The Big Picture - The David Lynch Episode

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

This year marks the 30th anniversary of David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,’ and the 25th anniversary of ‘Lost Highway.’ To celebrate, Sean and Adam Nayman are diving deep into the unnerving, beautiful, often terrifying dream logic of their Lynchian fascinatination. Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Adam Nayman Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the Men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about David Lynch. More than 500 episodes into this show, we have somehow never had reason to dig into one of America's greatest living filmmakers. But this year marks the 30th anniversary

of his film Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me and the 25th anniversary of Lost Highway, another film of his, which is celebrating with a brand new 4K restoration from the Criterion Collection this week. It's a beautiful piece of work. I highly recommend people check it out if they like that movie. I've picked these two movies because I consider them, on the whole, the scariest and arguably the least appreciated of Lynch's work. We can debate that here. Here to debate it and talk about Lynch and all of his work and all of his majesty is ringer contributor Adam Naiman. Hi, Adam.

Hey, Sean. It's also like the three and a half month anniversary of him not having a film at Cannes. Remember on Twitter where people were like, I didn't mean a David Lynch movie. It's really exciting. And people are like, that's not true. That site's never correct. And it didn't happen. There was no Lynch movie this year. I bought it hook, line, and sinker too. I was a true

Lynchian rube walking into the room, planning out how I was going to cover this new Lynch film that is not coming. And you know, it's understandable. Lynch is 76 years old. A few years ago, he made a 17-hour film for Showtime. It's not as if he hasn't done any work in recent years, but he hasn't made a film in a long, long time. And so we're stuck in anniversary land in terms of having conversations with him. Let me just start with this, Adam. What's your relationship to David Lynch? My relationship to him, I call him every day, talk about the weather. No, he, I mean, anecdotally, he was the first really intimidating interview I ever did. I was like 20 years old, covering TIFF in 2001, the September 11th TIFF, and got thrown in a hotel room with David Lynch.

And of course, I did a terrible interview, and he was a wonderful guy. He understood that someone's looking for copies, so he gave it. And he's also the occasion of the scariest interview I ever did, where my tape recorder only recorded one half of a conversation with him, resulting in the ultimate Lynchian artifact, which is me talking to thin air. I'm like, really? That's what Inland Empire is about? Just piss. So I called his office back and said, this happened.

This is terrible. And I could hear them talking in the background. I think it was pretty clearly Lynch. They're like, well, just say whatever you think he said. It's okay. You know, and I always thought that, you know, beyond being generous, that sort of spoke to the wisdom of interviewing him in the first place, which is sort of, you can't not do it.

And it's life highlights for me, but also like, what's the point? He has said so many times the movies speak for themselves. So I think my relationship to him is very few filmmakers have ever tried to say more about the films, including on Ringer, where I've written about Mulholland Drive and I've written about Straight Story, tried to say a lot about them. But what do you say about movies that do speak for themselves, right? That's my relationship to Lynch. I love trying to hear how these movies do speak for themselves. It's interesting too, because I've spent a lot of time this week reading interviews with him, reading interviews with folks who have worked with him over the

years. And he has this long and extensive kind of troop of in front of and behind the camera folks that he returns to over and over again. I read his kind of quasi memoir room to dream, which is co-written with Christine McKenna and is a fascinating document and is revelatory in many ways, but still doesn't do, I think, what you're describing, which is like, let's use Quentin Tarantino as an example. He's been on the show many times. He's incredible at talking about his films. You hear Quentin talk about a movie and you know what the intent was, you know what the story is, you know what we're meant to think about, you know what movies he watched to prepare for it, you know what the inspirations were. Everything is abundantly clear and it doesn't take away

from the film. But with Lynch, I've heard him speak even about circuitous Mobius strip film like Lost Highway many times. And even when he is sincere and emotionally direct about the inspirations for the film, I still don't ultimately know what the movie is about. I can presume or I can theorize, but the air of mystery is something that I think surrounds all of his work in a fascinating way. Yeah. Well, there's two cliches, right? There's the cliche of the, this is exactly what this means, right? So the insect in the Robin's beak at the end of Blue Velvet means either that that you know her fan sandy's fantasy is correct or it mocks sandy's fantasy and then the other cliche is that

you know there's nothing mediating lynch and his unconscious and these things just bleed out of him and he doesn't know what any of it means and they're both dubious right i think that he is very very good at playing the guy or being the guy or channeling the guy who doesn't want to give it all to you because really in a way he's being more generous that way. I have thought sometimes about, you know, what if you could put a gun to the head of someone like a lyncher or other filmmakers, you know, what if you could, you know, you know, force Claire Denis at gunpoint or a pitch upon or anyone to sort of say, this is what I was thinking. Is this going to improve it for you?

Is anyone's experience in these movies actually going to be improved or anyone's hunches being proven correct going to be satisfying? I guess I think that there's also some filmmakers where I don't care about the mysteries and Lynch's mysteries are bottomless. I think about them all the time. I don't want to solve them. I just enjoy

being inside of them. That might be the great gift he has to American cinema is it's spacious and it's bottomless. You don't get to the bottom of David Lynch. It's not possible. a class with largely foreign, I guess, sort of art house, true artist filmmakers. And Lynch is for sure that. He is for sure in that tradition, and I'm sure he inspired both of those filmmakers in ways. But he's also a mainstream American filmmaker. He is a person who is, he is a legitimately famous person who has made movies that have been watched and rewatched and picked over time and again that are a part of the canon. He's a person who's been nominated for three Academy Awards. He's not this oblique, standoffish outsider. He is, in an odd way, a part of the fabric of American movies, and that is highly unlikely when you really dig into his work. But it also makes sense because he's working in a tradition as well.

It is unlikely. And, you know, I mean, we don't want to be too discursive and jump around, but I'll throw something out for you because you're a guy who likes ideas. And I try never to have takes on this show. I'm like, if I ever have takes, I need to arrest myself. But, you know, Chris is good at takes. I don't have takes. But here's a semi take for you, which is that his fame, the true fame you are talking about, is more of a byproduct about what he did to television the first time than anything else. Right?

I think Blue Velvet makes you seriously famous as a filmmaker. Sure. filmmaker sure but i think twin peaks makes you seriously famous in a moment when uh you know everyone's watching the same things on prime time where it's limited options and all of a sudden there's a bunch of eyeballs on one television show and that television show in the form of twin peaks is just so strange that's where i think his fame metastasizes into something else and he becomes the go-to adjective for that which is is not mainstream in American moviemaking. I don't know how that sits with you because we were both there for that, but we were young when Twin Peaks was on. But that's how I remember him becoming really famous. That is certainly how he got on my radar, was my parents racing to the TV to catch

Twin Peaks in that first season. And I think it's Angelo Badalamente tells this great story, the composer who has worked with Lynch many times over. But he talks about the way that he designed the score for that TV show was its simplicity was almost like a clarion call for people who were doing the dishes in their house to come to the couch to sit down, which I always really liked. And I think that you're right. However, his fame and his notoriety well precedes the TV show in a few ways. And his nearness to the mainstream precedes it too. Even before Blue Velvet, he's someone who of course made Eraserhead, which is arguably the cult film of the last 50 years in America. And he goes on to make The Elephant Man, which is a slightly more conventional film

that is produced by Mel Brooks and Garner's Academy Award nominations. And then after that, he's literally asked to direct Return of the Jedi. I mean, he is in the running to become what we now understand as a kind of franchise filmmaker and then instead opts to make Dune, which is this disastrous project that I think actually has some things about it that I enjoy,

but completely changes, alters his trajectory as an artist. But prior to the extraordinary success and acclaim of Blue Velvet, he was in the mainstream then in 1982, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. He was, but I think that it was still a selective proposition where, you know, if you're interested, you'll pursue it. I think Twin Peaks marked a point where even people who weren't interested or didn't know they were interested or who used that to decide they definitely were not interested, and that's then their point of relationship to Lynch, which is, you know who is what is this annoying pretentious television show i don't know if there's any other conditions that

could have made him be like that because i don't know if tv's relationship to film was ever at that same point it was in the mid 80s where it's like something's gotta give right either the spectacle of movies is gonna fully grind tv out right right? The special effects size of sequels and the Star Wars moment is either in some ways going most universal enticement in the world, which is here is a dead body who killed them. Right. And that's even the primetime TV guide language who shot Jr. And who killed Laura Palmer are like two sides of the same sentence. And then the fact that it went about not just, you know, sweet time to solve that mystery but turns literally every interaction into a mystery you start with this dead body and you're like that's mysterious what could this show be about and then every single scene you're like people at the time are saying what is this and the kind

of fandom that that creates the fandom it creates in support of it, the fandom that needs this show to sustain itself, that organizes itself around the show. It's not an internet era show. And can you imagine if the internet had existed when the first Twin Peaks was on, right? I mean, this round of Twin Peaks, The Return was a much, it's a different kind of phenomenon because it's lathered in nostalgia, right? And in the idea of returning to what it was like to have primetime Twin Peaks. I'm not saying his TV works better than his film worker. It's the only reason to care about him. Everything you say about him being a significant figure in the early 80s is true. And if you paid attention to experimental film in the 70s, he was semi-famous even before Eraserhead.

But yeah, the idea that you could have a conversation about American film with fairly normal people, let's say, in 1988 or 89, and he would come up, probably, towards the top, despite never making a $100 million movie or franchise like that is fascinating. He's one of the very few filmmakers that I can think of who explodes the Manny Farber white elephant art versus termite art paradigm. You know, he's sort of both simultaneously, which is such an unusual thing. And it makes him fun to pick over, too, because you can reliably count on, like you said, workaday folks knowing his movies knowing his knowing his tv shows and and that that has evolved over time he has become like in in some ways even more of a cult object than when he was a cult filmmaker but i i almost i find it hard to understand how to talk about him like i i wonder what space he will occupy in the future as time goes on is he a person who is inspirational is he a person who's work? Is he a person who's work? It seems like his work kind of resonates more deeply. And in fact, his work that was

cast aside, including the two films we'll talk about today, is actually now arguably considerably his best work. There are people who are kind of reclaiming it as the truest work that he's ever done. So I'm kind of fascinated by his long-term legacy. There's a long period of his career that at the time and in retrospect, I think both are defined by this idea of fatigue, like Lynch fatigue. It's just that in retrospect, that was kind of not true, certainly not artistically, right? You know, I would argue that the period between, let's say, the second season of Twin Peaks not being everybody's favorite thing, up to and including Wild at Heart, Fire Walk With Me, and even the two thumbs down rhetoric around Lost Highway, which they used in the ad campaign.

They used Siskel and Ebert disliking the movie as a reason to see it, which, yes. Brilliant. yes you know brilliant but but that decade is marked by a certain fatigue with lynch or the fact that a lot of other people in film culture had kind of caught up to him and maybe made it harder to sort out the genuine article from the imitators i would never say quentin tarantino is a david lynch imitator exactly but there's that famous david foster wallace essay when lost highway came out and he's like well tarantino who to be fair to wallace and to tarantino was new at that point newer you know wallace is like well tarantino shows you an ear getting cut off and david lynch is interested in the ear and you can already sense in there

this defensiveness around lynch which is like dude he was there first you know and the the post-modernism of 90s cinema and the the hip violence, and even just to some extent, the branded weirdness, or just the auteur branding in general. He was more singular when he was doing it himself. And in the 90s, a lot of that caught up to him, to the point that as a 15-year-old, 16-year-old, kind of callow idiot trying to go be smart about movies, I think Lynch followed Tarantino for me to some extent because of just when you're allowed to see the movies in the theater. Like for anyone who's listening, who's ever wondered, I'm sure no one cares, but how old I am.

I mean, I'm 41. So it's not like I'm seeing Blue Velvet in the theater. It's not like I went to Cannes and booed Wild at Heart. So I think that for a lot of the people who'd been with lynch in real time the 90s was either where you double down on him and you defend him against fashion right and you defend him against the slings and arrows of whatever or it's when people kind of got sick of him and then the end of that period is like the two-tier comeback there's the sweet comeback of the straight story which no human being on earth could possibly dislike. And the alternative press tried briefly to be like, this is a right wing movie.

And you're like, you're stupid. You know, I mean, the, the, the, the,

the movie was well-received, but then Mulholland drive is the real comeback because it's like, he's doing the things that people wanted of him and doing them at a supremely high level. And how that movie ended up nominated for an oscar is insane because it's you know pretty pretty pretty avant-garde by by multiplex standards but everybody loved it you know and i think that he has been basking in the warm after glow of that for the last 20 years the art art is not easy. Inland Empire is incredibly unpleasant. And Twin

Peaks The Return is as challenging as anything he's ever made. But there's no pervasive anti-David Lynch sentiment anymore. People love him. He's beloved. It's fascinating. And even just what you said about the idea of him being nominated for Mulholland Drive, the same occurs to me about Blue Velvet. I mean, the idea of him being nominated for Best Director for Blue Velvet, no other nominations for the film. And obviously, in some circles, it was critically acclaimed and hailed as kind of a masterpiece instantaneously, but

that is not an Academy film. His films are not Academy films. They are deeply violent. They are inspired very much by both avant-garde and genre. And none of those things have anything to do with what the Academy usually recognizes. You know, you're already wading into the dangerous waters of interpretation

when I say this, but I mean, just to take Blue Velvet, because we're going out of order anyway, and they're all fun to talk about. They are. That movie wears the lining of the first half of 80s cinema, right? It's a bit of teenager in love.

It has very faint traces, not influential traces, by the way. No one kill me for saying this. It's not inspired of teenager in love. It has very faint traces, not influential traces, by the way. No one kill me for saying this. It's not inspired by John Hughes remotely, but it's in that pocket a little bit. And it has the overtly American signifiers. People wanted to read it through the political lens of Reagan and Morning in America. There's just enough in there that you can kind of see why even as an independent movie, it got some traction. And then there's just the fact of what it is. I cannot imagine an audience in 1986 before Blue Velvet is a series of classic scenes to

be remembered. Can you imagine the mommy-daddy gas-huffing Hitchcock through the closet rape scene the first time around. You can't not react to it, right? It's extraordinary and scary now as it was then. I mean, none of those things have aged. And that's another thing that I think is powerful about the work. Let's just say like a couple of things about him as a man, because he's basically become kind of a cartoon character at this point.

He's become a living meme in many ways. partially of his own choice and participation too without question i think he has always played up certain aspects of his persona um in a way to to make himself a similar kind of rock star driven auteur as you describe but he does so in all of the opposite ways he's never in pursuit of cool. In fact, his whole identity is this middle American man who's born in Montana and who lived in Idaho and Washington and who, you know, he's a smoker and a coffee drinker. And in many ways, there is a, you know,

Cooper from Twin Peaks, that kind of affect, that friendliness, but that deep oddity that is a huge part of the appeal of Twin Peaks isn't a part of the appeal of Lynch. And Lynch is like a real soul of an artist kind of figure and a painter and a practitioner of transcendental meditation. But he also just seems like kind of a goof sometimes. If you've ever seen him, say, on David Letterman in the 80s or in the 90s in the heyday of Twin Peaks, he's got a kind of silly affect.

He's in on the joke, but not completely. And there's something to that that is appealing. He has a silly affect, but I also never doubt for a second, and I've met him, but also watched a lot of interviews. I don't doubt for a second he's ruthless. This whole Jimmy Stewart from Mars thing that Mel Brooks said about him, it's a wonderful descriptor, and it's not wrong. And when his actresses talk about his kindness and how he calls, I think it's Laura Dern is Naomi Watts' buttercup. You know, he has these sweet names on the harshness of his characters to direct, you know, and to realize a vision. You know, he's someone who has a softness and a sweetness and a gentility and people want to stick up for him and defend him. He's written certain lines of dialogue that resonate with the least likely communities, you know, in that Twin Peaks The Return, when his character, and he speaks for himself about the trans FBI agent,

he uses the phrase, you know, I told those clown comedians, fix your hearts or die. I mean, that's a statement that gained traction well beyond the Lynch cult or the Twin Peaks cult. So, he confounds even doctrinaire political readings about him. But there's a hardness underneath all that too. And the movies are very unpleasant. So tell me about when you first came to him. Was Twin Peaks the first work of his that you saw? How did you get hooked on his world? Well, I think one of the things I mentioned when we were looking at the notes for the podcast is he's a gateway filmmaker,

which is either all roads lead to him through something else, you know, because probably something in the nineties, something mediocre that we all liked was described as Lynchian. And we went, Oh, who's David Lynch, you know,

or he becomes a great gateway to the history, history of the first half of the 20th century of film. He becomes a gateway to surrealism, right? I mean, you get to Bunuel and Dali and Maya Deren through Lynch, or you look at his own list of favorites, and they're not exactly obscure, but it is helpful when you're a teenager to have him say something like, I like Fellini. And you go, I should like Fellini too. I should probably watch those movies. I think I came to him, some of my high school friends might be listening

and they can correct me if I'm wrong. Theatrically, it was Lost Highway and it was sneaking into Lost Highway. And while I am sure that I had seen Blue Velvet already because that was one of those movies I watched way too early because I think it was on my mom's VHS shelf, Lost Highway and the sense of seeing a dangerous movie that I shouldn't have been at

and that I kind of had to buy a ticket for something else and sneak into, that was the beginning. So again, for people who were sick of Lynch or tired of Lynch by the 90s, that's a very different thing than seeing Lost Highway and feeling like this is some undiscovered country. What about you? I certainly saw episodes of Twin Peaks as a kid. I recall my babysitter

watching that show and spending some time sitting next to her watching the show and trying to wrap my head around what the purpose of the Enterprise was because it was not a sitcom, which is probably what I was spending most of my primetime hours watching. And it was not a true

dramatic procedural or even like 30 something is a contemporaneous show. It had nothing to do with that. It was one part, that murder mystery that you talk about, but it was also a kind of ode slash parody of soap opera. There was a clear riff on a storytelling style. It's probably the first time bar barring Mel Brooks, that I started to think about what it meant to make art that was not wholly, not sincere, but was sort of like, I guess, postmodern, for lack of a better word. You know, that there was an idea that you had thought about form and that you were trying to defy it by paying homage to it. And that's big stuff when you're 10 years old. You know, that's very heady.

And it definitely got inside of me. But honestly, it was not until years later when I started seeing the films. And I didn't see Twin Peaks Firewalk with me until the 2000s. That's not something I certainly wasn't racing out to see it in a movie theater when I was 12 years old. And I don't know, I'm not even sure if I saw Lost Highway. If I did, it was only because of the presence of Trent Reznor that I got interested in it. So it's interesting how people come to his work because it's kind of scattered. Well, it's funny, it's interesting you mentioned Trent Reznor and also within the film and on the soundtrack, someone who was a real kind of flash in the pan provocateur at that time, but like a Marilyn Manson, right? There was a gesturing in Lost Highway towards other subcultural stuff that maybe the other

Lynch movies hadn't done. Not that they didn't have their cool subcultural stuff. But I mean, when I was in high school, it was like, can't really say that I was, you know, like a Harry Dean Stanton fan boy yet. You know,

it was only a few years away, but I think that in the case of lost highway, the bleakness and darkness of that soundtrack and the brilliance of the ad campaign, which was really a kind of salvage ad campaign. They had to build an ad campaign around the fact that people didn't like it. You know, I mean, that's what the Siskel and Ebert two thumbs down thing was. But I think also, and this is a Canadian thing, you know, in Canada, we have ratings that are

14A and R, which is in some ways more and less permissive than the United States. So when I was a teenager, 14A meant, yeah, sure, you can go see it if you basically look 14, but R was not even with an adult. I mean, our R was a bit like the NC-17. It was never put in those same terms. So as a kid, teenager in 1995, I could see 7, and even kids was 14A. Imagine that. But Lost Highway was an R. And so the means of having to circumvent that R and get into the theater. And then the fact that a lot of the violence and sexuality in the film is simultaneously so extreme, but so fast, you're not sure you've seen what you've seen. He doesn't linger over it.

Even the murder scene in Lost Highway, you're not quite sure what you're looking at. And that had a big impact. in his films, but I would not say that he obsesses over the ugliness. I think he obsesses over the aftermath of the ugliness. That seems to be a core theme of his, is sort of what is wrought from all of these terrible things that happen in our world, which is interesting. It's funny that we keep circling back to Lost Highway. And Lost Highway is, like I said, it's a little bit back in the culture. I think people are seeing it again because it was on screens earlier around the country. And I did not know that the Canadian rating system was quite so severe. That's fascinating. You should do a six-part series on it. It's really interesting.

I mean, I don't know if I could squeeze that much blood from that stone. But it is notable, right? Because Lynch's work, it feels sort of illicit. And up until The Straight Story, everything that he made, including the primetime network TV show, felt discomforting. It made you, it pushed you off of your easy chair, you know?

Well, I'll throw out an idea there, which is that, and this is not to leave aside Eraserhead or Elephant Man, because God forbid you're going to make me rank these later, and those do not rank low for me. I mean, Elephant Man as a spoiler ranks very high for me. Wonderful film. It's a wonderful film. But I don't think that in those films, whatever the unpleasantness, it's not really a form of voyeurism. And I wouldn't say that that's really present in Dune either. I think that in Blue Velvet, starting with Kyle MacLachlan in the closet, watching someone who's not his mommy, but someone's mommy, and someone who sure as hell is not his daddy, and certainly not her daddy, do this bizarre, nitrous-aided pantomime of your parents fucking. I mean, from that moment, I think what made the films feel illicit was there was always a place for that kind of voyeurism. It's all over Blue Velvet. In Twin Peaks, there's lots of people being watched,

but there's even psychic space where people are seeing things that they don't want to see, like visions. Wild at Heart has visions. Fire Walk With Me, it's like no one wants to look at this. Even the characters who are looking at it don't want to look at it. And then Lost Highway modernizes it with the video camera, where the video camera in that movie is the language of voyeurism and sadism and perversion you know this is one of the great 90s time capsule moments it should be on every like blockbuster video ad should have you know for the blockbuster video should have robert logey being like hey kid Porto, you know, handing him the tape in the car. It's like everything about,

about, about analog is so evil, you know? And I think that that's where the illicitness comes from is that you see people in the worlds of these movies watching something you are made to watch the same thing that they are watching and you are aligned to some extent with their desire to watch. You know, I think that that's the

Hitchcockian side of Lynch. And there's a lot of sides of Lynch. There's his Fellini side, there's his experimental side, there's his corny side. But his Hitchcock side, the voyeurism side, the illicit side that you should not be watching this, but you want to watch this. It's a big part of it. I think that's basically the core theme of the two movies that we'll focus on. Because Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, let me give some context for this,

because it has certainly been rescued and reclaimed, as I said, over the years. But by the second season of the show, it had switched nights. It had moved, I think, from Thursdays to Saturdays. And Lynch and even Mark Frost, to some extent, I think, from Thursdays to Saturdays. And Lynch and even Mark Frost, to some extent, had moved on from the show. They were not as relevant or participating as deeply in the writer's room and in the production of the series. And the network also

forced everyone involved to reveal Laura Palmer's killer. And in revealing her killer, they basically took the air out of the balloon of that series. And it kind of left it with nowhere to go. And the ratings plummeted and the show basically died. And Lynch, who is developing other projects at this time and other television shows and is getting ready to make Wild at Heart at that time, is starting to think about why he was interested in this story in the first place. And what was it about what happened to Laura Palmer that resonates with him? So he starts to develop this idea with a co-writer for a film that tells the story of Laura Palmer and a film that will force us to see what happened to her, which is not something that we saw on the show, at least not in full. And largely, Cheryl Lee, who was Laura Palmer on the show, was just a corpse.

She was cast to be a corpse, and she was just this kind of lingering memory who was defined or redefined by the various characters throughout the story. And so the idea of him wanting to show us that terrible thing that you're describing, that illicit or awful thing, force us to watch what happened to this person and why this really charming cult object sensation TV show came about.

It wasn't just because of Cooper's coffee. And it wasn't even just because of the Black Lodge. It was something much more sinister and something much more primal and much more human in a way, not as abstract. And so he writes this script and sets out to make this film. And the participants in the film, many of the people who worked on the show did not want to be a part of it. You know, Kyle MacLachlan himself, who does appear in the film briefly, did not really want to spend more time in this world. And he had grown to resent Lynch because of the way that he removed himself from the project. And Sherrilyn Fenn is not in the film, and Laura Flynn Boyle is not in the film, and a handful of other people. So he's constantly kind of jerry-rigging around some of

these changes. But nevertheless, he makes something that is simultaneously true to Twin Peaks, but that feels like it is digging even deeper under the surface of this thing that he made. And it is really, I his his maybe not his most affecting movie but his most primal movie his movie that makes me the most sad for sure as i watch it and um it hits really really hard uh when did you first see it what is your relationship to it i mean i first saw it in that that mad rush in the mid 90s either just before or just after lost highway to see all of it as much as I could, right? A little easier to rent VHS than to sneak into movies. And in some ways, we'll see

how much we investigate this, not hard to find like-minded male friends with whom to watch the films. This is not to say that Lynch is not a director with female critics or defenders. And some of the most interesting writing on Lynch has been from female critics. It's been from trans critics. I mean, there's interesting writing on him from all over the place. But the extent to which misogyny and violence towards women is a motif in his work, whether it says something about the person, the artist, the onscreen world, the culture, the characters, you either have to talk about it for two hours,

or just admit, oh, I'm just inventorying it along with the other stuff. And I think that Fire Walk with me is where that discussion I think becomes very hard to have because people say, well, there's a lot of cruelty towards Laura Palmer, not a real person. So he is putting her through that. And then people turn and say, there's a lot of empathy towards Laura Palmer. And it's like, we better come up with some empathy because he came up with the cruel conditions that her character has put through as well. And I know that the first time that I watched the film, I don't have thin skin and I'm not pretending to be any kind of white knight viewer.

I mean, I sat through lots of stuff around that time and got off on it for bad reasons. That's around the first time I saw Showgirls, for goodness sake, a movie that's similar in some ways to Fire Walk With Me. But all I knew about Fire Walk With Me when I watched it as a teenager was it made me deeply sad. It made me extremely upset. And I had such a feeling of relief when it was over that was not the same as satisfaction or catharsis. It was just like, thank God. And when I started thinking about how that feeling aligned maybe with that character and what that character had been put through, not just in that movie, but the whole of Twin Peaks and symbolically what uses that character had been put through, a character defined by being a corpse wrapped in plastic

finally gets to rest. And in these transcendent, almost angelic terms, he works up for her. I just knew that I felt something I'd felt at very few movies. There are a lot of movies I couldn't wait to be over. This was different. I was just like, oh my God, it's over. My brain is my own again. My heart is my own again after these two and a half hours. And I've always found it to be one of those movies that just made me take terms of scenes that I can watch that I am interested in, but we'll save that for a second. I mean, the story itself, it wrong foots the audience in the beginning because it starts out as very similar to the Twin Peaks television show, although it does essentially replace McLaughlin's character with Chris Isaac and later Kiefer

Sutherland as this kind of pair of FBI agents who in the past are investigating the murder of a woman named Teresa Banks. And it's a sort of prologue that reminds the viewer of Twin Peaks, like we're in this world, we're going back to this world, maybe not fully, and maybe we're shifting the tone somewhat, but the oddity, even the sense of humor, the mystery, the kind of slick coolness that Twin Peaks could evoke is all there in the first 10, 15 minutes of the film. And then it takes a hard turn and it becomes Laura Palmer's film. And we should say that the Twin Peaksness at the beginning is also slightly stilted, slightly self-parodic, you know, like when they're deconstructing the woman's gestures and her facial expressions. It's almost like a bit of an SNL parody, which is something that Lynch never admits to. And I'm not even saying that's his intention, by the way. But it feels a little bit

like Twin Peaks as a blueprint or like Twin Peaks as a series of gestures. It's funny you say that because my reading on that was that he actually just could not get himself back onto the wavelength he was on when he first started making the show, that he was so locked in on telling a story that was essentially pure tragedy that he couldn't get himself around the idea, and especially without McLaughlin as a kind of central figure in that prologue. But when the film does become this story about the final seven days of Laura's life, it's more or less a, it's,

I think it's a horror movie. I don't really think it's, you know, there are obviously the sort of lynching tone that defies genre, but it is basically just awful event after awful event culminating in the awful list of events. Yeah. No,

I don't know. I don't know what else you could call it, but a horror movie. And one that, again, it's not, um, it's funny because scream is only a few years later and I don't know what else you could call it but a horror movie and one that again it's not um it's funny because Scream is only a few years later and I wouldn't hazard too much of a

comparison there but it's like there are teen horror tropes that Twin Peaks universe kind of ticks off multiple suspects and the girl next door and could it have been her her her father then the supernatural element I mean but it's never grouped with those movies because even though it is horror, it's also, you know, deeply, deeply psychological, you know,

deep, deep psychological study, deep melodrama. And it somehow manages in a way that I don't find insulting. I find it operatic. It takes this girl and her demons and her fate, and it makes it feel universal in a way. I would never say Laura

Palmer is actually representative of everything, but she is a pretty good example of how if you fictionalize something slightly, like in this case, I don't know, Marilyn Monroe, who was a big influence on the creation of that character and her iconography, that if you fictionalize it, you can get away both with a cruelty that a certain filmmaker whose name rhymes with Andrew Dominick could not achieve in his recent, a very fire walk with me inflected movie, like even more cruelty than he on his best day could come up with, but without the kind of cruelty that does this all over a person's real life, because Laura Palmer's not real. She comes to stand in for things that are incredibly real by the end of that movie, so real that you kind of can alone even while she's surrounded you know this

the truly sadistic filmmakers on their best day can't do what lynch does in that movie and he's not doing it to be mean i think he's doing it as a dramatist and he's doing it peerlessly well while being right by the way i don't know if you want to talk about this but being right on the border of camp because we're not talking about a movie that the whole world saw and felt this way about it was not a well-liked film at all no i i think both of those things are critical which is one the tone when he makes this tonal decision to i guess for lack of a better phrase make a more serious film than what twin peaks was but it's almost as if if he is incapable of making something dramatically formulaic. You know, he can't just do a pure Greek tragedy about incest and its brutal after effects.

And he also can't just make a, because ultimately Twin Peaks is like a possession tale too. You know, Bob and the idea of Bob and the idea of looming and lingering and invasive evil is such a core part of so much of Lynch's storytelling and especially these two movies too. You know, Bob and the idea of Bob and the idea of looming and lingering and invasive evil is such a core part of so much of Lynch's storytelling and especially these two movies that we're talking about. But he can't do something like that either. He's not making a movie you'd watch on Shudder. He's doing something that is informed by the avant-garde, but I think it's also informed by a completely unaffected weirdness and goofiness. You know, in that goofiness,

there's a moment in this film where Cheryl Lee's character is on her lawn and she witnesses her father exiting the house. And she's having revelation after revelation about who has been torturing her and abusing her and raping her. And in the aftermath of that, she's having realizations about her own father and she sees him and she's laying on the lawn out of view of him. And he is in a suit walking to his car to

go to work the next day. And the camera holds on her and the look of sheer terror and the intensity of the music that is tracking that moment is so upsetting and caustic, but also ridiculous. There is something ridiculous about everything that is happening in this film that it creates a kind of totally sui generis tone. Like there's nothing really that you can compare it to there. And it's also something that I keep, I think keeps a lot of people away from his work or makes it hard for them to accept what he's doing because it's sometimes just feels goofy. You know what I mean? When I say that I,

I, I do. And I, and a lot of the objections, I mean, there's, there's objection, by the way,

objection should be raised to any filmmaker. The point here is not that there aren't objections to Lynch and some objections are more persuasive than others, but I think some of the low level objections to him have to do with the fact that the films are not particularly realistic, which is a bugaboo that people have about narrative plausibility, or, well, people wouldn't say that, or people wouldn't do that. And people like that kind of ridiculousness when it's safely constrained by formula. If it's safely constrained by an action movie or a romantic comedy, actually, the

unlikeliness is sort of part of the fun. I think that Lynch is a filmmaker who a lot of people who either are honestly alienated by unconventional art or unconventional approach to narrative or character, I think they come by their reversion honestly. And I think people who want to get their backup over the idea of art, the idea that God forbid someone is making something that's a little tough or a little challenging or a little out of pocket, he makes them really mad, which is conversely why he has such a giant cult following. It's a cult following that's almost like the size of the mainstream itself because for all the people who are sick of formula and convention or passivity or innocuousness, he's a culture hero. And the

fact that that heroism has to be written sometimes in the language of such brutal violence and sexual violence and misogynist violence is worth asking about. I would say that in some ways, he's unique among the male auteurs who tend to be venerated in that he's at all interested in women in the first place in terms of who he tends to write as his protagonists and the level of parts he has written and directed for actresses. I mean, Naomi Watts' talent is her own and her career is her own achievement, but the career doesn't get the chance to happen without the part that she has in Mulholland Drive. That's the thing about Fire Walk With Me that I think personally bugs me the most. I don't know Cheryl Lee. I've never met her. I've never interviewed her. But the idea that

she should have ever been anything less than incredibly proud of that performance kind of breaks my heart that you would read people write about her at the time and be like, boy, that was bad or boy, that didn't work. I mean, that's just not understanding what acting is and what following direction is, you know? Yeah. I i mean in my notes here i i wrote what makes this movie special and the first thing that i wrote was shirley and it is like it is her performance if it doesn't work the movie doesn't work and what's amazing about that is you know she is essentially more or less cast off of a uh headshot you know she's they met her but she didn't have a role on the show, really. And so without that role,

the idea of thrusting her into this really nightmare scenario for two hours, that's really what her character is forced into. It's a huge ask of a performer, and she has to inhabit a really, really awful space for a long time. And she does so amazingly well. I love what you said about how the cult itself is larger than the mainstream in some ways, or at least equal to the size because of our desire to kind of defend him. That is an interesting impulse. And it's something that has come up with a number of filmmakers over the years. Like you mentioned Claire Denis earlier. I think she's someone who also occupies that space where the people who are turned off by her, her defenders feel they have to even more vociferously explicate and emotionally locate what's so special about what she does. I really like artists like that. And I also like conversations about artists like that. And that's one of the reasons why I think I was drawn to Lynch in the first place too. One of the things about Lynch though, is it does feel to some extent like culture has cornered the argument and it's weird that it would be Mulholland Drive that did it.

But that was sort of the movie where there were like the little you know the dumb movie reviewers or the odd you know daily pan or whatever but there was sort of just this feeling that happened when that movie came out where it's like all right well he's come out the other end of his unfashionability it's really pretty great all along this is an unbelievably good film that is not like anything else and then it's sort of just like you're in Valhalla now. And I'm sure that that didn't make Inland Empire any easier to get financed or made. There's a lot of struggle in Twin Peaks The Return. And I don't know how that guy feels when he goes to bed at night. I know how he seems to feel when he gives the weather every morning, which I still watch. I love hearing the weather from David Lynch. It's always sunny, cloudless

skies, all that. But I feel like after Mul after mahalan drive there was a little less of the anxiety of how will history judge this filmmaker i kind of feel like history is like we're good and then it sort of does become going back to and picking over the movies not as a victory lap but actually as a way like what can you say about them that's not a cliche and i'm not picking on us here either because we're earnestly trying to wrestle with a body of work that is the opposite of underrepresented. Okay? This is not a filmmaker who lacks for analysis. I think that the map is bigger than the territory is still a bit bigger than the map in this case. I don't think he's exhausted, but people love him. I don't

think that we have to worry about that anymore. The reason that I wanted to do this is because I don't necessarily even feel like I have the... Let me backtrack for a second. I said this when Jean-Luc Godard died. When he died, I didn't do an episode about him because one, I am not a scholar. Two, I don't feel that there's anything that I could share about my experience with his work or my understanding of what he accomplished that was not effectively regurgitated by many other people in film school and on podcasts and in all the reading I've done over the years and in interviews with him that I've read. And I didn't feel like I had anything meaningful to say.

The same is probably true for me when it comes to, say, Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet is one of those iconic pieces of art that has been picked over and chewed over and kind of memefied in a way that it is almost immune to analysis at this point. But these two movies, and in part because of this 90s context

that you were describing earlier, makes them still more ripe. And the fact that they are still earlier makes them still more ripe and the fact that they are still kind of being rediscovered and the fact that they do represent this era of storytelling and a kind of cultural infiltration i would say of storytelling types like the fact that trent resner was a part of lost highway the fact that twinaks Firewalk with me was a prequel to a TV show. These are relatively audacious developments in the mainstream. And I think there's something rich about them that is exciting for me. Now, five years from now, when these two films have been sitting in the Criterion Collection for years, and people have listened to this episode, and they've read all the essays, these two might also get kind of mothballed to the way that Blue

Velvet and Eraserhead have been mothballed to the way that blue velvet and eraser had have been mothballed in terms of the context of interesting and relevant new conversation about these things but the 90s being a moment in which filmmakers like david lynch got a chance to emerge and david lynch was somewhat reviled or defied is a unique turn it's a fascinating turn that the the david foster wallace essay about essay, because for people who've read it, they know exactly what I'm talking about. For people who aren't, it was an unusually long piece in premiere. These days you barely get to read a piece on a movie anywhere that's not 80 words long.

This is pages and pages and pages. It's a mix of on-set reporting and his own postulations about lynch and digressiveness into the rest of culture. I mean, this is David Foster Wallace kind of at the peak of his powers too. He made it very clear, I think, in 1996 that the jury was still out on what the upshot of all this lynchness was, even for him, right? Because what he was mapping to some extent was this infiltration of irony and cool and sadism into mid-90s culture, which you can see on TV. Any direction that the American culture didn't go in the 90s that was pious and evangelical, it went to the other extreme. And without making a ridiculous comparison, even something like Seinfeld sort of celebrated the fact that it was about nothing. It was like grinning nihilism, right? And you could get a sense that Wallace was trying

to just get his hands around this idea. So what are David Lynch's movies? He's talented and he's skillful and you don't forget them, right? So are they a worldview? Are they a vibe? Is he catering to an audience? Is he supplying something that nobody wants? Is he meeting a demand that we don't want to accept is there?

It's a very thoughtful way to think about the films. I think now maybe one of the things that I love about Lynch and Twin Peaks The Return brought this out in me to the point that even when the show wasn't emotional, I was emotional watching it, was the idea that, and it's a very auteurist idea, but that idea that you are going to make work that is about something that matters to you and people are going to meet you there not even halfway not even three quarters of the way it's like this is what i want to make and if you like it great and if you don't then it's it's not for you because so much of what's being made now at every level is is pandering to an imagined audience

or creating supply from people, creating demand from people who don't know that there's anything else out there. This is what I love about Lynch, is that you will meet him on the terms that he sets. And even when those terms sometimes get familiar and even nostalgic, like in the new Twin Peaks, which is filled with callbacks, which in other media drive me nuts. I hate fan service. I hate it. Can't stand fan service in comic book movies or superhero movies. When Lynch does it, I'm in love with it because I feel like it still gestures towards these same themes and these same ideas, which are so hard to reconcile and frankly, which are so freaky and off-putting.

That bit in Twin Peaks, The Return, where they're like, James has always been cool. Yeah. I was watching that on TV. I mean, I had tears in my eyes watching it. And it's not even like I grew up with Twin Peaks, but the idea that there were people who did who were going to be watching this 25 years later feeling what that line means for that character.

It's the happiest I've been watching anything in years. I'm not convinced that it's something as simple as fan service. And that's also something useful to talk about with Fire Walk With Me, which is that that was the first of three total planned films. And so Lynch had been thinking about the long arc of this story for a long time and felt that there was a lot more to tell. So when Twin Peaks The Return came around, it wasn't WandaVision.

You know what I mean? It wasn't meant to be something that was sort of capitalizing on the box office success of a recent commercial property. It was a story that kind of clearly swirls inside of him and that he had a lot more to say about. And I'm sure that it evolved over time and what The Return became became something quite different. But if you look at the pure text of the story and the idea of a kind of evil force occupying this family and destroying this family though in the way that many families are destroyed and trying to understand why terrible things happen in the world that's kind of like the originating germ i think of many of the twin peak much of the

twin peak story by the time we get to twin peaks the return we get, much of the Twin Peaks story. By the time we get to Twin Peaks The Return, we get this kind of like ancient recitation of the origin of these evil demonic forces. By the time you get to that critical episode eight, which has been hailed over and over again

and as more time goes by as like one of these signature things that's been made in the last 10 years, I think rightly so. It is so directly linked to the events

of Fire Walk With Me and the sense of like where did this come from and why or why do we torture ourselves and torture each other is very deep and very sincere and trying to find a kind of logical rationale in an in a phantasmagoric way for why there's pain. And he's, this is not just like an avant guide, avant garde guy following his subconscious and making some self-indulgent bullshit. Like it is maybe the deepest story you can tell,

um, if you accept it on those terms. And so one, it's, it's obviously remarkable that he got a chance to do that series for showtime. It's, it's like a miracle.

It's bizarre. It's like so crazy that that happened. It's so crazy that it's as long as it is and that it is as willful in its pursuit of its own story as it is. But it does feel like an attempt to close something, you know, to close a loop that had been lingering for 30 plus years for him.

And so it feels correlated. Like there's a reason to go back and revisit Fire Walk With Me and there's a reason to revisit The Return. For sure. And I mean, everything you're saying is true. And then when he does close the loop, you get about a half second of peace

and then it's like the worst scream in the history of American entertainment. It gives Janet Leigh and Nancy Allen a run for their money and you're like, oh, Jesus Christ, nothing's fixed. There is no peace. There's no peace. I think maybe one way to think about Lynch too, and I'm trying not to be too highfalutin about it, because in some ways he's a very unpretentious guy, which is part of the enigma of the work, right? You have cognitive film theorists and Freudian film theorists fighting over his movies like contested territory. And he's just like,

I just, I'm trying to catch fish in my brain, you know? Yeah. But, but I do think that, and Lost Highway comes to mind for me with this too. And we talked about the illicitness of it.

I think for Lynch, somehow the space of the movies he makes is a deeply moral space without being remotely correct. You know, it's not remotely correct. There's that shot in Lost Highway of Patricia Arquette in her underwear with a gigantic gun pointed to her head, surrounded by kind of these seedy types.

And this is not in any way meant as a reactionary comment to say, first of all, I love that shot, or also, oh God, I'm not supposed to. I think in some ways, the kind of worldview that Lynch puts forward is very out of step with a more politically correct film culture, or it's seen as being hugely contributive to certain imbalances or certain really kind of unpleasantly popular things in that film culture. There's a lot of angry, unchanneled male sexuality, and the women tend to be either unknowable enigmas or deep victims. I mean, this is all true.

I never take those things to really be prescriptive. I've never thought that retweet equals endorsement in these cases, nor do I think he's a scold. And I'm just showing my own hand with the kind of filmmakers I like, De Palma, Verhoeven, Lynch, they do not pretend that they are not getting off on this stuff, which is not the same thing as putting it forward cynically and uncritically and salaciously because it's the lowest common denominator. And Lost Highway is a good movie to think about that in terms of because, my God, that's a mean-spirited, lascivious, grotesque movie. Sort of irredeemable. I like the way you frame that, which is to say that he's not exploiting you just named, is it any wonder that they're kind of obsessed with illicit sex because of the way that they were raised in the environments that they were raised in?

And I think like the sensitivity with which they tell their stories can be debated. And there are some people who will certainly look at the work of Paul Verhoeven or Brian De Palma or certainly David Lynch and say that this is not okay. I think that there's a version of... And younger generations may look on his films and say that this is passe or dangerous or whatever. I'm not really sure. I don't really care to litigate any of that. I do think that Lost Highway feels like a very purposeful confrontation with that idea. And you mentioned Marilyn Monroe earlier.

Marilyn Monroe is not just Laura Palmer. Marilyn Monroe is clearly Patricia Arquette, as much as she is the Black Dahlia and any number of other women who've come to LA for a chance at something resembling stardom and then find themselves ensnared in one man or another man's awful vision of sadism and manipulation. And the two films are really tied together. What happens in between Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway is really funny to me, though.

Like what his work is, because it's effectively five years past between the release of these two films. In that time, David Lynch, who is by now a very famous film director and the creator of Twin Peaks, directs six commercials, including a commercial for

Brea Pasta, Adidas, and Alka-Seltzer. The Alka-Seltzer commercial is quite good. You can imagine a David Lynch Alka-Seltzer commercial. He tries to get a number of movies off the ground. He tries to get this long gestating film, Ronnie Rocket, which he has been talking about for many years off the ground. He tries to get One Saliva Bubble off the ground, which is a script he wrote with Mark Frost, which is kind of sort of a dream logic comedy. And then Dream of the Bovine is a true comedy that he never made. And at a certain point, he writes in Room to Dream that Marlon

Brando came to his home and they spent a day together with he and his partner at the time. And he and Harry Dean Stanton and Brando were going to make this movie, which is sort of like a park bench movie about two guys who are actually cows talking

through the world as if they are cows. And that certainly sounds like a David Lynch movie that never got made. In 95, he's asked by the Lumiere project to make this short film that uses the same technological, I guess, restrictions that Lumiere had 100 years earlier when he was sort of developing the film camera and film technology. And then he embarks on Lost Highway. And he does it with Barry Gifford, who of course wrote Wild at Heart and who is a writer that Lynch is really inspired by. It is all of the things that you described. It is like a very scary and kind of ominous and dangerous and raw film. It is definitely beautiful in its own way. It is also tell me if you respond to this. It's kind of slick

in a way that I feel like a lot of David Lynch movies are not. There are moments that have that kind of awkwardness or that ridiculousness that we're talking about, but there's also a kind of noir artistry that you don't see in all of his work. It's the first California movie, right? Interesting his work. It's the first California movie, right?

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. He has the Hollywood trilogy with that and Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, which are all saying the same thing in slightly different ways, which is, I do not want to be here. No one should,

no one should, should want to be here. I think Mulholland Drive, that is much more crystalline in Mulholland Drive. It really is a satanic industry movie, whereas here, because the Robert Loggia gangster, he's only symbolically associated with the movies. He kicks the shit out of the guy in front of the Hollywood Hills sign,

but he doesn't actually work in Hollywood. And the filmmaking you see in the movie is like porno filmmaking. It's not studio filmmaking, but you can read your allegory pretty cleanly right and the fact that the main character is an artist who would much rather be one a mechanic you know a tortured jazz saxophonist who when he goes into his psychogenic fugue you know either reimagines or literally reconstitutes himself as althusser get you know, the most callow, who gets a shot lying in his suburban backyard, just like Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet. I mean, among other things,

it's the ultimate middle-aged guy movie. It's like, oh, to be young again, you know, except to be young again basically means you have the same problems you did when you were older. I mean, the whole movie is about being unable, you're unable to outrun who or what you are, which is why you have that Mobius strip structure. Diclarant is dead at the beginning and at the end. What I've always thought about Lost Highway, there's a bit of the slickness, but I've always just also found it to be a film. And part of it is the video stuff and the way that Robert Blake is used and the way it riffs on OJ Simpson, too, in a lot of ways, because he said that that was a big inspiration, the OJ case, if not OJ and the race aspect of it, certainly celebrity and murder, right? I've always found that Lost Highway seems to somehow be scrutinizing me while I'm watching it.

It's like the line of it. Hey, kid, you like porno? The whole movie is kind of like, do you like this? You having a good time with this guy brutally butchering his wife and going to jail for it? It's almost singularly unpleasant. Whereas I think Mulholland Drive is a much sadder movie in the end, or just as sad, but it has lots of surface compensations. Because it's sexy, and it's funny, and it has lots of surface compensations because it's sexy and it's funny and it has lots of sweetly goofy, quirky touches. Those are not in Lost Highway. I mean, you could make the case that Mulholland Drive is a lost love story and that Lost Highway is not really about a person

in love with anything other than his own dying masculinity or his own perception of himself and how that's not fulfilled. There's a great line in the film that Bill Pullman's character utters when he's being interrogated by the detectives when they start receiving these videotapes at their home, which is, I like to remember things my own way, how I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened. And in a way, a kind of mission statement, I would say, for the way that David Lynch translates the ideas in his mind onto the screen and maybe the way that he thinks about the world. I mean, it's often cited, but it's such a perfect summation. And there's the two other lines that are often cited. I mean, the movie is,

it's sort of not considered to be his top, top tier, although I know some critics who think it is, but it really is very quotable. In addition to that, and you like porno, there's the two lines, which I think are very, they're, they're, they're Lynch lines. They're key Lynch lines. There's the, um, uh, when Pullman is told by Robert Blake, the Robert Blake is in his house. Pullman just looks at him and is like, that's fucking crazy, man. And the man at the end is just the right hipster jive jazz saxophonist flourish. But it's also such a direct confrontation with what a lot of us go to Lynch for. You're like, when are you going to get the moment where

the guy tells you he's at your house when you're calling him? But also Arquette has this incredible line where right before the fantasy dissolves again, she says, you'll never have me, which I've always thought, or when I've read smart analyses of that film, I've always thought is about the appeal of the movie is more than anything else. It's ephemeral. You'll never have it. And that's because it doesn't exist.

It doesn't want to be had. It's not for you to some extent. I've always thought that her saying naked and bathed in that glow and in her blonde faux Monroe. No, not faux, but she's got black hair at that point in the film, but she's made to look quite ethereal and illuminated the way Lynch's women often are. The you'll never have me line I've always just thought is so crucial to aspects of his project because almost all of his movies deal with the idea of waking up. Almost all of them have that to some extent as a relief, right?

Maho and drive thought of relief exactly, but you do figure out what's real and what's not. Twin Peaks is full of that lost highway and inland empire full of that too. The end of lost highway is a realization that there's a lot of things that he's fantasizing about, I think, that are just not, they're not to be. And the fact that she makes that line makes it so sexualized and so cold and so dismissive. It stayed with me for years. Unlike in most of Twin Peaks' you know when the absurd is happening you're thinking about alternate dimensions or um a kind of dream state but there is a sequence in fire

walk with me that feels very directly correlated to lost highway and it's the scene in the pink room which is the sort of the club scene where the noise is so the sort of music is so loud that the sequence is subtitled now when you watch it and you know laura palmer's character and her friend donna and two men who are essentially johns and she's starting to work as you know she's working as a prostitute at this point and her pimp jacque is in the club with her and they're all kind of drinking and hanging out and talking and And they have this kind of obtuse conversation in which odd things like, I am the great

went, are uttered. But also, it's kind of very direct. It's very clear what is sort of happening, which is that Laura has unfortunately dragged Donna into this world and she sees her as an innocent. And it's kind of a self-reflection of what I did to myself and how I shouldn't let my friend slip into this hell with me. And the music that is playing in

that scene is the scariest, most beautiful, fake Dwayne Eddy 50s film score that you'll ever hear in your life. And it echoes in my mind and it's like, it's true terror. It's not someone being brutally murdered. It's just terrifying what is happening in that space. It's meant to look like we're in hell. And Lost Highway is sort of two hours of hell. The whole movie, it feels like you have been dragged into the sewer

of someone's mind, and he won't let you out. And I like what you said about it kind of confronting the audience to say, do you like this? Because to me, it's not just, do you like this movie or the damaged minds that made it but do you like all noir movies do you like all stories about dead dames and awful men and the evil that they do which is a pretty bold kind of challenge to an audience it is but what i imagine i mean i i'm i'm agreeing with everything you're

saying i just think that when he poses the question i will point out he's not wagging his finger he's kind of asking because it's like an interesting question but i think that you know there's some filmmakers who are very successful as scolds where they ask questions like that and then end with pointing that finger at you and being like you know this is on you i mean this is one of the things i wrote about it for the ringer that I found almost transcendently obnoxious about blonde was the idea that, you know, this needs to be rubbed in our face as if this is our problem. I think David Lynch, it's pretty clear it's his problem.

And I think it's a problem that he suspects lots of other people have. He's sharing it his way. I think he finds it interesting. If it wasn't interesting, he wouldn's sharing it his way. I think he finds it interesting. If it wasn't interesting, he wouldn't put it on screen. But the next time I think he tries to score a point off of the audience or tries to score a point off of contemporary morality will be the first time he's ever done that. It's not the kind of filmmaker that he is. And while I'm not sure I totally, because I don't believe in absolutist anything, I'm not sure he's absolutely earnest or as earnest as he says he is.

I think we would recognize him if he was acting in bad faith because he would be like all the people who act in bad faith while copying David Lynch. And they're not worth talking about. Or they're worth talking about for a film or two or for a couple movies. And then ultimately no one cares. I'm not going to name names, but I'm just going to say the work doesn't hold up. It holds up for as long as it's supposed to, which is the release cycle or award season cycle of a single film, and then it's gone. And with Lynch's movies, we're returning to what some people might even consider to be mid-tier works or works made in a fallow period in the 90s. Nothing's being promoted anymore. I guess what criterion is a reason to promote it,

but the work is there. That's what he means by it speaks for itself. Even if you talk in circles around it, it's still the work. I wonder about that level of intent that you're describing, though, because obviously the film is like a real true hollywood underbelly story and i think you're right to identify that it's about how los angeles is in many ways an awful place i like it but i also hate myself so you know imagine the contradiction there um yeah he did cast balthazar getty who is a scion of a great and very tragic los angeles family And he did cast Natalie Wood's daughter in this film. And he cast Patricia Arquette, who is a part of a kind of modern

Hollywood royalty, a family that is greatly successful. These are purposeful choices. And so is casting Richard Pryor, which David Foster Wallace had issues with in that essay. He said that for him, the way that Pryor is used in that movie makes you think Lynch is maybe not such a nice person, which I thought overstated it a bit. He's referring to the fact that prior at that point in his life was just not well, right.

And he kind of looks like he's sort of just a ruin. Not that prior is particularly Hollywood legendary exactly, but he is an example of kind of showbiz. I don't know, showbiz diminishment, you know, by, by, by, by, by, by that time in his life.

I've always thought that Pryor being in it is this weird nod to the James Harris movie, something like Loving. I don't know if you know that film. I haven't seen it. The main character actually is a crazy jazz saxophonist. It's like a strange, weird precursor to Lost Highway prior being in both films. But no, I mean, these purposes in Lost Highway are truthful. I just mean, I think the film's interest almost, it's partially tied to its intent. It partially transcends its intent. And all these movies, put them in a row or rank them or whatever,

they stand a test of time. And I'm not just not being fair. I'm not just saying, well, of course, a movie made last year doesn't stand the test of time. Time hasn't tested it yet. But let's be honest. There are a lot of things that get compared to Lynch because he's very easy to compare things to. And I think those comparisons end up being not flattering to the people who are

winning them. Yeah. Do you remember when VHS tapes were the most awful thing in the world to certain people? I think of the release the same year was Boogie Nights and the famed Jack Horner, Floyd Gondoli conversation about what the future of the business was. And if you read Lynch, you know that he was deeply against digital, special effects, even videotape to some extent. The idea that he saw these kind of evolutions, so to speak, in movie watching and movie making as an affront to the art form.

It's really funny to imagine him using some of that rage as an impetus to tell a story about a guy getting his head smashed through a glass table. There's such a... There's a humor in this very dark movie, too. But then he's mellowed to the point where he's

one of these advocates now for digital. He says he'll never go back, and he's amazing in that Keanu Reeves doc side-by-side where Keanu is so earnest and wonderful asking all these people why they're sticking by 35. And Lynch is extremely just relaxed about it. He says it makes it easier for him to work. I believe that is the film where Keanu is asking someone a question. He looks down at his notes. He goes, what do you think of digital? And then looks at his notes and says, video video i forget if that's the interview with be

nice to keanu reeves i could not be i love that guy he's he's the best i i i say i cite it with with with with with tremendous affection but no i mean for lynch to go from such a tactile artist who actually like made sculpture and projected six men getting sick you know it's projected animation onto sculpture for him to not just embrace digital, but like go so ugly with it in Inland Empire to the point that he actually made video sculptural. I mean, that's a whole other great subplot.

That to me is in many ways, the kind of spiritual threequel of the two films that we're talking about today, which has not yet, I guess it was restored this year and it was released on screens. And I think we'll probably, if I had to guess, we'll see a Criterion Collection edition of that film as well. It's the last of his films to not be kind of fully restored and reissued.

And we could very well be having a conversation like this about Inland Empire a year from now. That film is probably, I want to say the least seen out of his movies. Does that seem right to you? Yeah, I think so. Um, but, and it is, as you said earlier, very unpleasant and very difficult to watch, but also I think rewarding in its way when you're looking at the total body work, um, are either of these movies among your favorites? Well, I drafted a restraining order to keep us from ranking the movies but i'm happy to tear it up no i mean i think that was not signed by a judge that order i'm sorry no no no it's you know it's all good um i think that fire walk with me is absolutely top tier for me and if lost highway isn't it's because I guess if I'm going to call something top tier, I have to make it a pretty rarefied tier.

I mean, I'd be kind of interested by process of elimination, maybe not working down from the bottom to the top, but almost from the top down to the bottom, because I don't want to put anything at the end. I just wonder what would end up there once I've said what I think is the very top shelf. I mean, Dune will end up at the bottom invariably, right? Probably, but I don't know if your top shelf would have one of the movies that I put in my top three. I'm curious. He almost more so than any other filmmaker for whom we do an exercise like this. I think the tides shift quickly. There are times when certain films feel like they are kind of fundamental or critically key. And it seems stupid to put like a racer headed number eight on a list of someone's body of work. But also in terms of what I want to revisit or what I glean more from, I might glean more from Wild at Heart at this stage

of my life. So this is a dumb exercise, but it also allows us the opportunity for 10 minutes to just talk about a couple of more movies that we might've not mentioned enough throughout this conversation. I'll say I'll, I'll save the restraining order for a new, for a different podcast. Um, who,

who is a filmmaker for whom you would never ever rank their films? Is there a person that, that is like a gross injustice to your intellectual fortitude i think that the hardest filmmakers maybe to rank are those filmmakers where the body of work is so granular like how could you rank hong sang-soo movies and to be fair you know there might be regular listeners who aren't aware that you know this is a south korean filmmaker who has turned self-repetition into a sort of art form, right? I mean, it also feels kind of hard to rank people who made 40 movies. People do that

sometimes and you're like, yeah, no, definitely. How could you have that at number 27? Yeah, that's true. How could you have that as the 27th Soderbergh movie? I would say that in Lynch's case, I just think it's hard because they all mean a lot. So, I mean, how do you quantify something that means the world to you versus something that means just slightly less? But I'm also, what I like about this, and we did this years ago with my Cohen book, with the Coens, is it is fun sometimes, not because it's not binding or definitive to

rank things, but it does give you a chance to sort of advocate for things that maybe the listenership hasn't watched in a while. And then you feel like you're giving them the gift maybe of seeking out that movie if they are so moved. That to me is the purpose of the exercise. I think you summed it up. It is, sure, it's to entice people to listen to something that is easy to understand and is formulated for their simplified brain.

But it's also just nice to be able to say the names of films and share your enthusiasm for them in a way that is organized. Let's say the names of some films. I've changed my mind. It's a great idea. Thank you, Adam. Number 10 is Dune. I'm sorry. I won't hear otherwise. That's the one. I, of course, revisited Dune

in anticipation of the most recent Denis Villeneuve adaptation of the Herbert novel. You get what he was going for. There's some cool stuff in that movie. Confirmation that David Lynch is not suited to this kind of storytelling. And also it seemed like quite a hell of a production to wrangle. And I'm grateful that it happened because it obviously set him on a trajectory that

made him who he is today as a filmmaker. It proves that the 1980s can happen to anybody, right? The 80s can happen to anybody. It's too bad. Okay, number nine. Now what do we do? Well, this is where I don't know what we're going to do in terms of a consensus list, but here's where I'm going to be. Some people think that this is a ridiculous choice, but for me, my least favorite is Wild at Heart. And that's a film that I'm not sure I'm right. I mean, I'm probably not, but I just believe that if you love a filmmaker and if you love what they do, part of that is just being honest with yourself when it doesn't work. And that is one of the only times I have

ever myself felt like Lynch is straining. I could read a very persuasive essay and have read persuasive essays that say the opposite and say, this is as unfiltered and unstrained as he gets, and that this is as good as Lynch ever was and it deserved its palm door. I grant that that is a fair point of view, but it's definitely my least favorite, and by some distance. That's interesting. I certainly am comfortable putting it at nine. There is a forthcoming documentary this fall called Lynch Slash Oz by Alexander O. Philippe, who has made a handful of documentaries about filmmakers and specific films. He made 7852 about the psycho shower sequence. He made Leap of Faith about the making of The Exorcist recently. I saw this movie

a few months back. It's interesting. It's an interesting kind of montage collage film that has a very obvious but persuasive thesis, which is that The Wizard of Oz is the most critical piece of art that informs David Lynch's work. And we haven't said The Wizard of Oz is the most critical piece of art that informs David Lynch's work. And we haven't said the Wizard of Oz since we've been talking about him for about an hour and 20 minutes here. That is the most true in Wild at Heart. Wild at Heart is so heavily indebted to the framework of the Wizard of Oz and the characterization and the idea of of getting swept away. And I like it. It's convulsive. It's entertaining.

It is definitely not. It is arguably the least realistic of his movies in a world in which none of his films are realistic. It's arguably less realistic than Eraserhead. I like it still. But again, we're splitting hairs. I would watch it tonight very happily yeah yeah but for me for me lower i mean i don't know how we're gonna do with the joint top 10 but let's just see how we see how we go life is a negotiation i've said this many times and this here is a

negotiation uh okay my my gut is that inland empire is number eight here. I mean, I have it higher, but it is maybe a ratio of like, you know, obsession to pleasure, not weighted hugely in the direction of pleasure. I wrote about it for Film Comment earlier this year, and I was very excited to rewatch the restoration of it, which was even uglier. And Lynch was crowing at all these interviews,

like, ah, it looks exactly as ugly as it's supposed to. Isn't it beautiful? And it is. So I'm not going to argue. I'm just going to say, I think I like it a bit more than you, but it's not on my top shelf. So I'm not going to freak out. Here's the beauty of putting it at number eight. It gives me an opportunity to revisit it when it is reissued at home. And because I missed it in theaters earlier this year, and then we can talk about it more then. Okay. Number seven.

I think that most people at this stage of Lynchian fandom would put the straight story at number seven. Now I know this is a very, very important film to you and you have written about it. I would place it higher. I would point out that a certain website i believe ranked it below pokemon the movie in the films of 1999 package uh but i i i was very nice it was very nice i got to write it was that kaido cinema who did that yeah it was kaido cinema i had a pokemon movie i now live among pokemon cards with my older daughter so

she you may be the bigger may be right it Ringer may be right. It might be better. I think that this movie is sublime. But we have to put these things in a certain order. And I would say that maybe because of its unusualness and because in some ways of its almost indistinguishableness from a kind of Hallmark movie, which it's not. I'm not saying that nobody quote that. I think it's a fake indistinguishableness from a Hallmark movie or a Disney family movie, but maybe I can see why it gets shunted to lower.

It's on my top shelf, but we can put it low here if we want. What would you put at number seven? I would, well, this is a funny thing after talking about it this whole time. For me, it's either Lost Highway or racerhead and lost highways really great. And eraser is one of the most important movies, probably more important than any Lynch's other movies. I rewatched eraser head recently and did not have the best time. I had a similar experience.

That's so funny. You say that. Yeah. But how can you have the best time with something that you have internalized so deeply right and it's so many other filmmakers have internalized so deeply too that's the other thing about it is its legacy looms so heavily on a rewatch where you rewatch it and you're like okay i know what this is and it doesn't have it didn't have the same disruptive quality that i think that two movies spend so much time on. If we could put Eraserhead at 7 and Straight Story at 6 or 5

it'd be good on Twitter. I don't know what you're referring to. Are there people on Twitter who listen to this show? I don't know. Why don't we say Eraserhead at 7? Why don't we say... I'll give you Lost Highway at 6 and I'll give you Straight Story at 5.

How about that? That, that's great. Okay. And then, and then, and then the great work really begins. Yeah. Um, I, I, I suppose Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me does, does feel right at four. What do you, what do you, what do you make of that? Put it, put it at four. I put, I would say that Blue Velvet certainly has it in the, in the universal nerve touching category.

Yes. It's working in a similar format, but doing something maybe even more elevated and, and less contingent, you know, this being a prequel film and it kind of being necessarily kind of oriented around this big strip of storytelling. We're not ranking the TV shows or anything when we have this conversation.

And he also, he made other TV shows, right right didn't he make a show called hotel room that was a kind of anthology show and hotel room and on the air and on the air was another show that was like a sitcom style show right yeah these shows have not been reclaimed for some reason not not not not in the same way no my number one will not be the number one and i'm being deliberately inflating when i say it because i think it's so weirdly it's not a disrespected movie but because of certain convention and classiness people tend to downplay it a bit i mean i think the elephant man's just the greatest you But in some ways, maybe it belongs lower because he is melding himself to material in a way that's different. The material exists as the play, and it is a

project that he was hired for as opposed to one that he purely originated. I just think the performance of John Hurt in it and seeing Lynch orchestrate some more conventional elements of filmmaking while still making something that is so powerful and humane. But I know it won't make our number one, so I'm okay with it at three. I think that's correct. I think I've had a similar thought to the one you just shared, which is that wouldn't it be fun for David Lynch to get a high-toned assignment in 2022? You know, to get an adaptation of some kind or to borrow into someone's life

and try to capture it on screen and tell it. That would be cool. It would be cool because he was good at it. He had a skill for making the conventional seem unconventional.

And I will say that, you know, for the people who love, you know, like there's all these sites that retweet, you know, just interview snippets. This is like what these sites do. There is not a single David Lynch, Mel Brooks anecdote that is not priceless and make you want to cry. The greatest odd couple, same wavelength friendship. There's that story about Lynch not having a coat when he got to

London and Mel Brooks buying him a coat because he was cold and he wore the coat every single day on set and then kept it. And then years later, when Brooks got some lifetime achievement award, Lynch showed up wearing the coat, which he had kept in like perfect condition. Like he cared for it. That idea of caring for a coat is such a David Lynch thing. All of those anecdotes, though, do so much more for me for Mel Brooks than they do for David Lynch. The idea that Mel Brooks sat in a screening room and watched Eraserhead and said, who is that?

I want that guy is just tremendously powerful. And it elevates a person who, obviously, we all love Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks is a global treasure but when you get that dash of sophistication that sense of artistry on top of his obvious sense of humor and kind of coming from that working class comedy television background like it makes him feel like more of an artist as well so it's it's wonderful and that's a great film and the fact that he wouldn't put his name on it as a producer because he didn't want people to think it was somehow Mel Brooks making a sick parody of The Elephant Man. Lynch has had other great patrons. I mean, Dino De Laurentiis is one too. And De Laurentiis kept his word, which is the only reason Blue Velvet got made. That's right.

Right? As Dino was like, you make Dune and me... I'm sorry, I was doing a bad Dino De Laurentiis impression. You make Dune and then you can make something small for yourself. And then that becomes Blue Velvet, which I would have at two. Wait, just quickly. I do want to cite that I was told that Chris Pratt's Mario voice was inspired directly by Dino De Laurentiis. So I just want to get that on the record. You would have Blue Velvet at two and Mulholland Drive at one. Is that your feeling?

At this point, yes. I didn't rewatch Mulholland Drive to prepare for this i have seen it many many times it is very high on my re-watch lifetime list it is also a film that is very i don't know about important that's a silly word but it is um it was a date night movie with my my now wife when we were dating and uh we both loved it and it was a real like let's have a three-hour dinner conversation about the film afterwards. That's the other thing. It's so wonderful about his movies. And one of the reasons why I just wish

we got new movies from him is he is the absolute best. We just saw this. Let's go talk about it for a couple of hours, filmmaker. You know, because even if you're completely wrong or you hated it, it's rich. There's a lot to explore and to unpack. And Mulholland Drive, that was a feast, man. Those

were good times when that film came out. It was so exciting to kind of take apart all of its little concepts and rebuild them in your mind. I love that film so much. I think that what would put it over the top for me, it's sort of the same thing that gets Firewalk with me into the conversation is, and it's nothing against the cast and blue velvet because the ensemble is incredible but the performance in mahal and drive the the naomi watts turn the naomi watts performance is one of the greatest credits to his direction that you can imagine and that's not meaning it's not her triumph it's her triumph but he cast her in the way that she's used. And the notes that she hits in that character for me are first among equals in his movies. I always like to ask filmmakers

when I speak to them about how they direct actors and how comfortable they are explaining their process. And Balthazar Getty actually, of all people, told a wonderful story about the odd and comforting way that Lynch spoke to him when he was struggling to nail a scene in Lost Highway. And I don't know that even regurgitating specifically what Balthazar Getty said would do justice to the level of ease that Lynch provided to him. But it's obvious that he is one of the most careful and thoughtful directors of actors. And sometimes it's because he puts them in extraordinary,

extraordinarily violent and upsetting circumstances. And sometimes it's just because he cares about them and he cares about the work that they do. And he seems really interested. It's odd to call him a actor's director, but he is in a lot of ways.

But, you know, he is. And, you know, I find that there are a lot of interviews because at the time, it was what a lot of ways. But, but he, no, he, he is. And, you know, I, I, I found that there are a lot of interviews because at the, at the time it was what a lot of the, the electronic media around the movie was around the idea that Watts was this ingenue, but not young, right? I mean, she's 29, 30. I mean, young, but you know what I mean? She's not, I think she might've even been a little older than that.

A little, a little older. And the way she talks, she talks about doing an audition where, you know, it's not like the fact that Lynch should win a gold medal for this says more about the industry than about him. But just the fact that he was interested in her and kind of asked her about her day and how she was doing and how she was feeling. She said it wasn't what she was expecting auditioning for David Lynch. And she said that it was the strangest feeling that he was like kind of evaluating her as a person. There was like the headshot and there was this evaluation of her as a person. There was the headshot, and there was this evaluation of her as a person, and they kind of talked a couple times,

and she sort of just got it. And she says that the trust has been implicit for her with him ever since. And you look at the way he directed her on Twin Peaks The Return, where Janie is not a huge part. But Watts is incredible. She hasn't had a movie part that good in 15 years. And that little inner circle of Lynch people, the Laura Derns, the Naomi Watts, McLaughlin is obviously one of them. They seem over the moon to be still working with him. It's very sweet. Yeah. He's a hard person to talk about but i i feel like we we honored his work i hope i hope people you know i'm sure there are some people who know every inside and out about his entire career that listen to this and will want to correct some misunderstandings but i'm what i'm really hopeful for is just the people who don't know these movies or have not not

revisited them go back and spend more time and try to understand them what are his odds on winning best supporting actor for the fableman's is he gonna is he's gonna get it i mean i still haven't seen the film we we neglected to mention that you did mention that on an episode uh last month and that's the other thing is i like the idea of him circling our culture if not being the center of it i like him as someone that people are kind of forced to think about on a regular basis. And kudos to Steven Spielberg. I mean, just what a clever idea. He's clever, that Steven, just putting David Lynch in his movie. It's a real coup. And I think we talked about this on the TIFF show, but it's worth repeating.

There is some anecdote where Spielberg told Lynch, he says, I'm pretty sure that about as many people have seen Eraserhead as E.T. They're just different people. The best. You know, which is, which is, I don't want to think I have that line wrong. I should have pulled it up before quoting it, but it's something to that effect. And that somewhere between Spielberg and Lynch, you can map a big chunk of the last 40 years of American film culture. God knows not all of it, but a big chunk with the last 40 years of American film culture. God knows not all of it,

but a big chunk with, with those two guys and their little alien, their little alien movies. Adam, thank you so much. Brilliant. Pleasure as always. Thanks to our producer,

Bobby Wagner for his work on today's episode. Later this week, we're doing another movie draft. It's me. It's Chris Ryan. Amanda Dobbins will be there. She's not drafting a special guest. We'll be contributing to the first ever horror movie draft. We's me. It's Chris Ryan. Amanda Dobbins will be there. She's not drafting. A special guest will be contributing to the first ever

horror movie draft. We will see you then. you