The Screengrab : boxing helena

Catching Up with the Lynches, David and Jennifer

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The Guardian recently sent two writers on different expeditions to track down David Lynch, currently camping out as Gaby Wood discovered, in "a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills", and his daughter Jennifer, who's been busy clearing the ground for the U.K. release of her own second feature as a director, Surveillance. Wood's own feature is short on terrific new quotes from the great man, which probably reflects less on her journalistic abilities than on where Lynch's head is at these days: he's still deep in that "Film and me are quits!" space he's been promoting ever since he discovered digital video and made Inland Empire. Wood describes that work, accurately, as "a three-hour ode to impenetrability.") " 'I just love this camera,' Lynch says, in his nasal, deliberate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It's a machine.' A look of delight passes across his face. 'It's just a glorious world,' he says.

It's nice to know that he's happy. Those who saw the documentary Lynch know that the director now spends a lot of time in his own "bunker", which includes offices and studios and recording equipment, piling up cigarette ashes while waiting for inspiration to hit. Word has apparently reached Lynch that he has nothing left to prove, and his attitude towards his future movie career seems to be that if he has a reason to make another film, he supposes he will. "Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished." But if he never gets the money to make another movie, "I don't care. See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realize that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of." In the meantime, he's returned to his first love, painting, and he also makes two-dimensional art works, and shoots photographs. He has a special fondness for nudes in factories--decaying factories, "factories [that] are defunct, celebrated for their decay and decomposition in a way that renders them organic," like the pencil factory in Eraserhead if it had spent a few decades under water.

Wood writes that "In the course of our interview Lynch had made (I felt) a series of didactic yet meaningless speeches of varying length, none of which lent itself to illustrating any particular point. But afterwards I found myself laughing, because I realised he was not so much unforthcoming as bordering on the Delphic. He is – unbudgingly, impenetrably, but nevertheless magnificently – a character of his own making. In his movies the characters who talk like this – a sort of scattershot guru-speak, in which sayings are either wise or total rubbish, depending on what sticks – are fortune-tellers, random ciphers or mysterious orchestrators of strange plots (the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks, the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the witchy neighbour in Inland Empire). In other words, the most unnatural among the dramatis personae. But when you listen to Lynch you realise they are (in their delivery at least) the most natural, the most like him." It turns out that the Oracle of Missoula, Montana recently got married, for the fourth time. The new Missus Lynch is Emily Stofle, a 26-year-old actress who was in Inland Empire. (Before that, she played one of the victims of the title character in 2002's Ted Bundy.) Says Wood, "I'm not the first to wonder how someone who is so evangelically "blissed out" can live through the un-bliss of three divorces (he has a child from each marriage) and a well-publicised break up with Isabella Rossellini. To this Lynch will only say: 'We live in the field of relativity. Things change.' "

Visiting Jennifer Lynch, who's now 40, John Patterson failed to ask what she thinks of her new mommy. When Jennifer Lynch was 24, she was busy being raked over the coals for her ill-fated debut film, Boxing Helena. Bad as that movie was, it seems likely that the reaction to it would have been considerably less intense had its auteur's name been Ratskywatsky or something. "It had no chance to be seen through unbiased eyes. Did I know what I was doing? I knew what I was trying to do. And I think it's OK to fail at things. But it was the astonishing rage and, in particular, the suggestion that as a human being I didn't deserve to be loved ever again - something the National Organisation of Women actually said about me. Like, are you fucking kidding me? C'mon, even Hitler deserved to be loved - in fact a little love might have made him a way better guy. I had to retreat and wonder why the reaction to a movie could be so violent and so vitriolic. And there was hostility all over the world - there was no safe place. Whatever I got, I got in a personal way, directed right at me. I would have welcomed a serious discussion of the flaws and intentions of that film, but not a debate about whether I deserved to be alive."

Fortunately, Lynch--who Patterson describes as "rowdy, bawdy, sick-in-the-head funny and very fast with a quip"--was able to use the connection to her father to her benefit this time. "My father called me after he read the script a couple of years ago and he said, 'You're the sickest bitch I know!'" Thanks, Pop! But after Jennifer was unable to get funding for Surveillance, "he called ages later and said, 'What's happening with your movie?' and I said 'Zilch.' I told him I don't know if it's the material, if it's the 15 years raising a kid, if it's Boxing Helena, but nobody's interested. And he said, 'What if I put my name on it?' I'm like, 'C'mon Dad, you know how I feel about it.' Because, believe me, it's a big issue for me. But that day I typed: 'Executive producer: David Lynch', and within 48 hours I had more offers than I knew what to do with. I swear, any screenwriter wanting a little attention should just write 'Steven Spielberg' on their script. Who's checking?" The movie stars two veterans of her father's films, Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond, as investigators on the trail of a serial killer, and involves the viewpoint of an eight-year-old girl who picks up on things that the adults around her miss. "I wanted to play with the wisdom and clarity of a child's perception," says Lynch. "And also I like the idea of the serial killer movie in a way that's not just 'cut 'em up, kill all the sluts'. Although, God knows, I did some of that too. But I wanted terror in broad daylight, in a place that outwardly seems so safe...The second you start being brave about something that terrifies you and start really digging into it, confronting it head on, that's great; it's the cowards who say, 'Nah, not a problem.' And that's a real way in which - as bumper-stickerish as it sounds - art can save your fucking life. You need a place to put all that stuff."

Fantastic Fest Review: "Surveillance"

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Surveillance begins in typically Lynchian fashion, with the FBI arriving in a small town beset by violent tragedy. We're a long way from Twin Peaks, however, and this is no David Lynch film. It's the much belated follow-up to Boxing Helena by the Peaks auteur's daughter, Jennifer Lynch, and while it begins as a routine thriller, by the end it has turned into one long sick joke.

The Feds in this case are Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond), taking over for local law enforcement in the investigation of a mass murder on a remote country road. The victims were passengers from three different vehicles: a family in a station wagon, two cops in a patrol car, and a couple of junkies fleeing from a drug deal gone awry. The survivors have all been assembled at the police station and are questioned separately, with Hallaway overseeing it all via surveillance cameras.

Each survivor has something to hide, so nobody is telling the whole truth - except perhaps for the little girl from the station wagon. Bobbi Prescott (Pell James) isn't interested in discussing the drug dealer who expired in her presence, while Officer Bennett (Kent Harper, who co-wrote the screenplay) would prefer not to disclose the full nature of his unorthodox law enforcement methods.

Only those of us in the audience are privy to the whole truth, as the survivors' stories unfold in flashbacks that contradict the testimony being given. At about the halfway point, the movie goes off the deep end - at least it seems that way until the big finale arrives and you realize, "No, now it's really going off the deep end." There's no way to discuss it in depth without revealing some huge spoilers, but if the whole point of Surveillance is to get its viewers thinking, "Dude, this is fucked up!" - well, mission accomplished. If there's a larger point, I'm not sure I want to know what it is.

Related:
Vanishing Act: Jennifer Lynch
Welcoming Jennifer Lynch Back with Open Arms

Welcoming Jennifer Lynch Back with Open Arms

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Mention the name "Jennifer Lynch" to most people, and you expect a certain reaction — a mixture of respect, admiration, and pride. That lasts for about ten seconds, before they realize that they're thinking of that army soldier who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital. That was Jessica Lynch. Jennifer Lynch, as we keep reminding you, is the daughter of David Lynch whose own debut effort as a writer-director was, Dennis Lim writes in the Los Angeles Times "much-derided", which is actually kind of like saying that maiden voyage of the Titanic drew "mixed reviews." Lim, who's had his own career problems of late, got together with Lynch for an interview that might easily have turned out a little like the scene in Jaws where the guys compare each other's scars. The occasion was Lynch's emergence, perhaps from federal protection or her dad's garage, to promote her second feature, Surveillance, which is premiered last night at the Cannes Film Festival. "It feels kind of miraculous being here," she told Lim, "and kind of surreal." Hey, as Keith Richards likes to say, it probably feels kind of miraculous being anywhere! Thenkyewverymuch.

Seriously, Lynch describes herself as "a different person" from the one who made Helena, and not just because she's 40 now instead of 24 — not that that's not a big part of it. But in the time between her two movies, she also raised a twelve-year-old daughter, conquered alcohol abuse, which she describes as "an ongoing process", and recovered, over the course of three surgeries, from major injuries sustained in a car accident. ("The fact that I get to walk down the red carpet tonight and hold my daughter's hand," she says, "is a big deal — they didn't even know if I'd walk at one point.") On the subject of family, Lynch will always have to deal with the fact that people who care about movies may never be able to separate her from the knowledge that she's her father's daughter. Boxing Helena got more attention than many a first-time director's work does because of that, and people may have been primed to pounce. Surveillance, which stars Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond as FBI agents investigating a case in Nebraska, sounds as if she shares her father's interest in voyeurism and small-town rot: "Originally," she says of the script by Kent Harper, "it was about witches. But what I gravitated to were the elements of desolation and the idea of people watching each other. I also liked the idea of a thriller that right from the get-go lets you in on the fact that all these people are lying." Speaking of both her father and her mother, the painter Peggy Reavey, Lynch says that "If there's one gift I've been given from both my parents it's the idea that you make the work you want to make — the joy is in the making. Once it's done, you let it go, and you move on." Which is great. Of course, there are some people who saw Boxing Helena who will never let it go — and Lynch knows that, too. "I'd be lying if I told you it all didn't really mess my head up," she says of the reaction to her first film. "I still can't Google myself today."

Vanishing Act: Jennifer Lynch

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Most of us first became aware of David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer when she authored The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a Twin Peaks tie-in book that could have been nothing more than a cheap gimmick. Instead, as Entertainment Weekly noted at the time, The Secret Diary is “gratifyingly faithful to the spirit of Peaks, and is therefore full of unorthodox sex, illegal drugs, casual blasphemy, and a generally negative attitude… Lynch has taken her father's conception of a good girl gone bad and run with it.” (Fewer Peaks fans remember the worthy follow-up, Scott Frost’s hilarious and astute The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes; you can read it in its entirety here.)

So it wasn’t too surprising that Lynch the younger got her own director’s chair, nor was it a shock that the subject matter of her debut was a bit off the beaten path. As originally announced, Boxing Helena would star Kim Basinger as a woman who has both arms and legs amputated by an obsessed stalker. At some point Basinger decided that this perhaps was not the best direction for her career and dropped out of the project. (Lynch and her producers sued Basinger for breach of contract and were awarded over $8 million, although the verdict was later overturned.) The part of Helena was recast with Peaks beauty Sherilyn Fenn, and Julian Sands took on the role of the creepy suitor.

“I see it as a love story," said Lynch in 1992, "not a horror film. The image of Venus de Milo is so powerful. Obsessive love is like a series of amputations as you steal from one another. It's inviting, exciting, animalistic. I've been there; I've been drawn to it." But few others were drawn to Boxing Helena when it was released in 1993. “This film has all the psychological depth of a wading pool,” wrote Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle. “Anything you've imagined without seeing the movie is likely more interesting than what's here.”

Most reviews were as bad or worse. As Lynch told the New York Times last year, the criticism stung. “I was so completely dumbfounded. Not that any creative medium isn’t important, but how was it possible for people to write that I didn’t deserve to be loved, or that I was a misogynist? It’s a movie, folks. It’s not like you walk into a museum and see a painter you don’t like and say: ‘You know what? That guy doesn’t deserve to be loved anymore. He’s a bad person.’ ”

Lynch endured some personal struggles as well, including recurring back pain from a long-ago traffic accident and struggles with the bottle. Now clean and sober, Lynch has returned to that director’s chair for the first time in 15 years with Surveillance, a serial killer thriller starring Bill Pullman (Lost Highway) and Julia Ormond (Inland Empire). It’s due later this year; take a look at the trailer, which features more than a trace of her father’s trademark imagery.

The Ten Worst Hairdos In Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Yeah, we know, we know, that haircut soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Javier Bardem sports in the soon-to-be-Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is pretty disturbing and awful. But that's not even the worst haircut of Javier Bardem's career. (Read on!) Indeed, thinking about No Country got us thinking about some of the other truly monstrous 'dos we've encountered over the years on the screen. Here's our list of the Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History.

Mickey Rourke, YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

In his shambling youth, Mickey Rourke had a tough veneer with a sensitive undertone. He might have become a major movie star (as opposed to an object of cult worship in France and some of your better dorm rooms) in the Hollywood Heartthrob, Good-Bad-but-Not-Evil division, if he'd found a few more roles like the Baltimore honeydripper he played in Diner. But he drove his career into a ditch in a misguided effort to show what a tough, hard-slugging badass he was. His performance in this descent into the Michael Cimino-Oliver Stone Thunderdome tells you everything about what went wrong, and much of it is concentrated on his hair. Twenty-eight years old when the film was shot, Rourke seemed a little young for the role of a much-decorated NYPD veteran who learned about the deviousness of the Asian criminal mind while serving in Vietnam, more than ten years earlier. So the decision was made to send him down to the high school and have the erasers clapped together over his head. His chalk-encrusted tresses here make his entrance a guaranteed laugh-getter, especially since he wears a hat that he must have borrowed from a flatfoot in a Bogart movie; when he plops it down onto his noggin, you expect a cloud of white dust to envelop the room. (In some scenes his hair darkens to a grayish tint and then goes white again, suggesting that the testosterone release of beating up Chinese punks and having sex with Dutch-Japanese-supermodel-slash-godawful-actress "Ariane" has youth-restoring benefits, but they wear off fast.)

Sean Penn, CARLITO'S WAY (1993)

Penn's performance as Al Pacino's fast-talking lawyer, who lusts after the bad-boy cred and sleazy thrills that his client has outgrown, is a beautiful comic turn, and the selflessness that makes it possible extends fully to his scalp. With a little mop of frizzy curlicues that suggest that he's had his pubic hair transplanted onto his head, he looks like Art Garfunkel, Superstar. (This effect was especially funny back in 1993, when it was possible to go from this movie to see Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena and see that the actual Art Garfunkel had turned into Larry Fine, C.P.A.) His red mop grows more excitable and unruly as his character grows ever more dangerously unhinged. At the end, we hear a gunshot that signals that his character has been put out of Carlito's misery, and it is a great disappointment that the camera cuts away without showing his hair scurrying away under its own power. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to set up a sequel anymore.

Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO (1997)

You think his hair in No Country for Old Men is bad? Pfft. For some of us, our first impression of Javier Bardem was with another bad hair cut, the one he had in Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (aka Dance With the Devil). Playing a homicidal, kidnapping voodoo priest, Bardem sports an unholy mullet that could scar your eyeballs. It's a scary character, and the hair cut makes him scarier because you know he knows he can get away with it. And you fear what would happen if you accidentally made fun of it. Nobody's making "business in front, party in the back" jokes around him, we guarantee you.

Anne Bancroft in THE HINDENBURG (1975)

In 1937, a German passenger zeppelin caught fire and exploded as it was preparing to land in New Jersey. The catastrophe was captured on film by a newsreel cameraman, and in 1975, some master of taste and sensitivity got the inspiration of trying to tap into the mid-'70s "disaster movie" fad by making a period melodrama leading up to the horror. Looking to tone this idea up a little, the movie posits that the explosion was set off deliberately, as an act of anti-Nazi sabotage. An alternate theory is that the saboteur felt that it was necessary to wipe Anne Bancroft's hair off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost. Bancroft plays a German countess who is also a morphine addict, which must be pretty mild stuff compared to whatever the hell her hairdresser is on. Since this is the kind of movie that tries to impress you with the historical accuracy of its fashions and knick knacks, Bancroft's grisly coiffure must have been the result of intense research. But could the researchers not have kept it to themselves that the stylish German junkie of 1937 walked around looking, as Pauline Kael put it with baleful accuracy, as if she had "black potato chips stuck to her head"?

Keith Carradine in TROUBLE IN MIND (1986)

Every once in a while, the writer-director Alan Rudolph feels the need to make a movie so strange that all his other movies will consider reporting it to Homeland Security if it threatens to move into their neighborhood. At present, the holder of this title is probably his 1999 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions, but Trouble in Mind, a sort-of-futuristic daydream set in "Rain City", a drizzly place where the local criminal kingpin is played by Divine, took on all comers for quite a while there. This is one of the few times Divine played a non-drag role, but he must have brought his make-up case with him, because it looks as if Carradine got into it and made a hell of a mess. He plays a dopey young punk from the sticks who falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes overly enamored of the decadent thrills that Rain City has to offer. The most garish of these are apparently dispensed at the local Supercuts, because he keeps disappearing for awhile and then returning with his hair drenched in sticky-looking glop and twisted into fun house shapes, with his face painted as if he'd gotten a job as David Bowie's stunt double on the cover of Aladdin Sane. All in all, this may have been Keith Carradine's unstudliest hour.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 2!