Whether you believe [Lynch is] a good auteur or a bad one, his career makes it clear that he is indeed, in the literal Cahiers du Cinema sense, an auteur, willing to make the sorts of sacrifices for creative control that real auteurs have to make—choices that indicate either raging egotism or passionate dedication or a childlike desire to run the whole sandbox, or all three.
— David Foster Wallace: David Lynch keeps his head (1996)
Lynch inherited from Sirk the basic tenets of melodrama: that the objects, people and gestures that seem most simple, even clichéd, are those most burdened by meaning, and that a world which proffers total transparency – what Peter Brooks called the melodramatic ‘world of hyper-significant signs’ – actually yields nothing of the sort.
— Ruby Hamilton (London Review of Books)
Synopsis: The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child.