Ghost Operas

“I think that to write the music for that scene was also his way to tell it…You almost have the impression that his script for the scene is the colour and the sound, that’s it.” Bertrand Bonello is here referring to a scene from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), in which the doomed Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) sways to a sinister, druggy rhythm on a roadhouse dance floor bathed in red light. The bar band is playing Lynch’s own composition “The Pink Room” (one of the few Twin Peaks tracks not written primarily by Angelo Badalamenti), and the imposingly bassy and tremolo-soaked performance overwhelms every other element of the soundtrack. It’s like a glimpse into Laura’s haunted soul: there seems only to be that throbbing song, and that infernal light. “[Lynch is] truly a filmmaker who has found his own sound,” Bonello continues, “and he’s found it all alone.”

With Grasshopper Film’s limited-edition release of , we are now better able to assess to what degree Bonello himself has found his own sound. “Music is there as soon as I start working on the script, (2011); in (2014), the designer’s model and muse Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade) whipping her hair back and forth to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “I Put a Spell on You”; or, well, Willow Smith’s enervating “Whip My Hair” used to score scenes of explosive carnage in (2016).