You can think David Lynch is a mad genius who redefined cinema for the post-realist age, or you can think he’s a dream-addled hack who distracts from weak plots with lots of trippy flourishes, but you can’t deny he’s cool. “Cool” is relative, but it’s not a value judgment; it’s hardly different from “rich” or “book-smart.” David Lynch, with his indelible weirdness and unmistakable shock of hair, is cool. And if he’s personally designed a private members’ club and named it Silencio, after the one in Mullholland Drive, and if this club is in Paris, in a place where Emile Zola wrote and Molire was buried, it will be, as the French say, super-cool. Obviously, we have to go. This is made easier by the fact that we are actually in Paris–we being me, my world-best friend who has moved here, and the first girl I loved in Toronto–for my birthday. I am old enough. Joining us is a favourite couple on week-long vacation, and they wanna go too, and while we feel there’s some element of ridiculousness in our venture, it’s mitigated by the fact we’re already in Paris. On a Saturday night. For fun. So, you know, we’ve crossed that bridge. Membership to Silencio, which opened earlier this month and has–I hear–yet to be graced by Lynch himself, costs between 420 and 1500 euros a year. Euros aren’t what they used to be, but this is still what I’d call too much money. After midnight, though, they let in the hoi polloi and by the time we leave the Carmen’s in Pigalle it is well after midnight. I really want to add “in Paris,” but you’d stop reading, and then you’d miss an even better opportunity to hate me. Anyway, we go. Rue de Montmartre is historically fancy, but now it’s a lot like King between Spadina and Bathurst. Across the street from no. 142, the address of Silencio, socialist leader Jean Jaurs was shot while trying to stop the Second World War. Now you’d be more likely to get shot trying to steal someone’s escort. But really, it’s not dangerous at all. We get out of a taxi and enter the fray. Sixty people are pressed up outside a seemingly impenetrable shield–which might just be a fence–outside a building that more resembles a bunker, painted black. A security guard watches, impassive. There is no line; this isn’t London. There is a list, held by a brunette with a wicked moue, but no one looks at it. No one gets in. Then comes a doorman who resembles a famous person–it’s on the tip of my tongue–ah, yes. Mr. Toad. He scans the crowd leerily ‘ere plucking three probable models from nearest the fence, and I understand how it works. Well, I may be older but I’m not dead yet. I summon up all the powers contained in messy hair, M.A.C.’s best red lipstick and a semi-sheer shirt, and I give him eyes (not sure which eyes, but definitely eyes) until he looks back. “You,” he says. “How many?” I hold up four fingers, then point to the girls, the boys. He shakes his head. “Only girls.” At which point I should spit and walk away, probably, but I am so beyond embarrassment at this point, and tell him softly it’s my birthday (yes, I did) and I need all my friends. He leers again, seems not to find any better prospects, and says okay. This is all social, no justice, but there’s no time to wonder what Zola would do. We’re in. And… it’s dark. The club lies down six wide, spiralling sets of stairs, like some kinda minimalist dungeon. Inside, it’s more like a set of interconnected caves. The walls are curved, like tunnels, and lined with hundreds upon hundreds of small blocks, each hand-painted in gold-leaf. If you have read a European newspaper in the last, oh, six months, this is stunning to think about. But who’s thinking here? Let’s get gin-and-sodas with individual pricey bottles of soda the bartender gives you so you can customize your cocktail and he doesn’t actually have to do work! In the next room, the largest, we settle uneasily into chairs made by cubist spiders, probably. Further in, people are beginning to sway. At the end of the room, there’s a cabaret-style stage; this is the only point at which I remember, oh right, Mulholland Drive. In the whole room there are maybe 10 black people, and eight of them are on this stage, performing. Just like Paris in the ’20s, guys. Kinda racist. Perhaps Lynch’s design is working, because I start to feel like I’m playing an empty version of myself in a long foreign film. We’re standing next to the stage, unsure, and then we’re beckoned up to dance with the performers, and we do. The girl I’m dancing with says her name is Justine. I want her to like me. She says I’m a good dancer; close enough. It’s the most fun I will have. Later we smoke inside–a possibility that always, lamely, thrills me. The smoking room is the smallest of the caves, and is carpeted, which is like, great idea guys. Some short-ish man who declares himself an artist and has a generically French name gives me a light, talks about nothing. I ask who designed the club. He stares blankly. I stare back. “David Lynch?” he says. I stare even blanklier. “Right,” I say, “but who actually did the work?” He still looks confused; must be that tricky concept, “work.” We go. We’ll come back again. And that’s all it is, this dreamplace. Coming. Going. Smoking. Dancing. Looking. Being looked at. Like any other club. It is beautiful as all hell, and expectedly strange in places (my favourite cave is like a deep enchanted forest, with faux-birch trees and a smoked-glass pool of a window), but clubs are not clubs. Clubs are people. And the people here seem like the shimmeringest mirage. I notice that no bodies touch, the way they inevitably do in the sweaty, choked hours of club nights everywhere, and I wonder if that’s because they know they’re not real here; they’d disappear on contact. In the end, passably drunk on stolen bottle-service vodka, we escape into a street we’d never visit if we lived here. I wonder who could induce me to come back. Lynch himself, maybe. __ Sarah Nicole Prickett is the Toronto Standard Style Critic.
