by Oscar O’Sullivan

Many filmmakers invite us into their confidence in one way or another. Hitchcock and Tarantino give us a taste of their fetishes. Spielberg and Baumbach use their own lives as ammunition for emotional stories. Many directors make us privy to their bizarre political fantasies. And of course, there are the dreamers – James Cameron and his nightmare of a killer robot from the future, Paul Schrader’s fictional expressions of his own darker impulses, Kurosawa’s literal translation of his dreams to filmic form. Among the dreamers, there is one who stands apart – the late great David Lynch. His films are not merely about dreams. At their very best, they are dreams, in a form no other film even dares approach. They are hazy and unfocused, sprawling and densely layered, esoteric and startlingly mundane. Beyond all that, they are sublimely subjective – to even begin to break down their meaning, we must first ask: who is the dreamer? The audience? The characters within the film? Or Lynch himself? Approach each of his films in these three different ways and you will walk away with three different experiences. Or approach it with no perspective at all and allow the image to demonstrate itself. No matter how deep we go, no matter how much we learn about the man himself and his influences, the secret and arcane methods that drove his work forward, the gradual iteration of ideas and intertextuality with himself and others, we can never know what any Lynch film really means. We can convince ourselves that we do, perhaps, accept the meanings that make themselves apparent. But, more than perhaps any other narrative films, no singular meaning or explanation can perfectly encompass the experience Lynch creates. To say Lynch is the only filmmaker, or even the first, to perfect the art of dream in cinema would be erroneous – he owes an obvious debt to Ingmar Bergman and surrealists such as Maya Deren and Salvadore Dali – but it could safely be said that nobody understood the magic of dreams quite like Lynch. He represents a perfect synthesis of imagination, technique and that indelible factor that separates the masters from the merely great. Lynch is not my favourite director, nor would I say he has the greatest body of work in cinema. Yet I would not hesitate to call him the greatest artist in the medium, perhaps the most singular and important creative voice of the last century. The gap he leaves behind in the artform can never be filled by any one person alone. But while his death may be sad, it’s important to remember that he’s not really gone. He lives through his films and through our memories. Lynch himself did not believe in death, at least not in the conventional sense. He described it as simply a change, a break, stepping out for a while but not really gone away at all. If life is a shared dream, he’s woken up – he’ll see us all again in the waking world sometime for a cup of coffee. Whether you believe that or not doesn’t really matter. Someday, when I’ve finally tackled the final season of Twin Peaks, I’ll write something long, rambling and probably pointless on Lynch’s entire filmography. Until then, my only advice is to watch some of his work. If you’re already familiar with him, do what I’ve done and revisit your favourite. If you’ve never seen any Lynch, start wherever you want. While my first David Lynch experience was Eraserhead, it was Mulholland Drive that truly stuck with me – watching it on my phone out of boredom while trapped at home in 2020, experiencing that film blind for the first time was magical. Thus, the title I’ve given the below piece of writing – few films have so altered my view of everything I see after.

The View from Mulholland Drive

Just a name. No more, no less. Rattling around the back of my head. When I first see the chaos, that is all it is. Noise and image. Laughing at what we do not understand. I do not realise then that head I’m seeing pulled apart is my own.

Silver screen in the palm of my hand, adrift within my cage. Here is a puzzle I cannot piece together. Still, understanding comes. The dreamer must awaken.

To die, to sleep, to sleep, to dream, to dream, to live, and so to die once more. Here, where two can be one but never the same. Of all the places you have shown me, I return again and again to discover the view from Mulholland Drive.

Silencio! There is no band! And yet the music plays. I’ll see you further on up the road and thank you then for showing me how to hear.

“Never. Oh never! Nothing will die. the stream flows, the wind blows, the cloud fleets, the heart beats. Nothing will die.”