Though his most famous films date back to past decades, with “Eraserhead” in 1977 and “Blue Velvet” in 1986, David Lynch has continued to produce art so starkly strange it cannot be ignored, right on into the new millennium.

Lynch has tried his hand at many things–adaptation, television, stage musical. To all of them, he brings a combination of childlike wonder and an almost crushingly cynical sense of the evil that lurks inside every one of us. This decade, he’s only released two films, essentially companion pieces. He’s otherwise occupied his time with performing music, taking photographs, animating, promoting transcendental meditation and reporting the weather.

2001 saw the release of Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” originally conceived as a television pilot but ultimately released as a film. The surreal narrative pursues Lynch’s ongoing fascination with identity (1997’s “Lost Highway” dealt with a traumatized man entering a fugue state in which he developed an entirely new personality), but introduces the new element of performance, specifically Hollywood filmmaking, to his discomfiting brew. A young woman named Betty (Naomi Watts) comes to Hollywood, hoping to make it as an actress. Instead she ends up embroiled in the travails of Rita (Laura Elena Harring), an alluring amnesiac who fled a car crash and ended up in Betty’s apartment. Parallel to these events, and perhaps related, is the story of haughty young filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), whose film project is being wrested away from him by shadowy, mob-like forces beyond his ken.

The movie trades in non sequiturs of a particularly jarring type. The uncooperative Kesher is sent away to conference with “the cowboy,” a man in cowboy garb (Lafayette Montgomery) who seems to supernaturally affect electric lights. Rita raises Betty in the middle of the night to attend Club Silencio, a disturbing L.A. night spot where you’re never watching the performance you think you are–perhaps a metaphor for “Mulholland Drive” as a whole.

As the film shifts into a new permutation of the plot at around two thirds of the way through, with the same actors suddenly portraying different characters, it’s all too easy to lose track of the action, but “Mulholland Drive” invites consideration and discussion as much as any film of the decade. It’s been compared repeatedly to Billy Wilder’s classic Hollywood weird-noir “Sunset Boulevard,” and rightly so, though the few moments of delicious oddness in that film barely touch the insanity of “Mulholland Drive.” The movie’s Wikipedia page scratches the surface of the innumerable interpretations viewers have applied to the film; in fact, there is a whole catalogue of interpretations available online.

Lynch followed in 2006 with the inscrutable “Inland Empire.” For all the riddles of “Mulholland Drive,” its complexities were seductive, but “Inland Empire” actively confounds understanding on first viewing, and probably upon subsequent viewings, too. Again dealing with the problem of performance and identity, this time we’re presented with a blurring of the lines between an actress (Laura Dern) and the character she portrays. The movie’s tagline is “A woman in trouble,” and really, that’s about as much plot synopsis as you can hope for. Jeremy Irons and Justin Theroux also star, with a memorable cameo by Harry Dean Stanton, who worked with Lynch before on “Wild at Heart” and “The Cowboy and the Frenchman.”

Lynch handled the cinematography and editing for this picture, and also performed some music for the film, opting not to use a score by long-time collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, whose ethereal stylings enriched “Mulholland Drive.” But Lynch’s musical contributions are creepy in a new way, playing with and echoing dialogue.

The film’s three (or more!) layers of narrative made my head spin on first viewing, but the experience of seeing “Inland Empire” in a theater was unforgettable. Some of the film’s strangest moments, as with every Lynch film, sound positively comic out of context: The recurring image of a sitcom family composed entirely of rabbits who speak in clichés, the sudden transposition of a giant mouth over a human face mid-scene.

But you can’t experience those subconsciously resonant shocks anywhere else, and it’s a fine thing that David Lynch is still making interesting films. It’s hard to say what he’ll do next—he’s lined up to produce films for fellow madmen Werner Herzog and Alejandro Jodorowsky, but his next directorial endeavor is yet to be announced. Whatever he pursues, it will undoubtedly tell us something uniquely Lynchian about the world we live in, something we perhaps didn’t want to know, just as “Mulholland Drive” and “Inland Empire” force us to reconsider how we watch movies and understand filmic performance.

Image sources: Gerry Mooney/Photoshelter; Ffffoun
Links: YouTube, Wikipedia, www.dnots.com, The Journal, www.davidlynch.com, www.mulholland-drive.net