The Not-So-Straight Story: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive

Scott Thill

It's weird to see people leaving the theater laughing directly after the final, breackneck thirty minutes of David Lynch's latest dream noir, Mulholland Drive. It's especially strange when you consider that those final moments were packed with the most violent imagery, frightening occurrences, and harrowing cinema we've possibly seen from the eclectic visionary since his prequel to another failed television revolution, Twin Peaks. Maybe it was the elderly couple crawling beneath the door to terrorize the film's protagonist into what may have been her inevitable, self-imposed destruction. Or maybe it was the fearsome, grimy demon in the alley behind Winkie's (Lynch's version of his favorite restaurant, Bob's Big Boy; get it?).

Either way, I was glued to the back of my chair during the end of Mulholland Drive as forcefully as I was slouching in it near the film's beginning.

As much as people still decry Lynch's extensive use of what have come to be known as Lynchian archetypes -- the fair-skinned innocent filled with aw-shucks naivete; the dark-haired femme fatale with an even darker secret; nicely dressed crimefighters speaking in clipped sometimes pointless dialogue; dark arts villainy and an unnameable evil presence; flickering lights and lascivious flesh-baring; feminine depression/sexualization and masculine oppression/impotence, among others -- they are just the colors on the palette that his self-styled film paintings usually require to run their non-linear -- unless you consider the infinity symbol linear, that is -- course to doom, alienation and deferral. Those and other archetypes belong to Lynch as much as the in-over-his-head (usually Italian or Italian-American) dreamer belongs to Scorcese, the dysfunctional family/corporation belongs to Coppola, the hardy impotent belongs to Hitchcock, or the deranged or deteriorating moralist belongs to Kubrick.

Each artist has his tools, and to fault Lynch for his possibly obsessive ruminations on female sexuality -- Freud called it the "dark continent" -- is to ignore the cinematic gifts he's given us, the professional and artistic risks he continually takes, or the daring twists he's made on convention of all stripes. Without his invention -- specifically that found in Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks (the television show and the film), and now Mulholland Drive -- cinema and television would simply not be as sophisticated and as brave as it is today.

The light-haired innocent puzzles over the dark-haired enigma, two archetypes that some may be sick of seeing in Lynch films. But they look so good!

That might sound like a mouthful, but you don't have to look far to find those who have benefited directly or indirectly from the pioneer steps Lynch and his circle of actors, sound engineers, co-producers, editors, and writers have taken. In film, he upped the ante of visual storytelling from his first film, Eraserhead, on, paving the way for the likes of David Fincher, Jeunet and Caro, Tarsem, Kasi Lemmons, and even Guy Ritchie; his narrative risks, like those presented in Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet have fueled the careers of plenty more. In television, well, it gets easier there. Just as so-called reality television is demarcated by the introduction of Survivor, adult dramedy is measured by its occurrence relative to the introduction of Twin Peaks, which blazed trails the likes of which Northern Exposure, Six Feet Under, The X-Files and more have all shared at some point.

To forget the impact Lynch has had on the artistic media he's worked in is to avoid the nearly obvious in favor of the reductive point-and-grunt criticism that so much of his work has been subjected to after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. "It's just Lynch being Lynch," someone said as I wobbled out of Mulholland Drive.

I thought that was supposed to be a good thing.

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