Willem Dafoe – Blood and Porridge

January 19, 2025January 19, 2025

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 15^th.

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 sounds pretty rough. 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 work – 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 dying 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 particularly 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

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024

Cultural Alasdair-isation

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023). This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992. Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector. But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out. So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel. A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s. It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow. The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature. What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do. McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films. I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too. For me, it’s his most engaging work so far. However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

Firstly, it has many good performances. Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago. I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands. Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character. They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly. But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined. Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her. Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her. While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella. Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96^th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength. Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque. One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies. I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though. Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments. Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence. They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature. Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long. And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband. At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella. He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist. Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him. Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part. (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film. As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it. One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end. This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller. She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional. She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice. What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication. Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’. However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland. Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one. And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names. This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England. When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19^th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on. When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation. Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things. I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’. Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out. (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision. Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie. Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all. How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it? It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia. Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book. That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.