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David Lynch, among filmmakers in recent memory, most embodied the Trickster archetype. His works comprise a singular mythology that is daffy, hallucinatory, hopeful, and filled with dread. A mythmaker as infatuated with donuts and coffee as with depicting interdimensional demonic forces, Lynch died on January 15, 2025, from complications with emphysema. It was difficult for me not to think that the Los Angeles wildfires beginning on January 7th killed him, in some way. I have called Los Angeles home for six years, and his death feels inextricably connected to the nodes of our city’s cultural memory that were incinerated from Pacific Palisades to Altadena.
Joseph Campbell, whom I’ve spent the greater part of these six years thinking and writing about, reminds us that, from Polynesia’s Maui to the Germanic Loki, the Trickster is a fire-bringer (Primitive Mythology, 251). It is sad but maybe fitting that Los Angeles’ great Trickster filmmaker should depart us under these infernal skies. After all, the generative energy for his Twin Peaks mythos lurks in the couplet:
“Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds
Fire walk with me.”
The Fire-Bringer
Synthesizing the Trickster archetype across cultures, Campbell considered it “a lecherous fool as well as an extremely clever and cruel deceiver; but he is also the creator of mankind and shaper of the world…” (Flight of the Wild Gander, 128). As fire-bringer, the Trickster is an archetype of duality, separating void from light. But the Trickster’s torch does not fully extinguish darkness; the Promethean act, on some level, paradoxically intensifies the dark.
David Lynch operates on this register, as some of his characters and narrative situations contain the cruelest and most unpleasant images in cinematic history. Despite this, his work, especially Mulholland Drive (2001), lingers on the salvific magic found in beauty and “little” things and the heroic act of believing that humanity is yet capable of goodness. Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers “the influence of a vital person can vitalize the world” (183) in The Power of Myth, and I can easily imagine Lynch repeating the same sentence during one of his morning weather reports for KCRW in Los Angeles, queuing a song by The Ronettes.
The Trickster is not quite The Fool nor entirely The Devil. This tension between creation and deception lends itself to approaching Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as a Trickster myth in cinematic form. Loosely tracing aspiring actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) as she chases the Hollywood Dream, the film is often read as a Matryoshka doll of dreams within dreams, crisscrossing subconscious fantasies of stardom and nightmarish erotic jealousy. Personally, I enjoy reading Mulholland Drive as a representation of Hollywood’s collective Trickster unconscious, charting the interactions of numerous dreamers across a dark night of the Los Angeles soul.
Duality through trickery
Mulholland Drive explores duality through trickery, as many characters have doubles. Naomi Watts plays two actresses, Betty Elms and Diane Selwyn, the first iteration something of an overnight starlet while the latter is reclusive and embittered. Laura Harring is the amnesiac Rita and successful actress Camilla Rhodes, while Ann Miller is first the flamboyant building manager Coco, then reappearing as the mother of hotshot director Adam Kesher. But in a film riddled with Tricksters, none are so striking as The Cowboy (Monty Montgomery).
Kesher (Justin Theroux) is blackmailed by stealthy financiers into casting their lead actress of choice for his upcoming picture, and he refuses. Tricksters are devious archetypes, and Kesher channels this ludic defiance by smashing a mobster’s limousine with a golf club and pouring pink paint into his unfaithful wife’s jewelry box. But when the shadowy cabal demonstrates that they can freeze his bank accounts and fire his entire film staff, Kesher’s Trickster outbursts must end. He is directed to a horse corral atop Beachwood Canyon to meet with “The Cowboy.”
Sometimes there’s a buggy…
At the corral, a buzzing, flickering light bulb dangles on a wooden beam below a cow-skull. Tricksters frequently inhabit animal forms like foxes, coyotes, ravens, or rabbits as part of their shapeshifting play that doubles as a shamanic aid for crisscrossing the realms of our reality and the otherworlds of myth. Lynch’s mythic image of the cow-skull signals that we are entering a threshold zone with a not-quite-human Trickster who is mysteriously tethered to the realm of the dead. The Cowboy greets Kesher with a “Howdy” and begins speaking in the vernacular of the Western radio serials that Lynch listened to as a child. Kesher is impatient with his prairie pleasantries, instigating this exchange:
Cowboy: A man's attitude... a man's attitude goes some ways. The way his life will be. Is that somethin' you agree with?
Kesher: Sure.
Cowboy: Now...did you answer ‘cause you thought that's what I wanted to hear, or did you think about what I said and answer ‘cause you truly believe that to be right?
Kesher: I agree with what you said, truly.
Cowboy: What’d I say?
Kesher: Uh...that a man's attitude determines, to a large extent, how his life will be.
Cowboy: So since you agree, you must be someone who does not care about the good life.
Kesher’s meeting with The Cowboy reminds me of Campbell’s summation of the Yoruba trickster Edshu (Eshu/Èșù): “spreading strife was his greatest joy” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 74). The Cowboy relishes teasing the anxious director by nestling wisdom in wily parables:
There's sometimes a buggy. How many drivers does a buggy have? So, let's just say I'm driving this buggy. And, if you fix your attitude, you can ride along with me.
Whether Lynch intended it, having this trickster Cowboy be the lone buggy “driver” to whom Kesher must entrust himself recalls Campbell’s definition of “the trickster Hermes, guide of souls to the underworld, the patron, also, of rebirth and lord of the knowledges beyond death (Occidental Mythology, 138)” in The Odyssey and Homeric myths. Informing Kesher of the steps he must follow to regain some autonomy on his film, The Cowboy concludes “you will see me one more time, if you do good. You will see me... two more times, if you do bad.” As trickster, The Cowboy is a Lynchian admixture of Edshu’s joyous chaos, Hermes the underworld navigator, Br’er Rabbit’s mischievous riddles and the fire-bringer who restores order to Kesher’s creative act that has become shadowed by pandemonium. Later in Mulholland Drive, The Cowboy will beckon Diane Selwyn “wake up, pretty girl” from sojourning in the underworlds of her subconscious.
Into the silencio
How do we respond to the Tricksters in our own lives, those figures at the crossroads of chaos and life’s creative potential? The shamanic compact, as it were, is one of trust. We are sometimes forced to entrust ourselves to the care of mildly unnerving guides in moments of profound bewilderment. It is heroic to reckon that the fire-bringers will illuminate, perhaps even enchant, those lost highways and twin peaks that are necessary thresholds within our “soul’s high adventure.” When the Trickster chants “fire, walk with me” into our world of donuts and damned good coffee, do we trust them to drive this buggy called life along the Mulholland Drives of our psyche? Lynch’s Trickster film ends with a whisper of “silencio.” Campbell might as well have been rebuking those countless explanations of Lynch’s work when he wrote that “anyone trying to express in words the sense or feeling of this mystic communion would soon learn that words are not enough: the best is silence… (Primitive, 128).”
It is heroic to reckon that the fire-bringers will illuminate, perhaps even enchant, those lost highways and twin peaks that are necessary thresholds within our “soul’s high adventure.”
Thank you for guiding us into the silencio, David.
MythBlast authored by:
Teddy Hamstra is a writer and seeker in Los Angeles. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, in the final stages of completing a dissertation entitled 'Enchantment as a Form of Care: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Mysticism.' Recently, Teddy has been working for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, spearheading their Research & Development efforts. As an educator and research consultant for creatives, Teddy is driven to communicate the wonder of mythological wisdom in ways that are both accessible to, and which enliven, our contemporary world.
This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Trickster.
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"The archetype of the hero in the belly of the whale is widely known. The principal deed of the adventurer is usually to make fire with his fire sticks in the interior of the monster, thus bringing about the whale’s death and his own release. Fire making in this manner is symbolic of the sex act. The two sticks — socket-stick and spindle — are known respectively as the female and the male; the flame is the newly generated life. The hero making fire in the whale is a variant of the sacred marriage."
-- Joseph Campbell