David Lynch Land

The Drowned Man
When: July 2013

Where: Temple Studios (Old Paddington Sorting Office)

I think I just visited the best theme park ever, or was it a cinema, the theatre or a real life open world game?  My three hours of The Drowned Man felt like I'd entered David Lynch Land.  One of our group said that it felt like queuing for a ride as we went in, they were not far wrong.  I originally thought that the lack of imagineering as Disney might call it was missing from the queue area, in retrospect I was wrong as going past the BBC watching people queue outside in the rain was far less glamorous than the metal walkway that led to Temple Studios.  Once it was our groups turn to go in we were sent down a serious of poorly lit corridors that were designed to disorientate us until we reached an induction room where we were given our masks.  After we were fully masked and slightly confused the real events began.


We entered a lift, it was like something out of Disney World complete with a uniformed, American accented guide telling us about the studio, the stars and the rather shady town that lay outside the studio gates.  The lift stops and our group begins to depart before the lift operator slams the door shut and takes us up a little further into that shady town.  We walked out of the lift feeling somewhat disorientated into the misty air filled with the smell of a dry ice induced fog.  There was a church to the right and a set of small caravans to the left where most people headed and not having been to one of these Punchdrunk events before I thought I'd follow the crowd around and began to explore the trailer homes, not feeling overly interested in the fight that had broken out in front of the church.

It was pretty obvious that the level of detail put into the sets was frighteningly good, newspapers, notes, magazines, artefacts, cigarette butts, posters warn out furniture, you really felt like you had stepped back in time and were invading somebody's home.  The other important thing became clear that music and lighting would act as our guide to focus our attention on to the performances.   The scenes we were witnessing were part of two parallel stories of man meets woman, who has an affair with another man and is caught in the act at a party.  The man becomes irreconcilably jealous and murders the woman.  One of the stories takes place in the studio, the other in the town outside, though many of the scenes, back story and incidents go between the two locations.

The best and worst things about the performance is that you have an almost free reign to wander anywhere you want, shops, buildings, restaurants as well as through the studios, offices and back rooms of Temple Studios.  It's great to explore in your own time, being free to examine props, enter the cinema and sit down, sit at the bar.  The downfall of this is that you can easily miss the performances that drive the story, or lose track of the story or character you were following.  I found it much easier to keep track of goings on in the town area (The William and Mary story) which was a lot less crowded than the studio story (Wendy and Marshall).  


I enjoyed most of the set piece dance performances, though there was a little too much theatrical rolling on the floor for my liking.  Possibly the most exciting part of the William and Mary story was chasing the two of them up to the sandy wastelands where Mary is strangled to death.  The Wendy and Marshall story seemed to fly past me.  I got caught up in the back story of casting and picking the star and following one actress to a sad death and another to the wrap party where she takes part in a rather fun magic trick.

One thing that I couldn't ignore was the Lynchian styling of The Drowned Man.  From the mysterious cowboys, the Americana, 50s and 60s pop music to the ambient noise that fills the air when a scene is about to climax it's hard to ignore.  Not only that, there was a room complete with a black and white checked floor, a man in front of a red curtain lit with a spot light who over sees a strange initiation ritual of the new star carried out by small men with deformed faces wielding baseball bats, all that was missing was the dwarf talking backwards!

To sum up, The Drowned Man offered an experience like nothing else, I didn't know where I was or what I was doing and the freedom to explore and see different things made for great discussion afterwards.  None of us saw both the murders or both the parties and we all saw scenes that the other three had not.  However, with the freedom comes frustration, it would have been nice to have been able to see all the scenes and all of the stories or for a little more guidance.  At times the only way to follow a story tranche was to run after the actors pushing past anyone that didn't step aside before they lost you through a serious of unmarked doors, corridors and stairways.  By the end of the performance I felt a mix of relief and disappointment and was left with one question that I could not answer, if I saw this again with the knowledge and experience of the first viewing would it be improved with repetition like a favourite film where the backgrounds, back story and references add layers of meaning and enjoyment, or would it all feel flat, boring and predictable once the secrets were uncovered?

I think You Should Have Taken Woody's Advice and Seen a Shrink

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

When 8th August 2010

Where BFI Imax

This film worked a little bit for me, it depends what that third elusive layer is and if I can be bothered to find it or not. I think it would have worked less well if I had written this review right after seeing it when I thought that Cobb was referring to Ma, instead of Mal for most of the film (but it sure would have been fun, especially if he had killed Michael Caine to get to her). The manipulation was entertaining and the inception of the idea was a good one but rather than being filled with a sense of purpose I am left with an empty feeling of "Is that it? You had the chance to have so much more fun." To keep it quick Inception uses dreams as a metaphor for films. In the world of Inception you can create shared dream experiences as a way to gather information that people would prefer to keep secret. However the true masters can also input ideas into the recipients' brains without them knowing about it, making them think it was their idea all along.

I guess my problem with Inception was that it failed to give me the killer idea, it kept me entertained with pretty visuals, some funny jokes, a nice bit of action, great acting but that's all. To take the whole dream/film metaphor idea to its logical conclusion as presented in Inception just got dull. The following exchange sums this up nicely:

Cobb: You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream and fill it with their subconscious.
Ariadne: How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it's reality?
Cobb: Our dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? It's only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange!

I'm sure it would only take a second viewing and pen and paper to find a few more interesting quotes that say the same thing. Anyway, Ariadne and Cobb make some shorts together, and Ariadne learns from Cobb not to make the world too strange as the audience can't take it. He also tells her that you should use elements from real places but not exact copies as people can't cope with that. I think Nolan needs to watch some better movies or have more faith in the audience, real locations are a lot of fun. Or as to summarise Chris Doyle, the best movies are made on your door step or as far away from home as you can possibly be.

Anyway, how do you know whose film you're in: you will need a little mark/motif or action that is known only to you. In the film these are represented as totems that behave in a specific way so their user knows if they are dreaming or not (we have a chess piece, a loaded dice and a spinning top that only runs out of energy when you are awake).

Arthur: ...when you look at your totem, you know beyond a doubt you're not in someone else's dream.

You also need a full crew, and since someone has taken the time to put this together already I don't feel the need to do so again:

One interpretation of the film proposed by critic Devin Faraci reads it as an allegory of the filmmaking process. Saito represents the studio head who orders the project, and who insists on overseeing the work in progress. Arthur, who is responsible for making sure the job is organized and runs smoothly on schedule, is the producer. Cobb, who is in charge of executing the mission, but who brings his own personal dreams, ideas, and agenda into the works, is the director. Adriadne, who is hired by Cobb to design the world of the dream, is the screenwriter. Eames, who impersonates Browning, is the actor. Yusuf, who supplies the team with what they needs to do their work, is the special effects technician. And Fischer is the audience for whom the whole show is put on for.

Anyway, I am getting bored of film studies 101 now. If David Lynch made action Sci Fi blockbusters this might have been great, more subtle and I would have enjoyed making my own meaning from the film even if it wasn't quite the right one. Inception never allowed me this benefit. The structure and metaphor of film=dream was too obvious, we saw the inception coming as we already knew what it was. However, maybe I am missing something as wasn't there supposed to be a dream within a dream within a dream or a film within a film within a film. I will update should I find the time to take a second look to make all three layers happen.