But sadly, though I had no concrete goal to begin with, the results were lukewarm at best. When I flipped back through the detailed accounts, each was strange and amusing, but all were missing something important. Namely, me. Each entry felt distant and read like some lunatic post-modern movie pitch, rather than the recollection of an experience.
This period of time also happened to coincide with my budding obsession with David Lynch — the silver-haired master of surrealist film and beloved cult icon.
Partway through the infamous diner scene in “Mulholland Drive,” Lynch’s chilling Hollywood story gone awry, I was suddenly hit by a fear deeper and more affecting than any I had ever felt while watching a movie. It was the feeling of a nightmare, a feeling that cannot be casually scrawled in a bedside notebook or recreated with conventional storytelling. And I was floored.
Gleefully breezing through the amputation in “127 Hours,” any number of Tarantino’s extended torture sequences, and even, I’ll admit, the entirety of “The Human Centipede,” I had up until this point considered myself conveniently desensitized to on-screen suffering. But “Mulholland Drive,” along with the rest of the films in Lynch’s bizarre, genre-defying and wholly disturbing oeuvre, continued to haunt me long after the credits rolled.
Lynch’s unique success is built upon (a) his command over every aspect of filmmaking, from his jarring imagery and labyrinthine storytelling, to his meticulous sound design, (b) his uncanny grasp on the human subconscious, and (c) the undeniable fact that the man is completely and unpretentiously batshit insane — all setting his convention-tweaking apart from “(500) Days of Summer”-type quirk, resulting in his construction of intensely real emotions.
So, for any fan of Lynch’s subversive nightmares, the director’s recent stir in the music is something to celebrate.
Lynch has already released two tracks from his not-so-inappropriately-titled Crazy Clown Time (set for release in November) and, thankfully, they are as predictably unpredictable as anyone might have hoped. The first single, “Good Day Today” finds the 65-year-old auteur trying on glossy, downplayed synth-pop (of course, with his own delicate flourishes — “Paper Planes”-like gunshot sound effects and quiet, vocoder crooning). And it totally works — the track is catchy, unnerving and unexpectedly in vogue.
The seven-minute title track, on the other hand, dons Tom Waits-inspired theatrics over a stomping barroom march, as a squealing Lynch narrates an encounter between three characters who take their shirts on and off, scream at one another and vomit beer.
It’d be a curve-ball move for anyone else, but coming from the genius behind “Twin Peaks,” it’s a goddamned event. Nightmares are frightening, but with Lynch at the wheel, I have no intention of waking.
