David Lynch is a gateway drug, for many cinephiles, to the weird, the extreme and the erotic. My first encounter was probably in the mid-to-late 90s when Channel 4 or BBC2 would screen avant-garde cinema late at night. I have never forgotten the exquisite and sensual terror of Eraserhead’s Lady in the Radiator emerging through the darkness to croon “in heaven everything is fine”.  

Years later, I attempted to review Mulholland Drive for my student newspaper. The result was so inadequate at conveying the ineffable experience of the film that it all but destroyed any aspiration to pursue a career in film criticism. 

Very few auteurs give birth to an adjective or to a universe. Even fewer seem to emerge fully formed, with a sui generis visual vocabulary: flickering light; smoke; red curtains; languorous camera movement; folksy, mannered performances; lip-syncing of 1950s torch songs. There are of course influences—it’s possible to see Persona or Sunset Boulevard or any amount of classical noir in the films—but Lynch’s background as an expressionist painter helps to explain the uniqueness. 

Popular paraphrases of “Lynchian” focus on the supernatural and the nakedly weird: the men in planets; ears in fields; backwards-speaking dwarves dancing in red rooms. But this misses the truly uncanny quality of the “naturalistic” scenes: Henry’s excruciatingly awkward meal with the in-laws in Eraserhead (“just cut them up like regular chickens”); Adam’s meeting in Mulholland Drive where a poor choice of espresso sends a studio executive into apoplectic rage; any number of encounters with bumbling cops or freakish siblings. Perhaps, though, that is a false dichotomy. The seemingly omniscient figures who seem to exist outside and beyond the narrative (Eraserhead’s the Man in the Planet; the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive; Twin Peaks’ The Man From Another Place) are part of the fabric of Lynch’s reality as much as coffee and apple pie. Perhaps he is best described as a horror director, in the true sense. There is nothing more horrific than pseudo-“Laura Palmer’s” existential howl at the climax of Twin Peaks: The Return. 

David Lynch was born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, into an ostensibly happy family, the eldest of three. He had a self-described golden childhood. Biographers can only speculate about the origins of the neurosis and sense of the macabre that permeates his work, but Lynch had a sense that all was not what it seemed from an early age. He once said:

“There were lots of advertisements in magazines where you see a well-dressed woman bringing a pie out of the oven and a certain smile on her face—or a couple smiling, walking together up to their house with a picket fence… it’s a strange smile. It’s the smile of the way the world should be or could be. They really made me dream like crazy.”

It is that very coexistence—perhaps co-dependence—of the grotesque and the banal that David Foster Wallace brilliantly articulated: 

“… a regular domestic murder is not Lynchian. But if the police come to the scene and see the man standing over the body and… the cops have this conversation about the fact that the man killed the woman because she persistently refused to buy Jif peanut butter rather than Skippy, and how very, very important that is, and if the cops found themselves somehow agreeing that there were major differences between the brands and that a wife who didn’t recognise those differences was deficient in her wifely duties, that would be Lynchian.”

Lynch’s was an itinerant though happy childhood; a brief stint at art school; a series of idiosyncratic shorts including The Grandmother, The Amputee, The Alphabet, and Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) before moving to Los Angeles and the American Film Institute grant that partially financed the years-long production of Eraserhead, a film that contains the DNA of his whole career: desire; terror; electricity. There are few more sensual moments in cinema than the dissolving of Henry and his lover from across the hall until only her black hair remains, bobbing on the surface. 

Like many auteurs, when we say “Lynch,” we are in truth referring to a creative team, which includes long-term editor and producer Mary Sweeney, production designer Jack Fisk and composer Angelo Badalamenti, whose languorous, seductive, mysterious scores feel synonymous with the films. Indeed, Lynch has described working closely with Badalamenti in a way that suggests the ideas spring from the music rather than the other way around. Sustained squalls of distorted guitar are everywhere: Lynch himself composed and performed some of the music in his film and television, recorded three studio albums and was heavily involved in sound design, so vital to the internal and external vibrations afflicting Jack Nance’s Henry in Eraserhead. And what a joy it was to visit the Bang Bang Bar at the end of many episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return for a serving of live music from some ethereal manic pixie dream girl. 

And then there are the actors: Catherine Coulson (the Log Lady) and Jack Fisk (both of whom worked on Eraserhead); the ubiquitous and wonderful Jack Nance, the original Lynch surrogate, whose furrowed brow is so expressive of fatherly angst and whose death (following a punch up in a donut store) the most Lynchian of demises. The most famous surrogate of all is Kyle MacLachlan, the innocent of Blue Velvet whose discovery of the severed ear leads to all kinds of knowledge of worldly things, and, later, Special Agent Dale Cooper, whose quirky connection with the spirit world was just as endearing as his penchant for fine pie.   

Seminal cinema

It is fascinating to detect in the films not written by Lynch the director’s imprint, albeit sometimes buried. The deeply moving humanism of The Elephant Man (financed of all people by Mel Brooks) and The Straight Story are full of “Lynchian” grotesques, sometimes in the fringes of the story. That imprint is all over 1984’s Dune, an experience that nonetheless convinced him never again to relinquish final cut to the studios. 

What did he understand about dreams? The insidiously slow realisation that we are dreaming, which feeds into his critiques of the ultimate dream factory, Hollywood. That structure reaches its zenith in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. 

It is at the heart of what Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) experiences in Mulholland Drive, a movie that baffles on the first few viewings because of a glut of confusing detail and identical-looking blondes, but eventually reveals itself to be a masterpiece that Sight and Sound rightly now ranks as one of the ten greatest films ever made. As with all the great surrealist masterpieces, like Bunuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, it’s often instructive to ask ‘who is doing the dreaming?’. 

In both Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, the protagonist experiences a traumatic event that triggers a flight from reality and the creation of an elaborate fantasy. That fantasy is told in the language of classical Hollywood cinema. So, struggling actress Diane hires a hitman to kill her unfaithful lover (Laura Harring) then, shortly before her suicide, conjures a fantasy in which her lover is reimagined as an amnesiac, seduced and rescued. But the Hollywood fantasy keeps undermining itself and in doing so reminds us that we are dreaming: Justin Theroux’s director is told by shadowy bosses that it is “no longer his film”. In Lost Highway, Bill Pullman’s jazz musician kills his wife and then, while awaiting trial, replaces himself with a young garage mechanic who rescues Patricia Arquette from the evil Mr Eddy (a malignant Robert Loggia). Both films then function as a comment on losing creative, romantic and psychological control. They are also funny, violent and erotic in their own right. 

Did Lynch have a woman problem? Quite the reverse. He understood the eroticism of cinema. He understood rebellious horny teenagers. Female nudity, a certain unreconstructed masculinity and the male gaze are dominant but his oeuvre is also full of horrifying and compassionate depictions of sexual violence against women and girls. Indeed, underneath the surrealist Americana there is, most often, a story about abuse. It is the domestic violence that Laura Dern is condemned to experience forever in Inland Empire. In another breathtakingly bold performance, Dern endures the indignity of being aroused against her will by the hand of Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart. Women adored working with him, and it shows in the work. 

What strikes me today on re-watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is the sincerity of those teenage declarations of love. Yes, the soap opera banality is a bait-and-switch and a device that sweetens the trauma beneath, but Lynch clearly also believes in it and it is as real for us as it is for the characters. Lynch’s deeply felt romanticism is there in the blinding light that Henry sees when he touches the hands of the woman who lives inside his radiator and in the robins in Blue Velvet. It is even there in the most saccharine, banal dialogue featured in the audition scene in Mulholland Drive, where Naomi Watts as “Betty” cosies up to her older male co-star. 

After 2006’s almost incomprehensible but fascinating Inland Empire, which was written during the shoot and contains a TV soap opera with rabbits and a frazzled Jeremy Irons presiding over a film that is possessed by the evil spirit of an old Polish folk tale, we did not receive the gift of another feature film. But 2017’s television series Twin Peaks: The Return is, unquestionably, cinema, despite its origins, and is much closer in mood and style to the later feature films than to the original series. Its digressions are sometimes patience-testing and some episodes are pure abstraction but the ambition, especially MacLachlan’s portrayal of a triumvirate of Dale Coopers—one possessed by Killer Bob and evil personified—makes it worthy of Cahiers du cinéma’s accolade of best “film” of the decade.

Long ago, Lynchian chic was appropriated for nightclubs and immersive cinema, not to mention any television that can be classified as “weird Americana”. Alongside the work, there is the content. For the TikTok generation there is plenty of material. The daily weather reports which are destined to be repurposed as ASMR loops; the dissing of those who watch movies on their iPhones; the one-word reply to a question about cynical product placement. So there is the viral humour, but the other legacy is in the commentary and advice about creativity—admittedly often gnomic—and the undoubted scores of people who will have been inspired to take up transcendental meditation. I will miss that voice; that slow, mischievous, naïve and inimitable voice. The deep compassion for actors—the gift of acting—and the movies; the sense of humour and the absurd. When a visionary is alive, there is a nourishing sense of potential. Speculation abounded for a Netflix series. In the end, that potential was taken away by, of all things, wildfire stalking the Hollywood hills… 

Tim Fox is a critic of theatre & film and solicitor.