Q: Another thing I found very striking about the chapters on film is that inasmuch as they’re about American identity, at a more basic level they seem to be about seeing, about perception. You really revel in the sensory details of these films, going to great lengths to make the reader perceive them before analyzing them. I wouldn’t imagine you write this way proscriptively, but do you believe that there are elements active in American culture predicated against deep perception?

A: No, I don’t think so. One of the great things about being a critic is getting to spend your time on things other people are too busy to attend to. So you get to watch a movie many times, or replay it in your head, or listen to a record for days on end, or read a book six times, until you are at home with it, and seeing through its eyes or speaking with its voice. Other people are busy doing other things. It’s not like I’m saying, “I see more deeply than you do,” I've just spent more time with it, just like you’ve spent more time doing what you do and could tell me things about that I could never grasp myself. My daughter said something that I incorporated into the book about Lost Highway, which is a movie she loves and has seen many times. About Mulholland Drive, which was so confusing to people, me included, the first time they saw it, she said the more you see it the more sense it makes, and the more times you see Lost Highway, the less sense it makes and the more unstable it becomes. That’s really frightening, something that continues to resist summation, my ability to say, “This is what happened.” In the book, I end up disagreeing with Barry Gifford, who wrote the damn thing.

Q: Have you had the chance to see Inland Empire, which came out after the book was written?

A: I saw it twice. I was really hoping that the second time it would come alive for me in a way that it didn’t the first time, but it didn’t. There were parts I loved watching, and I wish they’d gone on longer, like when Laura Dern goes up many flights to see what looks like a Hungarian private detective or something, this really sleazy looking character. I love those scenes, and the ones with the big rabbits. But ultimately I didn’t care enough to invest myself in the characters and the jeopardy they were in.

Q: There seems something distinctly American about the mix of paranoia and excitement you might experience when receiving video tapes of your life from a mysterious source, which happens to Bill Pullman’s character in Lost Highway. But we saw the same concept revived last year in a film by a German filmmaker, Michael Haneke’s Cache. As technological advancement continues to erase more traditional regional and historical boundaries, will a distinctly American identity be preserved?

A: Well, let me tell you two things about Cache. The first is that in Cache, a person is being sent these threatening videos in really the exact same manner as in Lost Highway, but there are specific reasons for it. It’s all rooted in particular events in the past, and in the end we really do find out who and why. It’s all explained, and in Lynch it is not. Lynch is working in the realm of the gothic tale, covering the same territory as Washington Irving in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Edgar Allen Poe, Hawthorne, and into Faulkner, that whole strain of the uncanny, the haunting, the dead rising to take their revenge, of this somehow all being a terrible mistake. It really is a great social drama. They’re saying, “This land is cursed, and it’s up to us to figure out how and why,” but the artist never offers any simple answer. With Haneke, it all fundamentally resolves itself. I met him at a film festival right after I saw that movie, and I said, “It’s just fascinating what you’ve done with the same premise David Lynch used in Lost Highway, and he looked at me and said, “What are you talking about? I’ve never seen that movie.” Sure. So they’re very different films. D. H. Lawrence would say that this country is different from any other country because it is cursed, and it’s cursed because there’s no step you can take on this continent where you’re not stepping on a grave, by which he means a dead Indian. Well, I don’t see it that way, but that’s what was compelling to him. He’s out there in New Mexico where there are Indians all around and the woman he’s staying with is having an affair with one, so he’s very conflicted about it. I think from the very beginning when people came here and said, “We’ve come to this land to establish a new world,” this was a terrible mistake. Look at what we’ve left behind. We have walked into a wilderness, psychic as well as physical, and even after you settle the physical wilderness, the psychic wilderness remains. I think that’s part of what’s being played out in Lost Highway.