Top 10 Effed-up Sex Scenarios Of David Lynch
10. THE AMPUTEE
Lynch dealt with amputee fetishism way before it was cool. In his 1974 short, THE AMPUTEE, a legless woman (the Log Lady from TWIN PEAKS!) writes an emotional (love?) letter, which we hear her reading in her head -- very unemotionally --while a (transvestite?) nurse played by Lynch himself changes her dressings. Some kind of liquid (her emotion?) starts pouring out of one of her legs. Yep, it's gross. But so is love sometimes.
Author: Em & Lo9. ERASERHEAD (1977)
In the surrealist ERASERHEAD (1977), David Lynch's first feature film, sex is not much fun at all. Reproduction is handled by The Man in the Planet who pulls a bunch of levers to produce deformed babies (no thanks to the Lady in the Radiator embodying the spirit of Nonoxynol-9 and stomping on sperm cells).
Getting laid is a shameful activity that you will eventually be punished for. Raising a baby kills your sex life (okay, maybe that part isn't all that surreal). Infidelity with your sexy neighbor kills your marriage. (Ditto.) Oh, and your baby may or may not resemble an overgrown penis and therefore your own fucked-up sexuality. As one film critic puts it, "Similar to uncontrollable sexual urges, the baby-penis constantly demands attention from Henry who becomes its slave. Henry realizes that he must kill the baby-penis in an act of self-castration to rid himself of his loathed sexuality. The baby-penis is the centre of the world created by unnatural sexuality, hence its destruction obliterates the world of ERASERHEAD." Well, it's a hell of a lot more realistic than the sex scenes in your average Hollywood rom-com.
Author: Em & Lo8. BLUE VELVET (1986)
BLUE VELVET (1986): Five words for you: "Mommy...baby wants to fuck." 'Nuff said.
Author: Em & Lo7. WILD AT HEART (1990
In WILD AT HEART (1990), young lovers Lula and Sailor (Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage) are on the run from a bunch of misfts hired by Lula's mom to kill Sailor -- she doesn't want her daughter sleeping with him because he just got out of prison. And maybe also because he throws around lines like, "Man, I had a boner with a capital 'O.'" At one point Lula says -- in what could be a tagline for Lynchian sex -- "This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top."
We're not sure which is more depressing: the idea that young lust and young love are no match for all the violence in the world, or that Nicolas Cage later went on to make doozies like THE WICKER MAN and CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN. But we do know what's most disturbing: the "fuck me" scene with Dern, Willem Dafoe, and one gnarly set of false teeth.
Author: Em & Lo6. TWIN PEAKS (1990)
Only Lynch could get a two-season prime time television show on network TV that's basically centered on the the murder of a homecoming queen (Laura Palmer) committed by her own father after years of him raping her. Talk about "feel good"! But you gotta love a man who can swing highbrow and low with his sex references -- he named his series (and the fictional Pacific northwestern town it takes place in) TWIN PEAKS (1990), a pun that would be right at home in the movie AIRPLANE. Bonus points for naming the the evil spirit that possessed Laura Palmer's father simply "Bob."
Author: Em & Lo5. TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)
In the prequel to the television show, the rated-R movie TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) had the benefit -- or the problem, depending on your perspective -- of being able to show actual sex acts with female nudity. So audiences finally got to see the boobies of Laura Palmer and her fellow high school student, the prim white-socked Donna, when they took drugs and prostituted themselves at the local dive-cum-sex club (yes, we're using Latin there).
At least one of the high school girls received some oral -- proof that this scene is totally bizarre, surreal, and unbelievable.
Author: Em & Lo4. LUMIERE AND COMPANY
In 1995, 41 directors from around the world, including Spike Lee, Wim Wenders, and Lynch, made super short films using the original Cinématographe camera invented by the Lumičre brothers in the late nineteenth century for the movie LUMIERE AND COMPANY. In an effort to recreate conditions similar to those of 1895, they followed these three rules: 1) shorter than a minute, 2) no synchronized sound, and 3) no more than three takes. Lynch's contribution to the collaboration, entitled "Premonition Following an Evil Deed," included a totally naked woman upright and spread eagled submerged in a water tank. Of course it did.
Author: Em & Lo3. LOST HIGHWAY (1997)
Lynchian sex is possibly at its creepiest in LOST HIGHWAY (1997). The marriage bed of Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman is presented as a desperate and unpleasant wasteland; as David Foster Wallace wrote in an essay about the movie, "Bill Pullman has frantic wheezing sex with a Patricia Arquette who just lies there inert and all but looking at her watch (a sex scene that is creepy partly because it's exactly what I imagine having sex with Patricia Arquette would be like)."
In the real world, the death of sex in marriage might mean divorce, infidelity, couples therapy, a renewed interest in Glamour magazine sex tips... but in Lynch's world, Arquette ends up dead and also (just go with it) a porn star who gets her nipples licked alongside co-star Marilyn Manson.
Author: Em & Lo2. THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)
Perhaps the most shocking thing Lynch ever did in the realm of sex -- at least according to Lynch super-fans -- is to create a film with zero sex in it. THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999) is about an elderly man from Iowa who rides three hundred miles on a lawnmower to visit his sick brother. The movie scored a G rating -- no one ever expected Lynch to come within a mile of one of those. What, no severed baby-penis-head?
Author: Em & Lo1. MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)
We bet you think we're going to talk about the lesbian scene between Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001). Please -- that's so atypical Lynch. The most startling -- and therefore most Lynchian -- sexual moment in that film was the solo sex scene with Watts: we're fond of saying that there's no wrong way to have sex, but if you're crying hysterically while masturbating, then we're pretty sure you're doing something wrong. Want to recreate that scene? Fly to Paris, get weepy drunk and diddle yourself under one of the tables at Silencio, a nightclub inspired by the movie's Club Silencio. The '50s-esque chairs you'd be sitting on might help: they were designed by Lynch to "induce and sustain a specific state of alertness and openness to the unknown."
Asked to explain this new endeavor, Lynch brought it back to the penis: "I'm 65 years old. They say that when men go into their 50s they dream of building gigantic towers to prove their virility."
Author: Em & Lo
