Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted

Ever wondered what it would be like if David Lynch put on a musical stage show with Julee Cruise? Look no further! Industrial Symphony is a supremely strange show put together by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti for the annual Brooklyn Academy of Music. They only had two weeks to prepare for the show, and so the result is rather remarkable.

It opens with Sailor and Lula from Wild at Heart on the phone, with Sailor leaving Lula. The rest of the film is an extended fever dream set on stage. It reminded me of a concert, only this is a concert by David Lynch so there's awful blonde wigs, half naked women gyrating on cars and dwarfs sawing logs. I found it rather fabulous.

Julee's vocals are incredibly haunting and hypnotic. Match this with the visuals David presents us and it feels incredibly nightmarish. There's a moment where Julee stops and screams mid-song and falls from the rope suspending her from the ceiling. It's so jarring and it actually scared me a little bit. It doesn't help that she turns into some 30ft skinned papier-mâché deer either.

The whole thing wouldn't have felt out of place if it appeared as a scene in Inland Empire, so that gives you an idea of its mesmerising weirdness. For Lynch fans, it's unmissable. For everyone else, it isn't.

A description of this project can only be, like descriptions of Lynch's other more obtuse works ("Inland Empire," "Lost Highway," "Fire Walk With Me" "Rabbits") a description of "what happens" during the running time, which is more or less a useless venture. Try to describe what you dreamed last night to a friend and watch his eyes glaze over. One would hope that someone watching this video has a vague idea what to expect...you don't go for a viewing of something by Lynch hoping for "Singing In The Rain" at the least.

This project is definitely "out there," and like the other films mentioned is more or less non-narrative, more like a tone poem...what "meaning" there is to be found is probably up to the individual viewer. As I've said before about Lynch, only the dreamer of the dream can really guess accurately what any of it "means" to him, our experience can only be what the artist has filtered through. So what do we have? First and foremost, this recording, culled from two live performances Lynch was apparently commissioned to do, contains some of the wonderful, spooky songs written for and recorded by the ethereal Julee Cruise. The pyrotechnics, flashes of lighting, metal-on-metal surroundings, frustrated sexuality and typically Lynchian sound effects evoke an "industrial" dread that pre-sages Cronenberg's "Crash" a few years later. It is by turns perversely sexual, horrifically surreal, sweetly sentimental and slightly dull, and all within 50 minutes. The possible highlight is a song that plays like a sad lament for a lost era of 50's doo-wop, with two blasé prom-dressed girls and a chorus of vivacious Vegas showgirls.

This is "Lynch-land," and if you like Lynch you'll probably enjoy it, if not you would probably find it pure torture...it looks a bit "90's" by today's standards, it is relentlessly dark and slow at times and I question how much forethought actually went into it (Lynch himself claims it was put together pretty fast) but it is inherently memorable...one is unlikely to forget some of the strong images, or the plaintive sighing of Julee as she floats through the air, the embodiment of an innocent heart broken, but not destroyed.

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.

This is a fantastic production that caught my eye because of my long love of 'Twin Peaks.' Although it is actually unrelated to the show, 'Dream' has enough elements of 'Peaks' to make it seem to be an extension of the series. Julee Cruise, the otherworldly bar singer in 'Peaks,' stars as the dream-self of an otherwise average woman whose heart has been broken. Other familiarities from the series include Michael J. Anderson (the "little man from another place"), the song "Into the Night," and the instrumental "Bookhouse Boys" used as the background to "Up in Flames." I greatly enjoyed this fifty-minute trek back into the surrealism and sound that made the series so unique.

I was a bit Twin Peaks fan at its peak. The series was nothing like I've seen on television. With the passing of Julee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti last year, I've been mourning the musical collaboration between the singer, composer and lyricist, David Lynch, who is still alive. I never saw this show as experimental concert. Julee Cruise is the star performer who sings hauntingly and with the voice of an angel. Julee is floating above or singing from an old car. The concert last only an hour. It's bizarre to say the least. David Lynch is truly an artist and visionary too. He opens your mind to so much more. Music and visuals are key in understanding. I hope Julee and Angelo are making beautiful music in heaven as they did on earth.