Thank you, David Lynch
Eighty minutes into Mulholland Drive, we cut to a bejeweled Lisa Lackey at a ‘50s microphone. She’s singing “Sixteen Reasons Why I Love You.” The camera dollies out to show us her backup singers. The camera keeps going. We see now that they’re in a studio, and we’re on the other side of the plate glass — CBS, it seems, live on air. But the camera keeps going, and it’s not a radio station after all. It’s a mockup of a radio station. We’re on a soundstage, our fictional director is casting his movie, and Lisa Lackey is lip-syncing. If we kept pulling back, we might see a real movie being made as well.
The singing gets no less beautiful when you realize it’s a lip-synced audition for a fictional movie. In fact it gets more beautiful.
I remember thinking, on my 1,000th viewing of Mulholland Drive, that the whole movie is like this. You recognize what you’re watching as a movie about detectives or amnesia or nightmares or mobsters or hitmen or Hollywood or two Nancy Drew types trying to figure things out, you think you know what you’re seeing, but the frame keeps pulling back. And even when you’re told it is all a recording, for some reason you still believe Rebekah del Rio is singing.
This is the smallest fraction of what I have to say about Mulholland Drive. It’s the best movie I’ve ever seen. My friend Max H introduced me to it our senior year of high school, about three years after it came out, for which I will always owe him. I tried to pay this life-changing favor forward to new friends on my freshman hall and to various subsequent girlfriends. Their uniformly negative response had more to do with my pushiness than with the genius of David Lynch.
There’s no statement too cliché about the effect Mulholland Drive had on me. It’s hard to remember what I thought about art before my introduction to David Lynch, and art is most of what I’ve cared about since.
If it hadn’t been Mulholland Drive, it would have been Blue Velvet. If it hadn’t been Blue Velvet, it would have been Twin Peaks. I don’t know if The Return is a TV show or an 18-hour movie, but it’s the best of whatever it is. I never got to see Twin Peaks on network television — so 2017, as I waited for each new episode, will always be a special year for me.
One miracle of David Lynch is that others love him just as much as I do. His genius is so singular, so particular—so quirky and hilarious and light and dark, so simple in one moment and so difficult to decipher in another—on such an exact wavelength that how many of us could there possibly be? But the owls are not what they seem. There are Lynch obsessives everywhere. All that quirkiness taps into something shared. (It would be too cute to point out that life is also quirky, hilarious, light, dark, simple, complicated.) No one else could have made his movies, yet so many people were waiting for them. He was way out there and also no distance at all, and those two sides of David Lynch explain my insistence on the word genius.
And to seem so damn down to earth about it. Of everything that has meant so much to me, it’s thinking about the weather reports that most breaks my heart. I’m sorry we’ll never get another weather report.
An hour into Blue Velvet, Jeffrey and Sandy are parked outside a church. Organ music plays. Part of the brilliance of Blue Velvet is how compromised we are, how complicit, when we laugh uproariously at an earnest discussion of good and evil.
Jeffrey, at maximal earnestness, asks: “Why are there people like Frank?”
So let me say, in equal earnestness, that I took a lot of solace knowing there was a person like David Lynch.