A couple of weeks ago, in the immediate wake of David Lynch’s death, I wrote about Blue Velvet (1986): “It’s a testament to Lynch’s prowess as an artist that one of his projects that serves as a draft for a much greater work can still stand to be touted as one of the Great American Films.” It’s commonly understood in the genesis of Twin Peaks that Blue Velvet was a first-run at catching that Big Fish, and much of Lynch’s work can be interpreted as a cumulation of reiterations, continuous swipes towards something bigger that he can feel even when it’s near-impossible to grasp. There’s been much analysis of the way Lynch’s L.A. Trilogy (Lost Highway [1997], Mulholland Dr. [2001], and Inland Empire [2006]) works as a stream of compounding ideas, each building off the last like tributaries streaming into a grander river. What I found surprising revisiting the trilogy’s centerpiece, Mulholland Dr.—a film often touted as Lynch’s greatest work—also acts as a draft for Twin Peaks, with much of its aesthetic and thematic implications extrapolated further in The Return’s (2017) cinematically behemoth runtime.
Much as Fire Walk With Me (1992) was a fulcrum in Lynch’s career in terms of perspective—shifting his gaze from the more voyeuristic and interrogative to one built around the first-person viewpoint of one’s own psychology—Mulholland Dr. marks the end of Lynch’s era with Mary Sweeney as his go-to editor. Starting with Season 2 of Twin Peaks legendary seventh episode, “The World Spins,” wherein Laura Palmer’s killer is revealed and Lynch had originally intended to part ways with the show, Sweeney was a sharp refinement to Lynch’s flow. Sweeney worked as both a blunt-force object—with smash cuts hitting like a left-hook to the jaw—and a slow scalpel, peeling images over each other in some of Lynch’s most iconic fades, like Cooper’s face overtaken by the red curtains in “The World Spins” or Naomi Watts’ dreaming face gliding across Hollywood palm trees. By the time the two worked on Mulholland Dr., the pair’s sensibilities were already drifting apart, with Lynch starting to enter (return?) a more languid phase of mise-en-scene. One needs only to look at Fire Walk With Me side-by-side with The Missing Pieces (2017), the companion film largely made up of footage left on the cutting-room floor: Missing Pieces lingers on compositions of posed bodies, whereas Fire Walk With Me is constantly flying off like a 2x4 leaping from a table saw.
You can see the change in Lynch happening with the progression of Mulholland Dr. itself, turning from a TV pilot into a full-fledged theatrical work. The backend of the film, after the vibrant, gently diffused world of the film turns into a harsh and bitter reality, scenes begin to move different. Naomi Watts stands in her character’s decrepit kitchen, the long wide shot emphasizing her surreal loneliness, turning the banal routine of turning on a coffee pot into a painful exercise fighting against the arthritic aches of depression. Her deliberate and dead-eyed movements foreshadow the terrifyingly detached viewpoint of Rabbits (2004) (surely, some of Watts’ direction from Lynch under her bunny suite was similar to this scene in Mulholland Dr.). While Mulholland Dr. is one of Sweeney’s greatest accomplishments with Lynch, many of its most interesting moments play out in an un-Sweeney way.
Mulholland Dr. also is a solidification of Lynch’s interest in rhyming characters, rather than just foiling or doubling. While Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini’s respective blondes and brunettes in Blue Velvet reflect off of each other, they’re fundamentally different points on the scale. In Twin Peaks, Lynch’s obsession with Laura Palmer starts to complicate this; the introduction of Laura’s cousin Maddy (also played by Sheryl Lee) is a classic Lynchian blonde/brunette double, but with the added complication of the two’s identities being fluid within each other. Lost Highway pushes itself further into the “I’m not me” realm, where a person hides from their own hideous reality so aggressively that they transform into someone else. Images repeat, iterate, but under slight variations. Mulholland Dr. plays this the most directly, though, where the initial three-quarters of the film is revealed to be a refraction of reality—its rhymes are direct, names of people or purposes of places are swirled together in the soup of dream logic. What can’t be confronted in the light of day can be understood through smooth edges of dreams, or perhaps the soft glow of the cinema screen.
This rhyming between reality and dreams, filmic seriousness and the soft lighting of TV melodrama is also the foundational difference between The Return and the original run of Twin Peaks over 25 years earlier. They’re made for different audiences—different generations of audiences, even—with the viewers of the 2010s more accustomed to “prestige” TV and much less tolerable to Twin Peaks’ beautiful corniness. Whereas Twin Peaks wore its soapiness on its sleeve, constantly comparing itself to the town’s favorite (fictional) show Invitation to Love, The Return finds its reference points in Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Lost Highway may have worked as something of a call-and-response against Wild Palms (1993), but Mulholland Dr. went in on interrogating Lynch’s own form, his place within in, and the agency he does or doesn’t have—it’s a movie inviting the audience to find its key, while itself the key to Lynch’s final investigations into TV, cinema, and his own works’ place in them.