David Lynch, dubbed once by Mel Brooks as 'Jimmy Stewart from Mars' is a filmmaker that makes things happen in my head that I can't quite explain. He places a mixture of raw feeling, emotion, words, sounds, intuitions, images and tangents in there and leaves them to grow, evolve, fester. This is both good and bad, and provoked me to write something a little different for a director who always has looked at and sneered at the conventions of the system.

Occasionally, in a magazine or newspaper, two critics will go head to head in a literary gladiatorial contest, enthusiastically trashing or praising a given figure. One will claim that Woody Allen is a beautifully humane, poignant and hilarious artist, whereas the other will rage that he confuses the media of stand-up, drama and thoughts perhaps best left for the mirror at home into an excruciating bundle of indulgence. However, Lynch is not Woody, and so I decided not to contact someone to do battle, because I wasn't sure which side I'd choose. On one hand, you could say that Lynch is a visionary genius, and on the other you could say he spouts glorified bullshit. These two hands could be my own. So, I've decided to write one of these head to head articles with myself on both sides, taking on the good and the bad in all things Lynch.

I've taken two recent films of his, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, and stared at the television for so long that my fingers took up and walked towards my laptop Evil Dead style...

Bad Lynch

Trouble in Lynchland

Why Mulholland Drive is a perfect example of the considerable lows, missing links and black spots in David Lynch's dream manifesto

Spoilers as rampant as weird looking insects in French Camp Sites

It's often pointed out that the Lynch universe (Lynchland to us folks) contains the extremes of good and bad in the very same location. Purity and evil. The underworld and suburban society. Deviants and heroes. Madonnas and Devils. Light versus darkness. This is supposed to imply the duality of people and their surroundings; constantly and unpredictably shifting from one extreme to another, yet always possessing that possibility of divine goodwill as well as desirous aggression (often in the same character or place). The world of Lynch is one that can showcase the benevolence of the human spirit, the admirably curious human mind and the power of love, before cruelly dousing that with perverted criminals accidentally decapitating themselves with their own shotgun. You never know quite how Lynch feels towards his characters, and just what he'll do to them next. Who the true villains or heroes are or if the ending will spell ambiguous happiness or ambiguous tragedy, and it's much the same with the finely-tuned world they inhabit. The dark and mesmeric world of Lost Highway, the faux 1950's evocation of Blue Velvet or the industrial blurring of smoke and steel in Eraserhead are places of more dimension and scope than 99% of films out there. It's great that these unique places are almost surgically attached to the characters, such is the feeling of a universe, rather than particulars. These places and these people can never be letterboxed, stereotyped or easily labelled. There is no overtly sinister theme tune when particular characters stroll onscreen, and the existence of old screen adages such as the facial scar or black hole-dark sunglasses is either removed or subverted. Such a multi-layered vision is almost impossible to come by when scouring the crop of today's directors.

Above all, even after the credits roll and the obligatory baffled cinema-goers quickly return to the safety of their cars and homes, the viewers themselves are unsure of what they've just witnessed. How it made them feel, what they've gleamed from the experience and even if they liked the damn thing or not. Over the course of the next few days as the film festers and evolves in the mind, things start to make a shaky sort of sense, like an alien set of rules which can be followed but not really understood. The sound of everything clicking delightfully and acutely into place on a second visit to Lost Highway or Fire Walk With Me is up there with the aural beauty of birdsong at dawn or the incoherent laughter of new-born babies. Said with a straight face though, these are two of Lynch's definite accomplishments: his unique sense of four-dimensions to his subjective yet accessible world and the installation of massively contradictory thoughts in the head of viewers. The mere fact that I'm talking in length about the spookily-coiffeured man now is surely a compliment to his films, which at their best are part masterfully modern filmmaking, part thought machine, and part dystopian surrealism. In fact, within some moments in his films, Lynch is up there with the best directors of the past twenty years, producing work that embraces a strong modern context as an outlet for outlandish idiosyncrasies and genuinely enthralling individuality (something that the recent work of the somewhat soporific and only sporadically worthwhile auteurs of past years, amongst them Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, Lumet, Polanski, and Wenders, fail to recognise). However, those who are baffled by my congratulatory prose clashing with the damning title can rest easy, as Lynch also has this imbalance of good and bad in the quality, clarity and level of ingenuity and sheer indulgence in his films. The clashing of the beautiful and the provocative with the plain useless does not limit itself to Lumberton or Los Angeles, and David Lynch's latest film is the perfect tour for exploring the good, but most interestingly, the bad, the ugly and the revelatory failings of this visionary who occasionally stumbles into the kingdom of the blind.

Mulholland Drive is what David Lynch would probably call one of his 'beautiful accidents', the name he administered for such moments as the spontaneous tear that rolls down Anthony Hopkins' face when he first glimpses The Elephant Man. Starting life as a television series in the vein of Twin Peaks, the plug was pulled when Lynch's product was deemed too obtuse and uncommercial (what were they expecting, 'The Wonder Years'?). In steps French television company Canal Plus and offers Lynch a few million more to turn this abortive project into a feature film, on the proviso that he offers a conclusive ending and re-shoots certain scenes. Conclusive ending quibbles aside, Mulholland Drive was reborn. Equal parts noir mystery, twisted love story, murky Hollywood satire and all-out horror film. The plot concerns two young women, played by Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring, who respectively play a young aspiring actress and an amnesiac woman. Opening with a strange visual sequence involving several overlapping images of couples dancing in the style of 1950's diners (a ghostly image of a broadly smiling trio is occasionally overexposed on top) followed by a typically atmospheric Angelo Badalamenti score which accompanies the title sequence, Mulholland Drive spends no time reminding us where we are. The problem is, this place with memorable characters, witty and incisive dialogue, thoroughly accomplished cinematography and several bizarre and exciting encounters lacks something, or more accurately, forgets to include something. That something is the sense of unity one experiences when admiring a film, a middle ground between the artist and the consumer, the creator and his audience. Herein lies the central fault with Mulholland Drive and in turn, the output of one David Lynch, namely the uneven, unrealistic and dare I say, negligent relationship between the audience and the film. I'll explain…

Anyone who likes to think they know a bit about cinema can toss the following films into the pile labelled 'To be melted down for glue': Titanic, 8MM, Showgirls, Pearl Harbor etc. The list could go on, but you get the idea. Films with absolutely no artistic credentials, doomed to be on the receiving end of sneering witticisms whenever cineastes descend to talk. Any critic brave enough to say a word this side of the expression 'eternally damned to celluloid Hell' is slowly stepping towards the cliff marked 'Career Suicide'. However, what these folks tend to forget is that despite the films themselves existing in the realm of complete bullshit, they were entertaining in a shallow way. Bottom line. Sure, Titanic is trite, appallingly scripted, and ridiculously overwrought, but it's the kind of inane and sensational gloss you can buy into for a few hours. Ditto 8MM with it's bonehead theorising or the glitzy slime of Showgirls. Yes, these films lacked an intelligent bone in their body and conceptually they were as empty as Pearl Harbor's 'leading' men, but they were sufficiently well-executed and straightforwardly entertaining to become a passable waste of one's evening. When David Lynch watched these films I'll bet my best hat that he walked out, disgusted by the mind-numbing simplicity, because when it comes to linearity, Lynch is as straight as a lost highway. Mulholland Drive and much of the Lynch oeuvre is exactly the opposite: Too conceptual, too deliberately obtuse, carefully rendering the ideology and meaning of the film well before the vagaries of plot, coherent execution, believable drama and so forth. With alarming ease, David Lynch appears to want to alleviate his films into the position of only existing partially on screen, the rest filling the annals of one's brain: a contemplation about the dwarf that controls Hollywood or an afterthought about the ending after seeing it for the third time. And that isn't fair. Whilst the themes and messages of Lynch's world may be more complex and passionate than your average fare, this doesn't excuse the omnipresent use of the purple veil function at the start of Blue Velvet to shroud each and every one of his films (bar the relatively straight 'The Straight Story', and 'The Elephant Man') to the point of dislocation. This overt concentration on the ideology and the deeper meaning often makes characters, situations and places perfunctory and unconvincing. The implication of this wavering level of reality is that Lynch lacks trust in his individual creations, failing to allow the personalities and the world to create the stories and pivotally, the ending. The conclusion is always transparently lifted from the mind of Lynch and not those of the participants. Mulholland Drive's ending seems like Lynch had this grand idea of personalities shifting and was waiting for a half-appropriate point to insert this gratuitous section, like an acceptable version of Bob Guccione's hard-core insertions into Caligula. If Lynch himself doesn't believe in his characters, why should we give one jot of emotion towards them?

As the career of Lynch progresses, his modus operandi seems less to do with surrealism and abstraction, and more to do with giving the middle finger to clarity and coherence (perhaps whilst beckoning the phrase 'monstrous indulgence' with his spare hand). Take the 'twist' in Mulholland Drive involving the switching of identities and imagine how much more effective it would have proved if this had been delivered in the harsh light of utmost exposure. I'm not asking Lynch to devote his final twenty minutes to a mysterious man who explains all (like Vanilla Sky chose to), but surely if his ideas and innovations were so strong, this would be the perfect time to lift the lid off his Pandora's Box and unleash the monsters within, so we could see the horrible truth that lurks in the corners and shadows of Lynch's world. If there is in fact anything there. That that most of the audience are wondering what the hell is happening at this crucial point of revelation, this prevents them from emoting and relating to the plight of these characters. Yes, the ideas floating around the edges of the screen are often ingenious, but what does that count for if we rarely see them clearly delivered onscreen? In stubbornly staying enigmatic David Lynch has forced an audience to turn onto themselves, rather than letting the screen do the talking. Thusly, the conclusion of this tightly woven mystery is neither revelatory or edifying when it really must be both to satisfy fully. I have great concerns about Lynch making his films puzzle-boxes to solve, rather than concentrating on something which congeals emotionally, and the ending of Mulholland Drive (as well as many others) is the proof. I'm having trouble thinking of a film which ends with the main character killing themselves, that miscues as much as Mulholland Drive in terms of emotional power and pure horror. It's the same with Fire Walk With Me, Wild At Heart and to an extent Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. The ending in itself is fair enough, but how we get there is the real problem. This is the biggest letdown in Lynch's twisting narrative: The fourth act. How we traverse the fine line between the mysteries and tangents of before, to reach a satisfying conclusion, something that Mulholland Drive certainly does not possess by any stretch of the imagination.

This is often because the true nature of the story is revealed with about half-an-hour to go, like reality has suddenly overlapped with the elaborate subjective images we've seen up to this point. In Lost Highway, it's revealed that Bill Pullman's head IS in fact the film, Eraserhead induces (and possibly reduces) everything to a purely metaphorical level and Mulholland Drive shows us the darker sides to dreams (in every sense of the word) when it's narrative shift takes place. David Lynch whilst being able to create an awesome atmosphere, is no gear-changer, and he lacks the courage to allow his films to conclude conventionally, assuming that the strength and enigmatic allure of the whole film will be suffice for a less than sensational ending. Take the Coens' Barton Fink, which combines the humour, darkness and invention of a typical Lynch with it's mysterious core, and look at the ending it delivers. The audience leaves satisfied without the film lamely attempting to explain it's sense of purpose, because the ending works on an emotional level, whilst staying primarily enigmatic. Lynch should realise that the audience couldn't care less about exactly what happens, if they're not sure exactly why it happens.

It's at trying times like these that David Lynch's films can often be exposed as more than a little fraudulent. One can often reveal the ridiculous, the crude and the superficial if they take a step back and observe what is happening, rather than immersing themselves within. I recently did this with The Academy Awards and quite a humbling experience unfurled itself (Denzel won why? Why do even the smiles seem rented?). Many Lynch films fail on this level of reading between the cinematic lines, the basic ability to see the joins in the fabric of the film. If one chooses to pause and consider for a moment the number of pulleys and levers (read contrivances) contained within the otherworldly Lynch universe, the truth can be quite shocking. Most redundant is the link between the main thread and the ending. Yes, the fourth act. Mulholland Drive contains what is perhaps the most superficial of these contrivances with the utter redundancy of its blue box, which magically transports the viewer from quite a good film, to one mightily inferior. Doesn't anyone find this contraption to be completely laughable, especially in a film with as many strong ideas and themes as Mulholland Drive? All of the films that we can deem 'Lynchian' have one of these: The all-knowing Mystery Man of Lost Highway. The convoluted mystery which even the film has no real interest with in Blue Velvet. The far too easy transformation of the incestuous story in Fire Walk With Me. Wild At Heart's Wizard of Oz homage, at once amusing and incredulous. Eraserhead's rambling dream sequence which heralds the murderous conclusion. The ending is there, and frequently it's good in it's isolation, but as film doesn't work like that on this planet, the lazy way we arrive there really removes all the power there could have been. Sorry, but the blue box and Club Silencio is simply not good enough, and shame on Lynch for thinking it would do. The ending of any film really goes some way towards defining it's outlook and raison d'être, and the messiness of Mulholland Drive reduces the film to little more than an interesting but dislocated series of atmospheric vignettes, a serious threat that one could argue can be applied to Eraserhead, Lost Highway et al.

All this convolution is normally acceptable because the feel, mood and resonance of David Lynch's creation is often worth the admission price, the over-priced popcorn and the taxi ride home. But, and this is the biggest but of all, his films are essentially superficial entities with fake characters, motivations, locations, ideas, dialogue, responses, philosophies and so forth. Watts, Harring and Theroux do not exist anywhere but within the limited confines of the film, and the very nature of the film makes it difficult to imagine events taking place outside of the frame. There isn't that lingering presence when characters leave the film, seen so effectively for example in the haunting presence of the absent Saskia in the original Vanishing. It's very difficult eventually to accept a film as serious or meditative which is so synthetic and deliberated at heart, and it's therefore impossible to really connect or empathise with the characters within. We are spectators who despite our involvement in the mystery and conundrums available, we're never immersed in the very heart and soul of this cruel evocation of Hollywood with fangs and cloven hooves. We are merely spectators, which is unforgivable in a world with such an emphasis on tone and mood. This is much the same for all of Lynch's films: Our affection and belief is merely a transient state. Because of such an emphasis on the weird, unorthodox and convoluted, it's very difficult to create a parallel between the Lynch universe and the real world. It's often as if Lynch films are set on Earth by default, with humans participating because other creatures were unavailable. The only semblance of truth in Lynchland comes from the loose theorising and deeper meanings mentioned before. If you've come this far you'll realise that this is one hell of a Catch 22: There is this possession of some great ideas and ingenuity, which Lynch fails to evoke satisfactorily in the execution on screen. And this is really the main problem at hand. How far to go, how much to cover up and how much to reveal. At the very heart of alternative cinema is the choice of what to deviate from, what to change and that which should be as methodical as mainstream cinema. This crucial choice is certainly a problem that Lynch often fumbles with and treats with far too much nonchalance. Lynch films seem to be all about talking and never about listening, all too willing to propose and create this manifesto of ideas, but never really interested in reassuring an audience in fields ranging from plot saturation to their lives as they leave the cinema. Because, isn't that what the intelligent, artistic cinema is about? Producing something beautiful, imaginative, incisive, witty, topical but of most importance, creating work of real meaning and purpose. Something Lynch will forever forsake for silhouettes and darkened corridors.

The final point really goes without saying then, as it's been there all along: The conflict of interest between what the director wants to produce for his own ends, and what he wants an audience to see or feel. I often feel that the biggest strength and weakness of David Lynch films is Lynch himself, never seeming to be able to moderate his particular interests and fascinations into something that's interesting to all. He's about as far from a utilitarian director as you're going to get, and that often gives way to the ugly notions of elitism, as if there's a special club one can attend if they can 'understand what David Lynch is trying to say'. It's that middle ground which is all, a perfect state of equilibrium between film and audience, something David Lynch can often fail to achieve. Just think what a wonderful and important filmmaker he could be if he was able to touch, influence and infect all of us. A nice, if slightly scary and unrealistic thought.