A car drives down a road at night. As far as we can tell, it’s the only vehicle on the road, a lonely wayfarer ripping through the darkness. The night is so consuming that the headlights reveal only what’s in the car’s immediate path. We can see the twists and turns in the road as they come into view, but nothing further ahead than a few feet. There’s no way to know what’s coming. We could turn back now, but what might we find if we drive a little further?
Intimidation is the enemy of curiosity, and anyone Lynch’s work has touched knows that all it takes is a little nudge over the threshold to fall headfirst into his world.
That question occurs again and again in David Lynch’s filmography. It’s one of the millions of queries one might have watching his films, which are all distinctly different in tone and genre, yet bleed into one another, falling under that ever-cryptic umbrella term, “Lychian.” The expression was born from a desire to designate an intangible feeling, similar to the sense one gets deep in one’s stomach watching something Lynch made. But funnily enough, a good chunk of Lynch’s films aren’t so difficult to dissect; all one needs are the right tools.
One of the loveliest things about the community that David Lynch’s work has forged is that, if you ask for a key to begin unlocking it, any given Lynch fan will tell you a different theme, stylistic motif or scene that they feel best represents his artistic ethos in a condensed, easily digestible form. Lynch’s works — his films, paintings and drawings, his groundbreaking television show or even his advertising spots — are famously obtuse. That can be intimidating for an outsider. But intimidation is the enemy of curiosity, and anyone Lynch’s work has deeply touched knows that all it takes is a little nudge over the threshold to fall headfirst into his world. As soon as you’re immersed in his canon, all you’ll want is to go deeper.
For me, both Lynch’s personal philosophy and cyclical thematic interests are best exemplified by the road, specifically his affection for depicting the road at night. The shadows of trees in a car’s headlights; a stoplight swaying softly in the wind while it changes color; the sensation that something peculiar will inevitably appear the longer a car stays in motion. Those images are what I remember most about watching “Twin Peaks” for the first time at 15 years old. There were plenty of other things about Lynch’s radical, soapy mystery to captivate me. But unlike The Log Lady’s enigmatic messages or Bobby Briggs’ dreamy gaze, I was not just entranced by these visions of the road at twilight, I was terrified.
As someone who has always had a masochistic streak, finding out that these sequences of cars speeding down darkened paths recurred in Lynch’s other works both delighted and horrified me. While they made me feel a particularly nauseating dread, they also made me feel alive, teeming with speculation about what they meant to Lynch and why I loved being steeped in their ambiguity. A car driving down a road at night is not innately evil. Rather, it simply produces a straightforward picture of our world’s vast unknowability. The feeling these scenes conjure might be difficult to parse, but their metaphor isn’t.
Uncertainty is an emotional crossroads at which we choose to either sit and suffer in our anxieties about all we do not know about the world we exist in, or allow ourselves to be curious enough to pursue knowledge of the strange and obscure. The latter path is, of course, a more difficult one to traverse, adorned with obstacles and covered in black night. But it’s an edifying experience, hurtling forward with only the mighty light of intrepid wonder to guide us. With each new experience we have on that road, the path ahead is gradually illuminated. The aperture of the mind’s eye expands. We can see the detours and the mile markers and all of the other people in their own cars, traveling down the very same path. Even as we speed forward in the void, we are never alone.
From the start of his film career, Lynch took isolation by the collar to turn it inside out. In his debut feature “Eraserhead,” Lynch established a thematic foundation to build upon, a tale of detachment and involuntary solitude that burns deep within the core of the soul. “Eraserhead” is a picture of sex not as something that results in joint pleasure between both parties, but as a means to a new, alienated end. Lynch follows Jack Nance’s Henry Spencer as he tries to care for his newborn child, while the droning industrial noise of Henry’s urban surroundings only magnifies his loneliness. This continued into 1980’s “The Elephant Man,” where Lynch acutely criticized separation and othering, touting empathy as the ultimate virtue among humankind.
With 1986’s “Blue Velvet,” Lynch refined the balance between his message of compassion and his fixation on the surreality of everyday life. To shoot the film, he returned to Middle America, where he spent a vast portion of his childhood being shuttled to different states depending on where his father, a USDA researcher, was assigned. In that part of the country, Lynch learned the difference between picturesque Americana and the reality of what goes on inside it.
In “David Lynch: The Art Life,” a 2016 documentary where Lynch speaks freely about his childhood and early career, Lynch describes a moment when his father, Donald, called him inside one evening. Shortly after, a nude woman with a bloodied mouth slowly approached him. “Something was bad wrong with her,” Lynch says in the film, before admitting that’s the last thing about the moment he remembers.
A similar scene to the one Lynch describes in his childhood appears in “Blue Velvet,” when Isabella Rossellini’s character, the lounge singer Dorothy, appears naked and beaten to Kyle MacLachlan’s out-of-his-depth Jeffrey Beaumont. Sometimes, this is all we get in Lynch’s films: abstract glimpses of a tragedy already in motion. But instead of ogling violence to exploit its evil and nauseate the audience, Lynch calls attention to the systems that propagate it. How do we respond when someone tells us they’re in pain and that they need help, and where is the line between our natural curiosity and involuntarily escalating existing trauma? Elucidating the harsh truths of day-to-day life without capitalizing on them is no simple feat. Seeing the world with an unvarnished eye takes consistent practice, and for Lynch, filmmaking was that practice.
When discussing Lynch’s films, people often refer to his propensity for exposing society’s underbelly. Almost all of Lynch’s movies, in one way or another, seek to turn over some small subset of the world — white-picket-fence America, Hollywood, the nuclear family — to reveal the worms and dirt hidden beneath the shiny perfection on the surface. And while that’s true, Lynch wasn’t just fascinated by these communities, he was intent on illustrating how everyone who exists within them, good or bad, is on a desperate quest for some kind of peace to make sense of this life. If one is burdened by the suffering they’re made to endure, peace is achieved by sowing enough discord and pain to make everyone feel that same hurt. There is a wicked solidarity in shared grief. Anger is a disease that takes hold because the symptomatic violence is driven by one primary desire: not to feel alone. But if cruelty, like any disease, has no one to feed on, it dies.
Unlike the fickle, fleeting peace that can be derived from forcing pain onto others, true harmony comes from unity and the journey toward it. Lynch understood that it’s far easier to give up and give into the madness than to stay strong-willed and fight it; a great deal of his most beloved cinematic protagonists — Laura Palmer in “Fire Walk with Me,” Betty Elms in “Mulholland Drive” and Nikki Grace/Susan Blue in “Inland Empire” — must all survive these trials in their quest for serenity. That’s why Lynch’s films are often so sinister and surreal: You can’t tell stories about the pursuit of peace without depicting the everyday wars one has to fight to attain it.
While Dern sunk into what is perhaps the most remarkable role of her long career in “Inland Empire,” she was carefully watched by a genius at work. You can’t lose your identity if there’s someone there to hold onto it.
But Lynch’s films weren’t interested in preordaining a character to their misery. Watching his movies, one can see that Lynch was compelled by all of the ways his characters might be able to extricate themselves from their horrendous situations. They aren’t doomed, necessarily, just fated to endure, or perhaps born for their nature. That conversation comes up in “Twin Peaks: The Return” as Lynch flat-out confirms Laura Palmer to be a cipher for unyielding good, intended to restore universal balance after humankind developed a new capacity for evil. Elsewhere, condemnation isn’t so certain. Lynch’s sole approved synopsis for “Inland Empire” was, simply, “A woman in trouble.”
That woman, an actress named Nikki Grace (played by Lynch’s longtime collaborator and friend Laura Dern, who also starred in “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” and “Twin Peaks: The Return”) confronts what is arguably Lynch’s most surreal vision of the battle between good and evil, and how easily we can lose ourselves trying to fight it. Nikki has been cast in the role of a lifetime, a surefire legacy-maker. But the quality of her performance depends on how deeply she can sink into the role, and Nikki will do anything — consciously or otherwise — to achieve utter sublimation, and, in turn, total perfection. In that respect, it’s strangely poetic that “Inland Empire” is Lynch’s final feature. A role as demanding as Dern’s, with a narrative as dense as Lynch’s, innately means that its star won’t always have a completely vivid idea of what they’re performing at any given moment. It’s a film that works because of the complete faith between the filmmaker and his star, a trust that could only be developed through decades of genuine friendship both in front of the camera and away from it. While Dern sunk into what is perhaps the most remarkable role of her long career in “Inland Empire,” she was carefully watched by a genius at work. You can’t lose your identity if there’s someone there to hold onto it.
In a letter written for Lynch after his passing, published in the Los Angeles Times, Dern reminisced on their relationship. She spoke about Lynch writing lengthy “Inland Empire” monologues over cappuccinos, and how he impressed her with his deep care for her “Twin Peaks: The Return” character, Diane, despite Diane being what some directors might consider tertiary. “The respect for character, the magic you brought to the story and the truth that you demanded we find in even the most extreme or absurd places opened my eyes,” Dern said. “Not to the surreal or even unique individualism in your art, but to your humanism.”
It’s Lynch’s humanism that started those cars down all of those dark roads, in “Twin Peaks” and in the opening credits of “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive.” They represent Lynch’s perennial curiosity and his hope that, somewhere down the line, things might look a little brighter for us if we keep trying, even if we can’t see that spot in the distance.
In a clip from the documentary “Lynch (One),” — which was shot during the production of “Inland Empire” and made the rounds online after Lynch’s passing — Lynch gives first-time actor Helena Chase a quick pep talk before they film one of the movie’s most pivotal sequences. “You can’t mess up, you’re going to be so fantastic,” Lynch tells Chase. “I’m going to feed you lines. You hear me, you say the line…no problem. Don’t worry about a thing.”
Behind them, cars drive up and down Hollywood Boulevard. There’s the road again, still covered in the dark of the evening as vehicles move through the frame and out of sight. Each hurries forth into the night, headed somewhere we can’t possibly know in a world full of uncertainty. But there, in the foreground, is Lynch, encouraging Chase to be curious and looking directly into her eyes with supreme conviction. “You are going to be sensational!” he tells her. When Lynch reminded us that we weren’t alone in this life, it was impossible not to believe him.
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David Lynch’s life and eternal work
