Inland Empire with David Rees

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Black Jack with Griffin and David Don't know what to say or to expect

All you need to know is that the name of the show is black Jack

Some podcasts change well they don't change they reveal they reveal themselves over time you know

kind of a low energy.

You didn't want to do like brutal fucking podcasting.

Something like that.

I'm trying to think of like, it is true that even though Inland Empire has lots of dialogue,

it's not like a movie where I'm like so quotable.

Bam!

I kicked him straight in the podcast so hard they go crawling into his brain for a refuge.

He went down like a $2 whore.

There are consequences to one's podcasts, and there certainly would be podcasts to wrong action.

I fucking the blue, whatever, who gives a shit.

What would you do, Sims?

I would super old fucking podcasting.

Okay, see, Ben's right.

This is the right way to open with a quote for this movie: an eerie stare.

Yeah, can you do it for me?

Thank you.

And with the teeth out.

You're doing the trying to do the teeth out.

And just imagine like holding a light bulb two inches below your chin, just blowing your face out.

You could say, hey, this feels just like dialogue from our podcast.

Fuck, that is good.

How many times have you seen this movie?

Three times.

Okay.

I've seen it four times.

Well, it's not a competition.

Well, you kind of set it up like one.

No, because I feel like our guest today,

the movies we've had you on for, you're very particular about when you come on.

It has to be kind of a totemic film.

We always...

At least to me, it does.

Doors wide open.

And there are other things we've kicked around that you've almost done, but it feels like it has to be the right kind of thing.

But I also feel like, despite the fact that you are a man who is very thorough,

dare I say can be obsessive within certain passions and interests

i think there is a ceiling on how many times you watch a movie so even the movies that are the most impactful for you i feel like you've never gone beyond five is that right you're not really a big rewatcher 28 days later episode i feel like you said that was the most you've ever watched and that was that five times that's my memory so i think i've seen

Yeah, 28 Days Later, five times.

And I think I don't think I've ever seen a movie six times.

But I think there's multiple movies I've seen five times.

Not even as a kid you wouldn't watch like,

you know, whatever, some comedy.

Well, we didn't have a VCR for a long time.

Sure.

And you probably didn't have like cable.

No, my parents did not pay for that.

So no control.

You're at the mercy of the network programmer.

Yeah, right.

You're flipping around watching the same movies over and over.

But there was no like going to see Star Wars six times in theaters.

No, that would have been an indulgence that would have been beyond my parents' imagination.

But I wonder over over the course of my life have i seen star wars like all the way through five times possibly but then we're not we're not talking about like right about that of like yeah through osmosis some movies are always right the intentionality i guess is what we're i like i like the way you're putting it of like right you going to your parents as a young person and being like i'd like to see star wars again and they being them being like you but you've already seen you've already seen it once

the text is exhausted there's nothing more to say

like the outlay happened right it was like we have star wars at home except it was you have star wars in your memory yeah exactly right you can watch it whenever you want that's why we paid for it the first time so it goes in there no i i saw inland empire the first time i the first and third times i saw inland empire were two great

great experiences with movies yeah i mean when i when i when we were talking about david lynch and and you said, are you interested in any of these?

And I was like, I would do Inland Empire.

Part of what I was thinking was, I have a memory of the first time i saw this movie as being

so

fucking

great

and since i agreed to do it i was like well now i have to do my due diligence i should re-watch it i haven't seen it since it came out in the theaters the fabled third time and i saw it the second time oh with friends which was good and then the third time was Well, I can't wait to talk about the third time because the third time was really special.

And

I related to the movie in a way that I've never related to another movie.

And for me, it took the movie to a whole new level where all of a sudden, like,

this is my favorite thing David Lynch has ever done.

Then it's great that we have you here on what podcast?

Blank Check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm David.

It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce.

Baby,

this is a mini-series on the the films of David Lynch.

It is called Twin Pods Firecast with Me.

Wow.

But I should say it is a mini-series on the films and television series of David Lynch because today we are talking about to date his final theatrical film, his final feature film.

But this mini-series is obviously far from over.

Wait, are you guys doing Twin Peaks?

Of course.

All of it kind of can't not.

You can't do David Lynch and not do Twin Peaks.

Are you doing one episode or episode?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

We are doing six total episodes on Twin Peaks.

Wow.

Plus Firewalk with Me.

That's right.

That's right.

So seven, I suppose.

You guys are doing a complete rewatch of the whole

correct.

We have already watched.

For me, first time watch.

I mean, and for Ben, for most of Twin Peaks.

For most of Twin Pinpin.

Right.

Do you know what I have here, Griffin?

Well, we'll get to this.

Okay, we'll get to this.

Okay, but.

I have someone else's recollections of the first time they ever watched Twin Peaks when it aired.

Wow.

So we can get into that.

We should talk about compare notes.

But yes, we are doing season one, season two, and the return.

We're splitting the return into four episodes.

Yeah.

It's quite a dense.

It's interesting because any other, I guess, look, when we did Wachowski and Cameron Crowe.

We did do their Wachowskis and Cameron Crow.

And those two miniseries, the most recent project they had done was TV.

And we did the seasons of their now largely forgotten TV shows.

And then we kind of went, we never want to do TV ever again.

And so we made that a rule and obviously the wachowskis and uh cameron crow hasn't made another thing but the wachowskis did this is such a bizarre example of like with other people we'd be like well the series ends with inland empire tv doesn't count right yeah but i mean obviously it's also look we did the wachowskis and cameron crow and they didn't even like direct every episode of

but obviously When Peaks the Return is, you know, all directed by David Lynch.

He made it all as

at a film festival, right?

Like at Venice or something.

They gave it to him or it was on Seaton Sound, his best movie of the year.

We'll talk about it, but right.

Some people now try to sort of claim it as a movie.

I used to be very resistant to that.

Now that I know how he made it, I'm a little more open to it.

He didn't quite make it as traditional television.

Look, we're doing four episodes on The Return, and one of them will obviously be entirely devoted to whether or not it's okay to log it on Letterbox.

We'll spend a full episode litigating that.

It's an interesting conversation.

People love that kind of film analysis.

Can you not put TV shows on Letterboxd or mini-series that have

david what it's it's it's a contentious topic amongst oh fidgety nerds we're we're i mean we're doing the bit now largely people are not so annoying about this largely television is not on letterbox because it's quite unwieldy but certain projects are projects such as swim peek's the return that's allowed to be on letterbox well allowed is a funny it's a you know if you can smoosh stuff into their database, then, you know, it's not like Letterboxd has total control over it.

But people still fight this with the urgency of like, Donald Trump is lowering the esteem of the office.

He is setting a precedent we will never be able to revert.

If I cannot log Twin Peaks the Return 50 times on Letterboxd, you know, why am I even?

But Letterboxd is mostly for feature films.

It does, you can't like go and look up like here's an interesting thing.

CSI New York on Letterbox.

No, it's not like IMDB where everything.

Okay, got it.

But here's an interesting thing on Letterboxd.

You cannot log Twin Peaks.

You can log Twin Peaks, the European cut

of the pilot.

You can, which was sort of a theatrical

release.

Yes, Northwest Passage, it's called.

Right.

The pilot.

So usually there's that kind of delineation, but then short films are on there and TV movies are on there.

And it starts to get slippery.

That's not what we're talking about.

And you love Twin Peaks, but we're not here to discuss it.

Today we're talking about Inland Empire.

His last feature film.

And as of the time we're recording this, there's been a lot of hand-wringing recently about him saying that he, due to health, cannot be on set making a feature film away from his home, which people took as a retirement notice.

And then he put out a press release saying, I am not retired.

I will never retire.

He also said he had quit smoking and then lovingly described the experience of setting tobacco onboarding.

Setting them on fire.

Way

me want to

spark up.

We were texting.

I was like, this is the best argument for cigarettes I've ever read.

They sound incredible.

While he is saying, like, I have not touched a cigarette in two years.

I barely can leave my home if I take three steps.

I almost crumble.

I shouldn't laugh, obviously.

I think the press release ended with the immortal sentence, I'm filled with happiness and I will never retire.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like so glorious.

But clearly, you know, he may not make a traditional feature film again.

We don't know.

He's 78 years old and he does have emphysema and who knows what the future holds for David Lynch.

Let's congratulate Ben Hosley on quitting smoking, by the way.

I saw Ben

run around the mic.

Yeah.

That press release hit you hard.

It did.

It was hard to read because here's the thing.

It's a terrible habit, but damn, is it fucking cool?

Can you imagine how many cigarettes he smokes?

No one makes it look cooler than him.

When it was like David Lynch's emphysema, I was like, that's not.

That's like saying like the sky is blue.

Like I've never not seen a picture of that man.

Like he's always smoking.

Have any of you watched that David Lynch, the Art Life documentary?

Yeah, I saw that.

Yeah.

That's right.

I believe the opening credits play out over a static, like three-minute shot of him just

lovingly smoking a cigarette while sitting back and looking at the painting

that he just finished.

And I'm just like, right, this is the fundamental image of him as a guy.

Is that the thing where he...

I was thinking about this when I was thinking about Inland Empire.

He's like.

If you want to know if a work of art is finished, you take a stick and you tie a ball to the stick on a piece of string and you point it at the painting.

The stick will tell you if the painting is finished.

And then he does it.

And you just walk.

Is that what you're talking about?

That thing?

Because I know I've seen a video of that.

Is it in that thing?

Or is that just another?

There's been so many rice.

He's making rice.

Is that what he's making?

Or fried egg or something?

Like, you know, he has his cooking videos.

I don't know, man.

Look, he's the king of content.

The man's been putting out tent.

He's been pitching tank for decades.

our guest today returning to the show from going deep with david rees

a show i mistitled recently in an episode oh really i combined it with how to with john wilson i'll take it i need all the help i can get that was it his was a hit show is is i have to ask this every time you're on the show is it streaming anywhere is it back anywhere do we know i think it you can watch i think you can watch some of it on amazon okay and some of it on youtube i'll take that yeah david reese and dicktown starring grift dick town Yeah.

Well, and starring David Reese and John Hodge.

Right.

Season one is on YouTube for sure.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank God.

Not sure about season two.

David Reese is here.

Hi, David.

How are you doing?

I'm good.

It's nice to be in the

face to face with all you guys.

In the room.

After almost two years.

More.

Well, last time was his wedding.

Yes, but not

seeing you in person.

It's been two years.

I thought you were.

Season two is on Amazon.

It's all on Amazon.

Great.

Purchasable.

Episode in person, I believe, has been five years.

Is that possible?

I think the last time we did one, I was on a Zoom.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's been a long time.

Yeah.

Whatever the last time.

Yeah.

A sight for sore eyes.

You too.

I like your mustache.

Hey, you know what?

I was shaving and I was like trimming around.

I decided to keep the stash.

And I was like, the test of this is going to be if Reeves approves.

I love it.

That was my thought.

I was like, if this works with David, I'm holding on to it for a bit.

Yeah.

And if he doesn't like it or he doesn't mention it,

gone.

I'm into it.

Thank you.

I'm into it.

Thank you.

So the last one you did in person with us was it spirited away.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

And you were in a different studio than I remember you were in Manhattan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, and since then, right, you've come on for 28 Days Later and

something else, right?

There were a couple episodes that almost happened.

Didn't if we want to fucking crack open the books.

Miami Vice was a thought.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

You were going to do one of the Buster Keaton episodes.

Oh, that's right.

But then we, then you wanted 28 Days Later.

So we, right, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Because I live kind of near Buster Keaton's old studios.

And you love that guy.

I do.

Yeah.

So do I.

So do I.

Nah, you don't think he's so great.

Oh, you weren't into him?

No, he's he spirited us doing Buster Keaton.

He's a huge fan.

Yeah.

But I'm fascinated that, yeah, you had only seen this once.

It had a massive impact on you.

And then in your two revisits in prep for the podcast, it grew.

So the first touch.

Yeah.

So I brought a couple documents with me.

Carefully organized.

Classic, David.

Yeah.

A couple documents, big notebook filled with notes.

You know, I got to show up with all my paperwork.

I love it.

It looks like an evidence layout.

Like, we're going to take all the evidence out of the Joker's pocket.

This movie is weird.

Now, you say you were at the bodega at 5.30 p.m.

That's what you're saying.

So I have three documents.

Why don't I list the documents and you tell me in which order you would like me to present my case?

Fantastic.

The first is a green spiral notebook filled with, I guess, six pages of sloppy notes that represent my reaction and recording of the second time I watched Inland Empire.

Wow.

Can we time that?

That was last week.

Okay.

Okay.

Wow.

Last week was the second time?

Yes, second and third times.

I watched it for a second time, and then among my friends, a particular decision was made.

And then two days later, we watched it for a third and transcendent time.

We got a great story here on deck.

You hadn't seen it before.

No, I watched it.

This is the one you've never seen.

Yeah.

Exhibit B is

so

I re so I saw

I saw it when it was released theatrically in North Carolina.

I was in Chapel Hill in the spring of 2007.

I think technically it came out in 2006.

It came out December 06, but slow

release.

So I saw it on, I have the date, I saw it on the 10th of March, 2007 at the Carolina Theater in Durham.

A day after my sister's ninth birthday.

The Carolina Theater is a grand old theater.

Yeah, and it's gorgeous.

And it was the perfect place to see this movie because it was like 10% capacity.

You know, it felt like...

It's like you're at Club Silencia.

Exactly.

Right.

Yeah.

And I went in absolutely cold.

It's one of my favorite memories of going into a movie absolutely cold.

All I knew was David Lynch had a new movie out.

I had seen Mulholland Drive.

Right.

Probably once in the theater and once on VHS or DVD.

I like David Lynch.

As Exhibit C will point out,

will prove, I beg your pardon, I have a long-standing relationship with David Lynch.

I feel like we lead with Exhibit C because it feels like that's the earliest point.

Oh, you you want to go chronologically?

Okay, forget Exhibit B.

Forget I.

Okay.

Because we often ask our guests, what's your history with X?

Which is

your current David Lynch?

Right.

Okay.

Exhibit A.

Renum.

Yeah.

Holy shit.

Journey's kicking their pitch.

Objection.

Objection.

Approach the pitch.

I mean, fellas, I'm about to set it off with Exhibit A.

This is the May 18th, 1990 edition of the Proconian,

the official newspaper of Chapel Hill High School.

Wow.

Let's say also perfectly preserved.

It is called the Proconian because it discusses the pros and cons of life at Chapel Hill High.

Okay.

That's the fucking name.

Yeah.

Why is it NRT?

It's 331.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It goes way back.

Wait, so you're allowed to be like, hey, I got a con this week.

I don't like doing homework.

Can we get that on the front page?

I mean, that's kind of a regular column.

It's a revolving door of who takes the man.

I mean, on the front page, one of my buddies, Matt, he wrote an article about how the Chapel Hill High School Counseling Department was encouraging students to limit their college

entrance attempts to five.

They wanted to cap the number of colleges you apply to.

And the article goes on to say, like, that was really, I reread.

So I reread this whole issue the other night because.

I haven't thought of, you know, I haven't thought about this in what, 34 years.

Have you kept every issue from your years there?

Well, Griffin, I kept every issue in which I was the movie critic for the Procanians.

So, what's the, can you tell me the year again?

I'm sorry.

Sorry, yeah.

It's 1990.

So, this is spring of my senior year of high school.

Right.

Okay.

Senior year in high school.

The Procanian's a daily newspaper, right?

You guys.

Twice daily.

It was a morning and evening edition.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's still on paper.

No, it was every Friday, I think.

It was a weekly paper.

Weekly is for high school paper, but it's nice also to give you the weekend to sort of release it with.

Digest everything.

Yeah.

Totally.

So I had an entertainment column.

It was called the Three Bean Salad of Entertainment.

The three beans of the salad were movies, TV shows, and music.

Those were three of my interests.

The three great beans of society.

And like every fucking know-it-all high school boy, I just use this platform to announce hyperbolic justifications for why.

The Minutemen are the best band that has ever existed or, you know, whatever.

Just justify all my tastes.

Did you have an editor?

Like, how much can you say?

Well, the editor was my high school girlfriend.

So I actually

quite

like that.

Some antics.

Yeah.

Now, what's it's interesting about this edition

is that I like yell a lot.

Remember when, um,

remember, so remember on Spirited Away when I brought in like one of my favorite pieces of criticism, Nigel Andrews.

Six out of five stars.

In the history of the paper.

And you checked with him and he maintains.

Yeah,

exactly.

Just such a great, such a great, also, it's another well-preserved piece of newspaper criticism.

Well, the wonderful thing you'll remember is that that was six out of five stars.

Well, now, when I paid close attention to page 10 of the Procanian,

where the where the column title is, it doesn't say three being salad of entertainment, it says four being salad of entertainment.

And then the column begins, As Burger King says, sometimes you got to break the rules.

So I broke a few.

Did Burger King say that?

I think that was a thing back in the 90s.

Yeah.

So

I broke a few rules, ordered a Whopper, and changed the name of my column.

What is the fourth bean?

Because now, of course, it used to be the three-bean salad of entertainment, but now there's a fourth bean, right?

So, like Nigel Andrews, unknowingly, of course, I was like, let me acknowledge up front what you're all thinking, which is what happened to the three-bean salad of entertainment.

Why is it now a four-bean salad of entertainment?

We've all gotten used to this.

It's all so hugging.

We've all committed to a prism through which we understand.

exactly.

Yeah.

What the fourth bean was this week I decided to review all the comics in the Chapel Hill newspaper.

Oh, so I added them as the fourth bean.

The fourth bean is

the funny page.

Your newspaper.

Yeah, exactly.

Prince Valiant, two stars.

The Born Loser, 4.5 stars.

Kathy, 0.6 stars.

Wait, you just bodied Kathy out of the room.

Kathy's funny.

She likes to clear it.

Do you want to hear my review?

I mean, i'm i haven't looked at kathy in a long time and you have to remember i was a high school boy and i was a total asshole so it was probably some misogyny but here's the review of kathy kathy by kathy how do you pronounce her last name geiswite geiswite i gave it point 0.6 stars it says oh my

here's the basic kathy strip panel one kathy sits behind her desk panel two she says

So you're doing

this.

You're cold reading this.

Yeah, I haven't looked at this.

Panel two, she says,

it's so awful.

Panel two, she says, I don't look good in a bathing suit.

Panel three, mass hysteria.

Kathy yells, oh.

Panel four, Kathy looks guilty.

Lines of exasperation shoot from her head.

Kathy says, I need chocolate.

There.

Now you never have to read the stupid strip again.

What an asshole.

But I mean,

that reflects my sense, you know,

where I was at the time.

That was where America was on Kathy.

Kathy blazed a lot of trails.

I'm very pro-Kathy.

That's kind of like the Lights Camera Jackson girls' trip review.

Oh, yeah.

What happened with him?

No, it wasn't that.

What was the one Brooksmart where he said, my grandmother always said, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

And they just stares down the camera for a minute in silence.

What was your favorite funny page?

Like, what gets the highest?

Snuffy Smith.

Snuffy Smith by Fred Laswell.

Oh, I'm aware of five stars.

Wow.

That's awesome.

Because I think of Snuffy Smith as like the sort of gasoline-inhaling, like absolute nonsense.

like where it's like barney google is a little too erudite for people we need a yokel character to kind of like bring the labs can you write what was the case for stuffy smith snuffy smith the art

especially the sunday pages the art was beautiful yeah stuffy smith is kind of a cool style it looked really really good it was just silly i mean it was like one of those things when you're in high school and i think it was i don't think it was a deliberate decision but it's like you and your friends are like let's all get really into snuffy Snuffy Smith and say this is the best cartoon.

And that'll be our thing.

It's like, we're the Snuffy Smith gang.

Yeah, I'm really sorry to do this.

I know this is a big, dense movie.

I just have to know what other funny pages you reviewed.

Just the names.

Oh, and I just want to see if any of the others I will.

I'll run through all the, all the, I'll give you the titles and the stars.

Okay, we'll do that.

Prince Valiant, two stars.

Frank and Ernest, four stars.

Outland, one star.

The Phantom, 3.6 stars.

Calvin and Hobbes, four stars.

The Born Loser, 4.5 stars.

Kathy, 0.6 stars.

The Farside 3.4 stars.

The Family Circus, 2.5 stars.

According to Guinness, 3.7 stars.

Peanuts, 4.6 stars.

Snuffy Smith, 5 stars.

I mean, you're putting Snuffy Smith over Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes.

You're being a bit of a high school contrarian.

I was a high school.

Right.

I know at that point.

I had a whole page every week where I could just do whatever I want.

You know, it's like,

I mean, wait till I read this fucking review of Twin Peaks.

I mean, if you think this is queuing up him reviewing Twin Peaks.

And by the way, we've already established it's a dense movie we have to talk about.

We haven't even gotten to the Twin Peaks thing.

I just want to read quickly a Snuffy Smith script.

A script.

From like recent?

No, it's from 86.

Okay.

Because I believe Barney Google and Snuffy Smith still runs, and you read it, and you're like, who on earth even knows what this is about?

Well, like what this is.

The original strip, I think, was from the early 20th century.

It's long last.

Right.

And Barney Google is gone.

Like, he hasn't been a part of it in like 100 years.

I think it's literally still called, though, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.

Oh, I wonder.

But, okay, well, please read me a Snuffy strip.

It should be from 06.

I'm having a hard time reading the handwriting on the date on it.

But they're playing poker.

Snuffy and his friend.

Excuse me.

I don't know the character's name.

And he says, balls o' fire, Snuffy.

I'm tired of all your cheating.

Put up your dukes, your spelled Y-O-R.

Of course.

It's only a two-panel strip.

Snuffy Smith is usually two panels.

Somewhat insulting.

Which I'm starting to.

No, I'm starting to see David's case here, which is there's a cleanness to it.

It's so clean.

It's so freaking clean.

It's like ammonia.

Balls of fire, Snuffy.

I'm tired of it.

Put up your dukes, right?

Toxic.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, second panel, Snuffy has dropped the cards and he's holding up two

pendants that say JMU.

He's putting up his dukes.

Oh, wow.

That's so bad.

That's more literally.

That's like more referential.

Can I read you today's Snuffy Smith?

Are they still making Snuffy Smith?

I have to talk about the movie after we talk about Twin.

Snuffy is talking to, I think his friend is called Doc.

I don't remember.

Snuffy says, why should one feller get to decide everything?

Oh, wow.

David's making a choice in the voice.

And Doc says, hmm, you know, you're right, Snuffy.

Okay.

Panel two.

Doc is flipping three coins in the air.

and saying, I'll flip Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington.

That's good.

That's good.

That's a good comment.

I will defend that one.

That's good.

I don't really get it, but it's sort of.

I really get it.

Yeah.

That's, yeah.

It's just like the logic of Snuffy saying, I don't like how one person decides everything, which I think Snuffy's trying to talk about like executive power.

Could be.

And Doc is interpreting it as like the coin.

It's actually kind of deep.

It's actually kind of awesome.

The president on the coin is kind of making the call.

Right.

Yeah.

So he's going to flip three coins.

Now, I don't know how flipping three coins is really going to help him make any decisions is the only thing I'll say.

Well, sure, but if there were a sense of closure, then this trip would end.

There has to be a yearning.

There has to be something unresolved with Snuffy.

John Rose is the current.

Yeah, Fred Laswell must be long, long, retired, if not deceased.

Yeah.

But anyway, it's just really funny that you put Snuffy on top.

Back to the Perconi and four beasts.

Oh, right.

John Rose has been doing it since 1998.

Oh, wow.

So he was 12 years old.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So in the

same issue of the Bracanian, I reviewed Twin Peaks, which was airing at the time.

This I have reread.

This is a

tough read.

I mean, this really.

Reading your high school writing.

I was going to say there's a precedent for it on this podcast, and you couldn't come off worse than I did.

So please proceed.

Right.

I'm not going to read all of this review.

I will just read the thing that I remember being so proud of when I wrote it.

I can't believe David Lynch recovered from this cutting

remark.

The critic says, I don't like Twin Peaks.

It moves too slowly for television.

It's pretentious to the point of being overtly obnoxious.

Director David Lynch has not changed the face of television for the 1990s.

He's just made a tired genre more surreal.

That's no great feat.

Yeah.

You're throwing it out.

Wow.

I see.

I thought you were going to be like, hey, guys, check out this crazy show on ABC Twin Peaks.

But you're like, no, no.

No, I was like...

Storm is

like a little Armin White up in here.

Like, oh, everyone's talking about this great show, the Liberal Elites.

It actually is kind of boring and weird.

Young Hawk masses are falling for it.

Yeah, exactly.

With your Snuffy Smith is actually the best shit.

Some contrarian shit.

Right.

You know, like where you're like, the common man, the simple tales, you know.

But, but what's interesting and I had forgotten about until I reread this review was at the time I had seen Eraser Head because so what I say is,

oh God.

I talk about some other stuff and then I say Eraser Head is weird and it represents Lynch at his best.

Eraser Head is actually extremely bizarre, hot take, and has some of the more disturbing images in the history of American film.

Right, but you're like Twin Peaks too sanded down.

Right, yeah.

Right.

But the weirdness in Eraser Head is not without purpose.

It's a twisted sort of symbolism and makes the film agonizingly personal.

Twin Peaks is not very personal.

It's actually quite alienating.

Anyway, so I had seen Eraserhead.

Do you know when in the arc of Twin Peaks this review came out?

Like, how much of the show were you commenting on?

Well, if it's spring of 1990, I think it was probably within the first few weeks.

I don't remember when it actually reached.

I remember the season is eight episodes that started late.

Like it was like March to May or March to April or something.

That sounds right.

I'm just curious if you're like reviewing the pilot or if you're.

Probably the pilot and maybe one other episode.

I honestly don't remember.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

But I know I watched it.

I mean,

I would have actually watched an episode.

Yeah.

The only time I, the only, the only time I behaved unethically as a

entertainment columnist was.

I actually reviewed a Guar concert before I went to it because we had to get the thing into press and Guar was playing that night.

But I had seen Guar so many times.

I was like, I know what's going to happen.

So I just reviewed it before actually seeing that particular.

Yeah.

Shock.

Yeah.

I'm a little different from a long-running TV.

I tried to just talk about embarrassing high school newspaper things.

Yeah, because there's definitely nothing

history of you saying stuff on Mike or in paper.

So were you a high school movie critic?

I had a column called Griffin's Top Five.

That was, it was usually more of a, it was a humor piece.

It was a, I'd come up with a weird top five list.

Uh-huh.

Maybe it was top 10.

It was top 10.

It was top 10.

But there was, they would, I feel like at the end of the year, they'd ask a couple people to do end-of-year movie lists, and you'd have like four competing ones

on the page.

I wasn't the regular movie critic, right?

I see.

Yeah.

And you wanted to put on that sex tape and they wouldn't let you.

Yeah.

You know, Lucretia Martel's The Holy Girl at number three, Paris Holton sex tape, number 10, I believe, was my original list.

And they wisely said, absolutely not.

Ben.

What's up, Griff?

This is an ad break.

Yeah.

And I'm just, I'm not, this isn't a humble brag, it's just a fact of the matter.

Despite you being on mic, oftentimes, when sponsors buy ads based on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

They love it to get a little bonus Ben on the ad read, but technically, that's not what they're looking for.

But something very different is happening right now.

That is true.

We had a sponsor come in and say, We are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement.

This is laser targeted.

The product.

We have copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

It certainly is.

And what is today's episode sponsored by?

The Toxic Avenger.

The new Toxic Avenger movie is coming to theaters August 29th.

Macon Blair's remake of Reimagining.

Reimagining, whatever.

Reboot.

of the Toxic Avenger.

Now, David and I have not gotten to see it yet, but they sent you a screener link.

Yeah, I'm going to see it.

We're excited to see it.

But, Ben, you texted us last night.

This fucking rules.

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Yeah.

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Let me read you the cast list here in billing order, as they asked, which I really appreciate.

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Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

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There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like David.

David?

Sizzling.

Yep.

And then Elijah Wood plays like a dang-ass freak.

He certainly does.

He's having a lot of fun.

Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

I just got to say, the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high school.

Trauma.

Yes.

Yes, yes that's right the original film yep i grew up watching toxy and trauma movies on porches yes with my sleazy and sticky friends it informed so much of my sensibility your friends like junkyard dog and headbanger yeah exactly making toxic crusader jokes and so when i heard that they were doing this new installment i was really emotionally invested

It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Cineverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect, but also a little weary.

They're playing with fire here.

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Okay.

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uh great action it's really fucking funny it just it it hits all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version cinniverse last year released terrifier 3 unrated yeah big risk for them there i feel like it's a very very intense movie and one of the huge hit more interesting yeah theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years want to make that happen again here

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Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it?

Summon the nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band.

Hell yeah.

Who are also mercenaries.

Cool.

And drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

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Anyway, David Lynch, great American artist.

So you liked Twin Peaks.

You didn't like Twin Peaks as a...

young man.

Did you come around on Twin Peaks or on David Lynch generally?

I think before the Showtime thing started,

I think I re-watched all of season one.

I don't think I've ever seen all of season two of Twin Peaks.

I think I just bailed at some point.

It feels like everyone does.

And I are currently working the same thing with season two.

Okay.

There is the certain point, I think, where we all kind of drop off with a certain and I think that's because he wasn't involved as involved in it or something, or he was, or the other guy wasn't involved and something like that.

The film was a little less involved and it was a little more chaotic.

I i think there's much to love about season two but it's it's hard to feel motivated to watch it especially before knowing that return is coming right where it's kind of like well i know this didn't really get to you know kind of resolve itself artistically like blah blah blah but it is worth watching season two if you ever have the time uh to get to the final episode which is quite quite amazing I think I have watched the final episode.

I think a lot of people just skipped ahead.

Which is understandable.

And I've never seen the Twin Peaks movie Firewalk without.

Me.

Oh, interesting.

I would say it's quite good.

I've heard that, yeah.

But I have watched The Return,

and that was a

really special experience.

Do you feel like Firewalk With Me, is that the only Lynch movie you haven't seen, possibly?

No, I haven't seen a number of them, I realized, coming over here.

I've never seen The Elephant Man.

My favorite.

I think when I was a kid.

I think when I was a kid, The Elephant Man was always on HBO.

I could be misremembering.

So I don't want to say, like, oh, I watched it

through osmosis, but I think it presented as so heavy and intimidating that childhood David couldn't handle it.

Maybe was just like, that's, I'll never be grown up enough to watch The Elephant Man.

Yeah.

It's in black and white.

Like, what?

So I've never seen that, and I, and I've never seen the straight story.

I would, you would.

I think you would really like the straight story.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

Because I did.

I mean, I've been watching it on Disney Plus if you have.

Oh, really?

Yes, yes.

And

I think I've seen all the other ones.

I saw Eraserhead in middle school because

I had this great book.

It was called Cult Movies by Danny Perry.

Have you guys ever heard of that book?

He published three of them.

And in the 80s.

I have heard of this.

If you wanted to know about weird movies, he published these three collections of his idiosyncratic personal essays and reviews of cult movies.

And I like turned me on to a lot of amazing movies.

And he wrote wrote about Eraserhead

and included some stills in the essay.

I think there's a photo of the baby.

And my friends and I are like, whoa, we, we definitely got to see this movie.

And also at the time in the 80s, I lived in a college town.

So like, I think at the record store, I think they had eraserhead posters, you know, the iconic image of what's his name with the hair backlet.

So I think it was like an image.

It was like, it had a currency like

you want to see if it was in our eraser episode that it's just like, if you're someone who's kind of trying to find the subculture in any way yeah right yeah in art that's just an image that somehow gets exposed to you at a young age right i remember having i had an entertainment weekly issue that i want to say was from 02 or 03 that was like their definitive ranking of the top 25 cult movies of all time And I probably kept that issue for 15 years.

Yeah, it's like those books I had.

Yeah.

Yeah, the cult movie books.

Right.

But like to get that issue when I was in high school and be like, well, here's the guide.

If I watch these totally five total piece right i have some sense of like the weird corners of film and then i can go deeper from there right in each direction how am i gonna get a copy of el topo and watch it yeah because that sounds really crazy yeah when a lot of this stuff felt like superstar the karen carpenter story was on that list oh wow and they mention in the write-up you can't watch it makes you want to watch it at the time that i was doing all this cult movie research remember there was no there were no dvds there was obviously no streaming it was just like vhs like and maybe they'll have it maybe they won't won't.

So, Eraserhead was something that we really wanted to see.

And I remember, like, we had a slumber party.

It was like, we got it.

We got it.

Tonight is Eraserhead Night.

And then we watched it.

It was great.

You know,

it is, to me, the definitive cult movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, aside from your distaste at the time for Twin Peaks.

Yeah, well, you just got it.

You know, you saw through the

fog.

I saw through society's lies.

Yeah.

You were otherwise pretty in the bag for Lynch, it sounds like.

Well, I think for years, I mean, I only knew him from a racer head.

Like, I don't think I saw Wild at Heart until I was in my 20s.

You probably didn't see Lost Highway when you were in the city.

I only saw Lost Highway last year when it was in revival.

Pretty good.

Yeah, pretty good.

And Mulholland Drive, I saw in the theater when it came out, and then maybe once or twice afterwards on DVD or something.

So let's take you to International.

And Dune, and Dune, I never saw.

Should check it out.

I can't believe Hodgman has let you get away with that.

Well, he summarized it for me like 50 times.

Yeah.

I remember once we were on tour and we were at a, we were performing in Alabama in this great venue called the Bottle Tree.

It doesn't exist anymore.

And when it was over and we were hanging out at the bar, they were playing David Lynch's Dune in the background.

And it was just like, I've never seen someone struggle as much as like John trying to be sociable and make and talk to other people while also just like his eyes are watching from

the 80 times.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

But I've never seen that either.

Okay.

Because it just looks like, I don't know, man.

Okay, so when it's gnarly when you walk into Inland Empire in Chapel Hill in 2007, in 2007,

you're not like

David Lynch is my god.

I'm obsessive.

I'm encyclopedic.

He's made a couple things that you love deeply.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I really, really liked Mulholland Drive.

And I think that is like, he was just in the pocket on that one.

Like, if he was in the sweet spot.

And,

you know, there's just moments,

there's moments in that movie that are just so affecting.

Just like,

I think one, I think the thing, I think one thing that David Lynch does better than anyone,

he does it in the final scene of the Twin Peaks, the Return.

He does it with Naomi Watts masturbating in Mulholland Drive, and he does it in an Inland Empire is a sense of almost just like

cosmic desolation.

Yes.

Just an utter

reduced reduced to rubble.

Someone who has been reduced, like a hollow feeling that is so haunting.

Like it woke, like when we finished watching The Return, like it woke me up that night.

That, when that, that shot of him where he's like, what, what's the line?

What year is this?

Against an absolutely black sky.

They must have CG'd the sky to make it just totally matte black.

And the same with Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive when it's like you're back in reality and the brick, she's masturbating and that brick wall is like, it's like going in and out of focus or whatever.

It's just like, yeah, I think that's really rude because I usually jerk off to walls.

It's such.

Well, if they have the right curves, if it's that kind of like, what is that?

It's almost like a stucco kind of thing.

Yeah.

It's,

I think he's so good at that.

And it's also a feeling that, anyway, so when I went to see Endland Empire, it was like, I like David Lynch.

I'm not going to.

You're not there with two flags being like

the biggest significant movie.

It's like, oh, David Lynch has a new movie out.

Like, I've never seen a movie at the Carolina.

It's supposed to be a great theater.

I'll go see what it's going to.

Yeah.

And what's interesting is when we get to Exhibit B, I mean, one of the reasons that this memory is so special for me is that I remember it in the context of thinking, that was a great year for me going to the movies.

2007.

So you were seven about this.

Right.

You know what I mean?

I mean, it's a great year.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Because this, this falls into 2007 for you.

So you're 2007 thought of as sort of like a high watermark.

A big movie.

It's kind of a second 1999 of a lot of major young American auteurs.

So Exhibit B is a printout of my Excel spreadsheet that I kept for tax purposes.

I was a freelancer, so seeing movies was a tax write-off, according to my accountant.

So I have like over 20 years of just like all the movies that I paid money for.

And I mean,

it's crazy.

If you like, specifically, I realize, if you like broy, elevated genre movies that end with an unresolved kind of crappy feeling.

This is your year.

That's so true.

Children of men,

the departed.

Well, some of these are late 2006 that you're seven early seven.

I just want to clarify.

Yep.

Yep.

The freaking.

Because you have there will be blood and no country at the end of the year.

Yep.

You have freaking Zodiac.

Michael Clayton.

Yep.

The movie.

Eastern Promises.

The feeling you're talking about is present in all these.

Yeah, right.

Gone, Baby, Gone, which actually I re-watched recently when I was looking at this spreadsheet.

It It got me so psyched for Gone, Baby, Gone.

I re-watched it, and that might be getting up towards five times.

Wow.

I freaking love Gone, Baby, Gone.

I think it's so good, and I think some of the sequences are so exciting.

And I think Casey Affleck is fucking mesmerizing in that movie.

He is.

Before the devil knows you're dead.

Speaking of feel-good movies.

Yeah.

I mean, cheapers, creepers.

Do you know what I almost think was in the water that year?

And I'll make it 2006.

And the Iraq War.

Yeah, I was wondering, what is it?

I think a lot of it is there was like the immediate aftermath of how do we reckon with 9-11 and a lot of movies that were trying to tackle it more directly.

Or there was all the sort of like po-faced Iraq war movies.

And these are all taking an elliptical approach.

And that's why they're more just in the movie.

It's like it took five or six years for people to be like, I want to make a movie about this mood I'm feeling rather than actually trying to talk about.

Zodiac for crying out loud.

Zodiac.

I saw.

I mean, when I was thinking back on Inland Empire, when I think back on that memory,

I think back of just being in the sticket of just like really good movies.

Now, Inland Empire is obviously an outlier.

Like, as much as I like Zodiac, like, Zodiac is not Inland Empire.

You know, like, it's just, it's...

Inland Empire is just doing something completely different.

Sure.

The movie that I saw just about a week after I saw Inland Empire comes the closest to the experience I had watching Inland Empire is this fucking Romanian movie.

Did you ever see a Romanian quote-unquote comedy called The Death of Mr.

Lazaruscu?

Of course, yeah, yeah, I remember that one.

That was hot shit, though.

Yeah, it was when Romanian cinema, it was after four months, three weeks, two days.

Yeah, for sure.

Christy Pugh.

I'm bad on pronouncing Romanian names, but it is one of those things, right, where they're like, there's a great new comedy out of Eastern Europe.

And I'm like, hmm, is it two and a half hours long?

And it's crazy.

Is it

two and a half hours of an elderly alcoholic dying in real time as he is kicked out of multiple hospital emergency rooms.

It's basically a dozen people on the radio like rolling in the hills.

This is the best shit I've seen in EEE.

Why is this fun?

It's bureaucracy refusing to let this guy die.

It's making fun of, you know, institutions, right?

Yeah.

Another great experience of just going into a movie called, I saw it in Chapel Hill, there's an art, an indie cinema that was actually started by

my old high school English teacher,

Bruce Stone.

It's called The Chelsea, and it's still in operation.

And you could go there and just like like and watch all these funky movies.

Like I saw Akira there when Akira came out.

I saw The Vanishing there when The Vanishing was first released, speaking of another great feel-good movie.

Yeah, the ends really happen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so it was like, yeah, there's a new comedy out of Romania, The Death of Mr.

Lazaruscu.

So I went in cold.

It's like Inland Empire, it's a long movie.

Yeah, it's two and a half hours long.

And at the end of it, an older guy on the front row literally yelled out, that's it.

He was so pissed.

He's like, Yeah, that's it.

He died.

Like, it was in the title.

You can't be disappointed.

Like, you're not getting your money.

I think it actually, from what I remember of that movie, it ends with them being like, Okay, we're finally gonna do like a brain operation on you.

And the movie's like, Well, leave it off here.

We're gonna, we're gonna let you guys go now.

And you're just like, No, I think he dies on a stretcher.

I think it's a he's he's definitely on the table.

I can't remember if you, yeah, I've never seen it.

I mean, it is in the title that he dies, so you know, don't be so.

My memory of Inland Empire is coupled with my memory of just being like, What a great year for movies!

Like, I like grow-y movies that end on a bummer note.

I thought Death of Mr.

Lazaruscu was fun.

Like, I don't need to see it again.

But, you know, it's like if you saw that recent movie from Romania called Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, did you see that?

Fucking awesome.

Yeah.

Another two and a half hour movie.

Absolutely an absolute grind.

Yep.

A comedy.

1208.

East of Bucharest.

Did you see that?

That was a fun thing.

I never saw it.

00607.

Very funny, very bleak Romanian comedy.

That one I think is at least short.

I'll give that one credit.

Yeah.

I don't know what the rule is about Eastern European films needing to be very long.

So in the Sunland Empire in this beautiful I saw it in this beautiful, empty, almost empty theater.

I went in just being like, oh, David Lynch has a new movie.

And that's all I knew.

And

I

remem, I just

remember it as just like a...

Great experience.

Like re-watching it was interesting.

I had misremembered a lot of the movie and I'd obviously forgotten a lot of it.

It's been 17 years, but there's some, you know, this, the, the shot of Laura Dern running towards the camera on that outdoor path, and then you close up on her face, and she's got this agonizing grimace that's really overlit.

My memory of that night is seeing her face

on a fucking, it was like one of the

biggest things I've ever seen, if that makes sense.

The, the,

The hugeness of her emotion and seeing it on a big, huge screen.

I just remember being just like, absolutely like,

I don't know.

It was just like really intense.

And then the other thing I remember is

the credit sequence with Cinder Man and just a feeling of absolute relief and euphoria and catharsis.

There is a huge relief to the credits in the theater because it is an incredibly long movie and it is quite punishing at times.

And

the ending is fun and the music is so good.

And there, yeah, there's just that sense of like, okay, I can kind of turn my brain back into low power mode a little bit.

I've been straining, especially the first time you see this movie, I think you're like, I've been strained to kind of keep all these placemitting and try and think about what they are while another part of my brain is like, don't worry about it.

Like, just soak it in or whatever.

But you can't.

If you're watching a movie, you can't help but try to grasp a narrative, I think.

Absolutely.

Unless you're very, very used to like avant-garde cinema where you're like, oh, yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Like, I'll just bathe in it.

Rees,

early in this

series,

we've recorded almost all the episodes up until this point, basically all of them, but they haven't come out yet.

So I just want to inform you, Sims made a joke in maybe the Eraser Hit episode that his glib analysis for all David Lynch movies, when people try to unlock them, was just going to be it's about a guy who loses his keys.

It's clear what this movie is about.

It's a guy who lost his keys.

Like, that's my jokey, like, right?

Like, you have to put the evidence together here.

And this represents the keys.

This represents the guy.

There are two stories

in all of human history.

Guy loses his keys, guy finds his keys.

That's basically Sims' bit.

I just want to point out, he's been proven somewhat correct maybe four times across this series.

Two minutes and 12 seconds into this movie.

A couple, a man and a woman in silhouette, subtitled in Polish.

Right.

We don't really have our bearings.

Face is blurred out, interestingly.

Start having an argument about, I don't have the key.

Yep.

It's true.

Before these movies,

key imagery

losing keys.

Yeah, he's a big key.

You're not wrong.

There is a lot of keys.

Passageways and portals.

I mean, that's obviously like one of his recurring motifs and obsessions.

You had your line on, I think, the Spirited Away episode, where you said that you think all movies are puzzles or dreams.

And it's a thing we cite a lot and think about a lot on this show.

And I think.

Well, not all movies, but like movies that you sit with and you, you know what I mean?

Like.

Flubberry is a puzzle, you know,

there's ones you ruminate on, like you think about, right?

Like, can they be, can it be solved?

Like, is it a, is it about finding the solution or just like being in a feeling?

Isn't what's interesting about Lynch that he kind of makes films that are simultaneously puzzles and dreams?

Well, that's why I think Mulholland Drive is in the pocket.

Yeah.

Because that's in the sweet spot.

It's the best version.

Because you can watch it.

You can watch it as a puzzle or not.

You can watch it both ways.

Right.

Inland Empire.

I think you can't solve it all the way.

I mean,

this is the reason that I've really come to love this movie.

I think part of it was that, you know, it was like improvised.

Like, he didn't really have a script.

Like, he was just like with it.

And we can talk about that.

I mean, they crack open the dossier.

But I watched this movie last night for the first time with the, like, I'm not going to try to solve this because I understand the way he made it.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not as intentionally designed with a like simple codex in his mind.

I think there is still a sort of story you can pluck out of Inland Empire.

But it's sort of like Mohan Drive where you don't have to do it.

At the very end, I suddenly had a read on it.

I'm, I'm sorry, I feel like I interrupted you.

No, nothing you were about to say about not trying to solve this movie or whether it is solvable.

Well, I mean, the solution is

in the posters.

It's like a woman in trouble.

Yeah.

Like, what more information magic, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Of

like

there will be an emotion at the center of the story I'm telling you that will get through to you no matter how it's being communicated.

And a performance that is so locked in that even if the actor herself does not really understand what movie she's in or what she's doing.

Right.

There's a quote where she's like, I can't wait to see this movie and figure out what the fuck I was doing.

She talks about her and Justin Thoreau would just kind of be like, what do you think this movie is about?

But the difference is that she's in almost every shot.

Well, no, she's not.

She's not in quite a lot of it, actually.

She's in a lot of it.

Of course.

It's a big crazy performance yes uh but it was it's funny and grounded that you kind of stay locked into whatever she's playing at that moment that the movie became this kind of like early internet meme because david lynch rented a cow and went on the street and did an oscar campaign for laura dern and people were like in a way she should get an oscar nomination she has like 40 Oscar clips.

She delivers monologue.

She does accents.

She cries.

She dies.

Like, and at the same time, people were like, can you please be serious?

No Oscar voter is going to respond to this movie.

But

it was such a thing at the moment where I feel like his Oscar campaign became more famous than the movie.

Oh, yeah, totally.

In a certain way, despite not getting her nomination that she was never going to get, it has proven more effective than most Oscar campaigns in that we all remember the campaign.

The campaign.

Yeah, right.

Like that and the fucking Melissa Leo, I'm buying out ads myself that say consideration.

Those are the two for your consideration campaigns that people still talk about.

And they're the two times that people went crazy, right?

That they were just like, fuck your like model of how you do this.

And good for them.

I'm not sure.

I totally see us.

And David Lynch doesn't get the nomination.

But he got, he got attention.

Yeah.

And he knows how to get.

All right.

Yeah.

I will, we have research on the film, so I will.

Right.

Okay.

Uh, crack open our dossier.

Yes.

Mohal and Drive, of course, came out in 2001.

And David Lynch doesn't really have any plans for another movie after that.

He is much more interested in the internet.

And he's doing his dumb land.

Right.

His own website.

Yeah.

Maybe starting his own television station is something he talks about.

He starts DavidLynch.com and for $10 a month, people will remember this, you would get his daily weather reports,

something called Out Yonder, where he and his son Austin would talk to each other.

I'm not sure I've ever seen those.

I've definitely seen the weather reports.

Of course.

Blue skies and golden sunshine.

He would speedrun levels of Sonic and Knuckles.

Yeah.

Dumbland, which we talk about a little bit on our...

Do you remember Dumbland?

It was sort of an animated, crudely animated.

It feels very people, actually.

Yeah, right.

I get it confused with the comic he had that never changed.

The angriest dog in the world or whatever it was called, where it's the same art every single time.

Something called Head with a Hammer.

Oh, yeah, I remember that, which is sort of like an office drone satire.

Something called Blue Bob, which was a blues, Industrial Blues album he made with the guitarist John Neff.

Jesus Christ.

I mean, it's David Lee.

Industrial Industrial Blues.

But he was almost like doing an early version of a Patreon sort of idea.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

You pay your subscription.

Here's all my stuff.

This will is where all of it will go.

In 2002, he released Rabbits, which is probably the most famous thing that came out of all of this famous quote-unquote, which footage of which, of course, is in the Inland Empire.

We talk about that on our short film episode as well.

Have you ever seen Rabbits?

I've only seen it in Inland Empire.

And so, you know, you've got Scott Coffey, Laura Herring, and Naomi Watts in rabbit suits doing the strange sitcom.

And they are in the rabbits.

Oh, wow.

Confirmed.

Whoa, really?

It's really them?

That's cool.

That's Laura Herring.

I mean, if you're going to do it, do it.

Like, that's what's so wonderful about him, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Laura Herring said her approach was, I closed my eyes and I followed his instructions.

Like David Lynch.com shut down.

uh in the mid-2000s

classic second dot-com bubble he did yes he did keep up the weather reports sporadically, and they sort of still exist.

But he realized, he said, you can't charge people for a site you don't update all the time.

So I lost interest in it.

Would that others would take the same lessons?

I'm going to say he was quick to figure out the grind that doesn't a lot of people.

Right.

And then he went from intranet to the most analog form of generating creativity, walking and running into Laura Dern, his new neighbor.

He hadn't seen her in a while.

She was dating Billy Bob Thornton, apparently.

And they ran into each other on yon street, just walking around.

And they were like, you know, we should do something together.

Are you serious?

That's how this happened.

Because, like, what would the last thing she'd have been with him?

Like, wild at her.

Wild it hurt.

Yeah.

It had been 10 years.

More than 10 years.

I just want to quickly.

Oh, it's blue velvet.

I've seen blue velvet.

Sorry, of course.

Of course.

I figured you would have said that.

Don't spend time on this.

I just want to quickly just jump back and circle a thing that I think people forget, which is that Billy Bob Thornton left Laura Dern for Angelina Jolie.

Yeah, he was

dating some really fancy folks.

In that crazy, whatever it was, 18 months, two years of the Billy Bob Angelina thing, the quiet narrative was, and Laura Dern is sad.

Right, right, right, right.

That he had dumped her.

Yes.

Do you want to know something really crazy that I remember about Billy Bob Thornton?

I think about this so often on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the interview show.

She once interviewed him, and he said he was like yeah i'm

he was like i really get freaked out by old furniture like i can't yes i can't buy antique furniture or secondhand furniture it like freaks me out it really disturbs me i have to buy new furniture i think about that all the time i believe do you think there's a point at which his furniture becomes too old for him yeah i wonder yeah right exactly yeah anyway i i believe he has like held up film productions if they set dress.

The thing thing about him is like his phobias and hang-ups are like complete and unbreakable.

Right.

Yeah.

And there are many of them.

It's not an affectation.

But I know the antique one like carries over into all aspects of his life.

I love that.

They ran into each other and they're like, we should do something together.

So David Lynch is like, let me just film you doing some stuff.

And she says she did tell her agent at CAA, I'm going to do this.

And her agent was like, what's he paying you?

And Lynch said, well, the internet rate is $100.

And so he paid her $100.

And they shot this lengthy monologue, which is, you know, basically lots of it is in the film, which is her talking.

They're called the Mr.

K monologues in the film, but it's her when she's talking with the sort of southern accent, recounting these things to a bespectacled man.

One of the actually creepiest characters in the movie.

Yeah, he's that performance is so unsettling.

He

of the guy behind the desk.

It's all shot in his painting studio, which they made a sort of set inside of.

And she started speaking, and they stopped twice, once for an airplane, once to reload the camera.

Just apart from that, they just did long, like 45-minute takes.

But we should emphasize they were not reloading the camera with film

because this movie is not shot on film.

No, you love to come on for movies that were shot on

tax machines.

Yes,

what are you looking up?

Yeah, Eric Crary, who plays Mr.

K,

is kind of a Monty Montgomery situation.

Right.

He's a film producer, right?

Here are the titles he held on this film in Lind Empire.

Okay.

He, of course, functions as an actor, playing the role of Mr.

K.

He also was associate producer.

He also was production supervisor.

He also was camera operator at times.

He was part of the construction team.

But this is how all movies should be made.

It's like this film is made.

Yeah.

Yep.

I mean, yeah.

I mean, is the camera supervisor just someone who's like, hey, could you turn it on?

Maybe.

Like, make sure there's no film in that camera.

Make sure that thing looks like absolute garbage.

He was Mary Sweeney's assistant on Mulholland Drive.

Yes, right.

So you're like, here's his like

longtime partner, Creative Collaborators assistant, who then he's like, I'm working on a new thing.

I don't really know what it is yet.

Can you come and be the person Laura Dern monologues to?

And also as the project grows, he starts putting him in all these different places.

They do this, and producer Jay Asing

recounts that Lynch afterwards was just like, what if this was a movie?

And was just very excited.

And so.

2006 still a time where a lot of people would look at that and go well what we should do is reshoot this on film in a process

never going back to film yeah never going back to film my biggest cultural memory of this movie having not seen it until last night uh but remembering reading reviews and interviews at the time was that he kept on referring to and i don't know if this is in the dossier the digital camera as my my beautiful little ugly thing right that he was in in love with like we'll talk about it but he could have shot this on higher quality digital film it was available to him right he shot on very low quality he liked that it was ugly you know it looks so uh it just makes it it looks forbidden like it looks like you shouldn't be watching it it's perfect so he starts writing pages uh jeremy alter uh who's a location manager on lost highway a friend you know starts helping him type pages up and stuff

And they would just sort of sporadically shoot things.

They refer to Jeremy Irons coming on board as the moment from when the film shifts from like a project they're working on to like a film they're working on right like Jeremy Irons, I guess, makes them all be like, I guess we should like come correct and like act like this is a feature, not just like weird David Lynch shit.

So that was one of the.

It's more structured.

Yeah.

And his, and his performance is completely naturalistic as opposed to everybody else who's acting like they're in a dream.

And when he showed up, when I re-watched it for the second time last week, he was one of the things I'd forgotten about.

It was like, what the fuck is Jeremy Irons doing?

He's lost.

Like, what is he doing here?

Not to mention Mary Steam Virgin and just all these other William H.

Macy basically reprising his role from Sea Biscuit for one shot.

Yep.

There's more of that on the like they filmed plenty of, like, that's the whole thing.

They're just filming stuff.

David Lynch insisted that he could smoke at any location where he was shooting, so they had to find strange locations

to film.

Because it's the 2000s.

Smoking is going out of vogue.

Like smoking in public places is going out of vogue.

He would do things like say, like, hey, Jeremy, write this down.

I need six black black dancers, a blonde Eurasian with a monkey on her shoulder, a lumberjack sawing wood, Natasha.

Right, that's for the culture.

The credits, the closing credits.

You know, like he would basically just be like, see if he can find this, this, this.

Well, like, a past and future guest, a friend of the show, Drew McGweeney, messaged us some months ago when Lynch won March Madness and told us that he's in the special thanks for this movie.

I don't know.

Is it one of the scenes that's in the film or is it?

I believe so.

I couldn't identify which one it is, but that he got a call from his friend who was working in some department on this movie and was like, do you still have an empty room in your apartment?

And he's like, yeah, my roommate moved out two days ago.

I haven't found like a subletter yet.

And he's like, can like, we'll be there in like three hours.

Can we smoke in it?

20 minutes.

20 minutes.

He shows up.

I have the text here.

And he's with David Lynch.

David Lynch is like, can I use your room to shoot my new film?

Daru says, yes, of course.

And that night,

so not even like,

oh, this is a location scout.

You'll get back to us in two months.

You'll come here.

Not on this one.

He shows up with Mary Sweeney, a cameraman, Laura Dern, four young European women, shoots for five or six hours.

And after that, would call Drew every few weeks and ask him what Drew says was just random questions about things.

Wait, David Lynch would call him?

Yes.

Cool.

It is cool.

And that's why he has a special thing.

Yes.

I mean, Dern always said, like, I'd wake up every morning and go, I wonder what we're going to shoot.

And I'd like arrive on set and he'd deliver me pages he'd written the night before.

But also that's how like all of the department heads, if those even are really proper titles on this one,

are processing it.

And then everyone in real time is sort of like, great, like it's a movie made like it was chopped or something, you know, where it's like, here are the ingredients.

Now figure out how to put this together in the next six hours.

Right.

Shake it all up in this big metal bowl.

As Lynch says, I never saw any hole.

W-H-O-L-E.

I saw plenty of holes, H-O-L-E-S, but I didn't really worry.

I would get an idea for a scene and and shoot it, get another idea and shoot that.

I didn't know how they would relate.

Production lasted about three years.

Initially, it was self-funded.

At a certain point, he goes to Studio Canal and he's like, I'm making this.

It's going to be vaguely this.

And they gave him a few million dollars.

He's obviously shooting it on a Sony PD-150.

But what's also big here?

He is credited as the cinematographer.

In a lot of the film, he is physically the one operating the camera.

He is the cinematographer editor and composer.

Like, you know, a lot of people.

Sweeney, obviously, usually did his editing.

And he said, in this case, like there's no script to go off of.

There's no order to put these things in.

I was the only one who could edit it because I was the only one who had any sense of looking at the footage and trying to figure out what it meant to me.

But I think the whole point of the process of this movie is him just being like, how do I basically reduce this art form to like pencil on paper?

Like even from the time he's at AFI, it's like, well, you need a crew of a certain size and you need film.

It has to be processed and there's a structure and all of this sort of stuff.

You know, like film schools do not just teach you the creative aspects and the language of film, but they also try to train you in like how to behave like a proper film production.

They try to teach you how to be like upright and upstanding and have everything covered.

And this feels like him at this point in his 60s.

being like, how do I turn filmmaking into something as direct as my painting?

Where it's like, I'm just moving I'm holding a camera I'm writing stuff I'm handing it to people I'm cutting it I'm just like it's whatever I fucking feel like in the moment the way he talks about it is also how Soderbergh talks about it this like this liberation of like I don't have to take all day setting something up like we you know we're no longer bound to uh you know he calls film a dinosaur in a tar pit much like Soderbergh he now has kind of gotten over it it's not like he doesn't like digital anymore but now he's like ah film's nice and yeah I might use it again who knows you You know, they kind of get nostalgic, I think.

But there's something liberating, I think, of just like, oh, I just put the camera here and we're ready to go.

Liberating is the world word.

But Suterberg is so often working with writer collaborators working with some kind of like pretty fixed honed piece of text.

And then he likes the challenge of like, how do I simplify the workday around this, the process, the language of the movie itself?

Lynch is also like generating the language in real time.

Yeah, it's really, I mean, I think think one of the reasons the movie is so exciting is it's it's so intuitive.

Everything about it, right?

The shooting of it, the writing of it, such as, such as it is, and then the editing of it, obviously.

So in a way,

you know, David Lynch is all into meditation and all this kind of stuff.

I haven't heard that.

And this feels like the closest he gets to.

I don't know what you call it, like a flow state or whatever.

Yep.

And he did it for a whole movie, which is like bonkers.

Over three years.

On and off, obviously right like yeah yes he was but i can't remember another movie that i've seen i can't remember another feature film that i've seen in a real movie theater that is so intuitive no i don't think there's another film quite like this and a lot of it is like the process and him having a reputation

right i don't know if those people make him that people trust him to do that exactly that he had like in certain ways it feels like this would be a lot of people's weird first film they made yeah exactly before they figure out how to hone their thing.

This is also just, this is basically an avant-garde film, and it is the only avant-garde film a lot of people have seen because they saw it because it has a David Lynch film with burn and like famous people are in it.

Totally, yeah.

And it's kind of got a foot in each world a little bit, you know, versus like something you would see at a art museum or at a, you know, at the end of the day.

But that's why it's so damn good.

I sure because movies always have to have a screenplay.

And like screenplays are great, but it's like...

They're for nerds.

No, but seriously, don't you kind of think, don't you kind of get sick of it after a while?

Like, something worse, like

a good, a good movie, and it has a screenplay.

Oh, the script is so good.

Oh, I loved how they resolved act to that, you know, or this character's theme was

like you're doing a direct impression of this podcast, but

you know what I mean.

Like, I like good screenplays, they're a lot of fun.

They make movies really good, but to go, go, I mean, this is the thing about like to go to a big theater and sit in the dark at this massive screen in an almost empty, I remember it is almost empty theater, and just watch a terrifying dream.

Yeah.

And knowing on some level, this is inexhaustible.

Right.

Because I will never be able to solve it because it wasn't made with that part of the brain or something.

Like this is, this is intuitive.

This is pure emotion.

And there's just like you can fit, you can solve it.

Like, oh, she is the Polish prostitute or, oh, the family in the house wasn't her family quote unquote you know and by her i mean either sue playing nikki or nikki like who cares just to sit in that space and and be like

like really lost his keys i mean it's just like it's just so wonderful it's like yeah like david lynch is just doing his thing it's so awesome that i'm sitting in a fucking movie theater just watching david lynch do his thing well and i think this is the breakthrough of the technology changing right right Is that like

there was a baseline that a movie cost, the amount of crew people you needed on set.

You could not afford to be intuitive because, yeah, correct.

Yeah, exactly.

You need to hone your ideas, even in a movie that is abstract or even in a film that is avant-garde.

You need to come kind of correct.

Yeah.

Some clear plan and sense of how to get all of this done.

And he's like, not just rethinking the language of how the movie looks, but how he operates on a day-to-day basis.

And we've talked so much across the series about his whole thing of like his routines around creativity, where he's like, I have to be creative every day.

I eat the same thing every day.

So that leaves space for my brain to wander.

And then there has to be some expression of it, you know, whether I'm painting every day or things like the weather, which people were like, what is this?

Is this a bit?

And it's like, no, it's all part of the just like.

I need to do stuff.

And maybe something interesting comes out of it.

Maybe it doesn't.

Maybe it's shared.

Maybe it isn't.

But like the gears operate.

And then it felt like for him, every three or four years, he'd be like, and now here's a movie.

This is like a finished work.

I do a lot of stuff on a daily basis, but this is, these are the works that are real concentrated, focused, resolved in some way, even if they feel ambiguous.

And then this is the opposite.

This is him making a movie out of basically his daily routine of creative exploration.

Laura Dern famously told the BBC before it's premiered at the Venice Film Festival, I don't know who I was playing and I still don't know.

I'm looking forward to seeing the film tonight to learn more.

She references Catherine Deneuve and Repulsion as like a big influence in terms of like playing a dismantled person is how she puts it.

Basically like that's interesting.

She's sort of like, I think David was giving me several characters.

They may be aspects of the same person or the same vibe or whatever.

And Repulsion has that same kind of like inscrutable reality

vibe.

You're in someone's troubled mind and you can't can't tell what's real or not.

Justin Thoreau says Inland Empire is close to a spiritual opus as you're going to get.

It's powerful.

It's got all these inexplicably unforgettable images.

A character standing behind a tree hiding a Christmas light, for instance, so strange, and yet you remember it.

David, what?

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Who is one other person in the room?

This is so rude.

I sleep easy.

I'm definitely not someone who insists on 800 thread count sheets.

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That's very demanding to be in Europe.

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So they shot a lot in LA, a little bit of Paris,

and a lot in Lodz, I think is how you say it.

That's all the Polish stuff, yeah.

Lynch fell in love with it.

He went there to, I think, photographed some abandoned factories, which sounds like something that David Lynch would do, and really liked the weather, the raininess, the use of a big electrical plant.

It has no pivotal, right?

It has, yeah.

It's like an old faded industrial stuff.

But then it's got all this industrial stuff too.

Probably has like electrical hums in the evening that he gives electricity.

I mean, have you

ever been to Poland?

I have never been to Poland.

It is unbearably sad.

Whoa, cool.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

In a way, that's like kind of fascinating and profound.

I mean, I am predominantly Polish in heritage.

As am I.

But it is not a thing.

Really?

Yes.

Well, I'm my mom's side, not my dad's side.

I'm 50% Polish.

Scots and French or whatever.

My family has like no sense of like Polish pride.

No, they left, as did mine.

That's the thing.

It was like we moved on.

It's not a national

pride thing.

It wasn't a country.

Well, it might have been a country.

Wait, what makes it sad?

Just

I, I, I don't know how to verbalize it.

And I do think this comes across in the movie.

I was trying to crack why Poland, and maybe it is just he went there and started filming there and then was like, well, then I guess I need to Polish characters or whatever.

There is this sort of like cosmic sadness.

I feel like I had heard people say shit about like.

this city is still haunted by its past or whatever.

And I'd always be like, you're being metaphysical.

That's not a fucking thing.

It's a city.

People are sad.

Like 9-11, New York felt sad after that because the people were sad.

I don't think New York still feels haunted in like the ground in that same kind of way.

And then I went to Poland when I was like 20 or 21 to Warsaw.

And I was like, this place has like ghosts in it.

Like it just, and there's something about, you can feel in the way it was like.

destroyed and rebuilt.

Right.

What remains of old Poland and what has been rebuilt both feel reflective of like this unspeakable horror that happens in the middle of these two points.

And it just feels like there's a fucking heaviness there, which I swear extends to like the air.

Let's talk about Inland Empire.

The only other thing about the production is obviously just because of the digital film, he could shoot incredibly long takes.

It meant he had a mountain of footage that he himself edited over the course of six months in Final Cut Pro.

And the resulting thing is the film Inland Empire, which was released in theaters,

not like wide, but like was shown to Americans and took some people by surprise, I would say.

This movie has its own Twin Peaks the Missing Pieces type thing.

It's what also happened is what it's called.

Four things that happened.

Right.

That's it.

Yeah.

But there's an additional 75 minutes of stuff.

I've never watched them.

Me neither.

Yes.

It's on the disc.

So is the movie that I saw in 2007 the same version version that I watched last week on iTunes or however we watched it?

He made some minor changes.

He did a fascinating, incredibly complicated and bizarre restoration process for this movie.

I read about that where he says make it look good and then make it look like shit again or something.

They had to use like...

AI tech to like clean up and then read filthy.

I can find this.

It was weird.

We will post on social media the actual document and the wording when this film had its re-release in theaters and the criterion release that explains it.

But basically, it was like there was a certain amount of upscaling that happened at the time relative to 2006 technology to give it a little more detail.

So it would look a little less shitty, projected on a huge screen.

But that was an artificial sharpening and a more limited sort of like, I don't know.

So I can say the important thing is, can I say that I had the authentic Inland Empire experience?

Because I saw it on a big screen in 2007.

Correct.

But half the time I couldn't tell what the fuck I was looking at.

What he's done since then is they like dumbed it down and they went through a process to take away the sharpening from the theatrical release.

They downscaled it to SD.

To the blurriness of the original footage, and then they used more advanced AI sharpening.

AI was like, I've never been asked to do something like this before.

But he's obviously not trying to make it look like fun.

He was just like, I need to make it a little easier to delineate between shapes on screen.

So, yeah.

And it was like seven passes back and forth.

I did see this restoration at the IFC Center, which to me is like where you need to see a David Lynch movie because the IFC Center is such like a hallowed museum of like early 2000s New York film culture.

I still like going there to see anything.

It's a totally nice place, Bob.

But you know what I mean?

Like that reel they play in front of, do you know what I'm talking about at the IFC Center?

They play this reel of like, oh, like directors come here to talk about their movies.

And it's so much more the same reel from like 2006 of like, oh, you know, Spike Lee discussing Passing Strange.

It's like they've never updated it.

It's sort of adorable.

I like places like that.

Yeah, me too.

But I also feel like original run, this movie played for like what felt like a straight year at IFC.

And even the restoration re-release felt like it played for.

a very long time.

I think it's just regularly playing there.

Honestly, it kind of is never been a movie in a weird way, more than his other films.

Wait, so when you saw it the other day, did you see it on the screen?

I saw it last night.

I projected it here on the screen directly behind you in the office.

Okay.

All right.

What'd you think?

I will admit, it is a slightly hard movie to talk about, having seen only once.

I felt like

some of it is inscrutable.

I was very engaged by parts of it.

I was like, I have no idea how to talk about this.

And then truly in the last 30 seconds, I was like, before the end credits, I was like, oh, I think I have a handle on this.

So what's your take?

I don't know if my take is super reductive and dumb, but I think it's truly his movie.

And it makes sense that this is what he would get to as the through line from the process of how he made it, which just starts from, I should film Lord Dern doing stuff, right?

I think this is his movie of being like,

what is acting?

You know, like certain directors will talk about like, I am mystified by the process of watching great actors work.

Directors who are up there, close with them, holding their hands.

and are still like, there is some weird supernatural conjuring where they are able to pull something from the depths of whatever it is, their subconscious, their memory, their research, whatever it is, right?

And here's like David Lynch going through these experiments of filming Lura Duran doing stuff.

And he's able to give her shit without context.

He's able to pivot wildly, give her no prep time.

And somehow without fail, she constantly drops into something that feels incredibly rich, specific, honest, earned, deep.

And I think as the movie goes on, he's starting to like try to make sense of like, what is this?

I understand my own creative process and my conversation with my subconscious, my unconscious, you know, and trying to get to a flow state and everything.

But the idea of physically embodying that and making it something that feels real enough that it passes people's bullshit test in this fake medium, right?

Which he's sort of trying to collapse the wall of the medium in real time.

When you get that final shot before the end credits of her sitting back on the couch,

it's like in this Mulholland driveway, Driveway, this whole movie has almost been a contemplation of how to figure out this character.

And you saying, like,

she is the Polish sex worker, right?

It's like, well, part of it is, okay, she thinks she's just having to engage with this text.

And if it's about a relationship, then does she actually need to sleep with the guy?

And then she finds out, oh, this is actually based on an older film and there's a Polish curse connected to it.

So then she's going back to the original film.

Goosebumps goosebumps, but I want to talk about that part.

It's so funny.

Figure out like Polish history.

Like, it's the way you'll hear certain actors, and sometimes it feels kind of foofy and academic.

And you're like, is this actually necessary?

Of like, well, of course, I had to read 10 books about Poland because the character is Polish, even though it's a present day film or whatever.

Like the feeling of the lines being blurred, of like, you think you're watching an hour of this woman's life decay.

And then that at her absolute lowest point is followed by Jeremy Irons being like, and that's a wrap-on.

We're done with her scenes.

And now back to her.

Like the whole movie is just like, what is this weird fucking thing that some people are able to do?

That is such an interesting take.

It is, I would have never thought about any of that, maybe because I'm not an actor, but I will.

That's my fear is that I'm running it through the prism of my own experience.

No, but that makes sense.

Because I just think of like the opening of the couch, right?

Before she gets the monologue from Grace Zabritsky, this thing that's also implanted in her head that sort of then becomes like part of the process and the way that actors will talk about like, you know, what this weird other thing happened to me when I was filming, and it wouldn't seem like that had anything to do with the project, but it kind of got worked into my performance.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, right.

It's like that story starts to become a thing.

The whole thing is like, I have this exciting audition.

And yeah, she really wants to get the role.

Right.

This woman just sitting kind of like cross-legged on a couch, just thinking about like, how do I get my head around this character?

How did the movie make you feel?

Uncomfortable.

I would say.

Sure.

Yeah, confused and uncomfortable.

A lot of it is what you said, the sort of cosmic hollowing out

that I think he's able to capture better than anyone in this feels like a movie that is made up almost entirely of those moments.

I think it has like

real hammer blow versions of it, but I also think that's kind of a through line on this movie, almost on a scene-to-scene basis, more than most of these films.

Yeah, yeah.

What were you about to say, Sam?

Sorry, I don't know.

Can't remember.

Okay.

Um,

Ben, have you seen it before?

No, no, no, yeah, what'd you think?

How did it make you feel?

He's fucked up.

No, it made me feel

confused,

but I love

throughout all of his work the dreamlike nature of it.

And so, once you can just kind of let go and lock in, I found myself getting really lost in the world, but also kind of in my own just

internal interior

worlds and thinking about dreams I've had and

recurring motifs that have keep coming up throughout my life.

You know, again, dreams and imagery and just,

it's easy to space out and not feel like you're losing out on too much.

But that's also, I think, kind of a cornerstone of certain avant-garde cinema, and especially avant-garde cinema that's done at feature length or even extreme lengths.

I mean, this is his longest movie.

Must be.

Right?

It has to be.

Yeah, I would think so, yeah.

I've invoked this before, but I remember reading this review of Goodbye Dragon Inn.

A fantastic film, but a film that famously ends with like an eight-minute unbroken shot of an empty movie theater.

Yes.

Oh,

that's good.

I apologize.

You would have involved this movie.

Have you ever seen Sai Mingliang?

I'm sorry.

He's like a Malaysian filmmaker, but he's mostly

Taiwan new wave guy.

The whole, have you ever seen The Hole?

No.

You would love it.

Yeah, you should dig in.

Check it out.

But it's a movie about a movie theater on its last night of operation, playing an old

martial art epic.

I got to say this, like

one of the things that David Lynch does so well is,

well, we'll talk about this when I talk about the third time I watch this movie.

But images of movie theaters in movies.

Yes.

It gives me such a shimmering, uncanny feeling.

Well, so this Goodbye Dragon is made up almost entirely of that, right?

And it's like sparsely attended, and it's all these employees.

It has maybe 20 lines of dialogue.

Oh, I'm in.

A lot of it is watching the movie in the movie that is a real movie from the distance of an empty theater.

It's so funny because, right, I met like.

Like I was like this young film fan.

I saw the whole thing.

I saw what time is it there?

And I was like, I'm so pumped for this guy.

I'm now on board.

And then Goodbye Dragon really felt like him being like, oh, I'm even a little bit considered now.

You, you are about, you are in for

limiting distancing experience.

Right.

And I have come around to that movie, but I remember at the time being like, huh, I don't know what to make of that one.

That one kind of went over my head.

So I remember reading this critical discourse around this movie, probably happening in fucking Time Out New York.

and people fighting over it, right?

I think maybe two different critics debating it and saying like, I get the impact of having such an extended, long, final shot of this empty theater, the resonance of it, and now it's over.

But is there anything that you get from the shot being eight minutes that you don't get from the shot being three minutes?

With sort of their argument.

And this person retorts, like, when something extends to that length.

Part of it isn't asking you to engage and just give your full focus to watching it for eight minutes.

It's what Ben said.

It's sort of, it becomes about what you think about while that's going on.

It's a very different way of watching and engaging with a movie where you're used to it's holding your hands and it's begging for your attention.

And this is saying, what else does this make you think of?

And it's the, it's the classic, I was Kira Stami quote about like, I like films that make you, like, that put their audience to sleep in the theater.

Like, those are the films I like.

Like, I don't, I'm not trying to keep you awake, buddy.

I'm trying to actually put you to sleep.

Inland Empire.

I saw it when it came out

and it had an impact on me.

And I was so like into Mulholland Drive and like David Lynch that I liked it.

But I remember sort of emerging with like Laura Dern, though.

Like what an interesting emotional experience I had with her.

Right.

And then every time I would revisit the film, I would always be like, I really remember the sort of premise of like, she kind of gets lost in a movie she's making that's cursed.

And I really remember the ending.

And I always forgot that there was like a lot of Polish and a lot of like, yeah, right.

You know, wandering around in like like industrial spaces in the middle.

And that's, this is the first time, because when I saw the restoration, I was like, a lot of Poland, right?

I always forget about the Poles.

This time I was like, I am prepared for all the Polish stuff.

I am prepared for the monologues.

I am, you know, and the whole, and the whole life with Smithy, the domestic drama going on in the house inside the soundstage.

Yeah.

And I really kind of engaged with it a little bit more in a somewhat linear manner of like, right, this is about some sort of curse or recurring, recursive like

story that happens to this woman who has an affair and maybe gets murdered by the other woman and, you know, maybe is sort of being tormented by the other man.

And like the rabbits are this, the, you know, the Polish people are this.

The lost girl who's watching TV

is this.

Like, you know, it's like.

We're seeing just different versions.

And of course, the movie version of her is this, but also the real version of her seems to be this.

Like, she's always married to this guy, you know, who's this Polish guy.

Like, you know, keep going back to the Twin Peaks, it is happening again thing as such, like a key statement for Lynch, and especially his fixation on the violence that is done to women and the cycles that support it in society and how they process it.

That it's like all of this shit is a continuum.

Right?

Yeah.

And I do get the sense in the film that something has happened at the end to maybe break the cycle.

It ends with us.

She

destroys some sort of monster, like that crazy thing we see at the end, not just her face, but then the sort of other odd, weeping sort of clown face.

Right.

Yeah.

When she shoots the phantom, the hymn.

Yeah.

Right.

And then when we're seeing Grace Sabriski again, like it feels like, yeah, there has been some shift or some.

Oh, I think it's definitely a happy ending.

Right.

This is kind of a happy ending.

Yeah.

And they all dance.

And then they all danced to Simon Man while someone saws a log indoors, normal, which is what I do when I feel like I've kind of got it.

I remember being,

I got

when the guy sawing the log showed up.

I was like, it's all happening.

It's like that Ron Paul meme.

It's all happening or whatever.

Rand Paul or whoever is.

It's Ron.

Ron is the one.

Yeah, yeah.

It was all happening.

Oh my God.

It got me so sink.

It was so excited.

Because the thing about Ron Paul is he does look like a little elf from another dimension.

Rand Paul, you're just kind of like, nah, I don't want to see that.

Yeah, the face.

random.

Ron Paul looks like a time bandit.

Right?

Totally.

Yeah.

Anyway, the quote I think about, the quote I think about when I think about this movie is, I can't remember who told me this quote, but somebody who had some experience in psychiatry or psychology or something.

I was explaining some dream I had had where I was like, I can't remember if we talked about, did we talk on 28 Days Later about how I used to have these recurring nightmares about being attacked by zombies?

I think we did.

Yeah,

I mean,

right.

So I was talking about like how, oh, I dreamt I was back in my parents' house and all these zombies showed up.

And I knew if I opened the door, like, they would tear me alive, tear me apart or whatever.

Like, what do you think those zombies represent?

And this friend said, the thing you need to know about dreams is everyone in your dream is you.

It's all you.

And that, for some reason, helps me make sense of Inland Empire when I'm like, well, wait a minute.

Now in this scene, she's referring to her husband by the movie name, but in this scene, she's in, you know, it's a woman in trouble.

It's alarming, though, when you dream of being someone else.

Well, I don't know if you dream.

You mean, wait, hold on.

Are you saying that you can dream that you're inside somebody else?

Yeah.

What?

Like, who?

I've had the fans.

Here's a great example of a recurring dream.

Wait, you mean you're not you in your dream?

I'm someone else.

Who are you?

Ben, give your example, and then I want to build on this.

So I have this recurring dream that's kind of set in this world that's similar to where Bruce Willis is

before he goes back in time in 12 monkeys.

I'm underground and it's this kind of like dirt factory.

And I'm like, inhabit this worker who's controlling this equipment, like a crane like operator.

But my job is like harvesting potato people.

That's the real thing.

Well, sir, I understand like that's not your job in the real world, but how do you know you're not you in the dream?

Because I can see myself and see a reflection of myself.

When you can look in a mirror in a dream and see not your face looking back at you, such cinematic dreams.

But here's my question: because I'm the same way, Ben.

In that moment, don't you go, oh, interesting.

I'm this guy in my dream.

Like when I dream as other people, it's like being John Malkovich style.

Do you know what it's saying?

Why the fuck?

Are y'all on?

How can you not be yourself?

Is it optional?

It's just you.

But this is what I'm saying.

It's being John Malkovich, where it's like, I'm inside this body.

It's like watching this movie.

But also knowing that like I'm in this.

So that's the weird ring.

You guys thought Inland Empire was weird.

This should be your favorite fucking, this should be like watching like Toy Story to you guys.

That's so much crazier than any dream I've ever had.

I'll need to attribute with that one.

But I know I, it's the same thing where I'm like, oh, it's interesting that I'm someone else in this dream.

You don't have to think that in your normal.

My consciousness is in that other person.

I'm perceiving being this other person with all my thoughts and experiences and personality.

So I'm never fully like, of course, I couldn't be someone else entirely because it's going to be me thinking.

It's a matter of embodiment.

Like I am in a different person's body right now.

I do not have that kind of lucidity, but my dreams

as I remember them.

And I don't know.

I kind of dream like the cobbler, if that makes more sense.

That's an easier way to

classic Adam Sandler Tom McCarthy movie in which a cobbler literally unlocks the ability to walk in another man's shoes by wearing the shoes of his clients.

And then he gets to be

one the Razzie, I think, for worst picture.

Is this a David Lynch joint?

No, my dreams are always the same.

It's always just I have to do something.

I keep getting like way late or distracted.

Spreadsheet dreams.

Weird shit.

You're trying to get the Inland Empire episode down to 90 minutes, and somehow it's stretching off.

Well, we got.

Oh, well, we just hit 90.

We fucking nailed that shit.

Good job.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So,

right.

The first chunk of Inland Empire is about an actress named Nikki Grace.

Yes, we have other things that we're seeing, such as this hotel room.

Well, I mean, you saying you want to.

Do you know what a horror is?

That's one of the early lines of dialogue.

It is.

It's definitely like a, it's setting you up for like a chill time.

You always forget how much Polish there is in this movie.

It does kick off with it.

I'm clocking about 10 minutes until Lore Dern appears.

Yeah, I start out right.

There's a hallway conversation.

Then you're...

You start out with an honestly awesome and haunting title screen with this crazy noise and you can kind of like rubbing your hands together.

Yeah, yeah, truly.

The sound design in the opening is great, but then you have like the lost woman watching rabbits on the TV.

Like you're in all of that for 10 minutes before ostensibly the main threat of the movie.

If you actually want me, I actually have like a synopsis that I can go through.

There's an introduction to Axon N, the longest radio play in history, which we occasionally will return to.

Some kind of,

you know, these are, like I said, these are all sort of renderings of the same sort of drama of some kind of like betrayal and cockledry or whatever.

You have,

you know, right, this black and white footage of actors blurred out, you know, and this horrible kind of sort of sex worker situation.

You have the girl watching rabbits on TV.

And the immediate sense that this is her in the aftermath of something traumatic, that she is watching TV in an attempt to process or at least take her mind off of or right.

But then she's seeing rabbits, but but she's also seeing Inland Empire.

She's seeing like Grace Zabriski on the screen a little bit.

And then you have the rabbit taking two Polish guys to a strange sort of hotel room, lobby, banquet area.

Yeah, a big fancy room, a grand room, yeah.

And they talk about an opening and if they understand each other, which is language that the movie uses a lot, like over and over again.

something's going on there.

And then we're with Laura Dern and I'm like, okay, great.

We're like classic Hollywood setup.

movie actress she's got a new role ian abercrombie as a butler like you're like i get this we're we're dealing in orchid type she seems to live in some sort of like incredibly like awful mansion the feng shui in her house is so fucked up and it's like it's really something you do kind of get the sense that it's her husband's vibe or aesthetic or like she seems to have married some kind of some weird old money guy yeah or like you know guy who's a tycoon in of terrible things or something right right like like he's a fucking shipping magnate yeah it's like what's your you know what's your job he's like uh import export and you're like oh right okay

and it's awful in there and like the digital photography kind of enhances it makes it look kind of dark and oppressive and like there's curtains and then you see the light coming through you know in this like

sharp way

too it is yeah it's so nails i mean like the way people are dressed really like brought me back to that time but the way that that space in particular looks it just it looks like what a fancy person thought was like it must be real

and nice and classy right this must be someone's house well it's like queen of her size too like I feel like this is when they start filming that movie that is documenting someone ruining their life trying to make a version of a house like this that's a hundred times bigger this has to be a real place yeah yeah right yeah they weren't building sets for this fucking movie it looks like a trashy house in california though for sure.

Someone who has money, but no taste.

No taste.

Yep.

And then, luckily,

what you want in a David Lynch movie, Grace Zabriski comes to kind of like cool everyone off.

Yeah.

Just really settle you and make you feel like normal and not freaked out at all.

Lesson of this movie, never talk to your neighbors.

Never invite them into your home.

I remember watching

vampires on TV at one point in my room in college with headphones on and the whole thing where when she's just talking about a folk tale and putting a Polish accent and brutal murder, like having to turn the TV off, like and like take a break, you know.

That fisheye lens.

He's shooting her in a fisheye and then Laura Dern is in a regular lens.

And then eventually he shoots.

Dern in the fisheye.

And then you're like, oh, she's getting sucked into the star.

She's just about to pop off.

Yeah, it's so great.

And she does a lynch trick I really love, which I feel like he's, you know, where she points to the couch.

And then we're sort of Laura Dern is on the couch with her friends, and we've moved forward in time.

Yes.

Without any transition, really.

Yeah.

The couch where she winds up at the end of the movie.

Indeed.

Yep.

Right.

All the scenes with her and her friends are really funny to me, too, because it's like,

you know, they are being normal.

Yes.

Right.

It's just

right.

But then the aesthetic of it is so impressive that you're like, what is going?

Why am I just seeing them chat?

Well, that's so much of

what I remember the discourse being around this movie when it came out was like, you know, some people,

and looking back, it was more positive than I remembered.

People were just like, if you're in on Lynch, this is uncut lynch.

This is the most unbridled lynch you're ever going to get.

We're fucking eaten.

Right.

And then the counterpoint was like, I just don't get why it looks so ugly.

And this was a thing that was also circling around Michael Mann movies at that time.

Mike Lee, anyone who's

trying this stuff.

Why would you choose to use something that looks worse?

And it was part of like Lynch doing his interviews where he said, my beautiful, ugly thing, you know, and certainly like man talking the same way where it's like, it frees me up.

I used to be someone who obsessed over having the light in exactly the right place in these immaculate frames, but there's something that it just becomes so organic now.

And I also think it weighs a pound rather than like

there's the production advantages.

10 pounds.

But I do think that

the way this movie looks,

it really does to me look like a dream.

It looks like how my dreams look, which is a lot of like gray, diffuse light.

My dreams are also all kind of blurry.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of off.

It looks like a, it looks simultaneously like, like,

like a snuff film, like we said earlier, like something you sh like truly elicit.

But then also when you remember it, when I remember this movie and the palette, it's like remembering a dream because it kind of the lighting reminds me of a dream and the griminess, the murkiness of it is the murkiness of a remembered dream.

Like, I think it really works.

Like, even if he could have shot on a handheld camera that like shoots in 4K and looks terrific, this was the right choice, I think.

There's no other way to think about this.

And there's like the weird artifacting and abstraction that happens with like this level of DV footage.

Sort of my limited experience in film school before I dropped out.

was that like, you know, when they talk about film as a medium and people are trying to teach you how to work with it, it's like, here are all these magic tricks where you can do this, and suddenly on film, it looks like this thing that's a hundred times greater.

Right.

Right.

And video is the opposite where everyone's like, if you film like this, it's going to look like shit no matter what.

You can't get around this.

You can't be in any environment with fluorescent lights.

You can't do this.

You can't do that.

Right.

Like all these things to try to warn you away from that he is kind of barreling headfirst into because how wrong it ends up looking is able to

very cheaply conjure the kind of feeling and imagery that he used to have to like slave over.

Yeah, it's so evocative.

Right.

Yeah.

And he can, I mean, he can obviously make like a beautiful movie.

Yeah.

Kevin has.

And I wonder if he made, like, if he had made like six more films like this, would the magic of this film and the way it looks be a little like, you know, hurt by that?

It is.

What is fascinating?

Because at the time and the way he did it, you're just sort of like, it's bizarre he didn't go through a phase where he just kept just like, yeah, I'm just going gonna keep right improvising even if most of them

didn't end up being feature films if some of them ended up being web series or whatever it is it's interesting that then there's like kind of a shift and a gap after this right that's why this is not just like him being like well i filmed for three years and put it together it's like no he had eventually a thrust you know of storytelling with it what were you gonna ask him did he make a thing on Netflix where like he's still talking to a monkey?

Yeah.

He was like, he and the monkey are like solving crimes or something.

He keeps interrogating the monkey like he's a cop and the monkey is.

Is that a movie?

It's a short

25 minutes.

Yeah.

Netflix bought it at a certain point.

It's like he made it independent.

He self-finance it.

It was a big project, right?

He talked about it a lot.

What did Jack do?

Yes.

Or what Jack's.

Yeah.

We covered it on our Patreon.

Yeah, it's called What Jack Do.

You know, he's done a lot of stuff like that over the years for his own.

Like what Rabbits was, it sounds like.

Right.

And then some things got incorporated and some things kind of just.

And then he occasionally will do things like where Dior is like, Can you do a commercial for Dior?

And he's like, It's going to be weird.

And they're like, Great, you know.

But as you said, this is the only time he did this when it started to feel like, Is this going to be his model moving forward?

He's just filming all the time.

And whenever he feels like, Oh, this might actually be a movie, he'll start shooting more intentionally and cut it together.

And instead, this is like an absolute weird, one-off experiment and already weird, experimental career.

And then we have the sort of film section of the early production section of the movie.

She's on stage, you know, at Paramount on the Paramount Lot near where, you know, is that where is that where the

filming location?

Yes, because David Lynch loves, I think, the scenes.

I think it's in Sunset Boulevard, which are set at the Paramount Lot and like has great admiration for the Paramount lot as this like sort of hallowed old it's a beautiful classical

right yes it feels really preserved um and so we meet Kingsley Stewart Jeremy Irons in like you know Irons mode as like the pretentious director.

And then Justin Thoreau as the kind of, as Devon, the, you know, sultry star

knew he was in this.

Oh, really?

And just because, you know, we've, we've been trying to record chronologically, we did, I think Mulholland Drive was actually the most recent Lynch episode we had done before this.

When they revealed Justin Throw sitting in an audition, I think part of my struggle for the first, let's say, hour to hour and a half of this movie was like,

Lynch, I'm waiting for you to make the case for why this isn't you just still exploring the same things as Mulholland Drive.

Right, because it's Hollywood again.

It's a, you know,

weird dream tale again.

And Thoreau's here again.

Like there's a lot of the dynamics feel very similar.

But

it becomes its own thing.

Yeah, you sort of get this sense, like there's this thing where they appear on a talk show that's hosted by Diane Ladd and announced by William H.

Macy.

This sense that like maybe Laura Duran's character, Nikki, has some sort sort of scandal in her past, that Justin Thoreau's character is right, someone who always hooks up with his co-stars.

There's like a sauciness.

Right.

And

then kind of my favorite scene in the movie is when they're shooting the film and Harry Dean Stanton there, obviously, is there.

Looking for money.

Yes.

And wearing a suit and smoking.

Right.

Sees something.

And yeah, this is one of the things I remember from 2007.

Yes.

Like it's in the dark, you know, back there, and they go and look.

And I remember in the theater, as someone who had seen Mulholland Drive, being like, Am I about to be like scared out of my fucking skeleton?

Right.

Like, is something crazy going to happen?

Yeah.

And it's not.

It's more just this unnerving, dreamy.

Please talk about it.

You're raising this yellowed note.

Well, I just wanted to, I mean, actually, we should remember Fear Seban 4-7, the number that comes up a lot.

So this is the four of 4-7.

But during this initial meeting,

Kingsley says something

after

Justin Throw has like run off to try to find whatever Harry Dean Stanton pointed at.

And was like, there's something there, right?

Yeah.

This line is so scary to me when Kingsley's like, all right, I'm going to tell you guys the truth.

We're actually remaking a movie.

And then he says, it's this movie.

German film.

Yeah.

They discovered something inside the story and the leads were murdered.

One of my real heebie-geeby things

really gives me the heebie.

Well, murder, of course.

Is murder just doesn't haunted.

I don't like it.

Haunted productions.

Sure.

Oh, sure.

Like

the King in Yellow.

You know, the weird tale where it's like there's this haunted play, and when they start to perform it, they all go insane.

That kind of stuff.

The idea of...

I was thinking about last night.

Really, what freaks me out is humans, there's something so uncanny about this ancient tradition and art that we all recognize and love.

Humans putting on special clothes and pretending they are other humans and acting out a story for people who are watching them in the dark.

That is so fucked up and disturbing when you think about it.

Like if you take it out of like just the fact, like, we've always done that.

Like, what are you talking about?

It's totally normal.

And so

the idea of movie productions or tv productions or theater productions being cursed where you're in the middle of the production you uncover something or something is revealed and then it ends in despair madness death that's so freaky to me have you seen a mouth of madness the carpenter movie that's basically about a book that makes people mad in that kind of way see i need a list of like i want to i want to have a little film festival where i just watch the like the classic thing of like am i now is this actually about me am i

it like getting yeah this is my read on the movie that it's this thing of like what is acting is it convincing yourself you are that person is it thinking a lot about that is it researching the things around it you know like that that's part of what is being conjured here how are you able to bring emotions out of nothing right Are you taking from actual emotions somewhere else in your life?

Are you just empathizing and relating to the thing?

What I find interesting about that scene is it ends up getting to this curse, right?

There is a severity to which, the tone in which Jeremy Irons, who is an actor who is capable of great severity,

who can deliver anything with like a sense of grave importance that makes you sit up right in discomfort, if that's what's being asked of him.

Where he reveals like this is actually based on an older Polish film.

And Lurdern's response to that is as if he's already revealed that there was a curse in a murder, right?

Like she's like, you told us this was an original text.

Right.

It's like the real Hollywood IP reaction.

You told us this wasn't based on anything.

Right.

Yeah.

Where I like sat forward in my seat and went like, wait, what just happened in this scene?

Why is her response so extreme?

And it's like she can already sense that this is going to a bad place in a weird way before you even get to the curse and the tragedy and all of that.

This is one of the big, like, story scenes.

It's like one of the only scenes where it's really like, here comes the story.

Like, I'm, and you're like, I'm really going to hang on to this as we go out to

explain something.

Right.

Yeah.

Everything else, maybe you can sort of piece it together or go back later and sort of look at stuff.

No one's actually saying something.

But it makes sense that that was their attitude in terms of like bringing irons on him when irons was on set.

Was like these scenes were more structured.

His dialogue that he clearly like had time to memorize is able to sort of just like roll off.

And these scenes are communicating clear things.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's right.

There's this sense of

they're maybe playing with kind of some kind of darkness here by engaging with this story again, even though the story they seem to be doing is just a melodrama.

It's just like a romantic melodrama about an affair.

On High and Blue Tomorrow.

Very difficult.

Should we keep moving through that?

Yeah, you've got this notebook.

Is this exhibit C?

Yeah, I'm like, when did you see that?

Well, I mean, I do this every time.

It's just the notes that I took when I was watching it for the second time.

I'm going to talk about your.

There's no insights.

It's just me recording what happened.

So later I can go back, especially with this movie and be like, uh, what happened exactly?

Is now a good time to introduce the experiences of the second and third viewings?

I don't want to force your hand on this.

Oh, I know.

No.

Because I talked about the first viewing a bit.

Yeah, when we talked about it.

Sure, yeah.

So I watched it in 2007.

I remembered it as a great night at the movies, but it wasn't a movie that I felt like.

I gotta see that all the time.

Yeah, right.

So then I was talking to my friends that I play music with, playing a band together.

And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna talk about Inland Empire.

And they were like, oh, Inland Empire.

Like, never seen that.

One of them, Robert, had seen it.

He was like, let's have a...

Right.

Come over to my house and I have a projector and we can watch Inland Empire.

And I was like, great, because I don't have it.

I just have a laptop.

I was like, I don't want to watch this fucking thing on my laptop because I remember it as this big,

like overwhelming night at the movies.

You know, it's like when David, you know, have you guys talked about the David Lynch iPhone thing where he's like, now when you see a movie on your phone, that whole thing?

Yes.

Yeah.

Such a sadness.

So it's like, it's that and the clip where they ask him about product placement and it says, bullshit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fucking bullshit.

Get real.

Yeah.

Anyway.

So we went over to Robert's house and we watched it.

And that was like my time to, you know, take all my notes and all that stuff I was like yeah it holds up like it's pretty good right you had a good experience here but not nothing like like a bolt from the blue right but you felt like okay no I feel secure in the fact that I picked this as the episode I want to do yeah there's a lot going on in this movie obviously there's stuff most of the stuff I had forgotten I I thought a lot of the movie was her burning holes in camisoles and trying to save prostitutes.

And that's, I thought it was like mission impossible, you know, like, I got to burn another another hole so I can jump through a wormhole and go save more prostitutes.

But it wasn't that at all.

It's like so much more.

Like, I think, in retrospect, I tried to put a story on it.

Right.

It's the easiest way to engage with it.

Right.

Just like you do with dreams, right?

You try to find a narrative or make sense of it.

Then what happened was we were like, you know what we should do?

Because after we watched it, we were, they were like really into it.

It's like, we should score it.

We should

go to our practice space and set up a projector and screen the movie and mute it and respond to it with sound and music.

Like we'll do a live improv score of Inland Empire.

Fellas,

this was one of the great creative experiences of my adult life.

It was just three of us.

It wasn't the full group because people were traveling and stuff.

But Catherine and Brian and I went to the practice space.

I was like, this is like...

Catherine didn't know if Brian Wilson.

Yeah, exactly.

And And we had, we had a drum kit.

We had like rototoms.

We had bass and guitar.

It's like we set everything up.

Like, okay, we're going to set everything up so that we can just move from sound source to sound source.

So like I had like a, one of those corg bass synthesizers because I know like Lynch is great at those like low tones with like texture.

So we had a volca bass.

I bought a cello bow so that we could bow the cymbals for that iconic horror.

You know, when you hold, you like stabilize the bell of the symbol and then you drag the bow on and it's like,

it makes all these crazy overtones.

This is like fucking John Bryan at Largo.

Just everything's about

peek out.

The muse can take over us

all over to anything.

I brought a tape recorder and all these cassette tape loops I had made, you know, where you get the texture of the tape and the repeating click of the tape loop where you've splice the tape and all that stuff, you know, and

just had, just, I had all this stuff set up.

And it's like, all right, let's turn out all the lights and we'll start watching the movie on the projector.

And we'll just, we, we will engage

with the movie.

You know, we'll try to

reflect the movie back to itself with sound, right?

And

we had just watched the movie two nights earlier.

So we kind of knew in a way what the dynamics were, right?

Let's see.

You had things you could anticipate.

Yeah, exactly.

And it was so fun and exciting.

And we took like two breaks, like we took a break like at an hour and then a second break like within the last 45 minutes of the movie.

So it wasn't nonstop for three hours, but it was so great.

Like I'd never like I've like played guitar or noodled on guitar while I'm watching a movie at home where it's like, hey, just play along with the soundtrack or something, but I never like replaced.

the movie's audio and tried to really

express what I was feeling about the movie or what the characters were feeling like through

making music or noise or just sounds, right?

Like a lot of it is just like sounds, right?

Because that's what he does.

I'm curious.

Did you have the film muted or at a low muted muted captions on?

No captions.

No captions.

No, just working off of images and the fact that you'd all, as a group, watched it fairly recently.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Very recently.

Yeah, two days earlier, I think it was.

I feel like we must have talked about this in the Buster Keaton series, but it is fascinating how, in

a pre-sound era, a lot of those classic silent films, either original score lost or original score was never recorded, obviously.

Yeah, right.

You just have no idea what it was like to see that movie.

Or even the ones, and wherever you were seeing it screened, if it was live accompaniment, it was subject to reinterpretation.

But also even the ones that do have a quote-unquote definitive score.

There are so many people today who like write new scores for them.

Right.

And depending on like what release of a Buster Keaton film you get from which like disc manufacturer label, it'll have like two or three different scores.

And you're like, this fundamentally alters the movie.

It's fucked up when you're in the film.

We all think about

it.

You're like, well, Sherlock Jr.

is a definitive film.

We all can talk about that and have the same experience.

And it's like, no, are you watching the fucking like the Cohen Media Group disc?

Are you watching the Keeno Lohber disc?

Are you seeing it projected with live accompaniment?

And we think about like film being such a finite fixed thing and like the director's intent.

You're seeing everything as they wanted it.

When for the first couple decades, it was just like, no, this is, there's this whole big component that is one of the most emotional components of film stories.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That is very like

individual experience-based.

One of the reasons I think it worked so well and was so exciting was because this movie does, as a movie, have a lot of obvious, like, it was

improvised, right?

And it's so fluid and so open.

I mean, he would write things and give them to people on the day, but a lot of it is right, right?

It's just him capturing behavior.

So, improvising back to it felt really appropriate.

I love it.

Yeah, felt like did you record?

I was just gonna ask.

We recorded it, but stupidly, I like I didn't set the levels on the Zoom recorder before we recorded it.

It was like really loud, so it's like all blown out and compressed.

It doesn't sound

perfect, actually, for the movie.

It doesn't sound like the right movie.

Well, we got one through, right?

It sounds like shit.

Yeah,

just like Hill and empire

i don't know you should just do something with that

and the way it ended was well we'll talk about that when we talk about the okay because we ended it in a way where i had a like almost like a genuinely new experience it was awesome it's fun having david on the show that's always a treat um so i mean myself by the way i'm talking about having me on the show you have you on often enough um so after all of the things we were just talking about we have this sort of interlude with julia ormond as a character called doris yeah who's talking to a police person and she has a screwdriver inside her there is it is destabilizing anytime a quote-unquote like

established

actor shows up in this film and you're she she looks familiar she was great actor is a great actor but is sadly kind of like largely known as this incredible example of like the star making machine where she was in legends of the fall right that was her big early Hollywood movie.

And then it was like everyone in Hollywood decided she was the one, and they cast her in the Audrey Hepburn role in the remake of Sabrina.

And there was this New York Times article about the making of a star that's like, Julia Ormond's been going through the conveyor belt for the last year and a half.

Everyone has anointed her.

Everyone's now weighing in on what her haircut should be in her dress.

And this is the moment that she's going to become an A-lister.

And then that movie does not connect.

Is despised, I would say.

Yeah.

And kind of a classic, like, what do you think you're doing remaking Sabrina in the first place?

And stop jamming her down our throat.

Yes.

Everyone was just like, enough of this.

And now she's become someone who will pop up every couple of years.

And like, she is the daughter in Benjamin Button is very good.

You know what, though?

You love Mad Men, right?

Oh, yes.

Mad Men.

Do you like Mad Men?

I like it.

I don't know if I've seen all of it.

Megan's mother in Mad Men.

If you remember Megan, the French-Canadian

girl that Don Mary.

Second wife.

Oh, okay.

She has this imperious French-Canadian mother, Miss Calvey, who then ends up with, spoiler alert, Roger Sterling.

This is the thing.

She's just become kind of a really interesting character actress

who will pop up and you'll be like, Julia Ormond, she's still good.

Got it.

She never stopped working, but there are these two phases of all this energy around her for her throttling.

And then on the other side of it, her throttling way down and being like, I'll just show up and play with David Lynch.

Do you know who I thought she was?

I thought she was the actress who did that thing where she dressed up as bugs and had sex.

Isabella Rossale.

Yeah, I thought it was classic.

Because Lynch collapsed.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay.

And makes sense.

Another sort of raven-haired, you know,

Euro-tinged actor.

Who kind of looked

40 golden age movie starlets.

They had that kind of classical beauty.

Yeah.

Like, right.

Julia Orman never got to be the, maybe even the level of star that Isabella Rossellini was, but that was right.

The thing was, it's like, wow, this woman, she's a throwback.

She's this, right.

The camera loves her.

And she's gorgeous.

She is elegant.

She is grace.

She also played Guinevere in first night in that like two-year explosion before she then does Smila's sense of snow and becomes a bit of a punchline.

But yeah, she's sort of one refraction of this story, right?

This, the, when she appears.

Well, the ripple effect, I mean, you're dealing with this kind of like broken chronology of the movie of like, what happened to this woman?

And then two hours later, we get the scene of her finding out that this affair has happened.

You're not really centered within it, but you're almost seeing kind of like these projections of the ripples of damage.

Yeah, it's like small actions.

It's a network of associations and characters.

Right.

Then we have various things that are sort of like flitting between them making on High and Blue Tomorrow's sort of flirting

on set, offs, you know, off-camera.

Yeah.

Justin Throw has a strange conversation with with Nikki's

husband,

right?

Who's this kind of like bland, grumpy Polish Polish man

who says, talks about like the bonds of marriage and enforcing them and all that.

But you do have, he's playing the trick a lot of you're deeply in a scene and then it's like, cut.

Oh, that wasn't reality.

It starts to create this pattern of destabilization.

where you can be so far into a scene and still not really know what reality you're dealing with.

And the most brilliant part of that is right when they're having sex, it's all blue.

And then she says, this sounds like dialogue from her script.

Yeah.

And Kingsley's like, what's going on?

Because they are shooting this.

Yes.

Like she's gone the other way.

That's a really uncanny movie.

That's that line.

And it's really, really scary.

And that is really when things are, we sort of start to exit the loose frame, plot framework that we're in, which is easier to grapple with of like, okay, they're on a movie and like reality is blurring.

I get it.

She kind of goes to advanced study and is like, what about the history of commodification of women

as an industry?

That's when she is basically just like completely immersed and, you know, ends up basically going into the movie.

I don't know how else to describe it.

Going, kind of going through a portal.

How would you describe it, David?

This is when with the grocery bag, when she sees Axe on and she walks in, and now she is the person that Harry Dean Stanton saw.

Justin Throw like pressing his head up against the window.

Right.

And he can't see her.

And now she is in what we thought was a prop house and is now a new reality.

She's in an actual house and the reverse is like when she looks out the window, like there's a yard out there.

Yeah.

And then it's like, yeah.

And now through the looking glass.

Right.

I guess the closest way to understand it is she is inside the film in some sort of way.

Right.

Yes.

Because now we're kind of in this world where there's this sort of chorus of, they're called the valley girls, of these sort of women are they you know are they like representations of her feelings are they kind of like an external force that's trying to help her or one of them is jordan ladd right i think so i can tell you

sure oh yeah jordan ladd uh taryn westbrook uh kristen care there's a bunch of them and i think they change sometimes like it's not the same like group every time like classic david lynch trick uh they like to do things like dance to the locomotion

yeah yeah you know although when they do that they seemingly multiply it it becomes like 10 of them right now they like to check out each other's boobs they like to talk about there are some great shots

of laura dern leaned up against the wall looking at them like what the

it's so funny yeah it's the thing that i feel like has uh populated the internet the most is just shots of laura dern head against the wall smoking a cigarette with this kind of vacant like I don't know what I'm doing look at her face.

Can we like take this moment to kind of dig into Laura Dern more?

Sure.

Because

there's the stickiness of the cow campaign, right?

And part of that is at this point, Laura Dern had gotten an Oscar nomination very young.

Yeah, for Ramblin' Rose.

Ramblin' Rose.

But she's, what, 20 or 21 in that movie?

Is she that young?

Let's see if she's born in 67.

She would have been like 23, 21.

Okay.

You know, but like, but obviously she's Hollywood royalty.

She's the daughter, of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd.

Um, she's very young when she's in Jurassic.

She kind of has this like crazy artist.

Oh, my God.

She was in Jurassic Park.

Yes, but like before

like the highest-grossing movie as the female lead.

Before Rambling Rose, she has quite a long come-up.

Like, it's like Fabulous Stains.

Yeah, Fabulous Stains Teachers, which she's one of the students in it.

Mask, obviously, she's like a fairly significant part in that.

I think she's the best performance.

I would might agree.

She's good in that.

And then Smooth Talk, which was like

breakthrough.

Right.

This breakthrough, which is this early Sundance 80s breakout film, which is good, but recommends people seeing.

And then, of course, Blue Velvet is

with her first experience with Lynch and then talks about Wild at Hard and Ram Williams.

Both of her parents, very famous established actors, right?

And she's one of these sort of like children of the industry.

Industry babies, if you will, Nepo babies.

who was sort of like, I didn't have the intent to be an actor.

I sort of started getting thrown into stuff in this way that I think makes people angry and envious of people who have this kind of access to the industry.

Because it sounds disingenuous.

Well, I think she is genuine about it, but it was sort of like, I didn't want to be an actor.

My parents didn't want me to be an actor.

I'm around.

Somebody can't cast a role.

I'm doing two lines in something.

Then it becomes a larger supporting role.

I didn't really think of myself as an actor until I was already five or six credits in.

Until I saw the cow.

Right.

And then, as you're saying, there was this arc.

And then it's sort of like, oh, smooth talk.

Now now she's kind of like fully realized owning this as sort of like a profession right and as a craft and whatever and then yeah works with really interesting directors has these interesting parts but by the time she gets to jurassic she's like a veteran she's been doing it for like 10 years and she's also 25 uh yeah yeah she is quite young in jurassic park but she projects I feel like she projects sort of experience partly because she's been in movies for 10 years at that point, partly because she's an initiative.

In khakis and, you know, she's like a super scientist, right?

Right.

And then she kind of, you know, she kind of has a good, she's great in a perfect world.

Obviously, Citizen Ruth

is a great performance that gets her a lot of indie further into the world.

Incredible on that.

But I do feel like it's kind of like the Kate Winslet thing after Titanic, slightly less intense version of it, where Kate Winslet really just does not make a studio film for years.

Yes.

She does weird indie stuff.

She, you know, works with cool directors if she wants to.

She's like, she, Laura Dern doesn't really make, she makes October Sky and

I want to make.

I feel like when you hit 2000, Laura Dern starts to enter weirdly a space similar to Julia Ormond.

Obviously, minus the backlash, right?

But of like every two years, she shows up and people are like, oh, right, Laura Dern.

Laura Dern's really good.

And then she kind of disappears from people's minds again.

Like one of her only studio movies in that era in the 2000s is

fucking Jurassic Park 3, where she has this bizarre role where like that movie's marketing is

fucking Sam Neal is back.

Alan Grant is back.

She's not in the marketing at all.

I remember going to the theater and being like, she's in this too.

And then her role is she's now a stay-at-home mom with two.

Yeah, someone calls her on the phone and is like, hey, can you get a plane over to?

I don't really do that Jurassic thing anymore.

And she's in like four scenes, but all within a kitchen.

Huh.

And yeah, then she'll like pop up in things and be good.

When We Don't Live Here Anymore comes out, a movie that had a lot of Sundance buzz and people were like, this performance is incredible.

David Denby writes this very horny review that says she's maybe the best American actress.

And then it's like, she kind of dissipates again.

This movie felt like this sort of monument built to like, take Laura Dern seriously.

We need to stop taking her for granted.

And it works in some ways.

And

she continues on this other path.

And then I feel like it took another five or six years before.

It's five years.

I think it's...

It's starting with Wild, really.

No, no.

I think it starts with Enlightened.

It's like, oh, you're right.

It's like she does this.

And then, yeah, she continues on the path.

I think that she largely chooses for herself if she does stuff if she wants to, you know, and it's often odd little indie movies or whatever.

And then she does the HBO show Enlightened, which is not a, I mean, in the middle, she did play Catherine Harrison recount, which is kind of the other kind of Laura Dern thing.

Like, Laura Dern can give you really big, sassy acting if you want it, right?

She can do other stuff too, but she can play like a big sort of goofy part.

She's in Mike White's You're the Dog, where she goes pretty big, but she's incredible in that.

And I remember that being experience for me of being like, where is Laura Dern been?

Why isn't everyone using her all the time?

He writes Enlightened for her off of her.

Did you ever see Enlightened?

I think you'd love it.

I did.

That's where she working in an office and she wants to organize or get political and

she's just like annoying the shit out of everybody.

And it was two seasons of people being like, why aren't people watching Enlightened?

Why isn't this winning Emmys?

And it never really.

We kind of invented the half-hour dramedy.

Yeah, right.

That's true.

He's everywhere.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think you're right.

When people are like, I don't get it.

It's not that long, but it made me feel sad too.

But it is kind of funny, but also like, I'm really moved.

What's going on here?

Right.

Then off of that, Wilde is one of those famously short amount of screen time versus nomination performances where she's just kind of undeniable in three flashback scenes.

And it feels like everyone going like, right, we should celebrate every single time she's wild.

Um, it's an adaptation of the Cheryl Strade memoir.

Uh, sorry, Rhys Witherspoon, not Renee's Holy Spirit.

It's a she's like the Appalachian Trailers, yeah.

It's a movie I think is magnificent, and it's it, it, people put it in the sort of chick movie basket or the like, yeah, good, not great.

Fanny Project to get an Oscar nomination showcase.

I've seen major stars.

I think it is an incredible movie, which is shocking to me given that I largely despise the work of the man who made it.

He seemed like a nice guy, and he died, which is very sad, Jean-Marc Vele.

Who then does big little lies, which she's also in.

The best show.

This web of...

collaborators who are going like, I need to build more shit for Laura Dern.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wild.

She's Rhys Witherspoon's dead mother.

And I think she truly has like seven minutes of screening.

Intimidate.

Very brief.

She's this luminous.

Her mother is gone at this point, but it's she's this luminous presence in her memory.

It's like three flashbacks.

Perfect Laura Dern, just like she's like a fucking planet.

She's undeniable, but that's everyone leaned in and were like, we have to nominate this, right?

I know it feels insane because she's not in it very much.

It was seen as a slightly surprising nomination.

It was like the guy in Into the Wild.

Yes.

What's his name?

Paul Holberg.

He has one scene, but didn't he get nominated?

He's got more, but yeah, he did get a couple more scenes.

Yeah, he's so incredible.

He's amazing in that movie.

He says he wants to be his grandpa.

That shit, that movie rocked.

There's another movie I love that was.

2010s feels like Laura Dern finally

fucking achieving icon status.

Right.

And it's like, right, she wins an Oscar.

She's in Star Wars.

She's, you know, right.

What did she win an Oscar for?

She won an Oscar for marriage story, where I feel like she's sort of.

Oh, she's the crazy loyalty divorce lawyer.

It's kind of like the big little lies thing.

It's like, right, she can give you this like big comic,

you know, annoying personality or funny personality.

You know, like, she's been doing that her whole life.

I say this this in like a cynical way, but it almost feels like a calculated, you know what?

If someone gave Laura Dern this kind of monologue, she would win an Oscar.

Like Bombach was just like, it's just waiting there for someone to take advantage of it.

If you just have her do this for 15 minutes in this kind of structure, people are going to flip out.

I feel like she's kind of at her most workaholic now.

It might just also be because, you know, actors get older, they're less occupied by, you know, their kids or, you know,

they go into the other side.

Her most beloved.

I feel like everyone just values her so much now as they should.

And even like that show, Palm Royal, the Kristen Wigl Burnett show.

Laura Dern acquired it and developed it and then was like, I'm too busy to star in it.

I'll ask Kristen Wig to do it.

I have other shoots to do.

Like, she's kind of just fucking been on top of the world for a number of years now, I would argue.

So let me ask you a question about her in Inland Empire.

Yeah.

So obviously, we're saying like David Lynch obviously is in loves Laura Dern.

Right.

Right.

Is an incredible on-camera presence and even a shot on the worst camera in the world is just radiant, as we're saying.

But given the fact that she never really knew what was going on, I think this is it still acting?

Like, is it still good acting?

Well, this is my whole take on why this movie is about acting and why that's what he ends up finding as the spine across it as he's watching her react to this method of shooting.

Is like, this is in a weird way, way the purest form of acting, but also how many people on earth can do this?

Like, so fucking few.

It's like maybe double digits for like who can hold the camera, understand how a shoot works, understand the mechanics of acting, but also on-camera acting, which is a very different thing.

And be this quick of a process of material, be able to like identify the truth in a scene without any real time to study it or crack it.

Which is how lived experience is now that I think about it.

Like

when we act, like in quotes, live our lives, express ourselves,

we don't have, like, you can have a sense of what the arc of your life is like or what this weekend is going to be like, but we don't have a screenplay.

So I guess in a way, it does make sense.

This was shot like day by day, the way life is lived, right?

Day by day.

And she just had to react in any given moment, I guess, to how she was feeling.

And that also means you kind of got to be perfect in every take.

Right.

Right?

Because

there's no sense of intentionality or like strategy she can apply to how she constructs this performance.

It's like, in the way people saying that, like, acting is reacting and just being present, responding to your scene partner.

It's like, that's what she's doing with David Lynch.

Right.

He's her scene partner.

Right.

She's reacting to what he's giving her.

And I think he's just going every day.

It's why he fucking rented a cow, where he's like, I've watched the mechanics of this woman working.

I give her nothing.

And suddenly she gives you something that like most

would spend four months studying to crack that model up.

Like, how is she capable of this?

And also, is one of these people who is not, by all accounts, precious about her process, is not a method actor, quote unquote, any way we think of, right?

It's just like, I don't know.

I just sort of feel it and I get there.

So, you like this performance?

I think it's incredible.

I think it's stunning.

I think she's one of the best actors alive.

And I think she can be so entertaining, which now she gets a lot of credit for, that sometimes the like actual grit of the depth she can go to if she wants to.

She doesn't often do this sort of torrid, tortured shit.

Right.

Is taken a little for granted, I think.

I know I keep saying this over and over again.

But I think this film is so fascinating in her arc.

And much like Moleholland Drive.

There is this feeling in both cases of these narratives of these women who are just like, I am waiting for the opportunity to show everyone what I have in me, which is most struggling actors is this feeling of like, I got all this shit bottled in me.

I got these feelings I need to get out of my system and someone just needs to give me the space for catharsis.

You're talking about the characters in the movies or the actual working actors who are collaborating with David Lynn?

The characters in the movie, I think.

Like when Naomi Watts has that incredible audition, Naomi Watts is interesting because it's a complete overlap of she, the actress, is feeling the exact same thing the character is feeling.

This is her chance.

Laura Dern, I don't think, is feeling that.

Laura Dern is like, this is a fun experience of working with my buddy David.

Yeah, we're working on a little project together.

Right.

But what she's playing is someone who it does feel like in the immediate pressure of, I got this big audition.

It's like, is this a chance for something different for me?

Maybe it's not the Naomi Watts, I'm unknown and this is going to make me immediately a star.

But it's like, is there a thing inside of me I haven't gotten out yet?

And, you know, he's like, these two movies back to back with some years in between, both of them had very bizarre processes to getting to the finish line, are both sort of about this like,

this sense of desperation of like, if you really have something you want to say in an industry that is kind of like inherently ugly, evil, feeds on that desperation,

feels lecherous and predatory, even just every cut to like Harry Dean Stanton's face is like, is this guy a problem?

They're constantly just being some guy in a suit watching you and nodding

approvingly or like frowning like the Sphinx.

And then hitting you up for money.

Right.

And then she's like spiraling into despair.

But I also feel like there's this sense of like, this is a different take, but it's like, you have this melodrama they're making.

It's like, what if we keep tunneling down into a story?

Does it always come back to some sort of folktale that is like, once there was a child and he went into the world and then there was evil?

He saw his reflection.

Isn't that what it is?

He saw his reflection and evil followed him into the world.

And you're like, right, right, right, right.

If we just sort of like keep dissembling and iterating, right, over and over on some like, oh, I've written this melodrama and it's, you know, indicative of this and it's a reference to that.

And it's like, right, but at the end of it all.

of the big tunnel it's like we've been telling the longest story forever and the story is just like there's evil in the world or a person transgressed against something.

The Twin Peaks stuff.

Yeah.

Which is also interesting when so much of Lynch's work is: I'm starting with like a well-worn, proven American genre staple and going into those cliches and then starting to pull them apart, reconstruct them.

But I'm starting with a very basic noir setup or whatever it is.

A woman in trouble.

Right.

He's like, the film's about a woman in trouble.

And you're like, yes, sure it is.

Laura Dern is in trouble.

Right.

But But then also the film

with a person, a woman we don't know the name of or really anything about in a hotel room who's clearly in trouble.

And then we're seeing this snowy Polish street suddenly or whatever.

And like, you know, we're seeing the valley girl.

I don't know.

Like, there's just lots of.

versions of the same thing happening in different reflections.

And that's, that's what the movie's about to me.

Who's the wide-eyed actor?

I think he's a Polish actor who plays, I think, her husband.

Sure.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Like when she is sort of inhabiting the working class

version of when they're in the little house and they're having their domestic thing.

Yeah.

Right.

But he's also, it's this, right.

It's the same guy who's the fancy Polish guy.

It's the same actor who is her husband in real life.

He's just opening his eyes much wider.

Yeah.

He is really

striking, but scary.

He's a scary presence.

Yeah.

There's some

intense presences in this movie.

There are some mugs.

Yeah, there's some mugs.

There's some mugs up in this one.

Yeah, for sure.

Because the thing is, I'm also looking up, and you know, we've been at it.

Yeah.

Are we going to get through it?

We are.

Because at this point, there's less.

Now it's mostly vibes.

Like, you don't have to worry about like, oh, I forgot the car chase where they realized that the diamond was actually in the right.

I'll tell you the shot that blew my mind.

It's when he does the slow camera pan away from Laura Dern that within the shot transitions to Poland in the early 1900s.

That's dope.

And also the match fade between the guys in Poland at the table who reposition themselves so that they're synced up with the rabbits.

That scene is awesome.

But I also, I feel like that time travel shot, basically the movie entering a portal,

right?

Is the kind of thing I have seen so many, like,

I don't know, the fucking The Walk or Gangs in New York does a version of at the end where it's like, we're good staying in this location, but traveling through time.

And now I'm used to so many versions of this shot that are like big showcase of CGI.

Skyscrapers get built.

Right.

Or falling down or whatever it is.

And this is just truly, he's on her face.

The camera is clearly on a tripod.

It swivels.

And as it swivels, the color pulls out of the image.

It goes to sepia.

And then you see like a horse-drawn carriage.

Yeah.

And then on the other side of the camera, when it lands, here are women dressed in period clothing.

And you're like, oh, I guess we traveled through time.

It's so simple.

You're no, it's a good call.

You're making me want to rewatch it.

It is very cool.

And I do think, like you said, he does get so much out of it.

It's so freaky being there.

Yeah.

The landscape is so cool.

And can I throw out my quick?

So I was

talking to someone, a native of Warsaw, when I I was there.

And I was like in the downtown area.

And I was like, I find it so relaxing here.

I'm used to cities like living in New York, where it's this tightly compressed grid and everyone's crammed in and everyone's rushing.

And here, like the streets are so wide, the sidewalks are so wide.

Everything feels so open.

Why aren't all cities built like this?

And she was like, well, they built it like this for the rallies.

And I was like, that's why this place is sad.

Like there's

like that, Where anything you can point at, where you're like, there's an interesting vibe to no cities laid out like this.

And you're like, that's the thing they destroyed.

We built it this way because of this.

That's the last vestige.

This is the only building that didn't get burned down.

Right.

And there is, I just think there's something he's tapping into of that cultural identity.

And I just feel like, in my experience, the people of Poland just carry that shit with them.

It just feels deep in there.

And the fact that he's using so many Polish actors, he's not just hiring actors to put on Polish accents.

The first thing he shot in Poland when he's there, you know, taking pictures of factories and shit, and he's like, I kind of want to write something and film it, is the scene where it's the three old men at the table.

And that was just right.

That was like a fragment that he came up with.

And he's like, I'm going to go from here.

But like, that's, that's the beginning of whatever this genesis is.

She burns, you know, she, the valley girls tell her to maybe burn a hole in a,

you know, in some tights or whatever and look through the silk.

And we start to see things like the rabbits again, the lost girl again,

the husband attacking his wife or mistress,

things like her talking, you know, the Laura Dern monologuing to Mr.

K, right?

All of that stuff starts to pop up.

That's the stuff at the table when she has the accent and she's bruised up.

She's saying fuck her a lot.

Yeah.

She sure is.

The locomotion is happening.

Then

also they dance to At Last, I think, the Etta James song.

You know, what else have we got?

Beck song at one point.

Right.

One of the ones that when we land on the Hollywood Boulevard, yeah.

Yeah, that's later.

Yeah, that's a

you have the backyard party where some of the valley girls are there where Smithy, her husband in this reality, has ketchup all over his shirt.

And he's tough.

They're all talking absurdly and like very surreally, like, have the hot dog.

That shit is definitely, I think, if you are just like, I'm going to go see a movie tonight at the IFC Center when you're like, should I, I'm not, and I have no disdain for this.

Like, should I leave?

Like, right.

Have I just completely, like, I just feel like I have spaghetti in front of me.

I've read the temperature wrong.

This is not the night I wanted.

Right.

Right.

Like, yeah, because sometimes with David, like, especially in the return when it's like 20 minutes of a guy sweeping a floor, it's like, are you fucking with me?

Like, what's going on really?

Like, come on, level with me, bro.

Like, what are we doing here?

Yeah.

But that's the scene.

The backyard scene is important, isn't it?

Because that's when Smithy's like, yeah, I'm going to go take care of these animals with the,

this group of people, which is something that beat up Laura Dern describes to the guy at the desk in

when she's talking

in the monologues.

Right.

We're sort of seeing versions of that.

We should also say that she introduces the idea of the Phantom.

Yeah, which is an important character.

In the climax, that's

who she shoots.

Right.

Yeah.

Totally.

The Phantom is sort of...

Another hot mug, intense mug, that guy.

Right.

Sure.

Is sort of the villain of the film.

film, if you want to be.

He's kind of the Thanos.

Yeah.

Bob.

Yeah.

He seems to, I guess, be,

you know, the husband of the other woman, maybe, right?

Or some, you know, the lost girl, the girl we see in the, in the hotel room.

But I also, at one point, we see a guy with a red light bulb in his mouth

being weird.

That's the phantom.

But he also is Axon M or whatever that.

I guess so.

But also, I think the crazy iconic image of Laura Dern's face blown up on her head with the chip.

On his head.

Yeah.

On his, you know, that's him.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

She's the boy who saw his reflection and evil followed him into the world.

It's like one of the great David Lynch doppelganger moments where it's like, oh, right.

Everyone in your dream is you.

Right.

Yes, right.

Yes.

That's that's a good way of thinking about it.

At some point, someone mentions Inland Empire, which is really funny because it almost feels like late in the movie.

They're like, has anyone actually said Inland empire in this movie that's

just like there's one thing we forgot to shoot someone has to say the name of the movie even though from my limited understanding of uh la this is not really set in the inland empire it's mostly no it's set in la yeah it's set in hollywood on the soundstage i think someone said to david lynch like i grew up in the inland empire and he was like inland empire i mean it's a perfect it's a perfect

name for a david lynch movie because inland empire sounds like a poetic way of saying like your dream space right?

Right.

Yeah.

What is it's just this giant fucking boring?

It's what you drive through to to uh get to to get to Palm Springs.

Oh, but it's huge.

I mean, it's a huge metropolitan area.

Uh, it's flat, it's east, east of L.A.

You know, huh?

And it's a lot of desert and then just like huge warehouse kind of right areas.

And right, you know, but the movie is not set in, I mean, no, it's not, not geographically.

Psychologically, I think it's supposed to be like an inland, inland empire.

Right.

Right.

If you think David was pointing at his noggin or something.

Yeah.

The real inland.

Yeah, it's as in as you can get.

I can't get through all of this, but what we're eventually getting to is sort of the quote-unquote end of On High and Blue Tomorrows, where suddenly

Laura Dern, Sue, whoever,

is with the Valley girl.

She's back in her house and she sort of gets transported to the streets of L.A.

She's being attacked by the Valley Girls or yelled at.

She's She's

like, I'm a whore.

No, no, no.

I'm saying like the sort of end.

I'm a whore.

I'm afraid.

And she starts laughing.

Yeah.

You know, she ends up being sort of beaten.

The Mr.

K monologues kind of end and she gets like stabbed and dies on the street

with Terry Cruz there.

Yeah.

I'm glad he made it.

Yes.

You know, like just because David Lynch, you know, the work output slows down the last 20 years.

Right.

There are a lot of modern actors who never got to work with him, which is why you get so many people jumping in on the return.

Just like, I'm glad Terry Cruise made the cut.

I'm glad he's.

Was he famous at this point?

He's a former football player.

But he had done like white chicks and Friday afternoon.

Isn't he an idiocracy?

When was idiocracy?

That's true.

He probably doubles

idiocracy.

Did, I think, narrowly escape into four theaters this same year.

2006, yeah.

Right.

But he's basically Everybody Hates Chris started the year before.

He's a growing kind of comedy character actor.

I mean, I remember when I saw him in Everybody Hates Chris, because I think I didn't see idiocracy until a couple of years later on like video or whatever.

I was like, where did they find this guy?

This guy is fucking hilarious.

That was my feeling in White Chicks.

A film I mostly find Dyer.

And then you're like, kind of brilliant.

That's the thing.

If we rewatch it now, are we going to have a Jack and Joe's?

I would say reappraisal.

But he's incredible in that.

Yeah.

Basically playing the nobody's perfect role.

Anyway, yeah, Terry Cruz is in there.

Yeah, there are these three street people is what they're called in the credits.

One of them played by the actress, maybe sort of singer called Nee, who is later in Twin Peaks of the Return, gives this incredibly long monologue about a friend of hers that is.

very compelling, but completely inscrutable, at least.

About Nico, a friend who you assume was like a

sex worker or something.

And then something very bracing and it's really, really not.

Awful physical description.

When she says, yeah, she has a hole in her vagina that goes into an intestine.

And it's like this really grounding, horrifying moment where you realize like for all of David Lynch's.

love of his of his female character his female characters and all the violence that happens to them throughout all so many of his movies and just how how awful men can be to women and then but it but it also so often feels allegorical in a way as graphic as the visuals can be.

But something about this line of dialogue is just like, oh, right, this is what

violence does.

Right.

And does that make sense?

It's like very, very striking, embracing, and sobering.

I mean, I keep going back to this, but like

the discourse after Blue Velvet of people arguing over whether the film was exploitative.

Right.

I think in every film after that, when he wants to deal with violence against women as a subject, he really feels a responsibility to be like, I'm not dealing with this as a plot point.

Right.

I actually need to engage with the effects of this.

Right.

You know, like, and part of it is, I think, him genuinely trying to, and this is so much what Twin Peaks is about, wrap his head around like, how can this level of evil exist?

How can people perpetuate this level of harm?

You know, and how do people survive that?

I think that's the other side of the big passing.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

How do people go on from this sort of thing?

And that whole monologue is being delivered to Laura Dern, who is then off-camera.

You're not sort of cutting back to her reaction shots.

There's almost like five consecutive minutes where you're holding on her and almost forgetting Laura Dern is there.

And she's been stabbed at this point already.

Yeah, she's bleeding to death.

She's bleeding out on the street.

Right.

And this, like the film reaches like such.

a pinnacle of discomfort and what you're saying that sort of like absolutely barren hollow despair and then you see the fucking seat of a camera crane and Jeremy Irons calling putt and doing the fucking picture wrap applause.

Right.

It is so destabilizing to have the rug pulled out from under you and be like, yep, movies.

Right.

Acting.

Right.

Which is, of course, what you're fucking watching.

And you would think for a lot of directors, they'd be like, they would end there and be like, of course.

Good enough.

It was all a movie.

Instead.

The film continues for a while.

Laura Dern does not speak again in the film.

She's like in a strange fugue state for the rest of the movie.

It's clear that like what not

me saying it's clear right now.

It's totally obvious that what actually happens is it feels like whatever recursive kind of like dream she was locked in, she has exited

to some extent.

You read it as, okay, we are back.

We're back.

And like she went into this loop and like was sort of moving through worlds or moving through stories.

It's also very fucking Mulholland drive of like, right.

We've landed.

And

now

she seems to be sort of empowered or

filled with some sort of knowledge because she then goes to find the phantom and destroys it.

Right.

Essentially.

Yep.

Like we're watching her.

She goes into this movie theater.

Right.

And then she's sees herself on the screen.

It is incredibly awesome.

This is right the point at which if you did make it through the middle chunk of the movie, you're kind of like painting.

I don't know what's going on, but I am right, so transfixed.

You also in this section get,

am I wrong, the lost woman back in the hotel room now instead of watching rabbits, watching the movie we've been watching.

Yeah, and then Laura Dern comes in and kisses her, and that sends the lost girl or lost woman back into the house.

Which is for me.

And reunites with her husband and the son.

A key part of my reading, which is like, why, why do this?

Why pursue this?

Why, almost like what you were saying about like this weird tradition of dressing up and entertaining strangers in the dark, like why make a fucking movie?

Why try to act?

Is like in that instant, instant, a woman sitting on a bed in a hotel room after a bad experience, flipping through channels, lands on something that for 45 seconds helps her process her shit, which isn't to say that art is therapy for others, but that it's about finding things that you can actually connect with in some way, you know, that help sort of reveal things to you or make you make sense of your your own life that aren't just reflecting back the things you know you like, but are challenging in a way that pulls something new out of you that sometimes can be productive.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I mean, I don't know how to describe exactly what it is, but she moves through these sort of industrial spaces and doors.

She's lynching

and confronts the Phantom, who is first the Phantom Man, right?

And then is this odd projection of her face.

And she

which is another thing I remember from seeing it in 2007 on the big screen.

The face.

First, we see her face as she runs towards the camera along that pathway.

And then we see that same face kind of crappily

put over the Phantom's face.

I got to say, no one does shitty FX better than David.

He's the king.

In the return, when she opens her face, like he has such, he knows exactly how crappy special effects can be, where it actually somehow like adds to the uncanniness or the drama of it, that it kind of just looks like

even the title.

Well, I don't know what he, what font this is, Inland Empire.

It's like Helvetica, but like he compressed it.

And it's like so janky, but it's like so great.

I was going to say, the poster is very graphic design is my passion.

It absolutely

works in a multi-weird emotion.

Yeah, actually, I don't know his process, but he does kind of feel like a guy who just played around with like iPhoto in the early 2000s on a Mac, like messing with pixels.

But that's his whole DavidLynch.com era is just like, what can I do with this new fancy computer machine?

When I talked to Jane Schoenbrun about I saw the TV club, like great film.

Right.

They told me that so much of the VFX conversations were that they were too good because it's kind of impossible for them to not be pretty good, even on a lower budget these days.

Right.

Exactly.

How do we degrade this without it feeling too insane?

You know, like to what extent, you know, no, show me that earlier rendering you had that looked fucked up.

Why did you, you know, not why did you clean it up, but like, can we get it back to that?

You know, it's what I find so interesting about what feels like a truly like new wave of for 20 or 30 years, we've had people who are influenced by David Lynch, but it often feels like they're trying to copy Lynchian stuff rather than finding their own version of what Lynch was able to express.

And rather than trying to copy his visuals or language, they're starting to figure out their own language, but tapping into a similar creative process or finding things that have some weird uncanniness or some inexplicable power.

Like that movie is a great example of that for me.

Where I'm just like, have you seen that film?

I saw TV Glow.

You'd like it, I think.

I think it's really depressing, isn't it?

It's about two

bonding over.

I don't think you would really find it super depressing.

It's got some of the absolute hollowed-out shit.

It's a melancholy to too upsetting, too disintegrating.

I can't get hollowed out too often, but the next time I'm in for a hollowing on.

Yeah, and so after destroying the phantom, we're, you know, we wind towards the end.

Seems like the lost girl is freed.

Like, it feels like the rabbits, Nikki goes to the rabbits' house.

4-7.

She goes through the door and is in their place.

And she's, like you say, ends up back on the couch, smiling, wearing a gown.

And then we have a lovely dancing scene.

Laura Herring is there.

Natasha Shikinski is there.

Yep.

my man sawing the log, Twin Peaks shout out.

Um,

yeah, you know, a lot of uh,

a lot of uh anyway, it's really good, and people exit being like

uh, that was great, and I loved it.

I don't know.

So, let me tell you, $24 million, number one at the box, or let me tell you what happened.

My experience of the end of the movie, watching it for the third time, when we were playing along to it, something really interesting happened.

So, at this point, we've been we've been engaging with the movie for like what is like two hours and 45 minutes.

And now we reach this final sequence, which is

now it is so explicitly David Lynch dealing with his, some of his favorite themes, which is people watching other people through the radiator, through the closet door, on screens, on TV screens.

And now Laura Dern is like watching herself.

First, she sees a snippet of the movie she was in.

Then she sees herself.

Then she goes up the stairs.

All this crazy stuff is happening.

Right.

So we're playing, like making noises and sounds, all this stuff, playing music.

I remember that the music in the actual film is like a ballad.

It's like a really melodramatic, beautiful traditional song, right?

That he probably co-wrote with somebody.

So I was, I had this little tape loop of like some old snippet of like a symphony or something.

It's like orchestral strings, but it's just a little loop.

It's like two seconds or something.

So it's just looping and looping with like an echo pedal, like making it get bigger and bigger and more abstract.

And it's like we're reaching this climax, and drummers going crazy on the cymbals and everything as we're watching Laura Dern watching herself.

And it's like we know everything is wrapping up because we watched the movie.

Like we know where it's headed.

It's headed to this resolution.

Something really, a really great accident happened, which is that we stopped playing too soon.

We stopped playing before the end of the movie so that that final shot of Laura Dern in her blue dress sitting on the sofa looking at us,

you're hearing like this echo fade away and the symbols fade away.

And then we just kind of like, cause we're facing the screen, we've been facing the screen the whole time.

We kind of just sat in silence and looked at Laura Dern looking at us.

And I like, I got goosebumps.

It was a really great moment because it was like, So, you know, and also just thinking about like, I've known, I've been like, I've fucking like watched Eraser Head like 34 years ago.

Like, David Lynch has been such, I'm not a completist.

Sure.

I'm not a super fan, but it's like this guy has been a part of my adult life and a certain part of my sensibility, like my whole life.

And now we've just like engaged with this movie in a way that I've never engaged with the movie before.

This movie is the last move, could be the last movie made by a guy who is so into the

the porousness between dreams and realities and self and doppelganger and all these things and screens and watching and being watched.

And now it's like this thing has ended and we're just looking at Laura Dern and she's looking at us as if we had just, as if it had been like an honest collaboration.

The spirit of this movie, the fact that he's so freaking creative, like there are a lot of great auteurs and great directors.

Like Paul Thomas Anderson isn't pointing a stick at a painting with a ball attached trying to figure out if the painting is done.

You know, like this is a true artist.

Yes.

This guy is a true artist.

He has tunneled into another dimension in a way.

And it was so.

And it has had a monastic almost commitment to the idea of what it means to be an artist as a way of life.

Not just I make art, but like, this is my primary identity.

Yeah, totally.

And there was something so cool and uncanny, but like in a happy way to be facing Laura Dern as if we had all just finished, like, we did it.

We're back.

Laura Dern is back on her sofa.

A woman in trouble can relax for a fucking minute, you know, for once.

And we feel our ears are ringing like we're exactly.

Yeah, it's like that kind of feeling.

And just sitting in silence because we had muted the movie and just looking at Laura Dern.

And it was almost like, because so much of David Lynch is about these,

right, portals, openings, passages, keys.

I had this crazy feeling that the world of the movie, like when you're watching a movie, you know that the world of the movie is this two-dimensional plane that the light is being projected on and you kind of enter into it.

But in this moment, I had this crazy feeling that the world of the movie is moving towards me in a third dimension.

Like, I'm in it now.

I don't, like, you know what I mean?

Like, it was just, I don't know how to explain it really, but it was like, holy fuck, like, we're kind of in this movie because this is a movie about moving between planes and realities.

And like, we kind of did that.

Like, when it was over, I said, you know what?

I think I love this movie.

Like, I love Inland Empire.

It gave me such a special

experience of engagement and creativity and

being in active conversation with the movie that is really difficult, if not impossible to quote, understand.

But by using a nonverbal technique of noise making and music making, like, to really try to get a handle on it.

It was so awesome.

And I'm so grateful to David Lynch

for being a somewhat commercially viable director who can make something

that can kind of like

change the way I engage with movies.

Like this dude is the greatest living American director.

Like there is no one like him.

There is no one like him.

No one can do what he did.

You're right.

In part because of historical accident, in part because like he was an Eagle Scout who got into transcendental, like all these particulars.

Like

he's just the greatest.

I mean, he's the fucking greatest.

I mean, he's just like ramping up.

You just like keep finding out.

But I mean, like, when I think about it, it's just like so terrific.

Like, what a fucking nut job this guy is.

And yet he has so much love for humanity.

Yeah.

It's so inspiring.

You're right.

That's, that's the thing.

It's dark and despairing and hollowed out as it can get.

It's not cynical and it's not like punishing.

No, it's not like realistic ways.

Yeah, you know, like fucking Neil LaButte's always like, look at this play about how shitty people are.

Oh, what?

You can't handle what asshole.

It's like so fucking easy.

Yeah.

Dog shit and go, that's dog shit as well.

Right, exactly.

I agree.

Shitty people are bad.

Yeah.

Who fucking cares?

Can I,

we, you know, JJ puts so much into all these dossiers or researcher, uh, who is fired, of course, uh, and uh, much more than we can ever say on Mike.

And in our Elephant Man episode, which was 15 years ago, I think approximately, there was a quote that has really stuck with me that I forgot to bring up in the episode.

And I've been like, when is there going to be a relevant time for me to bring this back?

Here's the, what's the quote?

But it's stuck in my cry.

I haven't pulled it up here.

And it feels your, your manifesto you just went on feels like the perfect on-ramp to this.

Okay.

And then I have a quote.

You, even you talk about him being a semi-commercial artist, right?

Right.

The man who largely like helps him transition to that state is Mel Brooks.

Yes.

A guy who's

such a great story.

Then takes his name off of the movie because he's like, I don't want people to get the wrong expectation.

Yeah.

But his famous tale of like Stuart Kornfeld showing him a racer head as like, you want to see the weirdest shit I've ever seen in my life.

And then Mel Brooks is like, this is a real filmmaker.

This isn't some guy making some weird gonzo thing.

There's like a real filmmaker here.

He could make a studio movie, right?

And then the whole arc we've gone on.

Obviously, it's not done.

Next four weeks will be Twin Peaks the Return, but this is his final feature film as of recording.

Mel Brooks has this quote.

He's from 2001, many, many years after Elephant Man, looking back on it.

And he says, I felt I was dealing with a true artist with David Lynch.

I felt that he was as close to the phenomenon of life and why we're here and why we have to die as any artist I've ever met.

Perfect.

Yeah.

That's perfect.

It is such a simple, direct statement for a guy who is often seen as so hard to parse and we're all going to spend decades trying to untangle the webs.

But I just think like fucking Brooks hit the bullseye there.

And that's what he identified in watching his first film and working with him on his second film.

And two very different movies in a lot of ways and similar in other ways.

But like, in a way, that's kind of what all of his fucking movies are about.

It is why you cannot totally crack them because he's making movies about these unanswerable questions that fundamentally kind of don't make up sense.

That kind of fundamentally are absurd.

Yeah, and I think

it's about you just have to, it's just like with life.

You just have to sit with it and react to it and try your best.

You know, it's like the Eagle Scout way.

You know, it's like.

Cale Brooks's other great line was he's like Jimmy Stewart from Mars.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love that.

I that's right.

Jimmy Stewart from Mars.

So when we were done watching the movie and

packing up our gear and everything and just like marveling at it, like that was so fun.

Like we got to do this.

Like we should come up with a list of other movies that we can like do this type of engagement with this live scoring.

Big Mama's House.

Big Mama's House and the Clumps or the Crumps or whatever it's called.

The Crumps would be good.

We were thinking like,

who are the other, like, who, who are the other David Lynches?

Like, who else can do this?

And it's like, well,

obviously, no one is like David Lynch, right?

He's one of a kind.

Walfacker.

But I was thinking about like other artists who just have this fully realized vision.

And the person I thought of was the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois.

You guys know her?

Of course.

She's famous for these huge metal sculptures of spiders.

Love the big old spider out there.

They have the movie.

Uses them.

There's sort of imagery like that.

She died in her late 90s, and I was, I had, was really struck with the comparison.

So I never really liked her stuff.

It's, it's like, um, she was an iconic 20th century feminist artist.

She made a lot of sculptures that are like about being embodied and they have like protuberances and all kinds of growths and stuff.

And she uses like sometimes untraditional sculptural materials.

And it, it's like, feels really intimate and really kind of like icky, a lot of it.

But she worked in all different types of media.

So once I was in DC, and the Corcoran Gallery was having a lifetime retrospective of Louise Bourgeois.

It was like, I don't know, seven decades of her artwork.

It was like a true lifetime because she was in her 90s at that point.

My friend and I'm like, all right, let's go check it out, see what it is.

Room after room of these artifacts of someone

expressing

all this

inchoate, deep, deep stuff through art, through drawing, through prints, through sculptures, through things that look like they could have been sets or props in a David Lynch movie, you know, the same type of interest in bodies or like a

who made video drum with that guy?

Kernberg.

Yeah, that kind of stuff.

Like a lot of unsettling, beautiful objects.

And as I was going, as I was going through the exhibit, I was like, holy fuck, this is,

this is a real artist.

This is someone who lived their life

and truly expressed it.

I mean, you're asking who else fits into that bucket.

The very few American artists we could describe that way.

And I got one top of my head.

Who's that?

Ben Hosley is pointing at that.

You got that Louise Bourgeois stuff?

I feel that Ben is as close to the phenomenon of life and why we're here and why we have to die as any artist I've ever met.

Wow.

That's a huge compliment.

So at the.

So you have a similar commitment to, you said who else would point a stick with a ball at a painting?

Ben would do that.

I would do that.

You bury a pair of pants in the dirt for 20 years.

Wasn't that your business model?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm actually, that's one of the things I'm doing in L.A.

Burying pants or digging them up?

Burying them.

The amount of projects that Ben has done that have might never be released that he kind of does for himself.

That's the way to do it, man.

Secret projects.

So let me finish this story.

So we...

go through this whole exhibit.

It's truly like an artist's life work, someone that I had never really engaged with because it made me uncomfortable.

And by the end of it, I'm like, this is terrific.

Like

what she did is like heroic.

And then at the end, the thing that really put it over the edge, and I think this quote is almost like, could be like a capstone to David Lynch's career.

She had a little piece of embroidery.

It was like a vintage handkerchief, like a cotton handkerchief with like a blue border.

or like a light blue pattern.

It was very old and she had embroidered text on it in light blue and all capital letters.

Remember, I'm seeing this after I've just walked through a life's work of like really wrenching stuff, right?

Someone really seeking to express themselves, explain the world to themselves, all this kind of stuff.

On this, on this little handkerchief, she had embroidered.

I've been to Helen back.

And let me tell you, it was wonderful.

Tears flowing from my eyes, like, holy shit.

What an artist.

what an artist and i really do feel like david lynch has has yeah a lot of that energy especially in this movie right yeah it's just like so awesome it's so inspiring process film yeah yeah yeah yeah it's just great yeah i agree it's just great thank you for being here thanks for having me back it was great to see you guys i i just like i the fact that you'd only seen this movie once and throwing you the lynch list and you saying yeah why not inland empire

gave you the opportunity to have this experience.

No, I thank you guys.

No, I mean, yeah, I should thank you.

I was just thinking for that.

It just feels

nice.

It was nice to, it was nice to,

because of all the movies that I've come on to talk about, this is the one where I hadn't seen it in a long time and I wasn't sure I loved it.

Like those other movies that we've talked about, like I really love all those movies.

They're terrific, you know?

And this one, I just remembered the memory of like, that was a total cinematic experience the first time I saw it.

And so I'm really happy that I got to come back and then have this other total cinematic experience.

So I think is honestly going going to like kind of change the way I engage with movies going forward.

So, thank you to you guys.

Can you remind me the date you saw this film?

March 10th, 2007.

Oh, on my spread on exhibit B?

Was March 10th 2007?

I saw

it

on March 10th, 2007.

Three days later, I saw the lives of others.

Good movie.

Yep.

310 to you.

We didn't even talk about the remake of 310 to Yuma, another absolute banger.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

Matt.

Secretly a Western, though.

We are so excited to say that this week's box office game is brought to you by our friends at Regal with the Regal Unlimited program.

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So we've done the box office game for Inland Empire before.

It's the weekend the holiday came out.

Oh, wild.

Well, it's been a while.

I wouldn't remember this.

But we could also do that weekend.

Oh, March 10th?

Well, I won't play because I'm looking at all of the movies right here.

But I would do either.

I genuinely don't think.

All right.

Well, here's the opening weekend.

Of course, Inland Empire opens on like, you know, a couple screens.

So it's not in the top, it opens on three screens, yes, in fact.

Um, but number one at the box office is not The Holiday, but it is a new film.

It is a kind of amazing action historical epic directed by a guy who's good at that kind of thing, but also has a couple of,

you know, behavioral.

It's a Ridley Scott.

No.

No.

No, he's got behavioral.

Oh, he's done a couple bad things in his life.

I don't know why I'm doing this voice to describe the actions of a sort of an awful guy.

He's done a couple bad things in his life.

Huh.

Had some bad opinions and also just sort of, you know, been a bad person.

Yeah, it's 2006.

Yeah, Christmas time.

It's December.

It's Christmas time.

It's historical epic, you said?

Yep.

Oh, it is the very good film called Apocalypto.

Yes, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto.

Wow, look at that.

Ryan's,

you know, sort of adventure.

Was that you doing Mel Gibson?

Wasn't that voice?

It's just like that thing where it's like, how am I supposed to talk about it?

He's doing the this is the voice we affect when we talk about about

the thing.

Yeah,

um, also that we all like this movie, yeah.

The movie's, in my opinion, kind of excellent.

Uh, Ben, you're a fan of Apocalypto, right?

I remember you've talked about it in the past.

Uh, I wouldn't say a fan, but I like that film.

Number two at the box office is a car.

Do you want more?

No, is it an animated film we've covered?

Uh, it's an animated film we've covered.

Is it it's not a Zemekis, nope, uh, and it's not uh Musker Clements, nope, And it's not a Selic.

Nope.

It's not a Bird.

Nope.

It's a guy who makes live-action and animated films.

Sure.

Oh, is it the motion picture Happy Feet?

It's Happy Feet.

It's Happy Feet.

George Miller's Happy Feet.

Tappa Tapa Tap.

Dancing Penguin movie.

I've never seen that.

Is that good?

It's good.

Yeah.

I kind of prefer Happy Feet 2.

I was going to say your shit would be Happy Feet 2.

You're a Happy Feet 2 man, if I've ever met one.

Is that a real sequel?

Yeah.

People didn't like it and bomb rules.

Is that the last movie he made before he made Mad Max Fury Road?

Happy Feet 2 was.

Happy Feet 1 was such a success that they were like, we will let you make your Mad Max film if you make us a Happy Feet 2.

Seriously, that's what it was?

And then Happy Feet 2 bombs.

It's one of the wildest drop-offs in box office from one movie to another.

And Happy Feet won one best animated film.

He gets an Oscar.

And everyone's like, oh, God, we're stuck making this Mad Max movie with him.

And then he delivers the best movie ever made.

Wow.

Holiday is number three.

Number four at the box office is a film featuring the character James Bond.

That could be anything.

Still a lot of options.

It is Casino Royale.

Yes.

And number five, new this week and underperforming, although it will have major, decent legs.

Okay.

Not major legs.

But we'll get Oscar Noms.

Major legs stand down.

Got a bunch of Oscar noms, including two acting noms.

It's a big

adventure, drama, action,

very serious.

It's about issues.

It's underperforming.

It's about.

huge movie star.

It's a huge movie star.

Is it a cruise?

No.

No.

Is it Blood Diamond?

Blood Diamond.

Yeah, there we go.

TheodiCaprio in Blood Diamond.

Then you've also got the wonderful, incredible Deja Vu at number six.

You ever seen Deja Vu?

I don't think so.

I think you'd love it.

A Sims favorite.

What is it about?

So Tony Scott film about a, it's Denzel Washington plays a guy who's investigating a terrorist attack

and then like

is exposed to strange surveillance technology that he eventually realizes is time travel technology.

It's completely insane.

It's like source code with Jake Gyllenha.

Did you ever see that one?

That one's good.

Yeah, he's on a train and he keeps like looping back to try to find the terrorists.

Weird.

It almost feels like I've seen that movie before.

Naive.

Comedy points.

You've also got Unaccompanied Minors, the Paul Feig kids film.

Based on this American Life story.

Yes.

Yep.

You've also got the Nativity story, the Catherine Hardwick Manger movie.

Yep.

Deck the Halls.

That's the Jamie Lee Curtis'.

Nope.

That's Christmas with the Cranks.

This one is Danny DeVito and Matthew Bradwick fighting over who has more lights on their house.

And you have the absolutely reprehensible, the Santa Claus 3, the escape claim.

One of the most evil films ever made.

A kind of Lynchian glimpse into the portals of madness.

And we really should just be done.

But when David saw the film, number one at the box office was a surprise smash hit R-rated action movie.

It would be called 300.

300.

Right.

Did you see 300?

No, I was too.

I heard it was fascist, and so I withheld my money.

I did not want to promote that ideology.

Snyder's response was like, Yeah, it was.

It's about the fascism of our war in Iraq.

Wasn't he kind of saying some shit like that?

It's not my favorite of his movie.

My favorite thing is to refuse to see a movie because I've decided it's fascist.

That's like my hobby.

That's good.

And then to announce it proudly to everybody.

I never saw Happy Feet 2 actually.

I heard it was kind of fascist There's a lot of fascist movies in this top number two at the box office big family comedy starring Tim Allen and others well it's Wild Hogs one bus fascist films of the 21st century hugely fascist movie about the lure of motorcycle gangs Number three is an adaptation of a young adult classic 2007 Bridge to Terabithia yeah a hugely fascist movie of course number four at the box office bridge is too fascist right I've never seen it that's I I read the book.

Number four is a comic book adaptation.

Is it Ghost Rider?

Nick Cage and Ghost Rider.

Kind of a fascist.

Damn, how do movies do this, man?

Every single time.

This is the matrix inside my head.

This is why it takes so long for me to respond when you ask me a simple question is because I have to shut down the box office page.

It's just like running like a crawl.

When people ask me what time it is, I'm like, I have to X out of like 17 tabs to get to it.

Yeah, the Ghost Rider movie in which Peter Fonda plays the devil.

It's kind of a fascist movie.

A genuine thing I texted David last night is, you know what I think about a lot?

That Angel Eyes and Shrek came out on the same weekend.

It's true.

It's a thing I think about way too often.

Number five of the box ops gives a shit.

One of the great films of 2007.

David already invoked it many times.

It's a holder from 2007.

No, no, no.

Oh, one of the early films.

It's Zodiac?

Zodiac.

Yeah.

And then you've also got Norbit, fascist.

Number 23, fascist.

Music and lyrics, not fascist.

Breach, not fascist.

Amazing Grace.

It'd be rude for me to call the movie about the anti-slavery movement fascist.

So not fascist.

Okay.

Funny.

Yeah.

So that's what was at.

So actually, yeah, not a lot of the movie, but Zodiac you did see

in the theater.

I loved it.

I think that's probably the only thing.

You probably saw it.

Well, The Lives of Others is here, as you mentioned.

Pan's Labyrinth, you probably saw that.

A lot of the Oceania.

Anti-fascist.

Very anti-fascist.

Yeah, it would be really rude to call that fascist.

That would be nakedly anti-scale.

You held a press conference to announce you were going to see that movie.

Only high school movie critic David Reese would dare to say that

you'd be like, I see through the right here.

Exactly.

Yeah.

We are done.

We have podcasted for a long time, as we are want to do on our David Lynch mini-series.

People should watch Going Deep with David Reese, now seemingly on

Dick Town on Hulu.

And Election Profit Makers.

Can I plug something?

Of course you should.

It's coming out before or after the election.

What's y'all scheduled?

After.

This is coming out around.

Depending on how the election goes, my podcast might still be going.

No, come on.

You got to keep it going.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Election Profit Makers is a salve for me every week.

Sim's talking about it all the time.

You and the great John Kimball talking about, you know, skylines and

foot pedals and, I don't know, occasionally politics.

Every so often.

It's great.

And,

you know, I was getting worried for you guys.

Things just felt a little despairing in the Democratic Party.

That hollowed out feeling.

Yeah.

It was getting a little

in the presidential show.

But things have changed recently and feel a little more energetic.

So that's good.

Here's another thing I texted you last night.

Our biggest takeaway from 2024 should be that presidential campaigns, it should be illegal for them to be longer than six months.

Yeah, it should be like parliamentary elections.

Yes, where the Brits have it right.

Six weeks and out.

Let's just, you know, race to the finish.

You can find all the links to David's work in the episode description.

Great.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

It was really fun.

It's great to see all you guys.

I'm glad we made it happen in person.

It was touch and go.

We'll talk about it one day.

We'll talk about it one day.

Take us out.

Thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Thank you to Marie Barty for helping to produce the show.

Marie's going to be posting a bunch of images on our social that have been discussed in this episode.

Great.

And you know what?

Hey, why not just get ahead of it and say, we're going to have a newsletter.

It might even exist at this point.

I'd love it.

Fucking state that intent online.

Let's make it happen.

Let's babe ruth it.

Be the newsletter we want to see in the world.

Thank you to AJ McKean for editing the show.

He's also our production coordinator.

Thank you to JJ Birch for our research.

Thank you to Joe Bo and Pat Reynolds for our artwork, Lane Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme song.

You can go to blankcheckpod.com for links to some real nerdy shit, including possibly our newsletter by this point in time.

Tune in next week for the first chunk of Twin Peaks that return.

Is that right?

Yes.

That's what we're finishing out the rest of the year.

No, I know.

I just couldn't remember if there was any other.

I double-checked, unless some crazy

here got moved up.

In fact, I know.

I'm just saying maybe unless Costner wants to sneak it in there.

Yeah, right.

That's that could happen.

I suppose we'll see what happens.

But presumably next week, Twin Peaks, the return, barreling straight into that to finish out Lynch with the end of 2024.

Bye-bye.

Oh, and as always.

Yes.

And as always, bye-bye.