Triple Threat: David Lynch’s L.A. Trilogy

A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe that’s why the trilogy is such a satisfying structure for so many epic series or curious corners of cinema history. This year in Triple Threat, Ken Lowe revisits another of cinema’s best trilogies each month, including some unofficial trilogies that have come to define a director, actor, or time in film history. You can follow the series here.

David Lynch is not a director who values exposition, so his movies are not the sort for “askers,” those folks who, in the middle of the movie, need to ask what is happening, who is he, is this a flashback, and so forth. More than other movies of his—and especially more than that most popular thing he ever contributed to the discourse, TV’s Twin Peaks—Lynch’s three films Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire are seemingly made entirely to dismay and demoralize the asker-type viewer. When asked if Lynch was joking when he ordered a producer to locate a one-legged woman, a monkey and a lumberjack for a scene in his movie, Inland Empire star and previous Lynch collaborator Laura Dern reportedly reminded the producer that he was working on a David Lynch movie.

Lynch’s unofficial L.A. trilogy spanned from 1997 to 2006, a period of time where the old analog world drifted into the past and a digital one increasingly rose to prominence. There isn’t anything in Lynch’s three movies about social media, the internet, or the constant and harrowing nature of self-surveillance that we imposed upon ourselves during those exact years. The biggest questions at the heart of all three movies are about identity: Who are the main characters, really? (Not just in the sense of “Who are they as a character?” but literally “Who is actually the main character?” That’s a question you’ll find yourself asking more than once while giving these a watch.) It feels like these movies couldn’t have come out at any other time, even if they aren’t about the particulars of how we’ve come to completely and consciously commodify and cultivate our own identities.

Noir that’s set in Los Angeles is something of a distinct subgenre, always about a juxtaposition between the glamor of Hollywood or the country’s most modern city with the blood and betrayal mixed into its concrete. For Lynch, the juxtaposition in these movies is instead between his characters’ visions of themselves and the harshness of intruding reality. (At least I think so. These are movies that reject easy interpretation.)

When you sit down for these movies, you are in for hours of being unsure what you’re seeing, and in the case of Inland Empire, of being about as sure of what you’re seeing as the director and actors apparently were. They can be a tough watch. They are also some of the only movies I’ve ever seen that replicate the uneasy logic of nightmares, the brooding vindictiveness of daydreaming about being some terrible person you think you wish you were.

You will also see a one-legged woman, a monkey, and a lumberjack. I don’t know why they’re there, either.

The Movies

Lost Highway begins with Fred (Bill Pullman, just a year after he blew up aliens for America and God in Independence Day) and Renee (Patricia Arquette), a married couple who seem to live an inert life together. Fred is a jazzman who can’t seem to perform in bed and who suspects Renee is messing around on him. They keep receiving eerie VHS tapes that could only have been filmed inside their own home, while they are asleep. Then, one of them depicts Fred having killed Renee. He does not remember this, but he takes the fall for her murder.

Then, in prison, something completely inexplicable happens. The security guards check on Fred and find that he is not Fred. Inside the cell, for no reason anybody at the jail can figure out, is Pete (Balthazar Getty), a young mechanic with a bitchin’ jacket and a rap sheet, sure, but there’s no reason he should’ve been incarcerated. Completely baffled, the authorities release him to the parents he lives with, who seem uncertain how he got there. It’s implied, heavily, that Pete was injured or killed on some night during which he and his girlfriend fought. Pete returns to his job, which largely consists of tuning the car of Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia, also an Independence Day alum!).

Pete’s life is complicated further when Mr. Eddy’s lover, also played by Patricia Arquette but not the same character, we think) ensnares him with sex and promises of running away. It all descends into a lot of violence and bad choices, before Pete turns back into Fred. It’s clear (well… it’s arguably clear) that Fred has built another bad-boy persona for himself, a badass who will live in a dangerous world and take what he wants. How much of that is real and how much of it is in his head seems to be up to us to decide.

Mulholland Dr. introduces us to Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a bright-eyed ingénue moving to Los Angeles for her very first big Hollywood audition. She’s the picture of naivete, and so we feel a kind of panic when she discovers, hiding in her aunt’s apartment, a mysterious woman with a head injury and amnesia, Rita (Laura Harring). We have seen that Rita has narrowly survived an assassination attempt, and the shady characters out to get her are still looking for her. As Betty and Rita try to unravel the truth of Rita’s identity and why she’s in danger, we also see the travails of a Hollywood director, Adam (Justin Theroux) whose wife has cheated on him and who is at the mercy of his shadowy superiors at the studio who insist that he cast a particular girl in his film.

Like Lost Highway, there’s an unnerving inversion of the main character in the last reel, something too good to spoil. Betty is not the young innocent she seems, and several disjointed scenes from before—a terrified man in a café, a hired killing gone disastrously and hilariously wrong—are not what we thought they were. It’s a bait-and-switch that’s up there with the best of them.

Of all of these, though, Inland Empire is the most likely to break you. Lynch did not write a script for the movie, shot scenes without any idea how they might or might not attach to the final product, and filmed everything on a digital camera that, by today’s standards, is visibly lousy compared to the video capture you have on the phone you may be reading this on. There is at most half an hour of discernible plot and coherent premise in the three-hour feature. It took Lynch three years to make. It ends with the Mad Libs guest stars I mentioned above, and there is no explanation for them. The cast each seem to play at least one alternate character.

It is, as you might imagine, very difficult to piece together exactly what’s happening after the premise is laid down. Laura Dern’s character is an actress who, along with co-star Justin Theroux, is cast to play co-lead in a movie that is supposedly cursed—the stars who tried to film it once before were murdered (or so it’s rumored). Dern and Theroux’s characters have an affair in the film, and Dern seems to be losing herself in her role in much the same way the protagonist of Perfect Blue does. Yet that anime film is an order of magnitude easier to understand than this one, which features storylines—revisited in disjointed asides—that center a family of anthropomorphic rabbits playing out domestic strife to the eerie canned laughter of a sitcom audience, an abused Polish woman, a version of Laura Dern’s movie character who is married to a guy who runs away to the circus, and long interludes where Dern’s movie character or perhaps Dern-as-actor is hanging out with a coterie of sex workers. Even the stars are said to have had no idea what the movie was actually about in the three-odd years they were working on it.

Inland Empire is the last feature film Lynch has yet directed, though he’s done various shorts and even returned to do another season of Twin Peaks since. It’s the darkest of the trilogy, and may be the most relentlessly distressing of anything he’s ever made. If it’s to be his last movie, it’s one of cinema’s most discordant swan songs.

Best Entry

For me, the clear winner has to be Mulholland Dr., with its stunning reveal and how it makes you completely reassess everything you’ve seen up to that point, while still leaving a lot of the film’s particulars up to your personal interpretation. Lots of Lynch’s strength comes from vibes. This one keeps those vibes front and center while also managing a masterful plot turn.

Unofficial Trilogy Notes

Lynch has said that his time living in Philadelphia, during which his family was robbed and he lived close to acts of violence, profoundly affected him, but he has also had interesting things to say about Los Angeles. Besides his fascination with the living film history on offer in the city, he said that the city’s intense light at night struck him. That stark imagery, combined with his career-long interest in the rot that lurks under a beautiful veneer, is present in all three of these movies.

Marathon Potential

Pretty terrible, especially if you go in release order and save the notoriously impenetrable Inland Empire for last. These are best consumed one at a time, with plenty of time to digest what you’ve seen, or even to rewatch—some scenes in these movies only make sense once you’ve seen the entire film, and a rewatch can add clarity.

Join us next month for another edition of Triple Threat, as we reach 88 miles per hour with the Back to the Future trilogy.

Kenneth Lowe is in your house. RIGHT NOW. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.