[ the oc part ii ]

Earlier in this class you probably got tired of me talking about robots; well, now you can be tired of me posting about David Lynch, because I'm doing it again. Anyway, his first movie was Eraserhead, which is totally incomprehensible and largely lacks a plot. It's a horror movie, but it's so bizarre that to anyone who hasn't seen it it sounds like a comedy. This is summed up nicely by TV Tropes: Whenever this contributor tries to describe Eraserhead to someone, they always think it's a comedy. "This guy finds out that his girlfriend has had his baby, so they get married, but the baby is an embalmed cow foetus and its crying drives the girl away, so the guy has to raise it by himself, and a deformed lady lives inside his radiator and a topless guy with burned skin wanders around and he dreams that a giant penis bursts out of his neck and knocks his head off and a small boy sells his brain to make erasers. Oh, yeah, and throughout the film, he has to fight giant mutated sperm." And there's a dinner scene involving man-made miniature chickens. The "giant penis" mentioned is actually the head of the mutant cow-foetus baby, whose head is admittedly sort of phallic, but either way it makes no sense. For his next two movies after Eraserhead the weird was sort of inherently toned down because The Elephant Man was based on a true story (of the "elephant man" Joseph Merrick) and Dune was an adaptation of the book of the same name. His more recent movies appear to be approaching Eraserhead-like weirdness, though. I think this IMDb summary probably gives a good idea of the level of strangeness achieved by his movie Lost Highway: After a bizarre encounter at a party, a jazz saxophonist is framed for the murder of his wife and sent to prison, where he inexplicably morphs into a young mechanic and begins leading a new life. This plot is apparently taken completely seriously and treated as a film noir, but it's as nonsensical as it sounds: most reviews I've seen say it's even weirder than Eraserhead, which is a near-impossible feat. And INLAND EMPIRE is supposed to be stranger still...as evidenced by David Lynch's promoting the film by sitting around with a cow on a leash. When questioned, he explained, "Cheese is made from milk." I haven't seen either of the aforementioned movies yet, but having seen two of his others plus most of Twin Peaks I'm looking forward to them.