Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted

There are two sides to Lynch. One is the master who works in long, abstract form and gives us not just a world and some plot that takes place there but a world together with the mind that gives rise to it, creates agency from that mind that is itself at the mercy of that world.

The other is the art school student, painter, sculptor, all around quirky guy who loves to populate these abstract forms with scrapyard theatrics and figures, log ladies and black-faced monsters behind the corner. It takes both of these Lynches to give us the truly mind-bending stuff that haunt.

Here we have just the second Lynch. He got together with Angelo Badalamenti, secured a soundstage and staged a performance piece around dreamlike heartbreak. We have bodies suspended on strings, a midget who recites, a demonic figure dancing on stilts. Various hues of light, beams and flashes, an industrial feel. The good witch from Oz sings throughout.

It has something akin to purpose, framed as it is as Lula and Sailor breaking up at the start, it was probably something he had fun with for a few weeks after finishing Wild at Heart. But it's a thin agency and mostly these forms mingling on a scrapyard stage, a bout of eccentricity.

He would do a lot more of these in later years when he could just grab a digital camera, but it's when both Lynches are at work that I'm interested.