David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (Icons)

by Dennis Lim

Citing the vague tagline that describes Eraserhead as “A Dream of Dark and Troubling Things,” Christie asks Lynch: “Would you like to expound on that a little?” “No,”

Lynch told a French interviewer that he appreciated the susceptibility of the television audience: “People are in their own homes and nobody’s bothering them. They’re well placed for entering into a dream.”

Edgar Allan Poe believed that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” Twin Peaks the series might have gone along with that notion, but Fire Walk with Me rejects it. As Lee plays Laura, she is desperately alive. Some faulted the film as a cruel exhumation, resurrecting Laura only to kill her again, but Lynch’s point is to show us how she lived and what she experienced.

The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette once said that for all storytellers, “Scheherazade is our patron saint.” When Lynch says, “Endings are terrible things,” he also — perhaps unwittingly — invokes the mythic queen of One Thousand and One Nights, who perfected the art of the cliffhanger as a hedge against death. In its way, the circular Lost Highway was an attempt to make a film without a conclusion, and serial television, regardless of its risks and constraints, allowed him to defer, at least for a time, those terrible endings.