isabella rossellini

Lynch in Limbo, Culture in Decline

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Full disclosure: I have extremely unhip opinions about David Lynch.  The accepted wisdom among movie nerds is that late-style Lynch is the director at his best, with the titles Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return earning frequent accolades as the absolute artistic pinnacle of cinema.  I find them borderline unwatchable.  My favorite Lynch titles are much better behaved: Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Original Flavor Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart … essentially, Lynch for normies.  It brings me no pleasure to take the conservative stance on this, wherein David Lynch was at his creative best when his vision was tempered by studio notes instead of being allowed to run wild.  In my tragically square view of his catalog, the last great movie he made was while working for Walt Disney Pictures, which is never the side someone wants to take in an argument.  So, I’ve done a lot of recent soul-searching on why, for example, Lost Highway works for me but Mulholland Drive does not, when they’re essentially the same inexplicable persona-crisis story told in two different ways.  Or why I enjoy the chaotic absurdism of Twin Peaks‘s second season that most fans hate, while I could not force myself to finish the third-season arc of the same television show that fans frequently cite as “The Greatest Film of All Time” on my Twitter feed.  It was during a recent screening of Blue Velvet at Canal Place (as part of their new Prytania Cinema Club series) when I finally came up with a theory.  Forgive me as I work it out on this blog as a form of public therapy.

It’s likely that Blue Velvet remains Lynch’s finest hour in my mind simply because it’s the very first film of his that I watched.  A feverish erotic thriller set down the street from where the Cleavers live, the film has a very accessible premise — perfect for teenagers desperate to see something strange & risqué.  Looking back as an adult who’s since seen all of Lynch’s features before & after, Blue Velvet paradoxically becomes both eerier and more familiar.  As literal as the film is about its peek into the grimy underworld just beneath the pristine surface of American suburbia (starting with the bugs & larvae wriggling below subdivision flowerbeds), it also indulges in capital-L Lynchian dream-logic imagery that cannot be fully explained without robbing its magic.  What do the closeups of a roaring wind blowing out a candle symbolize to the audience beyond association with the villainous Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has incorporated candlelight into his nightly sexual abuse routine?  To me, they become an abstract symbol of that violence, often equating the white-knight heroics of our doofus protagonist Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan) to Booth’s violence by appearing during his own interactions with the victim that unites them (Isabella Rossellini).  Putting that association into words makes the image sound triter than it is in practice, though, especially since the link between hero & villain is vocalized multiple times in the dialogue (when Laura Dern’s virginal love interest says, “I can’t figure out whether you’re a detective or a pervert,” and, more directly, when Hopper says, “You’re like me”).  Maybe a more recent Lynch film would “explain” their connection entirely through the candle imagery without that accompanying dialogue, but the effect would more or less be the same.

The candle is only one isolated image among many that Lynch overloads with thematic significance; the longer you spend immersed in his world the more significance those totems take on.  It becomes significant that Rossellini hides her kitchen knife behind a radiator, since it recalls her fellow torch-singer who lives in a radiator in Eraserhead.  The hypnotic yellow lines passing under Frank Booth’s car recall Lost Highway.  Booth’s widespread smearing of red lipstick across his face before planting a Judas kiss on Jefferey’s mouth recalls the lipstick facemask of Wild at Heart.  When the camera pushes into the canals of a severed ear that Jeffery discovers in an open field, finding an entire inner world there, a modern audience recalls the same push-in to the interior of the Mulholland Drive puzzle box.  In retrospect, even just the casting of McLachlan, Dern, and Jack Nance feel like just as much of directorial calling cards as the heavy curtains Lynch always uses to mark his liminal spaces (in this case, Rossellini’s bedroom).  David Lynch has essentially been making the same movie his entire career.  He just repositions its building blocks into new, puzzling configurations as if he’s trying to work out a question he’s not fully sure how to ask.  In Blue Velvet, that internal interrogation seems to be fixated on self-disgust over the peculiarities of heterosexual male lust, especially in the Madonna/whore dynamic represented by Dern & Rossellini.  In the bigger picture scope of his career, he seems largely concerned with the manifestation of violence & Evil in an indifferent world.  Jeffrey’s melodramatic delivery of the question “Why are there people like Frank?” earned some ironic laughter in my theater, but I believe Lynch is posing it sincerely.  It’s a question he’s been asking over & over again for decades, often in fear that there’s even a fraction of Frank inside himself.

My theory on the divide between Lynch’s pre- and post-Mulholland Drive career, then, has less to do with how the director has changed than it does with how the world changed around him.  Not all of the heightened melodrama of Blue Velvet can be taken seriously.  If nothing else, Laura Dern’s recounting of a dream in which a flock of robins represent pure, universal love fully crosses the line from Sirkian melodrama to TV movie theatrics, inviting ironic chuckles from the audience.  I don’t know that Lynch himself is laughing, though.  He appears to find the mundanity of mainstream media to be oddly sinister, drawing out uncanny interactions from lesser artforms with just enough awkward pausing & ominous whooshing to make them genuinely nightmarish.  There’s a winking reference to the soap opera quality of Twin Peaks in the parodic inclusion of a fictional program called Invitation to Love, often playing on characters’ TV sets throughout the show.  Likewise, Blue Velvet draws comparison between the erotic thriller and the Old Hollywood noir by showing Jefferey’s mother watching old noirs on her living room TV whenever the audience passes through.  Mulholland Drive was also designed as an eerie abstraction of televised-drama aesthetics, as the majority of the film is a pilot for an ABC series that was famously rejected for being too uncommercial.  It’s the same approach to post-modern warping of mainstream media in all cases, but over time the cultural circumstances of that media changed.  When Lynch was finding the eerie world just below the surface of a Sirk film or a Days of Our Lives style soap, there’s a substantial, defined aesthetic to the source material that he’s working with.  Decades later, when he’s making the nightmare version of late-90s television in Mulholland Drive, the affect is flatter, uglier, less appealing.  The switch from celluloid to digital video in Inland Empire is emblematic of a steep decline in pop culture aesthetics across the board.  In other words, David Lynch did not get worse as time went on; the culture did.

Of course, this is all subjective, to the point where it might not even be coherent.  Given that there is currently a push to bring back the pop culture aesthetics of the late-90s and early-00s in the resurgence of low-rise Paris Hilton fashion, nu-metal rap rock, and “indie sleaze” college radio jams, it’s clear that there is some fondness for that era of cultural refuse that I cannot share in, possibly out of leftover embarrassment from being around when it was fresh.  The awkward acting & staging of Mulholland Drive reminds me of wasted hours of watching garbage-water melodrama on broadcast TV as a kid, desperately trying to squeeze entertainment value out of titles as insipid as Touched by an Angel and Walker, Texas Ranger.  The vintage television quality of that aesthetic might be a lot more romantic for a younger audience who wasn’t there to cringe through it in real time, the same way that I find the sinister reflection of 80s TV media in films like Blue Velvet to be mesmerizing.  If anything, I should be applauding David Lynch for keeping up with the times as his work evolved alongside the mainstream culture it subverts.  I might not personally be enthusiastic for his latest projects, but I’m also not cheering on his recent struggles to land funding, if not only because I know the pain of watching your favorite filmmaker get soft-censored by cowardly investors (having been left hanging by unrealized John Waters projects like Liarmouth & Fruitcake).  I’ve just come to realize that my personal split with Lynch is not a reaction to his thoughtfulness & seriousness as an artist; that has not changed.  It’s a reaction to The Great Enshittification of everything, positioning him as a found-materials artist who’s been given less & less substantial materials to work with as the quality in craft across all media has gotten generally worse (at least to my aging, Millennial eyes).

-Brandon Ledet

Problemista (2024)

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I’ve been a fan of Julio Torres’s for years, ever since a friend introduced me to the joys of Patti Harrison and I got into that whole crew. Los Espookys was a lot of fun, and I was excited to hear about his directorial debut when it originally premiered at SXSW last year, in 2023. It took some time for it to make it to my local theater, but I was excited to see that not only did it hit the mainstream multiplex nearest me, but that there was a surprisingly dense group of people in attendance at my Tuesday night screening, and it got a response from everyone there. 

Alejandro (Torres) is the son of a Salvadoran artist, and many of her designs for public art features came from his imagination, made manifest by her. As an adult, he’s living in a nightmare NY apartment situation and attempting to break into his dream job, as a toy designer for Hasbro. Unfortunately, despite his application to their “talent incubator program,” which included such designs as Cabbage Patch Dolls that have smartphones and the attendant anxiety that comes with such devices, slinkies that simply refuse to go down stairs, and a Barbie with her fingers crossed behind her back (instant drama in the dream house), he has not been selected. Instead, he makes a meager living at a cryogenic facility, where he is assigned to a particular corpse, Bobby (RZA), a painter who was focused on one particular subject: eggs. Bobby’s been frozen for over twenty years, and his art critic wife Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) is fed up with the ever-increasing cost of his “care.” When Alejandro is fired for a workplace accident—one with zero consequences—at roughly the same time that Bobby is to be moved to a smaller, less expensive part of the facility that does not accommodate his paintings, he latches onto the idea of helping her put together a show of Bobby’s work, as she needs the help and he needs an employee sponsorship in order to remain in the U.S. She agrees, but Ale quickly realizes that he’s bitten off more than he bargained for. Elizabeth is, it turns out, an erratic, defensive, bitter, verbally abusive narcissist, perhaps the exact evil monster his mother foresaw him encountering in a dream. 

Swinton’s performance here is utterly phenomenal, and Torres’s directorial and narrative choices that make her alternatively demonic, sympathetic, and delusional are pitch perfect. There are countless tiny details about Elizabeth that build a portrait of a very particular kind of person, one whom all of us have encountered at some point. When she’s sold on something, she’s devoted to it to the point of nearly psychotic loyalty, as evidenced by her obsession with using FileMaker Pro, a three decade old computer program, in order to maintain continuity across all of her databases. She’s hit a point of technological arrested development, and her frustration is made the problem of everyone else around her: Apple phone service agents for whom explaining how to find her photos on her phone is a daily occurrence, Ale for having to learn software that might be older than he is, and everyone who crosses her path and is blinded by her smartphone’s flashlight, which is always at full blast. She’s a classic evader, as she deflects any and all attempts to rationalize with her by changing the subject to one of her other countless complaints, and she has no appreciation for how her apathy toward signing his sponsorship documentation keeps him in a perpetual state not just of anxiety but of danger as well. 

Alejandro is her perfect foil in addition to being her assistant and, in some ways, both her student and her teacher. The details are best left discovered through a viewing rather than recited here, but the plan to be saved from deportation via Elizabeth’s sponsorship fails … but not before she empowers him to achieve not just his short-term goal of staying in the country, but his larger goals of sharing his ideas with the world through his toy creation. When he was a boy, Alejandro’s mother never limited his dreams in the slightest, and instead of that making him a selfish, demanding adult, it’s made him a soft-spoken sweetheart, and through learning to stand up to Elizabeth and break through the barrier she’s built between her reality and the world at large, he grows. And, having witnessed (and received) countless rants and diatribes from Elizabeth, he learns that this is rarely the best way to resolve a situation; there are instances in which it’s the only way to resolve it, though, and he uses this new wisdom to not only make sure that he receives credit for his ideas, but to secure a future for himself. The film has already provided an alternative happy ending by creating a path for him to stay in the U.S., and in a more realistic movie, we would likely have seen Ale accepting the job as a translator from his immigration lawyer and we would end the film with his next year’s submission to the Hasbro incubator program. Instead, Alejandro goes for broke and so does Problemista, to my delight. 

If you haven’t seen the movie or any of its advertising, then this probably sounds like a fairly straightforward plot description, since I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about the film’s touches of magical realism, other than a brief mention of Ale’s mother’s dreams about his future. In the dream, she sees her son approaching a darkened cave, the depths of which are completely occluded other than two glowing red eyes. Elizabeth becomes that monster, dragon-like, but when Alejandro breaks through her self-deception forcefield and gets her to take an opportunity to show Bobby’s paintings despite it being “beneath” her, he appears in that imagined cave wearing a child’s toylike idea of a chivalric knight’s armor, besting her. Alejandro imagines the thirty day grace period he has to find sponsorship for his employment visa as an upturned hourglass, set amongst hundreds of other such devices, and he sees a woman fade from existence in front of him at the lawyer’s office when her time runs out. And, when he is forced into a series of degrading, quick, for-cash Craigslist jobs, the website is personified as a living being (Larry Owens) that presents him with opportunities for food delivery, handing out hair care product advertisements, and, ever present as a last resort, “Cleaning Boy (kink).” 

There are a myriad of effusively captured smaller roles here as well. Torres’s partner James Scully, of You and Fire Island fame, is ironically cast as Ale’s nemesis. The perfectly named Bingham is a white, New England landed gentry layabout whom Elizabeth is asked by a friend to take on as a secondary assistant, and whose effortless WASPy sycophantism charms her. There are hints throughout that Elizabeth may owe what meager success she had in her critical career to her aggressiveness and self-delusion more than to her eye for art, and although I don’t know that this makes her “shallow” necessarily, she’s positively wooed by Bingham’s surface level blaséness and taken in by him, to the degradation of her working relationship with Ale. One couldn’t ask for a more perfect narrator for all of this than Isabella Rosselini, whose soft enunciation of Torres’s script creates just as much magic as the visuals, and as a fan of Killjoys, it’s always exciting to see Kelly McCormack out and about in the world, even if her appearance is brief (but memorable!). My favorite appearance, however, was from Greta Lee, who appears briefly as Dalia, a former protegee (and more) of Bobby, who is in possession of Blue Egg on Yellow Satin, the final painting needed to complete his posthumous(?) show. She’s an utter delight to see here, and she makes a big impression despite her relatively short screen time. 

This is my favorite movie that I’ve seen so far this year, and I couldn’t have been happier that I ended up in a less-than-ideal seat at the theater because there were so many other people already there. There was a constant undercurrent of pure joy that rippled throughout, and it proved that it had something for everyone as groups of various ages released giggles, laughs, and even the occasional chuckle, all over different bits and jokes. (One thing that we could all agree on: Torres’s eccentric running style never got old.) I loved this one, and if you have enough joy in your heart, I think you’ll love it too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Joy (2015)

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EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Has the David O. Russell hype train already crashed & burned? It wasn’t until 2012’s commercially-palatable mental health rom-com/drama Silver Linings Playbook that the director started to get his dues as a weirdo auteur, despite putting out quality work as far back as 1994’s uncomfortable black comedy Spanking the Monkey. Two Jennifer Lawrence collaborations later & critical consensus already feels like it’s turning on him, aiming to brush him off as a hack. It’s a total shame too. I understand, to a point, the complaints that Russell’s American Hustle resembled Scorsese’s Goodfellas a little too closely, but if you’re going to pay homage to something, why not make it one of the greatest films ever made? The complaints about his more-recent film, Joy, are a little more confounding to me. In some ways Russell is merely keeping the Goodfellas vibes rolling into the next picture & continuing his somewhat easy collaborations with Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert DeNiro in a film that might be a little too Hallmarkish for the hard-to-please, but if that’s all you see going on in Joy, you’re missing out on the much stranger big picture. It feels like Russell is really working out some half-formed new ideas here & watching him reach for that new, unexplored territory is fascinating stuff, making for the best film I think he’s made in years.

Expectation might be to blame for what turned a lot of audiences off from Joy. Based on the advertising, I know a lot of folks expected an organized crime flick about a mob wife, not the deranged biopic about the woman who invented the Miracle Mop that was delivered. Even more so, I believe that audiences expected a lighthearted drama from the guy who made Silver Linings Playbook. Instead, Joy finds Russell exploring the same weirdo impulses that lead him to making I ♥ Huckabees, an absurdist comedy that might be the very definition of “not for everyone”. Personally, I love Huckabees. It’s my favorite thing thing Russell’s ever done. Joy is certainly not as eccentric or as deliberately off-putting as Huckabees can be, but it does establish a delirious rhythm & nearly all-white visual palette that hits on the same anything-can-happen tone Huckabees delivered. By the time Joy delves into immersive soap opera & QVC imagery, the film has already established a dream-like sense of self-logic that makes the whole thing feel natural, despite television’s sterilized otherworldliness. Also like Huckabees, Joy plays its humor completely straight, with only the slightest hint of quirk prompting you to treat it like a comedy. The soap opera camp & Isabella Rossellini’s over-the-top performance in Joy were some of the funniest moments I had witnessed in the theater in all of 2015, but for some reason the audience I was with met them with more exasperated “That’s just ridiculous” comments instead of genuine laughter.

I, for one, welcome David O. Russell’s return to not-for-everyone cinema. The problem is that Joy might not have gone far enough in its Huckabees-esque absurdity. There is an admitted Hallmark/Lifetime-esque quality to the film that compels it to hammer every point home, to tie a bow on every resolved conflict. The dialogue indulges in some wholesome cheese in lines like “In America, the ordinary meets the extraordinary”, [from a young Joy playing happily-ever-after-type games] “I don’t need a prince”, and [from an adult Joy to her young daughter] “Don’t take any guff from anybody.” Worse yet is a completely unnecessary narrator who constantly reminds us that Joy is a “matriarch” or that she & her ex-husband are “the best married couple in America.” That aspect of Joy seems to be at war with the film’s strangest impulses, such as introducing a soap opera character who “came back as a ghost with even greater power”, including an extended cameo in which Melissa Rivers (all-too convincingly) portrays her recently-departed mother, and saddling its protagonist with a family so unbearably awful that you could easily forgive her for burning the house down with them all locked inside.

I would like to say with confidence that this contrast between the absurd & the maudlin was entirely intentional, that Russell was merely trying to reflect the mundane trashiness of his subject’s QVC/Miracle Mop subject. The truth is, though, that I have no idea. Joy is an odd compromise of things I loved & things I could’ve done without. The dream-like quality of the rhythm is fascinating, but the narration knocks its ambition down a peg. It’s Russell’s most experimental film in a decade, but it borrows heavily from not only Scorsese, but also from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (in one particular scene, I could swear that Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” would play at any second). Isabella Rossellini’s monologue about “The 4 Questions of Financial Worthiness” was one of 2015’s funniest moments to me, but the humor is played so dryly it doesn’t seem to register with half its audience. If nothing else, what’s clear when you consider all of these self-contradicting qualities as a whole is that David O. Russell has made something oddly idiosyncratic here that can be a joy to watch if you can get on its dual arty & maudlin wavelengths. That’s good enough for me.

-Brandon Ledet