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Valiantly trying to one-up Blue Velvet, his ominous cult shock to the senses, Mr. Lynch rapaciously indulges himself in the slop trough of existential imagery. He peddles discord wholesale. Anachronism is the rule. No frightening thought goes unturned. Hardly an unnatural notion escapes being pried open with black hearted curiosity. On this movie's warped terms, perversity is no less common than a burger and fries.
In the Middle Ages, such a sordid can of worms would win its heretical author a spin on the stake. And today's less adventurous filmgoer just may want to reprise that ritual after plunking down $7 to witness this newfangled madness. But thrill-seekers who salivate at things cutting edge, viewers who don't begrudge the director having a bit of sport with them, and general fanciers of life's darker side may want to take a morbid look-see.
What's it about?
The question would be reasonable, if this were a reasonably normal flick. Thus it evokes a twisted smile once you've experienced this mercurial exercise in plot defiance. Lynch's sensual gambit of dire admonitions, evil portents, and sick violence combines to form an entity unto itself. Story considerations are second banana to what the film auteur considers job #1. And that is the process itself.
Pushing the envelope of psycho-horror -- out there -- way out there. And thus establishing whirling dervish Lynch as Hollywood's chief purveyor of bad dreams. A Hitchcock for the nihilistic '90's.
If the movie has a protagonist it's Bill Pullman as Fred Madison, the presumably innocent victim of deranged circumstances. A jazz musician, he lives with his sultry wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) in a stark, neo-Frank Lloyd Wright affair perched in the Hollywood Hills. Just the kind of house you need to set the L.A. film noir mood.
They stare at each other. Tensely, they issue terse sentiments. Then eerie stuff starts happening. First a videotape is left on the doorstep. It spies the outside of their home. Renee offers: "Probably from real estate agents." Fred's grimace of internal anguish at that moment sets a new standard for marital mistrust. If looks could kill. But, apparently, they don't have to. For before you can say Kafkaesque hallucination, Fred is on Death Row awaiting the electric chair.
But then, suddenly, he's not Fred, but Pete (Balthazar Getty), a younger man who can't quite explain his presence in jail. Maybe he's really Fred, or at least his alter ego. Stranger things have happened. Especially in this movie.
Only Dick Tracy comics contained as bizarre a crew of metaphorical characters as Lynch is fond of assembling. Check out some of these winning personalities: Back as a blonde, Miss Arquette is Alice Wakefield, vamp mistress to Mr. Eddie. Portrayed with puckish terror by Robert Loggia, Mr. Eddie is a gangster/pornographer with a penchant for hot cars. His best moment is a lunatical scenes we'd like to see wherein he berates a tailgater. It's a feverish sequence of pure wish fulfilment destined for classic status.
Then there's Robert Blake as Mystery Man, a whitewashed gnome of a being whose ugly little trick with a cellular phone distils the essence of horror and foreboding. This is one strange dude, albeit scantily sketched for this movie's tease and run strategy. Two ostensibly parallel, but supposedly related, tales run helter-skelter down this deliriously demented highway as a fine musical score exclaims the meter. And before the dastardly doings come to a close, the director pays minor lip service to those who demand resolution.
Working in a genre that breeds pretension, however, it is to the filmmaker's credit that he offers no far-flung explanations. He wouldn't be caught dead with a discernible moral to the saga. Instead, throughout these maniacal meanderings it's its not certain whether all this dramatic dissidence is the handiwork of Beelzebub, a bit of undigested beef, or merely another item to blame on the Clinton Administration. Fact is, your guess is as good as anyone's. Which in itself may prove disconcerting to some. And that ironic possibility should warm the cockles of Mr. Lynch's sinister heart.
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