An HBO “true crime” limited series equally about the serial rapist and murderer who would come to be known as the Golden State Killer as it is amateur investigator Michelle McNamara, a woman we can now count among the higher profile casualties of America’s opioid crisis, I'll Be Gone in the Dark enjoys the curious felicity of having aired its final episode nineteen days before Joseph James DeAngelo, now seventy-four years of age, identified and arrested during the shooting of the series, was sentenced to eleven consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. To help ground this event squarely in and of its moment, still images from the DeAngelo trial have regularly depicted the former police officer and outrageously sinister malefactor with the requisite face shields and masks, all in accordance with ubiquitous COVID-19 protocols. I was myself not all that familiar with the Golden State Killer and only knew about Michelle McNamara in an altogether perfunctory sort of a way, but I did manage to find myself binging I'll Be Gone in the Dark earlier this month, shortly after it became available in bulk on a service to which I subscribe, a fact which doubtlessly owes much to a fascination I harbour for a certain obsessive libidinal dimension as pertains to these things (and which cannot help but find me identifying equally with both the Golden State Killer and Michelle McNamara, their effectively becoming distorted doubles of one another). The HBO series—which shares its name with Michelle McNamara’s highly successful book—reaches an early and utterly chilling high point at the beginning of its second episode. A pre-credit sequence is soundtracked by synthetic rapid heartbeats accompanying the tapes of an August, 1979 hypnosis session in which Lori, a victim of the serial offender then known as EAR (or the East Area Rapist), begins recounting her attack over a measured visual montage of sleepy, nocturnal suburbia. The first words we hear from the hypnotized Lori, “TV room,” though they may seem innocuous, immediately had the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. Her auditor presses Lori along. The young woman recounts hearing her dog bark, looking onto the back porch, et cetera. There is a man in the backyard (or on the porch). Asked how she would describe the man’s face, Lori draws out an elongated, terrified, ineluctably childlike “mean,” and it is enough to freeze the marrow in your bones. Cut to opening credit sequence. Watching this, I had an immediate and unmistakable sense of finding myself deep in David Lynch country, a matter that I believe has to do with more than merely a certain species of the picket fence American unheimlich. On two other occasions in my compressed viewing of I'll Be Gone in the Dark, the impression was to return in full force. Hypnosis once again figures in the second instance. A police officer who actually saw him describes the suspect—again, while under hypnosis—as a man with a baby’s face, then goes on to recount how a bullet fired by the man with the baby’s face enters the flashlight that he, the officer in question, is pointing at said suspect, the tableau this paints in the mind of the viewer a shuddering mindfuck. Later in the series, Michelle McNamara discusses the personal connection she felt to Janelle Cruz, last known victim of the Golden State Killer, murdered in May of 1986. Over home movie footage of Janelle, the teenager cavorting with friends and so forth, McNamara discusses how Janelle’s hairstyle and general affect remind her of girls she, Michelle McNamara, grew up with in idyllic suburban Illinois. The Janelle footage reminds me more than a little of the home movies of Laura Palmer and Donna Hayward in Twin Peaks, a series that would originally go on the air in April of 1990. Janelle Cruz would have been about two years older than Michelle McNamara (who was born April 14, 1970). Lara Flynn Boyle, the actresses who played Donna on Twin Peaks, was less than a month older than Michelle McNamara, whereas Sheryl Lee, the actress who played Laura, was closer in age to Janelle Cruz (Sheryl Lee was born April 22, 1967). I turned eleven in 1990, and though older kids I thought cool were already into it (a particular babysitter comes to mind), I would not become hooked on Twin Peaks until the second season, the show already beginning to enter into its infamous, premature decline. The capsule review of Blue Velvet in the Time Out Film Guide hooked me, and I quickly procured the VHS tape, wearing it out with repeated viewings as an adolescent. I went to a midnight screening of Eraserhead with my friend Patrick when I was about fifteen, the two of us hanging out downtown for hours in advance of this unprecedentedly exciting event. In high school, the 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me became outsized in its personal importance for me, a fact that doubtlessly has much to do with my having both gone to school with and as Laura Palmer (or various versions of her), as well as having already come to tenuously apprehend the extent to which my own experience of chameleonic fluidity, within and beyond the codified field of sense of gender, was intimately enmeshed with addiction and self-destruction. Fire Walk with Me and Inland Empire remain my favourite David Lynch films to this day, the special status of the latter owing to elements I have tended to call Rabelaisian, the provisional autonomy afforded Lynch by cheap video tech having allowed him to push his form beyond anything betraying any remaining debt to precedents or the suggestion of a reproducible/co-optable model. It also happens to be his most potent encapsulation of both the horrors and ecstasies of psychospiritual dissipation. Inland Empire is, like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive immediately before it, a film that becomes sundered and/or bisected by virtue of passage through a portal. The two earlier films are not nearly as satisfactory to me, and I am not nearly as much a fan of Mulholland Drive as so many other commentators appear to be. Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are triumphs of structure, extensive as such of formal considerations—constellated as they would seem to be around coterminous whirlpools and centrifugal pull—but they also betray Lynch’s main problems, which are always problems of worlding (and the aesthetics of worlding), the implication being that we are bearing witness to a somewhat embarrassing overgrown boyscout’s notions (or projections) of bad people, the underworld, and, above all else, sex. The first and longer section of Mulholland Drive, originally imagined as the beginning of an episodic television series, has a lot of worlding problems, and the execution is itself consistently uneven to an extent I continue to believe a liability. That being said, there is the curious matter of one way in which this portion of the film, with all of its worlding problems, directly connects to my world. I hint at it regularly. Since I started growing my hair long again a number of years ago, I have occasionally had a tendency, when having had my long hair trimmed, to refer to the resultant hairdo as my “Betty from Deep River, Ontario.” Betty from Deep River is, of course, the character Naomi Watts plays in Mulholland Drive before the film passes through its portal, thereafter becoming a more wholly truthful downer in which Watts now plays the jilted Diane Selwyn. In dialogue with the amnesiac played by Laura Harring, Betty states near the beginning of the first section of Mulholland Drive that “I just came here from Deep River, Ontario, and now I’m in this…dream place. Well, you can imagine how I feel.” In the late 1990s and the early years of the 21st century, until I effectively completed grad school in 2003, I very regularly drove through Deep River commuting at the beginning and end of the academic year between Ottawa, where I was studying as both undergrad and grad student, and my hometown of Calgary. (I would occasionally drive through the northern United States, though it was seldom that I opted for that route on account of my habitually being in possession of a large quantity of cannabis as well as more or less permanently high on the stuff.) You can do the drive between Calgary and Ottawa (or vice versa) in three days if you go all out and sleep in hotels or motels. The ground covered is over three thousand kilometres in length (or over two thousand miles). Deep River is about two hours west of Ottawa on the Trans-Canada #17 highway, and because of the way the highway behaves at the town in question (current population less than five thousand), I always thought of the place as a kind of nexus or interstitial space, perhaps even a kind of portal, commemorating the termination of the first or commencement of the final leg of the drive. It may not quite read that way when you look at Deep River on a map. I am not quite sure I understand why that is. Though I do not believe I have passed though Deep River since 2003, leaving Ottawa by car for the final time, it seems to me that one had to make a hard left just after that gas station, right where the highway meets Deep River Road, in order to keep with the 17.
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