What happens when David Lynch produces a film directed by Werner Herzog with a supporting cast of cult classics Brad Dourif, Udo Kier and Grace Zabriskie?
The film could only be a self-referential homage to the underground heroes of the '70s who have tirelessly devised new variations on film narrative without resorting to the formal experimentation so many know and avoid as "film-art."
"My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done," finally released to DVD after limited theater circulation, is a triumph that will baffle most and requires explanation.
The plot is perfunctory at best. Willem Dafoe plays a police detective who is drawn into a hostage situation by a monopitched mother-murdering madman played by Michael Shannon. But Defoe's character really doesn't matter and he acts accordingly with a performance so obviously bad that it evokes the trademark Herzog grandeur of self-sacrifice for a greater artistic achievement.
Working in flash-backs, Defoe recomposes the events of the previous year when Brad McCullum began acting odd. Herzog is careful never to reveal what McCullum was like before his "break" with sanity, nor is he interested in portraying the abysmal descent or gradual revelation of madness. Instead, he uses McCullum, and Shannon's frozen Cro-Magnon scowl, for a series of monstrous tableaux which both parody the sublime and demonstrate how beauty can be manufactured by alienation. The uncanny can be beautiful; the fool's laugh is the sublime: the second unspoken credo of Lynch and Herzog.
Similarly, the film does not try to be a psychological profile of a killer. Although the film is loosely based on the true story of Mark Yavorsky, a Californian actor who over-identified with his role in "The Eumenides" and stabbed his mother 27 times, Shannon's acting style is a far cry from the naturalism anticipated in a psych-drama.
The genre as well as the actors function as an armature for Herzog to dress with quirky moments that have never been filmed before. McCullum and his bigoted, ostrich-farming uncle (played by Brad Dourif) stand by the stump of a fallen redwood.
Dourif explains how he once bred the largest rooster in the world and that his dream was to have this rooster chase the world's smallest man astride a Shetland pony around the world's largest tree.
Mythical opposites collapse into the absurd and quirkiness becomes a new aesthetic category. Considered alongside of Herzog's oeuvre, the film seems either a key, a renunciation, or a malicious laugh at the antics of Kinski astern the boat in Fitzcarraldo.
The committed fan might ask, "Does Lynch influence 'My Son?'" The answer is, yes, he does—his trademark set-design, flickering lights and uncomfortable domestic scenes are taken on by Herzog in a parodic clash of artistic egos which actually works.
Lynch also contributed a gem of the film, Grace Zabriskie, who plays McCullum's ill-fated, hovering mother. At several points in the film, Herzog employs a trick he developed in "Bad Lieutenant": holding a shot on an actor at unexpected moments, for instance, after the dialogue and scene would have typically ended. In these moments, Herzog documents facial tics with the eye of the zoologist, not the dramatist.
He never forgets his characters are also animals and he extracts better performances from entire bodies than modulating vocal cords.
"My Son, My Son" deromanticizes criminal insanity and makes the world itself seem insane. The film marks an interesting phase in Herzog's career and deserves to be watched by anyone who is teased through life by the unsettling nightmarish beauty of objects without an apparent use value.