Mention Lindsay Lohan to me and you’ll be treated to an excoriation of the joy with which this culture greets your average female public breakdown. As such, I've surprised myself this fall with my absorption in the personal and professional unravellings of two female television characters: Carrie Mathison of "Homeland" (Claire Danes) and Amy Jellicoe of "Enlightened" (Laura Dern). If you've also been watching those shows, you might question my yoking them together. Carrie and Amy could not occupy (heh) two more different dramatic universes. “Homeland” is a taut, quickly paced thriller about terrorism whose signature gesture is to end each episode on the edge of a cliff; while “Enlightened” [...]

The first in a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense.

Fans of David Lynch are accustomed, by now, to the half-decade wait. It took five years after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me unjustly bombed out of theaters in 1992 before we received Lost Highway. Later, once Mulholland Drive completed its strange, tortured path to realization—from stillborn network teevee pilot for ABC to a New York Film Festival premiere!—Lynch’s IMDB page indulged another similar gap when it came to feature-length projects. That streak of inactivity was only broken when INLAND EMPIRE smeared its digital abstractions and idiosyncratic willfulness (all-caps title included) across [...]

"Slate: Your collaborations with David Lynch are well-known and well-loved. A website called the Awl recently ran an article arguing that you are the only one who can persuade him to return to directing [“Laura Dern Is Our Only Hope for Bringing David Lynch Back”]. Do you think there’s a chance you can convince him?

Laura Dern: Well, if there were any truth in it, then over fried chicken last Sunday that website should know that I’m doing my job.

Slate: Can you tell me anything else about it?

Laura Dern: That’s all I’m saying. I went into this rant [to him] about how profoundly important that is. If [...]

"I’m becoming fluent in French so I can go to France and make French films when I’m 60.” —Is Laura Dern kidding? Serious? No idea!