However obsessed with fluxes in identity his movies are, Lynch has remained remarkably himself throughout his filmmaking career. You could probably argue it either way-that Lynch hasn't compromised or sold out, or that he hasn't grown all that much in twenty years of making movies-but the fact remains that Lynch has held fast to his own intensely personal vision and approach to filmmaking, and that he's made significant sacrifices in order to do so. "I mean, come on, David could make movies for anybody," says Tom Sternberg, one of Lost Highway's producers. "But David's not part of the Hollywood Process. He makes his own choices about what he wants. He's an artist." This is essentially true, though like most artists Lynch has not been without patrons. It was on the strength of Eraserhead that Mel Brooks's production company allowed Lynch to direct The Elephant Man in 1980, and that movie earned Lynch an Oscar nomination and was in turn the reason that no less an ur-Hollywood Process figure than Dino De Laurentiis picked Lynch to make the film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, offering Lynch not only big money but a development deal for future projects with De Laurentiis's production company.
1984's Dune is unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch's career, and it's pretty darn bad. In some ways it seems that Lynch was miscast as its director: Eraserhead had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history, and its production staff was the size of a Caribbean nation, and the movie involved lavish and cuttingedge special effects. Plus, Herbert's novel itself was incredibly long and complex and besides all the headaches of a major commercial production financed by men in Ray-Bans, Lynch also had trouble making cinematic sense of the plot, which even in the novel is convoluted to the point of pain. In short, Dune's...