Of all the analyses swirling online about the ending of Twin Peaks: The Return, the ones I’ve enjoyed the most have all pointed out that the name of the supreme negative force in the show’s universe, “Jiāo dāi”-or “Judy”-derives from a Mandarin word meaning to “explain” the worst, most evil thing that David Lynch can imagine is a mystery with a definitive solution. ![]() In this, Aronofsky could not be more different than Lynch, whose steadfast, long-standing refusal to delve too deeply into his works’ meanings has gone a long way toward entrenching him as America’s leading pop surrealist. And there is no doubt that people are talking: including and especially Aronofsky, whose interviews in Vulture and The New York Times scan as the gestures of a proud but insecure auteur desperate to explain himself before it’s too late. Given the media frenzy over its polarizing festival bows in Venice and Toronto and dead-in-the-water box office-the latter an embarrassment being laid at the (shoeless) feet of star Jennifer Lawrence-it’s understandable that Paramount would want to try to shanghai the narrative around its new, high-profile film maudit and reframe it as love-it-or-hate-it conversation piece. I thought of the Lost Highway poster when I saw the new online trailer for Mother!, a film that has already staked its claim as the most critically divisive title of 2017, with director Darren Aronofsky alternately hailed as a Lynch-like genius bringing difficult, personal art into the multiplex and derided as an undisciplined hack blowing studio money on a movie that’s subsequently been empirically proved to have zero appeal. In response to Siskel and Ebert’s downward digits, Lynch’s marketing team crafted the semiotic equivalent of a middle finger. Its joke was self-deprecating but also slyly weaponized against an impending consensus that the director’s cult-like fans-and, potentially, scores of other adventurous, antiestablishment-minded potential audience members-would see as the enemy. ![]() By leaning into the negative assessment being levied by arguably the only truly taste-making critics around (and in the context of Roger Ebert, whose thumb loomed larger than Gene Siskel’s, having also slammed Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart), Lost Highway’s poster signified defiance. “Two Thumbs Down” blared the print ads for Lost Highway-a brilliant example of pull-quote jiu-jitsu designed to give David Lynch’s characteristically inexplicable thriller a bit of leverage.
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