David Lynch
returned to Cannes with a sense of trepidation. In the space of just two
years, he'd experienced both the highs and the lows of the festival with
a suddenness that would stun even the most jaded spectator. After winning
the Palme d'Or for his demented 1990 road movie Wild at Heart,
Lynch seemed golden, but the critical barracking dished out to his Twin
Peaks movie, Fire Walk With Me, bordered on the personal and
seemed to have rattled the usually sanguine director.
With typically
wry humour, Lynch put it down to his appearance on the cover of Time
magazine a little while before. "Somebody told me it means two years'
bad luck," he has said, pointing out the strange time in his usually celebrated
career when his cartoon strip The Angriest Dog in the World was
dropped by its Los Angeles newspaper and his quirky television sitcom
On the Air was unceremoniously axed.
Lynch had been
a surprise figure to break through on network TV in the first place. After
establishing himself with the surreal, nightmarish Eraserhead in
1976, Lynch enjoyed a degree of critical and box-office success with largely
commercial films (Dune, The Elephant Man) that stood out
from the norm with their surreal flourishes and eccentric shading. In
1986, however, Lynch broke out of those restraints big-time, with the
perverse and dazzling Blue Velvet, a stunning post-modern thriller
starring Kyle McLachlan as an all-American teen who stumbles on a violent
criminal underworld.
Strange, bloody
and peppered with expletives, it was a succès
de scandale that took the box
office by storm and seemed to trade on its notoriety (the poster quoted
an anonymous cinemagoer saying: "Call me sick, but I want to see that
again."). It gave him the freedom to make Wild at Heart, a more
typically mercurial production that broke all the rules of mainstream
cinema and perfectly distilled his outlandish sensibility.
It was a far cry
from Peyton Place, but when Lynch pitched his soap opera Twin
Peaks, which started with a violent murder in a goofy, backwoods American
town, it was picked up in an instant and became a huge ratings hit. The
movie tie-in, however, flopped dismally when it emerged in 1992, and,
after the poor reception for On the Air, Lynch retreated for a
while, concentrating on his painting and his music. It is rumoured that
one of his artworks consisted of a plywood board, emblazoned with the
words: "I WILL NEVER WORK IN TELEVISION AGAIN".
His next movie,
Lost Highway, his most extreme film since Eraserhead, was
perhaps his revenge. Billed as a "psychological fugue", it starred Bill
Pullman as a jealous sax
player, accused
of killing his wife, who transforms, inexplicably, into a teenage boy.
After going so
far out, his follow-up, The Straight Story, couldn't have been
simpler or, indeed, straighter. Starring veteran actor Richard Farnsworth,
it told the story of Alvin Straight, a headstrong octogenarian who rode
a lawnmower across state borders to visit his ailing brother.
Venturing back
to Cannes for the third time, Lynch was both pleased and relieved when
the film received a warm reception, but that moment of comfort was short-lived.
In the meantime, he had been lured back to television by the ABC network,
who were intrigued by an idea of Lynch's called Mulholland Drive.
All Lynch would
say about his new idea for a series was that started with a car crash,
an amnesiac blonde named Rita and a starlet named Betty who helps Rita
find her true identity. "What happens next?" the executives asked. "You
have to buy the pitch for me to tell you," said Lynch.
Mulholland Drive
was duly bankrolled and shot, but when Lynch delivered his two-and-a-half-hour
pilot (roughly 90 minutes more than his paymasters were expecting), the
ABC people were appalled. Notes were delivered by the ton, and the more
they tried to make him compromise, the more he felt sickened by the end
result. Lynch even advised his fans not to watch it, but disaster was
averted when ABC dropped the series altogether and handed it over to Studio
Canal, who gave Lynch the money to restore and reshape his pilot as a
theatrical feature.
Suitably impressive
to win a competition slot, Mulholland Drive promises a return to
form from one of the most fertile minds in American cinema. Whether he'll
ever apply that skewed imagination to the small screen again, however,
is a moot point.
"At a certain point you realise you're
in with the wrong people," he told The New Yorker. "Their thinking
process is very foreign to me. They like a fast pace and a linear story,
but you want your creations to come out of you and be distinctive. I
feel it's possibly true that there are aliens on earth, and they work
in television."
Damon Wise
