Swamp Water

Written by Dudley Nichols. From Vereen Bell's novel.Directed by Jean Renoir.1941.

Jean Renoir's Swamp Water is a troublesome picture. On the one hand, it is, as The New York Times allows, Faulknerian in its scope and, despite its many off-set troubles, an intensely personal movie. On the other hand, it occasionally smacks of a certain attitude toward the backwoods southerner that falls just short of barefoot caricature. There are moments that astound--a live snake striking at Walter Brennan, a man screaming to his very last breath in a quicksand bog--and threads that confound, namely the use of "Red River Valley" as a theme song (no cowboys here by a mile) and the mythic status assigned to the swamp by the denizens along its borders. If a whole community of hunters and trappers were to spring up adjacent to a swamp, surely they'd venture into its wilderness and brave it, if only for profit? I like to imagine Dana Andrews seeing Waycross, Georgia, for the first time. It probably helped his scenes as Ben, staggering around in a lost and dangerous land.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

"Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing a man's car, that's larceny."

Written by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch. Directed by Tay Garnett.

It's old, moralistic Hollywood that comes to Frank Chambers' rescue, that sets Cora Smith's soul free out in the ocean. The screenwriters believe a confession before a priest and a late-night swim are preferable to darker, nihilistic ends for Frank and Cora, and this generosity of spirit springs from the absolute necessity for justice to be served. But get this: it's not the murderers but the Law who really comes off badly here, those supposed guardians of justice who in fact joke and gamble in the presence of a blind lady. In the end, justice may be served, but it's dirty lawyers who administer it! Ah, I love old Hollywood for just this: the moralistic restraint it imposed and the social (and moral) subterfuge that restraint inspired.

Drunken Angel

"Fall in love for someone like me. I may be scruffy but you get free medical care."

Written by Keinosuke Uekusa and Akira Kurosawa. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1948.

"Japanese make too many useless sacrifices," says Shimura's doctor, a criticism of both Mifune's Yakuza thugs who populate the dingy, disease-ridden back-alleys of Tokyo and the militarists who made them -- both the thugs and the alleys. Kurosawa's historic epics, from Seven Samurai to Kagemusha, are his calling cards, but I'll always prefer his noir. His gangsters and drunks swagger and bluster, protesting under the burden of who they are, and it's in their darkest places their humanity shines brightest. Drunken Angel climaxes with a useful sacrifice: Mifune's life for the doctor's. At the movie's end, Shimura buys one of his patients, a seventeen-year-old girl who's survived TB, a sweet, payment on a bet. "Where does one buy sweets?" the old man asks. The girl laughs. "You really don't know anything, do you. At the sweet shop." They stroll off arm in arm and are immediately lost in the marketplace, in a sea of shuffling bodies -- all the more lives the doctor may now save, thanks to a thug.

Inland Empire

"From Hollywood, California -- where stars make dreams, and dreams make stars."

Written and directed by David Lynch. 2006.

So much of the early dialogue in Inland Empire is near inaudible -- and for good reason. It isn't really necessary. For a time, words are secondary to image. This becomes less the case in the second half, as nightmarish faces and ghost-like spaces are intercut with Laura Dern's violent (and quite funny) monologues -- neat vignettes offering glimpses of character in the dark.

But words, we understand from the beginning, are not the point. Everything Lynch has ever had to say about women in trouble (the film's nifty catch-all phrase), creepy bedrooms, whores, and Hollywood is here. He's said it all before and, yes, to greater, tidier effect. But to presume he's commentating on these things is to miss the intent of Inland Empire. Lynch's subconscious is on display here, the great dark region of his mind that doesn't plot but gives birth. It's appropriate that so many of Dern's close-ups share similar composition to Lynch's photographs: the movie is more an art show occupying many galleries than it is a narrative.

I've decided what makes David Lynch a great filmmaker is his defiance of any standard other than his own. There's not a rule of cinema you can hold him to or expect him to obey. And so we're tempted to measure each new film by comparison to his others. The end credits make it plain that Lynch is aware how redundant some might see this film, how self-indulgent it might seem. But a lumberjack sawing away at a bit of wood is the nod and the wink required, I think, the compact between Lynch and viewer: now you come to this only because it is a David Lynch film, and your expectations are both fulfilled and defied.

And it's fortunate, as Lynch has said, to be an adult and still be doing what you want to do.

Wild at Heart

Lula: "One of these days the sun's gonna come up and burn a hole clean through the planet like a giant electrical x-ray.
Sailor: "I wouldn't worry about that, Peanut. By then people'll prob'ly be drivin Buicks to the moon."

Written and directed by David Lynch. 1990.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

"That's okay. I was having a bad dream anyway."

Written by Robert Engels and David Lynch. Directed by David Lynch. 1992.

Good Coop ushers Laura into the light, but he's not the Angel. Or is he? In part, maddening, how the movie resolves an incidental thing or two and, for the most part, merely fills in a few factual and emotional gaps we don't really need filled in. In the beginning, Fire Walk With Me strikes the same beats as the series: humor, oddity, mystery. But when Laura Palmer shows up, it gets dark. Much to the dismay of the cast who got cut, if you watch the documentary on the DVD. Everett "Big Ed" McGill in particular seems affected. But really: this is Laura's story, always has been. You don't need Lara Flynn Boyle to make that work. Or Audrey Horne, I'm sorry to say. These poor girls are food for monsters.

Twin Peaks

"Bobby, may I share something with you? A vision I had in my sleep last night—as distinguished from a dream, which is a mere sorting and cataloguing of the day’s events by the subconscious. This was a vision: fresh and clear as a mountain stream, the mind revealing itself to itself. In my vision I was on the veranda of a vast estate, a palazzo of some fantastic proportion. There seemed to emanate from it a light, from within this gleaming, radiant marble. I had known this place. I had, in fact, been born and raised there, and this was my first return—a reunion with the deepest wellsprings of my being. Wandering about, I noticed happily that the house had been immaculately maintained. There had been added a number of additional rooms, but in a way that blended so seamlessly with the original construction, one would never detect any difference. Returning to the house’s grand foyer, there came a knock at the door. My son was standing there. He was happy and carefree, clearly living a life of deep harmony and joy. We embraced—a warm and loving embrace, nothing withheld. We were, in this moment, one. My vision ended. I awoke with a tremendous feeling of optimism and confidence in you and your future. That was my vision. It was you."

Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. 1990-1991.

David Lynch, like our hero Agent Dale Cooper, sees things: the horror in a ceiling fan winking in the dark or the slow, portentous change of a stoplight from green to yellow to red. Cooper sees Douglas firs soughing in the wind, a snowshoe rabbit, a hog reflected in a dead girl's eye. With his Old Hollywood love of femme fatales and drop-top cars, Lynch is, like Coop, at heart, a believer. In a town where murder and torment are commonplace, Agent Cooper shores up the darkness with coffee and pie. ("Harry," he tells the sheriff, "I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.") But Lynch also has a shadow-self -- the Dweller on the Threshold -- and his doppleganger is nothing if not a skeptic. In the final episode of Season 2, these two selves meet and do battle, just as Special Agent Cooper confronts his own dark self in the waiting room of the Black Lodge. Coop meets the challenge with perfect courage, offering up his soul as sacrifice for Annie's; the end result of that offer proves the Major's greatest fear to be prophetic: love might not be enough.

Or is it?

Blue Velvet

"In dreams, I walk with you. In dreams, I talk to you. In dreams, you're mine, all the time. Forever. In dreams..."

Written and directed by David Lynch. 1986.

David Lynch's bedroom closet is full of monsters. Isabella Rossellini opens her legs for Dennis Hopper and falls into Kyle MacLachlan's arms. I love the world these characters inhabit, the idyllic town of Lumberton where, according to the W.O.O.D. radio announcer, "there's a whole lotta wood waitin out there..." Indeed. Indeed.

Lost Highway

"I had a dream about you last night."

Written by Barry Gilford and David Lynch. Directed by David Lynch. 1997.

"I like to remember things my own way," says Fred. "How I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened." Seems that's the key to figuring out the enigma of Lost Highway. You might say Lynch was working out an idea here that he would perfect in Mulholland Dr.: the murder of one's lover and the rationalizing fantasy that follows (only, in Mulholland Dr., the fantasy comes first and the murder is the reveal). Here, instead of killing himself afterward, Bill Pullman ends up in jail, and in jail he breaks from reality, is reborn innocent (complete with new body and identity), and proceeds to reconstruct the pieces of his past in order to justify the murders he's committed -- his wife's and her lover's, a man named Dick Laurent, aka Mr. Eddy. Or is Mr. Eddy, like platinum-blonde Alice, just a fantasy, substituting for Andy (Eddy/Andy), whom Pullman suspected of cheating with his wife at the beginning of the film (it's hinted at that he discovers their infidelity in room 26 of the mysterious Lost Highway Hotel)? Either way, the video camera wielded by creepy Robert Blake is a lot like the little blue box and key in Mulholland Dr. It's the signifier of memory, one that Fred ultimately rejects in favor of his own re-creation. It's creepy as hell.

Also: nobody makes sunshine and breezes as frightening as David Lynch.

Mulholland Dr.

"I had a dream about this place."

Written and directed by David Lynch. 2001.

Mulholland Dr. is a movie about Hollywood. As such, it fits snugly into a category of films that's one of my favorites: the dream factory dreaming of itself. Lynch's major entry into this sub-genre is specifically about achieving some sense of identity in a place that subverts identity on a regular basis, promoting some to stardom and discarding others. For Diane, one of the discarded, it's about wish-fulfillment, dreams come true. Which is, in the end, if not reality, Hollywood. All the rest -- magic keys and scary old people and dimly lit apartments -- are just the trappings of truth.

Bad Day at Black Rock

"You're not only wrong. You're wrong at the top of your voice."

Written by Don McGuire and Millard Kaufman. Based on a story by Howard Breslin. Directed by John Sturges. 1955.

Nowadays, Hollywood manufactures Molotov cocktails by the twelve-packs, so it's something special when Spencer Tracy makes just one -- with his necktie.

Bonnie and Clyde

"You know what you done there? You told my story, you told my whole story right there, right there. One time, I told you I was gonna make you somebody. That's what you done for me. You made me somebody they're gonna remember."

Written by David Newman and Robert Benton and Robert Towne (uncredited). Directed by Arthur Penn. 1967.

Bonnie and Clyde startles in its silences, its awkward moments, its missing pieces, sometimes literally, when the edits are rough, the frames just not there -- as if the filmmakers, too, lack the full and cohesive picture of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Of course, don't we all. Theirs is a story that intersects gloriously between fact and fiction, truth and myth. And Arthur Penn's movie is a brilliant, unforgettable telling of that story myth.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

"I've been no place I wanna go back to, that's for damn sure."

Written by Frank Kowlaski, Sam Peckinpah, and Gordon T. Dawson. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. 1974.

Warren Oates is too cool to live, and -- unfortunately -- such is the end.

The Big Sleep

"You know what he'll do when he comes back? Beat my teeth out, then kick me in the stomach for mumbling."

Written by William Faulkner. From the novel by Raymond Chandler. Directed by Howard Hawks. 1946.

In praise of style above all else here, and there's nothing but praise for this: it's nifty the way Marlowe and Ohls light up in that hallway. Marlowe tosses his match to the floor. Behind him are a cigarette bin and a firehose. Almost as nifty as a tossed salute from a doorway to the tune of "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine."