Lynchbinge 2: No hay pelicula!

(Image: 35 Years of David Lynch)

The first thing I remember reading about David Lynch's ninth feature film Mulholland Dr. (or Mulholland Drive, if you prefer) was in a posting at my internet home-away-from-home, the Mobius Home Video Forum, maybe only a day or two after the premiere at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. I don't remember which forum member wrote it, or in what capacity he was at the festival, but he was obviously not a Lynch admirer, and he was crowing lustily that the jig was finally up for the director. To paraphrase roughly from memory, Mulholland Dr. was such a fiasco - so hollow and silly a rehash of Lynch's worn-out tricks -  that even the legion of trained seals that always clapped for his latest work would have to finally admit that the emperor has no clothes (I don't think he mixed his metaphors that badly, but the "emperor's clothes" cliche was definitely there).

Lynchbinge 1: The show that broke my brain

The good news is that, 22 years later, I still love Twin Peaks. 

Oh, hi. Ahem. Welcome back... Anyway...

Towards the end of this year, I will turn 40 years old. (Please hold your applause until the end.) Reminders that this is Very, Very Old multiply by the day. Recently, another one was sprung on me: "Twin what?" asked a 23-year-old colleague at the Day Job, blinking in puzzlement - or perhaps he was still dazzled by the brightness of light outside of the womb.

It was true - he had never heard of the TV show that, for a brief stretch over twenty years ago, gripped the popular culture by the throat, gazing into its eyes with the look of a maniac listening to sounds we can't hear, leaving still faintly visible bruises with its fingertips. That represented the most-unlikely-ever intrusion of avant-garde experimentalism into American network television. That took my developing and delicate teenage brain and squeezed and bludgeoned it into new shapes and then left it to recover as best it could. That, with its wild swings in creative quality, took me from unprecedented highs of ecstatic addiction to previously unplumbed lows of glum disappointment.