One night in January, 2002, during the initial theatrical run of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” a friend and I, students at the University of Southern California, drove up toward the Hollywood Hills to seek out the road itself. Mulholland Drive runs a curvy twenty-one miles from end to end, and we didn’t drive nearly the whole way. We entered off the 101 Freeway, just north of the Hollywood Bowl, and headed slowly west, relying heavily on our headlights to find our way through the darkness. From time to time, we pulled over to search for a good view, but mainly just to sit there in the dark, soak up the silence, and talk a bit more about the most fascinating film we’d seen in ages—a beautiful and confounding thriller about a car accident, a bubbly blond actress, a dark-eyed amnesiac, a sulky director, a shitty espresso, a po-faced cowboy, a hobo behind a dumpster, Roy Orbison, Rita Hayworth, “Persona,” “Vertigo,” and more besides.
For weeks, Lynch’s film had haunted me like nothing else. It was dark and funny and sexy and intoxicating—a dream that followed me out of the theatre and into my waking reality, and a picture that obliterated, and then thrillingly restored, my understanding of what movies could do. For a nineteen-year-old burgeoning cinephile whose idea of nonlinear storytelling had been shaped by Quentin Tarantino, it was astonishing to see a filmmaker so fluent in the poetry of the irrational. I was least prepared of all for just how shattered “Mulholland Drive” would leave me: how could a movie so arrestingly strange, with so many layers of deadpan absurdity and film-noir pastiche, also be tender and moving beyond words?
I couldn’t answer that question, any more than I could puzzle out what was in the little blue box at the center of the story. But for a few delirious months, “Mulholland Drive” became an obsession, the dream movie of my dreams, even a precocious early declaration of critical identity. I urged friends to see the movie and screened it for many of them with a cinevangelist’s zeal. “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star,” a 1961 Linda Scott golden oldie that appears in the film, wound up greeting callers on my answering machine. At U.S.C., where seemingly every film student had a “Shawshank Redemption” poster on his dorm-room wall, taping up a gorgeous Italian one-sheet of “Mulholland Drive” felt like a peculiarly rebellious point of pride. I became convinced—and then remain convinced—that Naomi Watts, the film’s incandescent star, had given one of the greatest performances of the still young twenty-first century.
And so, perhaps channelling the spirit of Betty (Watts) and Rita (Laura Elena Harring), the movie’s amateur-sleuth protagonists, my friend and I embarked on our nocturnal pilgrimage. Visiting during the day might have made more sense, but making sense felt antithetical to the spirit of “Mulholland Drive,” and I had no interest in shattering its spell. I just wanted to linger in its atmosphere a while longer, to clutch at Peter Deming’s seedily lustrous images and Angelo Badalamenti’s mournful caress of a score. I wondered what we might see: a black limousine, winding its way toward a roadside conflagration? A woman tottering downhill in a daze, the glittering magic-carpet expanse of Hollywood sloping off into the distance? We saw nothing of the sort, of course; the real Mulholland Drive seemed as reluctant to surrender its secrets as Lynch’s film was. All I remember seeing, by the light of the car’s high beams, was a grocery-store shopping cart abandoned on the side of the road. I decided—with a little overreach, admittedly—that this was an exquisitely Lynchian oddity: something banal that, by popping up where it didn’t belong, became ineluctably sinister.
In the years that followed, I ventured out in search of more “Mulholland Drive” hot spots. The farthest-flung of these was in Paris, where, in 2013, some friends and I half-heartedly tried to get into Club Silencio, a night club modelled on one of the film’s most electrifying sequences. Most of my excursions were closer to home. A year or so after that Mulholland drive, I wound up outside a Silver Lake apartment complex, charming in mock-Tudor brown and beige, that had somehow led Lynch to think, Ah, yes, what a perfect place to discover a corpse. If I had ventured about fifteen miles south, to Gardena, I could have enjoyed a cup of coffee at Caesar’s Restaurant—a now shuttered diner that, thanks to “Mulholland Drive,” will live forever as Winkie’s on Sunset Boulevard. Here, Lynch reminded us that the most chilling nightmares unfold in broad daylight.
Lynch’s movies are often described as surreal and unnerving, an entirely accurate assessment that doesn’t fully capture the violent havoc they can wreak on a newcomer’s expectations. I can only imagine the initial impact of “Eraserhead,” Lynch’s hallucinatory début feature, when it first emerged, in 1977, and became a midnight-movie sensation. But I still remember seeing it for the first time and thinking that nothing I’d read about it, in squeamish preparation, could have possibly blunted the pustular glory of its images, the otherworldly drone of its sound design, or its air of lysergic rot. “Eraserhead” was a movie that made you feel as though you’d truly seen everything, but Lynch had far more to show us. His flair for the grotesque found an affecting, unexpectedly classical framework in “The Elephant Man” (1980), which earned him the first of three richly deserved, unsurprisingly fruitless Oscar nominations for Best Director. Next came the critical and commercial disaster of “Dune” (1984), a rare foray into studio filmmaking that Lynch ultimately disavowed; even now, though, the unfettered intricacy and imagination of his visual design could hardly be ascribed to any other filmmaker.
An astonishing resurgence followed with “Blue Velvet” (1986), a masterwork of psychosexual terror that outraged as many as it captivated. Lynch dared us to watch, through our fingers, as a disturbingly off-kilter comedy of small-town mores became increasingly subsumed in an erotic miasma of fairy-tale dread. The movie is built around an Oedipal triangle whose transgressive power hasn’t dissipated in the slightest, resting, as it does, on the unshakable foundations of its actors: a boyishly corruptible Kyle MacLachlan, a bewitchingly vulnerable Isabella Rossellini, and a primally terrifying Dennis Hopper. But what lingers just as persistently is a certain slipperiness of intent—a sense that Lynch himself, so aware of the complex, symbiotic play of light and darkness in human nature, was content to flit eternally, and with a mosquito’s fickle curiosity, between two moral poles. Did “Blue Velvet” offer a straight-faced spoof, an enraged evisceration, or a half-hearted affirmation of Reagan’s America and its discontents? The question can still divide people, and I suspect that great puritanical swaths of today’s audience—those who demand clear thematic signposts, abhor frank treatments of sexuality, and find moral ambiguity repellent—are less equipped to grapple intelligently with “Blue Velvet” than even their fuming 1986 counterparts were.
Even among Lynch’s more thoughtful admirers, the need to decisively pin him down continues apace. Arguments still rage about the precise ratio of sincerity to irony in the director’s work—a debate that, for me, ultimately says less about Lynch than it does about the limitations of critical language, especially when such language is applied to an artist whose work is this unfiltered and instinctual. Even so, I’d venture that there is both sincerity and irony aplenty in Lynch, and the two aren’t necessarily in tension; each one illuminates and nourishes the other. Think of them as sweatily companionable bedfellows—or, if you prefer, transmigratory souls.
In the days and weeks since Lynch’s death, at the age of seventy-eight, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the Los Angeles that he left behind. He was, to be sure, a pan-American artist, with a sensibility steeped in many a regional cauldron. Missoula, Montana, where he was born, bequeathed him a folksy Eagle Scout congeniality, all nasal delivery and gee-whiz enthusiasm. He spent much of his childhood in Spokane, Washington, a period that would be enshrined in the lushly menacing Pacific Northwest landscapes of “Twin Peaks.” He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia, a city that he later described, in interviews, as a place of unrivalled foulness: “I saw horrible things, horrible, horrible things while I lived there,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, in 1986. “It was truly inspiring.”
Lynch moved to Los Angeles in the early nineteen-seventies to study at the American Film Institute; there, he began working on “Eraserhead,” much of which was shot on A.F.I.-owned locations. His later films, such as “Lost Highway” (1997) and “Mulholland Drive,” would reveal more of the city’s seamy beauty, finding menace in the sunshine and wandering down perilous roads to nowhere. His films delighted in collapsing the city’s past and its present together, in discovering cultural and architectural vestiges of an older Los Angeles tucked in among the city’s newer façades. It’s significant, I think, that all three of Lynch’s L.A.-set movies are so rooted in convulsive games of identity: think of Fred the saxophonist (Bill Pullman) morphing inexplicably into Pete the auto mechanic (Balthazar Getty) in “Lost Highway,” or Laura Dern shape-shifting at will in every other scene of “Inland Empire” (2006). It’s as if Lynch were remarking on not just the inherent plasticity of the motion-picture medium but also on a city known for its endless self-reinvention—and often derided, wrongly, as a cesspool of inauthenticity.
Lynch’s love for Los Angeles, and the inimitable, unfakeable reality of his presence around the city, gave the lie to that charge. In December, 2006, Lynch exposed the gussied-up absurdity of Oscar season with his own wonderfully absurd gesture, by launching a memorable one-man awards campaign for Dern in “Inland Empire.” He parked himself at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, sitting next to an enormous “For Your Consideration” poster with Dern’s face, a live cow, and a sign that read “without cheese there wouldn’t be an inland empire.” (It was one of the few times that he came even close to providing a rationale for his work.)
Elsewhere, Lynch was an insistent creature of habit, and his habits—always wearing top-buttoned white shirts, forever espousing the virtues of Transcendental Meditation—often became the stuff of local legend. For years, he could be found eating lunch at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, an establishment whose nineteen-fifties stylings fit right in with his love of diners, jukeboxes, and other scraps of vintage Americana. Later in his career, Lynch captivated his fans—and doubtless made some new ones—with a series of daily weather reports, delivered from his perch in the Hollywood Hills. If you didn’t know better, you might have suspected that his oddball geniality was some sort of cultivated affectation—a knowingly bold counterpoint to his attraction to the outrageous and the grotesque. But it never would have occurred to Lynch that there was any contradiction to begin with. He drew no tidy, self-flattering distinctions between normalcy and perversity, humor and seriousness. His unawareness that he was doing anything particularly subversive may have been the most subversive thing about him.
