Mulholland Drive's Justin Theroux says David Lynch also doesn't know what his movies are about
Either that or he just won't tell Justin Theroux what they're about
Film News Justin Theroux
David Lynch famously refuses to explain what any of his projects are about, lending them all a nice air of mystery and surprise that allows the viewer to come up with their own interpretations about Twin Peaks or Eraserhead or Blue Velvet without necessarily feeling like they’re wrong. That’s one of the reasons why the strange tease in one of his YouTube weather reports earlier this year was so tantalizing, since it could’ve been about literally anything (and it ended up just being an announcement about doing more YouTube weather reports, which was simultaneously the most and least predictable thing he could’ve said). However, Justin Theroux—who appeared in Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive, among other things—has his own explanation for why David Lynch won’t explain his movies: He truly doesn’t know what they’re about.
Theroux’s justification for this comes from his time working on Mulholland Drive, with him telling IndieWire that he immediately started asking Lynch questions about the movie when filming started (“Why am I there? Who’s the cowboy? What’s going on? What reality are we in?”). He says Lynch eventually cleared the set so it was just the two of them, but rather than actually answering any of Theroux’s questions about what’s going on in the movie, Lynch simply responded with, “I don’t know, buddy. But let’s find out.” Theroux says he “wasn’t being cute or cheeky or evasive” about it, he just “genuinely didn’t know” what was going on in the film. He says working with Lynch is like riding “an escalator into a cloud” because “you never know where the escalator lets off.”
One cynical interpretation of that Theroux quote could be that Lynch is just kind of making it up as he goes along, like he’s just being weird for the sake of weird and there’s no deeper meaning to anything he does, but that’s no fun (and Lynch seems too smart and introspective for that to be true). If anything, he could’ve just been bullshitting Justin Theroux, because why would the guy who famously doesn’t explain anything suddenly decide to explain everything to someone who isn’t even Laura Dern or Kyle MacLachlan? The more likely scenario, though, is that Lynch doesn’t really go in with a specific “about” in mind, choosing instead to—as he apparently told Justin Theroux—find it as he goes. Really, the whole thing is just up to your interpretation.
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The idea that there’s one canonical answer to what a movie is “really” about is nonsense; authors change their minds, authors sometimes don’t even think about it, works like movies are a collaborative effort and the director isn’t the only person making creative decisions, etc.What a movie is “about” is entirely up to any individual to decide.
One of my favorite things in my writing classes in college was when we’d get assigned to read a short story by someone else in the class (all anonymously), then read it aloud in a future class meeting and talk about the themes and what the story was about. It was absolutely fucking WILD to hear some of the things my classmates thought my stories were about. Stuff that never even came close to entering my head, but my classmates were analyzing text and pulling these ideas out of it and I’m just sitting there trying not to break face to let people know it’s my story.
That’s why I hate all these ‘Ending Explained’ and ‘What Does It Mean’ videos that come out about movies. If you need someone else to explain to you how to feel about a movie then you might as well not watch it.
I’ll hedge here by saying, I enjoy when people offer up explanations that allow me to watch a movie with a different frame of reference. Take the documentary Room 237. It offers five different theories about what the Shining means. Do I believe any of them are correct? No. But they sure do make the film fascinating to rewatch with the altered context.
When I had only seen Eraserhead I think once, I looked up someone’s explanation of it online — very much thinking “what can it hurt, it isn’t the kind of movie that someone can definitively explain” — but ironically, the reason I (inevitably) regretted reading it was that it was actually quite a good explanation, and I couldn’t help but port it over into my own thinking about the film. And that kind of de-personalized my relationship with it.Subsequently — like by the time of Inland Empire — I never read a goddamn word anybody wrote about it. Even though it utterly stopped making sense to me about halfway through. It provoked very deep reactions in me, and that’s enough. (I also, kind of different topic, but I also have never watched Inland Empire a second time. I’ve seen some of his other movies so many times it kind of started to take something away, like knowing what’s coming. By the time I see that movie a second time I’ll have forgotten almost everything about it.)
No one ever needs to explain Chopper Dave to me!
I wasn’t sure how I felt about those articles. Thanks for explaining to me why they’re not worth reading/watching.
Yup. What’s there, what the creator thinks they put there, and what the audience thinks is there are three different things. There *might* be some overlap.
I hated when those types of questions were put on tests in grade school “what was the author trying to convey here” Bitch i don’t know, the guy has been dead for a few hundred years and he never wrote it down, why not ask the real question “what do a few educators on a panel think the author was trying to convey here” In a much longer defence i was able to argue my point to my one english teacher and got those kind of questions removed for that class.
I think it’s a completely acceptable question to ask in a different framework: “What are some of the themes from this work?” and add an addendum about class discussion or personal views regarding it. The presumption of ownership over philosophical underpinnings is damn near impossible to gather.I mean, look at Uncle Tom’s Cabin that in the last 40 years has become pretty much openly reviled because Stowe’s understanding of Christianity was steeped in a patriarchal upbringing built around deference. Uncle Tom is Christ-like but also 100% subservient by force, so it has all kinds of unintentional layers to her writing that I’m sure Stowe wasn’t thinking about.
Awesome! My GF in college convinced me to tale an upper level literature course, for which I didn’t just have to answer questions like that, I had to write papers about it. I love to read. I read all the time. Maybe I think about what I’m reading a little, more likely I just enjoy the story and move on. I’d have a hard time telling you what books I read last month, and a harder time describing their plots. It’s a good thing my GF was there to write the papers.
You’ve rather egregiously overstated the impact that relativism and subjectivity play in creating and interpreting meaning. Surely you can discern the obvious difference between willfully obscure media by the likes Lynch or Lindelof and the majority of media containing more straightforward narratives and characterizations?Most media simply does not offer anywhere near infinite compelling interpretations that can be persuasively argued for, and some are clearly significantly more or less open to interpretation than others. We have the word “didactic” for a reason, to point out just one glaring flaw in your overly-simplistic and willfully-obtuse argument.
My mother is an oil-on-canvas artist who has had a bunch of exhibitions (even on in a super teeny tiny corridor of a tiny gallery in New York!) and she mostly does what I’d call “abstract but with like a couple of illustrative elements”. So think a big swirl and some patterns and textures and then a detailed little bird, or a violin, or some other object she felt like drawing (her art degrees are in illustration and graphic design).And nothing irritates her more than having some smart (usually) man stroll through the gallery and point at each work and say “Oh! Cinderella’s Carriage, see? See?” or “Ah! Bonfire of the Vanities! The swirl up here, and then down here, see? Bonfire of the Vanities? Right? Right?”This has something to do with Lynch’s movies but don’t ask me what it is or I might get all offended and turn into Bill Paxton for 40 minutes.**And if anyone posts “I think you mean Bill Pullman except you actually mean Balthazar Getty” I’ll scream. But the scream will turn into a totally sweet free jazz saxophone solo so maybe it’s worth it?
Nice try, but Deckard’s not a replicant.
Dangit!
And Rachel was special…no expiration date!
The arguments I had with my English teachers in high school about that concept were legendary.We had one actual Literature teacher, she always agreed with me.
Is it? Are there multiple meanings to Diehard? I don’t mean in the deeper possibly philosophical sense of capitalism and our perception on terrorism because that’s 100% not within the author’s view or original intent when he wrote it. I definitely think there are canonical meanings and ambiguity is totally acceptable but to argue that art has no intrinsic meaning and everything is internal to our own worldview reject objectivity which doesn’t hold water when you look at less intentionally philosophical ventures.
I think the point is that while there is some VALUE to understanding the director’s intent, it shouldn’t necessarily alter your own takeaways. While the artist can certainly control his or her own intent when creating the art, they can’t control a viewer’s interpretation … and that interpretation is equally valid. The notion that something is “canonical” is a concept that may help us understand a factual plot point, I suppose (e.g. Vader is Luke’s father), but it doesn’t dictate the various thematic meanings we, the viewers, may draw from those collection of plot points.
Ah, yes, the ‘head canon’ argument which I agree is something the author can’t control but you can still take away something that isn’t there and just a projection. Gold standard arguments in Wizard of Oz is a primary example of how somebody’s take away is a complete fabrication built on the shakiest foundations. It doesn’t invalidate their projection but it does unfairly begin to cast the work in a different light if it becomes a heavily shared argument.I think shipping is a less problematic subcategory here but it offers up scores of examples of where actors who merely ‘click’ or have a subtlety are suddenly implying things within their own work that nobody intended.
You’ve conflated common objectivity with absolute objectivity. Yes, objectively, the thing I’m typing on is called a keyboard; nobody would argue with that. That’s common objectivity (the things almost everyone agrees on, because we can’t get anything done otherwise). But the atoms the thing is composed of do not have “keyboard” labeled on them, and could easily be transferred to be part of some other totally unrelated object. That’s absolute objectivity.Artworks often have common intrinsic meanings, but there is no such thing as absolute intrinsic meaning.
Except that there is a definitive statement in a story. I didn’t conflate anything, I merely pointed out that while you’re entitled to an interpretation of reality it isn’t objective in regards to what was written by the author or what was visualized on the screen. Your example relies on an understanding of subatomic particles and simply goes down further to imply our understanding of concepts can be broken down if we simply traverse further which isn’t what those things mean, so either your example is awful or your obfuscating the point. That being said, the difference between interpretations is always a level of subjectivity but there are stated goals and intent within any story. If I write that Jane goes to the store and buys bread. That’s a story, it’s a very short one, but it has a definitive position, can you interpret it as a representation of market capitalism? Sure. It still doesn’t make your interpretation anymore objective than anybody else’s interpretation but the statement remains in and of itself objective to the view I originally wrote it with. I guess the point I was trying to make is that it’s a philosophical debate of what reality is and using the analogy of subatomic particles is bad and arguably disingenuous.
it isn’t objective in regards to what was written by the author or what was visualized on the screen. Yes, you’re making the same distinction that I was. The literal actions described by a story are not what people mean when they talk about “meaning,” and not at all what I meant when I made my original comment. (See how easy it is for someone to misinterpret the meaning of words?)The real problem is the word “about”. What is the Jane story “about”? If I say, it’s about a woman who buys bread, someone might respond with, “No, it’s really about the subtle harms of of capitalism.” But in that case we’re using “about” to mean two different things: I was using it in the sense of “what the story literally describes” and he was using it in the sense of “what does the story metaphorically mean.”And it was painfully obvious that my original comment was about metaphorical/interpretive meanings, not literal descriptions. So I don’t really even know what you’re arguing about.
Oof, you doubled down on trying to circle back to some attempt to make it literal. Interesting…Look, I don’t need to rip you down, you do a great job of that yourself, but we can differentiate between narrative meaning and implied meaning. You insisted I meant literal narrative but then things like Aesop’s fables only mean you shouldn’t make wax wings and allegories by default aren’t actually a concept then.Dude, just accept that there are narrative meanings and ‘head canon’ that people will read into things. Lynch’s work is more visual motifs without narrative meaning than not and often are done in that vein because that’s who he is. The more obscure the narrative meaning or lack there of can complicate the matter but there is a distinction between using horror as a substitute for feelings of xenophobia (Noserfatu), sexual awakenings (Hammer’s Dracula), and lost innocence (90’s Oldman Dracula). They all follow the same literal narrative (with some variations) but all have different narrative meaning.That being said….I’m out! *smoke bomb*
Dude, just accept that there are narrative meanings and ‘head canon’ that people will read into things.You’re trying really, really hard to pretend that we disagree, and I don’t understand why.
Well, I’m pretty sure I knew what Godzilla was about.
Yeah… it was about twenty minutes longer than it needed to be!
No shit.
How is this even an article? Lynch says all the time he doesn’t know what his movies and shows are about, they’re simply an artistic release that occurs and it’s up to the audience to make heads or tails of it. Saying that, Lynch has an idea what’s happening, but he’s also, famously, said he doesn’t want to direct specificity to things because to him art should always be open for interpretation. He’s always been more concerned with the impact of his work rather than the why of it.
I think it’s annoying that people are always looking for meanings in David Lynch’s movies. I just watch what he makes and enjoy the ride.
If you like that kind of experience, have you watched the long version of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie?
I saw a similar take in a recent interview with Jesse Plemons about talking with Charlie Kaufman on the set of I’m Thinking Of Ending Things. I think it’s just a reductive way of looking at it. Some creators specialize in the ineffable.
Lynch isn’t just chucking shit together like say a Michael Bay film, where they saw something “cool” and want to do it too, but rather he just seems to follow his gut or moments of free thought and see where that takes him.Sometimes it takes him places that don’t make a lick of conscience sense and he probably knows that (a lot of Twin Peaks) but it can also be following distinct themes that are explored in an unusual way (Eraserhead and the theme of a phobia of commitment or dislike of societal expectations of child rearing).
Has Jennifer Lynch ever commented on the fact that her father made a movie clearly about her, where she is depicted as some kind of weird, alien… creature? I mean, that’s gotta mess you up a bit as a kid.
It was less about Jennifer in particular and more about the general horror and stress of a first child. Many parents express stress about being responsible for an infant, Lynch just made his into a movie.
Well, no, because it’s not about her, it’s about him.
And also, you think Lynch showed his daughter Eraserhead when she was a kid?
You mean Dune?
Quality counts for a lot, and Lynch’s movies tend to do great things in terms of atmosphere and a sense of the unknowable. Someone compared them to dreams, and I think that’s a fair analogy. The imagery remains powerful and idiosyncratic in a way that haunts you after you leave the theater. It’s not hard to see why he’s polarizing as a filmmaker because if it doesn’t click with you, then it looks a lot like nonsensical, pretentious twaddle. And if you do Lynch badly — if the imagery isn’t compelling on its own — then your movie comes off as staggeringly inept at a basic level.
Lynch breaks some pretty fundamental rules of storytelling to achieve an unmatched aura of mystery. But if your skill level doesn’t justify that tradeoff, you’re in serious trouble.
Lynch himself often compares his movies/shows to dreams – you can even watch clips of him directing where he instructs the cast to make it more “dreamy”. There’s a reason why Coop’s deductive style in TP is dream-centric and why the central musical performance in Blue Velvet (well, besides “Blue Velvet” itself) is Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”. Just like our dreams, his work doesn’t often carry a firm narrative meaning, but they carry a strong emotional meaning.
Lynch himself often compares his movies/shows to dreams – you can even watch clips of him directing where he instructs the cast to make it more “dreamy”. I reckon the Studio Ghibli films Spirited Away and Ponyo are 100% the result of dreams. Especially Spirited Away. I’ve totally had dreams where I get stranded in a faraway slightly magical land and have to get a fucking job and am assigned some horrible sleeping arrangment, like a huge octagonal dorm where me and some long-forgotten uni buddy have to engage in ritual dice-and-squash-racquet(sic) combat to determine who gets the room with the door that locks, but it breaks down into a debate over whether racquet should be spelled racket, and then we discover a secret wardrobe but the RA is disgusted because it’s “just a wardrobe” but it has that awesome window from The Crow, but everyone warns me against going in there because it’s such a cliche.
I think this is a fair assessment: Lynch is a better cinematographer and director than a writer. He sets up stunning visuals and dreamy aspects and then leaves the story to a limited sense of existential crisis.
Yes, he seems much more interested in conveying emotion and mood. His movies have that dream logic where you can feel something totally overwhelming and it makes sense in the dream (or in his film), but in not in the waking world.
I was going to write the same thing. I saw his Master Class about writing, and his two big messages seemed to be: everyone should do Transcendental Meditation wherein you go past consciousness into a primordial unconsciousness, and creativity is about grabbing onto ideas and seeing where they take you. Less “Here’s what I want to say…” and more “Here’s an idea. Let me follow it! Oh, it takes me to this other idea! And this idea connects to a third idea. Now what happens here? I haven’t found the idea yet. I’ll come back to it. For now, I want to see where this new idea takes me!”
Only David Lynch could get away with this*.
“I don’t know, buddy. But let’s find out” is now my go-to answer for virtually everything. Thanks Dave!
Works well for the inane questions of children especially.
I’m currently writing a standard and will assuredly have to defend it to people much smarter than I am. I will quote this verbatim.
Do we apply this need to “understand” everything when we try to interpret our dreams? When I wake up, I can make sense of certain parts of a dream and logically connect it to my life. Meanwhile other parts of the dream or nightmare make no sense whatsoever. You might even say my subconscious was “just making it up as it went along.” To me, this is just another way Lynch’s cinema of the subconscious gets it exactly right.
Sure, but not everybody prefers dream narratives to waking narratives. I find my own dreams really memorable and bizarre but I wouldn’t want to watch them on TV.
“Do we apply this need to “understand” everything when we try to interpret our dreams?”
No, but get this: some people think that unconscious dreams are different from art that is very consciously constructed.
Ultimately, not necessarily, and that’s something I enjoy letting go of when I watch a Lynch show/film – I can try to thread a few things, or I can enjoy the imagery and ideas. It can be a little frustrating as your brain really wants to be able to contextualize everything and put it into a narrative, but I like his stuff best when I just unplug and watch.
Sure, sometimes parts of my dreams make some kind of sense or relate to something and I take note of them, and the rest doesn’t and I ignore it and allow it to be forgotten, because nobody but nobody is interested in hearing about other people’s dreams.
I suppose the investors of a film can also be taken aside and given Theroux’ answer when they want to know whether a film is going to be popular with audiences or if they have a “Space Mutiny” on their hands?
The last thing I want to do is understand most of Lynch’s work. That would make things more boring, when interpretation is much more interesting. It’s a huge reason why I’m against another season of Twin Peaks.
Lynch is definitely an exploratory filmmaker. He goes in with some ideas and themes, but he follows the experience of film making where it takes him.
I think it’s important to ask the right questions in a movie like this.Who’s the cowboy? Fair question. He’s just some guy (probably an actor) who happened to be at the party where Camilla rubbed Diane’s face in the fact that she had moved on.Why does “the cowboy” act strangely and help to force Adam to cast a particular actress, perhaps denying “Betty” her big break? Not a great question. This is just the role Diane has imagined for him, in her distressed imagination. Like everything else in her dream story, the only things that matter are her expression of bitterness and regret and that the story is entertaining to watch.IMO.
Also, because “Mulholland” is a busted network pilot, the cowboy probably had some sort of purpose that would have been revealed in a future episode. That’s the thing that drives me insane about “Mulholland”: people praise the narrative cul-de-sacs of the so-called “dream” portion, but the International version of the “Twin Peaks” pilot has just as many, and for the same reason.
I think that all the statements in the interview point to is that they have two different approaches to the creative process: Some people like to approach creative work like a project or a problem that needs to be tackled with a master plan that they reference back to it for almost every decision they make with regards to the project. Other people like to find their way as they go, maybe starting off with a few ideas or concepts, but not really having a master plan, just sort of following where their muse leads them.Both are actually pretty valid approaches, depending on how they work for you. As far as David Lynch’s approach goes, I’d say the man behind Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive kinda has his creative process pretty well down. Sure, he’s had his misfires too. But even those are pretty damn interesting.
Better than making something where you know what it’s about, but you spend a whole season not getting to the damn point…like The Mosquito Coast.
Just watch the movie.
I mean this just sounds like an actor was being annoying and the director gave a perfect answer to shut him up so they could actually do the scene.Also funny this is about MD, since Lynch has said it’s probably his only film where he does think there’s a pretty clear narrative.
Justin Theroux appeared in a Lynch project that was heavily reassembled after the pilot process (Mulholland Drive) and a Lynch project that was completely incomprehensible (Inland Empire), so no wonder he was confused. His scene with Laura Dern is probably my favorite part of Inland Empire, along with Grace Zabriskie’s role.
I’m one of those people that thinks Inland empire is pretty comprehensible. You just cling onto the Laura Dern character and every other wonderfully bizarre thing gravitated around that. Her arc is pretty clear. A struggling actor who dives too deep into a role and accidentally dives into a supernatural nightmare reality, then she kills the phantom running things and gains freedom again.
The answer is right in the middle. Lynch IS making it up as he goes along, but that’s the point. That’s always been the point. He’s been open about that for decades. Lynch uses dreams and dream logic in cinematic form. It’s pure ideas given physical form through his work. Inland empire in particular never had a complete script or even a solid plan. It was idea after idea shot and connected with lynch openly proud of that. The meaning you find it whatever you want, and that’s always been the idea. It’s why he refuses to discuss any interpretation if eraserhead in particular. That’s what Lynch meant by saying that we’d “find out together” what the cowboy might mean.
Lynch is clearly an American surrealist. It shouldn’t be surprising to people that his films run on instinct, the subconscious, and dreams. I am happy to see that a century later, surrealism still has the power to break some people’s brains. Still, if these people want to know what Lynch’s films are all about, maybe they should read some Andre Breton?
So who wrote the questions on the card given out with the DVD which supposedly contains clues??
Anyone who thinks this has never actually spoken to a director in real life. A director saying “I don’t know, but let’s find out together” does not mean the director doesn’t know what it’s about. It means he wants the actor to figure out what it means to them and doesn’t want to bias the creativity of his fellow artist. I’ve worked on enough sets to know this.
isn’t Lynch all about mindfulness and being in the moment, so i assume he just allows himself to be open to any ideas, and he goes with his intuition, whatever that may be.Re. The Red Room in Twin Peaks, Lynch recalled that he was leaning against a hot car when the image of the room came to him, fully formed. so fucking cool!
Congratulations on discovering the artistic process, Sam.
“Theroux says he “wasn’t being cute or cheeky or evasive” about it, he just “genuinely didn’t know” what was going on in the film.”
Well, if Theroux says Lynch was being serious then he must’ve been.
“One cynical interpretation of that Theroux quote could be that Lynch is just kind of making it up as he goes along”
But then, if you’ve ever actually seen a Lynch movie and thought about it for a quarter of a second you realize that no, it’s OBVIOUSLY not that.
Lynch knew what Eraserhead was about, it’s about adulthood, parenting, and the complications those things bring. Otherwise really when people think of ‘David Lynch’ they really just mean Lost Highway, Mullholland Drive, and Inland Empire for his weird ‘Lynchian’ stuff that has no discernible meaning. I’m not going to get into his short films because I think short films inherently fall into two categories of made with intent and focus or conceptual, Lynch is in the latter in that regard.Plus, Mullholland Drive was shot as a TV pilot movie that was cobbled together into a film when the dangling threads of the original pilot wasn’t picked up. If there was ever any meaning to this it was forced into it by Lynch after the fact. You could sum them all up as ‘Blonde woman that Lynch wants to fuck has weird psychosis and disassociative personality issues’ and you would be within the ballpark of any meaning. Oddly enough though his straight forward work is so much better, Blue Velvet while weird plays straight and works so much better for it.
Not sure why we needed Theroux to spell this out for us. Lynch has clearly said that he draws inspiration (and working techniques) from dreams, the subconscious, the unexpected and the unexplained. Why don’t we just believe him instead of constantly asking what his movies are about?And of course it’s the male star of a movie about two women who’s bugging the director about What It All Means. I get the feeling Lynch pulled the “everybody off set” stunt to make Theroux feel important, hoping he would finally shut up. “It means you’re a secondary character, buddy. Can we get back to work now?”
I gave up many years ago trying to follow storylines in Lynch’s films. Twin Peaks is the most coherent thing he’s ever done, and whoa man does that say something about the guy’s career. That having been said, I love his work. It’s beautiful and dreamlike and tugs at you in primal, visceral ways. I advise anyone preparing to watch a David Lynch film to just absorb it without trying to decipher it. It’s a delightful experience.
For fuck’s sake, why is this so hard? Lynch takes what he learned studying the expressionist and surrealist art movements and applies it to film. It doesn’t MEAN anything, it’s about FEELING. He has been open about this for 50 goddamn years.
Lynch has been quotes multiple times over the years as not even wanting to know what his films are supposedly about.
Lynch’s films are all dreams.