Nancy Lynch

In what was my turn to take the kids to the movies, I just saw the new Nancy Drew movie and found myself in a bit of a time warp. But it wasn't the one hinted at in the advertising, the spoofy set-up of an obliviously 1950's-style title character dropped in a crass 2007 Hollywood high school (what The Brady Bunch Movie did with their 1970's-stuck leads). Instead I was drawn back to 2001 when David Lynch's Mulholland Drive hit the screens.

In the current picture, Nancy is drawn into a shadowy investigation of the death years prior of a Hollywood actress, played un-coincidentally by the beautiful Laura Elena Harring, who provided the curvaceous question mark in Lynch's picture, which itself drew upon the teen-novel literary heritage of Nancy Drew, girl detective, a series begun in the 1930's. When Nancy tracks down a young mother in a seedy Hollywood bungalow the first interior shots match a similar scene (discovering a corpse) in the Lynch picture, and the filmmakers toss in an overt reference to Lynch's Twin Peaks television series as well (Nancy visits a clinic named "Twin Palms").

The overall mood veers between Lynchian and Mean Girls to relatively entertaining effect for a grown-up doing their kid movie duty, and it definitely made me hungry to see Ms. Harring and then-unknown Naomi Watts spiral down that dark, dangerous rabbit hole again. Thinking ahead to the resultant effect on innocent young viewers exposed to this new vision of the seminal All-American female adolescent detective just made me wonder:

Is Nancy Drew be a gateway drug to David Lynch?