Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/30/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)

Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Phoebe Augustine, Eric DaRe, Grace Zabriskie, Moira Kelly, James Marshall, Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, Kyle MacLachlan, David Bowie, Pamela Gidley, Miguel Ferrer. Screenplay: David Lynch, Robert Engels, based on the television series by Lynch and Mark Frost. Cinematography: Ronald Victor García. Production design: Patricia Norris. Film editing: Mary Sweeney. Music: Angelo Badalamenti.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was widely panned when it was released, but it has since developed a stout corps of admirers, some of whom think it's Lynch's masterpiece. I think I would have been among the naysayers when it first appeared, partly because I was never a follower of the TV series for which it's a prequel, an account of the last days of Laura Palmer, the teenager whose murder precipitated so much confusion and intrigue in the town of Twin Peaks. The film begins with another murder, that of Teresa Banks, another teenager in another town, and the investigators are not the familiar Dale Cooper and Harry S. Truman of the TV series, but Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland), who are sent on their mission by FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch) in scenes that have an off-beat enigmatic style: They're hilariously weird and played in a dead-pan artificial manner. But Lynch switches tone and style when we reach Twin Peaks a year later, shifting to his usual plausible nightmare mode. For devotees of the series, there are cameo appearances by familiar characters as well as some allusions that went over my head. But at its essence, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a straightforward story of a lost girl, caught up in a web of sex and drugs and adolescent rebellion. It seems to me that Lynch does this much better in other films, like Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), that aren't encumbered with the mythos generated by a popular TV series.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)

John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Cast: John Cameron Mitchell, Miriam Shor, Michael Pitt, Andrea Martin, Maurice Dean Wint, Ben Mayer-Goodman, Alberta Watson, Stephen Trask, Theodore Liscinski, Rob Campbell, Michael Aronov, Gene Pyrz. Screenplay: John Cameron Mitchell, based on the musical by Mitchell and Stephen Trask. Cinematography: Frank G. DeMarco. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Marcus. Music: Stephen Trask.

If nothing else, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a landmark in queer culture, a rock musical about a non-binary performer that moved from Off-Broadway to movies to a Broadway production with big-name stars like Neil Patrick Harris and Darren Criss. But is it anything else? Does it deserve to be celebrated as something other than a colorful anomaly in the usually gender-stable milieu of theater and film? Does it speak to anything enduring about humanity? I think it probably does, largely because it extended my sympathies to a portion of humanity of which I'm not a part, but that's fortunately not for me to decide. I enjoyed it, which may just be enough.