"I’m always fascinated by what girls do with their trauma. Laura Palmer is a girl who is caught up in some bad shit and is a victim of sexual abuse. She understands, in some way because of her trauma, that she can never be this clean, perfect girl that everyone thinks she is, and instead of succumbing to self-hatred internally, she externalizes it and seizes control of her narrative as a bad girl, as a dirty girl, always choosing her path to destruction and chaos, which I find perverse but also can’t tear my eyes away from. The way Lynch bridges fantasy and reality and uses supernatural forces to symbolize trauma feels like a more accurate representation of the chaos that trauma wreaks in somebody’s mind and body than a cold, hard naturalistic portrayal. I love that he was able to circumvent TV censorship and really show what was going on in the dark."

"Like many of these, this movie qualifies for me partly because it was an unexpected thrill when I first saw it in the early seventies. I’m neither much a Tony Curtis nor a Burt Lancaster fan, and I’d never heard of Alexander Mackendrick (he made half his relatively few films, including The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, in the UK; a later, strong U.S. job was A High Wind in Jamaica). Sweet Smell of Success, again, too, is quasi-noir. It’s a black-and-white, urban, small film about people’s bad luck and bad character, set in the Broadway cubicles and show-biz restaurants of New York’s sleazy show-world underbelly. Despite my prior relative indifference to the actors in it, they’re perfectly cast—against their standard types—in this, and do terrific jobs, and the script, by the highly skilled and literate Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, is spectacular. James Wong Howe shot the cold-ass thing."