LOCATION IN DAVID LYNCH'S WORK

Twin Peaks, CBS Television Distribution, 1990

Location, either in a small town or in a large city, plays an active role in David Lynch's filmed work. In this text I'm going to compare how the director uses the representation of the the city to create a - soon to be broken - apparent normality in two of his works: the TV series Twin Peaks and the movie Mulholland Drive, originally conceived as a pilot of a TV series as well.

In the TV series Twin Peaks, the locality is the generator of an atmosphere of normality and familiarity. Everything is initially shown as a typical american small town and its predictable inhabitants. As the series develop, supernatural events start to be revealed to be operating in this place, breaking up with the apparent normality of this setting. To achieve that, the director separates the location into two interconnected realms: the calm and peaceful town of Twin Peaks and its respectable inhabitants, and a supernatural realm and its forces that come to operate in the town. This separation of locality and their eventual superimposition arrive as an interesting resource to reflect the dark double life carried by many of the characters that seemed initially innocent.

This time set in the city of Los Angeles, Mulholland Drive plays with the same common idea of other David Lynch's works: a break up with reality. Even though much is discussed about the movie's meaning and plot, what seems to be a consensus is the relation established between a real world and a world of dreams. It seems that every person watching the film has a particular notion of when the characters were dreaming, and of when the presented events were real or dreams. This confusing idea serves as a tool to depict this allure of Hollywood in contemporary culture. It is by giving his vision over the city of Los Angeles, and most specifically Hollywood, that Lynch, as according to the the movie critic Martha Nochimson, "reveals both his passionate, radiant belief in the rich possibilities of American popular culture and his dark insight into its capacity to destroy its best and brightest".

David Lynch plays with our conception of expectedness. To achieve this, he uses his scenarios, showing that what is real and typical can soon be broken, meaning that normality is nothing but an illusion.