Dreamweaver

An appreciation of the artist and filmmaker David Lynch, 1946-2025.

“What year is it?”

It seems appropriate that this proves to be the final line of David Lynch’s final work of commercial drama, the miniseries that ran as “Twin Peaks: The Return” on Showtime over the summer of 2017. Across 18 hours, Lynch and co-creator and co-writer Mark Frost writ a magnum opus of Lynchian dread and reverie and mystery, following Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as his soul was split into multiple identities across many dimensions. At the end, with an incarnation of the woman he’s been trying and failing to save for an eternity, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), Cooper is so lost in his obsessions and savior complexes that all that’s left is the above question.

Across a career that encompassed cinema, television, painting, music, music videos, weather videos, even liquor and coffee bean cultivation, Lynch often took us so deep into his anxieties and desires, so deep into other worlds, that the disorientation of “what year is it?” became the standard operating emotion of navigating his work. Yet that disorientation yielded a kind of clarity. He was a master of strange moments that feel as if they’ve always existed, buried under the earth of our collective subconscious and awaiting excavation by an intuitive talent. The meme that places “Directed by David Lynch” over a window sill is a joke that expresses the universality of the emotions he tapped and that will continue to resonate.

What is going on when Dean Stockwell’s gangster lip syncs Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in the middle of a hostage situation in “Blue Velvet?” It happens because Lynch needed it to, but the moment exists as more than a gratifying of an artist’s whimsies. This scene acknowledges that even monsters — like the Stockwell character, like the rapist-gangster-drug addict played by Dennis Hopper — have dreams, yearnings, and this uncomfortable empathy animates all of his work. Lynch connected Hopper’s sociopath to himself, to us. Or look at the heartbreaking, pitiless ending of “Mulholland Drive,” which reveals a beautiful actress and sleuth to be every bit as intoxicated with movies as we are: Her brutally dashed longing becomes our longing.

On Facebook, a friend said that David Lynch’s films are “unmediated.” There might not be a better word. There’s plenty of ugliness in Lynch’s art. He’s obsessed with cruelty towards women, and as an artist he didn’t always fall on the right side of that obsession. The obsession is there in the multiple Dale Coopers of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” one of whom is a monster who hurts too many women to name, and the obsession is there in the divide between MacLachlan’s peeper and Hopper’s rapist in “Blue Velvet.” These divides are all throughout Lynch’s storied career.

They exist because Lynch did not sanitize his hungers. He did not appear to cultivate his art for awards or critical approval or political points. His reputation as a filmmaker is based primarily on a series of profoundly violent and erotic abstract thrillers — “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway,” and the incomparable “Mulholland Drive” among them. If Lynch’s soul led him toward darkness, toward scenes that may reveal something uncomfortable about him, he staged them anyway.

Could Lynch’s work be misogynistic? Yes. Did Lynch also create several of the greatest roles for women in American cinema? Yes. Could he get off on misogyny and critique it and empathize profoundly with women, all in the same sequences? Yes. All of these ideas can be true, because an ability to accept multitudes is something that we are supposed to learn as adults, and forget when entering arenas of politics or modern criticism. Lynch’s movies in particular are intoxicatingly dangerous for their determination to honor themselves.

David Lynch acting as FBI agent Gordon Cole in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992).

You can’t bend his films to fit a single theory or sociopolitical stance. Don’t believe me? One of this bad boy’s finest films is “The Straight Story,” a G-rated Disney trek across the heartland that lost none of Lynch’s fine-grained everyday poetry, none of his peerless sense for timing and atmosphere, none of his taste for what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.”

For many Gen Xers, Lynch’s films were among our first exposures to outsider art. He used variations of Hitchcock themes and crime movies to open our minds to surrealism. In Lynch-land, two men can have a conversation in a diner that leads to an encounter with a troll behind a dumpster, and that scene, from “Mulholland Drive,” can be the most terrifying that you’ve ever watched. In Lynch-land, a man can transform into someone else, someone who reflects the first man’s demented hungers, without any preparation for it. Lynch violates rules of cinema: timing is off, music is where it shouldn’t be, and most obvious of all many movies don’t have rules that allow for creatures out back where the trash is taken out. If we’re watching a horror movie, it’s tonally coded from scene one as such. But Lynch didn’t play that way.

Rather than honor genre rules, a scene happens in a Lynch movie because it must. Lynch managed to obliterate an issue that nags many filmmakers: How to get around the plot and get at the textures and moments and bits of poetry that fascinate us? The plots in his films are more carefully organized than is generally understood, but they also seem to disintegrate into arias of emotion and sensation. The sense of visual-sonic texture, reflecting Lynch’s background as a painter, is often overwhelming in his cinema.

 

 

Those red, red roses in “Blue Velvet” are presented satirically, as a parody of 1950s-era spotlessness, and earnestly, as a yearning for the very thing Lynch is parodying, because both emotions can be true at once. But, above all that, they are simply and unforgettably beautiful. Look at those donuts and pies in the first two seasons of “Twin Peaks,” a show that, decades ahead of so-called “prestige TV,” utilized ABC as a conduit into a world that fused surrealism with soap opera, turning a murder mystery into not only a revelation of our suppressions, but a celebration of community. When I watch an episode of “Twin Peaks,” I look forward to the scenes where the cops get together and eat the donuts. Lynch took an easy joke—cops love donuts!—and turned it into a symbol of communal rapture and a pungent visual leitmotif.

Lynch’s images and sounds feel handmade, including his paintings, which take a page out of Francis Bacon’s macabre, earnest canvasses. There’s a sense of pleading to the materiality of Lynch’s paintings, with rough gobs of paint and found pieces that emphasize their willfulness inherit in their existence. The films are the same way. The lurid colors of “Blue Velvet” and “Lost Highway” can make you drool. The soundscapes can rattle you, especially the musical performances that concluded many episodes of “Twin Peaks: The Return.” The dark alleyways and spaces of “Eraserhead” render Lynch’s days of living as a broke art student in Philadelphia into shadow realms, where fantasy is woven with the day-to-day comedy of living among industrial rot. Or the details of that alien child. That child is so real, so far beyond a special effect, that Lynch always refused to reveal how he achieved it.

Dissect a Lynch movie or painting or show and each element might seem familiar, but the totality is raw and alien and amazing. Regardless of the medium in which he worked, his art is: painting-as-movie-as-genre-as-life-as-detonated-collage-as-piercing ballad. Lynch made being a nerd with outsider fantasies look sexy.

Many of us are mourning him perhaps because we are remembering the rush of first seeing his work and feeling opened up. I remember circling that lurid, sexy VHS cover of “Blue Velvet” in my local video store in Small Virginia Town, USA, for months. I saw that movie when I was 13, and I felt seen by the extravagant mixture of banality and operatic sex and terror. A terror not only of others, but of self.

Lynch had the conviction to reveal his inner self and the talent to transmute those revelations into new and bottomless worlds of need and ecstasy. He was an architect of portals. In other words, David Lynch was a visionary.

David Lynch passed away on Jan. 15, 2025 at the age of 78. 

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