Look out! He's got a knife!

In 1942, the 27 year old writer/director/actor Orson Welles (then tagged "The Boy Genius") was embroiled in the filming of 3 movies simultaneously for smallish studio RKO: a dark thriller called Journey Into Fear, an ambitious and unique travelogue/documentary/anthology film called It's All True, and a downbeat family saga called The Magnificent Ambersons.

Welles's only previous film, Citizen Kane, had angered a lot of powerful people in America and had lost money at the box office. In addition all three of his current movies were running over schedule and over budget, and a recent management change at RKO had robbed Welles of most of his most ardent supporters.

RKO executives believed that The Magnificent Ambersons was too dark for wartime audiences. They also wanted to punish Welles for his various perceived transgressions. They arranged a screening of the movie in a city near Hollywood called Pomona, and double-billed it with a broad comedy called Mexican Spitfire Sees A Ghost. After sitting through this much lighter fare, the audience was unprepared for Welles's bleak vision, and RKO used this as an excuse to cut and re-shoot much of the movie without Welles's input. The movie, which had started at 148 minutes, was eventually released at 88 minutes, and the cut footage was all destroyed. RKO then started advertising their movies with a new slogan: "Showmanship Instead Of Genius".

(As "punishment" for working with Welles, a number of the technicians who worked on Ambersons were assigned to a b-movie unit to produce cheap horror movies with lurid titles. This unit also inherited a lot of of the expensive sets from Ambersons. The producer assigned to run the unit was David O. Selznick's former assistant, Val Lewton.)

As a result of this, a saying sprung up in Hollywood: "Will it play in Pomona?" This is a euphemism for "This is too arty &/or serious, we need to change it." (Another result was that in most of his future movies Welles involved himself much more heavily in the editing.)

In a scene towards the end of Inland Empire, Laura Dern is dying from being stabbed in the stomach with a screwdriver on Hollywood Boulevard. While Dern gives her "Academy Award death-scene performance", two homeless women have a lengthy and bland conversation over her body about catching the bus to Pomona.

Lynch's career has been plagued by producer interference, from the many problems he faced writing & directing Dune in 1984 to his being instructed to shoot racier footage for Mulholland Dr. in 2001. As a filmmaker obsessed by oneiric images and structures, Lynch has dealt with the medium of film as a "dream factory" and with how these dreams can be corrupted.

It's easy imagine Lynch seeing Welles as a kindred spirit, not just because of the problems they have had getting their movies made in the way they want, but as another explorer of the corruption underbelly of American society. Welles liked to describe himself as "THE technical master of the medium" (emphasis his) and it's quite hard to argue with that; Welles died in 1985, and it's my opinion that when Lynch wrote & directed Blue Velvet two years later he inherited Welles's mantle.

This is a possible key to understanding just one small scene in the most dream-haunted of Lynch's films, a film which to me stands with the best of Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren and Alejandro Jodorowsky as being rich with allusions, depths and meaning. A film that - like those of the other filmmakers I name - requires a certain amount of specialized knowledge to understand, but which offers rewards far greater than any narrative-driven cinema I have experienced.

That's my take anyway. I think I'd find it impossible to write a conventional review of this movie. It's the Mona Lisa, it's the Ode to Joy, it's the Bible.

Posted by pearce at August 6, 2007 5:23 PM