The small, transparent network logo that used to appear in the corner of TV screens was called a “bug,” or “the bug,” and it was invented by ABC Sports during this armed standoff, we learn here. That was the highlight of the movie for me. I’d always wondered about that. In the end, September 5 is a tribute to Nielsen ratings. Nine hundred million people watched this tragedy unfold on live TV. Now that TV news has become unprofitable for the entertainment conglomerates that own it, and the Olympics are viewed piecemeal across many platforms, the film can be seen as nostalgic longing for a time when terrorism got everybody to watch the same thing at the same time. That is not what movies are for.

It’s important to remember that even as Hollywood was ignoring Lynch, much of the mainstream, middlebrow critical establishment in the US was also disparaging his work. It wasn’t just that it was too weird. It elicited really hateful reactions from Siskel & Ebert, among others. At the New Yorker, one of the film critics instantly dismissed Twin Peaks: The Return as soon as the first episode ended, tweeting that Lynch had been superseded by Wes Anderson, and their TV critic simply refused to watch it, while at the same time insisting it was TV, not cinema. Even the highest-browed American, Fredric Jameson, who died four months before Lynch, saw in his work some kind of threat, writing against him in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by calling his work “evil.” Just last summer, Phillip Lopate’s latest collection of his film criticism, My Affair with Art House Cinema, came out, and included a piece on the inadequacy of Mulholland Drive in which this dean of American film critics described Lynch as “prone to jejune self-indulgence, capricious phantasmagoria, and vulgarity.”

Such big, dismissive words! As for me, my mind was blown open by Blue Velvet when I saw it college-aged in first run in 1986 at the Nickelodeon Cinema in Boston with my then-girlfriend. We could not speak when we left the theater, so rattled were we by this terrifying new thing that had come into the world (the same summer and fall as Down by Law, She’s Gotta Have It, Big Trouble in Little China, and Something Wild). This filmic world of smashed TVs, diners, wood paneling, the ominous hum of electricity, and rose-pink wall-to-wall carpeting was not, as some viewers may now think, an alien place. It was the actual America of that time, put on screen by David Lynch in a way no one had ever seen before.

In a typical case of tone-deafness, studio publicity described the ending of In a Lonely Place when it came out as a “stunning surprise climax.” Only in Hollywood could somebody’s innocence be touted as shock. But if what they meant was that the climax was emotionally devastating, and that emotional devastation was unexpected in a studio film, they had a point. Inner conflict structures every scene in this film. By its end, everything, even the way Humphrey Bogart puts down a telephone receiver to make two black holes in the frame, adds to its heartache.

“Can’t you relax for a second?” Gloria Grahame’s Laurel asks Bogart’s Dixon Steele. He can’t. Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter, exists in the tension between creative work and real life. His fear of being misunderstood and punished for being right plagues him, makes him lash out, and poisons his relationships. We see it happen in wrenching closeups of Laurel’s face as she looks at him. In the film’s last scene, Ray keeps subtly emptying the frame until Dix and Laurel break up and disappear, he through an arch that leads to the street, she behind a door she closes.

It’s not just the end, but the film’s whole last half hour that wrecks you. Ray couples anger to tenderness. Dix beats up a guy, then deliver’s the film’s (maybe any film’s) most romantic lines. He describes a “good love scene” to the woman he loves even as she realizes she has to leave him.

If, as Godard said, “the definition of the human condition should be in the mise en scène itself,” then Zontar, which plays like an industrial documentary on Dallas living rooms and shopping centers, puts it there in negative. A dead-watch-battery miasma pervades the film, a three in the afternoon of the soul.