The limited-time residency arrives in celebration of Frieze
After first opening 15 years ago, a Paris subterranean private club and cultural venue designed by the late David Lynch will make its Los Angeles debut this month.
In the lead up to Frieze Los Angeles (which runs Feb. 26 to March 1), Silencio will take over Sunset at Edition for a three-night residency from Feb. 24 to 26. Each evening will embrace the original Club Silencio of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive with distinct programming.
Credit: Courtesy The West Hollywood Edition
“In a city shaped by cinema and singular artistic figures, this project brings together contemporary art and creative communities through a series of nights that reflect Silencio’s DNA — creating meaningful connections between artists, audiences, and creative worlds.” said Silencio Founder Arnaud Frisch.
Credit: Courtesy The West Hollywood Edition
Like the Paris Silencio, guests enter the Los Angeles venue through a discreet entrance to submerge into a dark, glamorous space. The Frieze-timed run will also showcase music, activations and surprises from partners like LACMA-Avant Garde, Tom of Finland Foundation, How Long Gone, DJ Harvey and VTSS.
“Silencio’s distinct cinematic quality has always felt reminiscent of Hollywood,” says Frank Roberts, vice President of Brand Experience, W and Edition Hotels. “To welcome it to Los Angeles, the city where David Lynch imagined Silencio in the first place, feels like closing a circle. The West Hollywood Edition was built for moments like this.”
Credit: Courtesy The West Hollywood Edition
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Silencio is invite only, but Angelenos can help their chances of getting onto the guest list by keeping an eye on Silencio and The West Hollywood Edition’s Instagram accounts.
Sunset at Edition is located at 1090 N. Doheny Drive in West Hollywood. The entrance is just around the corner from The West Hollywood Edition’s main entrance on Sunset Boulevard.
Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Laura Dern and Andra Day at a special Q&A panel at Angelika Film Center in advance of the film’s theatrical release. Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images for Searchlight Pictures
A flailing relationship is no joke—unless you’re Alex Novak (Will Arnett), who stumbles into personal salvation by cracking wise in front of a live audience. Multi-hyphenate Bradley Cooper’s latest film c?, now playing in theaters nationwide, traces this journey, which begins with Alex’s spur-of-the-moment impulse to get up in front of a crowd and emotionally unload. “It’s the first time that he talks about what he’s going through,” Arnett told Observer. “It’s kind of the first time he admits it to himself.”
What triggers the confessional is a still-fresh separation from longtime wife Tess (Laura Dern), after 20 years of marriage (and 5 years as a couple before that). A quarter-century together will change anyone—moving to the suburbs, having kids, sacrificing professional goals for familial stability. The real question is how to acknowledge that change in each other without falling apart.
Arnett, who co-wrote the script with his writing partner Mark Chappell and Cooper, came up with the idea for the film after hearing the origin story behind British comedian John Bishop, who unexpectedly started his career in comedy—and saved his marriage—by turning his estrangement from his wife into comic fodder that became a catalyst for personal change.
“It’s a midlife catharsis, not a crisis,” explained Cooper at a press screening before Is This Thing On?, which premiered as the Closing Night Film of the New York Film Festival. “This movie’s not about a guy who’s unhappy in his profession. It’s that he’s not really comfortable with who he is.”
Arnett echoed the sentiment during his talk with Observer. “We don’t see Alex at work, for instance,” he said. “We don’t see any of that stuff. What was important to us was really getting down to him trying to find his voice. And by that I don’t mean his comedic voice, but his voice as a person—to see him start to connect the dots and be able to actually speak.”
Is This Thing On? is both a thematic continuation and a pivot for Cooper, whose trajectory as a writer-director-actor-producer includes his splashy Lady Gaga vehicle A Star Is Born and the ambitious Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Both of those were big-budget productions that, at heart, were relationship dramas writ large. Is This Thing On? compresses that canvas and trades studio spectacle for low-budget intimacy.
Intrigued by the story’s possibilities, Cooper—who has known Arnett for almost 30 years and even was his roommate in L.A. as their careers were getting off the ground—offered to join Arnett and Chappell to explore the script’s characters further with a rewrite. He then added himself to the cast (in a small role as a Falstaffian goofball buddy nicknamed Balls) and brought together a terrific ensemble, .including Academy Award winner Dern; Andra Day as Balls’s frustrated wife; Arnett’s Smartless podcast cohost Sean Hayes as his newlywed friend (coupled with Scott Icenogle); plus Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds as Alex’s parents. Amy Sedaris and Peyton Manning pop up in smaller roles, and stand-up legend Dave Attell even makes an appearance.
Cooper and his collaborators pulled together the film very quickly and shot almost entirely on location in New York last spring over 33 tight days, getting it edited in time to premiere at the NYFF in the fall. “New York is a treasure chest and very, very little was shot on a stage,” said Cooper, a native Philadelphian who relished being back in the downtown neighborhood where he spent time as a grad student in places like the Comedy Cellar and Bar Six (both of which play key roles in the film). Alex’s apartment is on 12th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, right on the same street where Cooper got his MFA at the New School.
“It was a small budget,” said Cooper, who often served as his own camera operator. “That shot of him crossing Sixth Avenue? I’m on a seatbelt on a dolly handheld with nothing shut off from the street. That’s all actual traffic. And there’s just the cop there. We’re like, ‘Is it okay?’ ‘Yeah, you got ten minutes.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, okay!’”
But that run-and-gun indie vibe was inspirational for the cast. “It’s like Christmas on steroids!” said Dern at the NYFF press screening, and then invoked her longtime professional relationship with David Lynch. “Inland Empire was the only other experience I had where my director was right there with the camera. Bradley, as an actor and as our family, knows us so well and feels the instincts with us in character. The most fun of your life is to be in it and feel an instinct as an actor that you catch up to after the take is done, and you go, ‘Oh man, maybe I should try this…’”
Arnett was even further in uncharted territory, handling a dramatic role while surrounded by Oscar-caliber talent. “For me, that was a lot of the work,” he said. “To just be present in those moments and be open and vulnerable. These kinds of roles never came my way,” said the actor best known for indelible turns like being Job in Arrested Development or the voice of Lego Batman. “But, also, I did it to myself. I’ve heard people say that I got typecast. Well, I didn’t have to do all the things I did. I had fun doing them—but certainly to do something like this is much closer to what I’d always wanted to do.”
Day, an Oscar-nominated actress better known as a Grammy Award-winning singer, plays a small but larger-than-life role in the film as Christine, an unhappy wife simmering with marital discontent. She has a seminal scene with Arnett when Christine hilariously confronts Alex about the rage she feels toward him. “She tells him straight up, ‘I despise you because I hate myself. You remind me of me’,” she told Observer, laughing. “Let’s see what you’re going to do now with that truth!”
But that interaction speaks to a greater truth: the film has no villains, only people who are adrift and unable to communicate with each other. “She’s not a victim,” said Day about her character. “She’s not blaming everyone else. She’s like, ‘What am I passionate about? What do I love? Well, shit, maybe I’m pissed at myself!’ You know what I mean? I love that the movie talks about this theme of grace. We have to transform as people in order to actually have a pulse and be alive. We need to have grace to allow other people to transform.”
Dern echoed those same feelings at the NYFF press screening. “The film finds the unbelievable complexity of relationships. I hadn’t seen a script or a film allowing us to know that we don’t know how we got here. Because most of us don’t, in moments of despair, in one’s self and in relationship.”
And for Arnett, as the lead in this marital reckoning, Is This Thing On? was truly transformative. “It was a difficult task for me,” he said. “I did have to recalibrate and remember why I started doing this in the first place. Making a movie like this was how I always envisioned my life going when I was a young man. For me, it was kind of like a rebirth in a way, as opposed to a new thing. It was just reconnecting to something I always wanted to do.”
This year, when Laura Dern started shooting Is This Thing On?, she noticed her dynamic with director Bradley Cooper echoing her work with David Lynch, who’d cast Dern in her breakout Blue Velvet role nearly 40 years earlier. “People might think, appropriately, that this would be the first time I’d have had the experience of the director being the camera operator,” Dern says, noting that Cooper took on that job just as Lynch had in the past. “But I’ve been lucky to have that experience firsthand [repeatedly], in a very raw way, where your director becomes your partner.”
Over the past several decades, Lynch remained one of Dern’s closest artistic collaborators, as she starred in everything from Wild at Heart to Inland Empire to Twin Peaks: The Return. He died just before filming began on Is This Thing On.“It was a very tender, heartbreaking time,” Dern admits. “I feel like I’m still just at the beginning of it.”
Dern has been touched closely by 12 months of profound loss and grief for Los Angeles, the city in which she was born, raised, and still works and lives. At this point, she’s all but embedded in its heartbeat, from her work with the Academy as a governor and museum board member to her singular filmography across iconic movies and TV series. January saw Lynch’s death and the devastating wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Last month, her mother, the Oscar-nominated actor Diane Ladd, died by Dern’s side at 89 years old. And on this December afternoon, we’re speaking just a few days out from the brutal killings of Rob and Michele Reiner, whose son Nick has been charged with their murders.
“Literally, my kids are in this house like it’s the countdown to Christmas, but it’s just for getting to the end of this year,” Dern says with a weary laugh. “That’s the most common discussion.”
As to how she’s holding up these days? “I just haven’t gotten there yet — I haven’t let myself be in it yet,” Dern says of processing her mother’s death. “It’s the same in a weird way with David and other losses that have happened this year — it’s so compounded. But I will say, while I’m in the deep thick of it, looking at photos and watching things and trying to figure out how to honor her and honor him and all of that to come, I feel really blessed by their legacies — by holding onto the things they’ve given us in art and in friendship and in memories, in stories and in activism, in all of it.”
Dern adds, “And I am particularly grateful — sincerely — that this is the movie that I’m talking about. I’m talking about intimacy and grace and longing and grief and being true to yourself. Honestly, I said to my publicist, if it were any other themes, I don’t think I could do this at all.”
“This was my first opportunity and blessing to be part of a movie that I knew Rob Reiner had gifted us,” the 58-year-old Dern tells me right out of the gate. What does she mean by that? “Knowing how to balance truth and complication and flawed characters and joy and hopefulness — it feels like an impossible task, but one that he seemed to always be able to give us.” Is This Thing On?was made intently in that tradition.
Dern met Cooper about a decade ago, and before long became a close friend and colleague as he made the shift to directing. “Anything he was acting in, he was like, ‘Will you look at this? What do you think?’” Dern says. “Then once he started directing, I was with him to watch screen tests and camera tests, or read early drafts.” On both A Star Is Born and Maestro, “We played around with scenes together watching cuts in the editing room.” She didn’t know Arnett as well, but he too was tight with Cooper. As they embarked on Is This Thing On?’s emotional two-hander together, the actors made each other a promise: “To be as vulnerable and honest and open as we’ve ever been.”
The magic of Dern’s moving, complex performance crystallizes in a scene where she doesn’t say a word. The film traces the lives of separated spouses Alex (Arnett) and Tess (Dern), with the former secretly processing the breakup through an amateur stand-up comedy act. While on a date, Tess inadvertently stumbles into one of Alex’s sets — which spikily interrogates why their romance fell apart. Tess listens on in shock. With Cooper right there up close with the camera, Dern reacts through it with spectacular nuance. You can feel the actor discovering, then exploring the emotions as they hit her — newly heartbroken, dryly amused, oddly turned on.
“It takes a filmmaker who wants to not only hold on an actor’s face, but let the actor in real time catch up with themselves,” Dern says. “What surprised me, but I’m so grateful for, is that I was able to find Will so funny even in the hurt and the pain.”
The sequence showcases what Is This Thing On? is all about: a warm, honest examination of flawed people reflecting on their mistakes while trying to figure out what they want. While the most modestly scaled film of Cooper’s directing career, it fits neatly into Dern’s oeuvre, which is loaded with movies by such great American humanists as Alexander Payne, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, Paul Thomas Anderson, Mike White and Kelly Reichardt. Its arrival at the end of a year marked by box-office gloom for films of its type — sophisticated, relatively quiet character studies made for adults — is top of mind for Dern. “We’ve all become desensitized by fireworks, maybe,” she says.
Does she worry about the future of movies without the fireworks, then? “The industry gets into a clickbait habit of like, ‘Oh yeah, that movie’s not doing well, that movie’s not doing well, people didn’t like that movie as much as the other movie,’” Dern says. “But it’s like, ‘Well, you’ve said that about 15 movies this season, so maybe it’s that people aren’t going to the movies.’
“What worries me is the noise of, ‘I guess people are just only watching it at home.’ When people talk about smaller, independent film — movies about people — as though those are movies you can stay home to watch because they’re intimate, they’re missing the point,” she continues. “To be next to your neighbor that you don’t know, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to, one, have a shared experience; and two, you’re then walking down to your car with the person you went with and you’re talking about it — and then you’re going to dinner and maybe getting into a relationship conversation you wouldn’t have had otherwise. That’s the church of movie going that I was raised on, and I just don’t ever want us to lose that.”
This has been Dern’s biggest onscreen year since before the pandemic, when she won the Oscar for 2019’s Marriage Storywhile appearing in Gerwig’s Little Womenand the second season of Big Little Liesthat same year. Her other major 2025 credit, Jay Kelly, is another Netflix-Baumbach joint in which she effortlessly steals all of her scenes — this time, as the worn-down publicist of a Hollywood mega-star, played by George Clooney, inching toward a personal reckoning.
Laura Dern with her mother, Diane Ladd, after being named the 2020 Oscar winner for best supporting actress at the attend the 92nd Annual Academy Awards
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
On the Oscars stage in 2020, Dern called Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarnados a friend; she also toplined the streamer’s romance film Lonely Planet last year. In all this talk about theatrical with films like Is This Thing On?, I wonder how Dern feels about Netflix’s possible impending acquisition of Warner Bros., which has the town on edge even as Sarandos is promising to maintain the legacy studio’s theatrical strategy. “I’m deeply hopeful that with the news at hand that what can come from it is a trust in cinema, that movies deserve to have a theatrical experience and audiences need that and filmmakers that need that,” Dern says. “If we lose that, we lose the filmmakers. They’ll always be there — David Lynch will go make a movie with the Sony camcorder and shoot it for $300,000 — but you don’t get to make the same movies you want to make if you’re not given the financial support to make them. Those movies should be seen in the theaters.”
And trust: Dern is going to theaters. “This is a great year for movies,” she raves. “I’ve been particularly moved by how intimate relationships are at the core of a lot of these films…. Filmmakers are leaning on empathy as a theme. I just saw such a great movie last night, which made me proud of this moment for movies.” I expect her to name a best-picture heavyweight in the conversation with her films, like Sinners or Sentimental Value. “It’s Zootopia 2!” she cheers. “Oh my God. I mean, incredible. Everybody’s finding their way to do it, and to be honest, you don’t want to miss seeing Zootopia 2.”
Dern brings a life spent on film sets to work every day. Moviemaking is her life and she speaks of the process with reverence, passion and expertise. She had a moment with Cooper on Is This Thing On? that says a lot about how she approaches the job these days. They were holding for some kind of noise pollution, maybe a helicopter, to pass while wandering around the set. He stood right in front of her, holding the camera.
“He’s staring at me through the lens, and I’m looking at him, and we’re waiting through this moment, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s you and me and we’re doing this,’” Dern says. “There was no adjustment period of like, ‘Whoa, Bradley is in my face with a camera.’ No — it’s what we do.”
For her noted taste in Hollywood, her work in the trenches with filmmakers like Cooper, Dern only amassed a handful of significant credits behind the camera so far. The big shift came a little over a decade ago with Enlightened, HBO’s masterful but underseen series that Dern starred in (winning a Golden Globe and receiving an Emmy nomination), but also co-created and executive produced with Mike White. She’s more recently gone on to help develop series like Apple TV+’s Palm Royale and Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things. But in observing an actor-turned-director like Cooper, might Dern see that in her future too?
“No one’s asked me recently because, for years, I’d say it is something that fascinates me, but I’ll never do it until my baby goes to college,” Dern says. “And now, my baby is at NYU — so I better get my act together.” She has been thinking about directing, she reveals, but as with every choice in her career, she’s approaching it carefully — and heart-first. “God knows I know how much there is to learn as a filmmaker, so I would never do it unless I believe that I was the person to tell the story,” she says. “So: Maybe. I hope so. I know that the story will reveal itself.”
The Viennale, or Vienna International Film Festival in Austria, has just unveiled its 2025 trailer. And, as has become tradition, it is directed by a well-known filmmaker. The trailer for the latest edition of the fest, running Oct. 16-28, comes courtesy of British director Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir, The Eternal Daughter).
Entitled Awakening, the short from Hogg, who attended the Viennale in 2022 to present The Eternal Daughter, is designed to get your heart pumping, providing a wake-up call like only cinema can. Sounds timely in an age where many of us may be tempted to stay in bed and bury our faces in the pillow? You bet!
“When are we going to wake up and open our eyes to what’s happening in the world?” Hogg says about her teaser.
“We are impressed by this small film by a great author, which shows how cinema has an inexhaustible power of renewal,” highlights Viennale director Eva Sangiorgi. “Joanna Hogg tries something new, putting herself on the line with a profoundly personal and political gesture.”
But see for yourself! Check out Hogg’s Viennale trailer here before diving into select teasers from big-name directors from the fest’s past.
With Awakening, Hogg joins a lineup of big-name filmmakers who have directed Viennale trailers over the years. They include the likes of David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Radu Jude, Leos Carax, Abel Ferrara, and Claire Denis, and Shirin Neshat, whose teaser starred none other than Natalie Portman.
Big eyes. A voice asking a question about rocks?. A rubber duck. A scream. A hammer. And that’s not all!
Lynch, Hollywood’s legendary master of cinematic dreams and illusions, made a typically bizarre short Viennale trailer for the 2011 edition, which is considered one of the can’t-miss teasers of its long history. View Lynch’s trailer here.
Jean-Luc Godard, Une Catastrophe (2008)
French and Swiss filmmaker Godard made a reputation for himself by experimenting with narratives, as well as audio and visuals.
The fact that his Viennale trailer includes tanks and fighter jets as well as love, among other things, may not surprise you, but the emotion it leaves behind may.
Leos Carax, My Last Minute (2006)
Smoking kills! But what if you stop smoking?
French auteur Carax’s trailer for the 2006 edition of the Viennale was likely one of the more shocking ones for audiences. Watch with care!
Short, but not sweet? That could be one way to describe one of the trailers made for the 60th edition of the Viennale in 2022, entitled Le Soldat, or The Soldier.
It came courtesy of the French writer and director. “Denis juxtaposes a scene from Godard’s Algerian war film Le Petit Soldat with a miniature from her hypnotic work Beau Travail, wherein she directly quoted Godard’s scene in 1999,” the Viennale explained about the trailer. “Michel Subor starred in both films.” See the result here.
Sergei Loznitsa, Independence Day (2022)
Ukrainian director Loznitsa created another one of the 2022 Viennale trailers, under the title Independence Day.
His is longer than Denis’ but seemingly touches on a related issue.
We’re still in 2022, but this time in the cinematic world of Japanese director Hamaguchi, who in that year won the best international feature film Oscar for Drive My Car.
His Viennale trailer is poetic and meditative. The visuals may captivate you, but don’t miss out on the sound – and the voice.
Alice Rohrwacher, Ad Una Mela (2020)
It was Italian filmmaker Rohrwacher’s time to put together a trailer for the Viennale in 2020, and she brought a different feel to it.
Get ready for an apple and some shadow theater!
Lucrecia Martel, AI (2019)
Artificial intelligence is a constant source of debate in Hollywood these days. The filmmaker from Argentina was well ahead of her time when she dubbed her 2019 Viennale trailer AI.
The result is very different and “stars” a pixelated face and the question: What is it you’re trying to do with your life?
Lav Diaz, The Boy Who Chose the Earth (2018)
Filipino slow cinema master Diaz went short, especially for his standards, in 2018 when he unveiled his Viennale trailer.
Held in black and white, it features a boy, a letter from his father, and the forces of nature. But watch for yourself!
Abel Ferrara, Hans, (2017)
Hans Hurch was the director of the Viennale for many years. In 2017, he traveled to Rome to meet Ferrara and discuss a possible festival trailer with him. After Hurch’s sudden death, the U.S. director decided to make the trailer a tribute to Hurch.
It features not only Hurch’s face, but also twilight, children screaming in the distance, as well as a picture of the young Bob Dylan and an image of filmmaker John Ford with his eye patch.
Shirin Neshat, Illusions & Mirrors (2013)
You might get Maya Deren vibes now. After all, Iranian-born, U.S.-based artist and filmmaker Neshat paid tribute to black-and-white silent films by surrealist directors with her 2013 Viennale trailer that stars none other than Natalie Portman.
It features a deserted beach and a woman following a mysterious figure into an empty house. But what is real and what is illusion? Watch the trailer below to see what you believe.
Chris Marker, Kino (2012 – 50th anniversary of the Viennale)
Before his death that year, the legendary French filmmaker Marker created a Viennale trailer that addressed the search for the “perfect spectator,” citing the likes of Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard.
But in a surprise twist… well, you have to watch and see for yourself to find out why the trailer ends with the words: “That’s all, Bin!”
Or doesn’t it? “You need an open mind to discover things,” the director said about his Viennale trailer. So, feel free to use your imagination!
Agnès Varda, Viennale Walzer (2004)
Last but not least, Belgian-born French filmmaker Varda referenced the most Viennese of all dances, the waltz, or “Walzer,” in the title of her Viennale trailer.
It brings the sounds, the colors, and the spins – but also much, much more. Salt, for example. If you’re confused, you’d best watch what Varda brought to the Viennale trailer dance.
In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine, David Lynch revealed that he was diagnosed with emphysema due to constant smoking throughout his life, and consequently must remain “homebound” to avoid colds, COVID-19, and other sicknesses. Lynch added that he could direct movies “remotely,” but that he “wouldn’t like that so much.” After speculation that this meant the longtime creative would retire, Lynch released an official statement today clarifying that’s not the case.
“Yes, I have emphysema from my many years of smoking,” Lynch wrote in his statement. “I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco – the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them – but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema. I have now quit smoking for over two years. Recently I had many tests and the good news is that I am in excellent shape except for emphysema. I am filled with happiness, and I will never retire. I want you all to know that I really appreciate your concern.”
Being homebound hasn’t limited Lynch’s creativity in the past. During the pandemic, he launched the “What Is David Working on Today?” video series and daily weather reports on YouTube. Over the past few years, he has also created the short films Fire (Pożar) and WHAT DID JACK DO?, directed a music video for Donovan, and released his new collaborative album Cellophane Memories with Chrystabell. Lynch’s most recent feature film, Inland Empire, came out in 2006.
In an article for Variety from earlier this year, Kyle MacLachlan is quoted as saying, “There I was. I don’t care. I’m up for anything.” Although it was in reference to his rash of, let’s say, wondrously weird TikTok videos, the actor could have just as easily been referring to his latest “artistic” endeavor: a commercial for Arby’s. An unexpected addition to the “K-Mac” oeuvre, the actor perhaps mentioned wanting to make it more “bespoke” than usual to the fast-food chain—possibly suggesting that the marketing team come up with something “in his range.” And, well, they certainly did.
The commercial starts out “normally” enough, with MacLachlan pulling up to the intercom to relay his order: “Can I get a beef and cheddar? And for you to bring back the potato cakes please. Please. I really need them. I really need them. The employee peers her head out of the drive-through window to say, “Sir, please, I keep telling you, they’re not coming back.” MacLachlan insists, “I know you have them.” The beleaguered employee returns, “Come on, Mr. MacLachlan.” Looking into the camera as though someone is watching him, he corrects her with, “Kyle MacLachlan.” She continues to rebuff his demand, insisting, “It’s over.” Defeated and tired of fighting, MacLachlan solemnly responds, “Okay, I’ll just have the beef and cheddar, thank you.” Seeing the sadness radiating off of him, the Arby’s worker can’t help but look sympathetic to his distinct yearning.
Just when MacLachlan has committed to surrendering to yet another day without potato cakes (or what Jewish people would probably call a bastardized latke), eerie music—Twin Peaks-y music—starts to play in the background. In the distance, he sees a shining yellow light suspended in mid-air, beckoning to him from the suburban version of “woods.” Wasting no time in getting out of his car (just as the Arby’s worker is about to hand off his order, too), MacLachlan beelines for the “nature area,” convinced the yellow light must be trying to tell him something. He’s not wrong, of course. For Agent Cooper-inspired instinct never lies. And when he follows that Lynchian light into a clearing in the woods, MacLachlan starts digging through the dirt to unearth the signaturely-shaped delight known as a potato cake.
The apparently oracle-like, stout triangle then proceeds to speak to MacLachlan in a combination of highfalutin gibberish and word salad until MacLachlan directly asks, “What?” The glowing potato cake (some might say it’s more “illuminati-coded” than Twin Peaks-coded) then answers simply, “Potato cakes are back.” That’s certainly more of a resolution than David Lynch could ever provide. But such is the way of capitalism: sooner or later (usually sooner), you have to tell the consumer what it wants. And it wants some damn fine potato cakes. For, ever since Arby’s discontinued the menu item in 2021 (instead opting to make its crinkle fries permanent “in lieu of” PCs or something), the outrage has been vocal and consistent.
Thus, when the commercial freeze-frames on MacLachlan holding the potato cake up toward the heavens, the following words are placed over the image: “Every vocal Arby’s potato cake lover on the internet manifested this [including, needless to say, MacLachlan]. Potato cakes are back for a limited time.” That “limited time” caveat perhaps being as ominous to some as any Lynchian narrative. As for MacLachlan carrying on the Twin Peaks-related torch, it’s but a continuation of his long-standing affection for the auteur, having once remarked in a 2012 interview with The Observer, “David Lynch plucked me from obscurity. He cast me as the lead in Dune and Blue Velvet, and people have seen me as this boy-next-door-cooking-up-something-weird-in-the-basement ever since.”
His enduring appreciation for their friendship was proudly showcased just a little over a week before posting the Arby’s commercial, putting up a video of various “Mac and Lynch” moments to the tune of Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” (because, as MacLachlan has made it clear by now, he’s a man who’s up on current trends and music). Who knows? Maybe it was but an “Easter egg” for how Lynch-oriented the Arby’s commercial was going to be.
On the heels of an iconic Arby’s on Sunset Boulevard closing (the one with the giant neon-worded cowboy hat), MacLachlan’s Lynchian homage to potato cakes might be just the thing to jumpstart the fast-food restaurant’s “career” again. Much as MacLachlan’s was by Blue Velvet. But, in this case, “the return” of something never tasted quite so good (ergo, endlessly unhealthy—as is also the way with Lynch-promoted menu items like pie and donuts).
Dune: Part Two, the upcoming sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 sci-fi epic based on the Frank Herbert novels, is releasing in just two weeks, but somehow the team behind it kept one major star’s involvement a total secret. During the February 15 world premiere in London, The Queen’s Gambit actor Anya Taylor-Joy appeared on the red carpet to confirm that she is, indeed, a member of the sequel’s cast. This came after an eagle-eyed Letterboxd user noticed that Dune: Part Two was listed under Taylor-Joy’s credits on the review aggregation app.
In Dune: Spice Wars The Spice Must Flow But Remember To Hydrate
Variety confirmed that Taylor-Joy is a part of the cast, which includes Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, Zendaya as Chani, Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha, and many more huge Hollywood stars. But, Variety refused to “spoil” who Taylor-Joy is playing, and it doesn’t appear that anyone else is willing to say who, either.
Except me. Dune novel spoilers below, but let’s be real, the book came out in 1965.
Anya Taylor-Joy is probably Alia Atreides in Dune: Part Two
First, an attempt at a brief Dune synopsis. In the far future, an interstellar society is comprised of noble houses whose fiefdoms are entire planets. The Atreides family, led by Duke Leto (played by Oscar Isaac in Dune: Part One), is ordered to take a harsh desert planet known as Arrakis as its new fief. Though the planet is virtually inhospitable, it is the only source of the highly sought after resource known as “spice,” a psychedelic drug that is used in space navigation. But as soon as the Atreides family arrives on Arrakis, it’s clear that they’ve walked into a trap set by the rival House Harkonnen, who wants to wipe them out entirely.
As seen in Dune: Part One, the Harkonnens’ plan results in Leto’s death, and forces Paul and his mother, Jessica, to flee into the desert. It’s there that they come into contact withe the Fremen, Arrakis’ native people who have learned how to thrive (not just survive) on the harsh planet. There’s a whole messianic thing that I can’t even begin to get into, but what’s important here in regards to Taylor-Joy is this: Jessica is pregnant, and submits to the “spice agony,” a ritual where she takes a deadly amount of spice. Because she’s with child, the baby is exposed to the spice in utero, and is born possessing all the knowledge of a fully grown adult.
Alia Atreides looks and sounds like a child, but is a full-blown Reverend Mother, the highest tier attainable amongst the Bene Gesserit (a matriarchal order that has religious and political power). In David Lynch’s Dune from 1984, Alia is played by a child actor, but I think (especially when seeing what Taylor-Joy wore to the premiere, and how it compares to what Alia wears in Lynch’s film) that Villeneuve has figured out a way to present Alia as an adult.
As the incestuously intertwined relationship between Jack Antonoff, Lana Del Rey and the former’s new wife, Margaret Qualley, intensifies, perhaps it’s to be expected that the trio would appear in a music video together. This one being for Bleachers’ latest single, “Alma Mater,” a generic-sounding number that reeks of the early 2010s tones and trends during which Bleachers first came to prominence (as did Antonoff’s other band, fun., for that matter). In fact, Antonoff’s mind has clearly been on that “era” based on the production he offered up for Taylor Swift’s Midnights as well.
With “Alma Mater,” he finally decided to spare some of that sound for himself, with the help of Del Rey contributing on vocals. The video, directed by Alex Lockett (who also directed the cringeworthy video for Bleachers’ “Modern Girl”), seems to want to make the song more interesting than it is (much as Taylor Swift’s video for “Look What You Made Me Do” wanted to for the song of the same name). So it is that Antonoff takes a different tack from the visual banality of “Modern Girl,” the first single from Bleachers’ forthcoming self-titled album. Thus, the “Lynchian flair” (or rather, wannabe Lynchian flair) of “Alma Mater,” which has a much slower, downbeat tempo than the plucky, overly exuberant “Modern Girl.” And, since David Lynch movies are, in the end, all about the filth and disgustingness beneath the surface of “squeaky clean” Americana, his “vibe” has often been compared to Del Rey’s, who, in her own way, speaks to the moral decay of American society. Antonoff, not so much.
Nonetheless, it is he who is featured driving around the streets of New Jersey in his convertible at night as we see bright signs for Rutgers Business School, Checkers and McDonald’s (Wawa, too, will eventually cameo, what with being name-checked in the song). In the next scene, he encounters two “twin-like” (in that they’re wearing the same suit) men carrying a full glass of red wine each. As Antonoff passes them in his vehicle, they raise their glasses in a surreal moment that smacks less of two drunkards and more of a New Jersey version of the Grady twins in The Shining. Either that, or zombies trying to approach Antonoff so that they can pair their wine with his flesh.
Less “sinister” (in quotes because none of it is actually sinister at all, only tries to be) scenes show up as Antonoff also encounters a man carrying his dog like a baby and a woman holding a plant at a bus stop as she faintly sways back and forth as though in a trance. That’s what it is to live in the bowels of America, after all. If you don’t impose the mental blackout upon yourself, it will be imposed upon you anyway. For there’s not much in the way of mental stimulation, with the entire structure and design of the United States ostensibly built to mind-numb. In another moment, Antonoff sees a dog sitting alone at the corner of the sidewalk before it runs away, almost in slow-motion, after being bathed in the car’s headlight for too long.
Elsewhere, Antonoff’s fellow bandmates appear as construction workers bursting into saxophone solos. We’re then given a brief instant of the car being shot from behind as it barrels through the darkness of an empty highway, also harkening us back to, what else, Lynch’s Lost Highway. And yet, there’s another movie inspiration one might not immediately think of at play throughout “Alma Mater”: Valley Girl. Specifically, that scene where Nicolas Cage as Randy drives through the boulevards of Hollywood with Julie (Deborah Foreman) in tow and sees similar sights/people, many of whom he shouts out to directly in acknowledgement of knowing them…or at least viewing them as a kindred spirit.
As for Del Rey, her own appearance is as muted as it is in the song. Though she has plenty of “New Jersey cred” after spending some time living in a trailer park there before her rise to fame at the end of 2011. Even if, in 2012, she told a French interviewer she had never seen a David Lynch movie…something that has since been corrected, but still, it was rather affronting at the time. Antonoff, meanwhile, continues on his surreal drive, now seeing a gray-haired man making out with a red-haired woman in the bright spotlight of a street lamp above them, cutting through the darkness.
For Antonoff’s “ultimate” moment of surreality, he sees his wife, Qualley (who Del Rey wrote a song about on Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd), crossing the road at Freedom Drive. Dressed in cream/beige-colored, flowy clothing, she looks more like a Hamptons dweller/pottery glazer than someone you might see roaming the streets of New Jersey at night. But one supposes that only adds to the “bizarreness” intended by the video.
Upon seeing this “vision of love,” Antonoff at last parks his car on the side of the road, as though he finally found what he was looking for on this long, gas-wasting, needlessly fossil fuel-emitting journey. And that “thing” was Margaret, who smiles sweetly in the final frame while looking like her face was replicated from Billie Eilish’s. A detail that’s less Lynchian than it is further proof of the “we’re living in a simulation” theory. Not to mention the idea that everything (and everyone) is a copy of a copy of a copy. Including this video that fancies itself much “weirder” than it is.
At a glance, Holly Macve might be easily mistaken for “Lizzy Grant.” That is to say, a blonde version of Lana Del Rey. The Irish chanteuse also has many of the same influences and inspirations as Del Rey, who also discovered Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen early on in life. Macve, however, seemed to end up adopting the country twang that Del Rey lately appears to want for herself (as made evident by things like collaborating with Nikki Lane, often wearing cowboy boots and her tour of shitkicker America for Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd). This country lilt of Macve might stem from being additionally influenced by Gillian Welch, known for her melange of Appalaichan, country and bluegrass stylings.
Del Rey, too, has veered further in this direction in the albums that have come after 2017’s Lust For Life, itself a harbinger of some kind of musical shift (manifest in songs like “Coachella – Woodstock In My Mind” and “Beautiful People, Beautiful Problems”) that was bound to take Del Rey away from the baroque pop genre she had established herself with. Indeed, Norman Fucking Rockwell would come out two years later and signal the complete shift that was to take form on 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club. Which, yes, featured some of her most country-sounding songs yet, including “Breaking Up Slowly” featuring Nikki Lane (who also gets name-checked on “Blue Banisters”).
As for Macve, her own songs smack of the Del Rey persuasion, with titles like “Daddy’s Gone,” “Lonely Road” and “Beauty Queen.” The latter arrived earlier this year, and offers cover art and an accompanying font that looks entirely cut and pasted from the LDR oeuvre of aesthetics. Shot in black and white, the photo shows Macve, in her modest tiara, posing against the backdrop of a stage curtain. The letters spelling out the single and her name appear to be an almost exact replica of the Lust for Life font. And yes, it was Del Rey who once dressed up as a Carrie-inspired prom queen for a magazine photoshoot and sang lyrics like, “Done my hair up real big, beauty queen style.”
Later, Del Rey would trade her beleaguered beauty queen/Lolita persona for something more “adult.” This occurred mainly by talking about white picket fences and “getting older.” For example, on 2019’s “Venice Bitch,” Del Rey notes, “Back, back in the garden/We’re getting high now because we’re older.” Not sure how getting high relates to getting older unless, of course, it means one can’t do the same hard drugs they used to as a youth. Other suburban leitmotifs on Norman Fucking Rockwell show up during “How To Disappear,” on which Del Rey sings, “I’ve got a kid and two cats in the yard.” That final part of it being a clear nod to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House” via the lyrics, “Our house/Is a very, very, very fine house/With two cats in the yard.” This 1970 “ode to countercultural domestic bliss,” as it has been called, is right up Del Rey’s alley in terms of marrying the kind of oppressive “white picket” suburbia Richard Yates wrote about in Revolutionary Road and the hippie-dippy L.A. kind that Graham Nash described as a result of living with Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon.
Because yes, on the one hand Del Rey is known for romanticizing suburban life, but on the other, she’s known for peppering it with the Lynchian tinges of imagery that indicate something sinister lies beneath that manicured facade. Macve is quick to establish this trope in the woeful opening verse: “It only takes one week to fall out of love/With a woman like me/For a man like you/It only takes one look to catch a stranger’s eye/And imagine a life, flashing colors while I’m blue.” The use of Del Rey’s favorite color to mention in song would ordinarily refer to something “happy” in a Lana number (e.g., “Out of the black/Into the blue,” “Paint me happy in blue”), but here it refers to becoming “lusterless” in the eyes of one’s domestic boo. Macve, like Del Rey, then subverts the idea of suburban living as an existence filled with happiness and contentment by lamenting, “I’ll sit back in my suburban house/While the nights close in and the leaves turn brown/I’m not waiting for what you think I am/I know love comes and goes, love comes and goes.” Although one might assume the coming and going of love isn’t as common in suburbia because of the enduring idea of a “healthy,” monogamous relationship, the reality is, it’s perhaps even easier to fall out of romantic, “can’t live without each other” love in that setting. As the vanilla, oatmeal existence wears someone with more avid sexual predilections down (why do you think the swingers trend of the 1970s had such a spike in suburbia?).
Del Rey enters the conversation on the second verse, crooning, “It only takes one turn to see a clear open road/Pretty white mountaintops, so many places to call home/I’m only just behind, but I’m already out of view/You always said snow looked so perfect whеn it’s untouched and new.” Once more, the connotation relates to being a suburban housewife, of sorts. No longer attractive or “shiny” to the husband she managed to pull all those years ago (or even all those months ago). To enhance the melancholia of that bleak realization, frequent Del Rey collaborator Zach Dawes’ production on the track heightens the undeniable sadness to the piano-infused ballad. Indeed, Dawes was a piano player as a child before switching to bass so he could join a band—thus, he knows a little something about composing with the former instrument.
By the end of the forlorn three-minute, forty-nine-second track, if one was having second thoughts about the single girl city life they chose in lieu of suburban living with a nuclear family and a two-car garage, Macve and Del Rey will surely have cured you of that. Unless, of course, you realize it’s okay to help start a new demographic in suburbia: the single woman. One content to sit out on her porch drinking white wine while her [insert large breed of dog here] sits faithfully beside her. A concept best conveyed by Macve and Del Rey when they sing together in the final verse: “I’ll sit back in my suburban house/No whitе picket fence is gonna save me now/I’m not waiting, I know you’ve made your mind/And love comes and goes, love comes and goes.” But a two-story home with a yard that you “own” (mortgage or not), well, that’s forever (though you still might want to install a bomb shelter in case).
First released in 2021, indie shooter Nightmare Reaper finally left Early Access this year, and that’s when I finally played it. And boy oh boy, am I happy I stumbled upon this under-the-radar FPS! Nightmare Reaper might look a lot like other, similar retro-inspired shooters—like the previously mentioned Cultic—that have become more common in recent years, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a roguelike with smart level progression, awesome music, and hundreds of powerful and zany weapons like whips and spell books. It’s a weird game, too. But in a good way. For example, to improve your character’s stats you play through different, elaborate Game Boy-like mini-games. It’s weird, it’s sometimes creepy, and it’s only $25 on Steam. Go play Nightmare Reaper! — Zack Zwiezen
It’s Black Friday, the day on which the entirety of planet Earth entirely takes leaves of its senses and spends all its money on stuff it doesn’t need for 5 percent less than it would have cost yesterday. Planet Earth this year has bought itself an entirely new moon, even though the old one’s fine, just because this one has Bluetooth. So let’s distract ourselves from all that by discovering 12 amazing new games.
As is ever the case with Indiegeddon, I am not vouching for these games, as I’ve not played any of them. Instead, I just think they look interesting, exciting, frightening, or so damned weird I couldn’t not write about them. Most of them aren’t out yet, but the most useful thing you can do for the developers is give them a wishlist on Steam: it makes a big difference.
There’s bound to be at least one game here that has you checking its release date and wishing it were sooner, unless you’re that one person in the greys who feels the need to tell the whole universe that he actually thinks they all look terrible. We feel sorry for you, that one person. Just pity, really. For everyone else, woo-hoo, let’s get going!
Stuffer Fox
Falling Frontier
Every time I see a space-based RTS that looks as cool as Falling Frontier, I think, “This will be the one! This will be the game where I conquer my fear of menus!” And then I fail. But maybe it will be this one, because damn, it looks brilliant. Four years in the making already, by only one human, this looks like it came from a team of 100 at Paradox. Just watch those spaceships asplode! It’s all about taking over a procedurally generated star system, with intel and logic as its primary factors. But then you can also design your ships, raid enemies, and do all that amazing space-strat stuff I wish I’d grown a brain for.
You, a squirrel called Bill who’s great at crafting, stumble upon an alien baby in your garden who needs your help! It’s a tale as old as time itself. The result, Bill, is a simulation game in which you must craft, farm and organize everything the baby alien needs to survive. And it’s all to explore the concepts of recycling. Which is the weirdest elevator pitch, and yet looks like it could be adorable.
Get your head around this one: A 1 to 4-player couch co-op game about attempting to maintain a spaceship in calamitous circumstances, but also in splitscreen where you see both the inside and outside of your ship at the same time. Yikes. People will be able to take on different roles on the ship, from captain to janitor, as everything goes wrong on board while trying to defend yourself from enemies. It’s all about chaos and multitasking, or as I prefer to describe it, failing as a team.
Quartet looks like an incredibly faithful classic-style JRPG, but with a new twist on its turn-based battle system. Indeed, there are eight characters in that thumbnail above, but you battle with four at a time, able to tag characters in and out as appropriate. It’s also a quartet of stories, four to choose from, played in any order you wish, and of course in an Octotraveller way, they intertwine as you play through them all. It’s an ambitious project for a five-person indie team, but it sure looks like they’re doing it.
That man has a very tiny head. That said, this is Dreambound, a visual novel that’s just had a successful Kickstarter (raising over $30,000), affording everyone the opportunity to watch handsome young men stare wistfully at one another. It’s booooy looooove. As well as that, there are also mysterious deaths, dreams that invade reality, and demons from the past to deal with, for main character Noah, in what’s already looking like a very pleasingly drawn and written adventure.
Coo, look at this! It looks like that all-too-rarely explored sweet spot between point-and-click adventure and RPG. Sky Of Tides is a sci-fi story in a civilization on the brink of war, telling the personal tale of Rin, searching for her missing father, and, you know, saving the planet Numen. (NUMEN!) It promises that your decisions will determine your character, as you explore the isometric world, and honestly, I want to be playing it already.
Elsewhere in space… Terra Invicta is another super-deep space sim, this one immediately reminding me of Stellaris, but with a far more specific focus: Earth. This is from a group of modders, best known for XCOM: Long War. The success of that mod sent them pro, and Terra Invicta is their first commercial game, a geopolitical space exploration sim, where you’re preventing (or even aiding) an alien invasion of our home planet. The game’s been out in early access for a couple of months, and is proving very popular with Steam reviewers, thanks to its complexity and scale.
An Arkanoid-like, but the blocks you hit shoot back at you! How is this not already a thing. (I think you’ll find, actually, that there was an example of this on the Amiga Rupture 3400 in Germany, in the parallel dimension of Raaaaaaa – That Guy.) The Blocks Shoot At You looks like such an obvious idea, but I’ve never seen it before: Bullet Hell Breakout. This looks like it could be my new obsession, at which I am endlessly terrible.
I love it when I can’t quite tell if it’s a video-nasty trailer or a retro FPS trailer. That’s a whole scene right now. Phobolis fits right in, its scratchy trailer at first looking like a ruined VHS video that will curse your grandchildren, then cutting to a grimy, old-school shooter. You can pick up the alpha test build of the game via Itch for a buck, or wait until the year after next when they plan to release.
Call me a sucker, but I can’t resist a game about a space cat detective who investigates a crime on an interstellar cruise ship populated by sentient carpets. As Domino, said detective cat, you explore the ship in third-person, attempting to catch a jewel thief. It’s presented so superbly down-to-earth, given the ridiculous premise, as you’ll see in that full half hour of the game in the video above.
I can’t write one of these without including a card game—there are laws. Zero Division is a cyberpunk approach, that promises to mix Magic: The Gathering with Slay The Spire. You pick three characters from a selection of nine, each of which has their own deck of 40 cards. And set deck sizes mean no deck thinning! Woo! What grabs me is the combination of cards and epic 3D monsters and robots flinging their arms and weapons around on the other side of the board. There’s a demo due in spring ‘23, and I’m definitely going to be playing it.
Always finish on an existential non-linear psychedelic platformer, that’s what my grandmother taught me. Not one to refuse sage advice, here’s Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity by Sam Atlas, creator of the 2022 IGF Nuovo nomination, Space Hole 2020. Extreme Evolution looks just so spectacularly fucked up, like if David Lynch had made The Lawnmower Man, and I think I’m going to be dreaming this brief trailer for the rest of my life. Oh god that spider virus thing.
Credit: Courtesy The West Hollywood Edition
