|
|
The Dream of the Brokenhearted
|
|
|
| The setting in New York was a vast cry from that which Lynch was used to creating his works in. Without a doubt, the extensive theatre allowed for tremendous creativity and innovation of Lynch's part; spanning several wings above the stage, it reached several levels deep beneath the stage. Perhaps it was the pressure of time and deadline which added all the more to the presentation of the stage, which in its final glory, was a mixture of industrial construction elements and various people positioned around the objects. The harsh visual effects of the industrial paraphernalia contended with the superficiality of the individuals ranging from chorus girls, to a pair of prom queens lingering around the wreck of a delapidated car, to photographers snapping pictures. In the midst of the rich set stands Julee Cruise, whose character is a woman heartbroken from her lover's departure, a scene which is enacted at the beginning by a phone conversation between Laura Dern and Nicholas Cage, drawing an interesting parallel to the amourous outcome in Wild At Heart. Represented as a cabaret singer, Cruise sings floating high above the stage, embodying the anguish of abandonment. The facetiousness of the individuals lingering on the stage below her, immersed in their worlds of false glamour and eminence, seem to be contributing to her sorrow in their feigned merriment. |
| Shortly thereafter, the scene changes without warning, as it is severed by the arrival of a couple of miniature planes diving down towards the stage; what at first seems to be a disaster takes a strange twist of fate. As the individuals scatter away from the stage in fear of the planes, Kewpie dolls descend down from above, released from the overhead planes. The woman, apprehensive at the outset, embraces her new-found freedom as a shower of glitter floats down from above, surrounding her. In a metaphor strikingly similar, yet interestingly different, to the kinapping of Annie Blackburn by Windom Earle in the last episode of Twin Peaks, the woman finds freedom only once the stage, and by extension, the pretensions, have been cleared. |
| Interestingly, the thearical production was undertaken without much rehearsal, as time was precious and Lynch was still penning the story until the final moment; it was Lynch's first experience with a live audience, and he had another, more confounding issue to contend with. Not only did the stage, and the perfomance, have to befit the theatre and the audience, but it had to be good enough in order to be captured on video. Finding middle ground between the two proved to be a major task for Lynch, who comments on the dilemma: "...someone comes over to me and says, 'Can you raise the intensity of the lights, because we don't have an exporsure?' And I said, 'There's no way. This is for a live audience: the film is secondary. And it's got to be a certain way. If we do that, it'll look great on film, but in here it'll be too bright...But then I found out that the film exposure problem wasn't as bad as they thought, so we just tweaked the lights up a little bit, and they were super-happy." |
|
Industrial Symphony No.1 was
presented on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City
on November 10th, 1989, recorded to be presented on videotape at a later
date
|
|
|
~
|
