We will be doing a multi-part tribute to David Lynch, who died January 15 at 78. Our biggest debt to him, though, will always be non-cinematic: his alt-weekly comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World, from the 1980s.
BLUE VELVET (1986) (B+) - David Lynch found his storytelling sweet spot -- call it psycho-comic nostalgic noir -- with a major breakthrough that would provide the template for his next two decades in film and television. From the opening scene -- flowers, a white picket fence, friendly firemen passing by on the fire truck -- Lynch announces that he is either celebrating or skewering a sclerotic vision of bygone American values. His camera immediately digs down beneath the surface of a groomed suburban lawn and then spends the next two hours wallowing in the underbelly of a culture gone to seed.
Kyle MacLachlan emerges from Lynch's "Dune" bomb of 1984 and leads the cast as a wide-eyed but overly curious squeaky-clean college boy Jeffrey, who plays junior detective and noses around the adult world of quirky intrigue, sparked by the discovery of a human ear. He hides in the closet of morose lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and learns that her husband and son are being held captive by creepy Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), whose oedipal kinks beset Dorothy. Frank heads up a crime syndicate best described as art-school Batman villainy, replete with giggling henchmen.
Lynch is tipping his hand at a world that would blossom into his TV series "Twin Peaks." There is the northwest burg of Lumberton (where the AM radio station marks the bottom half of the hour with the sound of a falling tree); we get gruesome crimes and sexual perversion in small-town America; and there is always Dean Stockwell lip-syncing Roy Orbison's "In dreams" into a vintage industrial drop light.
Lynch has a ball inserting Jeffrey into a love triangle between Rossellini's masochistic submissive Dorothy and a teenage Laura Dern's straight-arrow girl-next-door, Sandy, for whom Jeffrey is the buttoned-up bad-boy alternative to her lunkheaded jock boyfriend. This all works not only as avant-garde absurdism but also as a tightly wound crime mystery. MacLachlan plays it straight down the middle while Hopper, huffing from an oxygen mask whenever he gets his jollies, is just bat-shit bonkers. This is a perfect bookend with the "Twin Peaks" run, before Lynch would get more bold and experimental at the turn of the millennium.
ERASERHEAD (1977) (B-minus) - You had to be there. And back then, most people didn't want to go anywhere near there. A years-in-the-making film school project improbably saw the light of day, although it made its bones as one of the original '70s midnight movies, first in Los Angeles and then across the country when it became a cult favorite
Revisit it now, and it's tough to see this as much more than an interesting novelty, a signpost along the road to David Lynch's origin story. It was shot on a shoestring budget, strung out over years, edited on the fly -- more of a provocation than a cohesive narrative. It is trapped in the uncanny valley between experimental cinema and B-movies.
At least it is a first crack in the window into Lynch's brain. He apparently was obsessed with urban decay and serious fears of parenthood (or of abortion?). This is ostensibly the story of a couple torn apart by the birth of a deformed child -- one that is not much evolved from its sperm-shaped origins and resembles the creature from "Alien." Jack Nance plays the father, Henry, who lamely tries to care for it (a sight gag involving a vaporizer made me laugh out loud) but who is tortured not only by the being's presence but also by the fever dreams he pivots to, mostly involving a vaudevillian woman singing to him from the radiator in his apartment.
Lynch's touches can be inspired. The apartment is decorated with plants, but they are scrawny sticks that jut from a pile of dirt, sans flowerpot. When the wife goes to retrieve her suitcase from under the bed, she tugs and tugs, and Lynch holds the joke so long that the Three Stooges would nod in admiration. Henry is dressed in the classic nerd outfit of the day, with a pile of hair that might make you think it inspired the title -- until the story spins off into German fairy-tale gloom to provide the true reason for the title. Nance, always with a worried brow, comes across as Babe Ruth with a bellyache.
This is all assembled with bargain-basement special effects and a churning score of ominous industrial sounds. You might be tempted to fast-forward through some of these painfully long takes. It's like a film-school study assignment you wish you could skip but know you shouldn't
***
If you can access the two-disc Criterion release of "Eraserhead," the extras are worth it -- there are multiple previous short films by Lynch and several short documentaries (across decades) discussing the making of the "Eraserhead," a fascinating dive into the L.A. film scene during the American New Wave era.
BONUS TRACKS
"Blue Velvet's" gritty soundtrack offers up Bobby Vinton's original title track, a few hip entries from Chris Isaak, and the introduction of Angelo Badalamenti to the Lynch oeuvre. We'll pluck out the easy boogie of Bill Doggett with "Honky Tonk":
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