Frustrating Filmographies #5: Errol Morris' The Dark Wind, Page 2

FRUSTRATING FILMOGRAPHIES

page 2

It's hard to judge The Dark Wind because it's not really a movie. Not a finished one anyway. Based on the film as it exists, it would seem that when Morris left/was locked out of the project, they just patched all the scenes together before dumping the final release onto video. There's really no other explanation for the kind of incompetence on display: the sound is awful, the transfer is horrendous (I watched it on both vhs and dvd) and - most glaringly - there are production problems within shots that were untouched in post. The framing ratio has obviously been ignored: the film was clearly shot for widescreen but cropped for full aspect ratio, thus revealing things in the frame that Czapsky didn't expect to appear in his lens. Mainly, dangling boom mics - and lots of 'em. Now, I'm not one to cite boom mic incursion as proof of inferior quality: everyone from Kurosawa to Ed Wood has fallen victim to these accidental cameos. But it's staggering to see this many visible mics outside a Dolemite movie. They pop up in literally almost every scene, including a crucial point during the big climatic confrontation when Chee has a gun pressed against his head and it's hard not to wonder why the sound guy doesn't help out by whacking the crooks with his pole. I mean for god's sake, there's an entire sequence in which the camera's top barn door is plainly visible!

It's tempting to blame this on the inexperienced crew that Morris was apparently forced to work with on set (apart from saving money, the idea to hire them may have been perceived by the producers as a way to get reservation locals involved and double as a charitable gesture towards critics within the Native American community), but these problems could easily have been dealt with. Just about every shot features an embarrassing amount of headroom (like, Garth Marenghi levels of headroom), and there's no reason not to have cropped them in post. The credited editor is Freeman A. Davies, who's cut every movie Walter Hill directed since The Warriors (even Hill's original version of Supernova, also featuring Lou Diamond Phillips, for which he ultimately didn't receive credit), so we're not dealing with amateurs here. Davies' only notable non-Hill head editor gig was on The Horse Whisperer, so I guess Redford must have had him in his pocket - I can't think of any other reason a professional editor would allow this kind of shoddy post-production to fly. Since by all accounts including his own Morris was definitely not involved in the final cut of the film, he's blameless when it comes to these technical mistakes that could have been corrected. But to anyone not familiar with how movies are shot and edited - or, for that matter, not familiar with what a talented composer of images and technically saavy filmmaker Morris is - it makes it look like the director simply didn't know what he was doing. It feels like a waste of time to even point out how lousy the film looks when Morris wasn't at fault and the post-production process was so clearly a rushed job, but it just makes the movie so impossible even to look at, despite a number of obviously well-conceived and executed set-ups such as one where a giant herd of sheep run from one side of the frame to the next behind two people having a conversation. If the picture had been correctly color-coded and transferred, and if there wasn't a boom mic at the top of the image, it would have looked amazing enough to ignore the fact that nothing the characters are talking about is very interesting.

Most of the movie isn't. The poor quality of production almost becomes a secondary concern next to the script's fundamentally bad storytelling. The first fifteen minutes of the movie sets up a windmill vandal, bootleggers in a pickup truck, a mutilated body, a crashed plane with one dead pilot whose wife will come looking for answers, an additional body at the crash site, corrupt feds in town to find a cache of missing money and the theft of some jewelry at a reservation shop. Later this is all revealed to be loosely connected to a troubled ex-con and his drug-running partner, neither of whom appear in the movie as characters (only corpses.) In fact there are at least four major players in the crimes who never actually appear as living, speaking characters, and their names run so confusingly together that there is actually a scene where the lead character makes a list of the various players and draws arrows connecting one to the other...and their relationship to each other still makes no sense! When Chee sticks it to his boss by deciding to investigate the case, it's genuinely baffling to tell which of the various crimes he's stubbornly setting out to solve. You'd think it would be easy enough to follow, since unlike the book (which was not written in first person) the film incorporates wall-to-wall voiceover. I would have guessed most of it was added in post to help sort out all the convoluted subplots, except that it's mostly Chee waxing philosophical on his sad station in life and relaying memories of his (dead?) shaman uncle. It's not helpful at all, other than occasionally pointing out which desert location he's supposed to be snooping around, since the narrative sets up two opposing territories - the Hopi and Navajo reservations - but rarely details its geography to help determine where the characters are at any given time. Time itself becomes an imperceivable concept: after a family of Hopis discover a dead body, two scenes later when the cops go to investigate the corpse it's far-decomposed (What day is it now? Is it even the same body?) Morris is hardly an unskilled storyteller. Even though Thin Blue Line's narrative is told by various people, the re-enactments change based on who's telling the story and the flashbacks go back and forth in time to encompass events from the early 60's to the mid-80's, it's never confusing. Were the Dark Wind producers so intent on changing the parts of the script that Native Americans might find offensive that they forgot to make it coherent?

It's possible the events of the movie would be less difficult to decipher if the person they were happening to was at least somewhat symphathetic, but no dice there. Jim Chee, as portrayed in the movie, often comes off as spineless, wimpy, clumsy and thoroughly inept at almost everything he tries to do. In his first scene, he's sitting off the side of a desert road in his police jeep waiting for a pick-up truck hauling illegal booze (what year is this supposed to be?) As they pass him, he sticks his head out the window and meekly asks them to stop. They pick up speed, he swerves the jeep around to pursue and immediately plants it in a ditch. Of course it's good to give your protagonist some level of humility - like how Morris included the story of Stephen Hawking falling out of his wheelchair in Brief History - and obviously the screenwriters want to establish Chee as wet behind the ears, but do they really expect an audience to stick with a cop who can't even operate a vehicle? Shortly after, the sight of a dead body makes him vomit - again, not a bad idea to humanize him, but coming right after the ditch incident it just makes him seem that much more a timid, inexperienced loser.* Later when he starts investigating one of the five cases (who knows which one), he comes off smug and undeservingly proud of himself. There aren't enough real character moments, like the one in which he removes his gun belt and holster before approaching an elderly woman he needs to interview, to make Chee a sympathetic guide through all these murky delinquencies. We learn more about a female police officer who never appears in The Thin Blue Line - never even has a word of dialogue as a character in the re-enactments - based on a shot of a milkshake falling to the ground than we do about Chee, who does nothing besides narrate and appear in every scene of his own film. Going back to what Morris said about everyone believing themselves to be the protagonists of their own life story: I'm convinced Chee actually doesn't feel that way. He seems more like a supporting character in his own story, as if he'd be more comfortable sitting this big murder/smuggling/corruption/jewel theft/windmill vandalism case out. Although the script portrays him as pro-active, someone who has no problem disobeying his orders to sit idle and stakeout the windmill so he can develop his own leads and chase down a gang of murderous drug dealers, he's completely unenthusiastic about it. Hillerman stated in his autobiography Seldom Disappointed that he created the Chee character as a naive counterpart to Lt. Joe Leaphorn, so my guess is that the Dark Wind writers wanted to establish his puerility in case the film became the first of a potential franchise like the Tom Clancy-Jack Ryan movies in which the filmmakers could develop the character. As it stands, his character arc is that, by the end, he knows how to make a 180° turn in a car.

Hillerman's book describes Chee's methods of deduction and detection, how he works a crime scene using his knowledge of Navajo methods. This isn't easy to translate on screen, so you're constantly left wondering what Lou Diamond Phillips is doing crouching to the ground or scanning the desert surface. Every once in a while the voiceover tries to explain what he's up to, but it's just tedious to have to listen to. In the novel, he remembers his uncle telling him things like, "All is order. Look for the pattern." The movie makes a lazy attempt at badass juxtaposition by setting up that Chee is training to be a healer, which leads to a howler of a line when Leaphorn tells him "They won't know if you're going to catch the bad guy or heal 'em!" - but all it tells the audience about its lead character is that he's as inexperienced a Navajo as he is a policeman. The Hillerman Chee stands up for himself and the implementing of his ancestoral modus operandi, like in a scene where a white guy tells him he knew Indians were good trackers: "I am a Navajo. We don't have a word in our language for 'Indians.' Just specific words. For Utes, and Hopis, and Apaches. A white is a belacani, a Mexican is a nakai. So forth. Some Navajos are good at tracking. Some aren't. You learn it by studying it. Like law." This kind of righteous indignation wouldn't work for Lou Diamond's Chee; any time in the movie he tries to talk about his hertiage or defend himself against racism just feels unearned, like he himself doesn't really appreciate his own background any more than he's qualified to be an active duty cop. No matter what one thinks of Fred A. Leuchter, Robert S. McNamara or Joyce McKinney, the conviction with which they defend their respective accounts of the truth - while not exactly admirable - make them appealing characters.** While Hillerman is no Navajo expert (he admits to as much in the preface of the novel), he at least created a convincing lead who backs up his own beliefs.

Chee isn't given much to turn him into a memorable characters by the writers, but Lou Diamond Phillips' performance must be responsible for how timid and dorky the character comes off. I don't know about him being wrong for the part because he's not a full-blooded Navajo, but he's sure as hell wrong for any part that requires any level of believable intensity. In Dark Wind, his voice is so unauthorative and milquetoast that it makes Jason Schwartzman sound like Clint Eastwood. He's not the only liability in the cast. Most of the small roles are filled by local non-actors, so their horrible acting is excusable if not tolerable, but even some of the professional actors read their lines with a stammer of non-committal tone-deafness. Particularly horrible is the actress playing the dead pilot's wife (Jane Loranger, who has only one other mini-series to her name) - she actually makes LDP suck even more in their scenes together. At one point, she announces in a tepid monotone "I'm going to be sick..." and wanders so slightly out of frame you can still see her shadow in the shot. Gary Farmer, so memorable as the lead in 1989's Powwow Highway and even moreso a few years later as Nobody in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, is more or less fine as bullying Hopi lawman Albert "Cowboy" Dashee, given he has so little to work with (he would play Captain Largo in Redford's made-for-TV A Thief of Time with Adam Beach as Chee.) But even he has his embarrassing moments, like over-acting when he opens a corpse-stenched car. Fred Ward, part-Cherokee himself and coming off a great 1990 which saw the release of Tremors, Miami Blues and Henry & June, appears three times as Leaphorn but has nothing to do except pace back and forth teasing Chee about his lowly station. Character actors John Karlen and Blake Clark hold their own in their scant number of scenes, but the idea of Morris, who sets up his Interrotron and lets people tell their life stories, giving actors direction and talking to them about things like motivation and the inflection of line-readings? It's a depressing thought to say the least.

There are hints, tiny hints, of Morris in the movie. One memorable location is the Wigwam Motel, a roadside lodging with structures made to look like teepees under a sign inviting guests to "sleep in a wigwam!" that house single normal-looking hotel rooms. The motel is an actual place in Cave City, Kentucky that Morris must have read about and insisted be used in the movie, although Phillips' eye-roll reaction at seeing the motel is a far cry from the wide-eyed excitement the director undoubtly expressed upon discovering it. The outdoor locations, lots of shanties and trading posts, more or less run together except for the occasional dusk/dawn lighting scheme set up by Stefan Czapsky which might have looked great if the post work had been any better. Besides Czapsky, Morris also brought Ted Bafaloukos, his production designer from Thin Blue Line to Fog of War, to the project as well as his wife Eugenie Bafaloukos, who did costumes (she also did costumes for Miami Blues and Grosse Pointe Blank; both Bafaloukoses worked on Todd Haynes' Dottie Gets Spanked.) But there's not a lot of great design in the movie - most scenes are sparsely decorated, sometimes with a pathetic bowl of fruit unnaturally placed in front of a character. It's hard to look at the dull composition of these shots and not think about Thin Blue Line's framing of the cop, telling a bullshit story about Randall Adams' interrogation being routine with no police brutality or persuasion involved, which sets the subject in front of a giant map. The color scheme of the map suggests the Truth surrounding the cop, coming in for the kill, his small outline all that remains of his failed manipulation of the facts. Just compare that to a shot of Fred Ward's Leaphorn in front of a map: it's bland and artless and - not to keep hitting the same key here, but - pervaded by the presence of the boom mic!

The scene with Ward against the map cuts between he and Phillips, sitting across from Ward in front of a desk. The shot of Phillips, always the same sterile angle, the camera never moving, the two actors quite possibly in two different rooms, is such an unacceptable composition coming from a man whose specialty is filming people in a seat talking and making it absolutely thrilling. Similarly, a scene set in a prison visiting room has none of the style of the interrogation re-enactment or the interviews that take place in a prison visiting room from The Thin Blue Line. It's truly bizarre to think that Morris could apply such an accomplished aesthetic to a production with such unpredictable variables as shady subjects and public locations like a prison and police station, yet make a controlled, fully-crewed, reasonably well-budgeted film so bereft of style. I guess it's not exactly fair to expect Morris to bring the same game to something he didn't have final cut on, but it's such a shame that he wasn't allowed to slip some of Thin Blue Line's masterful production quality into Dark Wind (the haunting re-enactment of the highway cop's murder were transposed in "fiction" form to a desert roadside in a central scene from Carl Franklin's One False Move the following year.) Again, it comes down to a huge amount of preparation not being necessarily a good thing for Morris. The denouement of Thin Blue Line, an accidental result of running out of film needed to capture the subject, became a series of shots of a running tape recorder that is positively effective. Dark Wind's finale takes place during a thunderstorm at the "gathering of all the evil forces in the world," which looks like a left-over set from Masters of the Universe; for his part, Morris would create much cooler lightning effects a few years later for the opening credits of Mr. Death.

Producer Patrick Markey claimed that the film was full of "very Morrissian touches," but I have no idea what he's talking about. None of the director's trademarks - objects falling in slow motion, stock footage and clips from B-movies, subjects who talk in largely uninterrupted monologues, abrupt cutting, eclectic casts of romantic eccentrics, obsessives, artists, scientists, con men and dreamers - have anything to do with The Dark Wind. Although directors like Oliver Stone had established a trippy aesthetic approach to the mysticism of the Native American and Dark Wind's plot is confusing enough that there's room for visual experimentation, it never once displays what Terrence Rafferty once referred to Morris' "feverish clarity of hallucination." The story may revolve around solving a mystery, but there's no dialogue or actions to work out the clues and resolve the crimes - it's all voiceover. Mumbled, very badly written voiceover that nobody in their right mind would believe belongs in a movie from a man whose career is based on first person accounts. If I had to put Morris on the stand for anything, it would be going into a project with material that he evidently had no real interest in or expertise on. Errol Morris and Native Americans may seem a tenable combination, until you realize that Morris focuses so intently on the stories of white Americans. The only time his "narratives" have even travelled outside the United States is when he follows his Yank subjects to places where they leave a decidedly unwanted impact: Fred Leuchter desecrating the walls of Auschwitz, the military police tormenting prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Robert S. McNamara's impact on Vietnam, Joyce McKinney causing a scandal in England. You know how the Dances with Wolves formula can now be applied to movies like The Last Samurai and Avatar as "Dances with Wolves with samurai/big blue dudes instead of Indians?" Well, while Thunderheart - also featuring Fred Ward - is more of a modernized Dances with Wolves (or "Witness with Indians") than The Dark Wind since Val Kilmer is more of a "white man immersing himself into a strange culture and learning to appreciate it" the way Melanie Griffith would penetrate the secret world of Rabbis in A Stranger Among Us the same year, Morris' film feels like a more realistic version. Only the white man is Morris and he met with such opposition from the people he wanted to portray, it seems to have completely turned him off the topic entirely.

The concept behind the title of the film that intrigued interviewer Tom Ryan (see APPENDIX below) and myself (before actually seeing the movie) is delievered in the book and movie by Chee and appears as the poster's tagline: "The Navajo believe that when a man does something evil, it is because a dark wind has entered his soul." Ostensibly, Chee paraphrases it to dispel the idea that revenge is the motive for one of the murders (still not sure which one) since "my people don't believe in revenge." Although it does turn out to be a revenge-based crime and therefore the entire concept is sort of negated, the idea of an enigmatic evil almost saves the subpar mystery plot***, because it asks "why? how? and what?" rather than simply "who?" Why would somebody do terrible things? How do they live with themselves? What's the motivation? These themes are much more up Morris' alley. Several of his First Person episodes deal with people associated with killers ("The Killer Inside Me," "The Stalker," "In the Kingdom of the Unabomber," "The Only Truth") and one in particular, "Mr. Personality," has forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone explaining his theories on measuring evil. Stone, whose show Most Evil is based on his study of the neurological, environmental and genetic factors surrounding famous killers, assigns notorious criminals from Ervil LeBaron to Andrei Chikatilo a number between 1 and 22 based on the level of their "evilness." Although fascinated by Stone and his hierarchy of evil, Morris ultimately doesn't buy the notion of a quantifiable evil. Because although he finds the idea amusing, particularly Stone's inclusion of the word "zany" as a negative trait in a person (added "because it starts with 'z.'"), how could Morris possibly expect to set someone like David Harris on a scale of depravity, as a glorified statistic? The conceit is too simplistic. If anything, Morris' take on evil would probably be closer to something like "people who commit evil think they're doing the right thing." Hence McNamara's ninth "lesson" of war: "In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil." That "dark wind" tagline is closer to Errol Morris than anything else in the movie, which is why it's a pity that it ultimately has absolutely nothing to do with it. The corrupt feds, vengeance-bent shop owner and drug dealers who've received their comeuppance long before we got to know them are well-worn clichés who act the way they do because that's the way these kinds of characters act. Nothing is surprising and unexpected, which is the exact opposite of the kind of movie we've all come to expect from Morris.

This has been the most difficult and disappointing Frustrating Filmographies to write so far. The goal of this series is honestly to use the alleged failures of filmmakers to better understand their work as a whole. When I started the article, I was optimistic about the idea of uncovering the Errol Morris lurking within The Dark Wind; towards the end of it, I was so depressed I just wanted to get it done. Which is probably exactly how Morris felt making the movie. Like Morris' (actual) movies, this series is meant to be investigative - I look for traces of a filmmaker's fingerprints and, in writing about the subject, try to find some semblance of what makes that director great. And I truly believe there is good reason to study movies from great directors' careers that most fans would just as soon bury and forget about, or feel the need to make excuses for. The missteps, I feel, are equally important to understanding a filmmaker as the masterpieces in terms of his artistic evolution or how they relate to the things that interest him. But I don't know if that's the case with The Dark Wind. There is so little of Morris in the movie that it's kind of an insult to have his name appear on the credits over the sky above the desert canyons. Re-reading the article, it feels so much more like a straight-up review than most of the things I write for the site...there's just nothing to do but point out why the movie is so terrible. I tried to sit through the film four times - four! - before being able to finish it...it's just so boring. Whereas within the period of writing this Frustrating Filmography, I successfully screened Mr. Death from start to finish four times; not because I needed to for the article, but because it's so fucking good. I would get distracted pulling images from The Thin Blue Line because I'd constantly let it run so I could watch long stretches of it. Since becoming a full-time dad and seeing only a handful of films in the theater, I've seen Tabloid three times and would gladly go to see it a fourth and a fifth. So the fact that I couldn't make it through one sitting of The Dark Wind, which by all means should have been a fun dumb mystery-thriller at the very least, may give you some idea as to the totality of its failure.

This would have been the film's 20th anniversary, except that it never really got a release. While it had some theatrical life overseas (in Germany it was called Canyon Cop), in the US it was plopped into the pond of DTV releases three years later. But not many people remember it today. A book called Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American on Film lists Dark Wind as "directed by Patrick Markey," a typo which is more or less correct. Making the film must have been somewhat of a positive experience for LDP at least, since he would return to playing a Native American three years later when he cast himself as a Lakota Sioux who leaves the comfort of life with his Jewish adoptive parents in Beverly Hills to learn about his cultural roots and avenge his real mother's death in his directorial debut Sioux City (which also featured Gary Farmer.) Either undaunted by the experience or trying to proove this mess had nothing to do with him, after The Dark Wind Morris immediately began trying to put together another narrative film based on the story of Boots, an English sheepdog put on trial for the murder of an 87-year old woman, which was at one point being developed for Warner Brothers ("It could be my Citizen Kane," Morris said at the time.) Recently, he started twittering about "meeting with actors" to discuss a project. Sadly it didn't turn out to be a documentary on actors. It was just announced that Morris' next project will be his first narrative since The Dark Wind: an adaptation of a This American Life segment about TV repairman and cryonics pioneer/embarrassment Robert Nelson. At least the subject matter is familiar (to the First Person episode "I Dismember Mama," the subject of which was cryonics enthusiast/life extension activist Saul Kent) and the lead actor - Paul Rudd - is one we all know to be infinitely more charming and talented than Lou Diamond Phillips. But will it bury this atrocity?

Summation:

The director: Errol Morris

The movie: The Dark Wind (1991)

Why so out of place in director's filmography? His only narrative feature, his only adaptation of a novel, his only experience having a film taken away and cut without him, and the only flat-out terrible movie his name has ever been attached to.

Why the director strayed: The money. According to Morris, "I never really wanted to be a Hollywood director. I think that it's often easy to be confused. This is a very hard business to make a living in and I certainly have never made much of a living from my non-fiction work." So "needed the money" seems to be the obvious motive, but I give Morris more credit than he gives himself. He wanted to try something different because that's the way he rolls.

Scale of embarrassment for the director: If you consider this an Errol Morris movie, it's a 9/10. But it would be better not to. It would be an insult to label a project subjected to such shabby post-production "complete."

His triumphant return to form: 1997's Fast Cheap & Out of Control, followed by the stellar television series First Person.

APPENDIX

An excerpt from interview for Tom Ryan's Senses of Cinema:

TR: It's a theme that seems to have run through all of your work, right from the start. Even in the detective thriller you made, The Dark Wind, where the hero (Lou Diamond Phillips) puts it on to a different level when he explains that "Navajos believe that when a man does crazy things, a dark wind blows through him." I know you've disowned the film, but I think you've undervalued it.

EM: I've "undervalued" The Dark Wind for a number of reasons, because it could have been a very different kind of movie, a good movie. I hate to go on about it but, for me, it was devastating and, for a while, I even thought about giving up filmmaking altogether.

You know, I come from an odd place as a filmmaker. I've had complete control over my own material. Often my films have started in one place and evolved into something very different. I've gotten into trouble many, many times because I've defined a project in one way and then emerged with something completely different.

The Thin Blue Line is a classic example of that sort of thing, where the final movie bears absolutely no resemblance to what I've started out to do. And I haven't ever looked at that as a bad thing. I think it's good, because it means there's an investigative element in everything that I do. There's a process of discovery or uncovering of material.

The Dark Wind is one of those instances where I had no control over what emerged. I was there very often as a functionary, not as a director. And the experience was remarkably distasteful. I wasn't allowed to shoot what I wanted to shoot. And not only wasn't I allowed to edit the film, I wasn't involved in any way with the editing. So I feel so disconnected from the end result, so divorced from it, that it's hard for me to really think of it as one of my films.

Editing is very, very important to me. I've struggled with the editing of almost everything I've ever done. When we were having horrible difficulties putting The Thin Blue Line together, I used to fantasize that there was some editing facility where you could send your material and they'd edit it for you and just return it to you in a box, all finished. I had this fantasy of a group of blue-haired, elderly ladies working out of a cinderblockbuilding somewhere in the mid-West and I'd send them all of the dailies and somehow the movie would be returned perfectly put together. But it unfortunately doesn't work that way. I've sat for months, and in some instances years, in an editing room, trying to make my material work the way I want it to. And the idea that The Thin Blue Line or Fast, Cheap or Mr. Death could have been edited without me seems to be nonsensical. (The Dark Wind experience) was a lesson. I never really wanted to be a Hollywood director. I think that it's often easy to be confused. This is a very hard business to make a living in and I certainly have never made much of a living from my non-fiction work. It's not something which has produced gigantic salaries and income. Quite the contrary.

* Going back to SCALPED real quick (last time I promise) my favorite character from the series is Officer Franklin Falls Down, the only uncorrupt cop on the force who also has the worst luck of anybody on the rez. Jason Aaron writes him in a way very similar to Chee's portrayal in The Dark Wind: he wants to do good, but he's incredibly nerdy and so hopelessly incompetent that he botches everything he tries to do. Of course, he's just a supporting character: we don't follow Falls Down throughout the story, he only appears periodically. He's not strong enough to advance the narrative, but he's an endearing and funny character you care about whose flaws make him seem more human than dangerously inept.

** And that's really what they are to Morris: characters in their own life story, which becomes his movie. Interestingly, he did something in the final credits of Brief History which he had never done before and hasn't done since, which is to bill the subjects with a line from their interview rather than by name (kind of like The Naked Gun - "Hey, it's Enrico Pullatzo!")

*** It also sounds similar to the idea behind the Laura Palmer murder on David Lynch and Mark Frost's "Twin Peaks." That Lynch decided to explain why a father would rape and murder his own daughter by having his body taken over by an ancient, evil wood spirit (which became an even more tricky and ambiguous proposition in the movie-prequel Fire Walk with Me) suggests the same concept of a "dark wind" that corrupts a man and leads him to unspeakable evil.

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