Crash.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

This year witnessed the reappearance of two of the motion picture industry's most contentious and provocative directors, David Lynch and David Cronenberg. The two Davids came from the margins of cinema, where they built large cult followings, and later made significant inroads within the mainstream, only to have firmly entrenched positions in the industry pantheon elude them.

The career of David Lynch has been an increasing concern for his fans and chroniclers. He made an impact in 1976 with his small-budget, surrealist masterpiece, "Eraserhead," an eerie black-and-white meditation on post-industrial civilization that established him as a true visionary while Hollywood was busy swooning over George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Major projects soon came Lynch's way, some complementing his sensibility ("The Elephant Man"), some out of sync with his obsessions ("Dune").

In 1986, Lynch scored a major coup with "Blue Velvet." The film's perverse vision skewers the American small town of white picket fences and smiling neighbors made popular by TV sitcoms of the 1950s, a vision that the Reagan-era culture seemed to reinstitute. Lynch was off and running. In 1989, he developed "Twin Peaks," a television series ballyhooed as the beginning of a new "radical TV" that would push the envelope of commercial broadcasting. At the same time, Lynch made another studio film, "Wild at Heart," a kinky road picture that enjoyed neither solid critical reception nor box office receipts.

Meanwhile, the public fascination with "Twin Peaks" waned as Lynch seemed to show little interest in the project. A movie "prequel" to the series, "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me," left audiences cold. The motion picture gave the impression that Lynch merely was recycling the obscure fixations he had traded on through most of the 1980s.

This year, Lynch produced "Lost Highway," his first film in five years. The pre-release publicity clearly suggested that Lynch felt himself in a somewhat desperate situation. with this picture his attempt at regaining the momentum he clearly had in the 1980s, when his work seemed to intuit so easily the political/cultural moment. "Lost Highway" certainly is his most abstract work since "Eraserhead," with very obscure plots merging and dissolving.

It has many features of film noir, particularly with the central narrative of a paranoid jazzman accused of killing his femme fatale wife. Much of the movie seems to suggest that Lynch has given up on...