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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The uncompromising director talks -- a little -- about how ABC balked at his disturbing TV series, "Mulholland Drive," and how he brought it to the big screen.
Oct 12, 2001 | After the change of pace of 1999's "relatively" normal "The Straight Story" -- a G-rated film released by Disney -- director David Lynch is up to his old tricks again with "Mulholland Drive," a film that is likely to satisfy and provoke his fans, while irritating and provoking those who don't respond to his particular brand of skewed reality.
When Lynch made his feature debut with "Eraserhead" in 1977, it seemed clear that he wasn't destined for a Hollywood career. An extraordinarily weird exercise in surrealism, "Eraserhead" demonstrated amazing technical control, a bizarre but undeniable sense of humor and (most of all) a dazzling visual style, all in the service of a horrifying dreamlike narrative that made little traditional sense (unless your notion of tradition is Dali and Buñuel). One would have guessed that Lynch would spend the rest of his life putting his dreams and nightmares up on the screen in little, low-budget, personal films.
But Mel Brooks had the inspiration to hire the director to helm the version of "The Elephant Man" he was producing -- leading to a best director Oscar nomination for Lynch and thus Tinseltown credibility. The result has been one of the strangest bodies of work ever to emerge from the American film industry. A big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi perennial "Dune" was a catastrophe that almost threw Lynch back into midnight shows at art houses; but the deal he cut with "Dune" producer Dino De Laurentiis allowed him to make the sensational and disturbing "Blue Velvet," a perfect blend of his distinctive style and concerns with traditional Hollywood genre conventions. "Blue Velvet" -- which ended up near the top of any and all polls of the great films of the '80s -- led to "Twin Peaks," the TV show that (briefly) made Lynch a household word.
The "Twin Peaks" phenomenon was a roller-coaster ride that took the show from national obsession to old news within about eight months. For a brief time, Lynch seemed to be on the cover of every national magazine, and analytical speculations about where the show was going appeared in quarters where analysis had rarely been seen before; but, as soon as the murder mystery at the center of the plot was "solved," the show tumbled downward in both the ratings and in critical opinion.
Since then, the director has done other TV shows and directed the Cannes palm d'or winner "Wild at Heart," as well as "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" (a sort of prequel to the series) and the radical puzzle movie "Lost Highway." While his feature projects have been distressingly few, he has kept himself more than busy with his still photography and artwork, his comic strip "The Angriest Dog in the World," producing record albums, and now with an ambitious Web site, which he hopes will be ready any day now.
"The Straight Story," his last feature, was surprising only in how "unsurprising" it was: that is, it was by far his most conventional project, the true story of Alvin Straight, an old man who rode a lawn mower a few hundred miles to visit his ill and estranged brother. It had Lynch's stamp if you looked close enough, but it represented another unexpected career turn.
"Mulholland Drive," on the other hand, "feels" like Lynch, most particularly like "Twin Peaks," transported from the spooky woods of Washington state to the spooky world of Hollywood. It's hard to describe the plot without destroying the film's pleasures, but suffice it to say that it centers around two women: Betty (Naomi Watts), an apparently naive, starry-eyed blond, who, in the tradition of a million small-town girls before her, has come to Hollywood to be a star, and "Rita" (Laura Elena Harring), a dark-haired beauty, who has lost her memory after a car wreck on Mulholland Drive. As the two of them attempt to reconstruct Rita's past, their lives intertwine with a bunch of other L.A. players: some inept hit men, a temperamental Hollywood director whose ability to deal with executives is no better than his ability to deal with his marriage, a mystically withdrawn studio boss and a scary guy in a cowboy hat.
