Julee Cruise

Growing up in a small town in Michigan as I did, I didn’t have the chance to see any films weren’t on broadcast television (no cable, no VCR – and a black and white set at that) or didn’t get booked at the local theater – this in a town that wouldn’t advertise The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas when it came to town and actually changed the name on the marquee to The Best Little House in Texas. So, needless to say, I had no idea there was anything out there other than the Hollywood pabulum that was spooned to us (and that was spooned to us about six months after it had been released elsewhere).

Then I went to college.

Towards the end of my disastrous year at the University of Chicago, I wandered down to the lounge for one of our occasional hall-sponsored film screenings. I had been warned by my friend Christian not to see the film in question, but I was curious and bored (and a little stoned), so I eagerly took my seat as the lights went out and the film began. The film was Eraserhead and it completely destroyed me. I was so profoundly affected by it that I couldn’t even talk about it for days afterwards. Everybody else hated it (of course – further proof I was surrounded by idiots), but I stumbled away with a new appreciation for the power of film. I had never seen anything even remotely like it. The whole self-contained world that the film portrayed, and its disregard for physical realism in favor of the slippery truths of emotional and psychological realism erased my own head and I was left deeply shaken and unsure of who I was or where I was. Over the next few days, I got a lot of grief from my hall-mates for defending something that they hated, especially because I could find no words to describe what it had done to me, as the film hit me in a place where words don’t reach. I was dismissed, again, as being the resident weirdo. But Martha, the sometimes girlfriend of Christian, and the coolest woman I had met in all of Chicago, understood. She nodded her head at my inability to explain why it was so good, stopped me from trying, and, with her wordless smile and silent hand on my shoulder, let me know that I was not alone.

Eraserhead remains one of my five favorite films (the others, in no particular order, are Koyaanisqatsi, The Killer (John Woo), Brazil, and Crumb), and I eagerly followed the career of David Lynch through the ridiculous (Dune) and the sublime (Blue Velvet).

When David Lynch asked composer Angelo Badalamenti to find a singer with the voice of an angel to record their song Mysteries of Love for the Blue Velvet soundtrack, Angelo tapped Julee Cruise. The collaboration worked so well that the three of them produced an album together a few years later. Called Floating Into the Night, the album perfectly captures the twisted vision of David Lynch’s dark world. The power of David Lynch isn’t that his images are so sadistic, or so weird, it’s that they have just the right amount of normalcy in them to make them truly scary. No fevered acid dream, his best work takes the ordinary and stretches and twists it into the surreal, the disturbed, the terrifying. He scratches just beneath the surface of the picture perfect world to reveal the seething, turbulent underbelly of hate and fear and lust bubbling just below the surface. Watching his best films is like rediscovering evil – the shattered childhood dream of a happily-ever-after world snatched away forever.

Angelo Badalamenti is his perfect collaborator, because he has an unerring sense for taking perfectly normal pop idioms and stretching them just enough that they start to seem nightmarishly grotesque – yet never fully losing their appealing innocence. And Julee’s voice has the perfect purity of an angel about to fall that compliments these songs so well. The production is too lush, the tempos too slow, and the entire bloated, twisted vision of beauty too heavy to stand, and the whole thing slowly, tragically, beautifully collapses upon itself.

This is the last song on the album, and the last song played in the last real episode of Twin Peaks, Lynch’s monumental television series that chronicled the moral disintegration of a small American town (there was a misguided attempt to carry the show into a second season, but the story really ends with the discovery of Laura Palmer’s murderer). This song sums up the whole tragic, ghastly, sad, beautiful, and all-too human experience. The slow strings and comatose keyboards and that beautiful voice drag at you like an opiated dream, pulling you deep into the dark undertow, until you let go and disappear under the surface. There’s such a finality to this song, such a melancholic surrendering that there’s nowhere to go after it’s over. It’s a tragically beautiful tribute to this tarnished, imperfect world and how, no matter what happens and how dark things get, time moves on. All things shall pass. And the earth will keep on turning. Floating into the night.