher
outside a couple other trailers tough-looking crewpeople sit in canvas chairs reading
Car Action and Guns and Ammo. Some portion of the movie's crew spends just about
all their time in Base Camp doing various stuff in trailers, though it's hard to figure
out just what they're doing, because these crewpeople have the kind of carny-esque
vibe about them of people who spend a lot of time with their trailers and regard the
trailers as their special territory and aren't particularly keen on having you climb up
in there and see what they're doing. But a lot of it is highly technical. The area closest
to daylight in the back of the Lighting and/or Camera-Related trailer, for example, has
tripods and lightpoles and attachments of all lengths and sizes lined up very precisely,
like ordnance. Shelves near the tripods have labeled sections for "2 x MIGHTY,"
"2 X 8 JUNIOR," "2 X MICKEYMOLES," "2 X BABY BJs," on and on. Boxes
of lenses in rows have labels like
LONG PRIMES A FILTSl4 X 5/DIOPS WIDEPRIMES
50mm "En T2 4' SPC 200- 108A 30mm "C" T3 4'
75mm " E T2 4' B FILTS 4 X 5 40mm "E" T2 3.5'
100mm " E T2 4'
24 LAFD inspectors were all over the set, glaring at you if you lit a cigarette, and nico-
tinic conditions were pretty rugged because Scott Cameron decreed that people could
smoke only if they were standing near the sand-filled butt can, of which there was ap-
parently only one, and David Lynch, a devoted smoker of American Spirit All-Natural
cigarettes, tended to commandeer the butt can, and people who wanted to smoke and
were not near Lynch pretty much had to chew their knuckle and wait for him to turn
his back so they could steal the can.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 177
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 aquaria1 stillness that tends to precede Mid-
western 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 ofthe 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 roadwhere 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 ofblue. It's
hard to get straight on whether Asymmetrical chose this particular bit
of Griffih Park or whether it was simply assigned to them by the LA of-
fice 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 Pho-
tography try to capture whatever particular combinations of light and
angle and speed add up to a distinctively Lynchian shot of people driv-
ing. While the car-filming is going on, the other 60 or so members of
178 David Foster Wallace
the location crew and staff all perform small maintenance and prepara-
tory tasks and lounge around and shoot the shit and basically kill enor-
mous amounts of time. There are, on location today, grips, propmasters,
sound people, script people, dialogue coaches, camera people, elec-
tricians, makeup and hair people, a First Aid guy, production assist-
ants, stand-ins, stunt doubles, producers, lighting technicians, on-set
dressers, set decorators, A.D.'s, unit publicists, location managers, cos-
tume 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 dis-
cernible 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 tech-
nical and complicated and performed with high-speed efficiency, and
when everybody's in motion the set's choreography is the visual equiva-
lent of an Altman group-dialogue, and it takes a while even to start pick-
ing 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 FIX 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 ear-
rings, 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
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 179
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, insouci-
antly 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-sawy 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 com-
municates the exact same attitude communicated by somebody's use of
the phrase "Been there, done that." At lunch several of them won't 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 char-
acter for "strength," and she can manipulate her forearm's muscles in
such a way as to make the ideogram bulge Nietzscheanly out and then
A lot of the script people and wardrobe people and production as-
sistants are also female, but they're of a different genus -younger, less
lean and more vulnerable, without the technically savvy self-esteem
of the cameralsound 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 af-
ford it.
Another way to distinguish different crewpeople's status and func-
tion 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 ofpersonal communicative gear. The rest of the hands-on and tech-
nical 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 bar-
ricades. Many ofthe other crew carry cellular phones in snazzy hip-side
180 David Foster Wallace 1
holsters, and the amount of cellular-phone talking going on more than
lives up to popular stereotypes about LA and cellulars.25 The 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 bolstered cellu-
lar 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, under-
writer, D.P. - have personal pagers that sometimes will all sound at
25 After absorbing so much about it from the media, actually visiting Los Angeles in
person produces a curious feelingof relief at finding a place that actually confirms your
stereotyped preconceptions instead of confounding them and making you loathe your
own ignorance and susceptibility to media stereotype: viz. stuff like cellular phones,
rampant pulchritude, the odd ambient blend of New Age gooeyness and right-wing
financial acumen. (E.g., one of the two prenominate people named Balloon, a guy who
wore Birkenstocks and looked like he subsisted entirely on cellulose, had worked out
an involved formula for describing statistical relationships between margin-calls on
certain kinds of commodity futures and the market value of certain types ofreal estate,
and had somehow gotten the impression that I and/or Premiere magazine ought to be
interested in describing the formula in this article in such a way as to allow Balloon to
start up a kind of pricey newsletter-type thing where people would for some reason
pay large amounts of money for access to this formula, and for the better part of an
afternoon he was absolutely unshakable, his obtuseness almost Zen -like a Lynchian
bus-station wacko with an advanced degree from the L.S.E. -and the only way to
peel him off me was to promise on my honor to find some way to work him and his
formula into this article, an honor-obligation I've now fulfilled, though if Premiere
wants to take the old editorial machete to it there's not really any way I can be held
(By the way, in case you think I'm lying or exaggerating about having met two un-
connected persons named Balloon on this visit, the other Balloon was part of a rather
unaccomplished banjo-and-maraca street duo on the median strip just outside the
lavish deserted mall across the street from the gorgeous balcony that was too narrow
and hazardously fenced to step onto, and the reason I approached this Balloon was
that I wanted to know whether the wicked welts on his face-and-neck-area were by any
chance from errant quarters or half-dollars thrown at him from speeding cars, which
I they turned out not to be.) )
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 181
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 ev-
ery rule is Scott Cameron, the 1st A.D., who bears with Sisyphean res-
ignation the burden of two walkie-talkies, a cellular phone, a pager, and
a very serious battery-powered bullhorn all at the same time.)
But then so about like once an hour everybody's walkie-talkie starts
crackling, and then a couple minutes later Lynch and the actual shoot-
ing team and cars come hauling back in to Base and everybody on
the crew springs into frantic but purposeful action so that from the
specular vantage of the roadside cliff the set resembles an anthill that's
been stirred with a stick. Sometimes the shooting team comes back
just to change cars for a shot: the production has somehow acquired
two identical black Mercedes 6.9's, and each is now embellished with
different kind of filmmaking attachments and equipment. For a par-
ticular shot inside the moving Mercedes, some of the grips construct a
kind of platform out of reticulate piping and secure it to the hood of
the car with clamps and straps, and then various other technicians at-
tach a 35mm Panavision camera, several different complicatedly angled
mole and Bambino lights, and a 3' X 5' bounce26 to various parts of
the hood's platform. This stuff is locked down tight, and the 2nd Asst.
Cameraperson, a breathtaking and all-business lady everyone addresses
as "Chesney,"27 fiddles complexly with the camera's anamorphic lens
and various filters. When sunlight off the Mercedes's windshield be-
comes a problem,28 the Director of Photography and the camera guy in
the especially authentic-looking pith helmet and Chesney all huddle and
26 (lookslike a blankcanvas or stuntedsail,helps concentrate light where theywant it)
27 It's unclear whether this is her first name or her last name or a diminutive or what.
Chesney is dressed in standard grunge flannel and dirty sneakers, has about 8 feet of
sun-colored hair piled high on her head and held (tenuously)in place with sunglasses,
and can handle an anamorphic lens like nobody's business.
28 (There'soneyoungguyon thecrewwhoseentirefunctionseems to be going around
with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels and Windexing every glass surface
blindingly clean.)
182 David Foster Wallace
confer and decide to brace a gauzy diffusion filter between the camera
and the windshield.
The camera truck is a complex green pickup whose side door says it's
the property of Camera Trucks, Unltd. The back part has three tiers for
gear, lights, a Steadicam, a video monitor and sound feed, and then
little seats for David Lynch and the Director of Photography and a cam-
era operator. When it's back at Base, technical crewpeople converge on
the truck in clusters of entomological-looking avidity and efficiency.
During the crews' frantic activity - all of it punctuated with loud
bullhorn commands from Scott Cameron - the technicians from the
camera truck and the stand-ins from the cars take their own turns stand-
ing around and talking on cellulars and rooting through the baskets of
corporate snacks on the snack table looking for stuff they like; i.e. it's
their turn to stand around and kill time. The exterior driving-shots all
have stand-ins in the cars, but usually when the shooting team returns
to Base the actual name actors will emerge from their trailers and join
the roil. Robert Loggia in particular likes to come out and stand around
chatting with his stand-in, who's of the same meaty build and olive com-
plexion and has the same strand-intensive balding pattern and craggy
facial menace as Loggia, and of course is identically dressed in mob-
ster Armani, so that from the distance of the roadside cliff their conver-
sation looks like its own surreal metacommentary on parallel identity
David Lynch himself uses the down-time between takes to confer
with A.D.'s and producers and to drink coffee and/or micturate into
the undergrowth, and to smoke American Spirits and walk pensively
around the Mercedeses and camera truck's technical fray, sometimes
holding one hand to his cheek in a way that recalls Jack Benny. Now
50 years old, Lynch still looks like an adult version of the kind of kid
who gets beat up a lot at recess. He's large, not exactly fat but soft-
looking, and is far and away the palest person anywhere in view, his
paleness dwarfing even the head-shop pallor of the lighting and FIX
guys. He wears a black long-sleeved dress shirt with every possible but-
ton buttoned, baggy tan Chinos that are too short and flap around his
ankles, and a deep-sea fisherman's cap with a very long bill. The tan cap
matches his pants, and his socks match both each other and his shirt,
suggesting an extremely nerdy costume that's been chosen and coordi-
nated with care - a suggestion that with Lynch seems somehow endear-
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 183
ing rather than pathetic. The sunglasses he wears on the camera truck
are the cheap bulgey wrap-around kind that villains in old Japanese
monster movies used to wear. The overstiff quality of his posture sug-
gests either an ultradisciplinarian upbringing or a back brace. The gen-
eral impression is that of a sort of geeky person who doesn't especially
care whether people think he's geeky or not, an impression which equals
a certain kind of physical dignity.
Lynch's face is the best thing about him, and I spend a lot of time
staring at it from a variety of perspectives as he works the set. In photos
of Lynch as a young man, he looks rather uncannily like James Spader,
but he doesn't look like James Spader anymore. His face is now full in
the sort of way that makes certain people's faces square, and it's pale
and soft-looking -the cheeks you can tell are close-shaved daily and
then moisturized afterward - and his eyes, which never once do that
grotesque looking-in-opposite-directions-at-once thing they were do-
ing on the 1990 Time cover, are large and mild and kind. In case you're
one of the people who figure that Lynch must be as "sick" as his films,
know that he doesn't have the beady or glassy look one associates with
degeneracy-grade mental trouble. His eyes are good eyes: he looks at his
set with very intense interest, but it's a warm and full-hearted interest,
sort of the way you look when you're watching somebody you love do-
ing something you also love. He doesn't fret or intrude on any of the .
technicians, though he will come over and confer when somebody needs
to know what exactly he wants for the next set-up. He's the sort who
manages to appear restful even in activity; i.e. he looks both very alert
and very calm. There might be something about his calm that's a
little creepy - one tends to think of really high-end maniacs being
oddly calm, e.g. the way Hannibal Lecter's pulse rate stays under 80 as
he bites somebody's tongue out.
85 what several different members of the crew and production
staff, some of whom have been to film school, have to say
about Lost Highway
"David's idea is to do this like dystopic vision of LA. You could do a
dystopic vision of New York, but who'd care? New York's been done
184 David Foster Wallace
"It's about deformity. Remember Eraserhead? This guy's going to be
the ultimate Penishead."
"This is a movie that explores psychosis subjectively."
"I'm sure not going to go see it, I know that."
"It's a reflection on society as he sees it."
"This is a sort of a middle ground between an art film and a major
studio release. This is a hard niche to work in. It's an economically fragile
niche, you could say."
"This is his territory. This is taking us deeper into a space he's
already carved out in previous work already - subjectivity and psy-
"He's doing a Diane Arbus number on LA, showing the slimy
undersection of a dream-city. Chinatown did it, but it did it in a historical
way, as a type of noir-history. David's film's about madness; it's subjective,
not historical."
"It's like, if you're a doctor or a nurse, are you going to go buy tickets
to go see an operation for fun in your spare time, when you're done
"This film represents schizophrenia performatively, not just represen-
tationally. This is done in terms of loosening of identity, ontology, and
continuity in time.''
"Let me just say I have utmost respect - for David, for the industry,
for what David means to this industry. Let me say for the record I'm
excited. That I'm thrilled and have the utmost respect."
"It's a specialty film. Like The Piano, say. I mean it's not going to open
in a thousand theaters."
" 'Utmost' is one word. There is no hyphen in 'utmost.' "
"It's about LA as hell. This is not unrealistic, if you want my opinion."
'It's a product like any other in a business like any other."
"It's a Negative Pick-Up. Fine Line, New Line, Miramax -they're all
"David is the Id of the Now. If you quote me, say I quipped it.
Say ' "David is the Id of the Now," quipped , . who is the film's
"David, as an artist, makes his own choices about what he wants. He
makes a film when he feels he has something to say. The people who
are interested in his films . . . some [of his films] are better than others.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 185
Some are perceived as better than others. David does not look at this as
his area of concern."
"He's a genius. You have to understand this. In these areas he's not
like you and me."
"The head-changings are being done with makeup and lights. No
"Read City of Quartz. That's what this film's about right there in a
"Some of [theproducers] were talking about Hegel, whatever the hell
that has to do with it."
"Let me just say I hope you're not planning to compromise him or
us or the film in any way."
trivia tidbit
Laura Dern's soft blond hairstyle as Sandy in Blue Velvet is identical to
Charlotte Stewart's soft blond hairstyle as Mary in Eraserhead.
14 a section thafs a mix of extrapolations from other sections
and is impossible to come up with a unified heading for
The word postmodern is admittedly overused, but the incongruity be-
tween the peaceful health of his mien and the creepy ambition of his
films is something about David Lynch that is resoundingly postmodern.
Other postmodern things about him are his speaking voice -which
can be described only as sounding like Jimmy Stewart on acid - and
the fact that it's literally impossible to know how seriously to take what
he says. This is a genius auteur whose vocabulary in person consists of
things like "Okey-doke" and "Marvy" and "Terrif" and "Gee." After the
last car-filming run and then the return to Base Camp, as people are dis-
mantling cameras and bounces and the unbelievably alluring Chesney
is putting the afternoon's unused film under a reflective NASA blanket,
Lynch three times in five minutes says "Golly!" Not one of these times
does he utter "Golly!" with any evident irony or disingenuity or even
29 (= "Computer-GeneratedImages," as in Jurnanji)
186 David Foster Wallace
the flattened affect of somebody who's parodying himself. (Let's also
remember that this is a man with every button on his shirt buttoned
and highwater pants: it's like the only thing missing is a pocket pro-
tector.) During this same tri-"Golly!" interval, though, about fifty yards
down the little hypotenal road the catering trailer's on Mr. Bill Pullman,
who's sitting in a big canvas director's chair getting interviewed for his
E.P.K.,3O is leaning forward earnestly and saying of David Lynch both:
"He's so truthful - that's what you build your trust on as an actor,
with a director" and: "He's got this kind of modality to him, the way he
speaks, that lets him be very open and honest and at the same time very
sly. There's an irony about the way he speaks."
Whether Lost Highway is a smash hit or not, its atmosphere oftranced
menace is going to be really good for Bill Pullman's career. From movies
like Sleepless in Seattle and While You Were Sleeping and (ulp) Casper,
I formed this view of Pullman the actor as a kind of good and de-
cent but basically ineffectual guy, an edgeless guy; I always thought
of him as kind of a watered-down version of the already pretty watery
Jeff Daniels.3l Lost Highway - for which Pullman has either lost weight
or done Nautilus or both (he has, at any rate, somehow grown a set of
cheekbones), and in which he's creepy and tormented and plays jagged,
haunting jazz saxophone under a supersatured red-and-blue spot, and
in which his face contorts in agony over the mutilated corpse of
Patricia Arquette and then changes more than once into somebody else's
face is going to reveal edges and depths in Pullman that I believe
will make him a true Star. For the E.P.K. he's in a tight all-black jazz
musician's costume, and his makeup, already applied for a night scene
30 1.e. "ElectronicPress Kit," a bite-intensive interview that Lost Highway's publicists
can then send off to Entertainment Tonight, local TV stations that want Pullman-bites,
etc. If the movie's a huge hit, the E.P.K.'s can then apparentlybe woven together into
one of those Behind the Scenes at the Making of Thus-and-Such documentaries that
HBO seems to be so fond of. Apparently all name stars have to do an E.P.K. for ev-
ery movie they make; it's in their contract or something. I watched everybody's E.P.K.
except Balthazar Getty's.
31 (Pullman's turn as the jilted con man in The Last Seduction had some edge to it,
but Pullman seems to have done such a good acting job in that one that few people
realized it was him.)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 187
in a couple hours, gives his face a creepily Reaganesque ruddiness, and
while various kinds of crepuscular bugs plague the E.P.K. interviewer
and cameraman and sound guy these bugs don't seem to come anywhere
near Pullman, as if he's already got the-aura of genuine stardom around
him, the kind you can't quite define but that even insects can sense - it's
like he's not even quite there, in his tall chair, or else simultaneously there
and somewhere primally else.
Ms. Patricia Arquette has been bad in everything since True Romance
without this fact seeming to have hurt her career any. It's hard to predict
how audiences will react to her in Lost Highway. This is a totally new
role(s) for her, as far as I can see. Her most credible performances to date
have been as ingenues, plucky characters somehow in over their head,
whereas in Lost Highway she herself is a part of the over-the-head stuff
Bill Pullman and Balthazar Gettyget plunged into. LostHighway's female
lead is the kind of languid smoky narrow-eyed Incredibly-Sexy-But-
Dangerous-Woman-With-Mindblowing-Secrets noir-type role that in
recent years only Body Heat's Kathleen Turner and Miller's Crossing's
Marcia Gay Harden have pulled offwithout falling into parody or camp.
From the footage I saw, Arquette is OK but not great in Lost Highway.
She vamps a lot, which is apparently the closest she can come to Sexy
But Dangerous. The big problem is that her eyes are too opaque and her
face too set and rigid to allow her to communicate effectively without
dialogue, and so a lot of the long smoky silences Lynch requires of her
come off stiff and uncomfortable, as if Arquette's forgotten her lines and
is worrying about it. Even so, the truth is that Patricia Arquette is so out-
landishly pretty in the film's rough-cut footage that at the time I didn't
notice a whole lot aside from how she looked, which, seeing as how her
Duessa-like character basically functions as an object in the film, seems
OK, though I'm still a little uncomfortable saying it.32
Lost Highway will also, I predict, do huge things for the career of
32 Premiere magazine's industrial juice or no, I wasn't allowed to watch footage of the
pornvideos both her characters frolic in, so I can't evaluate the harder-core parts ofher
performance in Lost Highway. It'll be interesting to see how much of the porn videos
survives the final cut and the M.P.A.A.'s humorless review. If much of what the videos
are rumored to contain appears in the final Lost Highway, Arquette may win a whole
new kind of following.
188 David Foster Wallace
Mr. Robert Blake,33 who's been cast seemingly out of nowhere here as
The Mystery Man. The choice of Blake shows in Lynch the same sort
of genius for spotting villain-potential that led to his casting Hopper as
Frank Booth in Blue Velvet and Willem DaFoe as Bobby Peru in Wild
at Heart, an ability to detect and resurrect menacing depths in actors
who seemed long ago to have lost any depths they'd ever had.34 Gone,
in Lost Highway, is the sensitive tough-guy of Baretta and the excruciat-
ing self-parody of Blake's stoned appearances on The Tonight Show; it's
like Lynch has somehow reawakened the venomous charisma that made
Blake's 1967 performance in In Cold Blood such a sphincter-loosener.
Blake'sMystery Man isless over-the-top thanwas FrankBooth: The M.M.
is himself velvety, almost effete, more reminiscent of Dean Stockwell's
horrific cameo than of Hopper's tour de force. Blake is also here virtually
unrecognizable as the steroidic cop who said things like "Dat's the name
of dat tune" on '70s TV. Lynch has him many pounds lighter, hair shorn,
creamed and powdered to a scotophilic pallor that makes him look both
ravaged and Satanic -Blake here looks like a cross between the Klaus
Kinski of Nosferatu and Ray Walston on some monstrous dose of PCP.
The most controversial bit of casting in Lost Highway is going to be
Richard Pryor as Balthazar Getty's boss at the auto shop. Meaning Rich-
ard Pryor as in the Richard Pryor who's got the multiple sclerosis that's
stripped him of 75 pounds and affects his speech and causes his eyes
to bulge and makes him seem like a cruel child's parody of a damaged
person. In Lost Highway, Richard Pryor's infirmity is meant to be gro-
tesque and to jar against all our old memories of the "real" Pryor. Pryor's
scenes are the parts of Lost Highway where I like David Lynch least:
Pryor's painful to watch, and not painful in a good way or a way that has
anything to do with the business of the movie, and I can't help thinking
that Lynch is exploiting Pryor the same way John Waters likes to exploit
33 R. Blake, born 1933 as Michael JamesGubitosi in Nutley, New Jersey,was one of the
child stars of Our Gang, was unforgettable as one of the killers in In Cold Blood, etc.
34 Dennis Hopper's last powerful role before Blue Velvet had been the 1977 Apoca-
lypse Now, and he'd become a kind of Hollywood embarrassment. DaFoe had been
sort of typecast as Christ after Platoon and Last Temptation, though it's true that his
sensualist's lips had whispered menace even on the cross.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 189
Patricia Hearst, i.e. letting the actor think he's been hired to act when
he's really been hired to be a spectacle, an arch joke for the audience
to congratulate themselves on getting. And yet at the same time Pryor's
symbolically perfect in this movie, in a way: the dissonance between the
palsied husk on-screen and the vibrant man in our memory means that
what we see in Lost Highway both is and is not the "real" Richard Pryor.
His casting is thematically intriguing, then, but coldly, meanly so, and
watching his scenes I again felt that I admired Lynch as an artist and from
a distance but would have no wish to hang out in his trailer or be his
15 addendum to (14) re Lynch and race
Except now for Richard Pryor, has there ever been even like one black
person in a David Lynch m0vie?3~There've been plenty of dwarves
and amputees and spastics and psychotics, but have there been any
other, more shall we say culturally significant minorities? Latins? Hasi-
dim? Gay people?36 Asian-Americans? . . . There was that sultry orien-
tal sawmill owner in Twin Peaks, but her ethnicity was, to say the least,
overshadowed by her sultriness.37
1.e. why are Lynch's movies all so white?
The likely answer involves the fact that Lynch's movies are essentially
apolitical. Let's face it: get white people and black people together on the
35 And Richard Pryor's in the movie as Richard-Pryor-the-celebrity-who's-now-
neurologically-damaged, not as a black person.
36 Dean Stockwell's Ben in Blue Velvetwas probably technically gay, but what was rel-
evant about Ben was his creepy effeminacy, which Frank called Ben's "suaveness."The
only homoerotic subcurrent in Blue Velvet is between Jeffrey and Frank, and neither
of them are what you'd call gay.
37 (There were also, come to think of it, those two black hardware store employees
(both named Ed) in Blue Velvet,but, agam, their blackness was incidental to the comic-
symbolic issue of one Ed's blindness and the other Ed's dependence on the blind
Ed's perfect memory for hardware-prices. I'm talking about characters who are, like,
centrally minorityish in Lynch's movies.)
David Foster Wallace
screen and there's going to be an automatic political voltage. Ethnic and
cultural and political tensions. And Lynch's films are in no way about
ethnic or cultural or political tensions. The films are all about tensions,
but these tensions are always in and between individuals. There are, in
Lynch's movies, no real groups or associations. There are sometimes al-
liances, but these are alliances based on shared obsessions. Lynch's char-
acters are essentially alone (Alone): they're alienated from pretty much
everything except the particular obsessions they've developed to help
ease their alienation (. . . or is their alienation in fact a consequence of
their obsessions? and does Lynch really hold an obsession or fantasy or
fetish to be any kind of true anodyne for human alienation? does the av-
erage fetishist have any kind of actual relationship with the fetish?) Any-
way, this kind of stuff is Lynch's movies' only real politics, viz. the primal
politics of SelfIExterior and IdIObject. It's a politics all about religions,
darknesses, but for Lynch these have nothing to do with testaments or
interconnected trivia tidbits: what kind of car Patricia Arquette
has, whom she's married to, etc.
Patricia Arquette owns a brand-new maroon Porsche, which Porsche
must be very special to her because she seems to be in the freaking thing
all the time, even driving it the 200 feet between her trailer and the set
in Griffith Park, so that the crew always has to move carts full of equip-
ment out of the wayto let her pass, yelling at one another to be careful
of Patricia Arquette's beautiful car's paint job. Plus Arquette always has
her stand-in with her in the car - they're apparently close friends and
go everyplace together in the maroon Porsche, from a distance looking
eerily identical. Patricia Arquette's husband is Mr. Nicolas Cage, who
worked with Lynch on both Wild a t Heart and the video of Industrial
Symphony #1.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 191
16 Patricia Arquette's description of the central challenge for
Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty w/r/t the "motivation"
of Lost Highway's metamorphosing protagonist (whose
name when he's Bill Pullman is "Fred" and when he's
Balthazar Getty is "Pete")
"The question for Bill and Balthazar is what kind of woman-hater is
Fred[-dash-Pete]?Is he the kind of woman-hater who goes out with a
woman and fucks her and then never calls her again, or is he the kind
who goes out with a woman and fucks her and then kills her? And the
real question to explore is: how different are these kinds?"
H a why what David Lynch wants from you might be a good thing
If you will keep in mind the outrageous kinds of moral manipula-
tion we suffer at the hands of most contemporary directors,38 it will
be easier to convince you that something in Lynch's own clinically de-
tached filmmaking is not only refreshing but redemptive. It's not that
Lynch is somehow "above" being manipulative; it's more like he's just
not interested. Lynch's movies are about images and stories in his head
that he wants to see made external and complexly real. (His most illu-
minating statement about the making of Eraserhead involves "the ex-
hilaration he felt standing in the set of Mr. and Mrs. X's apartment
and realizing that what he had pictured in his mind had been exactly
38 (Wholly random examples:) Think of the way Parker's Mississippi Burning
fumbled at our consciences like a freshman at a coed's brassiere, or of Dances with
Wolves' crude, smug reversal of old westerns' "White=Good & Indian=Bad equa-
tion. Or think of movies like Fatal Attraction and Unlawful Entry and Die Hard 1-111
and Copycat, etc., where we're so relentlessly set up to approve the villains' bloody
punishment in the climax that we might as well be wearing togas. (The formulaic in-
exorability of these villains' defeat does give the climaxes an oddly soothing, ritualistic
quality, and it makes the villains martyrs in a way, sacrifices to our desire for black-
and-white morality and comfortable judgment. . . I think it was during the original
Die Hard that I first rooted consciously for the villain.)
David Foster Wallace
It's already been observed that Lynch brings to his art the sensibility
of a very bright child immersed in the minutiae of his own fantasies. This
kind of approach has disadvantages: his films are not especially sophis-
ticated or intelligent; there is little critical judgment or quality-control-
type checks on ideas that do not work; things tend to be hit-or-miss. Plus
the films are, like a fantasy-prone little kid, self-involved to an extent
that's pretty much solipsistic. Hence their coldness.39
But part of the involution and coldness derives from the fact that
David Lynch seems truly to possess the capacity for detachment from
response that most artists only pay lip-service to: he does pretty much
what he wants and appears not to give much of a shit whether you like it
or even get it. His loyalties are fierce and passionate and almost entirely
to himself.
I don't mean to make it sound like this kind of thing is wholly
good or that Lynch is some kind of paragon of integrity. His passion-
ate inwardness is refreshingly childlike, but I notice that very few of
us choose to make small children our friends. And as for Lynch's se-
rene detachment from people's response, I've noticed that, while I can't
help but respect and sort of envy the moral nerve of people who truly
do not care what others think of them, people like this also make
me nervous, and I tend to do my admiring from a safe distance. On
(again) the other hand, though, we need to acknowledge that in this age
of Hollywood "message" films and focus-group screenings and perni-
cious Nielsenism - Cinema By Referendum, where we vote with our
entertainment-dollar either for spectacular effects to make us feel some-
thing or for lalations of moral cliches that let us remain comfortable in
our numbness - Lynch's rather sociopathic disinterest in our approval
seems refreshinglredemptive (if also creepy).
I 39 (solipsism being not exactly the cheery crackling hearth of psychophilosophical
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 193
17 the only part of this article that's really i n any way "behind
the scenes"
Asymmetrical Productions' headquarters is, as mentioned, the house
next door to Lynch's house. It really is a house. In the yard outside the
door are a department store swingset and a Big Wheel on its side. I
don't think anybody really lives there; I think it gets treated as an an-
nex to Lynch's own house and that Lynch's children's play spills over.
You enter A.P.HQ through a sliding glass door into what is the house's
kitchen, with a Mannington tile floor and a dishwasher and a fridge
with witty magnets on it, plus there's a kitchen table where a college-
age kid is sitting working diligently at a laptop, and at first it all looks
like some ur-domestic scene of a college kid home at his folks' house for
the weekend or something, except when you come closer you start to
notice that the kid's got a scary haircut and a serious facial tic, and what
he's doing on the laptop is cueing a still-frame shot of the brunette
Patricia Arquette's mutilated corpse against some set of coded specs on a
clipboard that's propped against his Boynton mug of coffee. It's unclear
who the kid is or just what he's doing or whether he even gets paid to
do it.40
As in much of the Hollywood Hills, Asymmetrical's street is more
40 For somebody whose productions are supposed to be top-secret, Lynch and Asyrn-
metrical seem awfully tolerant about having functionless interns and weird silent
young people hanging around the Lost Highway set. Isabella Rosselhni's cousin is here,
'Alesandro," a 25ish guy ostensibly taking photos of the production for an Italian
magazine but in fact mostly just walking around with his girlfriend in a leather mini-
skirt (the girlfriend) and grooming his crewcut and smoking nowhere near the butt
can. Plus there's also "Rolande" (pronounced as an iamb: "Rolande"; my one inter-
change with Rolande consisted mostly of Rolande emphasizing this point). Rolande is
an incredibly creepy French kid with a forehead about three feet high who somehow
charmed Lynch into taking him on as an intern and lurks on the set constantly and
does nothing but stand around with a little spiral notebook taking notes in a dense
crabbed psychotically neat hand. Pretty much the whole crew and staff agrees that
Rolande's creepy and unpleasant to be around and that God only knows what the tiny
precise notes really concern, but Lynch apparently actually likes the kid, and claps him
avuncularly on the shoulder whenever the kid's within reach, at which the kid
smiles very widely and then afterward walks away rubbing his shoulder and muttering '
194 David Foster Wallace
like a canyon, and people's yards are 80' slopes with ice-plant lawns,
and the HQ's entrykitchen is actually on the house's top level, so that
if you want access to the rest of the house you have to go down a ver-
tiginous spiral staircase. This and various other stuff satisfies reasonable
expectations of Lynchianism w/r/t the director's working environment.
The HQ's bathroom's Cold knob doesn't work and the toilet seat won't
stay up, but on the wall next to the toilet is an incredibly advanced
and expensive Panasonic XDP phone with what looks like a fax device
attached. Asymmetrical's receptionist, Jennifer, a statutorily young fe-
male who'd be gorgeous if she didn't have Nosferatic eyeshadow and
cadet-blue nail polish on, blinks so slowly you have to think she's put-
ting you on, and she declines to say for the record what music she's
listening to on her headphones, and on her desk next to the computer
and phones is one copy of Deleuze and Guittarri's Anti-Oedipus and one
copy each of Us and Wrestling World. Lynch's own office - way below
ground, so that its windows must look out on solid earth - has a big
solid gray door that's closed and looks not only locked but somehow
armed, such that only a fool would try the knob, but attached to the
wall right outside the office door are two steel boxes labeled OUT and
IN. The OUT box is empty, and the IN contains, in descending order:
a 5,000-count box of Swingline-brand staples; a large promotional en-
velope, with Dick Clark's and Ed McMahon's pointillist faces on it, from
the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, addressed directly to Lynch
at Asymmetrical's address; and a fresh shrink-wrapped copy of Jack
Nicklaus's instructional video GolfMy Way. Your guess here is as good
as mine.
Premiere's industry juice (plus the niceness of Mary Sweeney) means
that I am allowed to view a lot of Lost Highway's rough-cut footage in
the actual Asymmetrical Productions editing room, where the movie it-
self is going to be edited. The editing room is off the kitchen and living
room on the house's top level, and it clearly used to be either the mas-
ter bedroom or a really ambitious study. It has gray steel shelves filled
with complexly coded canisters of Lost Highway's exposed film. One wall
is covered with rows of index cards listing each scene of Lost Highway
and detailing technical stuff about it. There are also two separate KEM-
brand flatbed viewing and editing machines, each with its own monitor
and twin reel-to-reel devices for cueing up both film and sound. I am
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 195
actually allowed to pull up a padded desk chair and sit there right in front
ofone ofthe KEMs's monitor while an assistant editor loadsvarious bits
of footage. The chair is old and much-used, its padded seat beaten over
what has clearly been thousands of hours into the form-fitting mold of
a bottom, a bottom quite a lot larger than mine -the bottom, in fact,
of a combination workaholic and inveterate milkshake-drinker -and
for an epiphanic moment I'm convinced I'm sitting in Mr. David Lynch's
own personal film-editing chair.
The editing room is dark, understandably, its windows first blacked
out and then covered with large Abstract Expressionist paintings. These
paintings, in which the color black predominates, are by David Lynch,
and with all due respect are not very interesting, somehow both
derivative-seeming and amateurish, like stuffyou could imagine Francis
Bacon doing in jr. high.41
Far more interesting are some paintings by David Lynch's ex-wife
that are stacked canted against the wall of Mary Sweeney's office down-
stairs. It's unclear whether Lynch owns them or has borrowed them
from his ex-wife or what, but in Lost Highway's first act, three of these
paintings are on the wall above the couch where Bill Pullman and
Patricia Arquette sit watching creepy invasive videos of themselves
asleep. This is just one of David Lynch's little personal flourishes in the
movie. The most interesting of the paintings, done in bright primaries
with a blunt blocky style that's oddly affecting, is of a lady in a tank-
top sitting at a table reading a note from her child. Superimposed above
this scene in the painting is the text of the note, on what is rendered as
wide-rule notebook paper and in a small child's hand, wl reversed e's
and so on:
41 Lynch's best-known painting, entitled Oww, God, Mom, theDogHe BitedMe, isde-
scribed by Lynch in his Time cover-story this way: "There's a clump of Band-Aids in
the bottom corner. A dark background. A stick figure whose head is a blur of blood.
Then avery small dog made out of glue. There is a house, a little black bump. It'spretty
crude, pretty primitive and minimal. I like it." The painting itself, which is oddly ab-
sent from the book Images but has been published as a postcard, looks like the sort of
diagnostic House-Tree-Person drawing that gets a patient institutionalizedin a hurry.
David Foster Wallace
Dear Mom I keep having my fish
dream. They bite my face!
Tell dad I dont take naps. The
fishes are skinny an mad
I miss you. His wife makes me
eat trouts and anchovys The
fishes make nosis they blow
bubbels. How are you [unreadable] you
fine? don't forget to lock
the doors the fishes [unreadable]
me they hate me.
Love form
In the painting, what's moving is that the text of the note is superim-
posed such that parts of the mother's head obscure the words - those
are the "[unreadable]" parts. I do not know whether Lynch has a child
named Dana, but consideringwho the artist is, plus the painting's child's
evident situation and pain, it seems both deeply moving and sort of .
sick that Lynch would display this piece on a wall in his movie. Anyway,
now you know the text of one of Bill Pullman's objets, and you can get
the same kind of chill I got if you squint hard enough in the movie's
early interior scenes to make the picture out. And you'll be even more
chilled in a later interior scene in Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette's
house, a post-murder scene, in which the same three paintings hang
above the sofa but are now, without any discernible reason or expla-
nation, upside down. The whole thing's not just creepy but personally
trivia tidbit
When Eraserhead was a surprise hit at festivals and got a distributor,
David Lynch rewrote the cast and crew's contracts so they would all get
a share of the money, which they still do, every fiscal quarter, in per-
petuity. Lynch's A.D. and P.A. and everything else on Eraserhead was
Catherine Coulson, who was later the Log Lady on Twin Peaks. Plus
Coulson's son, Thomas, played the little boy who brings Henry's ablated
head into the pencil factory. Lynch's loyalty to actors and his homemade,
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 197
co-op-style productions make his oeuvre a veritable pomo-anthill of
interfilm connections.
trivia tidbit
It is very hard for a hot director to avoid what Hollywood mental-health
specialists term "Tarantino's Disorder," which involves the sustained
delusion that being a good movie director entails that you will also be
a good movie actor. In 1988 Lynch actually starred, with Ms. Isabella
Rossellini, in Tina Rathbone's Zelly and Me, which if you've never heard
of it you can probably figure out why.
9a the cinematic tradition ifs curious that nobody seems to
have observed Lynch comes right out of
(w/ an epigraph)
It has been said that the admirers of
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligan are usually
painters, or people who think and remember
graphically. This is a mistaken conception.
- Paul Rotha, "The German Film"
Since Lynch was originally trained as a painter (an Ab-Exp painter at
that), it seems curious that no film critics or scholars42 have ever treated
of his movies' clear relation to the classical Expressionist cinema tradi-
tion of Wiene, Kobe, early Lang, etc. And I am talking here about the
very simplest and most straightforward sort of definition of Expres-
sionist,viz. "Using objects and characters not as representations but as
transmitters for the director's own internal impressions and moods."
Certainly plenty of critics have observed, with Kael, that in Lynch's
movies "There's very little art between you and the filmmaker's psyche
42 (not even the Lynch-crazy French film pundits who've made his movies the subject
of more than two dozen essays in Cahiers du Cinema - the French apparently regard
Lynch as God, though the fact that they also regard Jerry Lewis as God might salt the
compliment a bit . . .)
198 David Foster Wallace
. . . because there's less than the usual amount of inhibition." They've
noted the preponderance of fetishes and fixations in Lynch's work, his
characters' lack of conventional introspection (an introspection which
in film equals "subjectivity"), his sexualization of everything from an
amputated limb to a bathrobe's sash, from a skull to a "heart plug,"43
from split lockets to length-cut timber. They've noted the elaboration of
Freudian motifs that tremble on the edge of parodic cliche - the way
Marietta's invitation to Sailor to "fuck Mommy" takes place in a bath-
room and produces a rage that's then displaced onto Bob Ray Lemon;
the way Merrick's opening dream-fantasy of his mother supine before
a rampaging elephant has her face working in what's interpretable as
either terror or orgasm; the way Lynch structures Dune's labrynthian
plot to highlight Paul Eutrades's "escape" with his "witch-mother" af-
ter Paul's father's "death" by "betrayal." They have noted with particular
emphasis what's pretty much Lynch's most famous scene, Blue Velvet's
Jeffrey Beaumont peering through a closet's slats as Frank Booth rapes
Dorothy while referring to himself as "Daddy" and to her as "Mommy"
and promising dire punishments for "looking at me" and breathing
through an unexplained gas mask that's overtly similar to the &-mask
we'd just seen Jeffrey's own dying Dad breathing through.
They've noted all this, critics have, and they've noted how, despite its
heaviness, the Freudian stuff tends to give Lynch's movies an enormous
psychological power; and yet they don't seem to make the obvious point
that these very heavy Freudian riffs are powerful instead of ridiculous
because they're deployed Expressionistically, which among other things
means they're deployed in an old-fashioned, pre-postmodern way, i.e.
nakedly, sincerely, without postmodernism's abstraction or irony. Jeff-
rey Beaumont's interslat voyeurism may be a sick parody of the Pri-
mal Scene, but neither he (a "college boy") nor anybody else in the
movie ever shows any inclination to say anything like "Gee, this is
sort of like a sick parody of the good old Primal Scene" or even be-
trays any awareness that a lot of what's going on is -both syrnboli-
cally and psychoanalytically- heavy as hell. Lynch's movies, for all
their unsubtle archetypes and symbols and intertextual references and
c,, have about them the remarkable unself-consciousness that's kind of
43 (q.v. Baron Harkonen's "cardiac rape" of the servant boy in Dune's first act)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 199
the hallmark of Expressionist art - nobody in Lynch's movies analyzes
or metacriticizes or hermeneuticizes or anything,44 including Lynch
himself. This set of restrictions makes Lynch's movies fundamentally
unironic, and I submit that Lynch's'lack of irony is the real reason
some cinkastes - in this age when ironic self-consciousness is the one
and only universally recognized badge of sophistication - see him as
a naif or a buffoon. In fact, Lynch is neither -though nor is he any
kind of genius of visual coding or tertiary symbolism or anything. What
he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and contem-
porary postmodernist, an artist whose own "internal impressions and
moods" are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition
and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural ico-
nography - in other words, Lynch is sort of G. W. Pabst with an Elvis
This kind ofcontemporary Expressionist art, in order to be any good,
seems like it needs to avoid two pitfalls. The first is a self-conscious-
ness of form where everything gets very mannered and refers cutely to
itself.45 The second pitfall, more complicated, might be called "terminal
idiosyncrasy" or "antiempathetic solipsism" or something: here the art-
ist's own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come
off as just too particular to him alone. Art, after all, is supposed to be a
kind of communication, and "personal expression" is cinematically in-
teresting only to the extent that what's expressed finds and strikes chords
within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds
as communication and art that doesn't is rather like the difference be-
tween being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person
44 Here's one reason why Lynch's characters have this weird opacity about them, a
narcotized over-earnestness that's reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern
trailer parks. The truth is that Lynch needs his characters stolid to the point of retar-
dation; otherwise they'd be doing all this ironic eyebrow-raising and finger-steepling
about the overt symbolism of what's going on, which is the very last thing he wants
his characters doing.
45 Lynch did a one-and-a-half-gainerinto this pitfall in Wild at Heart, which is one
reason the movie comes off so porno-cute, another being the ironic intertextual self-
consciousness (q.v. Wizard of Oz, Fugitive Kind) that Lynch's better Expressionist
movies have mostly avoided.
200 David Foster Wallace
masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicativeExpressionism
is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average
Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.
It's the second pitfall that's especially bottomless and dreadful, and
Lynch's best movie, Blue Velvet, avoided it so spectacularly that see-
ing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me.
It was such a big deal that ten years later I remember the date - 30
March 1986, a Wednesday night -and what the whole group of us
MFA Program46 students did after we left the theater, which was to go
to a coffeehouse and talk about how the movie was a revelation. Our
Graduate MFA Program had been pretty much of a downer so far: most
of us wanted to see ourselves as avant-garde writers, and our profes-
sors were all traditional commercial Realists of the New Yorker school,
and while we loathed these teachers and resented the chilly reception
our "experimental" writing received from them, we were also starting to
recognize that most of our own avant-garde stuff really was solipsistic
and pretentious and self-conscious and masturbatory and bad, and so
that year we went around hating ourselves and everyone else and with
no clue about how to get experimentally better without caving in to
loathsome commercial-Realistic pressure, etc. This was the context in
which Blue Velvet made such an impression on us. The movie's obvious
"themes" -the evil flip side to picket-fence respectability,the conjunc-
tions of sadism and sexuality and parental authority and voyeurism and
cheesy '50s pop and Coming of Age, etc. -were for us less revelatory
than the way the movie's surrealism and dream-logicfelt: they felt true,
real. And the couple things just slightly but marvelously off in every
;>hot-the Yellow Man literally dead on his feet, Frank's unexplained
gas mask, the eerie industrial thrum on the stairway outside Dorothy's
apartment, the weird dentate-vagina sculpture47 hanging on an other-
wise bare wall over Jeffrey's bed at home, the dog drinking from the hose
in the stricken dad's hand - it wasn't just that these touches seemed
46 (= Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate
students who want to write fiction or poetry professionally)
47 (I'm hoping now in retrospect this wasn't something Lynch's ex-wife did. . .)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 20 1
eccentrically cool or experimental or arty, but that they communicated
things that felt true. Blue Velvet captured something crucial about the
way the U.S. present acted on our nerve endings, something crucial
that couldn't be analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic
principles or workshop techniques.
This was what was epiphanic for us about Blue Velvet in grad school,
when we saw it: the movie helped us realize that first-rate experimen-
talism was a way not to "transcend" or "rebel against" the truth but ac-
tually to honor it. It brought home to us -via images, the medium we
were suckled on and most credulous of -that the very most impor-
tant artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't
intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious, that the unconscious's true
medium wasn't verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were
Realistic or Postmodern or Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-
ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang
psychic cherries in the communicatee.
I don't know whether any of this makes sense. But it's basically why
David Lynch the filmmaker is important to me. I felt like he showed
me something genuine and important on 3130186. And he couldn't have
done it if he hadn't been thoroughly, nakedly, unpretentiously, unso-
phisticatedly himself, a self that communicates primarily itself - an
Expressionist. Whether he is an Expressionist naively or pathologically
or ultra-pomo-sophisticatedly is of little importance to me. What is irn-
portant is that Blue Velvet rang cherries, and it remains for me an
example of contemporary artistic heroism.
David Foster Wallace
Boa (w/ an epigraph)
All of Lynch's work can be described as
emotionally infantile. . . . Lynch likes to ride
his camera into orifices (a burlap hood's eyehole
or a severed ear), to plumb the blackness beyond.
There, id-deep, he fans out his deck of dirty pictures . . .
- Kathleen Murphy of Film Comment
One reason it's sort of heroic to be a contemporary Expressionist is that
it all but invites people who don't like your art to make an ad hominem
move from the art to the artist. A fair number of critics48 object to
David Lynch's movies on the grounds that they are "sick" or "dirty" or "in-
fantile," then proceed to claim that the movies are themselves revelatory
of various deficiencies in Lynch's own ~haracter,~9 troubles that range
from developmental arrest to misogyny to sadism. It's not just the fact
that twisted people do hideous things to one another in Lynch's films,
these critics will argue, but rather the "moral attitude" implied by the
way Lynch's camera records hideous behavior. In a way, his detractors
have a point. Moral atrocities in Lynch movies are never staged to elicit
outrage or even disapproval. The directorial attitude when hideousness
occurs seems to range between clinical neutrality and an almost voy-
euristic ogling. It's not an accident that Frank Booth, Bobby Peru, and
Leland /''Bob" steal the show in Lynch's last three films, that there is al-
most a tropism about our pull toward these characters, because Lynch's
camera is obsessed with them, loves them; they are his movies' heart.
Some of the ad hominem criticism is harmless, and the director him-
self has to a certain extent dined out on his "Master of Weird/"Czar
of Bizarre" image, see for example Lynch making his eyes go in two dif-
ferent directions for the cover of Time. The claim, though, that because
Lynch's movies pass no overt "judgment" on hideousness/evil/sickness
and in fact make the stuff riveting to watch, the movies are themselves
48 (e.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Vachaud)
49 This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop psychology, might be
termed the Unintentional Fallacy.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never D o Again 203
a- or immoral, even evil - this is bullshit of the rankest vintage, and
not just because it's sloppy logic but because it's symptomatic of the
impoverished moral assumptions we seem now to bring to the movies
we watch.
I'm going to claim that evil is what David Lynch's movies are essen-
tially about, and that Lynch's explorations of human beings' various re-
lationships to evil are, if idiosyncratic and Expressionistic, nevertheless
sensitive and insightful and true. I'm going to submit that the real
"moral problem" a lot of us cineastes have with Lynch is that we find his
truths morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching
movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort
is used to set up some kind of commercial catharsis -the retribu-
tion, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood hero-
ine, etc. - i.e. unless the discomfort serves a conclusion that flatters the
same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.)
The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than
just about anybody else making movies today -better and also dif-
ferently. His movies aren't anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-
formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that
responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy cor-
porations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not
interested in the devolution of responsibility and he's not interested in
moral judgments of characters. Rather, he's interested in the psychic
spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Dark-
ness. And Darkness, in David Lynch's movies, always wears more than
one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet's Frank Booth is both
Frank Booth and "the Well-Dressed Man." How Eraserhead's whole
postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring
and summary decapitations is evil . .yet how it's "poor" Henry Spen-
cer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV's Twin Peaks and cin-
ema's Fire Walk with Me, "Bob" is also Leland Palmer, how they are,
"spiritually," both two and one. The Elephant Man's sideshow barker
is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly
Dr. Treeves - and Lynch very carefully has Treeves admit this aloud.
And if Wild at Heart's coherence suffered because its myriad villains
seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically
the same thing, i.e. they were all in the service of the same force or
204 David Foster Wallace
spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies - evil wears
This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch's movies are not about mon-
sters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings,
about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch's
constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and
grotesque figurants: in his movies' world, a kind of ambient spiritual
antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explainswhy Lynch's villains seem
not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally,
possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopper's exultant "I'LL FUCK ANY-
THING THAT MOVES" in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in
Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it's
devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of "Bob"'s look
of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers
him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright.
The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully
present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are
not only actuated by evil but literally inspiredso: they have yielded them-
selves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these vil-
lains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the
audience, it's not because Lynch is "endorsing" or "romanticizing" evil
but because he's diagnosing it - diagnosing it without the comfortable
carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact
that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it's hideously vital and
robust and usually impossible to look away from.
Lynch's idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can
be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are - at least poten-
tially - everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts,51 pervades;
Darkness is in everything, all the time - not "lurking below" or "lying
50 (i.e. "in-spired,"="affected, guided, aroused by divine influence,"from the Latin
inspirare, "breathedinto")
51 It's possible to decode Lynch's fetish for floatindflying entities -witches on
broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good Witches, angels dangling overhead - along
these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in N a n d owl=Darkness in TP:the whole
point of these animals is that they're mobile.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
in wait" or "hovering on the horizon": evil is here, right now. And so
are Light, love, redemption (since these phenomena are also, in Lynch's
work, forces and spirits), etc. In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it
doesn't make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in
isolation from its opposite. It's not just that evil is "implied by" good or
Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within
the good stuff, encoded in it.
You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or neo-Hegelian,
but it's also Lynchian, because what Lynch's movies52 are all about is
creating a narrative space where this idea can be worked out in its fullest
detail and to its most uncomfortable consequences.
And Lynch pays a heavy price -both critically and financially -for
trying to explore worlds like this. Because we Americans like our art's
moral world to be cleanly limned and clearly demarcated, neat and tidy.
In many respects it seems we need our art to be morally comfortable, and
the intellectual gymnastics we'll go through to extract a black-and-white
ethics from a piece of art we like are shocking if you stop and look closely
at them. For example, the supposed ethical structure Lynch is most
applauded for is the "Seamy Underside" structure, the idea that dark
forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green lawns and PTA pot-
lucks of Anytown, USA.53American critics who like Lynch applaud his
"genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover
the strange, perverse passions beneath and his movies for providing
"the password to an inner sanctum of horror and desire" and "evoca-
tions of the malevolent forces at work beneath nostalgic constructs."
It's little wonder that Lynch gets accused ofvoyeurism: critics have to
make Lynch avoyeur in order to approve something like Blue Velvet from
within a conventional moral framework that has Good on toploutside
and Evil belowlwithin. The fact is that critics grotesquely misread Lynch
when they see this idea of perversity "beneath" and horror "hidden" as
central to his movies' moral structure.
52 (with the exception of Dune, in which the good and bad guys practically wear
color-coded hats -but Dune wasn't really Lynch's film anyway)
53 This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews ofboth Blue Velvet
and Twin Peaks.
David Foster Wallace
Interpreting Blue Velvet, for example, as a film centrally concerned
with "a boy discovering corruption in the heart of a town"54 is about
as obtuse as looking at the robin perched on the Beaumonts' window-
sill at the movie's end and ignoring the writhing beetle the robin's
got in its beak.55 The fact is that Blue Velvet is basically a coming-of-
age movie, and, while the brutal rape Jeffrey watches from Dorothy's
closet might be the movie's most horrifying scene, the real horror in
the movie surrounds discoveries that Jeffrey makes about himself - for
example, the discovery that a part of him is excited by what he sees
Frank Booth do to Dorothy Vallens.56 Frank's use, during the rape, of
the words "Mommy" and "Daddy," the similarity between the gas mask
Frank breathes through in extremis and the oxygen mask we've just seen
Jeffrey's dad wearing in the hospital -this kind of stuff isn't there just
to reinforce the Primal Scene aspect of the rape. The stuff's also there
clearly to suggest that Frank Booth is, in a certain deep way, Jeffrey's
"father," that the Darkness inside Frank is also encoded in Jeffrey. Gee-
whiz Jeffrey's discovery not of dark Frank but of his own dark affinities
with Frank is the engine of the movie's anxiety. Note for example that
the long and somewhat heavy angst-dream Jeffrey suffers in the film's
54 (which most admiring critics did - the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch
in the New York Times Magazine)
55 (Not to mentionignoring the fact that Frances Bay,as Jeffrey's Aunt Barbara, stand-
ing right next to Jeffreyand Sandy at the window and making an icky-face at the robin
and saying "Who could eat a bug?" then - as far as I can tell, and I've seen the movie
like eight times -proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it's not
a bug she puts in her mouth it's a tidbit sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure
Lynch means somethingby having her do it right after she's criticized the robin for its
diet. (Friends I've surveyed are evenly split on whether Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this
scene -have a look for yourself.) )
56 As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly
sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying and exciting. This is why the colors are
so lush and the mise en seine so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the
rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited by the scene but be-
cause he -like us - is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera's ogling
is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the
same time.
1 A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
second act occurs not after he has watched Frank brutalize Dorothy but
after he, Jeffrey, has consented to hit Dorothy during sex.
There are enough heavy clues like this to set up, for any marginally
attentive viewer, what is Blue Velvet's real climax, and its point. The cli-
max comes unusually early,57 near the end of the film's second act. It's
the moment when Frank turns around to look at Jeffrey in the back seat
of the car and says "You're like me." This moment is shot from Jeffrey's
visual perspective, so that when Frank turns around in the seat he speaks
both to Jeffrey and to us. And here Jeffrey -who's whacked Dorothy
and liked it - is made exceedingly uncomfortable indeed; and so - if
we recall that we too peeked through those closet-vents at Frank's feast
of sexual fascism, and regarded, with critics, this scene as the film's most
riveting - are we. When Frank says "You're like me," Jeffrey's response is
to lunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose - a
brutally primal response that seems rather more typical of Frank than
of Jeffrey, notice. In the film's audience, I, to whom Frank has also just
claimed kinship, have no such luxury of violent release; I pretty much
just have to sit there and be uncomfortable.58
And I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go
to see a movie. I like my heroes virtuous and my victims pathetic and my
villains' villainy clearly established and primly disapproved by both plot
and camera. When I go to movies that have various kinds ofhideousness
in them, I like to have my own fundamental difference from sadists and
fascists and voyeurs and psychos and Bad People unambiguously con-
firmed and assured by those movies. I like to judge. I like to be allowed
to root for Justice To Be Done without the slight squirmy suspicion
57 (prematurely!)
58 I don't think it's an accident that of the grad-school friends I first saw Blue Velvet
with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie - the two who said
they felt like either the movie was really sick or they were really sick or both they and
the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie's artistic power but
declared that as God was their witness you'd never catch them sitting through that
particular sickness-fest again - were both male, nor that both singled out Frank's
smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy's nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying
"You'relike me" as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal
moviegoing history.
208 David Foster Wallace
(so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that Justice probably
wouldn't be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either.
I don't know whether you are like me in these regards or not . . .
though from the characterizations and moral structures in the U.S.
movies that do well at the box-office I deduce that there must be rather
a lot of Americans who are exactly like me.
I submit that we also, as an audience, really like the idea of secret
and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and
exposed. We like this stuff because secrets' exposure in a movie creates
in us impressions of epistemological privilege, of "penetrating the civi-
lized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions
beneath." This isn't surprising: knowledge is power, and we (I, anyway)
like to feel powerful. But we also like the idea of "secrets," "of malevolent
forces at work beneath. . ." so much because we like to see confirmed
our fervent hope that most bad and seamy stuff really is secret, "locked
away" or "under the surface." We hope fervently that this is so because
we need to be able to believe that our own hideousnesses and Darknesses
are secret. Otherwise we get uncomfortable. And, as part of an audience,
if a movie is structured in such a way that the distinction between sur-
facelLight1good and secret/Dark/evil is messed with - in other words,
not a structure whereby Dark Secrets are winched ex machina up to
the Lit Surface to be purified by my judgment, but rather a structure
in which Respectable Surfaces and Seamy Undersides are mingled, in-
tegrated, literally mixed up - I am going to be made acutely uncom-
fortable. And in response to my discomfort I'm going to do one of two
things: I'm either going to find some way to punish the movie for mak-
ing me uncomfortable, or I'm going to find a way to interpret the movie
that eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible. From my survey
I of published work on Lynch's films, I can assure you that just about
every established professional reviewer and critic has chosen one or the
other of these responses.
I know this all looks kind of abstract and general. Consider the spe-
cific example of Twin Peaks's career. Its basic structure was the good
old murder-whose-investigation-opens-a-can-of-worms formula that's
right out of Noir 101 -the search for Laura Palmer's killer yields
postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer =Homecoming
Queen by Day & Laura Palmer =Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that
r A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
mirrored a whole town's moral schizophrenia. The show's first season,
in which the plot movement consisted mostly of more and more sub-
surface hideousnesses being uncovered and exposed, was a huge smash.
By the second season, though, the mystery-and-investigation structure's
own logic began to compel the show to start getting more focused and
explicit about who or what was actually responsible for Laura's murder.
And the more explicit Twin Peaks tried to get, the less popular the se-
ries became. The mystery's final "resolution," in particular, was felt by
critics and audiences alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was. The
"Bob"/Leland/Evil Owl stuff was fuzzy and not very well rendered,59
but the really deep dissatisfaction -the one that made audiences feel
screwed and betrayed and fueled the critical backlash against the
idea of Lynch as Genius Auteur - was, I submit, a moral one. I submit
that Laura Palmer's exhaustively revealed "sins" required, by the moral
logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her
death turn out to be causally related to those sins. We as an audience
have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these cer-
tainties need to be affirmed and massaged.60 When they were not, and as
59 Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and
not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries
than he is at wrapping them up. And the series'second season showed that he was aware
of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode, the show
had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of
the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact
that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I
actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle
of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try
to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist
were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on
national TV}.
60 This is inarguable, axiomatic. In fact what's striking about most U.S. mystery and
suspense and crime and horror films isn't these films' escalating violence but their
enduring and fanatical allegiance to moral verities that come right out of the nursery:
the virtuous heroine will not be serial-killed; the honest cop, who will not know his
partner is corrupt until it's too late to keep the partner from getting the drop on him,
will nevertheless somehow turn the tables and kill the partner in a wrenching con-
frontation; the predator stalking the herolhero's family will, no matter how rational
and ingenious he's been in his stalking tactics throughout the film, nevertheless turn
David Foster Wallace I,
it became increasingly clear that they were not going to be, Twin Peaks's
ratings fell off the shelf, and critics began to bemoan this once "daring"
and "imaginative" series' decline into "self-reference" and "mannered
And then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch's theatrical "pre-
quel" to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since Dune,
committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer
from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura's
existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was
fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid blacklwhite construct - Good
by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie, in which Ms. Sheryl Lee
as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this
multivalent system of objectified personas - plaid-skirted coedlbare-
breasted roadhouse slutltormented exorcism-candidatelmolested
daughter - as an integrated and living whole: these different identities
were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In Fire Walk with
Me, Laura was no longer "an enigma" or "the password to an inner sanc-
tum of horror." She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets
that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious
This transformation ofLaura from object/occasion to subjectlperson
was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever
tried to do - maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological con-
text ofthe series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to
make even marginal sense of the movie - and it required complex and
contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my
opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying.
into a raging lunatic at the end and will mount a suicidal frontal assault; etc. etc. etc.
etc. etc. The truth is that a major component ofthe felt suspense in contemporary U.S.
suspense movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and
character elements in order to engineer the required massage of our moral certam-
ties. This is why the discomfort we feel at "suspense" movies is perceived as a pleasant
discomfort. And this is why, when a filmmaker fails to wrap his product up in the ap-
propriate verity-confirming fashion, we feel not disinterest or even offense but anger,
a sense of betrayal - we feel that an unspoken but very important covenant has been
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 211
The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of Fire Walk with Me, is
one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to under-
stand what the movie was trying to do: "We always knew Laura was a
wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and
fucked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of
it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation ofthat
depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee
so vixenish and demonic it's hard to know whether it's terrible or a tour
de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit
of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown
off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready:] or both." Or
both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both in-
nocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer
in Fire Walk with Me is both"goodn and "bad," and yet also neither: she's
complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we
hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppycharacterization, muddy
filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate that's what we criticized Fire Walk
with Me's Laura for.61 But I submit that the real reason we criticized and
disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an em-
pathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves
and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and
uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours'
fucking relieffrom. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves
and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away
but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our
emotional relationship to the heroine herself - this movie is going to
make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off;we're going to feel, in Premiere
magazine's own head editor's word, "Betrayed."
I am not suggesting that Lynch entirely succeeded at the project he
set for himself in Fire Walk with Me. (He didn't.) What I am suggesting
is that the withering critical reception the movie received (this movie,
whose director's previous film had won the Palme d'Or, was booed at the
1992 Cannes Film Festival) had less to do with its failing in the project
61 (not to mention for being (from various reviews) "overwrought,""incoherent,"
"too much")
212 David Foster Wallace
than with its attempting it at all. And I am suggesting that if Lost High-
way gets similarly savaged - or, worse, ignored -by the American art- '
assessment machine of which Premiere magazine is a wonderful working
part, you hight want to keep all this in mind.