Cinematic ideas: David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive"

Lynch, I want to suggest, can be regarded as a cinematic philosopher -artist, presenting thought through sound and image ('ideas', to use Lynch's term). In what follows I shall explore this thesis by considering one of Lynch's most challenging films, "Mulholland Drive", a film that we can 'understand' by being attentive to not only to its complex narrative structure, but also to the role of what I shall call 'cinematic Ideas'. Although Lynch never really explains what he means, I take cinematic Ideas to mean visual and aural sequences that combine images and sounds liberated from a purely narrative function with images evincing a complex cinematic reflexivity. This striking conjunction of sensuous immediacy and complex reflection is the hallmark of Lynch's cinematic world. In a manner recalling Kant's 'aesthetic ideas', Lynch's cinematic Ideas are presentations of the imagination that exceed conceptual determination and linguistic expression. They are inexhaustible imaginative representations open to infinite interpretation.