Industrial Symphony No. 1

MOVIE #1,514 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 04.04.24 Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 59. This a cross-entry between my ongoing look at Nicolas Cage’s filmography and my shorts/odds & ends catch-up on the non-feature work of David Lynch. It’s an avant-garde concert performance directed by Lynch, with music by long-time collaboraters Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. Cage (alongside Laura Dern) appear only briefly in a pre-taped introduction, ostensibly in character as Sailor and Lula from Wild at Heart but credited as Heartbreaker and Heartbroken Woman (the show plays out as ‘a hallucinatory "dream" that the Heartbroken Woman has’).

It's interesting that, while this is a filmed stage performance, the camera angles, lighting, varied film stocks and editing are so intense and fragmented that you never get a good perspective of it as such. The whole thing becomes an abstraction, which is on some level the very antithesis of performing live in a theatrical setting. The only song set to anything close to a choreographed stage dance is intercut with VHS footage of cruise singing on televisions resting on the floor. We see performers dangling on wires (including Cruise herself) and a topless lady writing on a large metal structure before briefly humping and then entering a car through the missing back window. (The entirety is available on YouTube in bad resolution, and I'm shocked I waited this long to watch it.)

Michael J. Anderson shows up as an early incarnation of the famous Lynch woodsmen (at least in name only). His mini-monologue is actually great, proving that he's much more than just a visual oddity.

I think this is a bit more than a curious bridge between Lynch eras (if Twin Peaks can be seen as the culmination of his second and probably most beloved stanza and Wild at Heart the start of a third that would carry on throughout the 90s). It's an ambitious and bold experiment that's not quite like anything else in the canon (the humanoid flesh reindeer on stilts — billed as the “tall skinned deer” — alone is worth the 50-minute run-time). While how much you ultimately get out of it is still largely dependent on your opinion of this mostly off-kilter music, some of which was recycled from early Cruise records (I really dig it), I would still say it's a must-watch for any true devotee.

(Cage is in this so briefly that I am not counting it as an official entry in the on-going rankings - FYI)

THE VERDICT: 8 CAGES OUT OF 10 • CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,513 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,515 ⫸

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Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted is a 1990 avant-garde concert performance directed by David Lynch, with music by Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. It stars Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Michael J. Anderson, and Cruise. It was released on November 10, 1990.