‘Power Rangers’: A Positively Lynchian Experience

David Lynch and the Power Rangers. What do these two things have in common, you may ask? At first glance, not much.

But about midway through the new Power Rangers film, I started to have those Blue Velvet feelings. It was the experience of witnessing something so bizarrely camp that it blurred the line between good and bad. One could no longer discern any clear boundaries between the purposefully arch or patently terrible.

Folks of a certain age will remember the Power Rangers as a goofy-looking Saturday morning staple, five bland teenagers in primary-coloured Lycra suits and Daft Punk helmets who martial-farted their way through battles with rubbery monsters loosed upon the world by Rita Repulsa, a woman with horns growing out of her head. The series, based on the Japanese original called Super Sentai, spawned about a billion different iterations and inspired stupid children everywhere to karate chop their friends and enemies. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before it was reconstituted into a feature film and inflicted upon the poor old unsuspecting world.

In the tiny town of Angel Grove (actually Kamloops, B.C.) our world savers are assembled in detention.* There is Jason (Dacre Montgomery), former football hero, with an overly controlling father and a big fat chip on his shoulder. Or maybe that’s his head? Since he is a nice white boy, Jason gets to be the Red Ranger and the leader of the gang. The rest of the crew includes a boy genius named Billy (RJ Cyler), who is somewhere on the autism spectrum; mean girl Kimberly (Naomi Scott), with a penchant for vicious gossip; a rando kid named Zack (Ludi Lin) who lives by the railroad tracks; and finally a punchy little chickie named Trini (Becky G) who comes out of the closet mid-film.

Detailing the plot makes about as much sense as trying to assign meaning to the words on the back of a cereal box. But suffice to say, this hodgepodge group of pouty teens are apparently destined for greatness. All of this is kindly detailed to the new rangers by a space alien named Zordon (played by Bryan Cranston’s giant-pincushion head) and his wisecracking sidekick robot (voiced by Bill Hader). Zordon, who is inexplicably stuck in a wall, gravely informs the teenagers that they must earn their Power Ranger armour and prepare for the coming battle with world-destroying Rita (Elizabeth Banks).

The film looks like it was made while director Dean Israelite was busily texting on his phone the entire time. Things randomly happen or don’t for no apparent reason. There are dinosaur robots, a huge gold blob monster, a snatch of the world’s worst theme song and the usual world-crushing, soul-destroying medley of boots to the head karate moves. The only person who seems to be having a gay old time is Banks, who struts about commanding her shiny behemoth to destroy Krispy Kreme franchises and stealing the gold teeth from old hobos. Did you get all of that? You don’t really need to. The only thing that may give you pause is that the film cost over a hundred million dollars to make, and there are seven more of these monstrosities planned for future release. Maybe we’ll all be dead before that happens.

So, what of David Lynch you ask? I’m getting there.

There are a number of moments in Power Rangers when the painfully stilted dialogue and the sudden random arrival of bizarre and the inexplicable make you feel as if you might be losing your mind. Maybe it’s the experience of descending into some netherworld beneath small town America where an enormous pinhead addresses you in the voice of a character from Breaking Bad. Or perhaps it is the sight of pretty teenagers, with dead eyes, delivering speeches about the power of unity while duking it out with what resembles a giant golden dildo. Or maybe it is Elizabeth Banks channeling Dennis Hopper-grade madness whilst eating Krispy Kreme donuts. Whatever you want to call this intersection of ordinary Americana with grade-A insanity, I blame Lynch for setting it loose in the world.

Imagine what Lynch could do with a hundred million dollar budget, or maybe don’t. The mind boggles and then snaps into a million squiggly sperm-like pieces.

If you would like an origin story about how the filmmaker came to be, then David Lynch: The Art Life is a fine place to start — beginning as it does with Lynch talking about his childhood, his troubled teen years, and his art school days. Narrated by the man himself, the film perambulates at a measured pace, stopping here and there for meandering anecdotes about the filmmaker’s parents, friendships and early love affairs.

Whatever his facility as a genius type, credited with creating the greatest film of the 21st century, Lynch is not much of a raconteur. His stories often sputter and die, or simply wander off into silence. Still, he is nice to look at, often wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke, his silver cockscomb of hair standing at attention. Say what you will about the man and his narrative style, he is damn sexy.

The documentary has an easy way with its subject, who is filmed in his L.A. studio in the practice of actually making art. Accompanied by his young daughter Lula, Lynch smokes, talks, smears paint on canvases, and mostly remembers the seminal experiences that informed his creative sensibilities. It is curious to see some of these early memories show up later in his films. A particularly vivid encounter with a naked bloodied woman who wandered onto the street where little Lynch was playing with his brother bears a striking resemblance to the scene in Blue Velvet when Dorothy Vallens (played by Isabella Rossellini) stumbles blank-eyed and bloody into the street where Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) lives. 

So, too, do Lynch’s teen delinquent days bear an uncanny similarity to the Twin Peaks cast of lost teenagers, doomed to dark fantasy and primal urges. For Lynch, it is the creative imagination, the immersive act of making your own world, transmogrifying all manner of darkness, sexual violence, and chaos into art that is ultimately a redemptive act. 

The emergence of the young Lynch as a fully fleshed cineaste came about with the birth of Eraserhead. It is here, in creating a world entirely of his imagination filled with sex and dread and the prison of family and responsibility, that he forged his particular style. Recounting it, he says, “What I loved about it was the world, and having be my own little place, and building it exactly like I wanted, for hardly any money, it just took time. It just was so beautiful. Everything about it, everything about it...” He drifts off and we drift along with him, suspended in silver clouds of smoke.

The Art Life, as well as some of Lynch’s more outré offerings, including Eraserhead, Inland Empire, as well as a selection of his short films are part of the Vancity theatre’s Lynchian series next week in Vancouver.

Which brings me curiously back to where we began. Power Rangers is by no stretch a good film, and some would argue that it has no business being mentioned in the same breath as the work of Lynch. That is probably true, but the world is a curious place, and random things have a way of pushing you hither and thither. Strangely enough, this dumb film had the quality of reminding me just how much David Lynch has changed the world, since he entered it some 71 odd years ago. He unleashed the weird, shall we say, like a David Dementa.

It is a fitting moment to reassess his influence, with a new chapter of Twin Peaks about to re-enter our collective unconscious. I can’t help but wonder if some future budding cineaste, prompted by the gonzo technicolour lunacy of Power Rangers might somewhere, far down the road, make even stranger films than Lynch himself. It remains to be seen.

*Story corrected April 23.