David Lynch at The House

When Dreams Start Looking Like Reality

For our Film Club, we spent an evening with the world of David Lynch, where dreams, memories, desire and reality seem to exist in the same room.

Lynch never seems particularly interested in giving you a stable reality to stand on. His films are full of doubles, mirrors, strange rooms, mysterious characters and moments that feel like they belong to a dream you have forgotten the morning after.

You know something is happening.

You just don't know what.

And somehow, you feel it before you understand it.

That became one of the things we talked about during the Film Club.

Why do we expect films to explain themselves to us?

Why do we feel slightly uncomfortable when a story refuses to tell us exactly what is real?

Maybe because we are so used to cinema functioning like a machine. A character does something because of something that happened before. A mystery is introduced and eventually solved. A beginning leads to a middle and then an ending.

Lynch doesn't always give us that comfort.

Instead, he gives us a feeling.

His cinema operates somewhere between the conscious and unconscious mind.

And this is where Mulholland Drive becomes particularly fascinating.

The film can be read as a Hollywood story, a love story, a psychological breakdown, a dream, a nightmare, or several of these things happening at once.

It is a film about becoming someone else and discovering that perhaps you were never quite sure who you were to begin with.

Hollywood is particularly perfect territory for Lynch because it is already a place built around dreams.

People arrive wanting to become someone.

They create versions of themselves.

They perform.

They desire.

They imagine the life that could exist if only they were given the right part, the right person, the right opportunity.

But what happens when the fantasy becomes more convincing than reality?

This is where Lynch becomes less interested in Hollywood as a place and more interested in the machinery of desire itself.

We don't just dream about becoming someone else.

We construct entire worlds around the possibility.

And sometimes those worlds collapse.

One of the questions we kept coming back to was whether Lynch's films actually have a “solution” at all.

Maybe there isn't one.

Maybe the urge to solve a Lynch film is our own need for certainty being projected onto something deliberately uncertain.

There is a strange freedom in that.

You can stop asking what does this mean? and start asking what did this make me feel?

Because Lynch understands something that cinema sometimes forgets: dreams don't have to make sense to be revealing.

You can wake up from a dream and remember almost nothing about its plot, but remember exactly how you felt.

Fear.

Desire.

Embarrassment.

Loss.

Longing.

Lynch's films work in much the same way.

You might not be able to explain what happened, but a particular image stays with you.

A particular sound.

A face.

A song.

A feeling you can't quite name.

And perhaps this is why watching Lynch together makes such a good Film Club night.

Everyone walks out having watched the same film, but nobody necessarily walks out with the same film.

One person wants to solve it.

Another wants to feel it.

Someone else wants to argue that none of it happened.

And someone is still thinking about that one scene three days later.

Maybe that is the beauty of Lynch.

He doesn't give you a world to understand.

He gives you a world to enter.

And once you're inside, you're not always sure whether you're dreaming or awake.