The House Next Door

By Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard

[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

ED HOWARD: David Lynch is a filmmaker who has haunted my mind since the first moment I saw one of his films. This is especially true of Mulholland Dr. I vividly remember my confused, stunned reactions the first time I saw this film. It was in the afternoon, and when I stumbled outside afterward, into bright daylight, everything looked strange, somehow subtly changed. I'd spent over two hours in Lynch's world, and in the time I'd been lost there it was as though the real world had been infected with Lynch's unsettling aesthetic. It was a unique experience. I can't remember another film that shook me up and destabilized me so thoroughly, and I've returned to it, and to Lynch's work in general, compulsively ever since.

Perhaps because they have such a profound, visceral effect on me, I find the precise character of Lynch's films to be elusive, hard to explain in concrete terms. I've never happened across a better synopsis of their effect, though, than the one offered by the novelist, essayist and critic David Foster Wallace. In 1996, Wallace was asked to visit the set of Lost Highway for Premiere magazine, and in response he produced a witty essay that was explicitly not a "behind the scenes" piece but an attempt to come to terms with the ineffable quality of Lynch's cinema. In the midst of this article is a passage that I want to offer as a starting point for our discussion, since it couldn't do a better job of encapsulating my own responses to Lynch if I had written it myself.

"David Lynch's movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third different kind of territory. Most of Lynch's best films don't really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretative process by which movies' (certainly avant-garde movies') central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch's movies are "to be experienced rather than explained."...

"Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial senses of being comfortable or linear or High Concept or "feel-good." You almost never in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to "entertain" you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don't feel like you're entering into any of the standard unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of a point or recognizable agenda in Lynch's films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don't. This is why his best films' effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We're defenseless in our dreams too.)"

JASON BELLAMY: I can't tell if you've jumped into the deep end of the pool or the shallow end with that quote, and maybe that says something at the outset about the elusiveness of Lynch. In general, though, I agree with the passage by Wallace, and I surely relate to the destabilizing effect of Mulholland Dr. as you described it. That's Lynch alright. Indeed, we are defenseless to his abstractions. Watching a Lynch film is like waking up in space. We're so accustomed to A-Z narratives—even if they start at K, flash back to A and then flash forward to T—that we are conditioned to the idea that movies move forward or backward. Lynch is too dynamic for such restraints. His films come at us from above, from below, from the side, from our blind spots, from places we didn't know were there to be occupied. Whether this is some kind of genius filmmaking mutation, essential for the survival of the species, or some kind of disorder, interesting in its abnormality but ultimately detrimental, is a conversation for later. In the moment, we at least agree on how a Lynch film operates and affects—at least some of the time.

Mulholland Dr. is an apt window into Lynch, because for so much of its running time it's about as conventional as Lynch gets before becoming about as unconventional as Lynch gets. It's like a boxed set experience in one film. Watching Mulholland Dr. again for the purpose of this discussion, I found it to be as captivating and confounding as I'd remembered it. It's typically inexplicable—not just in terms of plot, but in terms of its overall effect. At the moment, trying to consider the entire film in my mind—a monumental task in and of itself—I vacillate between thinking that it's the heartbreaking work of a staggering genius and an inauthentic, glossy self-indulgence by an artist who takes himself too seriously. The real answer, I'm sure, is somewhere in the middle. These are not my conclusions. These are the emotions that Mulholland Dr. stirs within me. That said, you adore this film. So let's move away from the big picture for a moment to concentrate on the film itself. I assume you'd call it a "great" film, perhaps even a "masterpiece." So here's a challenge: With the knowledge that you'll have the entirety of this conversation to state your case in detail, for the moment tell me why Mulholland Dr. is great ... in 250 words or less.

EH: For me, the heart of the greatness of Mulholland Dr. is the famed Club Silencio sequence, which provides the blueprint for enjoying (and understanding) the film as a whole. This is the moment where David Lynch steps into the film and announces, "Here I am," where the magician reveals his secrets. He's reminding us that we're "just" watching a movie, that everything we're seeing is fake, "an illusion," and yet no less affecting for its artificiality. This scene is the film's aesthetic and thematic core because Mulholland Dr. is a tribute to the beautiful lie of movie magic. The preceding two hours were a mélange of self-conscious genre references (noir, Western, mystery, sexploitation, melodrama, action) but Lynch doesn't mock or parody these genre clichés; instead he glories in the endless capacity for creativity and emotion still contained, waiting to be unleashed, in even the most hackneyed Hollywood scenario. We see this also in the audition scene, where lame material is transformed by sheer talent into something electric and awesome. It's this generous quality that I most love in the film, the way Lynch seems to really care about art's ability to move, change and provoke us. The film is about a young woman who tries to transform herself through an artful act of imagination, and Lynch invites us to care as deeply about her constructs, her imaginary self (or selves), as we do for the glimpse of the "real" her we see in the final half-hour of the film.

JB: And here I thought I'd given you a nearly impossible challenge. I like your encapsulation. Brief though it is, it provides me with a deeper reading of the film than I took away myself based on only limited viewings. More specifically, it takes my seemingly disparate reactions and suggests that, yes, they do fit together in a relatively tidy whole. There's quite a bit to react to here, but you started with the Club Silencio sequence, and that seems fitting, so let's continue.

If that surreal display is the "blueprint for enjoying (and understanding) the film," you might also agree that it's the linchpin, too. Already to that point, the movie has been typically Lynchian—weird, creepy, somewhat depraved, not to mention vibrant and compellingly oblique—but the Club Silencio sequence is when the LSD hits the bloodstream. In the passage you quoted from Wallace, he notes correctly that we "almost never in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to 'entertain.'" I agree with that, and I'm down with that. Perhaps Lynch simply intends to provoke. Good enough. But this leads me to the first of what I'm sure will be multiple Lynch-inspired philosophical questions:

If we agree that the main strength of Lynch's filmmaking is its ability to render us defenseless, couldn't it also be argued that the intentional inscrutability of Lynch's work is its biggest downfall? Yes, we're vulnerable to these images, at least at first, but the natural human reaction when violated (made uncomfortable) is to emulate an armadillo and curl into a ball—physically, emotionally or cerebrally. Some would say, "That's on the audience. If they can't take it, it's their problem." But is that accurate? Lynch might not want to entertain us, and he certainly isn't out to set box office records, but he does want his films watched, or else he wouldn't make and distribute them—they could just live in his head. Lynch wants to share. He wants to provoke. He wants to communicate. Yet if he causes a moviegoer to shut down, his/her experience ends before the movie does, as if waking one's self from a nightmare. After that, the rest of the film is essentially irrelevant to that person. So I guess what I'm asking is this: If Lynch's style is so discombobulating that it pushes me away before it finishes delivering its message, if it makes me want to give up rather than keep trying, is that a fault of Lynch or of me?

EH: All I can say is, no matter how confounding and inscrutable Lynch's films can be—and this one is by no means his most inscrutable—I have never been repelled by them, never tempted to "give up." This is because Lynch's filmmaking is very modular: he thinks as much in terms of crafting individual moments as he does of the whole film. There's a reason that he was able to salvage Mulholland Dr. from a rejected television pilot by adding new material and making it seem like the film was always meant to be like this. There's a reason that INLAND EMPIRE is able to incorporate ideas and images from Lynch's digital shorts and experiments (like the absurd Rabbits) and fluidly blend it all into the whole. Individual scenes, like the audition or Club Silencio or the conversation with the cowboy or the creepy Robert Blake phone call sequence in Lost Highway, can stand on their own as self-contained modules, separate from the films that contain them. This approach obviously encourages a very different kind of viewing, one that necessitates taking the film moment by moment, scene by scene, at least at first. (And the hypothetical armadillo-like viewer you mention would still have experienced many of these isolated moments before giving up, and I suspect Lynch would be OK with that.) It's only later that one realizes there's actually a story here (even, in the case of Mulholland, a surprisingly straightforward story), that the little pieces start fitting together into something coherent. The first time one watches a Lynch film (other than, naturally, The Elephant Man or The Straight Story), it inevitably seems like just a string of random moments, most of them compelling and moody in their own right but not really logically understandable. It's only when you return to the films, or even just turn them over in your mind for a while, that what had seemed like randomness and surrealism-for-its-own-sake begins to take on form.

This is why Wallace emphasizes watching a Lynch film as an "experience," and certainly an active experience. These films undoubtedly require a certain level of complicity on the part of their audiences; if the viewer turns off, refuses to engage, then the film will never mean anything, will never come together in the way Lynch clearly intends it to. On some level, every film (or at least every film worth any attention) requires something of its audience. Lynch asks more than most, but then I'd argue that the rewards of his films are unique enough to warrant this extra effort; you may, of course, disagree.

It's also probably worth pointing out that Lynch is—despite our and Wallace's description of his disorienting qualities—often willing to give his audience at least something to hold onto. In many of his films, this something is the comforting presence of Hollywood genre clichés, which Lynch uses in quite a different way from other self-consciously referential directors like Tarantino or the Coen brothers (who Wallace quite convincingly argues were both influenced by Lynch). Lynch deploys familiar tropes and images as a way of suggesting to us that the film is not as random as it might otherwise seem: the Dragnet-style detectives in both this film and Lost Highway, the amnesiac femme fatale with a purse full of money and a mysterious key (what does it open?), the shadowy behind-the-scenes conspiracy, the gangsters and hitmen. Years of watching films in which these things appear have conditioned us to want to decode them, to want to solve the mystery, but Lynch purposefully twists the conventional meanings and gives us something unexpected. The clichéd detectives turn out to be incompetent, the femme fatale and the cheery good girl switch places, and the key seems to open a kind of psychic doorway rather than a physical object: the featureless blue box it unlocks is as nakedly symbolic as the box full of white light in Kiss Me Deadly, one of Lynch's key reference points in his recent work. As disorienting as Lynch's recent films have been, by making the Hollywood dream factory his subject, he's provided at least one crucial stabilizing factor amidst all the surreality.

JB: All true. But let me avoid the particulars of Mulholland Dr. for a moment to hit on something you said so revealingly casually: "the first time one watches a Lynch film." The first time. See, there's an understanding among film fans educated enough to have an idea of Lynch's canon that his films can't be digested in one sitting. In fact, it's not just understood, it's accepted. I find this fascinating. First of all, why do Lynch's films get the benefit of assumed repeat examination? Just to grab a name, let's compare Lynch to M. Night Shyamalan, as thoughtful (as in well-intentioned) a filmmaker as any. I saw his Lady in the Water just once, but that's all that I needed to recognize it as a jumbled failure. If I said as much, many would nod their heads and agree without hesitation. If I said the same about Mulholland Dr., I'd likely be told that I need to see it again, that the film can't be properly appreciated in only one sitting. Well, what if the same is true of Lady in the Water? What if that film has been unfairly panned because most critics and moviegoers only sat through it once?

I want to be clear before I go any further that I support the idea of repeat viewings. I don't think a film that one has grown to appreciate has lesser value than one that is adored immediately. At my own blog I have championed the idea of reexamining one's position and being willing to admit initial error. But here's the thing: If Lynch's films are so complex that it takes more than one viewing to digest them, to the point that fans of the work might disregard an initial-viewing pan, what are immediate raves worth? In other words, if someone sees the film once and proclaims it a masterpiece, do you trust that reaction, or is it as incomplete as a one-viewing dismissal?

I bring this up because, rightly or wrongly, the vast majority of film debate is based on singular viewings, not just with new releases but with older films, too. Serious film fans don't bat an eye at reexamining something that challenges them, yet even we don't withhold judgment of films we've seen only once, nor do we always go out of our way to offer the caveat that we might feel differently if we saw it a second time. We trust our instincts, and we should. They are honest. So, to hook back into my previous question: If a Lynch film doesn't compel me to see it the number of times necessary to fully appreciate it, isn't that a fault of the film and filmmaker, just like my abhorrence of the idea of suffering through Lady in the Water a second time reflects the failings of that film and its creator? Has Lynch earned this stature with early successes? Does he have to re-earn it within each film, or is it a given at this point? Would Mulholland Dr. receive the same flexibility if released by an unknown artist? I'm not so sure.

EH: Here's the thing: Lynch's recent films might require multiple viewings to fully understand them, but not, in my experience, to enjoy or appreciate them. As I suggested in my opening, I loved Mulholland Dr. the first time I saw it; I was utterly blown away by it. Did I understand it? Not even close. Subsequent viewings revealed layers of narrative and themes that I hadn't detected the first time. But the sensation of watching the film, the mystery and beauty of its images, the ideas about imagination, fantasy, movies and loss bubbling up through its obscurity, these were all there the first time. The fact that I was compelled to revisit the film a second time—indeed, probably close to a dozen times by now—says a lot about the power of that first experience, that it made me want to return to this film so frequently. I do trust my instincts, and I trust them to know when a film has more to offer me, and when it's Lady in the Water: Lynch's films suggest that there's more there, depths to be mined on subsequent viewings, while the Shyamalan film does not. My instincts might be wrong—it's perfectly possible that Shyamalan's film is a misunderstood masterpiece and that Lynch could make a film that would offer me nothing further after the first viewing—but so far, each time I've returned to one of Lynch's films, I've discovered something new, something deeper that was only hinted at in earlier screenings.

This is, obviously, just my experience of Lynch, and I gather that you have had a somewhat different one. So, in an attempt to steer us into the substance of Mulholland Dr. itself, what did you make of the film on first viewing and (how) have those feelings changed now? You called its plot "inexplicable" earlier, which I don't think is really true—the narrative is one of the things about the film that started to pop into place for me the second time around—but did its story's outlines sharpen for you on repeat screenings? What I'm asking is, basically, since we agree that watching a Lynch film is an experience, what is your experience like?

JB: In my initial encounter, seeing the movie upon its release, my brain cramped somewhere during the Club Silencio sequence and never recovered. Even knowing to not expect anything linear from Lynch, I felt convinced that I must have missed something. To that point, the film had indeed been an experience, but a somewhat maddening one in many respects. For example, Naomi Watts' performance is marvelous, but it takes more than an hour to realize it. She spends the first half of the film acting like someone who can't act. It isn't until the audition scene, when her character begins to act, that we realize that, oh, fuck, this has all been a ruse. It's a juicy ruse, and on my second viewing I adored it, but having not seen Watts previously, I spent the first half of my initial trip to Mulholland Dr. genuinely annoyed at her flat, aw-shucks line readings. The joke was on me in the end, but in the beginning the intentionally robotic performance by Watts was a distraction. (Aside: Watts is hardly the only one in this picture whose acting is mechanical, and I'm not convinced that all of the other cases are by design.)

Likewise, I find many of Lynch's why-the-fuck-not elements to be distractions. Mr. Roque, for example. Perhaps you've seen the film enough times to decode his meaning. Or maybe there's no meaning at all. But for the brief time Mr. Roque is on screen, Lynch pays the kind of attention to Mr. Roque's oddness that suggests it's worth paying attention to. And maybe it isn't. Maybe it's just there. I don't need everything to have an answer, but I have a hard time investing myself to look deeper if I'm convinced that as much as half the time I'm going to wind up in a dead end. It's not that I don't respect Lynch's unconventionality, because I do. But a while back you hit the nail on the head when you said Lynch is a "modular" filmmaker. Indeed, that's how Mulholland Dr. plays for me—like a series of vignettes. Your comparison to Kiss Me Deadly is sound. Your argument that this all makes sense in the end holds water (at least I think it does). And yet to pull this off, Lynch plays the lazy storyteller's favorite "Get out of jail free" card: It's all just a dream (or hallucination).

Thus, upon multiple viewings, I see the Club Silencio sequence as both the moment "when the magician reveals his secrets," to quote you, and the moment when the storyteller resorts to a whopper of a deus ex machina that rescues him from the corner he wrote himself into. I had no idea that Mulholland Dr. was a TV pitch tweaked into a film, but it doesn't surprise me to learn that. Frankly, this doesn't strike me as the work of an artist with a grand vision. It strikes me as the work of a guy with many ideas that got thrown together. Maybe that's genius. Maybe it's jazz. Or maybe Lynch doesn't know what to make of the larger whole any more than we do. Maybe the episode-by-episode intrigue of Mulholland Dr. obscures an unfortunate truth: that it's as empty at the core as that blue box.

With that latter possibility in mind, my most recent viewing of Mulholland Dr. was much more enthralling—much more of an experience—because I expected as much as half the film to be plodding, stiffly acted and ultimately insignificant. Sure enough, it often was. But when I was engaged, wow! It was visceral. And it might surprise you to read this, but the most powerful part of the film for me begins with Club Silencio and carries on through to the end. I'm still not convinced that Lynch has any better idea of "what really happened" than we do, and I find curiosities like the Lilliputian senior citizens crawling under the apartment door to be mood breakers, rather than ambiance enhancers, but I can't argue with the idea that I'm experiencing the film at that point, rather than just watching it. And that's special.

EH: That strained, mechanical quality you point out in the performances of Watts and many of the other actors (certainly Laura Elena Harring, Robert Forster as one of the two detectives at the beginning, Ann Miller as the willfully eccentric Coco, etc.) is something that Lynch often seems to be striving for, for better or worse. If anything, it's even more pronounced in Lost Highway, in which Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman are practically narcotized in their line readings. You could easily dismiss it as just one of Lynch's weird tics, but it's clearly intentional, clearly meant to reflect a certain dreamlike quality to his films—in this case, because the film is literally a dream, but also in films like Blue Velvet where there are no overt dream cues. Even a lot of Twin Peaks was like that. This is one reason why I don't think "it's all a dream" is as much of a cop-out here as you seem to think: Lynch has always explored these kinds of dream worlds, even when the events in his films ostensibly "really happened" to their characters.

It's such a consistent trope of Lynch's aesthetic, his way of forcibly separating his vision from reality. He wants it to be apparent, even in the way that ordinary people are saying ordinary things, that what we're watching is artificial, constructed, fabricated, not real. And then, once we're assured that it's just pretend, just a fantasy, he hits us with shocking blasts of reality, like Watts' breathless audition, or the violent sequences in Blue Velvet, or the sight of Laura Palmer's blue-lipped corpse at the beginning of Twin Peaks. I can understand being put off by the typically Lynchian performances, but I also think that Lynch wants you to feel this way, wants you to be so destabilized that the intrusion of the real will be that much more unexpected and unsettling.

On the other hand, not every little thing Lynch does is imbued with conscious meaning. He is in many ways a very intuitive, visceral filmmaker, and a lot of his best work can't be explained. One of the dangers of the famous Salon article analyzing the film's plot is for people to conclude that, OK, now we understand what's going on in the film, that's it, it was all a dream. That seems, to me, far too glib in the face of the complexity this film has to offer. While the Salon article is compelling, and coheres with my own impressions of what's going on in the film on a narrative level, it unfortunately creates the impression that, beneath a tricky structure that needs to be decoded, Mulholland Dr. is just a narrative film like any other. I don't think that's true. Mulholland Dr. isn't Memento or Pulp Fiction, where time-jumping narrative gimmicks are deployed to obscure what would essentially be a rather traditional story if it were told linearly. This film can't be told linearly, it's not a puzzle to be solved, its knots can't be completely unwound, even if on some level we can say it's about a scorned, struggling, vengeful actress dreaming that she's an innocent, talented actress just discovering love for the first time.

I think it's a mistake to take any of this too literally, and some of the film's elements are certainly just Lynch's baroque flourishes: like Mr. Roque and the espresso-spitting gangster (brilliantly played by composer Angelo Badalamenti), both of whom are mostly there to suggest the grand conspiracy that Diane/Betty imagines is preventing her career from flourishing as it should. Did these figures need to be so strange and quirky to fulfill this narrative or symbolic function? Of course not, so maybe you're right to call them Lynch's "why-the-fuck-not" moments, but that's just the way the Lynchian world works: people are always bigger than life, and more often than not derived from Hollywood "types" rather than realistic people. To answer your implicit question above, the "oddness" of many of Lynch's images and characters are worth paying attention to, not necessarily for any deeper meaning or narrative function, but for their own sake, as outgrowths of Lynch's unique aesthetic, his warped interpretation of Hollywood generic norms.

JB: See, I don't disagree with that. But even if one approaches Lynch expecting surreality, the blue key that unlocks Mulholland Dr. doesn't come along until late in a movie that's just shy of two-and-a-half hours. I think it's asking a lot of an audience to hang on so long when there's no guarantee of eventual satisfaction. Remember: Lynchian films might be an experience, but they aren't always pleasant—and I'm not just referring to his penchant for the macabre. I mean, Billy Ray Cyrus is in the film, for crying out loud, and his acting is no more or less stiff than most of the other actors. Honestly, I don't even know what to think about that, but I know I don't find it engaging. Meanwhile, I don't buy the argument made by many (not necessarily you) that Lynch ultimately "doesn't care." Bullshit. Of course he cares. One can't label the guy an abstract genius who is calculatingly daring and then turn around and say he doesn't give a shit. But I've heard it done before.

Often, discussing Lynch reminds me of listening to a debate among philosophy and English majors high on innumerable drugs (or just pot), who prattle on about this author or that director, who go through their Beatnik phase, who have the whole world figured out. Some never evolve beyond that, but quite a few of them grow up and, only a few years later, look back on themselves and determine that they were full of shit. Usually this is attributed to the arrogance of youth, and that's part of it, but there's also this: Try hard enough, and you can project almost any meaning onto almost any thing. I would never imply that Lynch is careless or absent-minded, but then again: The swamp-thing that lives behind the diner ... what the fuck? Sure, we can assign it meaning. We can explain it away. We can say that it's a typically nightmarish vision, perfect for the plot. But, as I previously suggested, that kind of logic opens the door for anything under the sun. The "cop-out" element applies to the dream aspect of Mulholland Dr. because under these non-restrictions, Lynch can't make a wrong move. Everything is permissible, because if it doesn't make sense it wasn't supposed to. How convenient.

Having said that, let's drift into the meta again for a moment by leaving Lynch aside. I'd like to propose that, connotatively speaking, there's a difference between "suggestion" and "symbolism" in art, and it has to do with our perception of the artist's intent. For example: At the end of The Graduate, the shot of Benjamin, his arms outstretched, banging on the church window, at least suggests Christ on the cross. That's as far as I'd go. I see Benjamin, I see his crucifixion pose, and I make this comparison. But if I instead say that Benjamin symbolizes Christ, I'm implying that the director and actor are making a direct and purposeful allusion—that there is conscious intent to evoke Christ. If so, that might change my perception of the scene.

Now, I'm a firm believer that intent doesn't trump realization when it comes to art. I don't care what a filmmaker intended to do, I care what he did. So, don't answer the riddle of the mysterious Anton Chigurh/Sheriff Bell non-confrontation at the end of No Country For Old Men by telling me what was written in the book or the screenplay, or by telling me about footage that wasn't included in the final cut. None of that applies. The final cut is the final cut, and that's the story, and that's the film, for better or worse. Intent, in that context, is irrelevant.

However, as The Graduate scene perhaps reveals, perceived intent often does—should?—have an impact on our reaction to the material. And that leads me here: Ed, hypothetically speaking, what if Lynch himself doesn't know why there's a swamp-thing behind the diner? What if it symbolizes nothing? What if it serves no larger purpose? What if Lynch just thought it was a neat idea in and of itself, and so he threw it in there with all the care of a guy picking out his socks. If that were true, if Lynch were an accidental genius as often as a meticulous one, if in fact his films don't make sense even to him and are just intentionally inscrutable artworks designed to have us project our own unique meanings onto them, would that lessen your appreciation of him as a filmmaker? Would it enhance your appreciation? Hypothetically speaking.

EH: That's not entirely hypothetical, actually. Lynch often is an accidental genius—or at least an intuitive genius, which isn't quite the same thing but is close enough. If you asked him to explain his films or specific things in his films, you might get a gnomic "I don't know" or "Figure it out for yourself." If he were the kind of guy who's more inclined to speak openly about his own art (like Lynch worshipper Richard Kelly, who does his work a grave injustice by trying to explain it), you'd probably get a really tortured pseudo-mystical rap that wouldn't be nearly as satisfying or enthralling as the films themselves. Too-literal explanation is the enemy of art like Lynch's. To answer your question, I don't think it matters if Lynch is always conscious of the effects of his films; it's enough that they're there. In fact, his films are rich in meanings, themes and images about which Lynch would probably seem pretty inarticulate if he ever tried to speak about them.

But that's why he works in a visual medium in the first place. Lynch isn't a writer, or at least not a particularly great one judging by the fragments of writing I've seen by him. He's a painter, and a photographer, and as a filmmaker he's much closer to a crafter of images and moments than a proper storyteller. Lynch certainly "cares"—he wants to make deeply personal artworks and have people watch them—but he is not inclined towards analytical or explanatory thinking. His films leave a lot of loose ends as a result, things that can't be rationally worked out the way we expect everything in a good narrative film to be. And his films are also as a result multi-layered and resonant in ways that are not necessarily obvious on first glance, and that might not even be conscious for the filmmaker.

Rather than diminishing these films, however, if anything it enriches them, because Lynch's subconscious is apparently a deeply fascinating place, and a lot of really incredible things bubble up from the primal parts of his mind. Take, as an example, the story of the director of Mulholland Dr.'s film-within-the-film, Adam (Justin Theroux). During the first two-thirds of the film, he has his movie taken away from him, his ex-wife cheats on him with the pool guy, he gets beaten up, covered in pink paint and is hunted by all sorts of shady characters. After the film descends into the blue box and out again, it becomes clear that, on the level of the film's narrative, all of this is "just" an elaborate revenge fantasy, Diane's projection of violence and humiliation onto the man who, in "real life," stole Camilla from her. But what's striking is that Lynch makes Adam a very sympathetic character. We don't hate him the way Diane does: we feel for what he's going through. So the director's story takes on shadings that are not only different from its narrative meanings, but diametrically opposed to the content of the narrative. Adam, the villain of Diane's story, becomes instead a secondary protagonist, a stand-in for the audience and, as a filmmaker character, for Lynch himself, working out anxieties about the loss of control, artistic integrity and compromise, and the degree to which our choices and attitudes are really able to affect our lives.

Is Lynch aware that all this is going on with this character? I have no idea, really. But does it matter? It's all there in the film, working on levels both obvious and somewhat hidden, creating this dense framework of themes and ideas circling around someone who is, after all, a comparatively minor character despite Theroux's puzzling top billing in the cast. Some of the same things are going on, in this film and its companion piece Lost Highway, with the way Lynch uses the pedigree of the "double film" to inform the psychological subtexts of his own work: the references to Persona and Vertigo that weave through both films, along with the liberal incorporation of recontextualized elements from Kiss Me Deadly. Some of this is clearly intentional (there's no way that shot of the two women's overlapping faces in Mulholland Dr. isn't meant to evoke Persona, or that Rita's transformation via a blonde wig isn't an overt nod to Vertigo) and some of it is maybe more intuitive. But just because Lynch probably couldn't write you an essay about how or why he's referring to these predecessors, doesn't mean that what's actually onscreen isn't interesting and complicated.

JB: I agree. Conversely though, because it's complicated doesn't mean it's interesting or profound, and I think sometimes people are afraid to demand more of surreal art because by its very nature it's so hard to assess. (How can we tell if art has cleared the bar when we can't make out the bar in the first place?) Personally, I enjoy being challenged by filmmakers. I don't want to be talked down to. But I also feel that if a filmmaker creates a work so elusive that it might take two viewings (or more) to make any sense of it (even emotionally), it's the filmmaker's responsibility to compel me to keep watching ... at least once. Vertigo has that. Kiss Me Deadly has that. The latter is a talky picture that's full of references to people we don't know or can't remember, and yet it's propulsive. Its ending is arguably more ambiguous than that of Mulholland Dr., and yet the conclusion is rewarding because the journey is so exhilarating ("Calling Mr. MacGuffin..."). My initial experience with Mulholland Dr. was different in that for the first half of the film I wasn't experiencing it so much as slogging through it. Lynch wasn't compelling me to move forward, I was compelling myself—out of habit and duty. I felt no need to see what was at the far end of the rabbit hole. I just figured that, well, I'm here, so I might as well find out. To put it bluntly, I was bored.

The shift occurred somewhere around the audition sequence, when I discovered that, hold on, this blonde can do more than match her sweater to her lipstick. My interest had been tickled before, but that's the first moment that held me rapt, that made me sit forward in my seat. Still, as I mentioned earlier, when the Club Silencio sequence arrived, my fragile belief that I might take away something from the film was smashed—perhaps because the magician (Lynch) explained his trick before I even understood his illusion. This is probably my fault. Maybe I was trying too hard to get my bearings, or I wasn't trying hard enough. I'm still not sure. Regardless, once off the rails, I never made forward progress again, which is a shame because the final 30 minutes or so of the film are gripping and heartbreaking if one can get to them with their wits intact. I still don't pretend to "get" Mulholland Dr. in a literal sense—and, per your previous argument, I'm happy to avoid trying—but emotionally it resonates. Now that I've seen it again, that is. After watching the film recently, I have developed a genuine appreciation. I find its best moments haunting. But I can't shake the knowledge that my second viewing came about only out of a sense of duty, not because Lynch's film created an itch that needed to be scratched. And I find that damning.

EH: Obviously, I've always had a different reaction to this film, even the first time around. But rather than argue our subjective responses to Mulholland Dr. any further, I want to dive a little deeper into some of the intertextual elements in Lynch's films. You mentioned the ending of Kiss Me Deadly. That's a good example of how Lynch's references to other films are not just more evidence of his taste for random weirdness, but purposeful distortions of the themes and ideas of earlier films, reflecting the ways in which Lynch's own concerns branch off from his reference points. In this respect, Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway are closely related in Lynch's oeuvre, with both films dealing with identity, and especially with characters whose identity and mental space are defined to some extent by Hollywood pop culture. There are also the obvious similarities in the pervasive doubling: Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring each playing women with two distinct identities, just like Patricia Arquette does in Lost Highway, while the earlier film also has the twist of Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty playing, Buñuel-style, more or less the same guy. Mulholland Dr. has a few references to Kiss Me Deadly (Mike and Velda's clenched-teeth embrace re-envisioned in Betty's audition, and the mysterious blue box), but it's in Lost Highway that Lynch is most directly cannibalizing Aldrich's apocalyptic noir: the speed-blurred yellow line of the opening credits, the detectives trailing the hero everywhere, the garage with its overly enthusiastic proprietor (a wheelchair-bound Richard Pryor in Lynch's version), Mr. Eddy's hard-boiled dialogue, the pool party. And, most importantly, that recurring image of the exploding house, which can't help but evoke Mike Hammer's nuclear comeuppance.

What's interesting to me about this reference point is the way Lynch tweaks it by running the exploding house footage backwards, so that several times the house reassembles itself from its wreckage, after which the normal forward flow of the film continues. It creates the impression that the cabin is perpetually on the verge of exploding, letting the atmosphere of imminent apocalypse from Kiss Me Deadly's ending linger over the entirety of Lost Highway. This is consistent with the loop that Lynch creates at the end of his own film, in which the events cycle around to actually cause the beginning of the film: "The End is the Beginning is the End" is not the Smashing Pumpkins song on this film's soundtrack, but it really should be. Lynch seems to be toying with the ambiguous finality of Kiss Me Deadly's denouement, which leaves everything pretty much unresolved and yet also suggests that everything (as in, the world) is ending. Lynch takes this one step further, trapping his characters in an endless ouroboric loop that is, in the end, the result of their own actions.

If Lost Highway's key text is Kiss Me Deadly, Lynch's Ur-reference for Mulholland Dr. is definitely Vertigo, but a twisted, dreamlike variation on Hitchcock's bizarre masterpiece (but then, I've always thought that the second half of Vertigo possibly plays out only in Scotty's damaged mind as well; is it just me?). The "plot" of Lost Highway, if you think about it a certain way, also maps fairly well onto Vertigo: a man trying to recreate the woman whose death he caused, only to discover that she's not really dead and may have played him for a fool. Mulholland Dr. tangles this story up in further layers by making the hero another woman, Naomi Watts' Diane rather than Jimmy Stewart's Scotty. The woman she's trying to remake is both her lesbian lover Camilla (reborn as beautiful amnesiac Rita, as blank a slate as Kim Novak in Vertigo) and herself, re-imagined as the chipper, promising Betty. Thus, while the scenes immediately preceding the Club Silencio sequence resemble Vertigo in some ways, by cutting Rita's hair and placing a blonde wig on her, Betty is not really remaking her lover in the image of a dead woman but creating another version of herself. The blonde wig is strikingly similar to Watts' own hair, and when the women pose in the mirror together the large differences between the two actresses are blurred somewhat. Lynch is blending Vertigo with elements of Persona or That Obscure Object of Desire: two women becoming one. Soon enough, Betty disappears altogether, as if she had finally fused into Rita. Lynch's camera circles away from her and once she's offscreen, she's gone for good, leaving behind only her newly blonde doppelganger.

By playing with Vertigo's plot in this way, Lynch transforms it from a typical Hollywood narrative in which the man is active and the woman is the passive object of his obsession, into a complex structure wholly constructed by a female imagination. One of the film's most emotional undercurrents, to me, is the way it turns out to be about a female actress struggling against the Hollywood machine, a subtext that became the actual surface text of Lynch's next film, INLAND EMPIRE. Diane's acts of imagination don't ultimately do her much good, but they're nevertheless moving attempts to find a role for herself, to make herself into someone different.

JB: Believe it or not, I don't find Mulholland Dr. to be any more "twisted" than Vertigo—once all the pieces have fallen into place, of course. What Lynch has done—and this is the brilliance of the film for me—is riff on Hitchcock's classic while altering our perspective. Vertigo is told in the third-person, but it has two audience surrogates. The first is Scotty, dutifully on the job, trying to solve the riddle of Madeleine's odd behavior. After Madeleine's death, however, Judy becomes the surrogate. Why? Because the audience knows long before Scotty that Judy and Madeleine are the same person (Judy's voiceover reveals as much). Thus, even though Judy is passive, and even though Scotty maintains the demeanor of an investigator (that's his nature), the audience aligns with Judy in that Scotty becomes the subject of curiosity rather than the examiner of it.

This shift is easy to miss for several reasons, the simplest of which is that most films select their audience surrogates from the outset and never alter them. More significantly, Hitchcock is known for his mysteries, and mysteries are almost always experienced through the eyes of the person trying to solve them. Initially, Scotty is the solver, but not after Madeleine's death. While Scotty's constant prodding of Judy can be misinterpreted (or misremembered) as the calculated tactics of an investigator, especially in the shadow of Rope, Scotty isn't "on the case." (If he were, he'd be the most clueless detective this side of Inspector Clouseau.) His manipulations of Judy are motivated by something else entirely, something dark within him.

Thus another similarity between Vertigo and Mulholland Dr. is that their primary mysteries are redefined once we have the whole picture. Vertigo begins as a mystery about Madeleine before becoming a mystery about Scotty. "How come he can't see that Judy is obviously Madeleine?" The answer, of course, is that he doesn't want to. He's willingly, hopefully and erotically engaging in hallucination to cope with the pain of heartbreak. Which brings us back to Mulholland Dr. When Lynch's film begins, it appears to be a third-person tale. Instead, what we're seeing is the first-person hallucination of Watts' "actual" character. Effectively, the first half of Mulholland Dr. tells us how the second half of Vertigo would look if seen through Scotty's eyes. It's mesmerizing, and daring.

EH: I love your observations about the first half of Mulholland Dr. mirroring the second half of Vertigo, but I'm not so sure about Judy being an audience surrogate. She's just such a blank character, perfectly malleable, able to be transformed into a completely different person on command. This is one of the reasons that I'm tempted to think that the second half of Vertigo is as much of a fantasy as Diane's hallucinatory Betty/Rita romance. I mean, one moment Scotty is having this baroque nightmare with his disconnected head spinning around, and the next he's out of the asylum, standing outside of Madeleine's old building. We never see him leave the asylum, and the rest of the film represents his fantasy of finding Madeleine again, attempting to recreate this magical could-be romance with her, only to find it all falling apart on him, much as Diane's fantasy begins to crumble as her dream characters begin stumbling closer to the truth. Even if the second half of Vertigo is meant to be taken more objectively, Judy is still a character who is acted upon rather than acting (up until her very final moment, a way out she shares with Diane).

Lynch riffs on Vertigo, as you say, by making Betty and Rita both audience surrogates, both active and sympathetic characters, even assuming Scotty's detective role. When Betty remakes Rita, she's not acting on a passive object but helping her friend; it's an emotional moment that draws the two closer, both physically (they go to bed together soon after) and metaphysically (they're beginning to merge into one person). In the film's second half, all of the good will we've developed for these surrogates is abruptly tweaked as the characters are reconfigured. This is especially jarring because there are so many appealing surrogates who have suddenly been warped into unrecognizable forms. In fact, Lynch is able to make nearly anyone a compelling audience surrogate. In this film, Adam also fulfills the role, and even the frightened guy in the diner during his one brief scene.

One of the other interesting things about the first half of Mulholland Dr. is that Betty and Rita are not just wandering through a mystery story that Diane's subconscious has concocted to bring the two together: they're living a Hollywood movie, or more properly an amalgam of all different kinds of Hollywood movies. This goes back to your earlier point about some scenes being simply extraneous weirdness. A lot of the film's extra little bits seem like detritus left over from all sorts of different movies. So the scene at the diner where the guy with the Fuller brush eyebrows is scared to death by a monster/homeless man behind the dumpster: that feels like it's been chopped out of horror movie and spliced in here whole. The scene with the mobsters is a great Don Corleone pastiche. The opening jitterbug contest recalls 50s teenage rock n' roll movies like The Girl Can't Help It. The scene with the hitman who piles up way more dead bodies than he intended is a really funny Tarantino parody. Someone less sympathetic to the film could easily dismiss this stuff as plot threads that would've been developed further in the TV series that Mulholland Dr. never became. I can't do that, because, for one thing, all of it really works within the genre it's meant to work in: the monster at the diner is genuinely creepy and frightening, the Tarantino scene is hilarious and could probably fit comfortably into any of his films. And by the same token, this genre flotsam is believable as a representation of the mental landscape of a young actress hopeful raised on a few decades of exposure to Hollywood product. This could be anyone's mind: I can't count the number of times I've had dreams that clearly incorporate big chunks of genre-style plotting and imagery. This meta-commentary on Hollywood dream-making is one of many ways in which Lynch pushes the material of Mulholland Dr. beyond its humble TV origins, beyond the relatively simple narrative at its core, into a dazzling celebration of dreams, fantasies, creativity and the possibility of finding genuine sentiment and depth within kitschy artificial surfaces.

JB: Mulholland Dr. is dreamlike in its elusiveness, too. I don't just mean its lack of literal truth. I mean that the best parts go by too quickly. (I don't know if this is unique, but when I encounter something particularly interesting in my dreams I think, "Wow, this is cool! Slow down! Remember this! Remember this!") Films, thank goodness, give us the opportunity to go back and re-experience those fleeting fascinations (not that the chapter-free DVD of Mulholland Dr. makes it easy). Anyway, it's interesting that Lynch's films so often proceed at such a tedious methodical pace, stopping to smell the roses in instances when there are no roses to be smelled, only to then blitz through some of its most compelling material as if to emulate a game show's lightning round. I understand that the power of Mulholland Dr.'s final act is the direct result of all that comes before it—both parts work in harmony. Nevertheless, the stuff of the latter chapters is the film I want to watch repeatedly. To cite one example, Watts' expression of bitterness and sadness at the dinner party is unforgettable, and worth revisiting. I just wish that it didn't take so much effort—and for me it's real effort—to get there.

This discussion has been fascinating for me because I expected that loving Lynch required an angle of approach with which I am unfamiliar. Instead, most of the things you have articulated in describing your fondness of Mulholland Dr. are things I at least recognize and in many cases share an enthusiasm for—if not the same level of enthusiasm as you. Clearly I'm conflicted about Lynch, and Mulholland Dr. specifically. Focusing on the film: My enjoyment watching it increases upon each viewing, but my dissatisfaction has by no means disappeared. What's changed is that I have accepted the film's shortcomings and infuriations so that they are no longer distractions. Like the homeowner next door to the person with the unkempt lawn and detritus covering the driveway, I have begrudgingly accepted the imperfections of this neighborhood, because I have no other choice.

I will always be intrigued and befuddled by the enigma that is Lynch: the way the inexplicable and/or clumsy aspects of his films are revered rather than criticized; the way his abstract style is by its very nature almost impervious to criticism; the way his fans, almost out of necessity, give Lynch more leeway than they would likely grant to any other filmmaker. But I'm glad Lynch is around, taking his boot and kicking through the white picket fence of traditional cinematic storytelling to blaze new trails. Earlier I wrote about the connotative (if not actual) difference between "suggestion" and "symbolism," and so it's fitting that any assessment of Lynch comes down to the words we choose. Is Mulholland Dr. "modular" or is it "fragmented"? Is it "deliberate" or is it "plodding"? Is it "unconventional" or is it "sloppy"? Is it "surreal" or is it "inscrutable"? Perhaps it's all these things. All at once. Certainly that dichotomy is what I love about the film, and what I loathe about it.

EH: You're right that to some extent the words we choose to describe Lynch's films make a big difference in how we perceive them, and that the same attributes of his work can be described in contradictory and (seemingly) mutually exclusive ways. This might be the case because the films are so definitively non-verbal: Lynch offers few words to tell us how to feel or what to think. He communicates through his images, while much of his dialogue is purposefully mundane and delivered with a stilted quality that keeps us from investing too much in what's being said. He forces us to find the words ourselves, and as this discussion has suggested, there are a lot of different ways to speak about these films, many of which "feel" right even if they outright contradict other things that also feel right.

This non-verbal quality is a big part of what makes Lynch's films so disturbing and slippery to grasp. We're used to having words to latch onto, even in films by the most visually oriented directors. We're used to a film's dialogue advancing its plot, communicating its meaning and developing its themes, but Lynch does all of these things almost entirely visually and non-verbally. It's unsettling and unusual. This is what David Foster Wallace is getting at in the quote I cited at the beginning of this conversation:

"Most of Lynch's best films don't really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretative process ... The absence of a point or recognizable agenda in Lynch's films, though, strips [your] subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don't. This is why his best films' effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We're defenseless in our dreams too.)"

Maybe I'm just giving Lynch too much leeway, as you say, but for me the emotional riches of his films are almost always worth the mental effort and commitment it takes to get the most out of them, to reach that open, defenseless state that seems to be necessary to the Lynchian experience. For me, the experience is ultimately, not only worthwhile, but one of the richest and strangest visions in the cinema, and the journey that one takes through these films indubitably comprises a big part of that experience. If Mulholland Dr. is sometimes confounding and, yes, inscrutable on initial exposure, it expands and unpeels its multiple layers in fascinating ways over the course of subsequent viewings. What Lynch is offering us is something very much like what your own comments suggest: a dream we can revisit at our leisure, perhaps hoping to someday understand it but mostly just enjoying the opportunity to explore subconscious dream worlds with a clarity and depth that we are seldom able to bring to bear on such submerged mental regions.



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ADDENDUM

EH: Here's a brief postscript, an aside that came up while Jason and I were conducting this conversation, and that we agreed was too fitting to exclude. During the course of this discussion, I've been reading the newest book by the cartoonist Anders Nilsen, called Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes. It's basically a collection of funny philosophical dialogues between crudely drawn characters who talk about God and robots and creativity and stuff: highly recommended, incidentally, though not quite as highly as Nilsen's minimalist (and somewhat Lynchian) masterpiece Dogs and Water. Anyway, at one point, immediately after sending off a response to Jason, I continued reading where I'd left off, two-thirds of the way through. I was surprised to find that the characters in the book were more or less continuing our discussion about coherence, abstraction and the thin line between "surreal" and "nonsensical," complete with references to Lynch (they seem to be talking about INLAND EMPIRE). Here's a chunk of the dialogue between two of the characters, one of whom is a meta-representation of the author while the other is the author's assistant.

"I know this whole enterprise seems extremely haphazard and without coherence... I just want to reassure the readers out there that at the end all of it will actually make sense. This isn't meant to be an esoteric IQ test, or an artsy endurance contest. Like that last David Lynch movie..."

"I liked that movie."

"What? No you didn't. You complained about it all the way home."

"That doesn't mean I didn't like it..."

"Well, this book, it'll all be worth it at the end. That's all I wanted to say."

"Actually, I don't mean to contradict you in front of the customers, but I'm not sure that's really true. I think this might just be a big mess, actually."

And my favorite bit, a little later:

"I don't see what people have against artsy endurance contests, anyway."

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Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler.

Ed Howard chronicles his film viewing at Only the Cinema.