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10/14/2001 |
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Ideas lead, Lynch follows Director's
visions pull him into some strange, dark corners
TORONTO – Most of us don't see ideas as
living, breathing organisms. Most of us are not David Lynch.
Mr. Lynch's ideas are many things –
surreal, inspired, earnestly dark. But they're definitely not passive.
They come scurrying out of the subconscious, like those inexplicable
miniature people who slip under the door at the end of his new film, Mulholland
Drive, or the lady who comes out of the radiator in his first
feature, Eraserhead . They seem to have arrived directly from a
dream; indeed, few directors so deftly capture the look and logic of the
dream state. Mr. Lynch pledges allegiance to his ideas,
his visions. He gives them shape and sets them loose onto the screen.
They make sense to him, and it's your job to sort them out. "I accept and stay true to the ideas,"
the director says at the Toronto International Film Festival. "There
are trillions of ideas, and sometimes you get ideas that you fall in
love with. They tell you everything. They tell you how they want to be,
and you just stay true to that and keep checking back." In Mulholland, which opens Friday,
the ideas tell us about two women: one starry-eyed blonde (Naomi Watts),
one mysterious brunette (Laura Elena Harring). They take us on an
amateur-sleuth mission through the underbelly of Hollywood, but their
task is minimal compared with ours. Identity and time are but toys to
Mr. Lynch, pliable, mysterious and never to be taken for granted. He may
have clues to share, but that doesn't mean he will. "I never really
say anything about plot," he says coyly, "but you can run some
theories by me." He puffs on a cigarette and speaks in a
Midwestern nasal tone. He's friendly, if a bit guarded. He could be your
Uncle Bob from Des Moines (on a bad hair day). Except your Uncle Bob
probably has more comforting dreams. Some filmmakers connect too many dots for
you and take the mystery out of a story. Some let the mystery linger on
the edges before setting it loose to finish the puzzle. But Mr. Lynch
starts with the mystery and lets it get deeper, which also usually means
darker. It's no surprise that he counts Bergman and Fellini among his
favorite filmmakers: They were two of the most intuitive directors we've
known, eager to release those irrational, nightmarish corners of the
imagination that take us where they may. "I like 8 1/2," he says,
referring to Fellini's free-associative classic about a filmmaker's
creative block. "I can't pretend to understand the whole thing, but
I can get lost in the moods and the feelings and ideas and have the mind
engaged and just go with it. There's plenty to hang your hat on, but
there's a lot of room to dream. Those films that offer room to dream are
the ones I love." In that case, he must be in love with Mulholland
Drive. In a dream-or-reality season that also features Waking
Life and Vanilla Sky, Mr. Lynch's latest takes particular
delight in disorientation. It's as crooked as The Straight Story
was straight (though still a good deal more coherent than the likes of Eraserhead
and Lost Highway). The basics come together after a while, but
even they require you to stay a step ahead of what's onscreen. Much of the enticing confusion is simply
par for Mr. Lynch's twisted, winding course: He's always been willing to
chase those scurrying ideas. But there's another factor in play here,
one that lies in the differences between film and television. Mr. Lynch has enjoyed success in both
mediums; his Twin Peaks, which ran from 1990 to 1991, may be the
most creative series to ever hit the networks. He actually conceived Mulholland
as a television pilot for ABC, but the network folks didn't care to sign
on. Mr. Lynch puts it a bit more bluntly. "ABC did me the favor of saying they
hated it and goodbye," he explains. "But that tricked my mind
into catching ideas that I wouldn't have caught ordinarily – solutions
to a pretty big problem that gave me a bunch of anxiety for a while
because I didn't have those ideas. Then, one night, in come the ideas. I
was thrilled. I saw the way to do it, and it was as if it had always
wanted to be that way." Oh, when the ideas ... come marching in
... You can see some of the seams in Mulholland,
those places where the planned television series with room to grow
became a feature film with a definite stopping point. Then again, you
could watch Lost Highway a few times and wonder whether another
episode might help explain what the devil happened. Mr. Lynch doesn't
have to fancy himself an artist; he already is one, with all of the
enigmatic imagination that the label entails. He was born in Missoula, Mont., the kind
of small town that rolls over and exposes its dark side in many of his
films, and was something of a misfit as a high school student in
Virginia. Back then, he saw his future in painting. Then, one day in art
school, his still life became a bit less still. "One day, I was working on a
6-foot-square painting," he recalls. "Most of the painting was
black, but there was kind of a garden there. Then I heard a wind, and I
saw some parts of the painting appear to move. I thought, 'Man, that
would be beautiful to have movement and sound.' " And a surrealist director was born. You could ask if the story were true, but
that almost seems beside the point. Perception is always up in the air
of Mr. Lynch's world. Reality and fantasy, dreams and experiences jostle
for space among the midgets, naifs, and scoundrels. But in the end, they
all step aside when the ideas build up a good head of steam.
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