Here’s a link on YouTube. (I’m not going to bother embedding it because it’s an hour long and nobody wants to stay on my website that long.)¹It’s also on Nebula, a service that offers really good bang for the buck if you like smart people talking about things.

Anyway.

In this piece, he talks a lot about Tenet, a movie that I initially liked quite a bit,²RPatz as a sleazy Bond? C’mon. No brainer. but enjoyed much more the second time when I stopped trying to figure out exactly what they were saying and instead just let it wash over me. Since his breakthrough Memento, Nolan’s been the sort of filmmaker who, when not making Batman flicks, dares the audience to keep up with his use of time and space.

His movies typically feature dense dialogue dumps and plots that inspire people to make intricate charts, so I can get the impulse to approach Tenet with the same sort of attitude. Tenet‘s deliberate use of audio can either be seen as him saying “I see you, I hear you, I love you, here is my special mystery box for you to dissect” to those folks or an out-and-out refutation of that attitude. I could argue that Tenet is Nolan saying that they should put their protractors down and just vibe with him for a while.

And so this got me contemplating David Lynch’s use of audio.

I’d be hard-pressed to name two English-language filmmakers whose works are more dissimilar than Lynch and Nolan, but they share one thing in common: they trust their audience. Not the audience, mind, but their audience, and what Nolan did with Tenet is something that Lynch has done over a few movies, but most especially in the movie that felt like his definitive statement on film noir, Mulholland Drive.³And, yes, I could also talk about Lost Highway here (as it’s the Lynch movie that most closely aligns with what the general public thinks of as noir) but nobody is paying me and Patrick’s video got me thinking especially about this movie in particular.

He’s always been someone who uses sound to its maximum effect, disorienting the audience and giving them an impression more than a truth. Mulholland Drive has a Badalamenti soundtrack that starts off jazzy and gets more ambient, but that’s half of what’s going on with the movie’s audio. When Rita (Laura Harring) and Betty (Naomi Watts) argue about a possible breakup, Lynch creates a cacophonous background filled with unique studio tricks, including reversed noises and waves of ambience in place of actual dialogue for many lines. It imparts the emotional truth of their conflict, if not the literal reality.

Lynch is also fond of making the most straightforward, easy-to-follow dialogue the loudest while anything spoken that might reveal any part of the mystery is barely audible. This is used to splendid effect when Betty calls Diane Selwyn on the phone and the audience barely hears Naomi Watts’ voice on the other end. It’s a pivotal moment in the film that’s hanging on something that you might think that you imagined.

I could go all day about the choices here: how the clamor and dread of the background audio perverts the recollection of a fairly innocuous dream in the diner and the way that the build up and climax of the Club Silencio sequence perfectly demonstrates how Lynch’s audio is in a dialogue with his visuals. Even his use of silence transcends here.

It’s not surprising that Lynch was demanding when it came to how this movie was screened. You can see in his now-famous note to projectionists⁴Which I now always type as ‘projectionalist’ on the first pass thanks to The Nice Guys. that he not only wanted the picture to be framed a certain way; the sound should be louder, to the point that the audience couldn’t miss how intentionally crafted it was.

Setting aside how bad movie audio has gotten for the average home viewer for a moment, I think it’s important to realize just how impactful well-crafted audio can be. Nolan’s choices in Tenet and The Dark Knight Rises may frustrate a certain segment of the audience, but I appreciate that someone is at least attempting to do something interesting with sound in the blockbuster space. That’s some real cowboy shit.