So someone hands you a day on a plate (with a heating system down, a school can't run). Question is: how do you use it? Or, more accurately, half the day as the Wafflettes will be home for lunch.

Scoot round town? Go back to bed? Potter about? Crank out the next chapter of Hampton Armpit? Devise a cover for Morse Solids?

Instead, here are a few thoughts about Mullholland Drive which seems to be coming more into focus the further I get from the film. (I'm going on memory as the DVd went back yesterday).

The film works by dream logic - and writing this I feel much like I do first thing in the morning piecing together sequences of the night before, trying to establish 'meaning'.

The word in the title - Drive - is the key, perhaps. How Lynch draws upon the automobile in cinema. An object to be wrecked. An object that kills. Excites. That moves.

In this film, the opening sequence of the car driving up Mulholland Drive (repeated but with a 'short cut' - spatial and cinematic - at the end). The insulated space of celebrity anonymity - the limousine that glides through the city at night with Someone Famous concealed behind the smoked glass. Lynch seems fascinated by the peculiar logics of public visibility and private invisibility. There's the division of car space: driver and front passenger barely seen and the passenger in the back. Another peculiar logic: control and passivity. The chauffeur/taxi man (employee) vs. the passenger (client). And then it clicks - what is the car but a metaphoric space of cinema. *

You sit in comfort watching things unfold, dimly aware of the back of the heads of the people in the row in front. You - as the cinema audience - are being driven. The rich ambiguity of the 'drive' as verb and noun: to travel, to be motivated, to desire. Another peculiar logic of continuity/discontinuity: for the viewer the film unfolds seamlessly. The film as road viewed as if through a screen (rather than onto). Narrative logic is like a well-planned journey - each turning leads to another towards the destination. Yet film - of any medium - is based upon the cut, the interruption, the - key word for Lynch here - accident.

The other cars in the film ... Adam (the director) and his Porsche convertible (nicely presenting the 'open'/'closed' space dichotomy). On set, Adam sitting in the open top 'acting' the kiss scene - director and actor roles, simulated and real passion merge. The taxi driving the wannabe actress to her aunt's flat and later to the audition. A vehicle of desire. The taxi into which Aunt Ruth's trunk is being lifted (what else does it contain but a body?) at the start. Aunt Ruth herself is another cut/splice logic and dreamy thinking:

AUNT / TRUTH

It's a film preoccupied with evil. I did a search for Lynch + Manicheanism and didn't find as much as I'd expected. The inverted crucifix suggested by the street lights seen from up on the hill intimates that things aren't well above (or here below, either).

Yet it is only suggestion - bending the film back upon the viewer-passenger. How in control are you of this drive? Lynch re-uses a travelling shot: the walk outside and around the corner of the Twinkie diner ... to see what horror? The walk through the flat and - later - the empty house - in the expectation of what? Nightmare, panic, the doppleganger? What you or I - each in our little movie house of horrors - supply. We're the guilty ones. We house the horrors. (Did I see the cowboy one more time? Yes, leaving the party ... so I "did good"? Or did I see him a second time - but just didn't notice - and so I "did bad"? Lynch fuses disobedience with viewer inattention and what punishment to come? What do we see? What are we responsible for?).

Lynch the Shakespearean? He adapts Macbeth's poor player to the Hollywood dream factory. Producers and financiers diabolically manipulating actors and directors. 'We' are cast for reasons that elude us. Decisions are made 'above'.

Lynch's debt to Francis Bacon? I found I was often reminded of Bacon's claustrophobic spaces. Rooms with screens, thick fabrics. Centres of clandestine control (the secret bunker) and cages (isolation chambers). Marooned objects - the telephone to hand, nothing else. Time and again, the simplest objects charged with menace and cruelty. (Even the bubbling coffee machine). And that little blue box with the triangular lock. A vaginal trap? A vanity case? Pandora's box? A black hole? The unconscious? And how we plunge down into it.

A film which - even as you watch it the first time - feels like a seeing again.

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* Whereas, for Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), the operative metaphor is the eye. A character who has become EYE/I - his locked-in syndrome disabling everything but his one eyeball. Hamlet's world in a nutshell reimagined as this fragile jellied globe. And this, in turn, captures the scopophilia that cinema depends upon. The viewer de-limbed but becoming-eye. Blink for yes, blink-blink for no. The eyelids reterritorialized as lips. The ocular orb as tongue. Pupilage.