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City of Moods: David Lynch and Los Angeles
Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me My initial encounter with David Lynch was in the form of Maxell T-120 videocassettes, hand-labeled with my mother’s impeccable penmanship to indicate which episodes of Twin Peaks were contained. I was five when the pilot of Lynch’s series premiered on ABC, and it was canceled before I finished first grade. I never had the nerve to pop one of those tapes in the VCR, and so, filed in faux woodgrain VHS cabinets next to other recorded-from-television fare, these tapes remained untouched.
I grew up in the long shadow cast by downtown Los Angeles, and trips into the city were infrequent: a new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art one year, a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits another, with a stop at the Original Farmers Market on the way home. As a concept, Los Angeles was the birthplace of the movies I loved and home to the shiny celebrities who populated their frames. In reality, the city felt unapproachable, vast, terrifying and unknowable. Before I could drive myself there and before I moved here full-time in 2011, I learned about Los Angeles from the movies—the neighborhoods, the people who lived in them, the late-night diners where hushed conversations took place. It wasn’t until I saw Mulholland Drive (2001), my first Lynch film, that I could imagine an approximated experience of living in a city that glimmers so brightly it can distract from the rot seeping from below the surface. “I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world,” Lynch once said, “there are always red ants underneath,” an unnerving metaphor that unfolds in the opening minutes of Blue Velvet (1986) and a theme that carries throughout his work.
Perhaps only an outsider like the Montana-born David Lynch—or the Austro-Hungarian émigré Billy Wilder, whose Sunset Boulevard (1950) was a favorite of Lynch’s—can acutely embrace and critique a city as multifaceted, complicated and rich as Los Angeles. Experimental filmmaker Thom Andersen, whose epic essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) weaves clips from hundreds of movies into an analysis of and love letter to Los Angeles, was born in Chicago. Public television personality Huell Howser, whose programs California’s Gold and Visiting… with Huell Howser took viewers into the most magical and unsung corners of the city, was from Tennessee.
They say it takes at least two years to start to feel at home here; it took me at least three to feel connected to anything beyond my own neighborhood. I wonder how long it took Lynch to feel settled after he landed at the American Film Institute in 1970, that famous head of hair still windswept after the cross-country road trip from Pennsylvania with childhood friend Jack Fisk, who years later would production design The Straight Story (1999) and Mulholland Drive. “It takes a lot longer to appreciate L.A. than a lot of cities,” the filmmaker states in the book Lynch on Lynch, “because it’s so spread out, and every area has its own mood.” Like many transplants before him, drawn in and bewitched by the light, Lynch arrived here and never left, settling into the complex he would use as a primary location in Lost Highway (1997), the first film in an unofficial Los Angeles trilogy that also contains his masterpiece Mulholland Drive and his final feature, Inland Empire (2006).
How perfect are these bedfellows, the unknowable city and the filmmaker who refused to explain his movies? Is it even possible to understand a city that continuously erases its history, whether through intentional demolition or unforeseen environmental catastrophes like the Northridge earthquake or the 2025 wildfires that forced Lynch to evacuate from his Hollywood Hills home and likely exacerbated his emphysema? Is there any authenticity to be found in a dream factory?
In his brilliant City of Quartz, urban theorist Mike Davis reminds us, “We must avoid the idea that Los Angeles is ultimately just the mirror of Narcissus…. Beyond its myriad rhetorics and mirages, it can be presumed that a city actually exists.” Lynch made films that are as unknowable as his adopted city, but this does not mean he didn’t have an innate understanding of this place. In confronting its complications, its shimmering light between a cluster of buildings with no architectural cohesion, its
stories of hopes brought crashing down to an alienating reality, David Lynch manages to capture the Janus-faced duality inherent to the essence of his city. Both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive investigate what happens behind the closed doors of Los Angeles’s impossibly beautiful homes when their inhabitants think no one can see them—a plot point, too, of Blue Velvet. Though his characters may retreat to their slick mansions and courtyard apartments to escape the city’s omnipresent sunlight, they can’t hide from the ethical compromises that made their lifestyles possible. By abstracting this duality, examining the psychological horrors that emerge from damaged morals, Lynch’s trio of Los Angeles films is one artist’s attempt to render this seemingly unknowable city recognizable to someone like me who lives here and who, like Lynch, will likely live here the rest of my life. Now that Lynch is gone, I’m not sure another artist will ever make movies about Los Angeles that accomplish quite the same.
