David Lynch: the dream engine who altered our orbit

Now it’s dark.

He was our most indispensable invasive species, the extraterrestrial Other hailing from the Great Inside Out and pretending to be one of us. Far from just another hallowed filmmaker, much less merely a hipster-T-shirt idol and incredibly strange recipient of both France’s Legion of Honour and a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, Lynch was an unearthly force field, like a rogue planet exerting its own disorienting gravitational pull, an indefatigably defiant pop-culture fringe lord who bent the world and altered our orbit, diffusing our natural albedo and forcing uncertainty into our daylit materiality.

That’s one way to think about David Lynch, anyway, and there are thousands more, as we’ve seen in the encomiums flooding the mediasphere since the announcement of his death at the age of 78, on 16 January, following ill health with pulmonary emphysema, a condition he had spoken about in a Sight and Sound interview a few months earlier. 

It’s hardly hyperbole to say that he was one of the very few absolutely unique visionaries cinema has had in its 130-odd-year history; using the word ‘visionary’ should ordinarily give us nervous pause, but not this time. Of course, uniqueness has always had its pitfalls: for most observers, going back to the 1980s, characterisations of Lynch have been variations on the idea of him being a chugging, unchecked id, a ‘surrealist’ dream engine spewing racy weirdnesses without a filter, farmed out of the post-war American midlands. The reason for this appeared to be thinly disguised nonplussedness – though to be fair, we all invented ‘Lynchian’ as a descriptor in the 80s because there was no extant word that met the challenge. There still isn’t. (One hopes that over the decades he might’ve been amused, rather than maddened, by the mainstream attempts to articulate his work.) But, surprisingly, with mystification has come culture-saturated adoration, as though even Gen Z media-gulpers saw in the Yankee-scapes of inner Lynchistan a physics of derangement that rhymes with their sense of their inherited world.

Cinephiles, critics and film magazine readers never needed their hands held; part of the glory of Lynch’s work is how its ineffability forces us out of our formulations and standardised perspectives and into a creative headspin of our own – as with many of the greats, Lynch made films that teach you how to watch them, and to respond you must actively muster your own lyrical and conceptual army. In Lynchistan we don’t sit back – we lean forward, toes curled, eyes wide, angular gyrus firing away. In a culture devoted to passivity, wish fulfilment and sloganeering, his has been America’s most provocative, insistently demanding and productively unsettling art project. His treasured motifs – metaphysical waiting rooms with red curtain walls, shots that plunge into tiny abysses and emerge in undefined spaces, distorted and disassociated voices (why did Freddie Jones have a helium voice in 1990’s Wild at Heart?), shrieking psychopathy lurking beneath the surface of ordinary life, etc – have become, bizarrely enough, recognisable parts of the broad cultural slipstream.

The signposts of his biography – Montana boy-scout boyhood, art school meanderings, unhappy early marriage and fatherhood, disarming aw-shucks adult persona – are practically written on the wind; journalists spent decades interviewing him and trying to get deep answers to questions he would often respond to like a shrugging schoolboy. But from the moment he appeared in public, with the American Film Institute-produced short The Grandmother at the experimental Bellevue Film Festival in Washington State in 1970, Lynch was clearly a figure who lived outside of cultural and artistic trends, and whose mutative perspective on contemporary life in America was both terrifyingly off-kilter and terrifyingly truthful. Going forward, we saw a different country: the ur-slum Philadelphia of Eraserhead (1977); the warped Carolinan small town of Blue Velvet (1986); the haunted Los Angeles of Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006); the knotty, woozy, secret-sickened Pacific Northwest of Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992); the teeming, quasi-apocalyptic continent-wide mad map of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017).

With our eyes opened and our livers inflamed, Lynch’s national vision became iconic: a geomorphology of vestigial mutations and radioactive sexual psychopathy, of twisted power figures, errant electrical charges, hidden homunculi, blood-painted outposts, inexplicable wavelengths, deranged undergrounds – simultaneously an outland of sin-cloaking forests and a cosmic-kitsch hotel lobby of the dead. As a composite canvas of an existential cultural essence, it’s rivalled in its sui generis-ness and strange modern congruity only by the legacies of Kafka and Beckett.

Somehow, this guileless and hermetic assault on contemporary cultural conventions, beginning in earnest in the Reagan era, when Eraserhead stalked through midnight shows, The Elephant Man (1980) netted Oscar nominations and Blue Velvet tore unsuspecting filmgoers a new Weltanschauung, was eagerly folded into our zeitgeist. Maybe this is because Lynch’s films could be said to have a Jungian relationship with our own stages of development – maturing from Blue Velvet’s coming-of-age tribulation, through the lostness of the first adult confrontations with the venal countryside in Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, to Lost Highway’s bad-dream marriage espionage and Mulholland Dr.’s ordeal of romantic disillusionment, to the identity ruptures of middle age in Inland Empire and the vicious uncertainty about the once-familiar world in the unnerving years beyond, in Twin Peaks: The Return. They are almost an auto-chronicle of Lynch’s march through time and space, reflecting our own, progressing from the teenybopper’s hometown, fit for exploring, to a sprawling toxic tomorrow seen through something like the bloodshot eyes of the dementia-afflicted.

This is, of course, a take from a stricken Lyncheaste who has essentially grown up and grown old with the man (I was a teen when I first saw Eraserhead in its first years on the midnight-movie circuit), but Lynch, with a half-century-long career that included distinctive shorts by the many dozen, ongoing webcasts, albums of very peculiar music, original DVD supplements, paintings, deadpan comic strips (‘The Angriest Dog in the World’ ran in alt-weeklies from 1983 to 1992), and even experimental musical theatre, has seemed to slip the noose of generational obsolescence. He was as discombobulatingly seductive to the college students of the Carter administration as he remains to those confronting the Trump years, who can now look at the corpus as something sealed and delivered, stretching from the art school shorts made during the Vietnam War and culminating in the lysergic cascade of the third Twin Peaks season.

For a newbie, perhaps distractedly weaned on the free-associative whimsy rolling through much of Twin Peaks (however much they probably should’ve paid closer attention to the notorious, grimly arcane dialogue-free eighth episode from that third season, or the savage confrontation of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me), a tour through the legacy could provide a little dirty shock treatment. For instance, only the Lynchwork-to-come can provide retro-context for the aberration of Eraserhead; from nowhere, amid a post-Nixon America dizzy with disco and Star Wars, came what might be the most ingenuously strange American film ever made. We’ve been trying to articulate what Eraserhead is ever since, from its suppurating Man in the Planet to the wailing mutant baby to the Lady in the Radiator to the pencil factory, and somehow we’re right back where we started, wondering when the mere suffocation of dream logic ends and Lynch’s one-of-a-kind muster of dark material begins.

The only home for it was as a midnight movie, where dope could only have made it more harrowing. Lynch then had his dalliances with compromise, producing one masterpiece, The Elephant Man (1980), deftly walking the crooked line as it does between historical biopic and Lynchian cosmic fever-dream, and one boondoggle, Dune (1984), an oversized convoy of monster trucks Lynch wasn’t allowed to drive the way he wanted. (It’s ramshackle but speckled with otherwordly nuttiness no other artist would’ve dreamt up, and hardly as dull as the recent Denis Villeneuve version.) But then with Blue Velvet comes the modern Lynch, fully formed like a swamp thing and attacking a semi-recognisable TV-suburban America with an Oedipal flamethrower. From any perspective, the film is a free-standing ecosystem of reimagined sex-death, simultaneously a Freudian mother of all bombs, a satire on Bildungsroman mysteries, a psychosexual audience crucifixion, an elegy for lost innocence and a deathless plastic enigma. It’s everything.

Take Wild at Heart as its oestrogen-brew counter-film, then, abandoning the poisoned suburbs for the screaming American highways in an Oz-inflected swoon (not the first or last genuflection Lynch would make toward 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, a lifelong resonance tracked in its own 2022 feature doc, Alexandre O. Philippe’s Lynch/Oz). Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is every libidinal nightmare the TV show didn’t dare to be, while Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. exist in their own hyper-Hollywood-fringe terrariums, both bifurcated and therein mirroring one state of modern lostness with another, and discovering that plunging deeper into those shadowed antechambers – the wet closets of our own hearts and minds, after all – only finds grottier disjunctures.

In between, Lynch took a Disney assignment and made a temperate masterwork out of The Straight Story (1999), sublimating his natural creative sporing and paying inscrutable attention to the middle-America he knows so well; it felt like a sweater he’d always worn, but it was also a shock to see how close he may have always been to Rossellini, Hawks, Ozu and Renoir. Then, the irascible Lynch-blitz of Inland Empire, which separates the grown-ups from the freshmen and the dabblers. His most experimental feature, it’s a three-hour chaos of anxiety that seems to metastasise, mutating into something else, each time you watch it. It’s indicative of the film’s raging fever that star Laura Dern, in a scouringly fearless performance, manifests in a variety of personas, but we can never be sure how many.

Twin Peaks was a network TV experiment that, as far as the suits were concerned, flared and then failed in two seasons – except the aura of the show stayed active beneath the surface, like a Lynchian fungus, waiting for internet culture’s tendency toward conspiracy skulduggery and niche obsessions to feed it. At first a kitchen with many cooks, the show was ahead of its time, sure, but it’s possible that no media moment in modern times would be completely Lynch-appropriate, including 2017, when the entirely unhousebroken third season was unleashed on pay TV. This was television that tested you, and your capacity for ambivalence. Eight years on, it’s still opening startling windows on to a logic-free contra-America for new and younger viewers, for whom Blue Velvet is as old as Lynch himself was when he made it in the mid-80s.

As a gateway drug, Twin Peaks has proved a powerful intoxicant, and it’s certainly ‘safer’, mass-audience-wise, than Lynch’s seething library of short films, which should not be neglected, if you’re daring to take a full measure of what this protean consciousness has spawned. (In 54 seconds, Lynch, with 1995’s Premonitions Following an Evil Deed, out-evokes its alternative reality more acutely than most full-length films, even a few of his own)

He had no precedents, only imitators. And now we’re living in a post-Lynch world; what is authentically Lynchian now belongs to the finite past. (Maybe, given the way he smoked, we’re lucky this didn’t happen years ago.) What’ll we do now? As Lynch’s Twin Peaks character Gordon Cole said, fix our hearts or die?

• David Lynch, 20 January 1946 to 15 January 2025