Earlier today, Opera Chic was watching the fascinatingly incomprehensible INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch's new film, and while immersed in Laura Dern's rabbit-intensive nightmares she found herself thinking about something Shostakovich wrote about Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk (btw, if you haven't already, check out the lean, mean, terrifying literary source): "I feel empathy for her... She is surrounded by monsters".
Maybe it was the glum, industrial sets Lynch found in Poland, or the interesting bluish light that he used to drench the scariest moments of the film (there are a lot), or maybe it was Opera Chic's strictly Platonic crush on Lynch ("strictly" because, seriously, DL is a genius and lives in a Lloyd Wright (FLW's son) house and all...but he's sixty and smokes like a chimney and he's a big Weirdy McWeirdykins to boot!), but Opera Chic realized that Lynch would make a great opera director.
And he'd be especially awesome with Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth -- he'd give the opera the perfect tone of menace and nightmare. Lynch paints and takes photographs and writes music and he's already directed tons of ads, and choreographed a superlame Julee Cruise video. Opera Chic doesn't see why a smart, cool opera house should not commission him an opera staging. After all, don't we all complain that opera directors have few ideas? At least this man has A LOT of ideas. Some of them even good!
+++++ UPDATE1+++++
Aaron Hillis, film critic and scholar and NYC blogger, calls INLAND EMPIRE his favorite feature of 2006, and reviews creepy DL oldie Eraserhead
++++++ UPDATE2+++++
The Evening Class went to a DL lecture
++++++++UPDATE3++++++++
I was in Łódź, Poland. It's spelled L-O-D-Z, but it's pronounced "Wootch."
