Eternity is lying in wait for you everywhere. Even in a dull moment of the day, while you are waiting for the lift in the lobby of a corporate building, if you wait a couple of seconds too many, whether you are seated or standing, the sense of eternity is there.

This is one of Lynch's principal achievements: his way of creating a sense of forever as soon as someone waits, even for the shortest time.

13. "What Would You Do?"

Outside, in the night, the stranger's eye focuses through the camera-lens. His name is David Lynch and he doesn't seem particularly interested in the women. Lynch is constantly seeking the right feel, and he wants that mood to be felt on set or on location asfar as possible. It helps the performers, and also helps him sense if the scene is working as it unfolds before the camera. This affords the opportunity to play with what is actually happening on a moment-to-moment basis. A delicate balancing act of intuition and absolute control.

And he has what he wants – the hardcore soul of the character, sealed in a moment in time, as radiantly delineated as a body in a block of ice.

If the atmosphere and setting of the night shoot seems as disquietingly compulsive as Sunset Boulevard (1950), Mulholland Drive is equally disturbing. The script, an original creation of Lynch is beguiling yet impenetrable. The reader is quickly drawn into a dark mystery, which may involve a lover's revenge, though it refuses to yield it's many secrets readily. It dares to be the script of a film, but at best it only indicates what we will eventually see, hear and even feel when all is complete.

But did it really happen like that? Maybe not. The women were actresses. There were no knuckle-jawed lunks standing at the bar. And the women had been sitting in darkness until Lynch was ready to bathe them in synchronised floodlights.

Star Naomi Watts is on set. "Okay, start looking natural." Natural? Watts stands, restrained by various contraptions her body draped in black velvet. On the video assist, her head appears to float in a dark void, resembling the figures often-glimpsed stranded in Lynch's own near-black paintings. Peter Deming runs the camera at 40 frames-per-second. A breeze plays across Watt's hair and face, just before the electricity hits: that special Lynch electricity that flashes like lightning, those surges of energy that so often signified trouble or revelation in Twin Peaks.

Mulholland Drive is a fascinating synthesis of the different films Lynch has made. Lynch is constantly refining and extending his art and language. In each film, his demands on the camera have become more sophisticated and dynamic. He achieves dramatic sophistication by making the simplest scene interesting, both visually and emotionally. Mulholland Drive operates on an impenetrable, unreadable surface, like that of a portrait, a setting, an impression or a surveillance screen. Then, in moments a third dimension exultantly opens like a vertiginous, intoxicating hole, but in seconds the third dimension closes up again. On another occasion, the opening up of a third dimension produces a superimposition and makes everything go blurry, leaving nothing but confusion. The film operates in such an impossible dimension, related to the dualistic/doppelganger fractured identity theme, which attains its full value only at the end, reaching its climax when Betty commits suicide. Then it becomes as impossible for the film to distinguish one world from the other or to signify their separation, as it is for the viewer to locate himself or herself in the interval between them.

It is into this very abstract dimension that Lynch drives his film, pursuing his exploration of Mobius Strip worlds, trying to find out whether he could break out of the strip's pitiless trajectory by piercing a hole in it or holding it up to the light. Lynch's electro-symphony brings into play the maximum number of registers and dimensions, making them resound together – literally fulfilling the definition of the musical term itself "symphonia". This is what characterises Lynch's style as Baroque, in the full, multiple senses of the term. Lynch is the Baroque film-maker of the Post-human condition, down to his way of seeking to eliminate the barriers between genres as well as between audiences, maintaining a balance between experimental film and television. On each occasion he is rediscovering what he is doing while simultaneously extending his field and explorations. He is a film-maker who enables us to breathe the night air and feel the force of the wind, who touches directly on the mythic and the archaic. He celebrates the beauty and immenseness of the world in all its disparity, its tonal breaks, its sublime as well as its derisory aspects. He speaks to us about ourselves in our totality, including the utter dereliction of human experience, as the world we live in tends ever towards greater abstraction and repetition, he renews human connection with deep emotions and the infinite universe.

Bibliography

On David Lynch:

Hughs, David (2002). The Complete Lynch. Virgin Publishing.

Kaleta, Kenneth C. (1992).David Lynch: Twayne's Filmmakers Series. Twayne Publishers.

Lynch, David and Chris Rodley (1999). Lynch on Lynch. Faber and Faber.

Nochimson, Martha P. (1997). The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood. University of Texas Press.

Woods, Paul A. (2000). Weirdsville USA: The Obsessive Universe of David Lynch. Plexus.

On Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:

Deleuze,G. trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (1985). Cinema 2: The Time Image. Athlone.

Deleuze, G. and Felix Guattari. Trans B. Massumi (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Athlone.

Deleuze, G. and Felix Guattari. trans. G. Burchill and H. Tomlinson. (1991). What is Philosophy? Verso.

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.