Baffling, as always, this is Lynch at his most unrestrained. Working without a completed script and in digital video, David Lynch bounds through various themes: Hollywood, violence, sex, interconnected times, mysteries of the night, suburban secrets, 50s pop culture, and just anything that might creep out a viewer. There's strobe lights at uneven paces, screams, blood red lighting effects, decay, alter-egos, doors through time and space, demented women running at the camera into a close-up and more awkward closeups. And more closeups. The light digital cameras enable super-close shots at slightly odd angles, and Lynch utilizes the most irritating of digital camera mistakes to his unique motives. He manipulates focus so that the background is in focus when the face in close-up is out of focus, contrary to expectations. It's a little unnerving, and suggests that no one is ever clearly known.
Following an introductory scene involving a couple enterring a hotel room, presumably a sexual/business relationship, in which both people's faces are blurred, the first hour or so is fairly linear, and surrounds Laura Dern's character, Nancy, an actress in Hollywood, married to a powerful and mysterious man. She meets her new neighbor, played by a standard Lynch actress, who is super weird and says that she cannot tell tomorrow from yesterday. She also tells an odd story about a boy who goes out to play and creates evil. Evil. Evil. It doesn't make sense at the time, and I kept hoping it would click with something else in the film, but I got nothing out of it. Nancy gets a new film role and the linear plot follows the making of the film, which concerns a couple who enter into an adulterous affair. Nancy begins to lose control over the difference between her life and the film, and this is where is all goes bananas.
Nancy goes through a metal door off of an alley, goes back in time to an earlier scene and then gets trapped in a fifties-ish coral living room. She explores the house and spends most of her time with a group of young women, sexually provocative and dimly lit. There's screaming and red lights, bright flashes and choreographed dancing to 50s pop songs. The film moves to Poland, where Nancy's husband is involved with an invisible woman and some old men. And then Dern, dirty and dishelveled, meets with a man in a dark room high in a dilapadated warehouse, where she discusses her past abusive relationships and the ways she's beaten the men she's escaped from. There's also a side-line involving Julia Ormond, who I haven't seen work in a while, who goes into a police station. She's disturbed and has been hypnotised by some man in a bar and told to stab someone with a screw driver, but she's already stabbed herself with it. Then later she reappears as the wife of the adulterer in Nancy's film, and again as the first crazy version, stalking dirty Dern on Hollywood Blvd. Here the young women from the house are now prostitutes but still snapping in time together. Dern gets stabbed, staggers past the stars on the boulevard and collapses next to some people sleeping on the street waiting for a bus to Pomona. Not to mention the interludes of sitcom style scenes about a family of rabbits who speak in odd sequiters, as if part of an absurdist play.
There's all sorts that I've left out. Some of which I can't recall because it didn't make sense to me and some of which, like the Beck song on the soundtrack and the burlesque club, that felt awkward to me because of their contemporary connections. It felt to me that there was too much freedom. It went on too long and in so many different directions. And the film retread a great many of Lynch's themes that it at times felt like a satire.
So I found it an interesting freak out, but it lacked the mysterious beauty of films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and the cohesive feeling of purpose of Lost Highway. I thought a few times around the two hour mark, that I would never indulge another filmmaker like I would Lynch, and with good reason. The dirty Dern was truly creepy, and the strange hallways leading to other places captured that archetypal mysterious feeling found in everyone's unconscious that brings me back to Lynch again and again.
