NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – CAPSULE VIII

TOKYO LYNCH DREAMS

D L —IS NOT DELIGHT

On the first morning of Life without David Lynch in it, I’m discharged from Tokyo’s university Hospital. Kimiko, the wonderful nurse, says that Ralph Lauren, the unquiet American, has paid my hospital bill from jail. I’m about to ask if I’m supposed to send flowers to my negligent assassin when she points somewhere between my erased left ear and Angelo, my left bed neighbour. There is a bouquet of wisteria flowers.

Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome in reverse? I ask.

It is exactly what it is: Lima syndrome, when the attacker shows compassion for the victim. Ignore him: life sentence is the least he deserves for what he did to you and the other women.

I don’t want to leave the hospital: it is the closest to motherly love I can remember. Should I self-harm myself? I go to the toilet and a minute later I collapse against the door. Kimiko holds my body before I hit the ground. She asks what happened.

David Lynch!

What about him?

Highway to eternity.

No way

I have just read in the Guardian app that Blue Velvet has gone orphan blue, South of the heart, wild at nothing but the great beyond.

Angelo smiles like a diamond cat. Then sings his tribute:

I close my eyes then I drift away
Into the magic night, I softly say
A silent prayer like dreamers do
Then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you

II

The flowers are in poisonous bloom, radiating over our puzzled smiles. Kimiko says that she is off until Monday and asks if I need a lift.

Can you not get in trouble for doing that?

Only if I harm you intentionally, but since you can self-harm yourself, there is no need: it would be way too redundant, she says. We both laugh like maniacs, and then she says: the only reason I’m doing it is because I want to know everything about all the celebrities you interviewed.

II

Sadly, I never interviewed David Lynch during my journalist years. I mostly devoted them to interviewing cinema celebrities. It was a very sad job that everyone thought it was the coolest.

Guess what? It wasn’t.

I had to travel thousands of miles to meet extremely insecure and narcissistic people. I was left alone in the same room with abhorrent creatures, including Harvey Weinstein (in Berlin, as the producer of V for Vendetta) or Diego fucking Luna, who refused to share his lighter with me in the smoking area of Heathrow airport after a calamitous interview at San Sebastian’s film festival —where I had witnessed him embarrassing his country and profession for almost three hours in a movie whose titled I forgot, but whose co-star keeps haunting me: Kevin Fucking Costner.

To be fair though, the main reason to make the job and the talents almost unbearable was the mind-blowing tendency of all the “culture” journalists in the world to ask the exact same questions constantly. It was rather horrible to share junkets with journalists who also travelled long distances to ask: What is your biggest influence? And your next project? And how was it to work with Pedro or Jane or David? —Before asking them for their AUTOGRAPH!

I witnessed a number of adult journalists of all nationalities on their knees asking the entire underage cast of Harry Potter 3 for their autographs.

III

Kimiko can’t believe what I’m saying. It is my first conscious day in Tokyo, and she is driving me through little lanes and quiet streets. It feels like we are on the outskirts of a small Irish town. There are trees everywhere, all the cars are white and squared, and many of the parked ones have people inside them, just like in Ireland.

I ask where the children are and she says inside the cars. Next thing, she drives close to a stunning temple and lush garden and says: do you have time to visit someone special?  She is looking at me with a cheeky smile.

Obviously, unless someone is a Hollywood star…

She burst out laughing again and I wonder if this is Florence Nightingale syndrome, although I don’t really know what that is.

IV

Kimiko drives a seemingly looking countryside road and I say that I didn’t interview David but Laura Harring, Naomi Watts’ less popular co-star in Mulholland Drive. She came to Madrid instead of David, and even though she was probably as bored as the rest of the travelling actors worldwide, we had a conversation that I have not forgotten. I inevitably asked how the script read and how the fuck David directed it.

Laura looked at me bemused and said that David didn’t write scripts, and I knew it wasn’t true. Nonetheless, she claimed that she and Naomi would only get a single page the day before shooting —in order to get on set the next day without having a clue of what was going on, which is exactly how the movie works in the mind of the spectator.

I remember thinking how brave and cunning that was, and how well it worked. Laura, like most of Lynch’s casted actresses and actors had only loving words for him. I remember asking her why she thought she was cast for the role and she said that during her last screen test, David asked her about the slight cleft on her left temple. As it turns out, when she was underage, Laura was in the parking lot of a supermarket when she was hit by a stray bullet. It was a miracle that she was alive, and then David turned her into an eternal dream.

V

Kimiko says that she must watch the movie again, likely with her sister. This is her house, she adds. I wonder what we are doing here and she just smiles. We walk a tiny and perfectly trimmed lawn, and she knocks at the door of the cottage, suspended in the outskirts of Tokyo like the painting of a cloud.

Izumi opens with a big smile on her face and says: H, I presume. Follow me please. I do as I’m told, and next thing we are outside the back garden and I see an easel and then I see the canvas and only then I realise: it is a portrait of the Blue Velvet ear. I open my eyes in utter amusement and she says that she loves David so much that she has been consistently painting scenes from his movies for the last twenty years. The work is outstanding and the whole house is filled with it. I ask if I can take a photo and she says no please, and then I say, I’m so saddened by our loss. Kimiko opens her eyes wide open and Izumi asks:

What loss? You never lose eternity

Sometimes a wind blows

and you and I float

in love

And kiss forever

in a darkness

And the mysteries of love come clear

And dance in light

In you and me

And show that we are LOVE

Sometimes a wind blows

and the mysteries of love

come clear.