"I suppose if it was 9:45, I would think it is after midnight."

So here it is- the post on the David Lynch movie marathon.  What's that?  You weren't anxiously awaiting its arrival?  Hush your mouth, young one.

David Lynch is one of those crazy bastards that directs movies so intense he dares you to ridicule them.  Assuming, of course, you weren't lobotomized by the time the credits roll, and rendered able to only groan in anguish.  I approach these guys like a challenge, to see if I can beat them.

My friends and I watched, in this order-

Blue Velvet  (1986)

Mulholland Dr.  (2001)

Inland Empire  (2006)

Eraserhead  (1976)

Total play time: approx. 8.9 hours.

We didn't give much thought to the order before watching.  We started with Blue Velvet because my friend had already seen it.  As for the others... it was whichever downloaded first.  Turns out, we watched them in  the perfect order, from the most straightforward to the most abstract.  

Blue Velvet tells the story of a young man investigating the origins of an ear he found in a field.  He uncovers a terrible underworld of drugs, sex, and evil within the charm of his small town.  Starring Kyle MacLauchlan as Jeffrey Beaumont and Laura Dern as Sandy Williams.  Isabella Rossellini plays Dorothy Vallens, a singer mentally ensnared by Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper.  I'll say this here:  Dennis Hopper is the most effed up actor in a mainstream movie.  Take an early scene for example:  Jeffrey Beaumont is hiding in a closet, hid there by Dorothy Vallens.  Frank comes in to her apartment and begins what we can only assume to be a ritualistic rape, heavily breathing in a drug and crying out for his mommy, stuffing blue velvet in his mouth and Dorothy's.  My friends and I were terrified.  We were also dreading the rest of the night.  Would things get worse?

With Mulholland Dr., yes and no.  The tone of the movie was not so violent but started to feel more like a nightmare.  Hailed as Lynch's masterpiece, Mulholland Drive is a ceaseless avalanche of his thoughts and imagination.  I would try to give you a synopsis or a summary, but it's damn near impossible with a movie this abstract.  Basically, Naomi Watts goes to Hollywood, meets Laura Harring, they have some steamy lesbian sex, and before you know it no one is who you thought they were.  Or maybe they were all the same person.  Like I said, the tone is nightmarish.  I consulted Roger Ebert (hail the bastion of all things reel) to make some sense of the movie.  His advice?  

"This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else. "Mulholland Drive" works directly on the emotions, like music. Individual scenes play well by themselves, as they do in dreams, but they don't connect in a way that makes sense--again, like dreams."

So that's what I did.  I sat back and let the scenes and colors and sounds wash over me.  I feel stupefied.  I felt drugged.  But I did not feel happy.  Ebert called them dreams, but I still disagree.  Nightmares all the way.  One thing did make me happy and that was the arrival of this character:

That is Billy Ray Cyrus being an asshole, mullet and all.  WTF?

Midway through the marathon, the sun had set, dinner had been noshed on, and we were content in our seats once more.  Time for Inland Empire.

                                     

Key locations: I was on the right side of the television with my laptop open in front of me.  Lauren was directly across from me with a blanket.  Lydia was behind me clutching a pillow.  Tyler and Carolyn were far back into the room sharing a couch.  These are important details.

Inland Empire is the Arc de Triomphe of abstract film.  David Lynch calls upon Laura Dern's acting talents once more, to play an actress struggling against the temptation of her costar.  An actress playing an actress struggling against an actor playing an actor.  Inception, anyone?  

Laura Dern has come a long way since Velvet.

At first I was \=, then I was [=, then I was D-:<

That final picture is one of the many startling scenes from Inland Empire.  The plot barely kicks in before the crazy takes over.  Allegedly, the movie is the projection of her psyche, going completely apeshit because of her conflicted feelings for her co-star.  Whatever it is, it scared the bejeezus out of me and my friends.  I realized at one point I was hiding behind my laptop, clutching the top of my screen.  Lauren had the blanket at her nose and all I could see were the tips of her glasses.  Lydia was trembling under her pillow.  Tyler and Carolyn were petrified but safe because of their distance from the screen. 

Three hours later, we could finally breathe easy.  We had subjected ourselves to the most random assortment of nightmare imagery ever assembled this side of Holocaust documentaries.  The time?  Nearly midnight.  We were exhausted, but not because of the hour.

Last on our list was Eraserhead.  We started it, unsure of what we would encounter, but determined to finish the marathon.  Nearing the end, we were emotionally drained and jaded.  Nothing could freak us out, right?

Bzzzz, wrong!  Look, the tagline of the movie even says, "Be warned.  The nightmare has not gone away."  A prescient statement for his earliest movie of the bunch.  

Little in the movie made sense.  The guy on the movie poster is a scared man in an industrial nightmare (look, that word again!).  A mutant baby is thrust into his life, a temptress sucks him into a pool of metaphorical sex fluid, his head is turned into an eraser, and a woman with ovaries on her cheeks stomps on large, rubbery sperm.  Oh God.

If someone can explain this video to me, I would love to hear you try.  I need a good laugh.

And yet, for all the absurdity, I couldn't tear my eyes away.  Eraserhead was the shortest of the four films, but certainly the strangest and the most atmospheric.

At the end, I was scared silly, drained of energy, and ready to collapse.  One of the best ways to spend a day.  Or three days... or maybe it was all a dream...


Cheesy endings aside, here are a couple links.

A more emotional account of the marathon by Lauren Hank

My intense narrative written sometime during, but I don't remember doing it.

The list of David Lynch's works, in case you want to dive in for yourself.  Just be careful.