Discovering David Lynch

It’s always sad to think that we discover an artist when we hear of his death. That it’s the announcement of his death that reminds us that his works are still among the classics to be explored, in a list that never ends. All I knew of David Lynch was his name and the influence he left on cinema – in video games and film. I knew that Twin Peaks had left a palpable legacy in the art world, and I’d seen Dune a long time ago, retaining only very psychedelic memories. Elephant Man, seen more recently, was a magnificent film to discover, but also terribly tragic and sad, human and imbued with the loneliness of its hero. Nevertheless, I had the impression that these were his most “accessible” films, or those furthest removed from his usual style, particularly in the case of Dune, which is an adaptation rather than an original story on his part.

So when I learned of David Lynch’s death, I thought back to Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks – mysterious names that have left a deep mark on the world of cinema, and which I still hadn’t bothered to discover. This is my (sad) opportunity to pay a modest tribute to the director with this article, having finally seen Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, from a simple spectator’s point of view.

I was warned: David Lynch delivers films that can be felt, rather than analyzed. They lose us more than they reveal all the keys. Where everything seems strange, unreal, like a dream rather than reality. Indeed. Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway begin with places, atmospheres, street names, a highway speeding by, rather than precise locations and a structured framework. We’re in a blur, but always starting from an anonymous place, a liminal location, and then unfolding a story. I probably enjoyed getting lost in Mulholland Drive‘s labyrinth more than Lost Highway‘s, by the way.

“A Love Story in the City of Dreams”

Mulholland Drive is a love story. It’s even a story of fascination and obsession. The meeting of two physically opposed women – the candid, blonde Betty and the brunette femme fatale nicknamed Rita after a poster of actress Rita Hayworth – brought together in the same universe. The world of Hollywood cinema, the city of movie dreams and intimate dreams. Nothing seems to connect them, and yet they bond in an unreal friendship, on a meeting where anyone would have thrown Rita out rather than welcome her back, now amnesiac and without a clue to her identity following her car accident.

And yet, the two women appreciate each other and unite in the quest for Rita’s lost memories. They fall in love for one night, without really knowing if either of them has experienced it before. They offer each other support and help, even as the shadow of an investigation and murder hangs over Rita. Until that strange moment when Rita disappears, giving rise to a second part of the film, in which the actresses take on new roles: Naomi Watts becomes Diane (ex-Betty), an obviously failed actress, but still obsessed with Camille (ex-Rita, played by Laura Elena Harring) and whose fixation leads her into a form of dangerous madness.

Can we talk about a love story when everything seems to be a dream? Lynch’s camerawork is slow, contemplative and the images surreal. At times, pieces of the scene seem completely disconnected from the rest, as if independent of the main plot. A scene in a theater reveals that the singer who faints on stage after singing her heart out was already recorded in playback, making the whole thing an “illusion”. The music itself is dreamlike, floating and heavy at the same time, evanescent, with haunting, distant melodies.

So what are we to make of this story, divided into two parts? At times, it seems like a dream life, before returning to a colder, crueller reality. At times, it’s the two women who seem to project themselves into each other. Or the film’s non-linearity can make the second part seem like the first. But the silence at the end of the film still weighs heavily, leading us to believe that this was all a foregone conclusion, a story, a fantasy. This is undoubtedly the beauty of Mulholland Drive: in dreaming, we can only make suppositions. Without understanding everything. Without understanding everything. It’s a change from today’s films, where everything has to be explained to the point of infantilizing the viewer.

Yet it’s a love story that I felt deeply sincere about, as two women who are lucky enough to find each other in love and complement each other, while bringing an ambiguous personality to the table. The candid Betty, fresh to the world of Hollywood, possesses astonishing courage and unsuspected audacity, whether she’s playing a sensual scene in an audition or breaking into an apartment. Rita, so cold and empty on the surface, finds herself soothed and comforted by Betty’s support. Generously. Without expecting anything in return. Except perhaps that elusive love that doesn’t last.

The second half of the film becomes even crueller, turning Betty into a failed actress and Rita into a triumphant star. If the criticism of the film world and auditions was already apparent in the first half, it’s even worse in the second. Camille/Rita gives the impression of having taken every opportunity to advance her career, even marrying a director who doesn’t love her, crushing others and selling out. Love for Diane/Betty becomes indifference and mockery, as if it had only ever existed in her head. Diane’s suffering is poignant, painful, through the filter of the screen. The glory has been reversed, the dream of love has collapsed. Did it ever exist, or was it destroyed by the ambition of the City of Dreams?

It’s one of those hopes that, when you wake up in the morning, the false sweetness of the realization of a situation you thought you’d finally settled on ideals makes you suffer. As if to correct a reality too bitter and a solitude too pervasive. The cover of the remastered version of the film, inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting Morning Sun – which has always fascinated me – takes on its full meaning in the solitude of these two women.

Dreams and nightmares also feature prominently in Lost Highway. When musician Fred and his wife Renée (Patricia Arquette) receive video cassettes containing recordings of themselves without their knowledge, they see themselves sleeping. Fred has nightmares of a burning cabin, while Renée dreams of a man who looks like her husband. In fact, in the second half of the film, Fred is accused of murder and put in prison. But the man in the cell is then Pete, a simple mechanic who falls in love with the mistress, Alice (still Patricia Arquette), of the gangster he works for. This love story, too, can only end badly.

Echoes of being

Betty/Diane and Rita/Camille constantly echo each other throughout Mulholland Drive. Through their acting careers, through those parts where the actresses change roles, through that scene where Rita almost becomes Betty’s twin by donning a blonde wig. A fusion, a mirror in which they reflect themselves as they love each other. Then there are the reversed careers, where Camille seems to have become everything Betty had set out to be, while Diane remains on the sidelines, bitter, resigned, as if betrayed by her lover. Each change of face and identity further blurs the boundaries of what we think we’re seeing on screen.

These detours of being, these mirror effects, are also found in Lost Highway. Firstly, in the duality of Fred, who becomes Pete by changing his actor’s face, before becoming Fred again. In Patricia Arquette, too; from brunette wife to blonde femme fatale, she fits every box of the film stereotype. But wasn’t this a female figure who was/will be already there in Mulholland Drive? Rita, with her cold beauty and amnesia, and the way she seeks help from the distraught Betty, is a testament to the vulnerability suggested by femmes fatales, who seek protection from others. But it’s even more striking with Renée/Alice, whom some people try to kill off, through this elusive Alice character. She oscillates between fragility and ambivalence, elegance and seduction, sometimes in love with Pete, sometimes with the gangster in the story, to the point of driving Pete to murder. And that line “You’ll never have me”, as she and Pete finally seem to be together, but making her ever more cold and elusive, like Bizet’s Carmen or the Rita Hayworth of the film Gilda.

The mark of the “film noir” genre on these two works by David Lynch is unmistakable. The cryptic atmosphere, the murders and investigations in a heavy, heavy atmosphere, the femme fatale characters who push the hero or heroine to the limit. But it’s also obscure, mysterious shots, that sort of invisible mist that distorts everything, that makes the plot incomprehensible at first, that way of speaking so vaporous and distant of the protagonists. More than once, especially in Lost Highway, the discrepancy between the characters’ reactions and their supposed bonds is profoundly felt. Renée and Fred are married, but there’s no complicity between them; each takes an infinite amount of time to respond to the other… when they’re not responding in the opposite direction.

Time and again, I’ve realized how much of an influence this must have been on the Silent Hill saga, in those quirky, strange conversations between characters, as if each answered from a different reality, with that lapse of time that makes everything nebulous and blurred. Straight out of a dream… The amnesia, the troubled identity and quest of the protagonists inevitably reminded me of Maria and James from Silent Hill 2. An effect accentuated by the very electro and urban feel of Lost Highway’s music.

A mystery of its own

After seeing Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, I thought back to the images I know from Twin Peaks without having seen the series. I think back to Alan Wake 2, whose small American town with its dark secrets retains the deep imprint of the series. I think of the surreally blue shots in Come True, with its deserted streets and roads, somewhere between nightmare and reality. I’m thinking of the warm, minimalist places in Lost Highway. They remind me as much of the muted mist of the lost town of Silent Hill as of Edward Hopper’s paintings, imbued with the profound solitude of American cities. Here’s to characters lost in thought, wandering in dreams of connecting with others and reconnecting with a living existence.

The motionless protagonists frozen in the middle of the road – Alice after the car drops her off, Rita wandering the streets alone in the dark – sometimes reminded me of the series Mr. Robot. As in that series, David Lynch’s heroes and heroines are crushed by the camera, lost in their loneliness and lack of communication, sometimes leaving for a destination we don’t understand, sometimes disappearing. They echo each other to the point where we wonder whether they are not always the same characters, or projections of each into the other. A game of roles and masks where “everything is already recorded”, and where in the end only silence remains, like Mulholland Drive. A scene where one performer follows another in different guises, with a strangeness that casts doubt on the reality of what the camera and their vision are offering us.

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.” (William Shakespeare, Macbeth)

All these oddities in these two films sometimes leave you on the edge of your seat. One wonders what this or that scene is doing here. We find it disturbing when it dwells on a character trait, on a smile, on an absurd detail that makes us feel uncomfortable, without knowing why. Or completely senseless and liberating, when gangsters with guns lecture youngsters on the rules of the road. But there are marks that remain after viewing. Trivially, the haircuts of Naomi Watts, with whom I’m in love. More seriously… Rita’s sudden disappearance, the fixed shot of Alice motionless, the burning cabin, the pre-recorded scene in the theater, Betty’s tears, those flashing neon lights in the night, the mystery man, the cryptic phone calls announcing events, those stares lost in the void. In the characters’ eyes, there is the immensity of an inner life, an existence nourished by the dreams and emotions of each individual, yet always troubled by profound solitude and the darkness of a stifling city. Are dreams an escape, or are they always drowned, destined never to come true in the film’s second wind?


David Lynch has left a deep imprint that I became aware of afterwards, as I discovered a little more of his films, that neo-noir atmosphere that fascinates and loses at the same time, like a maze of thoughts, dreams and games with reality. An inheritance in works that I love enormously, and yet had no idea of their influence. I finally did it, (too) belatedly, for fear of completely missing out on these mythical and singular films. Of not understanding them. This, despite the attractive aura that surrounds the names Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Twin Peaks. I didn’t understand everything about the destination, but I enjoyed the journey. And I hope that David Lynch’s influence will continue, fascinating us with his distinctive, dreamlike films, and leaving its mark on other works after him.