A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

On assignment for Premiere magazine, Wallace is invited to the set of Lost Highway, a 1996 film by American director David Lynch, presumably to interview Lynch. However, from the essay’s outset, he confesses to gaining no knowledge about Lynch as a person. They remain distant throughout Wallace’s visits to the set, and Wallace’s essay expresses little interest in Lynch as a person. Wallace, an avowed fan of Lynch’s work, instead used the visit to explore his relationship with it. After a brief overview of Lynch’s filmography, Wallace posits that Lost Highway may be the film that rehabilitates Lynch’s reputation after a series of commercial failures in recent years. Lost Highway is about shifting identities. Throughout the essay, he repeats this motif (interchangeable identities) as actors pose next to their stunt doubles or stand next to their lookalikes.

Wallace wryly suggests that one could interpret Lost Highway in “roughly 37” ways. Although he cannot predict its success, he asserts that it will be at least “Lynchian,” referring to “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” (161). In a Postmodern sense, however, Wallace suggests that “we know it when we see it” (161). Wallace describes his own relationship to Lynchian cinema and Lynch’s influence on the medium. Lynch’s unnerving and uncanny style has led to some critics to label him as “sick,” but Wallace disagrees, at least in the pejorative sense. While he concedes that the films may be creepy, this creepiness supports an artistic goal. Lynch’s films “make [the audience] feel complicit in their sickness” (168), which can be uncomfortable.

Wallace describes being on the movie set, as well as the more general experience of being in Los Angeles. The city measures up, satisfyingly, to his stereotypical expectations. The set is professional and largely dull, staffed by competent people whose typicality contrasts with the Lynchian nature of the film they are helping create. Spotting one actor beside his own stand-in, Wallace notes that this became “its own surreal metacommentary on parallel identity” (182). At no point does Wallace approach Lynch, who stands apart, smoking and directing the film while engaging in earnest mannerisms. These mannerisms are, for Wallace, an example of Lynch’s relationship to Postmodernism, as he speaks with the unintentionally “flattened affect of someone who’s parodying himself” (186). Wallace does not warm to Lynch as a person, noting the almost mean decision to cast famed comedian Richard Pryor in Lost Highway: Pryor was known for his high-energy performance style, but by the time Lost Highway is shot, a medical condition has rendered him “a cruel parody of a damaged person” (188). Wallace suggests that Pryor is cast as a cruel spectacle yet concedes that the casting has artistic merit in a film about blurred and dissolving identities.

Wallace visits an editing suite to view a rough cut of the film. The suite is in a repurposed house, next door to Lynch’s home. The walls are decorated with paintings by Lynch (not particularly to Wallace’s taste) and Lynch’s ex-wife (which Wallace enjoys much more). Wallace dwells on Lynch’s training as a painter, suggesting that it helps clarify Lynch’s categorization as an expressionist: Lynch uses objects and characters not as representations but to transmit his own impressions or moods. This typical expressionism mixes with Postmodern self-awareness and idiosyncrasy. Wallace delves deeper into what he considers a tendency to misread Lynch’s work. Critics and audiences have associated its creepiness or violence with “various deficiencies in Lynch’s character” (202). This, Wallace suggests, is a misreading resulting from the audience’s need for art “to be morally comfortable” (205). The ambient, inexplicable, immediate evil of Lynch’s worlds defies the audience’s desire for comprehensible, distinct, and punishable evil in the reality they inhabit. It blurs lines of morality, while characters (particularly protagonists) exhibit the capacity to reflect and enact the violence that exists all around them. Lynch’s films do not punish their characters for this; instead, the films compel audiences to think about their own relationship with evil, violence, and society. Lynch’s films do not always successfully navigate this tricky idea, Wallace suggests, but he credits Lynch with “attempting it at all” (212).