David Lynch Angelo Badalamenti
Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted

Darkness, silence, cold, absence, the close-up faces of Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage communicate through a phone with short and broken phrases. She loves him, he leaves her, and the dream begins. David Lynch has within him an intense basic horror and shows it in two ways: there is the Lynch of linear stories where anguish lingers in the background ("The Straight Story") and occasionally manifests through sporadic eruptions from below, mainly embodied by the characters ("The Elephant Man," "Blue Velvet," "Wild at Heart"), and there is the surreal Lynch, more authentic, more spontaneous, where the story makes sense only if viewed as a nightmare ("Mulholland Drive"), stories where the basic logics of cause and effect fail, leaving nothing but to immerse oneself in the dreamlike combination of image and sound ("Eraserhead," "Inland Empire," "Lost Highway") without desperately trying to appear intellectual and wanting to find imaginative interpretations.

This 1989 theatrical performance belongs to the second category; David Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti together create a sort of infernal background of the "Twin Peaks" creature which was in the making at that time, with Julee Cruise (who played the girl singing at the Road House in the series) and the Black Lodge dwarf Michael J. Anderson. Already with "Fire Walk with Me," Lynch showed what he wanted to make of "Twin Peaks" before it turned into something that almost resembled "Beautiful"; with this staging, he creates what can be considered a synthetic and surreal version of the atmospheres and feelings that were highlighted during the television series. There's little light here, and it’s all for Julee Cruise, whose voice and angelic flights contrast the dark industrial settings surrounding her: iron, wind, dust, electricity. Always anguish derived from modernity, always the horror of small-town America. David Lynch, a terrifying visionary mind confined to the edges of the rational, fills the stage with key elements of his cinema: few disjointed phrases, flickering lightbulbs, rough sounds of saws on wood (ring any bells?), masks, monstrous humanoid beings, elegant yet unsettling extras, lots of music. That's all here, centrifuged and exposed to the audience for about fifty minutes. Michael J. Anderson appears, as usual, in a sinister and never well-defined role, like a specter, perhaps the materialization of Lynch's fears: he always seems to have a role above the parts, the role of the one pulling the puppet strings, the same impression he gave in those few seconds of appearance in "Mulholland Drive."

There are works by David Lynch that make you continue staring at the black screen while the end credits roll, captivated by the dream that releases you little by little, and it's there that you realize the greatness of what you have just witnessed; I will always remember how many hours it took me to realize that "Inland Empire" had ended. The songs performed here by Julee Cruise are included in her two albums "Floating Into the Night" and "The Voice of Love," which also feature other tracks written by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti.