Somewhere inside a tabula rasa passed off as an office space, a diligent worker is rewarded with a five-minute “dance experience.” It’s been a tough morning on all of us, her supervisor sighs, “and I thought a little frivolity would be just what the doctor ordered.”
He reveals a list and instructs her to choose from a menu of musical genre options, and one accessory. She picks up a maraca and chooses . . . Defiant Jazz.
With the click of a switch, the overhead lights start to flash red and white like a disco as music pumps through hidden speakers. Her boss’ stiff façade slips as his spine and joints move in a constant state of undulation. He bobs his head to the rhythm, sometimes flapping his arms. The white ceiling lights are replaced by orange and yellow as the manager’s dance grows wilder. Not everyone is grooving with him — one employee suddenly leaps from his chair and bites his superior hard enough to draw blood.
Calling something Lynchian means recognizing what we’re seeing is off-kilter and that it doesn’t entirely compute.
The music stops, the lights return to the usual sickly phosphorescence, and the administrator pulls his usual demeanor back to formality as everyone recovers from their shock. “The music dance experience is officially canceled,” he says in a low menacing voice.
In the days since David Lynch died at the age of 78, enough tributes have blossomed to fill the Elysian fields. Most celebrate “Twin Peaks,” his lasting contribution to TV, alongside his name’s installment in the lexicon of the moving image with the word Lynchian.
But what does that mean, Lynchian? That “Severance” scene described above demonstrates it. The Severed Floor’s usually staid supervisor, Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), behaves in a way viewers haven’t seen before. The song selection, “Shakey Jake” by Joe McPhee, spins on a ’60s-style turntable one might encounter at an estate sale or a museum. The light show evokes the work of abstract artist Piet Mondrian. Completing the sensation is Dylan G (Zach Cherry) scowling through all this forced glee until he erupts with a roar. A plainer recent example of pure Lynchian quirk is tough to come by.
You could describe this as Kubrickian too — although Stanley Kubrick’s favorite movie, according to Lynch’s report, was “Eraserhead.” Everything circles around.
Calling something Lynchian means recognizing what we’re seeing is off-kilter and that it doesn’t entirely compute. It’s a mundane image or situation not entirely tethered to reality. Entire essays are devoted to explaining it. One of the most enjoyable is “David Lynch – The Elusive Subconscious,” a 20-minute video essay by Lewis Bond that both distills the concept through narration and shows it in practice.
“To be Lynchian is to exude elusiveness, and the enigma of what signifies Lynchian sensibilities lies in producing unfamiliarity in that which was once familiar,” Bond explains, adding that Lynch’s work lives in “an obscure area of the fear spectrum that sits between safety and danger.”
This gets to what’s vital about TV shows that resist time’s tarnish – it’s made with an understanding that the medium is fueled by feeling, a reciprocating emotional exchange between creators and viewers.
Before Lynch and his collaborator Mark Frost unleashed “Twin Peaks” on ABC’s midseason schedule in 1990, network TV storytelling was simpler, for the most part. Comedies sometimes took serious turns. Dramas revolved around love affairs, murder and justice.
Our favorite shows trigger reliable responses, and major deviations from those expectations can be seen as betrayals. That’s why a few of the most successful ones (like “Law & Order,” which debuted in the same year as “Twin Peaks”) find an acceptable emotional plateau and take up permanent residence there.
Before Lynch and his collaborator Mark Frost unleashed “Twin Peaks” on ABC’s midseason schedule in 1990, network TV storytelling was simpler, for the most part.
Taken on their surface, FBI special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) are also familiar archetypes: a lawman investigating the murder of a local beauty queen.
But Lynch and Frost took that by-the-numbers setup and wagered that audiences might be beguiled by unease, disturbance and the appearance of confusion as long as there was enough beauty to capture the eye, and clarity to keep us on the line.
The Red Room is the apotheosis of this, part of a dream sequence in which Agent Cooper encounters the demon BOB, the One-Armed Man calling himself Mike, Laura and The Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson) — a little person in a red suit who makes cryptic statements like, “I’ve got good news. That gum you like is going to come back in style.”
All that is befuddling in itself. But Lynch throws in a strange dance and concise gestures from Laura that communicate a message that isn’t immediately apparent. The secret sauce, though, is in the way he cycles Lee and Anderson’s voice tracks through an analog recording process that makes them sound otherworldly. That ending to the second “Twin Peaks” episode launched an age of analysis and Easter Egg hunts that’s with us even now.
Brushing aside all that geeky frippery, though, and what’s plainest about that scene is how unsettling it is. The first sight of the red room was simply weird, it was sinister without depicting overt violence. Many shows have channeled that energy since. Each of Tony Soprano’s dream sequences and the myriad visual non sequiturs on “Lost” – the wreckage of a 19th-century trading ship and that polar bear turning in the middle of a jungle – are extensions of that room.
“Six Feet Under” is dappled with Lynchian homages – easy enough to explain in a show about a family that dwells in the figurative crawlspace between life and death, whose business is guiding families through loss. The first season episode called “The Room,” though, was as close to a direct homage as you could get: Nate Fisher (Peter Krause) discovers his father Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins) had a secret life that included a small studio he rented above an Indian restaurant.
As Nate stands inside this place that’s entirely out of character for his dad, he daydreams about what his father might have done, a string of visions that includes Jenkins doing a herky-jerky dance to Ted Nugent’s “Journey to the Center of the Mind” and ripping bong hits with bikers, ending on a darkly hilarious note with Nathaniel Sr. turning into a sniper.
“Atlanta” built a Lynchian house for its “Teddy Perkins” episode, perching a namesake character buried under prosthetics within its dim innards. The place nearly swallows Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) who visits Perkins, a forgotten R&B legend, to purchase a piano with rainbow keys. He barely escapes with his life.
Lynch’s TV influence doesn’t end with “Twin Peaks.” His 2001 neo-noir film “Mulholland Drive” is considered one of the filmmaker’s best, an exemplar of the practice of coaxing audiences into the theater of inscrutability and getting them comfortable before locking the door and leaving them there.
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Originally it was a pilot for ABC that the network passed on in part because of the number of questions it left dangling mid-air. Watching the versions Lynch re-edited into a theatrical feature, you can see how it could have worked as a series.
It already has. Ryan Murphy’s “Grotesquerie” follows the same structure of presenting one version of the world flavored with just enough surrealism to make us suspicious, then changing the paradigm midstream to reveal that, indeed, what we thought was real isn’t. Murphy even closed the season on an ambiguous note he may decipher in future episodes . . . but maybe he won’t.
“Art’s preoccupation with secrecy can feast on the deepest parts of you. But its mysteries can also energize something profound within,” Bond observes in “The Elusive Subconscious.” “I suppose cinema’s true affliction, as well as its triumph, is that its answers are often destined to remain unknown.”
Artistic greats like Lynch outlast their work and time on Earth, reaching new viewers through the visionaries they inspire. The prestige TV age is the product of creators willing to play with the rules of physics in unexpected ways, thanks to the man who made a broader swatch of the small screen seductively Lynchian.
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