David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti - Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted Featuring Julee Cruise (1990)

Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted directed by David Lynch featuring music by Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise and lyrics by David Lynch. This film interrogates consciousness with a deeply erotic, mesmeric fantasy involving suspension, dancers, and an assortment of intoxicating imagery that draw the viewer into an oft times terrifying dreamspace. Filmed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989, this startling musical explores the many facets of tortured love and serves as a testament to the troubles of the brokenhearted. The film begins with a phone conversation between Laura Dern and Nicholas cage not specifically but likely rescuing their characters from the sharp colors of ?Wild at Heart?. This is a breakup scene and indeed the characters are called Heartbroken Woman and Heartbreaker. He just has to let her go because the relationship is stifling him. After this brief scene, the performance starts proper with a dingy, dangerous industrial setting replete with bad directions and brutal angles. Diva Julee Cruise playing The Dreamself of the distressed damsel emerges from darkness to mime the words, penned by Lynch, to a song of wrenching beauty that stabs quickly yet painlessly. There are many memorable sequences to this affair and each scene is punctuated by Cruise?s wafting, impossibly elegiac songs that create an atmosphere of bitter longing for the ineffable. Michael J. Anderson, Twin Peaks? the Man from Another Place saws winsomely at a log and makes no progress. Through it all there is clanging, grinding, and a totalitarian tap dance disguised as writhing syncopations and distilled dream theater. A woman in a cage fights desperately to be released. Later she moans and caresses a burnt out Chevy in an act of supreme erotic power. Then a tyranny of suspended dolls bring an eerie, nightmarish quality to this terrible dream. The dolls are artifacts of a lost childhood which lies in ruins and decay nevertheless fostering a cruelly angelic exegesis of torments both real and imagined. Lynch creates a darkening world from which prayers and corruptions emerge at the Dreamself?s beckoning. There is a sleek loathsomeness to the production which is brought true by the chaos ringing through the rise and fall of the industrial soundscape. Light emerges and the fiery cauldron is temporarily subdued. Nevertheless, the smoldering despair returns to challenge the efficacy of the mystical yearnings that perpetually plague the Dreamself. A satanic reindeer, saturated death red, the jackbooted fancyman populating every good girl?s most rife fantasies, does a protracted, agonizing dance step. Julee Cruise is kidnapped and locked in the trunk of the same car that previously served such unwholesome purpose. She emerges to once again puncture the dreaded night with another plea to be returned to the bosom of eternal love. Overall, a most glamorous edification haunts every frame of this production. Sex and death are strung out on wires to tease and harangue. The tips of tongues are soiled in greasy excess as the dream ends, sending its occupants headlong into lampposts, to scurry mightily for the next torturous love affair.