Even the most die-hard David Lynch fans will admit that his movies make no sense. Terms like “linear,” “temporal continuity” and “narrative structure” are probably the last words that come to mind when you think of a Lynch storyline. So perhaps the only thing weirder than a David Lynch film is an opera based on a David Lynch film.
“The existential, unavoidable question concerning doubtfulness and the foundations of human existence,” explains Olga Neuwirth, when the young Austrian composer is questioned about what prompted her adaptation of Lynch’s Lost Highway. “A voyeuristic view of things oversees and unifies everything. This view inspired me to reflect upon what this could mean musically. It is a way of looking for something that cannot be uttered.”
While the manner in which the plot unfolds is entirely surreal, Neuwirth’s opera, on which she collaborated with 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature Winner Elfriede Jelinek, doesn’t stray far from the screenplay of Lynch’s 1997 cult classic: Fred Madison suspects his wife of cheating on him so he kills her but has no recollection of doing so. He goes to prison, where he mysteriously transforms into a 24-year-old auto mechanic who ends up having an affair and becoming dangerously entangled with a woman who is nearly identical to Madison’s deceased wife. Add to this a few bizarre motifs like an omnipresent pale-faced creep and cryptic videotapes of Madison and his wife asleep in their bed, and you have yourself a standard Lynchian nightmare—which Neuwirth conveys using live musicians, singers, actors, electronics and video. She says the film’s “fugue-like” structure and haunting registers of color, language, sound and time make it highly suitable for musical theater: “There’s no beginning, no middle, no end. Innumerable spaces inside and outside. The everyday alongside the mystical. All human utterances, from a howl to a shout, from laughter to despair, exist alongside one another. The dimension of phantasm as hope, the power of disguise; I could go on and on.”
Feb. 23-24, Miller Theatre, 116th St. (at Broadway), 212-854-7799; 8, $35.
