Harry Dean Stanton. (HBO)To be fair, Hotel Room wasn’t critically acclaimed when it premiered on HBO in 1993 (The New York Timescalled the three-part series a place “where stories go nowhere, anecdotes are pointlessly bizarre and lame quips are echoed emptily, as if banality were a form of wit), but some one-off projects are better enjoyed after a TV failure and rebirth.
Besides, David Lynch’s collaboration with Jay McInerney and Wild at Heart scriptwriter Barry Gifford is the kind of esoteric zeitgeist–not an oxymoron, at least in this context–that might actually be better with age. The tale involves a New York hotel room–number 603 of the Railroad Hotel–at three different points in time.
