Which is probably why his ninth feature checks so many boxes on the auteur scorecard, from the Hitchockian blonde/brunette dichotomy between Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring-shades of Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet-to the surreal criminal headquarters seemingly modeled on Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge to the persona-swapping imagery that’s straight out of Lost Highway. If Lynch is drawn toward the same types (and archetypes) in movie after movie, it’s not out of laziness or a lack of inspiration but a helpless devotion to his own artistic compulsions. Great directors are repeat offenders, and their recidivism is unconscious. Given these beginnings, it’s easy to see why the resulting cinematic salvage job-mostly financed by French producers before premiering at Cannes in 2001-turned into such a sour allegory of L.A.’s assembly-line creative process, imagining a movie industry haunted by violence and despair and overrun at its highest level by thugs and know-nothings (one of whom is very particular about his coffee). Originally written and shot as a 90-minute pilot, the project first enticed and then alienated ABC executives in interviews, Lynch recalled how one suit with his finger on the green light watched the first cut standing up at six in the morning with coffee in hand. The smashed television set that inaugurates Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me served as a ready-made symbol of Lynch’s disillusionment with the prime-time establishment, which is why it was so odd that he tried to hook up with ABC on the first incarnation of Mulholland Drive. On the 20th anniversary of this inexhaustible masterpiece, here are 20 reasons to love it-or maybe 20 attempts to describe exactly what it is. In the two decades since then, Lynch has produced other significant work, but Mulholland Drive still looks like the summative triumph described by Ebert: a movie that works equally well as a gateway into the director’s oeuvre or a culmination of his obsessions and fetishes. When the film was released in October 2001, it proved to be a surprisingly potent box office force, grossing $20 million worldwide and spawning an online cottage industry of essays and explainers showing viewers how to make sense of its fractured, intractable narrative. “David Lynch has been working toward Mulholland Drive all of his career,” wrote Roger Ebert, a longtime skeptic of the director’s neo-surrealist style and methodology. Two years later, though, Lynch returned to mind-fuck form with Mulholland Drive, a Los Angeles–set story about an aspiring actress trying to help a beautiful amnesiac rediscover her identity while showing the town’s power brokers that she’s ready for her close-up. In 1999, David Lynch released The Straight Story, a road movie that was also a detour into G-rated territory as signs of the impending Y2K apocalypse went, the guy behind Eraserhead working for Disney was suitably ominous.
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