“Get Your Money’s Worth” Vol. 4

I’ve subjected myself to quite the emotional rollercoaster over the last week in terms of viewing.

Below is everything I watched in the last week, there’s more television on it than you will probably see for the rest of the year, but it is all in service of exploring the work of David Lynch.

Inland Empire, David Lynch, Criterion Channel

Old Joy, Kelly Reichardt, Criterion Channel

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, David Lynch, Criterion Blu-Ray

Crash, David Cronenberg, Criterion Blu-Ray

Past Lives, Celine Song, Blu-Ray

Wild at Heart, David Lynch, Blu-Ray

The last eight episodes of the original run of Twin Peaks

Part 1-4 of Twin Peaks: The Return

Emotional Turmoil is the name of the game this week; open your hearts and embrace the pain. For the sake of discussion, the Past Lives bit will have some spoilers for the film, please give it a watch before you read that section.

Past Lives dir. Celine Song

I am the sort of person who invests far too much emotional energy into wondering what could have gone differently. In life, in love, in friendship, hell I think about it when I consider ways I spoke to a customer at work. It is a common question for many of us “If something broke a different way, what does my life look like?” The next question on someone’s mind is “Can I ever get back to that place?”

Past Lives wrestles with those two questions as Nora and Hae Sung have a significant distance wedged between them; both emotional distance and the thousands of miles between Seoul and New York. That emotional distance is manifested in Nora’s commitment to her life in New York and her husband, Arthur, portrayed wonderfully by John Magaro. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo’s performances as Nora and Hae Sung are so measured and handled with an incredible amount of grace. To convey a degree of heartbreak, longing, and resolve without turning things into a shouting match takes so much care and talent as an actor. The ostensible “love triangle” of the film doesn’t feel like a threat to the marriage of Arthur and Nora. I never felt that the story wanted to pit Arthur against Hae Sung, but instead wanted to pit Nora against Hae Sung’s idea of Nora.

A script written by a lesser writer would fall into typical conventions of a romantic drama, infidelity, abuse, and manipulation. Celine Song doesn’t commit any of these genre faux pas’ because the film is very autobiographical for her and because she understands that, for most people, quiet resignation is a standard response. Down to the framing of the Past Lives and how it is so often shot at a middle distance with minimal movement, the filmmaking reminds you that some distances are next to impossible to traverse. While two long-time friends separated by thousands of miles and 24 years who are finally reunited in the same place is a fantastic conceit for a story, many people are confronted with a similar feeling just with a shorter distance and less time. Song does an excellent job of displaying these very real experiences and emotions in the film, even if the rest of us aren’t writers married to writers, our conversations are less eloquent. 

Past Lives is just really beautiful and I will be talking about it with my therapist. Give it a shot if you want a very moving weeknight watch.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me dir. David Lynch

I’m about 33 years late to the party. The first time I saw an episode of Twin Peaks was sometime around 2017 when the series was still on Netflix and I wasn’t able to push through what I perceived as an awkward tone. This past week I finally finished the original run of the series and Fire Walk With Me while along the way watching almost everything else that David Lynch has put on the big screen (I’ll get around to the shorts eventually). In this journey of watching all of his films, I have fallen in love with the “Lynchian” tone and learned a lot about myself and this odd fella making beautiful and gut-wrenching films.

When you take in a single episode of Twin Peaks without the context of the series and the rest of Lynch’s work, it’s not difficult to see why people bump up against his films or go as far as to boo his films at a festival screening. The more you dig into his work, a common thread of pure evil emerges. Bob, Frank Booth, Robert Blake’s haunting visage; all are versions of this pure evil and cruelty that exists in the world. They commit heinous acts of violence and torture the protagonists of his films both physically and mentally. No one in the Lynch canon experiencing the degree of pain and torture that Laura Palmer does.

Through the first season of Twin Peaks, we see the tragedy and mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder unravel and learn more about who she was outside of delivering for Meals on Wheels and winning the Miss Twin Peaks pageant. But she is ultimately an unknown figure; one who we don’t get to see outside of a few scenes in the Black Lodge or in the face of her cousin Maddy. How she reached that tragic ending is eventually revealed in season two, but there is much left to be discovered. It is in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that we learn about the days leading up to Laura’s death and see one of the most tragic endings for a character you can imagine.

In the days leading up to Laura’s demise, you see David Lynch’s deep love and empathy for the character on full display. She very rarely gets to have a happy moment in the film, but when she does she is filmed so lovingly and is absolutely radiant. For the rest of the runtime when she is being put through hell, you sense that it is unbelievably painful for Sheryl Lee and Lynch to have to endure this. Lynch loved Sheryl’s performance so much that he developed a character to appear in a few episodes of the original series just so she could be on the screen as a real person instead of a photograph over the end credits. These egregious acts aren’t here to be watched in a voyeuristic and perverse way like many horror movies (a lot of which I like; I must admit that I love a slasher movie) but instead, they serve as reminders that there is a wickedness in those woods.

The Oxford English Dictionary added the term “Lynchian” into its collection in 2018 adding the note “Lynch is noted for juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace”. Fire Walk With Me is certainly a dream, and a horrific one at that, down to replacing Lara Flynn Boyle with Moira Kelly as Donna Hayward which adds to that feeling that something is very wrong here. The film combines the feeling of weightlessness and being untethered with a bombasting and chaotic ending to drive home the fear of what exists in this world or in our minds. I adored it, a five-star masterpiece. I wish I had the words to express just how deeply moving and emotional the experience of watching Fire Walk With Me is, but I think it is better to experience it for yourself instead.