Close Your Eyes
The shot is only two minutes long, but it establishes everything Lynch needs to give his tricky fable credibility. He needs a world where the pure and the corrupt, the pristine and the grotesque, are inseparable, where every moment of comedy is tinged with the threat of violence and every image of perversion holds the seed of parody. Thanks to the camera’s magical subterranean dive at the very beginning, we know that Lynch will take us to the most horrid, discomfiting recesses of his imagination.
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Although the play’s tone is too confused to give Close Your Eyes psychological coherence, one scene offers a glimmer of the work’s potential. Rail gets a job doing housework for Mrs. Sandman, a position he takes for the sole purpose of scoring with her. He saunters about her living room, cavalierly moving in for the kill–and she turns the tables on him, holding him momentarily captive and emasculating him by granting his desires on her terms. The shock is real, as is the trauma experienced by both characters–the only two who seem to possess real emotional reserves.
