Critic’s Appreciation: David Lynch, a Visionary Director Who Spoke to Our Darker Selves
Rare is the artist whose work is such a game-changer that the only way to describe it is to transform their last name into an adjective. Even rarer is the chance of that ever happening in Hollywood, a place where creativity, especially of the dark and deranged kind, tends to take a back seat to commercial viability and the all-powerful bottom line.
Yet somehow, David Lynch, who passed away Thursday at the age of 78, not only directed a groundbreaking array of films that can only be defined as Lynchian. He did it a time when the American movie business began to grow, and then balloon, into a franchise-driven behemoth where his brand of off-the-wall work was the last thing the studios wanted.
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Case in point: Lynch’s debut, Eraserhead, was released in 1977, the same year the first Star Wars came out. Both were, in fact, box office hits: The Lucas film became one of the first big summer blockbusters, paving the way for the kinds of movies that now completely dominate the business. But Lynch’s brilliant black-and-white freakshow, which began as a student project at AFI, was a smash on the midnight circuit, grossing $7 million off a tiny $100,000 budget made up of grants and donations from friends.
Eraserhead was so ungraspable, so far into left field, that most critics dismissed it at the time. Variety called it a “sickening bad-taste exercise” and The New York Times, reviewing three years later, claimed it was “not a particularly horrifying film, merely interminable.” But audiences were drawn to Eraserhead precisely because it was unlike anything they’d ever seen. Here was a movie that wasn’t giving them a story, or characters that even spoke. There was only a screaming mutant baby and a guy with hair like Frankenstein’s bride, coupled with lots of gory close-ups and shattering sound design.
It was as if Lynch had tapped into something that people had wanted to see all along — something bizarre and grotesque beneath the surface that was waiting to be unearthed by an artist as visionary as he was. And perhaps that’s one way to define “Lynchian”: the lifting away of the facades and illusions of so-called normal life — and so-called normal movies — to reveal something that speaks to our darker selves.
My own first encounter with the Lynchian world had a similar effect. After exhausting all the horror and action flicks at my local video store as a teenager, I took a chance on Blue Velvet, a movie I knew nothing about. I went home, popped the tape in the VCR and, for at least the first few minutes, believed I was watching a high school movie. But then things got weird. A severed ear was lying in the bushes, covered with ants. People weren’t speaking like normal people, but like people pretending to be normal people.
By the time I got to the scene where Kyle MacLachlan hides in a closet to spy on Isabella Rossellini, only to see Dennis Hopper emerge with an oxygen mask screaming “Baby wants to fuck!”, I can tell you that my 12-year-old self was transformed. Once again, it was about Lynch stripping away the appearances of the regular world — in this case small-town America — to reveal how those appearances were false, and always had been. The picturesque suburbs we grew up in, or had watched on Leave It to Beaver, were masking something deeply disturbing: unquenched or unspeakable sexual desires buried inside of us, or hidden behind all the happy families portrayed on television.
My second encounter with the Lynchian was, indeed, on TV. And once again it started off seemingly normal, quickly veered off the rails, then plunged into surreal chaos. I was visiting my grandma in Florida when the first episode of Twin Peaks aired during spring break in 1990. There had been lots of promotion by ABC for its new series, and we were both excited to watch the big Sunday night pilot together. Well, by the time we got to the end of those two crazy hours, I was embarrassed to even look over at grandma. What did we just watch? Why was Kyle MacLachlan again playing a guy who keeps encountering so much batshit crazy stuff? And yeah, who killed Laura Palmer?
I went back home to New York the next week, fairly convinced that my grandma, silently knitting as we watched the show (talk about a Lynchian image), would continue following Twin Peaks until the bitter end, just as I was planning to do. Lynch had now transformed my world in a totally different medium. He had managed to take what appeared to be a small-town crime caper, turn it on its head and twist it inside out, exposing its messy innards to the whole nation.
With Twin Peaks, Lynch wasn’t only revealing, yet again, the darkness and weirdness that prevail behind the humble facades of American life. He was showing how those facades were being built up and promoted by the very kind of primetime series he was remolding every Thursday night on ABC. And that’s perhaps another definition of Lynchian: the contorting of familiar genres and tropes, such as a typical TV murder mystery, until those genres and tropes begin to flush away, leaving behind something more sinister and disquieting — something that a TV show was never supposed to do.
Unlike the many books, essays, film school classes and podcasts about his work, Lynch never seemed to have big theories about the things he made — he just made things whenever he could. He was an artist who worked in many mediums: movies, television, music, transcendental meditation, weather reports on his website, and most consistently, painting and the fine arts. (The 2016 documentary, David Lynch: The Art Life, offers a rare glimpse into his process as a plastic artist.) As much as people tried to find meaning in his work, especially his most famous movies, he kept his head down and kept working, even as it became increasingly harder for him to do so in Hollywood.
The culmination of this struggle — between a major artist and the popular art form of movies that he was constantly circumventing — was his 2001 masterpiece, Mulholland Drive. Initiated as another ABC series, the show was dropped by the network at the pilot stage (rumor has it, because Lynch refused to remove a close-up of feces from the edit) and transformed, with additional shooting, into one of the greatest anti-Hollywood movies ever made. In Mulholland Drive, the Lynchian form and function are perfectly united in a story of Tinseltown dreams that drift into nightmares.
The intention is clear from the very start, when a dance number set to Linda Scott’s pop hit “I Told Every Little Star” gets skewed into a kaleidoscope of distortion. (Lynch liked toying with ‘60s chart-toppers: Witness the mesmerizing lip sync of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” that Dean Stockwell performs in Blue Velvet.)
From there, Mulholland Drive shifts into what feels, at least for 5 minutes, like another story of a bright young ingénue (played by Naomi Watts in a career-defining performance) showing up in L.A. to become a star. But things slide off the rails so quickly, before taking a nosedive into the obscure, that the aspiring-actress plot becomes another fa?ade Lynch tears apart. He’s not only mocking Hollywood and its star system — he’s asking us to consider whether, behind the system, is a shadow world in which all our identities wind up melting down.
As heavy as that all sounds, one shouldn’t forget that many of Lynch’s films, like the man himself, were marked by a dry and sardonic brand of humor that undercut some of the inherent darkness. What lots of viewers and critics found to be grotesque, Lynch may have found funny.
One of the best definitions of Lynchian humor, and irony, was laid out by the late David Foster Wallace in his seminal essay on the making of Lost Highway, entitled “David Lynch Keeps His Head”: “An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter. But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s ultimately definable only ostensively, i.e., we know it when we see it.”
Lost Highway is a good example of a movie that feels so undeniably Lynchian at times that it nearly stoops into self-parody. And yet when I first saw it in 1997, I nearly ran out of the theater, terrified by an absolutely demented Robert Blake charging at the screen with a video camera. Even the opening credits, during which Angelo Badalamenti’s thumping score plays over a shot of a highway at night, felt both ironic and haunting, as if the director were mocking the idea of a road movie while trying to scare the hell out of us.
In the years to come, less-loved Lynch films such as Inland Empire, The Straight Story or the 1984 adaptation of Dune, will likely be reassessed, as will the critically heralded but underseen third season of Twin Peaks, which aired in 2017. The latter contained some of the most baffling sequences to ever play in a TV series, purely Lynchian moments that could be both breathtaking and perplexing.
Twin Peaks: The Return, as it was called, would be the director’s last fully realized work, although he continued to make shorts, and lots of other things, until his death. His first and last big screen appearance was, to the surprise of many, in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 drama The Fabelmans, where he cameoed in the final scene as Hollywood legend John Ford.
It may have seemed like yet another irony to have Ford played by Lynch. The two couldn’t have been more opposed in terms of style and content: Ford, who won about a gazillion Oscars, favored bold pictorial vistas, unfettered lyricism, and outsized emotions — qualities that are about as far as you can get from Lynch, who never won an Oscar for his work and only received an honorary statue in 2019. But similar to Lynch, Ford’s signature was so unique that we now use the term “Fordian” to describe it.
If Fordian means the classical Hollywood style at its absolute apex, Lynchian means what happens when that style, co-opted by today’s Hollywood blockbusters into commercial meaninglessness, gets twisted in a bold new direction that lays bare life’s hidden horrors and absurdities. Many may still see David Lynch as an avant-garde filmmaker, but like Ford, he will ultimately go down as one of the great American directors of his time — an artist whose work is as recognizable as the name itself.
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