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annab-nana · 5 years ago

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About Damn Time - Colby Brock

At Playlist, both y/n and Colby are busy meeting their fans and doing several different events, but the fans keeping bugging Colby about him still not having asked y/n out yet.

Warnings: some curse words

Word Count: 2.4k+

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"Omg y/n! Hi! I can't believe I'm finally meeting you!" A fourteen-year-old blonde girl with big green eyes beamed at me as she almost ran to me and fell into my open arms.

"I can't believe I'm meeting you! It is so much more exciting to meet you, I promise. What's your name, love?" I ask her as I hold onto her as tightly as she is doing to me. I will never get over this feeling of meeting all these people who support me. They have no idea the impact they have on my life.

"Annabeth, but most people call me AB," she gushed as we pulled away from the embrace.

"Well AB, I am so happy I got the pleasure to meet you," I say as I hold onto her hand. She smiles at me before pulling out a beautiful yellow gift bag with white sparkly tissue paper coming out the top.

"This is for you!" she exclaimed as she handed me the gift.

"Oh my goodness, you didn't have to get me anything. They won't let me open it here because of time, but I'll send you a video of me opening it because I'm sure you wanted to see me do that. What's your Instagram?" I tell her.

"I wrote it on the letter in the bag," she informed me, and I nodded.

"Smart thinking. I like that. Okay, now it's picture time." I say with a wink. We turn to the camera and take a few pictures. We take a normal one, just standing next to each other. Then one where I kissed her cheek and one where she kissed mine. Then we took one where we hugged each other really tight and had huge smiles on our faces. Lastly, we took one where she got on my back, like a piggyback ride, and we made silly faces. I sat her back down and we hugged each other goodbye.

"Don't forget to send me those pictures later!" I shouted at her as she walked away.

"I won't!" She screamed back as she waved. I waved back as another teenage girl walked up with her younger brother with her.

"Hey!" I shout, restarting the routine and meeting more people.

...

"Bye Mason!" I shout to the last person I met at my meet and greet as he walks away. We wave at each other before I turn around to Lillie, my manager.

"Drink some water. We will get all of the gifts and things together and drop them off at your hotel room. But you need to hurry. Your Q&A panel with Sam, Colby, and Jake starts in five minutes and is on the opposite side of the building." She informs me as she hands me a cold water bottle and my eyes widen at the last bit of information.

"I have to be across this huge place in five minutes?" I worry. This building is enormous and there is absolutely no way I can make it there in time.

"You'll make it if you head over there now," Lillie reassures me, noticing who anxious I got. She nods her head in the direction for me to start heading in and pats me on the back, signaling me to go. I started walking to the panel, but I knew I wasn't going to make it if I walked, so I ran.

"Y/n! Where are you going?" I heard a familiar voice ask me. I turn around to see my tall, curly brown-headed friend that I met through TikTok.

"Hey Merrick! I'm in a hurry so if you want to talk, you're going to have to run with me." I tell him as I catch my breath for a quick minute.

"I have a better idea," he tells me as he turns around and squats down, "hop on." I laugh as I do as he said, climbing onto his back. As soon as he stood all the way up, I felt like I was really far away from the ground. Merrick is a lot taller than Colby and Colby is the tallest person I've ever piggybacked on. He has to be a little over half a foot taller than Colby.

"Where to?" He asked, turning his neck to see my face.

"Conference room 1017, please." I chirped and he nodded before taking off. His long legs and army background definitely moved way faster than I ever could. My arms tightened around his neck to hold me steady and he gripped onto my thighs better to ensure I wouldn't fall. I giggled the whole way there until we finally arrived at my destination.

"Thanks, Merrick! I owe you one," I say as I give him a quick friendly kiss on the cheek and slide off his back.

"No problem. We need to catch up later when you aren't busy running around this place." We chuckle and I hug him quickly before walking in. I head to the back where the boys are.

"There she is!" Jake says as he and the others walk up to me.

"Sorry guys. My meet and greet went on longer than expected and then I was going to have to run all the way over here, but Merrick came and saved the day." I explain. The three of them nod understandingly as some guy tells us it's time to head out there.

"Come on guys," Sam says as he leads the way. We walk onto the stage as the crowd of fans scream. The four of us wave at everyone as we make our way to the table where Levi, a Playlist worker, sits with four empty seats beside him. We each take our seat before saying hey and beginning with the questions.

"From @golbrockjakeyscherer: Y/n, since you weren't in the first trap house, what are you most and least excited about in moving to the second one?" Levi reads from the question card before looking at me. The boys have cheeky little grins on their faces, ready to hear my answer. I giggle before speaking.

"Umm... I'm most excited about living with my best friends and all the memories and fun times we will have and I'm least excited about the fact that the boys are going to lose the prank war. Am I right?" I answer, receiving chuckles from everyone and some rolled eyes from the guys next to me.

"Someone is mighty confident," Sam comments.

"Sure am. You guys are going down," I add. Colby lets out a scoff and rolls his eyes once more causing me to laugh, making him smile.

Levi goes around asking each of the guys a question and then it is my turn again.

"From @ynandthetrapbois: Since you are a skilled TikTok dancer, which one of the guys do you think is the best dancer on TikTok?" He asked me before looking up at me from the question card.

"Well, I'm not going to say Corey because he isn't here and is a better dancer than any of us but..." I drag out as my gaze shifts between the three beside me. "Sam is out. Sorry buddy," I say, and he frowns and pouts.

"But between Jake and Colby, I'm going to have to say the best is Jake. Sorry Colbs," I tell him as I pat his back. Jake has a childish grin on his face, happy with his victory.

The questions go around to all the boys until it is back to me.

"From @taralicious: Y/n, have you ever kissed Colby?" Levi smirks a little after reading that one.

"Uh yes I have but you all saw that. It was for a video. The one Colby pranks Sam and Corey saying he finally got a girlfriend but that's the only time I kissed him." I say.

"What about that night we were really drunk?" Colby whispers to me, forgetting the microphone is right in front of him. I smack him on the leg before responding.

"They asked if I had ever kissed you. You made that move, not me." I tell him which causes him to blush hard and the fans notice it, giggling at his adorable embarrassment. I join in on the laughter as well.

I watch as Levi reads the next question for Jake and he begins answering it. As he speaks, I notice Sam nudge Colby, nodding his head in the direction of the crowd. Colby's ocean blue eyes follow that direction and he smiles, his cheeks tinting red again. I allow my eyes to go where his were to see what the two were snickering about and notice a few fans with signs. Once I read them, I realize what the boys are giggling about. One read, "What are you waiting for?" Another said, "Just ask her out already." The last one had, "Y/n + Colby," written on it. My reaction was similar to Colby's, a smile and slight blush.

After Jake's question, Sam gets asked about our next series and then it was Colby's turn.

"From @babybrock: Colby, why haven't you asked y/n out yet?" Levi smiles hugely after that one. The girls holding those signs in the back scream, "yeah!" That blush that has been repeatedly showing up on Colby's cheeks revealed itself again as did his cheeky grin.

"Umm, I don't know why. I just haven't. But don't worry, I will someday. Someday soon hopefully," Colby softly speaks into the microphone in front of him. The audience coos at his words and I blush and smile.

We finish up our Q&A and separate to do our different events. I walk along the halls before hearing that same voice from earlier.

"So, you've downgraded to just regular walking now?" Merrick says from behind me. I smile as I turn around.

"Yeah, I'm not in as much of a hurry as I was last time. Thanks for that by the way. There was no possibility of me making it there without you and your long-ass legs," I chuckle as he smiles and nods.

"No problem. Are you going to any of the parties later tonight?" He questioned. I shrugged in response.

"I might. I know Tara wants to go and she will probably drag me into it. But honestly, as much as I love Playlist, it is tiring me out." I fill him in.

"I feel that. It can be very exhausting, but I love every minute of it." He told me and I nod in agreement. Before we could talk any longer, my phone starts buzzing in my hand. Lillie's calling me.

"I'll talk to you later, okay?" I assure him and he nods. We wave at each other before I answer the phone.

"Hey, Lillie!" I chirped into the phone.

"Hey y/n, so the other panel that you were supposed to be a part of got canceled so you are free for the rest of the day." She informed me.

"Okay, thanks!" I tell her before we hang up. Well now that I have some free time, I think I'm going to head up to my room and start filming me opening those gifts for the people that brought them. So that exactly what I did.

...

"Awwwww AB! I love this. You didn't tell me you were artistic," I gush as I admire the gorgeous artwork. She had made this amazing watercolor painting of her and me.

"This is definitely going up in my room when I get home. You should think about going into art. You have some promising skills here, Annabeth," I say to my phone camera that I had propped up on the tv stand of the hotel room. I sat the artwork to the side as I pulled more wonderful things out of the bag. It's crazy to me how well my followers know me. As I open a small box, I hear someone knock at my door.

"One second AB, I'll be right back," I whisper to my phone as I walk to the door. Getting on my tiptoes, I peek through the peephole to see who it was. Mr. Cole Robert Brock. I swing the door and let him in.

"Hey, I wanted to talk to you about something that was discussed earlier," Colby informs me as he scratches the back of his head nervously. The act made nervousness and anxiety flow through my body, scared about what was about to happen.

"Okay," my voice sounded shaky to me, but he didn't seem to notice. We sat down on separate beds, facing each other.

"So, you know how the fans really want us to be together? You know as in a couple?" His voice sounded shaky and nervous as well. I nodded my head and felt a small bit of hope. Was he about to finally do it and ask me out?

"Well, I was wondering if you wanted to get together for them? It wouldn't be anything real. Just for social media." As soon as the words fell from his beautifully parted lips, my heart fell and shattered. Its pieces were at ground level with my feet.

"I'm sorry Colbs. I can't do that," I tell him as I keep my gaze focused on the ground. Colby is not the type of guy who would ask me to do that, but I guess he isn't the type of guy I thought he was.

"Good because I was kidding. I want to be with you because I like you, y/n. So, will you be with me?" He snickers as he speaks and a huge smile spreads across my face.

"Of course, I'll be with you, Colbs," I say as he stands up, pulling me up to him and swinging around with me in his arms as giggles escape my lips. He sat me down back on the ground and stared into my eyes as he pushed some stray hairs behind my ear.

"I'm taking you out tonight, okay?" he questioned me, and I nodded as he headed for the door before leaving so we could each get ready. As I turned around, I noticed I was still filming.

"Oh my goodness, AB, I forgot I was filming," I say as I sat down where I previously was. I chuckle at my own stupidity as I continue with the video and finish opening her gift to me.

"Well AB, you are going to get a very interesting video," I say as I wink at the camera before ending the recording. As soon as I finish, I get a Twitter notification from Colby.

Colby @ColbyBrock i finally did it guys

A giggle escapes my lips as my fingers type away to reply to the tweet.

Y/n @y/n Replying to @ColbyBrock about damn time

#colby #Sam and Colby #colby brock #cole robert brock #cute colby #cute colby brock #colby brock imagine #fanfic #colby brock fanfic #colby brock fanfiction #colby brock x reader #y/n #tara yummy #Corey Scherer #sam golbach #jake webber #merrick beaumont #TRAPHOUSE #xplr

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prcttylittlethings-a · 3 years ago

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@mctionsick said | 🛋 for your character to curl up with mine / from leo !

ft. adult office verse meo bc i said so.

“remind me to send you to the pta meeting next time,” merrick announced, crashing down next to her husband on the bed - he’d been the one to stay home with the kids while she listened to yet another smackdown about food allergies. she kicked her shoes off, rolling onto her stomach so she could bemoan her evening - “maybe you can talk some sense into these people - i don’t think a single one of them listened to me remind them that we all did just fine with our gluten and sugar back in the day.”

#i had to use the gif it was 2 cute not to #( m ) merrick wood #( opp ) leo beaumont #v. beauty in ordinary things #mctionsick #how much of ur tag is just me making starters

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mctionsick · 4 years ago

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closed starter for @xonefamiliarsoul

Leo was going absolutely mad with boredom at his desk. He made a few sales calls already and even pulled in a new client. All things considered that was a productive day for a drowning paper company. Leo finds his gaze drifting just past his desk mate and to the receptionist who is often stealing away his attention. Leo hardly minds though, Merrick makes the days go by so much quicker.

“What are you looking at, slacker? Don’t you have sales to blow.” With that Leo is up out of his chair and making his way towards the front desk and involuntarily smiles at Merrick as he leans forward to speak to her. “I need to prank him. It’s been over a week. I’m having withdrawals.”

#player 1: leonard beaumont #leo & merrick (thread)#leo (thread)#verse: beauty in ordinary things

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riddledeep · 6 years ago

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LIST OF GEN 2 PIXIES

Offspring of Fergus Whimsifinado (Head Pixie the First) from Sanderson to Southmark. Most are interchangeable, but notable characters are bolded and marked with an asterisk.

Alternatively, click HERE to view a Google Sheet that lists the Gen 2 pixies, their ages during the frozen timestream, ages compared with Anti-Cosmo, and age difference from Sanderson (Basically a prettier and better organized version of this post).

This is a quick reference tool I made for author purposes and ages are not 100% exact to the year (H.P. doesn’t have his pixies exactly on the 500 year mark, after all).

*Fergus Whimsifiando - Head Pixie the First (Gen 1)

*Ennet Sanderson - Vice president of customer service; head of complaints department; H.P.’s personal assistant; Ivorie brand cowlick

*Cecil Hawkins - Sucks his thumb; has a bad hand; does budgeting work

*Alapin Wilcox - Fagigglyne addict; runs emergency response team

*Markell Longwood - Vice President of Pixies Inc. and H.P.’s heir

*Mitchell Caudwell - Foop’s therapist at Wish Fixers

*James Bayard - Kind of a goofball; marketing team

*Luke Madigan - H.P.’s personal secretary; likes birds; especially sneaky; needed glasses early

Oliver Graham - Pixie neotype in Eros Nest

Walter Keefe - In-vitro baby; has dysolfactya; manages the Labyrinth

Hunter Springs - Had a surrogate father

*Elliot McKinley - Extremely religious

Ralston - Emergency response team; annoying suck-up

Walters - Puts everyone else first; rooms with Caudwell/Bayard/Madigan

Thane - Tinkers with mechanics; texts smiley faces

*Charlie Palomar - H.P.’s favorite child; works at Wish Fixers (Born at the end of H.P.’s midlife crisis; represents healing in his mind)

Cinna - Architect; appears in “Make You Proud” and “Rain Dance”

Kaufman - Known for his short temper

Saddler - Works with the Big Wand in Fairy World; Ivorie brand cowlick

Abernathy - Does concept test work; chronic scapegoat

*Darius Smith - Gyne; Chief Pixie of PixieCo (in Hawthorn Haven)

Tindall - Works in retail

Butler - Personally attends to big-name visitors like ambassadors

Keight

Scott

Clark

Phillips

Richards

Ross

*Newman - Security; large “bouncer”; fastest; Ivorie brand cowlick

*Hamilton - Security; large “bouncer”; strongest; Ivorie brand cowlick

*Faust - Security; large “bouncer”; dumbest; Ivorie brand cowlick

Roberts

Wolfram

Carmichael - Judged diving competition in “Fairly Oddlympics” (“Make You Proud”)

Lee

Wright

Fisher

Brown

Middleton

Ward

Lloyd

Shaw

Cox

Powell

Chapman

Walsh

Dalton

Jones

Taylor

Matthews

Thomson

Miller

O'Neil

Walton

Burns

Perry

Hayes

Baxter

Johnson

Atkins

Colby

Higgins

Bates

Skinner

Marconi - Works on Sanderson’s floor (“Terrible Timing”)

Ford

Wilkes

Hanson

Devlin

Rawlings

Lovell

Heaton

Collier

Stanton

Bowman

Carey

Aldred

Cummings

Beaumont

*Herman Jardine - Gardener; likes Batman; POV guy of “Name”

Hirschi - Born under elephant statue at the golf course (Baby, You’re a Rich Man)

Wainwright

Devine

Conway

Edmonds

Hackett

Fielding

Knott

Manson

McKay

Duckley

Plume

Calvert

Hale

Dowling

Pike

Beck

Millburn

Ryans

Pemberton

York

Westing

Redmond

Proctor

Squires

Penn

Sahlberg

Moore

Humphrey

McAdams

Jensen

Webber

Brooks

Iyer

Kinsley

Martel

Craven

Polluck

Rothwell

Booth

Candless

Hobson

Oldfield

Gallowey

Dougal

*Jackie Cresswell - Pixie/Anti-Pixie relations; gyne

Haddock

Alderson

Windsor

Clough

Ohara

Jackson

Keane

Lewin

Crowley

Marr

Benfield

Stanford

Wale

Emmerson

Prescott

Montague

Kipling

Howe

Milford

Foulkes

Clifton

O'Donell

Tipping

Saville

Sherry

Ashby

Lawther

Carnegie

Purnell

Dover

*Rudyard Chidlow - Pixie-Human relations; gyne

Kilmurry

Fallon

Thomas

Dallas

Merrick

Oak

Yardley

Levett

Cahill

Beckett

Peake

Haker

Patchett

Ellerby - Demoed preening with Longwood in Frayed Knots

Hartshorn

Cawley

Wilmot

Vale

Henley

Astley

Cunliffe

Walling

Hatsfield

Parkins

O'Halloran

Craddock

Rogan

McFarlene

Southam

Wilkshire

Marland

Colebrook

Kimber

Starnes

Cobb

Rackham

Enright

McAlpine

Dunne

Draper

Mansell

Monroe

Cowan - Marketing (“Solo”)

Larson - Thematic maps of magic usage (“Solo”)

Woolley

Preece

Glenn - Got H.P.’s coffee wrong once so H.P. pretends he’s dead

Dickinson

Steadmon

Dawe

McDaniel - Appears in the Origin chapter “Mother’s Touch”

Lomas

Thatcher

Hutchings

Adamson

Wilkes

Lenninger

Meadows

Dalby

Birch

Travers

Tierney

Driscoll

Stamp

Ingram

Winters

Cottrell

O'Leary

Sampson

Royle

Whitaker

Caton

Laycock

Steel

Ricci

Carter

Pierce

Harris

Feldman

Brunet

Rush

Hinckley

Partington

Gillett

Hyde

Stretton

Darter

Banner

Orchad

Xanders

Haywood

Shipley

Chalmers

Groves

Milward

Ansell

Boulton

Quikley

Lockwood

Keating

Marlowe

Samuels

Cowdery

Orme

Leith

Lander

Court

Foley

Rixon

Toland

Lomax

McCall

Chatton

Wakefield

Tyrer

Mistry

Ricketts

Bower

Peck

Hartman

Swales

Woodford

Blakey

Grant

Kimball

Raeburn

Tailor

Holt

Rowlinson

O'Dell

Benson

Coburn

Rutherford

Winstanley

Lancer - Lancer and above are taller than Sanderson as of “Name”

Torres - Sanderson is taller than Torres and below as of “Name”

Pinnock

Bristow

Lilley

*Flint Spicer - Gyne

Worrall

Archer

Oates

Matheson

Fairburne

Rutter

Nicholls

Shand

Mallinson

Harker

Farnsworth

Mears

Tweddle

Falconer

Milett

Stout

Rasborne

Alpert

O'Malley

Baldwin

Featherstone

Bloom

Whitway

Bensigner

Fitton

Shackleton - Last pixie born before War of the Angels (Fae Wars)

Kingston - Born during war

Sterling - Born during war

Sweeny - Born during war

Andrews - Born during war

Gilbey - Born during war

Markham - Born during war

*Weskar - Deceased

*Dayflower Commelina - Flower child

Burton

Kerridge

Otten

Pattel

Bleeker

Norcross

Jake

Newberry

Hemming

Oxley

Dodds

Nelms

Steward

Hatton

Sunley

Imsodon

Noidees

Trying

Hartford

Klever

Ness

Hayles

Spoons

Kettel

Avery

Brookfeld

Keywood

Highridge

Skene

Elliston

Orritt

Lincoln

Sheldon

Lovett

Conrad

Killock

*Nathaniel Lambton - Gyne

Fernley

Sellers

Aherne

Tidmarsh

Stammers

Briggon

Harrows

Gammon

Knowler

Ketley

Rodwell

Beresford

Sorrell

Handcock

Geary

Kinch

Ainsworth

Lendon

Houlton

Danby

Chaser

Applebee

Blushden

Kerby

Patton

Locke

Gann

Somerville

Jericho

Markwell

Porter

Penham

Linley

Quinton

Jasper

Langford

Dolan

Underwood

Cunningham

Littlefield

Klein

Lifsey

Jeffreys

Dell

Sewell

*Mullins - Tolbert’s older twin

*Tolbert - Mullins’ younger twin

Lake

Rivers

Carey

Docker

Collinson

Shepherd

Drew

Ianson

Lindstrom

Dunmore

Wellman

Calderwood

Kinnison

Dyerson

Burrow

Chance

Downey

Carlile

Sumner

Willetts

Shuttleworth

Lendon

Castel

Slattery

Godwin

Buckland

Shannon

Leeding

Dowler

Wheatcroft

Birkett

Stokes

Briden

Crossan

Varley

Leeson

Percival

Dimmock

Milton

Sawden

Lillfell

Davy

Elphick

Peterson

Michaels - Born under elephant statue at the golf course (Baby, You’re a Rich Man)

Reid

Marland

Everton

Winfer

Simmons

Norgate

Kysel

Richter

Truman

Walsh

Branting

Derrien

Swanson

Burlinson

*Melvin Kettingham - Gyne

Teal

Kress

Pendleton

Roper

Brace

Showell

Dymott

McKeller

Strauss

Roman

Marshfield

Scammell

Cortes

Swatton

Green

Morse

Spearing

Steeper

Grayson

Cane

Sherwin - Last pixie mentioned in Origin of the Pixies

Stockdale - Born post-Origin of the Pixies

Zachman

Bell

Cooper

Carson

Putnam

William Snow - Scored 10/10/9 in gymnastics (“Make You Proud”)

*Addison Rosencrantz - Local screw-up

Marcus Verona - Skilled for his age and smug about it

*Gavin Finley - Poof’s, Foop’s, and Sammy’s roommate; gyne; tomte

Jordan Southmark - H.P. babies him since he’s his youngest

Click HERE for my Fairly OddParents worldbuilding masterpost

#Fairly Oddparents #Cloudlands AU #RD Pixie stuff #RD Head Pixie #RD Sanderson #RD Longwood #RD Finley #RD general #RD art #RD canon characters #RD side characters

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howling--fantods · 7 years ago

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An Excerpt of the Essay: David Lynch Keeps His Head by David Foster Wallace

I know a lot of you love David Lynch and this is an EXCELLENT defense and deconstruction of his work. The full essay is largely about the film Lost Highway, which was about to be released, and is 67 pages with 61 footnotes. The whole essay is incredibly entertaining and if you like to read, is worth it. You can find it here: x. This excerpt mainly concerns Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I put the footnotes at the end, I know it isn’t ideal, but it is hard when there aren’t pages.

9A. The cinematic tradition it’s curious that nobody seems to have observed Lynch comes right out of (w/ an epigraph)

“It has been said that the admirers of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari are usually painters, or people who think and remember graphically. This is a mistaken conception.”

—Paul Rotha, “The German Film”

Since Lynch was trained as a painter (an Ab-Exp painter at that), it seems curious that no film critics or scholars(42) have ever treated of his movies’ clear relation to the classical Expressionist cinema tradition of Wiene, Kobe, early Lang, etc. And I am talking here about the very simplest and most straightforward sort of definition of Expressionist, viz. “Using objects and characters not as representations but as transmitters for the director’s own internal impressions and moods.”

Certainly plenty of critics have observed, with Kael, that in Lynch’s movies “There’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche…because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.” They’ve noted the preponderance of fetishes and fixations in Lynch’s work, his characters’ lack of conventional introspection (an introspection which in film equals “subjectivity”), his sexualization of everything from an amputated limb to a bathrobe’s sash, from a skull to a “heart plug,”(43) from split lockets to length-cut timber. They’ve noted the elaboration of Freudian motifs that tremble on the edge of parodic cliche—the way Marietta’s invitation to Sailor to “fuck Mommy” takes place in a bathroom and produces a rage that’s then displaced onto Bob Ray Lemon; the way Merrick’s opening dream-fantasy of his mother supine before a rampaging elephant has her face working in what’s interpretable as either terror or orgasm; the way Lynch structures Dune’s labrynthian plot to highlight Paul Eutrades’s “escape” with his “witch-mother” after Paul’s father’s “death” and “betrayal.” They have noted with particular emphasis what’s pretty much Lynch’s most famous scene, Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through a closet’s slats as Frank Booth rapes Dorothy while referring to himself as “Daddy” and to her as “Mommy” and promising dire punishments for “looking at me” and breathing through an unexplained gas mask that’s overtly similar to the O2-mask we’d just seen Jeffrey’s own dying Dad breathing through.

They’ve noted all this, critics have, and they’ve noted how, despite its heaviness, this Freudian stuff tends to give Lynch’s movies an enormous psychological power; and yet they don’t seem to make the obvious point that these very heavy Freudian riffs are powerful instead of ridiculous because they are deployed Expressionistically, which among other things means they’re deployed in an old-fashioned, pre-postmodern way, I.e. nakedly, sincerely, without postmodernism’s abstraction or irony. Jeffrey Beaumont’s interslat voyeurism may be a sick parody of the Primal Scene, but neither he (a “college boy”) nor anybody else in the movie ever shows any inclination to say something like “Gee, this is sort of like a sick parody of the good old Primal Scene” or even betrays any awareness that a lot of what’s going on is—both symbolically and psychoanalytically—heavy as hell. Lynch’s movies, for all their unsubtle archetypes and symbols and intertextual references and c., have about them the remarkable unselfish-consciousness that’s kind of the hallmark of Expressionist art—nobody in Lynch’s movies analyzes or metacriticizes or hermenteuticizes or anything(44), including Lynch himself. This set of restrictions makes Lynch’s movies fundamentally unironic, and I submit that Lynch’s lack of irony is the real reason some cineastes—in this age when ironic self-consciousness is the one and only universally recognized badge of sophistication—see him as a naif or a buffoon. In fact, Lynch is neither—though nor is he any kind of genius of visual coding or tertiary symbolism or anything. What he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own “internal impressions and moods” are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography—in other words, Lynch is sort of G. W. Pabst with an Elvis ducktail.

This kind of contemporary Expressionist art, in order to be any good, seems like it needs to avoid two pitfalls. The first is a self-consciousness of form where everything gets very mannered and refers cutely to itself.(45) The second pitfall, more complicated, might be called “terminal idiosyncrasy” or “antiempathetic solipsism” or something: here the artist’s own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come off as just too particular to him alone. Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and “personal expression” is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.

It’s the second pitfall that’s especially bottomless and dreadful, and Lynch’s best movie, Blue Velvet, avoided it so spectacularly that seeing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me. It was such a big deal that ten years later I remember the date—30 March 1986, a Wednesday night—and what the whole group of us MFA Program(46) students did after we left the theater, which was to go to a coffeehouse and talk about how the movie was a revelation. Our Graduate MFA Program had been pretty much of a downer so far: most of us wanted to see ourselves as avant-garde writers, and our professors were all traditional commercial Realists of the New Yorker school, and while we loathed these teachers and resented the chilly reception our “experimental” writing received from them, we were also starting to recognize that most of our own avant-garde stuff really was solipsistic and pretentious and self-conscious and masturbatory and bad, and so that year we went around hating ourselves and everyone else and with no clue about how to get experimentally better without caving in to loathsome commercial-Realistic pressure, etc. This was the context in which Blue Velvet made such an impression on us. The movie’s obvious “themes”—the evil flip side to picket-fence respectability, the conjunctions of sadism and sexuality and parental authority and voyeurism and cheesy ‘50s pop and Coming of Age, etc.—were for us less revelatory than the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic felt: the felt true, real. And the couple things just slightly but marvelously off in every shot—the Yellow Man literally dead on his feet, Frank’s unexplained gas mask, the eerie industrial thrum on the stairway outside Dorothy’s apartment, the weird dentate-vagina sculpture(47) hanging on an otherwise bare wall over Jeffrey’s bed at home, the dog drinking from the hose in the stricken dad’s hand—it wasn’t just that these touches seemed eccentrically cool or experimental or arty, but that they communicated things that felt true. Blue Velvet captured something crucial about the way the U.S. present acted on our nerve endings, something crucial that couldn’t be analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic principles or workshop techniques.

This was what was epiphanic for us about Blue Velvet in grad school, when we saw it: the movie helped us realize that first-rate experimentalism was a way not to “transcend” or “rebel against” the truth but actually to honor it. It brought home to us—via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of—that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but wasn’t even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn’t verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern of Expressionistic of Surreal of what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.

I don’t know whether any of this makes sense. But it’s basically why David Lynch the filmmaker is important to me. I felt like he showed me something genuine and important on 3/30/86. And he couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been thoroughly, nakedly, unpretentiously, unsophisticatedly himself, a self that communicates primarily itself—an Expressionist. Whether he is an Expressionist naively or pathologically or ultra-pomo-sophisticatedly is of little importance to me. What is important is that Blue Velvet rang cherries, and it remains for me an example of contemporary artistic heroism.

10A (w/ an epigraph)

“All of Lynch’s work can be described as emotionally infantile…Lynch likes to ride his camera into orifices (a burlap hood’s eyehole or a severed ear), to plumb the blackness beyond. There, id-deep, he fans out his deck of dirty pictures…”—Kathleen Murphy of Film Comment

One reason it’s sort of heroic tot be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don’t like your art to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist. A fair number of critics(48) object to David Lynch’s movies on the grounds that they are “sick” and “dirty” or “infantile,” then proceed to claim that the movies are themselves revelatory of various deficiencies in Lynch’s own character, (49) troubles that range from developmental arrest to misogyny to sadism. It’s not just the fact that twisted people do hideous things to one another in Lynch’s films, these critics will argue, but rather the “moral attitude” implied by the way Lynch’s camera records hideous behavior. In a way, his detractors have a point. Moral atrocities in Lynch movies are never staged to elicit outrage or even disapproval. The directorial attitude when hideousness occurs seems to range between clinical neutrality and an almost voyeuristic ogling. It’s not an accident that Frank Booth, Bobby Peru, and Leland/“Bob” steal the show in Lynch’s last three films, that there is almost a tropism about our pull toward these characters, because Lynch’s camera is obsessed with them, loves them; they are his movies’ heart.

Some of the ad hominem criticism is harmless, and the director himself has to a certain extent dined out on his “Master of Weird”/“Czar of Bizarre” image, see for example Lynch making his eyes go in two different directions for the cover of Time. The claim, though, that because Lynch’s movies pass no overt “judgement” on hideousness/evil/sickness and in fact make the stuff riveting to watch, the movies are themselves a-or immoral, even evil—this is bullshit of the rankest vintage, and not just because it’s sloppy logic but because it’s symptomatic of the impoverished moral assumptions we seem not to bring to the movies we watch.

I’m going to claim that evil is what David Lynch’s movies are essentially about, and that Lynch’s explorations of human beings’ various relationships to evil are, if idiosyncratic and Expressionistic, nevertheless sensitive and insightful and true. I’m going to submit that the real “moral problem” a lot of cineastes have with Lynch is that we find his truth morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort is used to set up some kind of commercial catharsis—the retribution, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood heroine, etc.—I.e. unless the discomfort serves a conclusion that flatters the same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.)

The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and “the Well-Dressed Man.” How Eraserhead’s whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil…yet how it’s “poor” Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV’s Twin Peaks and cinema’s Fire Walk with Me, “Bob” is also Leland Palmer, how they are, “spiritually,” both two and one. The Elephant Man’s sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treeves—and Lynch carefully has Treeves admit this aloud. And if Wild at Heart’s coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically the same thing, I.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them.

This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopper’s exultant “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it’s devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of “Bob”’s look of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired(50): they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are—at least potentially—everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, (51) pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time—not “lurking below” or “lying in wait” or “hovering on the horizon”: evil is here, right now. And so are Light, love, redemption (since these phenomena are also, in Lynch’s work, forces and spirits), etc. In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in isolation from its opposite. It’s not just that evil is “implied by” good or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff too, encoded in it.

You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or neo-Hegelian, but it’s also Lynchian, because what Lynch’s movies(52) are all about is creating a narrative space where this idea can be worked out in its fullest detail and to its most uncomfortable consequences.

And Lynch pays a heavy price—both critically and financially—for trying to explore worlds like this. Because we Americans like our art’s moral world to be cleanly limned and clearly demarcated, neat and tidy. In many respects it seems we need our art to be morally comfortable, and the intellectual gymnastics we’ll go through to extract a black-and-white ethics from a piece of art we like are shocking if you stop and look closely at them. For example, the supposed ethical structure Lynch is most applauded for is the “Seamy Underside” structure, the idea that dark forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green lawns and PTA potlucks of Anytown, USA.(53) American critics who like Lynch applaud his “genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath” and his movies are providing “the password to an inner sanctum of horror and desire” and “evocations of the malevolent forces at work beneath nostalgic constructs.”

It’s little wonder that Lynch gets accused of voyeurism: critics have to make Lynch a voyeur in order to approve something like Blue Velvet from within a conventional moral framework that has Good on top/outside and Evil below/within. The fact is that critics grotesquely misread Lynch when they see this idea of perversity “beneath” and horror “hidden” as central to his movies’ moral structure.

Interpreting Blue Velvet, for example, as a film centrally concerned with “a boy discovering corruption in the heart of a town”(54) is about as obtuse as looking at the robin perched on the Beaumonts’ windowsill at the movie’s end and ignoring the writhing beetle the robin’s got in its beak.(55) The fact is that Blue Velvet is basically a coming-of-age movie, and, while the brutal rape Jeffrey watches from Dorothy’s closet might be the movie’s most horrifying scene, the real horror in the movie surrounds discoveries that Jeffrey makes about himself—for example, the discovery that part of him is excited by what he sees Frank Booth do to Dorothy Vallens. (56) Frank’s use, during the rape, of the words “Mommy” and “Daddy,” the similarity between the gas mask Frank breathes through in extremis and the oxygen mask we’ve just seen Jeffrey’s dad wearing in the hospital—this kind of stuff isn’t there just to reinforce the Primal Scene aspect of the rape. The stuff’s also there to clearly suggest that Frank Booth is, in a certain way, Jeffrey’s “father,” that the Darkness inside Frank is also encoded in Jeffrey. Gee-whiz Jeffrey’s discovery not of dark Frank but of his own dark affinities with Frank is the engine of the movie’s anxiety. Note for example that the long and somewhat heavy angst-dream Jeffrey suffers in the film’s second act occurs not after he has watched Frank brutalize Dorothy but after he, Jeffrey, has consented to hit Dorothy during sex.

There are enough heavy clues like this to set up, for any marginally attentive viewer, what is Blue Velvet’s real climax, and its point. The climax comes unusually early,(57) near the end of the film’s second act. It’s the moment when Frank turns around to look at Jeffrey in the back seat of the car and says “You’re like me.” This moment is shot from Jeffrey’s visual perspective, so that when Frank turns around in the seat he speaks both to Jeffrey and to us. And here Jeffrey—who’s whacked Dorothy and liked it—is made exceedingly uncomfortable indeed; and so—if we recall that we too peeked through those close-vents at Frank’s feast of sexual fascism, and regarded, with critics, this scene as the film’s most riveting—are we. When Frank says “You’re like me,” Jeffrey’s response is to lunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose—a brutally primal response that seems rather more typical of Frank than of Jeffrey, notice. In the film’s audience, I, to whom Frank has also just claimed kinship, have no such luxury of violent release; I pretty much just have to sit there and feel uncomfortable.(58)

And I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go to see a movie. I like my heroes virtuous and my victims pathetic and my villains’ villainy clearly established and primly disapproved of by both plot and camera. When I go to movies that have various kinds of hideousness in them, I like to have my own fundamental difference from sadists and fascists and voyeurs and psychos and Bad People unambiguously confirmed and assured by those movies. I like to judge. I like to be allowed to root for Justice To Be Done without a slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either.

I don’t know whether you are like me in these regards or not…though from the characterizations and moral structures in the U.S. movies that do well at the box-office I deduce that there must be a lot of Americans who are exactly like me.

I submit that we also, as an audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and exposed. We like this stuff because secrets’ exposure in a movie creates in us impressions of epistemological privilege, of “penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath.” This isn’t surprising: knowledge is power, and we (I, anyway) like to feel powerful. But we also like the idea of “secrets,” “of malevolent forces at work beneath…” so much because we like to see confirmed our fervent hope that most bad and seamy stuff really is secret, “locked away” or “under the surface.” We hope fervently that this is so because we need to be able to believe that our own hideousnesses and Darkness are secret. Otherwise we get uncomfortable. And, as part of an audience, if a movie is structured in such a way that the distinction between surface/Light/good and secret/Dark/evil is messed with—in other words, not a structure whereby Dark Secrets are winched ex machina up to the Lit Surface to be purified by my judgement, but rather a structure in which Respectable Surfaces and Seamy Undersides are mingled, integrated, literally mixed up—I am going to be made acutely uncomfortable. And in response to my discomfort I’m going to do one of two things: I’m either going to find some way to punish the movie for making me uncomfortable, or I’m going to find a way to interpret the movie that eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible. From my survey of published work on Lynch’s films, I can assure you that just about every established professional reviewer and critic has chosen one or the other of these responses.

I know this all looks kind of abstract and general. Consider the specific example of Twin Peaks’s career. Its basic structure was the good old murder-whose-investigation-opens-a-can-of-worms formula right out of Noir 101—the search for Laura Palmer’s killer yields postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer=Homecoming Queen & Laura Palmer=Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that mirrored the whole town’s moral schizophrenia. The show’s first season, in which the plot movement consisted mostly of more and more subsurface hideousnesses being uncovered and exposed, was a huge smash. By the second season, though, the mystery-and-investigation structure’s own logic began to compel the show to start getting more focused and explicit about who or what was actually responsible for Laura’s murder. And the more explicit Twin Peaks tried to get, the less popular the series became. The mystery’s final “resolution,” in particular, was felt by critics and audiences alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was. The “Bob”/Leland/Evil Owl stuff was fuzzy and not very well rendered,(59) but the really deep dissatisfaction—the one that made audiences feel screwed and betrayed and fueled the critical backlash against the idea of Lynch as Genius Auteur—was, I submit, a moral one. I submit that Laura Palmer’s exhaustively revealed “sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to those sins. We as an audience have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these certainties need to be affirmed and massaged.(60) When they were not, and as it became increasingly clear that they were not going to be, Twin Peaks’s ratings fell off the shelf, and critics began to bemoan this once “daring” and “imaginative” series’ decline into “self-reference” and “mannered incoherence.”

And then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch’s theatrical “prequel” to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since Dune, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura’s existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid black/white construct—Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas—plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter—as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura was no longer “an enigma” or “the password to an inner sanctum of horror.” She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers.

This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do—maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological text of the series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie—and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying.

The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of Fire Walk with Me, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: “We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and fucked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it’s hard to know whether it’s terrible or a de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready:] or both.” Or both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both “good” and “bad,” and yet also neither: she’s complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate the “both” shit. “Both” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate that’s what we criticized Fire Walk with Me’s Laura for.(61) But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s muddy bothness is that it required of us empathetic confrontation with the exact muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours’ fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judges away or massaged away but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself—this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we’re going to feel, in Premiere magazine’s own head editor’s word, “Betrayed.”

I am not suggesting that Lynch entirely succeeded at the project he set for himself in Fire Walk with Me. (He didn’t.) What I am suggesting is that the withering critical reception the movie received (this movie, whose director’s previous film had won a Palme d’Or, was booed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival) had less to do with its failing in the project than with its attempting it at all. And I am suggesting that if Lost Highway gets similarly savaged—or, worse, ignored—by the American art-assessment machine of which Premiere magazine is a wonderful working part, you might want to keep all this in mind.

Premiere Magazine, 1995

42. (Not even the Lynch-crazy French film pundits who’ve made his movies subject of more than two dozen essays in Cahiers du Cinema— the French apparently regard Lynch as God, though the fact they also regard Jerry Lewis as God might salt the compliment a bit…) 43. (Q.v. Baron Harkonen’s “cardiac rape” of the servant boy in Dune’s first act) 44. Here’s one reason why Lynch’s characters have this weird opacity about them, a narcotized over-earnestness that’s reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern trailer parks. The truth is that Lynch needs his characters stolid to the point of retardation; otherwise they’d be doing all this ironic eyebrow-raising and finger-steepling about the overt symbolism of what’s going on, which is the very last thing he wants his characters doing. 45. Lynch did a one-and-a-half-gainer into this pitfall in Wild at Heart, which is one reason the movie comes off so pomo-cute, another being the ironic intertextual self-consciousness (q.v. Wizard of Oz, Fugitive Kind) that Lynch’s better Expressionist movies have mostly avoided. 46. (=Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate students who want to write fiction and poetry professionally) 47. (I’m hoping now in retrospect this wasn’t something Lynch’s ex-wife did…) 48. (E.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Varchaud) 49. This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop pyschology, might be termed the Unintentional Fallacy. 50. (I.e. “in-spired,”=“affected, guided, aroused by divine influence,” from the Latin inpsirare, “breathed into”) 51. It’s possible to decode Lynch’s fetish for floating/flying entities—witches on broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good Witches, angels dangling overhead—along these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in BV and owl=Darkness in TP: the whole point of these animals is that they’re mobile. 52. (With the exception of Dune, in which the good and bad guys practically wear color-coded hats—but Dune wasn’t really Lynch’s film anyway) 53. This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews of both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. 54. (Which most admiring critics did—the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch in the New York Times Magazine) 55. (Not to mention ignoring the fact that Frances Bay, as Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, standing right next to Jeffrey and Sandy at the window and making an icky-face at the robin and saying “Who could eat a bug?” Then—as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen the movie like eight times—proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it’s not a bug she puts in her mouth it’s a tidbit of sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure Lynch means something by having her do it right after she’s criticized the robin for its diet. (Friends I’ve surveyed are evenly split on whether Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this scene—have a look for yourself.)) 56. As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying and exciting. This is why the colors are so lush and the mise en scene is so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited by the scene but because he—like us—is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time. 57. (Prematurely!) 58. I don’t think it’s an accident that of the grad-school friends I first say Blue Velvet with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie—the two who said they felt like either the movie was really sick or they were really sick or both they and the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie’s artistic power but declared that as God was their witness you’d never catch them sitting through that particular sickness-fest again—were both male, nor that both singled out Frank’s smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy’s nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying “You’re like me” as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal moviegoing history. 59. Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And the series’ second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks’s second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV). 60. This is inarguable, axiomatic. In fact what’s striking about most U.S. mystery and suspense and crime and horror films isn’t these films’ escalating violence but their enduring and fanatical allegiance to moral verities that come right out of the nursery: the virtuous heroine will not be serial-killed; the honest cop, who will not know his partner is corrupt until it’s too late to keep the partner from getting the drop on him, will nevertheless somehow turn the tables and kill the partner in a wrenching confrontation; the predator stalking the hero/hero’s family will, no matter how rational and ingenious he’s been in his stalking tactics throughout the film, nevertheless turn into a raging lunatic at the end and will mount a suicidal frontal assault; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. The truth is that a major component of the felt suspense in contemporary U.S. suspense movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and character elements in order to engineer the required massage of our moral certainties. This is why the discomfort we feel at “suspense” movies is perceived as a pleasant discomfort. And this is why, when a filmmaker fails to wrap his product up in the appropriate verity-confirming fashion, we feel not disinterest or even offense but anger, a sense of betrayal—we feel that an unspoken but very important covenant has been violated. 61. (Not to mention for being (from various reviews) “overwrought,” “incoherent,” “too much”)

#i hope this post isnt horrifyingly long and doesnt annoy anymore #im gonna tag it #long post #cause i know some people filter that tag #BUT THIS IS SO FREAKING AMAZING AND ABOUT THE ESSENCE OF FILM AND ART IN GENERAL #and is a great example of how wallace was able to write in a way that makes the reader feel more intelligent rather than intimidated #by his intelligence #david foster wallace #david lynch #a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again

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beaumontrpg · 5 years ago

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The following characters have been accepted to Beaumont! Please go over the checklist, and send in your account in under 24 hours. We welcome you home, to Beaumont.

Joshua “Josh” Bell [Jamie Bell] played by heather

Alastair Barris [Hugh Jackman] played by merrick

JOSHUA “JOSH” BELL is a 26 year old from ATLANTA, GEORGIA, living in Beaumont for the past YEAR. HE is a SOUS-CHEF AT THE ALAMO STEAKHOUSE and in his downtime loves GARDENING and WATCHING MOVIES. He looks an awful lot like JAMIE BELL. (ooc: heather, 25+, she/her, gmt) *Tiffani’s older brother connection.*

ALASTAIR BARRIS is a 50 year old from NEW YORK CITY, living in Beaumont for the past TWO MONTHS. HE is a STREET PERFORMER/MAGICIAN and in his downtime loves TAP DANCING and SOCCER. She/He/They looks an awful lot like HUGH JACKMAN. (ooc: merrick, 25, they/them, GMT)

#town rp #appless rp #rp #lsrpg #accepted

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ifitzpatrick · 7 years ago

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Since the new Twin Peaks is out tonight, I thought it would be a cool idea to introduce you guys to some David Lynch films that you may or may not have watched. If you don’t know who David Lynch is, he is basically the embodiment of, what multiple sites have called him, “a renaissance man of modern filmmaking” and does just about everything you can think of a person doing. He is a director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician, and producer. He has created a TON of cult classics that have not only blown peoples’ minds, but changed their perspectives on a lot of things, especially living in small town or Los Angeles, but at the end of the day, David Lynch is a surreal and complicated filmmaker at heart.

Now, I’m not saying you should watch these films in order, but I’ll lay out the important ones first and then get into stuff that you can see any ol’ time. So, let’s get started.

1. Eraserhead (1977) This masterpiece was David Lynch’s first feature length movie that combines surrealism and body horror all mashed into one. The plot is pretty damn simply… complicated. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a man who is left with a lizard or serpent like child, born from a one night stand with his then girlfriend Mary X. Henry, however, starts to also have hallucinations and vision of strange things that may or may not be real. The film is known to be a great cult classic and is one of the coolest midnight movies with El Topo (1970), Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Pink Flamingos (1972) to name a few. If you’re gonna start with some David Lynch weirdness, why not try out the best of the best first.

2. The Elephant Man (1980) The Elephant Man is one of the most heartbreaking films on this list. The Elephant Man tells the real life story of Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who was exhibited in freak shows before he was taken to a London Hospital. The film takes us into that history with John Hurt, playing John Merrick and Anthony Hopkins, playing the doctor Frederick Treves, who takes him from out of the freakshows. It’s a heartbreaking movie and incredibly acted from start to finish. Fun fact: the Academy created the Best Makeup and Hairstyling because this movie had the best of that year.

3. Twin Peaks (1990) You knew this was coming. Twin Peaks has become a cult classic over the years and for good reasons. It’s one of the most bizarre and brilliant television dramas that have ever been produced. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, the show focuses on the death of high school teen and homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). FBI Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is sent to Twin Peaks to investigate and teams up with Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) to investigate the case, but it’s not a straight up murder that they’re investigating. It can’t be that simple guys. There’s something deeper, shady, and sinister going down in the town of Twin Peaks and you’ll never see it coming.

4. Blue Velvet (1986) I actually still don’t know how to properly describe Blue Velvet to people, but I will try very hard for you guys. Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is just a normal guy, but one day he finds a ear in a backyard. (I know, I know, just hold on for me guys.) He goes on a small investigation to find out where it comes from, but takes a very sharp left turn into bigger investigation a nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) whose being held hostage by some f*cked up group of people, including ether-loving Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who tortures her in brutal ways. Jeffrey discovers that there is way more to the surface of the small town and himself as he becomes intertwined with Dorothy’s life. Guys, just watch Blue Velvet. It’s a really great psychology, wtf of a movie. 5. Twin Peak: Fire Walk with Me (1992) I know what you’re thinking Twin Peaks fans. “Why would you even put this anywhere near a list?” Well… because it’s Twin Peaks. No matter how you feel about Fire Walk with Me, it’s still a piece of the Twin Peaks history and dammit, it should be watched at least once! Directed and written by David Lynch and co-written by Robert Engels, the films tells the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s short life while going into the investigation of Teresa Banks. Most of the cast had returned for the movie except for Lara Flynn Boyle, who was replaced by Moira Kelly and Sherilyn Fenn because schedules suck. The film was met with… not so happy people and even though it was met with negative reviews, again, still apart of Twin Peaks. Also, you gotta watch this before you get into the series!

6. Mulholland Drive (2001) Another movie that I can’t properly describe, but goddamnit, I will try! Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) is an actress that wants to make it big in L.A. Fresh into her environment, she meets a amnesiac woman Rita (Laura Elena Harring) and try try to figure out what happened to her and get back her memories. I can’t say much else without giving away most of the plot so I’ll just leave it there. I can tell you that there is a super cool (kinda?!) twist at the end of this psychological mystery film. The fun part about this movie is that it very much lets you come to your own conclusions of what the ending might mean. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. Mulholland Drive will always be there. Fun fact: Mulholland Drive was inspired by Audrey Horne’s character in Twin Peaks. They meant to send Audrey into a spinoff where she goes to Hollywood, but it didn’t pan out.

7. Inland Empire (2006) Love is apparently a super f*cking dangerous when you’re on the set of a film that is cursed. That’s what Inland Empire presents us and it’s a really well done film by Lynch. Inland Empire follows the story of Nikki Grace, an actress whose perception of reality gets surreal and distorted as she falls head over heels for her co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). She also starts taking on the characteristics of the character that she’s playing in a film that is cursed. Yeah, f*ckin’ bonkers. Laura Dern is outstanding in the lead role, she does a great job in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, but this movie, Laura just goes all out!

8. Dune (1984) Dune is a great accomplishment, but I will warn you that when you go into Dune, be prepared to sit for awhile. Based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel with the same name, Dune is set in the future where there is a war brewing between families for control of Dune, or Arrakis. They mainly want it because the time travelling drug, “the spice” is vast on the planet and it’s the only place it can be found. I’ve watched this movie a couple of times and I’m still very unsure about it’s meaning, even though I totally should know what it’s about right now. In the scope of things, this was one of David Lynch’s most *raspberry noise* of movies. It was regarded as a flop, but I kinda disagree, for what it was at the time, Dune is an epic movie on a global scale and Kyle MacLachlan sports some pretty hair. OH, ALSO, THERE’S STING, so, yeah…. Watch it.

Honorable Mentions: Lost Highway (1997), The Alphabet (1968), Wild at Heart (1990), The Amputee (1974) and Six Men Getting Sick (1967)

#david lynch #film #the must watch list

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nouvel-ecran-blog · 7 years ago

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DAVID LYNCH, LA DISPARITION IMPOSSIBLE DES CORPS

Par Léone Metayer

Souvent, dans les films de David Lynch, les personnages apparaissent, disparaissent, apparaissent à nouveau. Dissimulés par un autre corps, éblouis par la lumière, immergés dans l’obscurité, éjectés en dehors du cadre de l’image et parfois même hors du récit même, survenus subitement d’ailleurs, emprisonnés, assassinés… Les corps ont de nombreuses manières de s’absenter dans l’univers lynchien, mais ils semblent ne jamais disparaître totalement.

Blue Velvet : la curieuse vitalité des morts

Chez David Lynch, le corps absent n’est pas forcément le corps mort, et le corps mort n’est pas forcément absent. C’est parfois pour cette raison que ses films nous maintiennent le souffle coupé, car dans leurs histoires, les cadavres ne renoncent pas si vite à l’existence. Quand un être humain meurt, que reste-il ? La chair, répondrait probablement Lynch. Par sa texture, sa matérialité, sa consistance, le corps se passe de l’âme pour vivre. C’est l’impression frissonnante que donne l’oreille coupée que trouve Jeffrey Beaumont dans un terrain vague au début de Blue Velvet (1986). À l’écran, en un plan, tout semble évoquer la mort dans cette oreille : le sang, les fourmis qui la parcourent, les tâches verdâtres de moisissure, son immobilité. Pourtant, Lynch lui confère une aura. Illuminée par les rayons du soleil, presque calme et silencieuse, elle semble avoir sa vitalité propre, ses pulsations. L’oreille est l’organe de l’être humain qui permet de capter, d’amplifier, et de transmettre les vibrations sonores jusqu’au cerveau par des connexions nerveuses. L’oreille égarée de Blue Velvet, bien que désormais séparée du reste du corps de son propriétaire, serait-elle capable d’entendre et d’écouter, de faire passer des informations d’un monde à un autre ? Elle donne en tout cas au spectateur l’intuition profonde d’un mystère.

Le corps est donc d’autant plus vivant qu’il est malade, mutilé, torturé. Une autre séquence de Blue Velvet met en scène cette autonomie d’existence du corps mort. Lorsque, à la toute fin du film, Jeffrey retourne dans l’appartement de Dorothy Vallens, une femme sur qui il enquête, il y découvre deux cadavres. Avant même que le spectateur apprenne leur présence dans cette pièce, il voit Jeffrey ouvrir la porte, avancer d’un pas, puis reculer aussitôt pour se cacher, comme effrayé par la présence d’une personne. Pourtant le plan suivant nous montre deux cadavres. Mais l’un d’entre eux se tient debout comme s’il était encore vivant ! Puis Lynch prend le temps, par de lents mouvements de caméra, de nous montrer ce corps, apparemment électrocuté par le courant d’une télévision : son crâne est en partie déchiqueté, sa main semble faire un bref mouvement et ses yeux sont à demi-fermés. Comment peut-il se tenir encore debout ? Il donne l’étrange impression d’être habité, non pas par un mouvement de l’âme qui persisterait, mais peut-être par un sourd fluide électrique venu d’un autre monde. Ce qui est certain, c’est que pour Lynch, la mort ne rime pas forcément avec la disparition, l’absence, le vide. Au contraire, le vide appelle le plein. Ses films donnent au corps meurtri une intense visibilité à travers les potentialités contenues dans la matière, autant la matière du corps humain que celle de l’écran de cinéma.

Mulholland drive et Lost Highway : matière et mémoire

Si le corps mort reste bien vivant chez David Lynch, alors que penser des corps qui disparaissent ? De quoi sont-ils le signe ? Dans plusieurs de ses films, l’effacement visuel du corps est en fait synonyme d’une défaillance de la conscience. Dans l’univers lynchien, un corps disparaît non pas parce qu’il a quitté le monde des vivants mais parce que l’esprit de ce corps est fébrile. C’est ainsi que commence l’histoire de Mulholland Drive (2001) : Betty rencontre Rita, qui souffre d’amnésie, et décide de l’aider à retrouver la mémoire. À l’écran, le corps de Rita apparaît comme effacé, estompé, notamment dans la façon dont Betty, au début du film, découvre la présence de Rita dans la maison qu’elle loue à sa tante à Los Angeles. D’abord, elle remarque sa robe noire sur le plancher de la chambre, comme si Rita venait de s’évaporer subitement comme le font les magiciens. Ensuite, elle se dirige vers la salle de bain où se trouve Rita. Le corps de Rita nous apparaît dans un premier temps à travers la vitre de la douche, sa silhouette est donc troublée, fragmentée, presque pixelisée, par les bandes verticales du verre, à tel point qu’elle ne nous semble pas tout à fait réelle. À ces éléments de mise en scène s’ajoute le jeu d’actrice de Laura Elena Harring (Rita) qui paraît, avec sa peau blanche, son visage statique, et son mutisme, presque fantomatique. Chez David Lynch, certains corps sont représentés de façon à donner l’impression qu’ils sont à la fois présents et absents, dans un entre-deux entre la réalité et la fiction. Leur effacement est en tout cas le signe d’un vide dans la mémoire, d’une conscience en péril, d’une identité incomplète, voire inexistante, et plus exactement - pour ceux qui ont vu Mulholland drive - le signe que cette histoire n’est qu’un rêve, le fruit de l’imagination d’un être en souffrance.

Puisque l’amnésie se révèle être à l’origine d’une disparition partielle du corps, serait-ce la mémoire qui donnerait au corps vivant sa matérialité ? La pensée d’Henri Bergson nous éclaire à ce sujet : « Plus je fais effort pour me rappeler une douleur passée, plus je tends à l’éprouver réellement. Mais cela se comprend sans peine, puisque le progrès du souvenir consiste justement, comme nous le disions, à se matérialiser » écrit-il dans Matière et Mémoire (1896). Si l’on en croit le philosophe, la mémoire nous donne prise sur la matière. Le mouvement inverse le prouve : un violent traumatisme crânien peut rendre amnésique. Un choc dans la matière cérébrale provoque un choc dans l’esprit. Il existe donc un lien d’interdépendance entre corps et âme, un lien d’ailleurs perceptible dans une séquence de Lost Highway (1997). Après cinquante minutes de film, le personnage principal Fred Madison, enfermé sur une île pénitentiaire pour le meurtre de sa femme, disparaît sans aucune explication. David Lynch met en scène de façon plastique cette évasion. Avant que le gardien de la prison constate cette disparition, on voit dans une courte séquence Fred, devenu fou, gesticulant au sol de sa cellule, dans un univers obscur de fumée, hurlant, les mains sur sur son crâne en sang. Puis la caméra pénètre dans ce qui semble être une ouverture dans un crâne isolé. Ces images sont dignes d’une peinture de Francis Bacon - dont l’inspiration est assumée par Lynch - qui aimait représenter la dimension charnelle de la figure humaine. La scène suivante montre le gardien découvrant dans la cellule de Fred un certain Pete Dayton, mystérieusement blessé au niveau du front. Pete, que nous suivons alors jusqu’à la fin du film, est amnésique. Disparition et mémoire sont ici curieusement intriqués, de manière encore plus évidente que dans Mulholland Drive. Si le souvenir est matière comme le dit Bergson, la matière de cette étrange séquence de Lost Highway, qui se déforme au point de se libérer de l’idée même de figure jusqu’à disparaître, est l’image d’un grave trouble mémorielle.

Sailor et Lula : entre l’être et le non-être

Mais où vont les personnages de Lynch quand il s’absentent ? Selon Guy Astic, qui enseigne à l’université d’Aix-en-Provence, Lost Highway est un film sur « la disparition impossible ». « L’effacement des personnages est constant dans le film, mais il n’est guère définitif (…) le mouvement semble infini »[1]. En effet, Fred Madison réapparaît à la fin du film. Si l’on observe la filmographie de Lynch, on remarque que ce phénomène de la disparition impossible est presque systématiquement présent. On pense à Jeffrey Beaumont dans Blue Velvet qui se cache dans le placard de Dorothy lorsqu’il entre par effraction dans son appartement : Dorothy le trouve, l’extirpe du placard, puis lui demande à nouveau de s’y cacher lorsque Franck frappe à la porte. On peut aussi évoquer Sailor, dans Sailor et Lula (1990), qui est incarcéré puis libéré à deux reprises dans le film. Dans The Elephant Man (1980), le personnage John Merrick, hideusement déformé par une maladie, évolue tout au long du film selon cette dynamique de l’apparition et de la disparition. Découvert par un chirurgien qui décide de l’examiner et de prendre soin de lui, Merrick est tantôt caché pour ne pas effrayer (par son « masque » de tissu, dans l’obscurité d’une baraque foraine, derrière le drap blanc des médecins, dans la zone de quarantaine de l’hôpital), et tantôt révélé au grand jour pour nourrir la curiosité perverse du peuple des foires, des infirmières de l’hôpital, et même des élites intellectuelles et politiques. Le constat est saisissant, disparition et apparition fonctionnent ensemble dans les films de David Lynch. Si les personnages réapparaissent toujours après avoir disparu, c’est peut-être parce qu’ils n’étaient pas tout à fait partis. Finalement, disparaître d’un endroit, c’est apparaître dans un autre, et donc, exister encore un peu. Lynch nous invite à repenser totalement la notion d’absence et d’existence.

Le film Sailor et Lula semble être celui qui cristallise le mieux cette duplicité de l’être humain, qui n’est finalement peut-être jamais totalement présent, ni totalement absent. Certes, les deux personnages principaux de Sailor et Lula ne disparaissent pas et constituent même la colonne vertébrale du récit. Néanmoins, ce film est l’histoire d’un homme qu’on cherche à faire disparaître, et plus exactement, d’un amour qu’on veut anéantir. Sailor et Lula, deux êtres passionnément amoureux, font face à la mère enragée de Lula, Marietta, qui refuse cette union. Pour vivre libre, le jeune couple décide de rouler vers la Californie, Marietta lance alors à leurs trousses son amant et un gangster pour tuer Sailor. David Lynch met en scène cette tension entre, d’une part, la force des sentiments qui unissent Sailor et Lula et qui pourraient les protéger de tout, et d’autre part, la fragilité de ce couple dont la pérennité est sérieusement menacée par ceux qui veulent la mort de Sailor. Les scènes de sexe entre les deux jeunes - quatre au total - sont significatives de ce trouble. Dans la première, nous voyons les visages de Sailor et Lula qui s’embrassent avec une passion presque brûlante, explosive, accompagnés d’une forte musique rock et d’une lumière rouge qui s’intensifie et inonde progressivement la totalité de l’écran. L’image suivante montre en gros plan la flamme d’un briquet allumant une cigarette, celle que Lula fume dans le plan suivant devant le miroir d’une salle de bain. Les quatre scènes de sexe sont structurées exactement selon le même modèle: les personnages sont envahis par un filtre de couleur - rouge, orange, vert, violet -, la scène est courte et précède toujours un gros plan d’une flamme suivi d’une scène où les deux amoureux fument allongés dans un lit. Si ce schéma systématique mis en place par le cinéaste dévoile au premier abord l’habitude presque rituelle que les deux amoureux ont de fumer après avoir fait l’amour, il est aussi porteur d’un sens plus profond. Au moment de l’acte sexuel, tout semble évoquer le plaisir des sens : mouvements, regards passionnés, respirations intenses, gémissements. David Lynch est fidèle à lui-même, la chair est à l’honneur. Pas de doute, Sailor et Lula sont bien vivants. Pourtant, la couleur criarde qui vient effacer leurs corps puis le tabac qui s’embrase de façon systématique, ont quelque chose de menaçant. Qu’est-ce que la cigarette sinon un objet destiné à se consumer jusqu’à la disparition ? Les personnages ne cessent de fumer dans Sailor et Lula, ils s’y accrochent comme on s’accroche à un objet rassurant et fiable. Pourtant, la fumée omniprésente évoque surtout l’éphémère et la vulnérabilité, celle de Sailor et Lula qui ne sont nulle part en sécurité et qui finiront peut-être par mourir. Il se peut que David Lynch ait trouvé dans cet élément visible mais insaisissable qu’est la fumée, une manière de manifester l’immatérialité des corps. Certains y verront notre capacité à vivre ailleurs que dans notre chair, quoi qu’il arrive, d’autres, les plus pessimistes, penseront surtout à la fumée de cigarette comme le signe de notre vocation à disparaître.

Nous pourrions aussi y voir la façon particulière que nous avons de vivre par moment, c’est-à-dire, dans un entre-deux de l’existence, entre le réel et l’imagination, entre la vie et la mort, entre l’apparition et la disparition, comme si nous nous tenions en permanence, avec une oscillation troublante, sur la ligne étroite d’une frontière, sur le fil fragile du funambule qui lutte pour l’équilibre mais qui demeure toujours prêt à tomber. En tout cas, l’importance accordée à la matérialité du corps dans les films de Lynch, par-delà la mort, par-delà la vie, a quelque chose de rassurant à notre époque où notre identité semble parfois se désagréger dans le monde virtuel et factice des nouvelles technologies.

[1] Guy ASTIC, Le purgatoire des sens : Lost Highway de David Lynch, 2000

#cinéma #corps #sailor et lula #mulholland drive #lost highway #blue velvet #david lynch #elephant man

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