I Know Catherine, the Log Lady—Obviously from Twin Peaks

She was the Oracle of Twin Peaks. The show wouldn’t be the same without her or David Lynch. Sadly and strangely, the 2015 return almost happened without either of them. Wisely, Showtime came to their senses and brought Lynch back on-board after previously deciding to proceed without him. There is no way Lynch would have left out his old friend Catherine Coulson, a.k.a. the Log Lady, but accommodations had to be made for her failing health. Friends and fellow cast-members pay tribute to Coulson in Richard Green’s documentary, I Know Catherine, the Log Lady, which has several special screenings starting today in New York.

Eraserhead started her long, close association with Lynch, even though her scenes were cut from the film. Instead, she played key roles behind the camera, which turned into an unlikely career for the academically trained thesp, who notably served as Eraserhead cinematographer Frederick Elmes’ focus puller on Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.

Coulson also happened to be married to Jack Nance, the lead on Eraserhead, but that marriage would not last. Perhaps ill-advisedly, Green (who played the Magician in Mulholland Drive) spends a lot of time on Coulson’s hippy early days in the 1960s, perhaps not realizing the extent to which he alienates the children of Vietnam vets and Vietnamese “Boat People” refugees, but the Twin Peaks sequences are redemptive.

There is indeed extensive footage of Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan, and Michael Horse. The latter might not have had the most PR at the height of the show’s success, his character had a special rapport with the Log Lady, so his presence is quite fitting. However, the three cast-members who graced the cover of Rolling Stone are absent and unaccounted for.

Of course, Nance (Pete Martell in Twin Peaks) only appears in archival footage, since he passed away in 1996. Green also documented his life in the film I Don’t Know Jack. Regardless, colleagues and fans all explain how Coulson was the glue that held the Twin Peaks community together during the wilderness years. Consequently, even casual fans will get choked up when the second unit crew describes Coulson’s grit and grace filming her scenes for the revival series, shortly before her death.

Lynch/Oz

The line "I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” has become an easy shorthand quote to suggest a character’s old assumptions about how the world works have just been turned on their head. It is the sort of thing David Lynch’s protagonists might say. Maybe they did. I honestly don’t remember if that precise line was included in the super-cuts of Wizard of Oz allusions seen throughout Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest cinematically-themed documentary. However, it should be reasonably safe to conclude Lynch has seen the 1939 classic fantasy and it made some kind of impression on the auteur after watching Lynch/Oz, which opens this Friday in New York.

Evidently, film critic Amy Nicolson and genre filmmakers Rodney Ascher, John Waters, Karyn Kusama, Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, and David Lowery having been thinking about Oz as an important source of Lynch’s inspiration for some time, because they each get one section of the film to draw their connections.

Frankly, they all make a very compelling case—so much so that Lynch/Oz will have most viewers completely convinced after the first part. However, there are five more sections, which largely repeat the same points. After a while, all the Oz-like motifs in Lynch’s oeuvre, such as the red shoes, mysterious curtains, doppelgangers, and the porous boundaries between dreams and reality, become repetitive. We get it. Lynch definitely alludes to Oz in many of his films. Case closed.

Indeed, Lynch/Oz shares the prime fault of Philippe’s previous documentary, The Taking, in that all his participating commentators share the same opinions and make the same arguments. There are no crazy outliers (as there were in Ascher’s Room 237) or dissenting opinions (as in Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood). It is just the same talking points, repeated five times over. Waters gives it more of a personal spin and Ascher takes a more macro perspective on Oz’s overall influence on American cinema in general, but there are no conflicts in the six analyses Philippe presents.

David Lynch: The Art Life

There are two types of David Lynch fans who will want very different things from a Lynch documentary. Casual fans will just want Twin Peaks relaunch spoilers and Dennis Hopper anecdotes from the production of Blue Velvet. Serious fans will want something as inscrutable and ambiguous as Lynch’s most recent films (that really aren’t that recent anymore). Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm do not even try to find a middle ground, fully opting for the latter option throughout David Lynch: The Art Life (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Shot in stylized grainy sepia-tones, Art Life looks like it might exist in the world of Eraserhead, the pseudo-climatic event Lynch’s reminiscences sort of build towards. Rather than moviemaking, we see Lynch painting in his studio and telling stories from his suburban youth. Mostly, these are just hints of artistic bildungsroman, but he gives us one obviously significant and cinematic incident that clearly helped inspire Blue Velvet. If anyone ever produces The David Lynch Story as a narrative feature, it will surely start with that scene.

Beyond that, Nguyen and company go about soaking up the Lynchian atmosphere rather than push him to be more revealing or to stay on topic. It is interesting to see photos and footage of Lynch as a Kyle MacLachlan-looking youth and he has some pleasant memories of his old art school buddy and future production designer Jack Fisk, as well as his early mentor, Bushnell Keeler. However, audiences should understand going in, there is much more discussion of Lynch’s paintings (they’re dark, go figure) than say Dune, Wild at Heart, or Mulholland Drive.

As a result, Art Life is bound to be divisive. It is deliberately slow and resolutely coy, readily allowing Lynch to maintain his guarded defenses. Yet, as a double irony, the mounting anticipation for the return of Twin Peaks makes it seem relatively commercial, even though Lynch and the filmmakers do everything in their power to undermine any possible popular appeal. For mere mortals, it is a frustrating film that often has a rather lulling effect. Hence, David Lynch: The Art Life is only for the diehard initiates in the Lynchian cult when it opens tomorrow (3/31) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Lynch’s Surveillance

News of another David Lynch vehicle featuring the G-men of the F.B.I. is bound to intrigue fans of Twins Peaks. Even though cult-favorite Lynch only serves as executive producer, relinquishing the director’s chair to his daughter Jennifer, devotees of the cryptic television show will hope for similarly distinctive characters and idiosyncratic charm. Alas, they will be greatly disappointed by Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance (trailer here), a cynical exercise in cinematic sadism, opening today in New York.

Agents Hallaway and Anderson look a lot like Mulder and Scully, except they do not seem to bother hiding their romantic feelings for each other. They have driven all night to get to the small police station of Nowheresville, USA, where they intend to interview the surviving witnesses of a vicious spree killing.

Surveillance fancies itself as a pastiche to Rashomon, with the three witnesses’ divergent stories collectively pointing to the truth. If only. Frankly, the structure of the film can be broken into two parts: the initial flashbacks in which the cops brutalize innocent bystanders, and the present timeline, where the serial killers torture and kill the survivors.

To be fair, Lynch successfully evokes the unsettling vastness of desert highways and certainly keeps viewers on edge as the horrors unfold. Yet, Surveillance is unsatisfying as a horror film, because it never provides a cathartic release. Granted, it is does not approach the graphic gore of recent charnel house pictures like Hostel. Still, the film’s moral universe is a dark Nietzschean place, where might makes right and the audience is expected to take vicarious thrills from the on-screen brutality.

There are no heroes in Lynch’s film. Great lengths are taken to show the cops are just as cruel as the killers—but not as sexy. The cast is also quite a mixed bag. Bill Pullman is intriguingly off-kilter as Hallaway, but Julia Ormand seems wildly miscast as Agent Anderson. Ironically, the most likable performance probably comes from Michael Ironside, the character actor known for playing heavies, so it is a sure bet his Captain Billings will shortly die a grisly death.

Surveillance has a mean streak as long as Route 66. Despite the gamesmanship of its big twist, Surveillance is nowhere near as inventive as Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, or even the justly notorious Lost Highway. For Lynch diehards not easily dissuaded, it opens today in New York at the Cinema Village.