David Lynch: The Later Features

After his first three movies caused an arthouse stir (Eraserhead), took his surrealist vision mainstream (The Elephant Man), and yielded a legendary bomb (Dune), the next phase of David Lynch’s career saw him becoming a cult figure. Blue Velvet unveiled his dark vision of cruelty and abuse lurking behind the facade of small town America, and paved the way for the major cultural moment which was Twin Peaks, and off the back of that he was able to make eccentric movies like the off-kilter road movie Wild At Heart and the industrial rock psychological thriller Lost Highway.

People didn’t know it at the time, but it seems like Lynch only had three more movies in him; certainly, after this last flutter of movie-making activity from 1999 to 2006, Lynch has moved away from feature films as a format, putting out short works (ranging from enigmatic originals to music videos to adverts), shooting a concert video for Duran Duran, indulging in a bit of acting, music, and painting, promoting Transcendental Meditation, and generally doing what appeals to him. His most substantial work of the past 18 years or so is the third season of Twin Peaks.

As of 2021, there was some suggestion that Lynch might be working on something new for Netflix; regular collaborator Laura Dern has suggested he’s up to some shit, and what has emerged suggests we should keep our eyes out for more television in the form of something that might be called Wisteria or Unrecorded Night. What doesn’t seem to be coming is a new feature film – and whilst we might luck out and get more from him, it may be just as likely that he’s done with that particular format. So let’s take in these last efforts and see how he bade farewell to the medium which made his name.

The Straight Story

Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a gently-spoken retiree living in Laurens, Iowa. His health is not what it was – his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) finds him having suffered a scary fall in the family home, and his doctor (Dan Flannery) advises him that he really needs to quit smoking or his ailments are going to get worse. In an even more alarming turn of events, Alvin learns that his brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke. Alvin and Lyle fell out ten years ago, and Alvin resolves to go and visit Lyle to finally bury the hatchet.

There’s just one problem: Lyle lives 240 miles away in Mount Zion, Wisconsin. Ordinarily, you could drive that in less than five hours if you don’t take any breaks – call it six or seven hours if you don’t want to push it. Easy visit, right? Well, that’s where Alvin’s own health problems come in: he no longer has a driving licence, and the mix of conditions he has means that getting a new licence is out of the question. And Alvin’s got an ornery streak, and adamantly clings to every scrap of self-sufficiency he has; if there’s a way he can drive himself rather than relying on someone else, he’s going to do it. When Alvin realises that you don’t need a driving licence to use a driving lawnmower, he decides to drive his trusty mower at a brisk 5 miles per hour all the way to Mount Zion. This is the legend of that journey: The Straight Story.

David Lynch: Before, During, and After Twin Peaks

After an early career encompassing arthouse oddity, mainstream acclaim, and a massive sci-fi flop, David Lynch had to go back to the drawing board – and in the process found new ways to repackage the surrealist instincts he indulged in Eraserhead in ways that would be accepted by mainstream cinema and television. Perhaps the crowning glory of this was the original run of Twin Peaks, in which he used a gripping detective story as a Trojan Horse to slip high weirdness, surrealism, and shrieking horror onto mainstream television to widespread acclaim – but his cinema projects immediately preceding, during, and after Twin Peaks were also part of that process – and for this article, I’m going to look over those.

Blue Velvet

Somewhere in the mid-20th Century, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is a charming, clever, and inquisitive all-American college student. When his father Tom (Jack Harvey) suffers a frightening medical upset, Jeffrey returns to his home town of Lumberton, a logging community, to support his father and family in this difficult time. After a difficult visit to see his stricken dad in the hospital, Jeffrey takes the scenic route home, traipsing around the old shortcuts and vacant lots he remembers from childhood – and in one of those lots he finds, lying in the grass, a severed human ear.

Jeffrey takes the ear to Detective Williams (George Dickerson), prompting a police forensics team to swoop in on the vacant lot, and Detective Williams warns Jeffrey that it would be better if he didn’t ask too many questions about the matter. Jeffrey’s curiosity about the case is not so easily sated – and nor will that of Sandy (Laura Dern), Detective Williams’ daughter, who’s overheard her father talking about the case and is all too happy to chat about it, and about Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a nightclub singer who might be connected.

Chasing up that lead, Jeffrey ends up sneaking into Dorothy’s apartment (with Sandy’s help) and observes her having a phone call which suggests she’s being subjected to some sort of blackmail by someone holding one of her loved ones captive. Dorothy discovers Jeffrey hiding in her closet, and outraged at the intrusion she sexually assaults him at knifepoint before bundling him back into the wardrobe after a knock at the door – for Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), the violently sadistic criminal whose gang is holding Dorothy’s one-eared loved one hostage, has stopped by to subject Dorothy to a violent sexual ordeal. After Frank leaves, Jeffrey finds himself drawn into his own relationship with her, in which she coaxes him into increasingly extreme sexual behaviour and demands that he hit her during sex. Unable and unwilling to keep away, Jeffrey has set himself on a course which can only lead to a confrontation with Frank…

Cosmic Horror and Classic Crime

Though both the majority of her output and the bulk of her commercial and critical success came in the realm of crime fiction, Agatha Christie didn’t solely work in that field. In 1933 she published a collection of stories hovering in the borderland between crime fiction, outright horror, and the hazy borderland of supernatural mysteries that neighbours those two.

With stories representing at both extremes of this genre spectrum and most conceivable positions between, The Hound of Death represents work from her first highly productive decade of writing (the earliest publication of any story from it in the magazines has been traced to 1924, other stories may well be original to the set), and reveals her to be adept at a far wider range of writing styles than anyone who’s only read a few Poirot or Miss Marple novels may have realised.

In fact, neither Poirot nor Miss Marple show up in any of these stories – even the one story we can confidently say is a pure crime yarn with no supernatural aspects even hinted at sits somewhat outside the accustomed atmosphere of their stamping grounds. Here are found enigmas which often stay a little mysterious – not the sort of thing which will succumb suddenly to the attention of Poirot’s little grey cells or any of Miss Marple’s flashes of inspiration whilst gardening.

GOGathon: Broken Swords From a Faulty Forge

When it came to point-and-click adventures, one specialist publisher of note is the UK’s Revolution Software. With the likes of Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky, Revolution carved out a reputation with games which, in retrospect, aren’t necessarily that hot when it came to the gameplay and writing, but did look remarkably nice for the time and did try to do some interesting new things with the form, even if those things didn’t always pan out well.

Such are the qualities which would eventually feed into the Broken Sword series of games. Set in the modern day, these combined globetrotting plotlines, charmingly realised locations, historical conspiracies, and an endearing cast to attain perhaps the most critical and commercial success of any of Revolution’s products, with five games so far being released in the series. However, are the games actually all that great, or do they hover at that good-to-mediocre level which can yield sufficient sales to keep the lights on but doesn’t result in a product which it’s especially fun to revisit after the hype is done?

Shadow of the Templars

The premise of the first game is simple enough: American tourist George Stobbart is enjoying a holiday in Paris when the café he’s sat outside is shattered by a bombing committed by an assassin disguised as a clown. Slain in the bombing is a certain Monsieur Plantard, a highly-placed civil servant in the Treasury, who had invited intrepid journalist Nico Collard to the café in order to discuss a highly sensitive story with her. When Stobbart and Nico compare notes, the duo realise they’ve stumbled onto something big, and neither of them feel able to set the investigation aside until they’ve got to the bottom of it all. And the mystery seems to have something to do with the secret treasure of the Knights Templar…

1996’s Shadow of the Templars is the shortest of the Broken Sword games, and in its original version you only ever played George. However, an enhanced Director’s Cut version of the game – first released on Nintendo DS and Wii in 2009 before being ported to other platforms, including the PC – expands the game somewhat by adding a number of sections where you play Nico, providing both a new prologue section as you play through Nico’s initial entanglement in the case which sets up the fatal rendezvous with Plantard, and then a few additional episodes as Nico’s personal investigation progresses.

These new additions rather dry up partway through the game, though they do lay the groundwork for a new end-of-game cut scene; this is inevitable because Nico’s investigation reaches a point where the writers couldn’t really do much more with it without significantly redesigning George’s segments of the game, and I suspect they simply didn’t have the budget for it that. Still, on balance I do quite like these new additions; as well as fleshing out the story a bit more, it also boosts Nico’s role in the story appreciably, since in the original version of the plot she didn’t do all that much, and it means Shadow of the Templars is no longer the odd-game-out in the series – for in all the others you play both George and Nico at various points in the game.

The Vanishing of a Promising Plot

1973: Paul Prospero, psychic private detective, has received a letter from young Ethan Carter, from which he quickly develops a hunch that Ethan’s hip-deep into some occult danger. Sure enough, when he reaches the lonely, neglected region of Red Creek Valley he discovers that Ethan is missing – and his supernatural powers allow him to sense the after-impression of terrible events that have overcome Ethan’s family. Can Paul Prospero reach Ethan and get him to safety, or is it already too late?

Released in 2014 by Polish indie developers The Astronauts, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a first-person adventure game which has been accused of being a walking simulator. I think that’s an unfair description of it; it might have some influence from the genre, particularly in the sense that a lot of gameplay involves you walking around a lovingly-realised location sort of just kind of observing what’s happened there, but it’s certainly not a purist example of the genre. There are puzzles to solve, things to interact with, and in one segment an avoid-the-ghoul hide-and-seek section reminiscent of pacifist no-fighting-back horror like Outlast or Amnesia; you can also run, which puts it a big step above Dear Esther.

It also isn’t the longest of games – you can play through it in a single evening (I did). I felt like I got my money’s worth, but then again, I got it for less than £3 on a GOG sale – I’m not sure I’d necessarily feel the same about it had I paid full price on release. See, there’s the kernel of a really fun way of conveying a narrative here, but the narrative The Astronauts ultimately choose to tell left me cold.

Paul Prospero’s abilities largely revolve around reconstructing past events – sometimes by putting objects back in the configuration they were in when shit hit the fan, which can allow him to witness a person’s last moments, and sometimes by entering strange secondary worlds as a result of the information he has found. The first time I did this and I realised that the ground under my feet had turned into, not the worn old stones that had previously covered the hillside, but a tangled morass of skulls was a properly creepy moment.

The problem I have with it is that the plot gets shallower and less interesting the deeper you get. At first it seems like Ethan Carter’s in trouble because he’s poked into secrets people wanted to forget, and developed a habit of writing stories that seem to curiously hint at the dirty laundry of the local area (and his family in particular). This is an intriguing concept and I was keen to learn more. As the game progresses, this resolves into a fairly bog-standard sub-Lovecraftian stop-the-cult plot – trite, but entertaining enough.

By the end of the game, even this plot – which, while hackneyed in many respects, still had the potential to develop in interesting directions – falls away and you are left with one of the most obvious, trite, annoying, and altogether exasperating plot twists you can think of. It is a really damn obvious one by the time you get there too, more’s the pity. Put it this way: when it becomes apparent that Paul Prospero doesn’t cast a shadow, I thought that the developers had goofed; by the time I realised what the twist was going to be, it seemed weirdly apt.

To spoiler it further, The Astronauts apparently resolved to pull off the final twist after reading An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge (though they were apparently thinking about the plot’s general direction before then), not realising that perhaps if Ambrose Bierce did it over a century ago, and if numerous hacks have done it since then, maybe the idea is a little stale. There seems to be an attempt here to say something about abusive family dynamics, but it’s handled in a rather trite and two-dimensional way (before and after the revelation) which doesn’t really add much depth there.

One suspects that the copout ending was inevitable – the earlier version of the story, the one I thought the game was initially hinting at, feels like it was probably too ambitious to realise on the scale The Astronauts were operating at. But as it stands it feels like they spent a lot of time developing a nicely realised little village and then wasted it on a story which didn’t deserve it.

Also I couldn’t take the game seriously because the kid’s name just reminded me of the wrestler of the same name.

The Essence of Stenbock

Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock (1860-1895) was until recently a comparatively forgotten literary figure. Montague Summers briefly mentioned enjoying one of his stories, but other than that his life and career was left largely uncommented-on for much of the mid-20th Century. John Adlard wrote a brief biography of him – Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties – in 1969.

Timothy d’Arch Smith, who had aided Adlard with a bibliography of Stenbock’s work, would later mention him in Love In Earnest, a study of the English “Uranian” poets of the late nineteenth century – chaps like Lord Alfred Douglas who used poetry to explore themes of homosexuality, though in a way which in retrospect was rather problematic in the way it bluntly refused to separate out homosexuality from pedophilia in the way we would today. (Much inspiration was taken from Ancient Greek sexual mores, in particular.) Such was the Victorian period, when heterosexual men were hardly more discerning about the age of consent.

As a gay man with a tendency towards mysticism, religion, and art, it is no surprise that Stenbock should have shown up on the periphery of this circle, but that is hardly the only thing which stands out about him biographically, A member of the Swedish aristocracy whose ancestral lands were in Estonia, he was nonetheless born and raised in England, and after a brief stint in the old estate after inheriting his title in 1885 would largely make England his home base, though he would tour Europe extensively. Addicted to alcohol and opium, he scandalised not just with his sexual inclinations but his religious views, which seem to have involved a strange syncretic brew of Catholicism, homebrewed paganism, and Buddhism. A possibly-apocryphal story claims that in later life he was accompanied everywhere by a doll or puppet he referred to as his son, and that he’d paid a lot of money to a Jesuit priest to educate this puppet-son.

Though Adlard and d’Arch Smith kept Stenbock’s name in circulation, we largely have David Tibet – the mastermind behind the Current 93 musical collective that was one of the subjects of England’s Hidden Reverse – to thank for recent efforts to put his work back into circulation. D’Arch Smith’s account of Stenbock in Love In Earnest inspired Tibet to look deeper into Stenbock, perhaps in part due to the parallels between Tibet’s and Stenbock’s religious interests.

Though the Count only published three thin volumes of poetry and a single brief short story collection, Studies of Death, during his lifetime, the amount of Stenbock material available has increased appreciably thanks to Tibet’s efforts. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tibet had turned his hand to publishing through his own imprint, Durtro Press, and through this avenue he reprinted Stenbock’s collected poetry, reissued Studies of Death (expanding it with an additional story, plus two Stenbock translations of short stories by Balzac), as well as putting out volumes such as The Child of the Soul presenting previously-unpublished works of the Count’s. The Current 93 album, Faust – a return to the project’s dark ambient roots – included a booklet containing the Stenbock story of the same name, which was in fact the first time it had seen publication in any form.

More recently, Strange Attractor Press have released Of Kings and Things, a Tibet-edited one-volume collection of pretty much all the Stenbock you need, constituting so far as I can tell all the short stories of his yet published, plus most of his published poetry, plus a biographical sketch by David Tibet of Stenbock’s life and an afterword by d’Arch Smith detailing how he came to feature Stenbock in Love In Earnest – and how a reader from the publisher queried whether many of the writers featured in the book had even existed, which is a measure of the level of obscurity they had fallen into.

Revisiting the X-Files, Part 9: Hey, Did You Know the Show’s Ending?

OK, here we are. Having covered the beginning of the show, its creative peak, a season hampered by the need to keep the mytharc static for the movie, the movie itself, two awkward post-movie seasons, and a season which started out trying to convince us that John Doggett was a lead character only to reassure us by the end that he really wasn’t – plus touching on two spinoff shows, one glum and one comedic – we’ve now come to the end of the original run of The X-Files. In the show’s run from 1993 to 2002, it had gone from some obscure cult thing to a massive pop culture juggernaut to a show which, honestly, at the time I was somewhat surprised to learn was still running.

I think it’s fair to say that whilst early X-Files at its best managed to catch lightning in a bottle, said lightning had long since escaped, in part because of goofy creative decisions, in part because first David Duchovny and then Gillian Anderson were just really goddamn tired of it, and in part because the audience were also goddamn tired of it. A loyal following continued to watch – ratings stayed over 10 million viewers an episode right through to season 8 – but discontent had grown over time, especially if you were someone who was actually emotionally invested in the show rather than just having it on because it happened to be on.

Season 8 was challenging enough, what with Duchovny leaving the show but then not really leaving the show. This time around, Duchovny really had left the show, only as we’ll see he hadn’t quite left the show, and Gillian Anderson also didn’t want to be on it full-time any more. A deal was reached whereby Scully’s role in the show would be dialled back and Agent Monica Reyes – a character planted in the previous season just in case this eventuality rose – would step up to be one of the lead X-Files Division agents.

However, whereas Doggett had the first half of season 8 more or less to himself without Mulder upstaging him, Reyes was in the awkward position of being a character to replace a different character who hadn’t actually gone away. In fact, Scully’s closely involved in the investigation more often than not in this season, in a half-in half-out situation even more awkward than Mulder’s. There’s also the small issue that, what with David Duchovny walking again, the show had to deal with the fact that they’d ended season 8 with Mulder and Scully back together and all apparently being right with the world, except that Mulder had been fired from the FBI.

Why I Won’t Be Fully Chronicling The Lone Gunmen

The Lone Gunmen is the other, less talked-about X-Files spin-off series. Whereas Millennium was originally not supposed to be set in the same universe as The X-Files, but crossed over with it as time went by until eventually it had a backdoor season finale as an X-Files episode, The Lone Gunmen was presented as being part of the same world from the start. As is obvious from the title, the concept of the show was that it would follow the exploits of the Lone Gunmen – Byers (Bruce Harwood), Frohike (Tom Braidwood), and Langly (Dean Haglund), a trio of dorky hackers who put out the underground newspaper The Lone Gunmen airing their various conspiracy theories to the general public.

Having been invented by Glen Morgan and James Wong (who, perhaps, would have made better showrunners for The X-Files than Chris Carter himself, given that they delivered the best episodes of the early seasons), the Gunmen had become beloved features of the show over time, their role largely to be Mulder’s (and, as she warmed to them over time, Scully’s) dorky little friends who sometimes helped out with a bit of info or technical expertise our main agents didn’t have access to.

So popular were they, they ended up getting a couple of Vince Gilligan-penned episodes focused specifically on them, with the story of how they met up with Mulder reprised in Unusual Suspects and Scully getting drawn into one of their investigations in Three of a Kind. With these episodes effectively acting as backdoor pilots, the TV show was cooked up by the four men who by this point made up the core X-Files writing team – Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, and John Shiban – as a lighter, more comedic show than The X-Files (much as Millennium was a darker and more miserable one), with more of an emphasis on corruption in high places and less on UFOs and paranormal stuff.

The sole season of the show aired in parallel with X-Files season 8. It was a ratings flop, losing around 10 million viewers over the course of its run, a good chunk of whom didn’t bother to stick around after watching the first episode or two, and to be honest you can’t blame ’em.

Revisiting the X-Files, Part 8: Hey, Did You Know David Duchovny’s (Sort of) Gone?

After a rather muddled sixth season (which itself followed an utter disaster of a movie whose existence had thrown the fifth season out of whack), The X-Files actually offered up a reasonably decent seventh season (if you ignore the utterly risible resolution of the “what happened to Mulder’s sister?” plot) which culminated in Mulder being abducted by aliens and Scully becoming pregnant. This allowed the mytharc to come back to life with two brand new mysteries – “Where’s Mulder?” and “How is babby formed?” – and also deal with the fact that David Duchovny, having become comprehensively tired of the series and wanting to explore other projects, forcing the show to adapt to a brand new Mulder-less format.

OK, so here’s the thing: Duchovny’s departure didn’t stick. Rather than entirely leaving the series, he was cajoled (perhaps with the aid of Fox driving a dump truck full of cash up to his front door) into sticking around on a guest star basis. In fact, he appears in about half the season, with small appearances depicting his peril in the initial two-part mytharc episodes and then returning to main cast duties in the second half of the season, which coincided with the most dense run of mytharc episodes the series had seen to date. Whilst season 6 and 7 had been light on the mytharc, season 8 is almost wholly consumed by mytharc in its second half, making up for lost time.

Speaking of stuff that almost wholly consumes the show, this season also saw a significant shift on the writing side. I’ve recounted how over time the show’s pool of writers tended to contract, until most of the writing was done by a four-man (emphasis on “man”) team of Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, and John Shiban, with occasional outside scripts filling out the rest.

Here, John Shiban and Vince Gilligan’s contributions are significantly contracted. Gilligan and, to a lesser extent, Shiban were concurrently working on the Lone Gunmen spin-off series, but then again so were Carter and Spotnitz. For whatever reason, for this season and season 9 (which followed the cancellation of The Lone Gunmen and therefore didn’t have that distraction as an excuse for this), the core X-Files writing team was effectively trimmed back to just Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz, with Gilligan and Shiban’s writing contributions not amounting to much more than anyone else outside the inner circle.

To quantify this, a statistic: in both this season and season 9, over half the episodes of the season have their script credited to Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, or both of them. And of those, only a couple of episodes in season 9 involve Carter or Spotnitz collaborating with others – William had a script by Chris Carter distilling a story concept he’d worked on with Duchonvy and Spotnitz, and Jump the Shark was the last episode credited to the trio of Gilligan, Shiban, and Spotnitz – the last time either Gilligan or Shiban would be given a script credit alongside Spotnitz or Carter. One may worry that this would have the effect of making the pool of ideas and writing talent available to the show even shallower, and narrowing its vision to the Carter-Spotnitz duo’s personal take. Let’s see, shall we?

Revisiting the X-Files, Part 7: Hey, Did You Know David Duchovny’s (Sort of) Leaving?

Season 6 of The X-Files was, as I recounted in the previous part of this article series, was a season of two halves – starting out as a big goofy mess, but somewhat pulling itself together by the end. Season 7 would find the production team having adapted fully to the relocation to Los Angeles, but also dealing with the fact that David Duchovny was feeling increasingly restless and clearly wasn’t going to be sticking around forever.

This was particularly the case because Duchovny had decided to seriously upset the applecart by suing Fox – the television network, not his own character. See, Duchovny’s contract with Fox included a cut of various royalties, including the proceeds from book deals, reruns and the like. Duchovny felt that, rather than seeking the best and most competitive deal for those rights, Fox had instead just sold them to their affiliates at an unfairly low price. (Note, for instance, how the show switched to Sky – a Fox-owned company – rather than the BBC after season 5, putting an end to my watching of the show because my family didn’t have or want satellite TV in our house and I no longer cared enough about the show to seek out other means of watching it.) By doing that, Duchovny and anyone else whose compensation included royalties on those would end up underpaid.

The lawsuit would also undermine Duchovny’s working relationship with other individuals on the show; most notably, though Chris Carter was not a full-blown co-defendant on the case, Duchovny’s suit did allege that Carter had been paid hush money to keep the arrangement quiet (presumably so as to not damage any contract negotiations which might have been impacted by the knowledge that the rights were going to be handed off for cheap). Fox settled with Duchovny, but it was clear that some bridges were burned there.

This was not the only situation the creative team had to face. Chris Carter’s own contract was up by the end of the season, raising the possibility that the show might get renewed but he might not be onboard. Perhaps as insurance against that policy, the circle of writers was somewhat widened for this season; it has the least Chris Carter script credits of any of the pre-revival seasons, and less Frank Spotnitz scripts than any season since season 3 (Spotnitz would be conspicuously absent from the revival seasons); as we’ll see, this is a trend that’s very much reversed in season 8.