Back in cinemas this week, the 2001 carnival of dream logic is beyond interpretation – which is why it’s the director’s best film

We’ve had ups and downs over the years, David Lynch and I. I first encountered him in 1981, the pre-VCR age, when moviegoing could still be a real adventure. I was a teenage movie nut with a new driver’s licence, and my first solo motoring venture was to see Eraserhead at a midnight screening in Baltimore, 50 miles away. Stumbling out in the early hours, I felt like I’d just looked inside the Big Wotsit from Kiss Me Deadly: my mind had been cosmically scoured. I bought an Eraserhead T-shirt that week, and didn’t take it off for four years. I was smitten.

Mulholland Drive leads the pack in list of 21st century's top films Read more

I admired The Elephant Man, too, as a great British movie by an American director (see also: 10 Rillington Place; The Servant), and also for – not something one automatically associates with Lynch – the convincing saintliness of both John Merrick and Dr Treves. But Dune felt like directorial miscasting of the most egregious variety, and I was on the outs with David Lynch for the next decade.

Which is when everyone else discovered him. I felt very alone in my dislike for Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. I admired Lynch’s access to the darkest recesses of his psyche, and the consistency and richness of his obsessions, but I detected traces also of Eisenhower-era nativism, white-picket-fence fascism and plenty of misogyny. When his camera savoured the sight of a black man’s brains hanging from the back of his skull in Wild at Heart, I’d had enough. “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” Mel Brooks called Lynch. That’s the same Jimmy Stewart, who, folksy demeanour aside, was in those years a reactionary super-patriot, so maybe Mel was saying more about Lynch than we actually heard.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trailer for the re-release of Mulholland Drive.

Fast-forward to 2001, when I saw Mulholland Drive (recently restored and soon to be re-released) under compulsion, for payment, and ye gods, suddenly it was like being back in Baltimore again. Snipped together from an abandoned pilot and un-commissioned TV series, it functions on dream logic like no other movie since The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Except that in Buñuel, the dream-logic feels entirely logical, whereas Lynch’s version features blown-out synaptic circuits, memory holes, clues to solve mysteries that may not exist, a new question for every dubious answer, too many puzzle-pieces, or too few. Interpretation is a swan-dive into an ocean of possibilities, all of them entrancingly plausible, and none quite reconcilable. Sixteen years later, it remains a wide-open work of art, capable of eliciting infinite responses, quite fathomless, and Lynch’s masterpiece

Mulholland Drive is in cinemas from 14 April