Abstract
David Lynch is a director, along with other auteurs, notably Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, whose authorial identity and creative authority —and the challenges these encounter in the 21st century— are negotiated by acts of performative self-contradiction. More broadly, David Lynch can stand contradictorily, but quite credibly, for the changing character and the current mutations of cinema, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, precisely because he embodies many of its contemporary contradictions. The films known as his Los Angeles Trilogy —Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006)— constitute three highly reflexive pieces of filmmaking, or meta-cinema, whose reflexively self-contradictory aspects are analyzed in this paper under the label of mind-game film.
