The iconic film David Lynch calls “a hell of a good revenge movie”
David Lynch is a master of weirdness. The director is the reigning king of the uncanny, as works like Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are designed to be equally goosebump-inducing as they are spine-chilling. His neo-noir approach to psychological thrillers and violence has revolutionised cinema’s take on horror. But according to Lynch, when it comes to outright revenge, a different director is the king.
Lynch’s work often deals with mystery. In Twin Peaks, we meet Agent Cooper as he tries to get to the bottom of Laura Palmer’s suspicious and sudden death. Similarly, Blue Velvet starts with Jeffrey Beaumont stumbling upon a clue that was never meant for him.
Building his own rich cinematic world where ordinary people get pulled into crazy plots, Lynch has consistently been interested in imagining chilling horrors and mysteries. There is always something quite isolating in the American auteur’s work. Even when set in a distinct place or time, his characters and cinematography always feel somewhat strange, always distinctly Lynchian and never too relatable or real.
But his favourite revenge movie is rooted in real life. While Lynch has previously discussed how the location of Los Angeles inspired Mulholland Drive, he didn’t realise for a long time that the film could be about a particular place. “I didn’t even know it was a Hollywood movie! I understood it afterwards,” he told Cahiers du Cinema. However, he maintains that the movie is “not a commentary on Hollywood per se. It is a story that is located there”.
But this prompts him to bring up Quentin Tarantino. Referencing Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, the film is not just set in Hollywood but is totally about it. In fact, LA feels like a character in Tarantino’s latest feature as he dives into the 1960s and the era when Sharon Tate reigned queen, and Charles Manson lurked in the shadows like a curse.
His integration of real life and fiction appears to fascinate Lynch, telling the magazine, “Tarantino’s film shows that things could have turned out differently”.
Re-writing the end of the Manson Family story, Tarantino leads the audience down a historical path that makes them feel like they know what will happen and then totally flips the switch. Anyone who has seen the film will know that the finale is a shock as viewer expectations go out of the window.
It’s this factor that Lynch loves, praising Tarantino’s bravery in taking history and totally messing with it. “It’s a hell of a good revenge film,” he says, adding, “In a feel-good way”.
