With “It” Being a Very David Lynchy Sense of Hollywood Tragedy

So there’s a singer named Lana Del Rey. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?

In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t put this one together until Spencer alerted me to a particularly insightful comment on a Del Rey-centric Gawker post. But yeah — now that you mention it, she’s like a character who spiraled straight out of Mulholland Drive, hobbled onstage and started singing a little dirge ditty.

Consider this her name: Lana Del Rey, with the first name presumably intending to evoke the old Hollywood glamour of Lana Turner and the two-part last name skewing very Los Angeles — the Del Rey neighborhood of Culver City or Marina del Rey or Playa del Rey over on the far west side. That’s Lynchy in itself, if you think about his Los Angeles-focused Mulholland Drive period, but it’s also a trick he’s tried before: the FBI agent that Chris Isaak plays in Fire Walk With Me is Chet Desmond — half jazz musician Chet Baker and half Sunset Boulevard character Norma Desmond. (And that’s all ignoring those Hollywood stand-ins for Los Angeles, Chinatown’s Hollis and Evelyn Mulwray.)

In one sense, you could view Lana Del Rey as a Camilla Rhodes figure — the blonde on the top left, the girl whose dreams of show business success come true for no good reason. Like the character in Mulholland Drive, it has simply been deemed that “this is the girl,” without any real explanation. She’s selected by the powers that be to be the one basking in the spotlight instead of anyone else who might be more deserving of the attention. But on the other hand, there’s also a sense that Lana Del Rey is a version of Mulholland Drive’s Rebekah Del Rio — the woman on the bottom with the painted-on tears, the singer whose entire persona is an illusion. Think about it this way: In the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive, Betty and Rita watch Rebekah sing on stage, and they’re incredibly moved by the performance. Before she can finishing singing her Spanish-language take on “Crying,” however, she falls to the ground, as if dead. The song continues anyway. Her whole thing — her presence on stage, her schtick as a singer, her song itself — doesn’t really need her. She’s just one part of an elaborate show. In my head, anyway, this works because her performance on Saturday Night Live revealed that the physical existence of Lana Del Rey, live and in person, pales in comparison to the reputation that precedes her. Watching her fumble through “Video Games” on SNL was sort of like watching her slump over dead on live TV, only we all knew that the song would keep playing no matter how lifeless she seemed.

Aside from all that, the lighting alone in this one shot I’ve found would totally make David Lynch smile. And, of course, if it turned out that Lana Del Rey were both Camilla Rhodes and Rebekeh Del Rio at the same time? That would make David Lynch even happier.

David Lynch, previously:

• Megan Mullally in Blue Velvet
• Laura Dern in my parking lot
• The video game that thought it was Twin Peaks
• The weird intersection of Twin Peaks and Legend of Zelda

This Is the Girl

While at work, I had to look up somebody's filmography on IMDb. One thing led to another and I stumbled onto the cast listing for that awful Lindsay Lohan movie, I Know Who Killed Me. Scrolling down the names — more out of mean-spirited curiosity for who else had their fingerprints on this train wreck than anything else — I saw one named that struck me as familiar: Bonnie Aarons. I couldn't place why, but I was sure I remembered seeing something that Bonnie Aarons appeared in. When I clicked on her profile, I saw her face. It was this face:


Again, she looked vaguely familiar, though something about her face disturbed me on a fundamental level. In fact, when the image loaded and popped onto the screen, I felt a little startled to see her. I couldn't put my finger on it, however, until I scrolled down a bit and saw what had made her known to me.

What was it?

Well, she's been in a good handful of movies most people would know of: both Princess Diaries films, for example, as well as Exit to Eden and Wristcutters: A Love Story, which just came out. But one role stands out. And I'm wagering that readers of this blog would recognize her most easily from this one role. For maximum effect, I'm making the image of her in this role open in its own page. When you click this link to her image, I'm hoping, you'll have a similar reaction to the one I did when I first saw her.

I'm including an explanation in the first comment of this post for those of you left scratching your head.

The Robe, the Ashtray and the Coffee Cup

I’ve been reading Catching the Big Fish, this new book by David Lynch that consists of a few dozen short passages — not unlike what you might read on a blog — that discuss his thoughts on filmmaking, art and transcendental meditation. Believe me, the way he explains it, the three are entirely related. I love it, as it gives me insight into a guy who I regard as one of the most talented and creative people alive today. Lynch also rarely discusses his work in any depth. In fact, his reluctance to include director commentaries on the DVD releases of any of his films is one of the many subject that merits its own passage.

The passage titled “Mulholland Drive” involves pre-production of the film of the sane name. The passage concludes with “I went into meditation, and somewhere about ten minutes in, ssssst! There it was. Like a string of pearls, the ideas came. And they affected the beginning, the middle, and the end. I felt very blessed. But that’s the only time it’s happened during meditation.

Even more tantalizingly, the immediately following chapter, “The Box and The Key,” would also seem to relate to the events in “Mulholland Drive.” The weird blue box and the correspondingly weird blue key make for one of the central mysteries in the film and in the discussions that should rightly follow any screening of the film.

Of them, David Lynch writes the following: “I don’t have a clue what those are.”

That’s it. That’s the entire passage. God, I love David Lynch.