DAVID LYNCH (1946-2025)

by Cláudio Alves

David Lynch as John Ford in his last big-screen appearance, in THE FABELMANS (2022).

Somewhere in LA, in the middle of a concrete nowhere, an open door beckons. It tugs, a jerky motion that makes you fly through space, into Club Silencio. The insides are old, the red velvet memory of a place that is no more. And yet, despite the unease, it's time to sit down and attend the MC's lugubrious presentation, a swirl of lies and jest, fakery that denounces itself in a spectacle that's a bit like a threat, a lot like a spell. Blue swaths over red, it glows, and then, at long last, the diva makes her entrance – Rebekah Del Rio will be singing "Llorando." But of course, it's not her voice, for she falls, and the ghostly tune persists. Somehow, that doesn't matter. In a palace of illusions, the false still rings true. And look, truthful tears stream down your face.

Watching this scene in Mulholland Drive feels like falling an endless fall, free-floating across the void, suspended in nothingness. It feels like pure beauty born of nightmares, pain and ravishment. It feels like nothing else in the world. Like something only David Lynch could have imagined. And what can we do other than surrender to that feeling on this day of all days when we must say farewell to the man, the artist, and the great? David Lynch has died…

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The Furniture: The Elephant Man and an Interior City

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

There’s an image from The Elephant Man I can’t get out of my head. 

Well, there are a few. David Lynch and Freddie Francis didn’t exactly slouch here. But there’s one moment, quite early on, that struck me with its oddness. Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins) has snuck into the legally-tenuous circus of Mr. Bytes (Freddie Jones), just as the police are about to shut him down. The deeper one ventures, the strange the surroundings look. Here we see a cop navigating this temporary labyrinth of light and shadow...

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Prime in August: The Elephant Man, How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Time to play Streaming Roulette. Each month, to survey new streaming titles we freeze frame the films at random places with the scroll bar and whatever comes up first, that's what we share!

Eat me alive. Mommy, mommy 🎵

How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017/18)
We should talk about this movie at some point real soon now that you can all see it. L-O-V-E this entire scene. My favorite in the movie though these screen pulls are random as promised. I want this nominated for Best Original Song though it never shall come to pass...

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Stage Door: Bradley Cooper in 'The Elephant Man'

Jose here for a special weekend edition of Stage Door, starring one of our Best Actor nominees...

The stage directions for Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man strictly call for “no prosthetic makeup” to be worn by the actor playing the severely deformed character of Joseph Merrick. It's only during a scene in which surgeon Frederick Treves explains to the audience what his deformities consisted of, that we get to see the actor playing Merrick become “the Elephant Man”.

Seeing Bradley Cooper play the part of Merrick, it's tough to believe it's as same actor you've just seen in his Oscar nominated role as Chris Kyle in American Sniper. [More...]

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Makeup & Hairstyling: The Elephantine Origin Story (and this year's finalists since we must)

It's history time, kids! Gather round. Did you know that The Elephant Man, currently on Broadway with Bradley Cooper, is indirectly responsible for the Academy's makeup Oscar? No, not that kind of make up Oscar ... though the Academy gives those all the time, too (why, hello Ms. Julianne Moore "Ms. February 2015"!) and maybe Bradley Cooper will get one of those someday?

what's that? u think this intro was an excuse to post a photo of shirtless Bra---FINE! don't judge.

I digress. In the stage version of The Elephant Man the lead actor traditionally performs while wearing no special makeup; he merely acts deformity. But that stylization hasn't yet been tried on film. When it came time to make the film version in 1980, David Lynch, no stranger to depicting deformity without prosthetics -- deformity of the soul at least -- opted for makeup effects. People bitched about the lack of Oscar recognition since The Elephant Man was an Oscar hit (8 nominations) and the very next year we had our category! Unfortunately for the The Elephant Man's team Christopher Tucker and Wally Schneiderman and all, it was too late. Those makeup artists never won a Makeup Oscar or even the other kind of Make up Oscar for overdue peeps.

Once there was an official category a young pony-tailed prosthetics genius named Rick Baker immediately began his relentless reign, hogging 11 nominations and 7 statues starting with An American Werewolf in London. The Makeup prize continued on its weirdly lyncathropic, excruciatingly unstable number of nominee (0,2,3,4) effects-obsessed path for decades thereafter.

UNTIL...

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