- Lost Highway
On Thursday, February 6, at 9 PM, as part of an ongoing series dedicated to actor Nicolas Cage, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films hosts a screening of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), in which Cage plays an amalgamation of Elvis Presley and every character in The Wizard of Oz not named Dorothy. It’s precisely the sort of barbed, eccentric role Cage has come to perfect, though the film itself, particularly when framed against the rest of Lynch’s filmography, has a far less serrated edge. The best of Lynch’s work, as is well-known, is far more incisive, the stuff of nightmares and sex and all sorts of other weird shit. I’ve always been fascinated with Lynch, particularly with how indifferent and occasionally resentful he is toward traditional (though not necessarily “classic”) film form, something that singles him out from most great directors. By his own admission, he became a filmmaker only because he wanted to see paintings move, a concept so indicative of his work that it’s become the default adage to describe his films. You can catch my five favorite after the jump.
- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1986) Viewers need not have seen Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks to appreciate this scatterbrained riff on innocence, Americana, and, uh, fingernails, though it certainly helps. A sort of postscript to Blue Velvet, it envisions a small town where unspoken tensions and repressed desires manifest themselves in ways both hilarious and disturbing. Laura Palmer, perhaps Lynch’s most alluring creation, is seen here in the form of an angelic harbinger of her own demise. The fact that there are virtually zero dramatic stakes (particularly if you’ve seen the TV show and already know Palmer’s fate) somehow makes the whole thing that much more terrifying.
