From Kim's fitting b'day toast:
David Lynch gets America. America the beautiful, America the bizarre. We can discuss how "weird" he is, how inscrutable his movies can be, how much he loves oddly conceived babies, oddly shaped humans, oddly pale-faced Robert Blake, oddly obsessed Crispin Glover and his "lunch!", but the man gets what drives our subconscious, our sweet dreams, our nightmares.
So naturally, Lynch understands one of the oddest cities on earth -- Los Angeles. With his brilliant, labyrinthine Mulholland Dr., a movie that started out like a jilted starlet (it was an axed TV pilot) he digs underneath our peculiar Hollywood system -- a system that pedals dreams, desire, sex, money, magic -- dreams that have the ability to spread like a celluloid sickness all over America (especially during the 2000?s. Did he know how prescient he was going to be?). Through the bright-eyes of innocent Betty (Naomi Watts, in a career defining performance), a starlet seeking fame in La La land, he presents a twisted, romantic, funny, terrifying and deeply emotional mystery involving a gorgeous amnesiac, a monster behind a diner, a persona altering box, a pair of elderly folks who slither under doors, and a director who answers to a dwarf, a mobster and a cowboy. And let?s not forget Coco.
Hauntingly beautiful, poignant, funny, subversive, dark, meditative, sexual (Lynch is one of the few American directors who can actually create inspired, erotic and yet intensely emotional sex scenes) and more, Mulholland Dr. poses many questions, but offers few answers, reflecting life in all of its enigmatic complexities. And if you think it?s weird that a box might be responsible for transforming a promising young actress into a suicidal starlet, rubbing herself in a tragic masturbatorial rage, then you need to spend a little more time in Los Angeles. Or on reality television. Or in your girlfriend?s living room after you ditch her. Or in a director?s chair. Or simply walking up and down Hollywood Blvd. between Western and Normandie.
Along with his mind-altering contributions to cinema as the chain-smoking godfather of American Gothic, Lynch has done tireless missionary work on bringing the healing stress reduction of Transcendental Meditation to students, prisoners, veterans, American Indians, and others under psychic siege through the David Lynch Foundation.
He was also the host and presenter of Interview Project, a series of snapshot interview portraits of "average Americans," which I put in quotes because each subject was individual, unique. Interview Project ended last year after 121 segments but next month Interview Project Germany begins.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/01/one-of-the-last-of-the-american-originals.html
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