TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.

   
 

Mulholland Drive

Genre: surrealist psychological horror.

Stars: Naomi Watts (American version of Ring), Laura Harring, Justin Theroux (apparently an Irish bad guy in the second Charlie’s Angels film).

Plot: a partially failed actress is dumped by the girlfriend who got her the few roles she ever had, for a man, and hires a hitman to have her killed. In her grief and guilt, she tries to reimagine her life in Hollywood with showbusiness gloss, but her dreams are haunted both by reality and terrifying symbols of death and dementia.

Why It’s Great:

  • The plot is more complex than the top two films combined in some sort of really complex way: it’s probably not possible for a human mind to grasp it on first viewing, and because of that it – like any David Lynch film – has been made artistically beautiful enough to work as a rationally unintelligible surrealist piece.
  • Dream is entangled almost inextricably with reality.
  • Dozens of ingenious crossovers and quirks crop up once you make sense of it.