Tag: Nine Inch Nails

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The man from another place has gone to another place

 

From wikipedia.org / © Georges Biard

 

For the past few days, I’ve felt like wearing a black armband while I sip my cups of coffee.  That’s because David Lynch, visionary maker of movies, short films, TV shows, web series, music videos and commercials, and artist, musician and actor to boot, passed away on January 15th.

 

In his cinematic output, Lynch was surely one of the most American of film directors. His work was suffused with Americana, both the cosy variety populated by porches, picket fences, lawns, sprinklers, diners, coffee, pie and kindly, neighbourly folk; and the flashier variety whereby bequiffed, leather-jacketed Elvis wannabes and peroxide blondes cruised along endless highways in big, finned sports cars.  This being Lynch, though, submerged beneath the Americana and frequently bubbling to its surface were things altogether weirder, darker, more surreal and twisted.  There was as much Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and William S. Burroughs in his work as there was Edward Hopper, Frank Capra and Ray Bradbury.  Meanwhile, though Lynch’s themes, motifs, imagery and stylistic touches felt unique – no wonder ‘Lynchian’ became a word – he wasn’t afraid to dress his visions in the clothes of familiar genres: horror, thriller, crime noir, science fiction and – something Lynch didn’t get enough credit for – comedy.

 

Anyway, here’s a guide to my favourite parts of the David Lynch film-and-TV universe.

 

Favourite Lynch cast

Lynch’s version of Dune (1984) was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics.  (Dung, I remember the New Musical Express calling it.)  Unfortunately, Dune’s old-school producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted the doorstop-sized and labyrinthine Frank Herbert novel on which it was based crammed into a regulation two-hour movie.  The condensed result didn’t make much sense.

 

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

But Lynch never worked with a better troupe of actors.  It even outshone the cast that, four decades later, Denis Villeneuve assembled for his telling of the story in 2022 and 2024.  The Lynch Dune features Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and Dean Stockwell.  Oh, and Sting – more on him in a minute.

 

Favourite Lynch collaborator

That would be Jack Nance, who played Henry Spencer, lead character in Eraserhead (1977), the film that put Lynch on the map.  With his impassive features, bouffant, tight suit and peculiar gait, Nance contributes as much to the film’s atmosphere as the elements that today we’d regard as typically Lynchian – the mutant baby, the lady in the radiator, the flickering lights, the industrial noise.  Thereafter, he was in all Lynch’s film projects (apart from 1980’s The Elephant Man) up to 1997’s Lost Highway.  He most famously played the amiable, fishing-and-chess-obsessed Pete Martell in Twin Peaks (1990-91), Lynch and Mark Frost’s oddball, sometimes barmy, occasionally confounding TV murder whodunnit, which coincidentally was a soap opera, comedy, horror story and science-fiction drama too.

 

© AFI Center for Advanced Studies / Libra Films

 

Nance’s life was hardly a bed of roses.  His film work was intermittent and in the mid-1980s he worked as a hotel clerk to make ends meet.  His second wife Kelly Jean Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke’s niece) committed suicide.  And he had severe alcohol problems.  During the filming of Blue Velvet (1986), he was in such a state that Dennis Hopper – Dennis Hopper! – had to drive him to a rehabilitation centre.  In 1996, Nance died of a subdural hematoma, resulting from a ‘blunt force trauma’.  The previous day his face was bruised and he told friends that he’d been punched during a brawl he’d got into with some strangers in a doughnut shop.  Lynch said in tribute: “There’s not another actor I can think of who could fill his shoes.  I had roles in my head for future films that I was saving for Jack.  I cannot think of anyone else who could do it.”

 

Favourite Lynch funny bit

The other day at work I was discussing Lynch’s passing with a colleague.  I started enthusing about the sequence where Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe try to rob a feed store in Wild at Heart (1991) and how funny it was: “Willem Dafoe trips and falls on his shotgun and it goes off and you see the top of his head flying up in the air…  Meanwhile, there’s a wounded clerk who’s had his hand blown off at the wrist…  His colleague comforts him by saying modern surgery can reattach his hand… And then you see a dog running away outside with the hand in its mouth…”

 

At this point I realised my colleague wasn’t laughing with me, but was looking decidedly queasy.  He didn’t seem happy to be reminded of that sequence.  Which shows humour is subjective.  Still, I think the attempted robbery in Wild at Heart is Lynch’s funniest moment.

 

© PolyGram / Propaganda Films / Samuel Goldwyn Company

 

Favourite Lynch musical bit

Lynch was a musician, so music played a big role in his films – right from Eraserhead, when the lady in the radiator sings In Heaven.  In his final major work, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the long-awaited third season of his celebrated TV show, music wasn’t so much an element as a fixture.  Each episode ended with a scene in the Roadhouse, the bar / concert venue in the town of Twin Peaks, where a musical act would be performing.  Given Twin Peaks’ small size and remote location, the Roadhouse attracted some unfeasibly big names: Julee Cruise, the Cactus Blossoms, Rebekah Del Rio with Moby on guitar, and one Edward Louis Severson – Eddie Vedder to you and me.

 

But in my opinion, the act that rounds off Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return is best of all.  It’s the fearsome electro-metal juggernaut Nine Inch Nails, whom the Roadhouse MC introduces as the Nine Inch Nails, no less.

 

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

Favourite Lynch musician in an acting role

Lynch was also fond of putting singers and musicians in his casts.  Many remember Sting playing Feyd-Rautha Harknonnen, evil nephew of the equally-evil Baron Harkonnen, in Dune.  I’m not a fan of Sting’s acting but visually, with his spiky blonde hair, lean frame and daft codpiece, he was striking.  Indeed, when I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 and Austen Butler strolled into view as Feyd-Rautha, my first thought was: “Oh look, there’s what’s-his-name in the Sting role!”

 

© Twin Peaks Productions / New Line Cinema / CiBy 2000

 

However, my favourite Lynchian musical-cameo comes in the middle of Twin Peaks’ cinematic prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).  This is when David Bowie pops up as Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent who’s been mysteriously missing for two years.  One morning, he suddenly steps out of a lift at FBI headquarters.  He proceeds to babble gibberish at FBI agents and Twin Peaks regulars Dale Cooper, Albert Rosenthal and Gordon Cole (Kyle MacLachlan, Miguel Ferrer and Lynch himself): “Who do you think this is, there…?  I found something.  And then there they were!”  Then he narrates a trippy dream montage involving dwarves, killers, masks, disembodied mouths and long-nosed spectres.  And then he vanishes into thin air.  “He’s gone!” squawks McLachlan.  “He was never here!” retorts Ferrer.

 

Bowie died early in 2016, before Twin Peaks: The Return began filming, which seemed to rule Philip Jeffries out of the third series’ storyline.  However, Lynch did include Jeffries.  Only now the disappearing agent is a giant teapot voiced by an actor called Nathan Frizell doing a Bowie impersonation.

 

David Bowie turned into a teapot.  Only David Lynch could do that.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

 

Favourite Lynch sad bit

Because of the nightmarish aspects of his works – it’s not the majority of their content, but it’s the stuff that lingers in viewers’ minds – Lynch isn’t readily associated with pathos.  Yet there are moments in his films that I find incredibly sad.  In The Elephant Man, for instance, it’s when the titular character John Merrick (John Hurt) escapes from the freak show owned by the evil Bytes (Freddie Jones), with the help of the show’s other inmates.  A dwarf, played by Star Wars’ Kenny Baker, remarks ruefully: “Luck, my friend, luck.  Who needs it more than we?”  Or in Twin Peaks: The Return when Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) says a final goodbye to the ailing Margaret Lanterman, aka the Log Lady.  This is made more poignant by knowing that Log-Lady actress Catherine Coulson died early in the third season’s production.

 

But my number-one Lynch sad moment is probably the ending of The Straight Story (1999), when Alvin (Richard Farnworth) finally makes it to the shack of his unwell brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton).  They’re two old codgers, one using walking sticks and the other a Zimmer frame, and clearly aren’t used to expressing their feelings.  But Lynch, with some basic dialogue (“Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” “I did, Lyle.”), some silence and some anxious, exhausted looks and expressions from his actors, conveys a huge amount of emotion.

 

© Asymmetrical Productions / Film4 / Buena Vista Productions

 

Favourite Lynch scary bit

Obviously, there are lots of scary bits in Lynch’s oeuvre.  I imagine he’d have been miffed if you described his works as ‘horror’ films, but he more than earned his entry in any ‘Encyclopaedia of Horror’.

 

Particularly freaky to me were several things in Twin Peaks and its 2017 sequel.  The image of Killer Bob (Frank Silva) crawling over a sofa in the original series was terrifying.  Twin Peaks: The Return featured in its first episode a strange experiment involving a big glass box and a mass of surveillance equipment that eventually conjures up a phantom entity.  Unfortunately for the guy monitoring the experiment – who’s inopportunely chosen this moment to have it off with his girlfriend – the entity is equipped with kitchen-blender fingers and It proceeds to reduce their heads to bloody confetti.  Also horrific is a sequence in a later episode wherein Deputy Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) tries to calm a hysterical woman at the wheel of a stalled car and a convulsing, vomiting zombie-like creature slowly rises out of the seat beside her.  This is never explained or referred to again – a perfect, scary Lynchian moment in other words.

 

And I remember sinking into my cinema seat, not wanting to look at the screen too much, during Lost Highway (1996), when Lynch’s camera starts prowling deep – deep – into the black recesses of the house belonging to Fred (Bill Pullman), the film’s initial hero.  That sequence had a real primordial chill to it.

 

But for my money, the scariest Lynch moment is the ‘Winkie’s Diner’ sequence in Mulholland Drive (2001).  A man sitting in the diner (Patrick Fischler) recounts two dreams he’s had, both of which take place there.  In each dream he’s been possessed by an inexplicable fear – and a man with a hideous face living behind the diner, whom he can see ‘through the wall’, seems to be responsible.  When a companion suggests he exorcises the memory of the dreams by checking behind the real diner, he reluctantly complies.  So they venture along the side alleyway, and…  What follows is one of the very few jump-scares in cinematic history that actually made me jump.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Spelling Entertainment

 

Favourite Lynch speech

Miguel Ferrer’s Albert Rosenthal, the arrogant FBI pathologist who assists Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, gets my vote here.  During the first season, Albert is very vocal about his low opinion of the town of Twin Peaks, which results in him getting punched out by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean).  During the second season, when Truman’s ready to punch him out again following a cutting jibe – “You might practise walking without dragging your knuckles on the floor” – Albert responds to the threat of violence with an impassioned speech explaining that he’s happy to be a knob-end if it helps him in the greater scheme of things, i.e. in the struggle against evil.  Oh, and he’s a committed pacifist too.

 

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet-man in the fight against violence.  I pride myself in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King.  My concerns are global.  I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation.  The foundation of such a method is love.  I love you, Sheriff Truman.”

 

No wonder Cooper tells the dumfounded Truman afterwards, “Albert’s path is a strange and difficult one.”

 

© De Laurentiis Entertainment Group

 

Favourite Lynch villain

There are a good many contenders for this too: Killer Bob in Twin Peaks, Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, and Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen in Dune, who’s basically a levitating, leering sack of pus.  But at the end of the day, my ‘Favourite Lynch Villain’ award has to go to Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet.

 

The scene where the black-clad, slick-haired Frank assaults Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) whilst acting out a deranged sexual fantasy, screaming things like “Baby wants to f**k! Baby wants to f**k blue velvet!” and slurping gas out of a canister is astonishing.  It’s made even more harrowing by the fact that the hapless Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is hiding nearby in a closet and has to witness it all.  This is the moment when the preppy, clean-cut Jeffrey discovers life is a lot more complicated, in a bad way, than he thought.  No wonder he laments: “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?”

 

So, thank you David Lynch.  Your oeuvre was sometimes comfortingly genial, sometimes perplexingly weird, sometimes shockingly dark – but it was always fascinating.  I raise a damn fine cup of coffee in your honour.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

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Thom is da bomb

 

 

I don’t know when I became a fan of the band Radiohead.  They seemed to creep up on me by stealth.  I’d been aware of them for years before suddenly, one day, I realised: “Hey! I really like them!”

 

Appropriately for a band who crept up on me, the first song by them I heard was Creep from their debut album Pablo Honey (1993).  Though a massive hit, I didn’t actually like Creep, finding it dull and plodding.  My disdain for it was shared by Radiohead themselves, with guitarist Ed O’Brien saying of their performances of the song during the early 1990s: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again.  It was incredibly stultifying.”

 

At this time I worked as a university lecturer in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo.  One day  in 1995 I received a gift from a cool indie-kid in one of my classes, Yoko Koyama, who’d discovered that despite my outward veneer of grumpiness and grouchiness I was, underneath, a sensitive soul who was heavily into music.  The gift was a cassette recording of Radiohead’s newly-released second album, The Bends.  I diplomatically accepted it, not expecting to like it much on the basis that I hadn’t been impressed by Creep.  But when I listened to it, I thought, “This is actually pretty good.”  Not brilliantly good, but definitely good.

 

Around then, Radiohead visited Sapporo and played a gig, but the night of their concert was one when I had to teach a couple of evening classes at the university.  So I missed the chance to see them.  The next day, I went into one of my regular Sapporo drinking hangouts, the Beifu-tei Bar, and got talking to a mate of mine, a Scotsman from St Andrews called Stevie Malcolm.  Stevie informed me, “Aye, thon English rock band were in here last night after their gig.  What dae ye call them?  Thingmie-heid.”

 

“You mean, Radiohead?”

 

“Aye, Radio-heid!”

 

I got the impression Stevie had chatted away to Radiohead barely knowing who they were.  Though from the band’s unconventional approach to the music industry and their discomfort with the trappings of superstardom, they probably liked chatting to strangers in bars with barely any idea of who they were.

 

In 1997 Radiohead released their third album OK Computer, which even my snobbiest, most purist music-loving friends, who’d dismissed Pablo Honey and The Bends with a contemptuous flick of the hand, had to admit was an awesome record.  It still figures prominently when music publications list the best rock albums of all time and retrospective reviews frequently award it a full five stars.  And though subsequent albums – Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001), Hail to the Thief (2003), In Rainbows (2007), The King of Limbs (2011) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) – never created quite the same stir, and often made demands on the listener by veering off into the avantgarde, experimental and left-field, I’ve found all of them laudable.

 

It helped that, unlike other bands who at various times were massively loved by audiences and hailed by critics as world-straddling musical colossi, Radiohead never seemed in your face that much.  So you didn’t grow sick of them.  Whereas for a few years U2 or Oasis, or even REM, seemed to be everywhere in the media, with the result that their ubiquity led to a backlash – the public losing interest, the critics getting disenchanted, familiarity generally breeding contempt – Radiohead were more subtle, less intrusive and lower profile.  Perhaps their credibility endured because of that.

 

Even their appearances in popular culture tended to be wry and quirky and happened in unexpected, and cool, places.  For example, I remember the very last episode of Father Ted (1995-98) when the suicidal priest Father Kevin (Tommy Tiernan) gets cured of his depression by Ted playing to him Isaac Hayes’ joyous Theme from Shaft (1971) – only to lapse back into suicidal depression when he hears Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film) (1997) playing on the radio in a bus.  Or when they turned up in a 2001 episode of South Park called Scott Tenorman Must Die and added a final layer of torment to the unfortunate Scott Tenorman of the title.  Scott is a kid who’s been tricked by Eric Cartman into eating the minced bodies of his dead parents.  When he discovers what he’s done, he understandably bursts into tears.  Just then, his favourite band, Radiohead, happen to stroll past, see him and cruelly mock him for being a ‘cry-baby’.

 

From x.com / © Hat Trick Productions

© South Park Studios

 

Anyway, last week on November 5th, Radiohead’s vocalist and main songwriter Thom Yorke rolled up here in Singapore to play a solo concert as part of his Everything tour.  Yorke has a long history of making music on his own, from his 2006 album The Eraser, through 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, to 2019’s ANIMA, and he’s also been involved in a couple of side-bands like Atoms for Peace and The Smile, so it’s not a surprise to find him performing without the rest of Radiohead.  I attended the gig accompanied by my better half, Mrs Blood and Porridge, who wouldn’t have missed this occasion for the world.  She’s such a dyed-in-the-wool Radiohead fan that the other day she even made our cat watch the video for 2016’s Burn the Witch on YouTube.

 

Yorke played at the Star Theatre, which I’ve visited a couple of times in the past.  At previous gigs there, I was not greatly impressed by the crowd, many of whom seemed more interested in filming the event on their phones than getting into the excitement and vibe of the music itself.  As I wrote a while ago about a Deep Purple concert: “Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen…?  It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage…  Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.”  But tonight’s audience, Singaporeans and foreigners alike, seemed to be genuine Radiohead fans and Thom Yorke-lovers who knew the great man wasn’t going to appreciate having a thousand phones pointed at him by a thousand glaikit dimwits.  So, thankfully, phone-usage was at a minimum.

 

It wasn’t the most physical of performances.  Yorke spent most of his time on a patch of stage encircled by musical equipment, including several keyboards, and looked like a cross between Rick Wakeman of Yes and Captain Nemo tinkling out Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on his organ.  He did, occasionally, venture towards the audience to play guitar or indulge in some shuffling dancing.  The latter drew affectionate cheers.  I have to say seeing Thom make his funky moves brought a smile to my face, as it seemed to prove there was at least one person on the planet whose dancing is even worse than mine is.

 

 

But what of the music?  I’d read a worrying review of a gig from earlier in the tour, in Sydney, where the writer observed, “Each Radiohead song that’s played – they make up just under half the setlist – is met with a hushed reverence, while loud chatter is heard every time something else gets an airing.”  Maybe that means modern-day Sydney concertgoers are disrespectful bozos, for that certainly wasn’t my impression of the Singapore crowd.  Yes, the ten Radiohead numbers he played during the set – coming from a range of the band’s albums, though nothing featured from Pablo Honey, Hail to the Thief or The King of Limbs – were enthusiastically received.  But the audience showed their appreciation of the non-Radiohead stuff as well.  This included material from all three of Yorke’s solo albums, two new songs (Back in the Game and Hearing Damage), and two he’d composed for the 2018 soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s remake of the Dario Argento 1977 horror classic Suspiria.

 

It all meshed together nicely.  The solo material evoked at different times the sounds of the Aphex Twin, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails and I even wondered if Yorke was getting a bit disco-y at one or two points.  Naturally, electronica-rooted Radiohead numbers like Idioteque, Everything in its Right Place or Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box (off Kid A) slotted in seamlessly among that lot.  Surprisingly, though, the band’s more conventional – dare I say more tuneful – songs, like How to Disappear Completely (Kid A again) Fake Plastic Trees (off The Bends), and All I Need (off In Rainbows) fitted in smoothly too, making it an impressively cohesive set.  Maybe it was because Yorke’s falsetto – often mocked, but inimitable, haunting and gorgeous – provided the aural thread that stitched together all these disparate pieces of musical cloth.

 

 

Praise is due too for the accompanying light show, with several tall screens treating the audience to dazzling and dizzying displays that, during the evening, seemed to range from daubs of luminous green graffiti to blizzards of multicoloured confetti, from drizzles of Matrix-style code to what looked like, frankly, masses of glowing spaghetti.  Occasionally, these gave way to stark white light, and darkness, where, at his consoles, Yorke looked like a torturer operating his torture-machines in a gothic dungeon.  Occasionally too, the chaotic patterns coalesced into the ghostly features of the man himself.  Thus, the show was an impressively visual as well as aural experience.  I have to say it was easier on the eyes than the screens at the previous gig I’d been to at the Star Theatre, which’d subjected me to regular, unflinching close-ups of the 78-year-old visage of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan.

 

By the concert’s end it seemed the many diehard fans in the crowd had got their money’s worth.  Their frequent cries of “I love you, Thom!” had never lessened in enthusiasm while the 22-song set wound on.  And presumably the guy who shouted, before the gig and behind us on the escalator while we rode up to the theatre’s entrance, “Please, Thom, don’t play Creep tonight!”, went home happy too.

 

A good evening, then.  It certainly took our minds off the horror that was happening elsewhere on November 5th.