Ebert joined the majority of critics in giving "Lost Highway" a bad review, and yet it may be Lynch's most fully realized film. This speaks to the great predicament of David Lynch's career: He's essentially an avant-garde filmmaker working within the Hollywood system. As a result, his work is often judged by how much he balances these tendencies with straightforward storytelling. It's no coincidence that "Mulholland Drive," "Twin Peaks" and "Blue Velvet," which do this extremely well, are his most acclaimed films. Like impressionist paintings, they display abstract thinking in a classical form, which is easier to comprehend than more surreal, abstract works like "Lost Highway" and "Eraserhead," which get as much head scratching as praise. Sadly, many fear Lynch being too Lynch.
"It's a subjective thing," the filmmaker shrugs. "Some people love getting lost and feeling their way out. Other people have more literal minds, and get angry when things are not very specific. You just hope that people get the same thrill that you got getting those original ideas."
However the Lynchian world is presented, the key is still the darkness itself. Lynch is a kind of Jacques Cousteau of the postmodern nightmare, where our cartoonish notions of family values and the American dream are ravaged by an undercurrent of forbidding treachery. And with apologies to Wallace, it's about much more than peanut butter or, for that matter, Pabst Blue Ribbon ("Blue Velvet") and cherry pie ("Twin Peaks"). It's about decent people cornered by obsessive evils we can't clearly see.
So where does such a polite, gee-whiz kind of guy dream up such things? Ever since "Eraserhead," his ghastly 1978 debut feature, fans have assumed Lynch experienced the dysfunctional childhood to end all dysfunctional childhoods. Not so. Born in Missoula, Mont., and raised in various cities throughout the Pacific Northwest, Lynch led the kind of peachy-keen 1950s family life we've all but written off as mythology.
"It was an innocent time, and in a way, a false time," he recalls. "But that's how you see it looking back. When I was in it, it was fantastic. It didn't seem false. There was an enthusiasm, a very positive feeling that you could do anything."
All that changed -- for a while, at least -- when Lynch moved to Philadelphia. "It was a corrupt, sick place," he recalls. "I found myself living under this blanket of fear. It's called 'the City of Brotherly Love,' and I always say if a city is going to call itself that, then they kind of owe it to the people there to make sure that that's true. It was so far from true that it wasn't even funny. It took a year after I got to California for the fear to lift off."
As we now know, Lynch put that fear to work. Five years in the making, "Eraserhead" articulated Lynch's twin nightmares of urban degradation and parental anxiety. (He must have overcome both, because he lives in Los Angeles and his daughter, "Boxing Helena" director Jennifer Lynch, seems to be a chip off the old block.) Although much of that time was eaten up by budget problems -- Lynch even had a job delivering newspapers during production, and once sent Christmas cards to people on his route asking for donations -- he clearly relished the chance to complete this labor of love his way.
"I have heard filmmakers say that they know exactly what they're going to do every day of the shoot, but I don't know if I believe that," he says. "You always have to stay on guard for something new that comes in to join with the ideas that have already gone down on paper. These discoveries don't necessarily need a lot of time to occur, but when you have time, you sink deeper into the world."
After "Eraserhead," Lynch's career took an unexpected turn when Mel Brooks tapped the young director to helm "The Elephant Man," a more straightforward film that won him high praise from a mainstream audience. This, in turn, led to "Dune," a critical and financial disaster that ultimately may have been a blessing. It returned Lynch to filmmaking on a smaller scale and, more important, on his own terms.
Next page: Is Lynch too Lynchian after Sept. 11?