David Lynch in the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016).
A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.
Only a few times have I ever felt that being in an audience enhanced my experience of a film. For me art has always been a private thing: “just me and a mirror and my brain,” as The Bee Gees once put it. The obvious benefit of solitary viewing is that you needn’t filter out your neighbors’ responses—contagions of fidgeting whenever action slows or logic separates, gales of laughter at aggressively unfunny jokes. Freed from the bullying influence of consensus, you watch differently; you don’t expect a film to perform for you in the same way. Instead of saying, “Here I am, entertain me,” you adopt the less adversarial, more absorptive role of the engaged bystander. You let the thing develop on its own terms, taking whatever risks it chooses to become whatever it wants to be. Then you judge how well, or if, it did that.— “Opening Statement” of “The Archivist,” from The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016), by Mark Frost
The films of David Lynch, who died on January 15, just short of his seventy-ninth birthday, were, I’m convinced, meant to be seen alone. They’ve given many of us a decades-long education in how to watch a movie as if dreaming a dream. Conditioned by critical reflex, or simply the need to have things make the same kinds of incremental sense that we’re used to, we’ve sometimes resisted Lynch’s screen-dreams. Even as we were seduced by his visual command, touched by his depth of weird emotion, and made to tremble by his mastery of the many levels of fear, we bemoaned his failure (as it seemed) to invent coherent plots or consistent characters, to spare us the awkwardness of apparently misjudged or stupefying scenes. I’ll never forget seeing Blue Velvet for the first time, in a multiplex in Cedar Falls, Iowa: the giggles that greeted the square dialogue, the tragedy face of a sobbing Laura Dern, Dennis Hopper’s “well-dressed man disguise,” a bruised, naked Isabella Rossellini materializing on a suburban lawn. If you’d polled the people leaving the Crossroads Theater that night, the consensus would have been, “Well, that was different.” Which is something Midwesterners say when they don’t know what to say.
People had giggled, and I had tried not to, as if Lynch hadn’t known what he was doing. The truth was that we didn’t yet know how to watch him—plus, we were members of an audience, which meant performing normality, both for ourselves and for the strangers around us. But that was when some of us began to figure out how to watch David Lynch. We’re still working at that, and maybe the greatest thing to be said of any artist is that the job of understanding them gets more interesting over time, not less. Lynch continues to show us how to watch patiently, not for linearity or resolution but for mood, mystery, apprehension, texture. For all his sordidness and violence, all the sulfur of his imagined hells, he leaves us feeling clean, clear, experienced yet innocent; perhaps bruised and naked, perhaps reborn. Movies can do many other things besides that, but I’m not certain they can ever do more than that.
***
Judging from social media, Lynch’s death inspired many people to go back and review his whole body of work—features, shorts, commercials, documentaries—almost as if it, too, might be gone tomorrow. Each fan was holding a personal séance, seeking contact with a ghost. No doubt we all saw and heard different messages. My séance didn’t involve the core of works that always led off the obituaries, those that were focused, holistic, and accessible enough to draw mass response and critical favor: Eraserhead (1978), Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (1990–1991), Mulholland Dr. (2001). The first and last of those I watch every year or two; the others, often enough. I wanted instead to reacquaint myself with things I’d not seen in ages, having once filed them away as minor successes or major failures. Would they have grown or shrunk after fifteen or twenty years? Changed shape, gotten fatter or flatter?
In the “minor success” category was The Straight Story (1999), with Richard Farnsworth in the true tale of Alvin Straight, an elderly man who rode a John Deere lawnmower across northeastern Iowa to see his ailing brother in Wisconsin. Though living elsewhere by then, I noted the quizzical coverage that my home state’s media devoted to the location filming. David Lynch, whom Time magazine had named “the Czar of Bizarre,” directing a heartwarming, straightforward Disney film about ordinary people in flyover country? Surely it was going to be a joke, a misfire, or some other breed of fiasco. Yet it wasn’t. It was, in plain fact, heartwarming and straightforward; simple, moving, uncondescending, sensitive to people and place. It remains Lynch’s most self-effacing, least dreamlike, indeed his straightest film—despite its connections to Eraserhead, his oddest. (Jack Fisk, Eraserhead’s Man in the Planet, was the production designer; his wife, Sissy Spacek, who plays Alvin’s daughter, had assisted with the earlier film; and Jack Walsh, an Eraserhead walk-on, appears as one of Alvin’s buddies.)
Seeing The Straight Story again revealed a film just as steady and unironic as I recalled, with only a few false touches (chiefly, a love-thy-brother scene with John and Kevin Farley, brothers of the late Chris). An irony imposed by time is that the tough but frail Alvin Straight, who walks on twin canes and needs helps when he falls, is in the advanced stages of emphysema. Lynch, a lifelong smoker, revealed in August 2024 that he had emphysema; it was complications of that disease that caused his death. In his last year he had difficulty getting around, and toward the end couldn’t move at all without assistance. I wouldn’t say that Lynch’s extraordinary tenderness toward Alvin Straight (and toward Farnsworth, whose own debilities are part and parcel of the character’s) means he was seeing his own future, his own end. I would say that it’s all the evidence anyone could need of Lynch’s empathy—a thing which, even as far along as 1999, many viewers had convinced themselves he didn’t possess.
***
“I heard a wind,” Lynch says, introducing the first selection on The Short Films of David Lynch (2002), a DVD collecting just those items. In his world, the sound or simply the mention of wind promises something strange, powerful, mysterious. To re-see the shorts that preceded Eraserhead—Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1966), The Alphabet (1968), and The Grandmother (1970)—is to revisit a dark, wet netherworld; to realize again, with amazement and delight, how stark, dark, gooey, and goofy Lynch was from the very beginning, when he first heard a wind.
The shorts are remarkably progressive in technique and penetration. Each pushes on from the last; each is a step toward Eraserhead, and none could have been skipped. In Six Men, to the sound of a wailing siren, several animated heads eject a series of multicolored vomits from lengths of steel pipe connected to stomachs that look like hearts. Repetitive, entrancing, strangely funny, it has sufficient variation in color and rhythm to sustain interest over sixty seconds. The Alphabet stars Lynch’s first wife, Peggy, as a ghost in white gown and and white pancake, striking tortured and terrified poses in and around a bed against a soundtrack mingling baby cries, underground hisses and whistles, and a voice reciting the letters: a Sesame Street for deeply unusual children. Sound designer Alan Splet, one of Lynch’s most vital collaborators, comes on board for The Grandmother, a longer and more ambitious piece of dream terror, about an abused boy who “grows” a kindly grandmother from a pod which he plants in his bed. At this stage Lynch is far from fully formed, but he’s already located many of the symbols and scenes that will become his—babies and dogs as agents of darkness; staircases leading to desire and doom; the shimmering, sticky mess of birth; the domestic bed as a place of muck and mystery, a portal where one organism might emerge, another disappear.
Lynch was as much an artist of biology and dream as Buñuel, and as much a natural master of his medium. He found, very early on—who knows where or when—a direct pipeline from the inner life of intestines and nerve endings to the flowing or convulsive forms of the screen. And “pipeline” is the word: pipes and ducts will emerge from the ground and throb behind the walls of every Lynch picture. They’re the hidden works determining temperature and visibility at the surface, the biomechanics beneath the lives we think we lead. Initially a painter, Lynch started making films because he wanted to create canvases that moved, as if stroked by wind. The years-long process of making Eraserhead taught him how to capture that sensation on film; with it, he left his own birth sac and dropped into the world. He would continue to grow and spread, to alarm and entrance us like some visitant from a darker, lusher place, a place almost, but not quite, like our own.
***
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a prequel to the namesake TV series, showing the events leading up to the murder of Laura Palmer, sounded like bad news from the start. It was booed at Cannes—which seemed a more damning indictment then than it does now, when we’re told that Baz Luhrman’s Elvis draws a fifteen-minute ovation from the same audience. Coming after the breakout combination of Twin Peaks and the Palme d’Or-winning Wild at Heart (1991), Fire Walk with Me was deemed to be Lynch’s first flagrant, flaming failure, and the occasion of his inevitable comeuppance. (1984’s Dune, mangled and meatballed by Hollywood, was generally not considered to be his fault, to the degree it was considered at all.) Unlike the two-hour Twin Peaks pilot, which Lynch directed, the prequel appeared to be all excess, no subtlety. Even those who had loved the narcotic drift and spring-heeled comedy of the series fell back in fits of outrage and confusion. Instead of teasing, it was puzzling; instead of sexy, it was vicious; instead of mordant, it was bloody. Where was the “Kafka comes to Peyton Place” vibe of the series? Why was nobody laughing?
That was at first glance, the only glance I and most people were willing to give. An exception was Greil Marcus, who devoted a chapter in his book The Shape of Things to Come (2006) to Sheryl Lee’s portrayal of Laura, and to Lynch’s achievement as director. Sometimes a critic’s vision makes you need to look again, in hopes of seeing what they saw; sometimes, you see it. With Marcus’s analysis in my mind, alongside twenty years of added context—Lynch’s previous and later works, other films and TV shows recalled or forgotten, the séance nature of the revisiting—Fire Walk with Me came together coherently, even elegantly, as a tragic and empathetic horror movie. Its first part constitutes the backstory to Laura’s murder, involving the discovery and FBI investigation of a previous killing. Seeing the frozen, discolored face of the first victim, we’re held by its awful contradictions—how still it is, how plainly dead, yet how electric and alive it seems. In a different way, Laura is caught between the same states. An abused daughter racing towards death, she’s full of feeling, but empty of whatever makes a person want to hold onto life. She knows what is coming for her, but not how it will come, or by whose hand.
Like many of its characters, Fire Walk with Me breathes hard, moves sideways, talks in whispers. You don’t just fall in step with it; you need to let yourself be led. Again, context helps. Fire is a kind of companion to Wild at Heart, which complements it from the credits (red and yellow flames are replaced by blue and white static, but with the same lettering over florid classical music) down to a transcendent ending, a deliverance from devouring depths of vice. But this strangeness doesn’t look like the strangenesses you’ve seen before, even from Lynch. It’s a strangeness so unguarded that it risks coming off silly and stupid. An indescribably tender, fragile scene between Laura and her secret lover, the biker James (James Marshall), leads to a bit of dialogue about turkeys—yes, turkeys—which no audience could resist laughing at, stomping on, killing outright. If you’re alone, just you and Lynch and the actors, the scene can break your heart a bit. It can slip inside you like wind through a window. But only if your window is open.
One reason many viewers recoiled from Fire Walk with Me was the stream of defilements and degradations visited on the character of Laura. I felt that recoil, too—not because the violence had struck me as gratuitous, but because Lynch had stylized it as something truly horrible. (I’d found the violence of Wild at Heart both gratuitous and exhilarating: upsetting, but easier to rationalize.) The movie’s extremity—not its failure but its success at being what it is—was why I had avoided coming back to it. What I understand now is that Lynch was making me pay for my safe passage on Laura’s journey through hell. That bespeaks the difference between ordinary Hollywood misogyny and a feeling artist’s depiction of sexualized brutality. Megan Burbank, in one of the best posthumous tributes to Lynch, highlights the “legible and extreme empathy” he shows for his female characters (and the women who act them), whose suffering “isn’t being used simply to shock viewers. Lynch frames their stories in a way that humanizes the women at the center,” while “depict[ing] harm with the emotional intensity it requires.” Never in Fire Walk with Me are we positioned to feel less than pain, sorrow, and horror on Laura’s behalf. It’s all part of what Burbank calls Lynch’s “maximalist ability to capture so vividly both the best and worst parts of being alive.”
***
Inland Empire (2006) travels some of the same passages, but here they’re longer, more serpentine; instead of neon and hellfire, they’re lit by table lamps and seedy sunlight filtering through paper shades. A three-hour modernist-brutalist epic, Inland Empire expands the interiority and insistence on non-sequitur of the experimental short film to near-cosmic proportions. And what a crime against taste and judgment that once seemed. I jotted these words after first seeing it, nearly twenty years ago:
I can’t get over feeling that it should have come out five years before Mulholland Dr., not five after. It’s like the giant block of granite from which Lynch chiseled his masterwork. The themes are the same—women exploited, brutalized, left for garbage along a Hollywood street—and the narrative could very well be, like the earlier picture’s, the revenge-and-deliverance fantasy of a woman passing out of one world and into the next. But rather than a logical progression of chipping down, we see what now looks like the earlier picture’s classical form being scarred and bloated by the piling and plastering on of extranea [sic], pointless repetitions, failed inspirations, tropes for dopes. And like a giant block of granite, the film is impermeable, unliftable, and will crack your skull if you bang your brain against it long enough. It would be spiteful to deny its unearthliness, mere genius worship to deny its dreadfulness. I was with it pretty much all the way for the first thirty minutes. The second thirty, I held tight, one hand gripping Laura Dern and the other my faith that Lynch would pull it out. The next hour was grim struggle, and the rest was like surviving a gulag. Of course Lynch and Dern know and want that—precisely that. They sought and fought to make Inland Empire that good and that bad, that tantalizing and that punishing. No joke is allowed to be simply, tersely funny, no beautiful moment is allowed to expire peacefully and leave its shapely wisp behind. Everything is dragged, stretched, flayed, labored, killed. Then it is kicked, and kicked, and kicked. It’s that horrible. Which is not to say that it won’t get better with time.
It has. At first view, I used words like “logic” and “simple” and “funny” and “shapely” to express my frustration at having wanted one thing and gotten another. But it belabors the obvious to say that a movie like Inland Empire—lengthy, confounding, not even glamorously lit—requires patience, a willingness to submit, the making of a pact with the work itself. That basic allowance made, after a while you begin to feel like a small organism caught in a spiral of intrigues whose windings are confusing but definitely interconnected. No, the movie is not a “block of granite,” it’s a sculpture of twisted metal; and to experience it means navigating its welds and joints, scraping against its edges, crawling through its crevices.
The camera gets unpleasantly close to actors’ faces. Focus goes in and out, seemingly at random. There are scenes from a nightmare sitcom about humanoid rabbits, with peripheral animations burning the corner of the screen. There are long tracking scenes through empty movie sets, dim corridors, the Lynchian stairwell. Characters engage in cryptic conversations, receive phone calls from unknown parties. Sometimes we stare at an empty room, wondering where it is—where we are. Behind and beneath it all runs a Lynch- Splet symphony of rising winds, power surges, earth tremors, human cries turned backwards, cool but sinister jazz.
A shift seems to happen about an hour in, when the heroine steps into a reality with multiple exits, any one of which will deposit her in another life. Again and again from this point, we leave the world we’ve known, to the degree we’ve known it; just when we think the descent has gone as far as it can or should, there’s another descent. The story is, to say the least, fragmentary, the style alienating. But Inland Empire finds form—or you find the means to give it form—as a trip through the parallel streets and mirroring rooms of intersecting places, eras, fates. The places are the Los Angeles of now and the Warsaw (or Cracow?) of the thirties; the lives belong to a contemporary Hollywood star, an unknown Polish woman, and a Greek chorus of sex workers. “She’s full of secrets,” said the dancing dwarf, aka The Man from Another Place, of Laura Palmer. But all of Lynch’s women are full of secrets; and in Inland Empire they share those secrets, or try to, strictly with each other, not with the men around them, and only sparingly with us. Like so much of Lynch’s work, this movie is about people—in this case, women—lost in strange worlds, trying to find homes that have disappeared, and the sparks that fly when they meet like live wires thrown across time.
In Episode 3 of the first season of Twin Peaks, Leland Palmer, sinking further into lunacy, puts on a Big Band record and dances around his living room, holding a picture of his daughter. (Spoiler alert: he killed her.) The shot of the phonograph needle tracking the spinning record is nearly identical to one that begins Inland Empire—same angle, same distance—but the Empire needle is different. Shot in black and white, with a single human hair fluttering from the dusty tonearm, it suggests an incarnation of the same technology, the same moment, seen in another time and place. I point this out not to log another cool informational unit for fellow fanboys and girls, but to say that the more you watch Lynch, the more you see that all his worlds are connected. If you can find your way into one of them, you can find your way into any of them. Because the fact is, you’re already there.
***
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| Photo: Miles Aldridge for L'Uomo Vogue (2007). |
What was pretty clear about Lynch from the start, whether we were ready for it or not, was that his engagement was with the mystery, not the solution; the drifting mood, not the settled state. Indeterminacy and ambiguity can be easy excuses for artists who lack the commitment or creative resources to follow their work through to whatever ending is encoded in its beginning. But for Lynch, mystery-not-solution was never a cop-out, it was a way in—the only way. His weirdnesses could feel transforming, others merely whimsical. But all were his, all were felt, and even when he flopped, no one called him a fake.
He always gives you that way in. His movies are full of forward passages both literal (hallways, staircases) and sensual (montage, movement). Like a birth canal or a dream tunnel, they take us out of the womb and into the world—his world, where even daytime is nighttime in disguise. Once you accept that you are in his world and that he is not in yours, Lynch’s movies only get better, deeper, more comprehensible. They also get scarier. As we continue to watch them, we’ll see more. We’ll recall images and encounters from long ago, in the same way we remember that rarest kind of dream: the kind that remains stored deep in our senses throughout our lives. Time will show us the connections. As a character promises, or warns, in Inland Empire: “In the future, you will be dreaming . . . in a kind of sleep. When you open your eyes, someone familiar will be there.” David Lynch is dead, but his worlds go on turning.
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