Jennifer Lynch’s frankly rather ill thought out debut is a rather a punchline. Upon release it was rather widely condemned as the ultimate expression of Hollywood’s misogyny problem (which feels like it’s probably kind of a stretch). Latterly, when I was a teenager, it’d largely moved on to being a joke, a sort of ‘how did this get made?’ sort of thing. A movie about a sexy amputee? Madness. Later still, it’s just really remembered as being a bad film however, though these earlier stigmata (as is apparently the plural of stigma) stick around.

Incidentally, the history behind the film is an odd one. Lynch originally apparently didn’t intend to direct, having not made any films prior (though she had worked as assistant on Blue Velvet), but it just sort of happened that she was thrown into the deep end of making a moderately budgeted feature film for wide release, while marketing hyped up her parentage (because god knows that tends to go well as a marketing strategy).

So, what’s the film’s deal? In reality, it’s nowhere near as bad, either in quality or offensiveness, as its reputation. Certainly, the thing’s highly flawed, chock full of writing sins and obvious symbolism; all very inelegant; but, at the same time, it’s a rather fascinating and compelling watch. Outside of the weird complaints that the film somehow endorses the idea of cutting a woman’s limbs off and holding her prisoner in your house until she falls in love with you, which… seriously? The film is pretty unsubtle about Julian Sands’ character being disgusting, and that he’s literally objectifying the woman he professes to love. Anyway, outside of those complaints, there seem to be complaints about the unsympathetic nature of the lead characters. Nick (Sands) is, as I just said, rather a creep. Sands plays him so wet that it’s actually rather gross; he’s practically Jacob Rees Mogg; and Helena’s (Fenn) revulsion seems entirely understandable. While the film aims to make you comprehend him, it doesn’t seem to want you to sympathise with him too much. Did people interpret having stuff to suggest he’s the way he is as a bid to make him not the villain of the piece, to make him a legit romantic hero? Helena, the complaint is that she’s a) a massive bitch, and b) kind of a cypher. The bitch thing is kind of an odd point. Surely if she were an all-round swell girl suffering meekly at the hands of the doctor, the accusations of misogyny thrown at the film would be more accurate? The fact that while even at his supposed mercy, Helena continues to berate and humiliate Nick at every turn, furious at the whole affair, rather than ditching her femme fatale persona the instant things take a turn seems more on point. The cypher question is perhaps more pertinent; we actually learn very little about Helena. She is a sexy lady whose interests include making the beast with two backs (but not with Dr Nick, who is terrible in the sack), and having limbs. Fenn does the work to give implications about Helena’s character, but in terms of concrete facts, there ain’t much. An argument could be made however that that is precisely the point; the doctor’s into the Helena that he’s created in his mind, not so much in the one who actually exists. Which I guess ties into the controversial ending, wherein the film commits one of the cardinal sins of writing, but in a certain light can’t not do so. The film’s old enough that I guess I can just say that huge swathes of it turn out to be a dream. Frankly there’s bits and pieces to suggest this beforehand, though I suppose some are perhaps somewhat opaque; Lynch highlights the male fantasy element of the sex scenes as being supposed to hint at it the non-reality of the situation, though the fact that films tend to portray sex in such a manner anyway doesn’t really help that impression. As I say however, it kind of has to end in such a manner, not simply because in the Lynch household dreams are deemed instructive (Ms Lynch mentions such in interview, and to be fair quite a few of her old man’s films pull this as well, albeit typically with more grace than here), but because otherwise it really would be a film about a dude cutting off a woman’s limbs and keeping her hostage ‘til she falls in love with him.