Tyshun Hopson

Photo collage of DVD posters of Blue Velvet (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

There is a moment early in “Mulholland Drive” when Betty steps off a plane into Los Angeles, and the city receives her like a gift. She is blonde, luminous, trembling with possibility. The older woman beside her on the flight smiled at her the way people smile at someone walking toward something beautiful that they cannot yet see is on fire. Lynch holds on her face just a beat too long — long enough for the warmth to curdle slightly at the edges, long enough for you to feel, beneath the arrival, the ghost of every arrival that came before hers and ended the same way.

This is Lynch’s signature move, and it’s not a horror technique. It is something more precise and more devastating than horror; Lynch is presenting the cinematic rendering of a haunting.

Lynch was an American filmmaker, painter, musician and artist whose work across five decades redefined what cinema could feel like. Born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946, he studied painting before his 1977 debut feature “Eraserhead,” announcing an original vision. His subsequent films, including “The Elephant Man,” “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart” and “Mulholland Drive,” earned him three Academy Award nominations for Best Director. His television series “Twin Peaks” permanently altered what American TV could attempt.

Years were spent writing about David lynch as a surrealist, a fabulist, a poet of the subconscious, an explorer of darkness. These descriptions are, honestly, not at all that far from the truth, yet they lack the center of what he was doing. Lynch was not primarily interested in the darkness, but moreover, what happens to a dream after it dies; it doesn’t go away. The dream keeps walking around in the body of the life you thought you were living. It smiles at you from the diner booth. It waves from the front porch. It is somehow still there, still warm, still luminous and you cannot stop seeing it even after you know what it is.

Betty Elms is haunting. Laura Palmer is haunting. The town of Lumberton, with its flowers and suburban neighborhoods, is haunting. Lynch understood something about the American dream that its critics and its defenders both tend to miss: it does not fail as being exposed as false; it fails by remaining beautiful. A dream is more devastating when it keeps working on after you know it wasn’t real

Consider what Lynch actually shows us in “Blue Velvet,” which is routinely described as a film about the darkness beneath suburban surfaces. This is accurate as far as it goes.

Take the moment Jeffrey hides in Dorothy Vallens’s closet. It is the scene everyone knows, but not always for the right reasons. Jeffrey watches Frank Booth arrive — the violence, the infantile ritual, the gas mask, the blue velvet — and Lynch lingers on Jeffrey’s expression, watching long enough to show you three things in succession: fear, fascination and something that is unmistakably, briefly, arousal. This is not incidental. Lynch is not showing us a pure observer contaminated by what he witnesses. He is showing us someone who already contained what he is watching. The closet does not introduce Jeffrey to something foreign. It introduces him to something interior. The dream’s darkness is not out there in Frank Booth’;s world; it is in the closet Jeffrey brought with him, the one he has been carrying since before he found the ear. This is the dream’s deepest secret. We hide it from ourselves and call the hiding innocence.

This is what separates Lynch from the long tradition of American artists who have criticized the dream. Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur Miller all showed you the gap between the dream’s promise and its delivery. They were diagnosticians, pointing at the failure. Lynch was doing something different. He was not pointing at the gap. He was living in it. His films do not stand outside the realm and critique it; they are seen from inside it, by someone who loves it and cannot leave it and knows exactly what it costs and keeps dreaming anyway. Betty’s arrival in Los Angeles works on you because Lynch meant for it to work on you. The beauty is not ironic. The beauty is the argument.

“Mulholland Drive” extends this argument into something even more structurally radical, because Lynch does not just show us the dream and its haunting. In this film, he makes you live inside the dream long enough to genuinely believe it before he takes it away.

Club Silencio is where Lynch makes his most explicit and devastating statement about the dream and its survival. The emcee announces, with theatrical certainty, that there is no band. Everything you hear is recorded, playback, illusion. No hay banda, there never was. Then Rebekah Del Rio walks to the microphone and sings a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” unaccompanied, with a kind of stripped and aching beauty that fills the theater completely. Betty and Rita weep before they understand why. Then Del Rio collapses. And the voice continues. The song goes on without her, without anyone, filling the room with emotion that now has no source, no body, no origin. The dream has been exposed as constructed, and the feeling it produces is more real than ever. This is Lynch’s central thesis made visible and audible simultaneously: the dream does not require its own existence in order to keep working on you. It has already done what it needs to do. The feeling outlasts the fact. The haunting is more present than the thing that died.

And then the film gives you its final, most brutal scene analysis of its own argument. The tiny laughing figures from the airport, the warm older couple who delivered Betty to Los Angeles with such genuine delight, who seemed to embody the dream’s welcoming promise, return at the end of the film as miniature demons pouring under Diane Selwyn’s door. Lynch uses the identical images, the identical faces and reverses their meaning completely without changing a single thing about them. The dream’s welcoming committee and the horror’s advance guard are the same figures. They were always the same figures. The warmth that greeted Betty’s arrival and the terror that ends Diane’s life are made of identical material, wear the same faces, move with the same energy.

Twin Peaks makes this structure explicit in ways that should have permanently altered how Americans talk about their communities, but did not. Laura Palmer is dead before the story begins. She was the homecoming queen, the girl who brought meals to shut-ins, the one everyone loved most and she was being destroyed in the dark for years while the town that loved her looked at the surface, saw only the surface. The horror of Twin Peaks is not Bob. Bob is almost a relief, a supernatural explanation, a monster in which to locate the evil. The horror is everything before Bob is revealed, the weeks of episodes in which it becomes clear that Laura’s suffering was visible, legible, right there and that Twin Peaks had organized itself around not seeing it. The dream the town was committed to was more important than the girl the dream was killing.

What Lynch was saying across forty years of filmmaking, in the particular visual language of Pacific Northwest forests and diners and red curtains and severed ears, is that the American dream is not a lie in the simple sense. A lie can be corrected. What Lynch was describing is more like a haunting, a presence that persists after its conditions have been disproven, that goes on shaping the space it occupies, that you feel even when you cannot see it. Betty Elms is still arriving in Los Angeles. Laura Palmer is still the homecoming queen. The flowers are still blooming on the street where Jeffrey Beaumont grew up, and somewhere in the closet of every house on that street, the dream is showing someone exactly what they already knew about themselves.

Lynch spent his career showing us that we cannot tell the difference, that we have never been able to tell the difference between the dream and its haunting. That we go on living inside one while calling it the other. That the robin is beautiful and the bug is real, and both of these things are true at the same time, in the same image, without resolution. That the voice keeps singing after the singer falls. That the figures who welcome you and the figures who destroy you are wearing the same faces and you will not know which is which until you are already inside the dream they brought you to.

He knew how it ended. He kept making it beautiful anyway. That is the most American thing he ever did.