Still from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001)
1.
AN OLD colleague from New York reached out. He was in Los Angeles for a few days and suggested meeting up for drinks. It was Friday afternoon, and I suggested an unassuming cocktail lounge tucked in the corner of Sunset and Argyle. Walking in, he was immediately struck by the contrast. Outside, it was bright and noisy, grimy around the edges but somehow resplendent. Faded glamor made more glamorous in its fading.
Inside the windowless bar, it could have been any time of day or night, anywhere in the world. Pleather seats and barstools, formica tables, brass railings. Dark and cool. The faint smell of bar cleaner and metal beer taps. My friend observed that separately, the two atmospheres were nothing of particular note. Contrasting them, particularly considering their tight coexistence, made for an effect that was, according to my friend (hardly a philistine when it comes to film), Lynchian.
A friend from Scotland was visiting the city. We spent an evening catching up. He told me he had spent the day at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, an LA institution infamous for its aggressive strangeness. Fashioning itself with a tip of the hat to the original definition of museum – a place dedicated to the muse – it is perhaps best described as a postmodern cabinet of curiosities. It exhibits are filled with strange oddities and curatorial non sequiturs, inviting the visitor to glean unorthodox meaning. Or, as my friend put it: It’s like the inside of David Lynch’s head.
2.
ORSON WELLES called Los Angeles “a bright, guilty place.” David Lynch, upon his arrival, noticed the brightness. “I love Los Angeles,” he wrote in Catching the Big Fish. “I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places.”
Lynch loved LA’s light. He saw magic in it. But he also didn’t shy from its darkness. He understood this city’s guilt, its talent for hoarding violent secrets, its sliding door dimensions of intrigue and menace, conflicting truths laid on top of each other like panes of glass.
3.
THE OBSERVATION that Los Angeles is a city of simulacra is lazy. Not because it’s untrue (Baudrillard was correct enough) but because it tends to stop there. It misses the fact that the simulacrum must be made somewhere. Life takes work, even at its most quotidian.
By virtue of the activities that took place there, no matter how hidden, a location has depth. This isn’t even to mention the ecological deep time a place possesses. However, because so much of the labor of the Hollywood culture industry and adjacent spheres is dedicated to flattening, the depth is refracted, diverted, hiding in plain sight. Finding the “soul” of this city only requires the smallest scratch beneath its surface, but the paths you find underneath are winding, strange, full of mirrors and corridors to nowhere. You see everything for what it is, but what it is hides stories pulled from real and fictional histories crossing countries, continents, and timelines.
This tightly wound contradiction encompasses just about every aspect of daily Angeleno life. It’s part of the reality in every late capitalist city, particularly considering the role tourism plays in so many big urban economies. Making a city “consumer-friendly” requires this fool’s errand flattening. But no city is quite as adept at it, nor puts it so squarely in the center of its existence as it musters its way through the deep time of the desert and chaparral.
4.
This article originally appeared in Locust Review 12 (2025) as well as Alexander Billet’s substack, Daydreams and Paving Stones.
THERE IS, for sure, a symbolism in the timing of Lynch’s passing, as the worst and most destructive wildfires in LA history ripped through the city, wiping out both history and ephemera. Lynch’s emphysema made it difficult to travel long distances. According to him, he was unable to do so much as cross a room without getting winded. That he and his family had to evacuate almost certainly exacerbated his condition. A more sentimental writer would say it’s because Lynch couldn’t bear to see this city brought to its knees like it is now.
Symbolic, yes, but way too on the nose for Lynch. In fact, it may be fair to say that while his LA films were deeply mysterious, they weren’t symbolic. What they told us about this city was siphoned through myriad different superstructural modes and manifestations, rising up from a deeply troubled and exploitative reality. Not reflections, but expressions: distorted and mutated.
5.
LYNCH WAS no radical. At least not on any traditional, straightforwardly political axis. His own beliefs seem to have been a strange mishmash of small-town conservatism (he had praise for Reagan), Hollywood progressivism (he supported Bernie Sanders in 2016), and New Age mysticism (his love of Transcendental Meditation). However, he drew out one of the often-overlooked parallels between radicals and conservatives: a deep ambivalence toward modernity.
It is one thing to illustrate how this gestates in the environment of a small town. Laura Palmer’s demons in Twin Peaks, powerful as they are, were the product of deeply private traumas. Her father’s sexual abuse prompted her to construct an increasingly extreme alter-ego. So potent is this reconstituted persona that she can show up in people’s dreams well after her death. As for Bob, the literal demon that possesses her father Leland, he is free to jump from body to body, visible only for brief moments in cracked mirrors.
The demons of the big city are of an entirely different nature. Yes, the Mystery Man of Lost Highway singles out Fred and Renee Madison to terrorize, but he does so through videotapes, camcorders, and cellular phones. Items designed to replicate moments, to snatch up your image and make it available to the whole world, manipulating and reinterpreting you, even turning you into an entirely different person – i.e. Balthasar Getty’s Fred Dayton and Renee’s doppelganger Alice Wakefield.
6.
THE PERVERSE, impossible compulsion to somehow permanently transform into this moveable image tears people apart in Lynch’s Los Angeles. It’s portrayed in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, both to terrifying effect. In both of these films – which, along with Lost Highway, make up Lynch’s unofficial “Los Angeles trilogy” – the artist (be it Fred Madison, Diane Selwyn, or Nikki Grace) inhabits a landscape that can adeptly deceive us into thinking it will always be standing. In actuality, this landscape might unexpectedly move and rearrange itself, remaking its reality so abruptly that we are liable to be crushed in its moving parts.
Writing about Paris, Walter Benjamin saw in its winding streets and historic buildings “dialectical images,” places where memory and utopian dreams were brought together. The locales of Lynch’s LA are the opposite. Almost inert, they have neither memory nor future and are emptied of geographical specificity. Like sets on a soundstage.
Most of the buildings and landmarks of Mulholland Drive are so sun-drenched as to seem like sets under blinding stage lights. Lynch uses the Angeleno brightness he fell in love with here. The apartment complex Betty Elms moves into, Winkie’s Diner, Diane Selwyn’s craftsman-style bungalow: these all have the designs of Hollywood chic, but they are somehow aloof, their stylishness experienced as cold and estranged.
They are also moved between with relative ease. Some filmmakers give you a sense of how far characters might have to travel between different sites of action. Not in Lynch’s LA. These locations could be five minutes from each other or an hour without traffic. This points to an oddity of Angeleno urban design, the truth behind the quip of 72 suburbs in search of a city. Lynch is right when he says that each area and neighborhood has a character all its own (though his lights deliberately wash that out in Mulholland Drive). What he doesn’t say is that these neighborhoods fit together with very little reason.
7.
JUST AS easily, human beings are cast and recast in this world, replacing and interchanging with each other, leaving some without anything like a sense of self. Places can do the same. You could say it’s because of the ruthlessness of the Hollywood system, but here it feels as if this cutthroat rot has infected everything around it, prompting the city itself to act erratically.
The most recognizable Los Angeles location in Inland Empire is the Walk of Fame. This is, as anyone who has visited can confirm, one of the dirtiest and grimiest places in all of Hollywood, where the most glamorous stars are memorialized next to cheap souvenir shops and homeless encampments. Lynch shows it exactly as it is. When Nikki Grace/Sue Blue bleeds out next to a pink terrazzo star between three conversing unfortunates, we see the various disparate worlds and planes of existence that have made up the film being brought together without any pretense or makeup. That is, until we realize it’s just another scene in Nikki’s movie. Not even the filth can be trusted in Hollywood.
As Mark Fisher suggested in The Weird and the Eerie, Inland Empire is essentially a film of Hollywood dreaming itself. However sane or unhinged the story’s characters may be, they can do little more than float through the city’s various memory holes and hallucinations. Oddly enough, it seems that Inland Empire is the only of Lynch’s Los Angeles trilogy that might hint at a happy ending. It is difficult to suss out given how disjointed the film is compared to Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive, but the final shots before the credits roll bring Nikki Grace back to where she was when we first met her. She is facing a version of herself across the sitting room right before she accepts a role that pulls her inside out psychologically. Is she telling herself not to accept? Is this the moment when she, unlike our other protagonists, steps back from the point of no return? We can only speculate.
8.
THESE ARE the pitfalls of Los Angeles, of Hollywood. Still, millions of us refuse to leave. We’ve built lives, families, and yes, careers here. Deep down, many of us probably believe that all the schlock and glitz stand in for a better version of themselves, as if the commercialization of art might one day clear the way for an art that makes the human experience noble and fulfilling. It still can be even now, albeit in brief, distorted flashes. Or maybe it’s just that we don’t have anywhere else to go. For better or worse, it’s home.
This is how we might believe David Lynch’s love for LA, despite/because of how dark and deceitful he showed it to be. Home cannot be defined merely by the four walls and a roof that surround it. It is just as much determined by its environment, a place where you can see yourself among others you can grow to love. You could see the horror and leave, but that would mean abandoning the possibilities that remain. Not just a place you want to be, but a place you want to want to be, worthy of redemption.
Now, significant parts of this home are gone. So is a large part of its cultural heritage, and with that, part of its cultural future. You can feel the absence in the rest of LA, like a phantom limb. Learning to navigate this new-old-disappearing city is going to be a terrifying process. Moreso now that one of its most imaginative cognitive mapmakers is gone.
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