WEIRDLAND: Noirish settings: David Lynch's Alphabet, De Palma's The Black Dahlia

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Noirish settings: David Lynch's Alphabet, De Palma's The Black Dahlia


Fox has officially greenlit its first event series, handing out the order to Wayward Pines and tapping Matt Dillon to star in the drama from M. Night Shyamalan and Chad Hodge.


The drama, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Blake Crouch, Pines is described as a thriller in the vein of Twin Peaks.


The drama revolves around Ethan Burke (Dillon), a Secret Service agent who arrives in the bucolic town of Wayward Pines, Id., on a mission to find two missing federal agents. But instead of answers, Ethan's investigation only turns up more questions. Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan further from the life he knew, from the husband and father he was, until he must face the terrifying reality that he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com


Wayward Pines isn’t the first show attempting to navigate the same treacherous road of plot twists and turns – set against the backdrop of a Noir-ish setting with supernatural overtones – as Twin Peaks did in the 1990s. Source: screenrant.com


Twin Peaks Cooper Dream: The iconic dream sequence that launched a cult TV show.


This weekend, as part of BAM's Booed at Cannes film series, they'll be showing two of David Lynch's most sublime works: Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. And although the former is a steamy and violent fairytale road movie about a couple on the outskirts of the law, and the latter, a psychologically terrifying mystery of sordid debauchery lurking beneath a placid facade, they both showcase different elements of Lynch's cinematic sensibility. His obsessions and auteurististic traits resound through both with the haunting tone he's known and loved for. Source: www.blackbookmag.com


Add one more film to the list – David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Early in Fire Walk With Me, an FBI chief (Lynch) presents two FBI agents (Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland) with a message in code. The message is, in fact, a woman dressed in red, with a matching red wig and a "sour" facial expression. She wears a blue rose on her lapel.


Blue flower imagery in Hollywood films goes at least as far back as 1946's The Blue Dahlia (directed by George Marshall from a screenplay by Raymond Chandler), the title of which was borrowed by the press to describe the most famous lust-crime of 1947, the murder of demi-prostitute Elisabeth Short, aka "The Black Dahlia."


The Black Dahlia, Brian De Palma’s fictionalized version of the Elizabeth Short murder investigation (adapted faithfully from James Ellroy’s book of the same name), is as dark a film noir as Hollywood has produced in recent years. Maybe not as dark as 1992's Fire Walk With Me, but dark and sexually perverse enough to make the recent Hollywoodland (the conspiracy film where there is no conspiracy) look like a kiddies story. Director Robert Wise once told Bright Lights that for a noir to be truly noir, it had to be shot in black and white.


The Black Dahlia is, of course, shot in color (by Obsession cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond), but black and white cinematography is skillfully woven into De Palma’s tapestry throughout. Elizabeth Short’s screen tests are black and white. So is a stag film containing clues to the victim’s murder. Source: brightlightsfilm.com


This being quintessential noir, “Black Dahlia” is sexually explicit in depicting a romantic triangle between Bucky, Kay, and Madeleine, who may or may not have known Betty Short and who may or may not be bisexual. The sexual attraction between Bucky and Madeleine is depicted in particularly steamy way in a number of scenes. As De Palma promised during production, Hilary Swank, known until now for her tough gender-bending Oscar roles (“Boys Don't Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby”) is utterly credible as a noirish femme fatale. Source: www.emanuellelevy.com


The spiritual deflowering is all Bucky's. As he watches Short's screen tests, he becomes entranced by her ghostly image, and pursues justice in hopes of reclaiming her goodness and strengthening his. Like the heroes of other obsessive necrophiliac love stories—including Laura, Vertigo and De Palma's own Body Double—Bucky works through, and also evades, his dawning sense of helplessness by falling in love with a murdered woman and figuratively trying to resurrect her. It's a doomed quest. As Bucky burrows deeper into the city's underbelly, Short's murder begins to seem a redundant postscript —the annihilation of a woman who was already dead in spirit— and a harbinger of Bucky's own journey.


Bucky will see that dead woman as long as he lives. Justice won't bring her back to life, and no matter how diligently he tries to submerge that dreadful image—to forget and heal and move on—it will remain in his memory and erupt when he least expects it. "Nothing stays buried forever," Bucky tells us early in the The Black Dahlia; by the end, he realizes just how right he was. Source: www.slantmagazine.com

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