![]() ![]() They are impossibly shrill and often sound identical, but convey different purposes: the same scream in an early scene transitions from a fear over a loved one being killed to a fear of that loved one killing another, and later we have the same theatrical screaming to convey at various points fan-girlish theater, insanity ripped visually out of The Shining (in a none-too-subtle mockery of the way films revel in blood even as they use obviously, garishly opulent reds that more closely resemble lipstick than the real deal), and pure cold-hearted movie villainy. One notable element is repetition, captured subtly in the overpowering presence of women screaming throughout the film. At one point, the camera cuts to Nicolas Cage’s character dressed in a completely black outfit, sunglasses hiding any semblance of humanity, and a cigarette there because it would be cool for there to be one, and he lays the film’s intentions out for us as clear as the too-bright daylight around him: “what the hell am I doing here?”Īnd this is to say nothing of the film’s audio work, which conveys dreamlike detachment and formalistic distance even as it puts us in the trenches of the film’s non-environment. ![]() The film throws and spews its visual palpitations at us in the most cavalier manner possible. Lynch is just more proud about his showing off and wants to let us know he’s doing exactly that, while other films try to hide it. And yet, as displayed here, that is exactly what The Wizard of Oz was doing in 1939, and exactly what every film does in a sense – combining artificial images to produce something that catches the eye and grabs the attention, even when they try desperately to approximate reality. Case in point: the references to The Wizard of Oz serve essentially no purpose other than to show off. You’re excused for wiping the sweat off your face while I go on to mention how the whole film is all very open about its artificiality. ![]() Flashbacks, inserts, all manner of foggy lighting, distorted fish-eye lens, stagey background work, cartoon-character dress-up, visual repetition, color-coding, lurid melodrama, kitschy satire, pop-culture smorgasbord, campy soap opera, all manner of deranged The Wizard of Oz references, and whatever Lynch had for breakfast that morning. ![]() But on top of this, Lynch has a field-day. So then, what does cinematic circus master David Lynch pull out of bag of tricks this time? Well the narrative, functionally, is just two kids head-over-heels in love, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern), on the run from mother-dearest, Marietta Fortune (Diane Ladd) – it’s a road movie about escaping suburbia. And they’d be completely right too, but I still like the film anyway. Everyone else who could conceivably see this film will probably be turned off by how garishly oppressive and gloriously messy it is to have any interest in reading this. A question: Have you ever seen a movie that made you want so furiously to scribble down notes about its greatness while watching that you were actually annoyed that it kept you looking at the screen with its unapologetic greatness to the point of being unable to write anything down legibly? I ask in this form, of course, because naturally I’m only writing to people who would want to write down notes about movies while watching. ![]()
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