The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999)

Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story

Cast: Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Everett McGill, John Farley, Kevin Farley, Jane Galloway, Joseph Carpenter, Harry Dean Stanton. Screenplay: John Roach, Mary Sweeney. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: Mary Sweeney. Music: Angelo Badalamenti. 

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)

Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Phoebe Augustine, Eric DaRe, Grace Zabriskie, Moira Kelly, James Marshall, Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, Kyle MacLachlan, David Bowie, Pamela Gidley, Miguel Ferrer. Screenplay: David Lynch, Robert Engels, based on the television series by Lynch and Mark Frost. Cinematography: Ronald Victor García. Production design: Patricia Norris. Film editing: Mary Sweeney. Music: Angelo Badalamenti.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was widely panned when it was released, but it has since developed a stout corps of admirers, some of whom think it's Lynch's masterpiece. I think I would have been among the naysayers when it first appeared, partly because I was never a follower of the TV series for which it's a prequel, an account of the last days of Laura Palmer, the teenager whose murder precipitated so much confusion and intrigue in the town of Twin Peaks. The film begins with another murder, that of Teresa Banks, another teenager in another town, and the investigators are not the familiar Dale Cooper and Harry S. Truman of the TV series, but Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland), who are sent on their mission by FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch) in scenes that have an off-beat enigmatic style: They're hilariously weird and played in a dead-pan artificial manner. But Lynch switches tone and style when we reach Twin Peaks a year later, shifting to his usual plausible nightmare mode. For devotees of the series, there are cameo appearances by familiar characters as well as some allusions that went over my head. But at its essence, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a straightforward story of a lost girl, caught up in a web of sex and drugs and adolescent rebellion. It seems to me that Lynch does this much better in other films, like Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), that aren't encumbered with the mythos generated by a popular TV series.

Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)

Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman in Lost Highway

David Lynch's Lost Highway is a kind of fantasia on film noir themes: shady ladies, ruthless gangsters, morally compromised protagonists, and so on. Its story (by Lynch and Barry Gifford) doesn't play out against a background of supposed "normality," the way Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks or his films Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001) do. In the first two, Lynch plumbs the dark depths that lie below the cheerful surface of small towns, and he opens Mulholland Dr. with the sunny, naive optimism of Naomi Watts's character as she arrives in Los Angeles, ready to make it in the movies. Lost Highway is dark from the start, though not without moments of humor: When Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), receive the first mysterious videotape, which shows only the exterior of their house, they assume it came from a real estate agent. Things get darker from then on, until finally a tape arrives that shows Fred standing over Renee's body. He is quickly tried and sentenced to death, and just as quickly somehow morphs, while in his jail cell, into someone else: an auto mechanic, some years younger than Fred, named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). Released from prison, since he's clearly not Fred Madison and the police have nothing to hold Pete on, he returns home to his parents (Gary Busey and Lucy Butler) and to his job at a garage, where he works on the cars owned by a Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia). He gets involved with Mr. Eddy's mistress, Alice (played by a blond Arquette -- Renee was a redhead), and eventually winds up having sex with Alice in the desert and morphing back into Fred, who ends the film on the run from the police after killing Mr. Eddy. Oh, there's also a mysterious figure played by a heavily made-up Robert Blake, and some other bits of Lynchian enigma. In short, Lost Highway starts weird and gets weirder, like a nightmare from which there's no hope of waking. Unfortunately, as played by Pullman, Fred is a bland protagonist who barely registers before his transformation into Pete, a character to which Getty gives a bit more substance. The best work in the movie is done by the ever-reliable Loggia, who has a wonderful scene in which Mr. Eddy takes his revenge on a driver who was tailgating him. But the film has the perversity of Blue Velvet and the narrative disjunctions of Mulholland Dr. without the wit and cinematic finesse of either. I think it suffers from its lack of roots in an identifiable reality, even the caricature of reality in those films.    

Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

Mulholland Dr. defies exegesis like no other film I know. Sure, you can trace its origins: Car-crash amnesia is a soap-opera trope; the mysterious mobsters and other manipulators are film noir staples; the portrayal of Hollywood as a nightmare dreamland is straight from Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), which the film even imitates by having its before-the-credits title appear on a street sign. But writer-director David Lynch isn't out to parody the sources -- not entirely, anyway. What he is up to is harder to pinpoint. There's a part of me that thinks Lynch just wants to have fun -- a nasty kind of fun -- manipulating our responses. At the beginning, we're on to him in that regard: We laugh at the minimal conversation between the two detectives (Robert Forster and Brent Briscoe) at the crash site. We recognize the naive awe on the face of Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), as she arrives in Los Angeles, as a throwback to the old Hollywood musicals in which choruses of hopefuls arrive at the L.A. train station singing "Hooray for Hollywood!" (Has anyone ever been inspired to sing and dance when arriving at LAX?) We're delighted by the appearance of Ann Miller as the landlady, just as later we identify Lee Grant, Chad Everett, and even Billy Ray Cyrus in their cameos. Even the seemingly disjointed scenes -- the director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), is bullied by the Castiglianes (Dan Hedaya and the film's composer, Angelo Badalamenti), or a man (Patrick Fischler) recounts his nightmare at a restaurant called Winkie's, or a hit man (Mark Pellegrino) murders three people -- are standard thriller stuff, designed to keep us guessing -- though at that point, having seen this sort of thing in films by Quentin Tarantino and others, we feel confident that everything will fit together. And then, suddenly, it doesn't. Betty vanishes and Diane Selwyn (Watts), whom we have thought dead, is alive. The amnesia victim known as Rita (Laura Harring) is now Camilla Rhodes, the movie star that Betty wanted to be, and Diane, Camilla's former lover, wants to kill her. It's such a complete overthrow of conventional narrative that there are really only two basic responses, neither of them quite sufficient: One is to dismiss the film as a wacked-out experiment in playing with the audience -- "a load of moronic and incoherent garbage," in the words of Rex Reed -- or to try to assimilate it into some coherent and consistent scheme, like the theory that the first two-thirds of the film are the disillusioned Diane Selwyn's dream-fantasy of what her life might have been as the fresh and talented Betty. There is truth in both extremes: Lynch is playing with the audience, and he is portraying Los Angeles as a land of dreamers. But his film will never be forced into coherence, and it can't be entirely dismissed. I think it is some kind of great film -- the Sight & Sound critics poll in 2010 ranked it at No. 28 in the list of greatest films of all time -- but I also think it's self-indulgent and something of a dead end when it comes to narrative filmmaking. It has moments of sheer brilliance, including a performance by Watts that is superb, but they are moments in a somewhat annoying whole.

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Would there have been a Quentin Tarantino if there hadn't been a David Lynch? Blue Velvet represents an opening up of mainstream moviemaking to the perverse underside of American experience. It had been approached before, in 1940s film noir, for example, but only by suggestion. In the era of the nascent Cold War, unusual sexual behavior was typically presented as the product of decadent cities like New York and Los Angeles. But in Lynch's film, made at the height of the Reagan era, it underlies the wholesome atmosphere of a small town where the fireman smiles and waves as he passes by. The film noir detective was disgusted by what he saw, not fascinated and drawn in the way Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is. Jeffrey, barely out of adolescence, teams up to explore the mystery of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) with a teenage girl, Sandy (Laura Dern), who is both disgusted and fascinated by what she learns. The use of songs like Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" suggests the way American pop culture, aimed at the young, floats atop a sea of darkness that it only thinly hides. In the end, of course, everything is cleaned up: the vicious Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) gets what's coming to him and Dorothy is reunited with her child. Even Jeffrey's father, incapacitated by a stroke while watering his lawn at the beginning of the film, is restored to health.  Sandy has earlier told us about her nightmare in which the horrors will only disappear when the robins fly down and bring a "blinding light of love." So in the end a robin appears on the windowsill, with one of the disgusting insects we saw at the film's beginning under the grass of the Beaumonts' lawn in its mouth. But Lynch mocks the happy ending by clearly showing us that it's a fake, an animated stuffed robin.