When the trailer for David Lynch’s new web series Interview Project premiered in early May, I was so skeptical that I mocked the repetitive banality of Lynch’s “drinking game-inspiring intro.” I’ve since had a chance to see five episodes of the series — which premieres publicly on June 1 and through which Lynch and Co. will unveil one short video each day for the rest of the year — and now I think I’ve found the method motivating the mundanity.
We’re to take that introduction as its producer’s statement of its thesis, but it also reveals something about its form. Addressing the camera in his rumpled shirt and jacket, firing off a deliberately prosaic monologue in sing-song, with the words “people”, “interview” and “different” pushed so many times as to completely lose meaning, Lynch appears to be using that banality as a smokescreen. And why not? This is, essentially, what he’s done for most of his working life.
In that intro, Lynch reduces the Project to its essence: “People have been found, and interviewed.” The word “found” implies that these people were lost, which theoretically could be taken to mean that Lynch’s “team”, as he calls them (led by his son Austin Lynch and Jason S., the producer of a 2007 documentary about the making of Inland Empire) have landed an exclusive with Amelia Earhart. In practice, Interview Subject’s projects are a different kind of lost. Residents of rural America living what appear to be at best lower-middle-class lives, resigned to their lack of control over the random acts of violence (at the hands of strangers, or abusive men) that seem to shape their destiny, all are lost to the dominant media picture of contemporary Americana. That’s obviously part of the point: “What I hope people will get out of Interview Project is the chance to meet these people.” Drawing a distinction between “people” as in viewers and “people” as in subjects, Lynch even seems to give the latter use of the word a slightly more emphatic inflection — “PEE-pole!” — as if he’s talking about alien species.
Most of the PEE-pole also seem to live lives marked by loss. Lynch couldn’t have asked for a better Lynchian character than Anthony, who evenly relates a history of hardship (shotgun married too young, a son lost to random gun shots), and offers first provincial mysticism (“Can I just put it point blank to you? That old devil’s runnin’ round here real good.”) and then oddball, oblique slang (“I don’t put my flavor in nobody’s Kool-Aid.”) to describe his determination to keep to himself. Another sample episode features Lynn, a weather-beaten blonde who calls to mind a real-world equivalent of Wild at Heart’s Lula all grown-up. In a nod to another Lynch film, we fade out on Lynn riding a lawnmower.
The common thread amongst most of the people interviewed seems to be an inability to hopefully picture the future. Of the five episodes I sampled, Lynn’s offered the most affecting example of this. After relating her various struggles mostly matter-of-factly, she closes with a loaded platitude. “I just want everything to be alright,” she says, her voice cracking. She then makes a self-deprecating face of embarassment, and rubs her eyes –– wearily, tearily. There could not be a more mundane desire than wanting “everything to be alright”, and yet it defies cynicism, especially coming from a woman for whom “alright” is something mystical and unknown, with no lived meaning. In this context, “alright” is as oblique a concept as anything in Inland Empire. (Similarly, in another episode, 17 year-old Jenny tells stories of getting out from under the tyranny of a bad man, and repeatedly says that now it’s all over, she just wants to “relax”.)
The project of Interview Project seems to be to locate Lynch’s patented aesthetic and concerns in a real version of Americana, one where the kitsch hides a very real despair Even if some of Lynch’s portraits veer towards caricature, this is probably for the best — in the realm of web video, caricature sells better than anything else. The segments in which over-the-top weirdos unwittingly offer themselves up for the derisive consumption of the giggling masses (see: Clinton) serve the same function as Mullholland Drive’s lesbian antics — they’ll attract an audience with pat shock, who will hopefully stay put for the genuine subversion Lynch wrenches out of less obvious targets.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth