David Lynch and the Kills
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InterIor empIres DaviD Lynch anD The KiLLs By Kevin Friedman Photos by Vincent Peters There is a darkness that permeates the world of David Lynch. His films capture a challenge to the audience to figure things out for themselves and to make their own something menacing and disturbing, often by combining the mundane with the surreal interpretations. To paraphrase something he said years ago: Life doesn’t always make but just as often going full bore into the heart of evil. Themes of duality, especially in his sense, so why should films? female characters, and sexual violence exist in the day-to-day worlds of both the urban And then there are The Kills, the kind of vampyric duo—blade thin, as though and the rural. Whereas traditional film noir kept its violence limited to the metropolis, carved from wood with a straight razor—that Lynch would conjure if he were to write Lynch subverts this idea. As he exhibited with Twin Peaks, the woods were just as a pulp film about a band. Their music is the lost soundtrack to a scratched celluloid menacing, if not more so, than any concrete jungle. It’s as if he were taking traditional black and white getaway flick from the French New Wave. Dirtily gorgeous, they are Grimm fairy tales as a starting point and going deeper into the furthest recesses of the musical equivalent of Sailor and Lula from Wild at Heart, guitars and microphones the forests of depravity. Drugs, murder, rape, incest? You betcha. Neither is suburbia substituted for guns and cars. Singer Alison Mosshart’s pouty lips break through immune to his forensic eye. As Blue Velvet made clear, it harbors its own moral decay. her black bangs and reveal dark eyes that can force forgiveness despite all evidence And cities? Well, they received their treatment in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and to the contrary. It’s not hard to imagine the native Floridian stepping out of a trailer Inland Empire—a trilogy of L.A. nightmares that is as unsettling and confounding as it in the Everglades and sliding into the back of a beat-up Cadillac, leaving broken is fascinating and captivating. hearts and bullets in her wake. Guitarist Jamie Hince, appropriately pasty in his Lynch increasingly eschews formal narrative in favor of an abstract and dreamlike pegged jeans-over-boots-under-leather-jacket style is the quintessential gaunt British approach. He can be brutal, both to his characters as well as his audience, subjecting flamethrower—he even has the supermodel wife to prove it—but his brass-knuckled, them to torturous episodes of nightmarish sequences without obvious cohesion or broken blues riffs back up his swagger. Yes, these are the people of celluloid dreams. resolution. But as anyone who was transfixed by the television phenomenon that Minimalistic yet potent, The Kills create sonic dioramas and lift the curtains just was Twin Peaks knows, he can also manifest exquisitely mysterious scenarios. Few enough for you to peek inside their jagged, private art, allowing you to listen to their directors since Fellini are capable of recreating the magically shadowed realms of the black dramas for just so long. Then they want to be left alone to make more. If you like subconscious. Lynch’s more abstract work isn’t meant to be easily digested; rather, it is it, swell. If not, then slag off. a cOnveRSATiOn WiTh DaviD Lynch anD The KiLLs Can you discuss your initial exposure to each other’s mood and your movement and your artwork for you and there they are, doing these things and then they go and work? the stuff that’s coming out of you. do something else and they meet somebody else and this Lynch: I go by ideas. I get ideas that I fall in love with thing happens. You see it’s a world that has characters DaviD Lynch: I came across The Kills first on the radio. sometimes. A beautiful day you get an idea, an idea that’s with all kinds of things going on and it’s a story. Then I saw their performance, “Live at Abbey Road”; that’s thrilling. When you get an idea, you see it, you hear it hince: It’s still a pretty raw and incredible thing, to watch when I became a major fan. They’re just a great band with and you feel it. And then you stay true to that when you two people fucking or to watch somebody being lynched. such great power—complicated, minimal power; the power translate it. So the mood comes from the idea. It comes It’s a strange thing. of their guitars and their ability to play it in the coolest way. from sound and light and color and pacing, but all of that Mosshart: It’ll never get old. For every generation being And then the beauty on top that Alison brings. is indicated by the idea. born it will be forever interesting. aLison Mosshart: Mine had to have been Mulholland Drive and then a total obsession with Twin Peaks. I Can you talk about sex and violence as an influence? Can you discuss the difference between your public watched it constantly on the tour bus. They have the most personas versus the artistic ones? perfect aesthetic, and the dialogue really speaks to me. hince: In cinema and literature and music, those are There’s something about it that is so incredibly artistic the things that humans gravitate toward. Maybe it’s the hince: You can’t live your normal life as the same person and so weird and so cool and so beautiful and so rock and simplest way of trying to understand life and death and that’s onstage. That isn’t to say it’s a character, but me and roll, so punk rock. As subversion, that’s the film version. love, but those are the things that make my heart beat. Alison are fairly introverted in our normal lives. When You’ve nailed it. Also, they’re the two clearest animal instincts that we I first met Alison she was so painfully shy she barely JaMie hince: I’d say mine was Twin Peaks. It feels like have left. That’s fascinating for us human beings. They’re spoke. But then I saw her perform and she was so much something that’s been in my life, not that you discover, animal passions. more at home onstage than off. She was so much more but something that’s always been there and just works its Mosshart: Those are the pinnacles of human instinct— comfortable in her skin. way into your cultural blood. It feels like he’s created a real the kind of light and dark. It’s always back to those Mosshart: To get that drive to do that thing onstage, world. At first people notice this creepy weirdness about two things in one way or another. It’s important not to you have to have both sides. It’s just part of you. I hate to the movies, but the music as well, you can recognize and disregard them. separate them. I feel that everything I do in my life is just pinpoint it straight away. It’s a real soundscape as well as a Lynch: Every story holds some kind of violence, preparation to go onstage and use everything for that. I’m cinematic landscape. some kind of dream, at least wondering about sex or totally drained afterward, I’ve given it all and just want to sexual things. You know, in stories, there are all these go lay down. Atmosphere seems centrally important to each of contrasts and a lot of stories deal with life and death Lynch: You know, people think I’m strange and dark and your work. Can you describe the respective moods situations. I was watching them kill Gaddafi on the violent, but I’m just like a little schoolboy, really. you create? TV. It was like a pack of wolves going for some kill and it was really incredible. I could just feel how this But there’s this contradiction between this former hince: I always like a certain triumph in sound and was happening and no one was gonna be able to stop Eagle Scout from Montana who makes these Lynch recently designed Club Silencio, a nightclub in the Montmartre hallucinatory drama of plans gone wrong and the adrenaline rush of running songs. Not like from scoring a winning goal, but the kind that. It was bloody and loud and—bango! There he was, harrowing and often violent and frightening films. district of Paris bunkered six stories underground. True to his directing from mistakes. of triumph you feel after you’ve been crying for an hour. deader than a doornail, stripped down in the street in How do those two exist? sensibilities, he conceptualized the look, feel and even the furniture. Further, It’s no real shock to learn that Lynch and The Kills share an attraction. When you feel euphoria after that. I love the darkness the sewer. It was unbelievable! he recently recorded his first album of songs,Crazy Clown Time, which is Despite their insular nature, the band isn’t immune to hero worship where contrasting with the sky opening up. That’s what I Lynch: It’s real simple. I like to stay at home. I like to every bit as hypnotically transformative as his films. The music ranges from warranted. Recently, Lynch asked if The Kills would perform at Club Silencio gravitate toward in music.