Hotel Room (1993)

David Lynch’s opening narration justifying the premise of Hotel Room, a failed TV anthology series HBO dumped onto the airwaves in January 1993, is almost self-parodic, not of Lynch himself, but of the very 1990s trend of anthology films set in hotels. They are, I guess, interesting spaces, though I suspect that’s more true if you’re the kind of person — a famous film director, maybe — who makes frequent use of them.

In Hotel Room, the hotel room is not itself an interesting space, but Lynch nearly succeeds in making it so. Working with Barry Gifford and a cast of recurring players (Harry Dean Stanton! Freddie Jones! Crispin Glover!), his two attempts at making meaning out of self-imposed limitation are interesting, but slight compared to his films and his episodes of Twin Peaks. They also feel cheap, and not in the pleasurable, tawdry way Gifford’s scripts often are. He hasn’t figured out the room and never really gets a chance to, so “Tricks” and “Blackout” feel half-baked and stagey, with little room to dream.

“Getting Rid of Robert,” which was neither directed by Lynch nor written by Gifford (instead you have Elvira: Mistress of the Dark helmer and SNL segment producer James Signorelli directing with novelist Jay McInerney writing), really shows the limitations of Hotel Room as it was intended — here’s where it feels like Lynch is being parodied, specifically Twin Peaks, but it’s so tonally adrift that it weirdly feels like a precursor to Sex and the City before exploding into violence. Its detachment from the primordial weirdness of the space Lynch tries to strike early feels accidental. Lynch’s, by comparison feels almost self-protective. It’s interesting, but only just.