David Lynch and the Mystery of Being
Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see that again.
—Overheard by film critic Pauline Kael after a screening of Blue Velvet
David Lynch died five days shy of his seventy-ninth birthday, presumably from complications related to emphysema—he was an inveterate, even joyful, smoker. Inveterate might be the best word I have at the moment to describe Lynch, an artist whose work is redolent of compulsive and perverse urges: a nitrous oxide-huffing gangster kidnaps a lounge singer’s husband and child and then extorts from her fetishized sex (Blue Velvet), a drug-addicted teen is molested and then murdered by her demon-possessed father (Twin Peaks), an industrial-jazz saxophonist wakes from a nightmare to realize that he has murdered his wife who was leading a secret life as a porn actress (Lost Highway).
This is not to say Lynch was essentially a pornographer. No, pornography, as Flannery O’Connor once put it, is “essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purpose.” Lynch’s films and television series (Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return) avoid the pornographic by undermining it. Across his oeuvre, the hard purpose of sex—procreation—is either so aggressively, claustrophobically present (Eraserhead), or so exceedingly distant (Lost Highway), that we slowly begin to understand the sexual perversions of Lynch’s characters in the way that Slavoj Žižek suggests, not as titillating, but as “defense against the Real of death”: inherently sentimental acts of magical and self-delusional thinking.
So while the perversions of Lynch’s characters are ultimately sentimental—an arrival at “a mock state of innocence that strongly suggests its opposite” (as O’Connor defines it)—the work itself is decidedly unsentimental. There is an explicit surface level to all of his work and a latent one: the explicit is melodramatic and soap-operatic, while the latent has an eschatological tinge. The meandering whodunit mystery of who killed Laura Palmer, with its moody theme music, bucolic setting, and quirky characters, slowly reveals itself to be a Gothic, interdimensional, and extraterrestrial psychodrama between the forces of good and evil lurking in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.
As a teenager, I wore my love of David Lynch as a badge of honor. I reveled in the avant-garde style and structural obtuseness that leaves many viewers to struggle and muddle through even the most basic understanding of plot and chronology—a sign of my aesthetic enlightenment. As an adult, while I still admire Lynch and believe him to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, I take seriously the possibility that Lynch is a misogynistic pervert hiding behind a post-modern surrealism. I have wondered whether my attraction to his perverse characters and nightmarish dreamscapes (a.k.a., being a fan) is a sign of corruption. After all, to watch Lynch is to invite disorientation, to willingly fall into his vertiginous plots, and to be carried along by the whorling, seductive current; an experience so intense that we emerge on the other side frightened, changed, but also exhilarated by the feeling of lost innocence.
As I have grown older, it is precisely this abiding exhilaration that causes me to wonder now about the efficacy and substance of such experiences. Is Lynch no more than a purveyor of high-brow kink, or is there something edifying, liberating, even redemptive, in his work?
Long-time The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, in an uncharacteristically glowing review of Blue Velvet, refers to Lynch as a “genius naif,” and praises his lack of “inhibition” when it comes to “his sexual fantasies, and the film’s hypercharged erotic atmosphere,” which, she writes, “makes it something of a trance-out.” Pressed to describe Lynch’s style, she calls it “hypnotic” and dubs it “hallucinatory clinical realism.” In the conclusion of her long review—Kale is notorious for her short, testy, and trenchant reviews—she writes:
The film’s kinkiness isn’t alienating—its naïveté keeps it from that. And its vision isn’t alienating: this is American darkness—darkness in color, darkness with a happy ending. Lynch might turn out to be the first populist surrealist—a Frank Capra of dream logic.
It is astonishing just how prophetic Kael’s words turned out to be. Lynch’s 1990 Wild at Heart, though it contains some of the most menacing and violent scenes in his body of work, ends with a Capra-esque revelation by the impulsive jail-bird Sailor (Nicholas Cage). His 1999 film The Straight Story, which earned a G rating and was distributed by Disney, is a deeply moving and joyful story about brothers reunited. The final episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), though grim and terrifying, also feature a long-awaited and beautiful reunion—the warm and healing balm of reconciliation and reconnection.
But Lynch’s Capra-esque nature—Mel Brooks once described him as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”—could be a shtick, a personal brand and mythos honed on numerous late-night talk show appearances in which he was asked for the umpteenth time about his habit of eating at the same Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Burbank every day. What is left when you strip away the style and Eagle Scout earnestness is his preoccupation with evil and suffering: Why does it exist? How can it be overcome?
This is what Kael misses in her review of Lynch. He is clearly preoccupied with what Gabriel Marcel calls the “problem of evil,” the actual “lived experience” of encountering evil in one’s life, rather than the intellectual pondering of the philosophical question: If God is all-knowing, and all-powerful, then why does he allow evildoers to commit atrocious acts?
“A problem is something which I meet,” Marcel writes in Being and Having, “which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce.” On the other hand, a mystery “is something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is therefore not to be before me in its entirety. It is as though in this province the distinction between in me and before me loses its meaning.”
Indeed, Jeffrey in Blue Velvet and Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, find themselves confronted by mysterious evil men whose deeds give rise to a conflict within them. Jeffrey is forced to confront his own perversions, and Cooper’s investigation into the darkness in the town of Twin Peaks leads him to confront his own dark past.
Lynch’s characters find themselves at existential loose ends, suddenly face to face not just with their own sinfulness, but with their own Being. Marcel writes:
Ours is a being whose concrete essence is to be in every way involved, and therefore to find itself at grips with a fate which it must not only undergo, but must also make its own by somehow re-creating it from within . . . So we see the problem of Being here encroaching upon its own data, and being studied actually inside the subject who states it.
We see this distinction between Marcel’s “problem” and “mystery” explored and elucidated through the unorthodox detective work at the heart of all of Lynch’s work. Again and again, Lynch’s protagonists go in search of the sources of darkness and evil, rather than merely reflecting intellectually upon the issue. It is a search that leads them back to themselves.
In Twin Peaks, Albert Rosenfield, a cynical FBI forensics expert, is converted in his thinking that what they are encountering is your run-of-the-mill serial killer, to believing in the existence of BOB, a malevolent spirit that moves from host to host. In a scene in which all the male law enforcement officers stand in a circle wondering aloud about just what sort of forces they are dealing with, Rosenfeld ultimately, ironically, theorizes that BOB is “the evil that men do.”
This demonic presence is not a “problem” in Marcel’s sense, a spooky plot device for explaining who is ultimately responsible for the death of Laura Palmer. BOB introduces us to the mysterious source of evil in Twin Peaks, and an entire cosmology that revolves around the presence of a White Lodge and a Black Lodge, supernaturally hidden sanctuaries of good and evil spirits that also appear in the dreams of Agent Cooper, whose medium-like abilities allow him access to their secrets. In episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, this cosmology is further demystified as we learn that BOB’s origin can be traced to a man-made source, the first nuclear blast—1945, White Sands, New Mexico.
In the so-called “Church Scene” in Blue Velvet we witness a similar attempted reckoning between problem and mystery, as we see Jeffrey and Sandy struggle to understand the dark vision unfolding before them and in so doing grow closer to one another through their shared concern for the presence of evil in the world. Jeffrey has recently encountered Frank Booth, a dangerously disturbed gangster who has kidnapped the lounge singer Dorothy Vallens’ husband and child. Sitting in Sandy’s car, Jeffrey tells Sandy what he knows of Frank’s plot, and then he blurts out: “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?”
In turn, Sandy shares with him a dream she has:
I had a dream . . . In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren’t any robins and the robins represented love. And for the longest time, there was this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed that love would make any difference, and it did. So, I guess it means that there is trouble until the robins come.
This moment is captured against the vividly backlit stained glass windows of the church across the street, and accompanied by composer Angelo Badalamenti’s ethereal “Mysteries of Love,” the two seem to come to an understanding, a pact that they will go forward into this darkness together.
The town of Lumberton, where they are coming of age, is the epitome of Kael’s American Darkness—a 1980s that looks like the 1950s, a fascinating and disorienting chronotope in which we feel pulled back to the future. Though it is clearly the 80s in terms of the cut of Jeffrey’s hair and his blazer and the single hoop earring he wears in his left ear, the soundtrack is Roy Orbison’s “Candy Colored Clown” and “In Dreams.” Ben (Dean Stockwell), one of the underworld kingpins, wears a paisley smoking jacket.
In this moment, Jeffrey and Sandy are not just characters in a detective mystery, they are also young people in the process of simultaneously becoming aware of the duplicity of the adult world as well as the history of suffering in the world. Even in sleepy Lumberton, there are traces of societies’ collective traumas. The Black employees in Jeffrey’s father’s hardware store regard him with a deference and affection that borders on a Jim Crow-era politeness. The centrality of drug dealing to the plot (Frank and Ben are in cahoots with a corrupt police detective) feels decidedly War on Drugs 80s and foreshadows the cross-border drug trafficking and teenage cocaine use in Twin Peaks.
To complicate the socioemotional milieu of the film further, there is even a call back to the atrocities of Vietnam in a scene where Dorothy (Isabella Rosellini) turns up naked and bloodied at Jeffrey’s house. In interviews with Lynch, he reveals this set piece was based on a childhood memory of a mentally ill neighbor, but also resonates with Nick Ut’s infamous 1972 “Napalm Girl” photo of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc.
The awakening that we are privy to in Jeffrey and Sandy also awakens in the viewer a sense of our participation and complicity within history. In a series of magazine interviews in the early 1990s, Lynch, who had become an overnight critical and commercial success due to the popularity of Twin Peaks, which aired in primetime on ABC in 1989-90, and winning the Palme d’Or for Wild at Heart at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, is often asked to reflect on his own personal politics and his views of the social conditions of the U.S. He remains characteristically obtuse, telling stories and using analogies to describe his perspective. “There was craziness in the air,” Lynch said in a 1992 interview, just weeks after the Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of four police officers accused of beating Black motorist Rodney King,
. . . and people were picking up on it. It’s as if the mind is a top: it starts to spin faster and faster and then, if it starts to wobble, it can go wildly out of control. Everybody feels it. It happens in traffic—people lose their temper. And you can’t even relax at home: the television is sending out more stuff, and it’s just mounting and mounting. It’s like you’re riding in a 747; you have no control if something goes wrong. So people are out of control, and filled with fear.
In another interview from that time, he reflects on the importance of political leadership: “A leader can inspire people overnight if they say the right thing in the right way.” But mostly he just tells stories, the most memorable of which is about a trip to Washington D.C. with a group of Eagle Scouts to witness the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in January of 1961. He was fifteen years old, and what he recalls most is that when the Kennedy motorcade began to emerge from the gates of the White House a Secret Service agent pulled Lynch into rank and file with the other dark-suited agents lining the curb, so that as Kennedy’s limo went by he could see the President beyond the glass, not even five feet away. He goes on to reflect on JFK’s assassination, focusing less on his own feelings and more on his girlfriend, Judy, who was Catholic. She was so distraught that she went to her room for four days and would not come out. “It was known as ‘The Four Dark Days,’” Lynch says—“[Judy] had a bond with this President like you couldn’t believe!”
It is tempting to read into Lynch’s thoughts on politics and this memory, the origins of a character like Agent Dale Cooper, someone who feels a strong sense of duty to justice, law, and order, while also remaining open and compassionate in the face of the sadness, grief, and heartache that follows tragedy. And, while Lynch would be one of the first to say that the artist’s biography has no bearing on how we should interpret their work, we can see in all of Lynch’s work a repeated curiosity about how people respond in the face of traumatic events.
This is where Lynch’s work really begins to take on theological heft. His body of work chronicles a period of history from the mid-1970s to the second decade of the twenty-first century, a half-century that has seen, no matter one’s political alliances or religiosity, an unprecedented level of moral and spiritual decay.
Whereas filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese commanded huge audiences telling audacious and epic stories of American mythology, Lynch remained true to his surrealistic and experimental vision. He offered a vision of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century focused not on anti-heroes, such as Michael Corleone and Travis Bickle, but instead on an odd collection of socially misfit and grotesque heroes who are, as Lynch said of Sailor and Lula in Wild at Heart, “trying to find love in hell.”
Had Lynch lived to see his seventy-ninth birthday, he would have lived to see the second inauguration of President Donald Trump, of whom Lynch said in a 2018 Guardian interview: “He could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much”—a comment that was quickly taken out of context and picked up by Breitbart. Trump himself tweeted: “Trump could go down as one the greatest presidents.”
Lynch, notorious for refusing to explain or elaborate on the meaning or themes of his work, broke his usual silence to post a clarifying statement on his Facebook:
Unfortunately, if you continue as you have been, you will not have a chance to go down in history as a great president. This would be very sad it seems for you—and for the country. You are causing suffering and division.
Writing in The New Yorker later the same month, Dennis Lim pointed out that though Lynch voted for Bernie Sanders and supported Barack Obama, he also owes much inspiration to Ronald Reagan. “There is sin and evil in this world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might,” Reagan declared in what is now known as his “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in March of 1983. The rhetoric of this statement can be heard embedded in Jeffrey’s outburst: “Why is there so much trouble in the world?
More explicit is Lynch’s visual quoting, in the opening of Blue Velvet, of Reagan’s famous “It’s Morning Again in America” ad. The ad, which helped propel Reagan to victory in the 1984 Presidential election, seeks to capture a kind of Whitman-esque breadth of American life, beginning with metropolitan street scenes that slowly dissolve into the tree-lined streets, a paperboy tossing papers from a bike onto the porches of white houses with white picket fences, bordered by rose bushes. Blue Velvet begins with a shot of an impossibly blue sky. The camera slowly pans down to reveal a white picket fence and a red Technicolor rose bush, followed by a shot of a red fire engine gliding in slow-motion down similarly tree-lined streets, lined with white houses and picket fences. The difference here is that Lynch’s camera comes to rest on the Beaumont’s house, and Jeffrey’s father watering the lawn. After several seconds, he grabs his neck and falls to the ground—a stroke. Then, famously, the camera slowly zooms in on the lawn itself, going past the blades of grass—now enormous on the screen—into the dark recesses of the loam where a mass of black beetles roil and click and chitter.
This is not to say that Lynch is a political filmmaker taking aim at conservative family values. He was clear in interviews that he does not see societal problems as a matter of right or left policies. It is to say that Lynch is an artist interested in how people engage with the problems and mysteries of the world and how we cooperate with and/or resist evil. He is interested in how human suffering and loss turns to despair, and how it becomes so deeply internalized that it erupts on the surface in grotesque ways, triggering us, the viewer—pervert-detectives that we now are—to begin our detective work, trying to solve the mystery, diagnose the social disease, so that it may be explained away.
Arguably, it is the human impulse to explain away, to treat mystery as a problem to be solved, that informs Lynch’s storytelling style. Lynch’s films cannot be easily summarized and reduced to moralizing lessons in which good and evil are easy to disentangle.
Johann Baptist Metz’s theological work on the primacy of narrative at the heart of faith and the sacramental power of storytelling bears mentioning here:
History is always a history of suffering . . . even in an age of equal opportunity, an age of being free from social and economic restraints on one’s future. That is to say, there continues to be . . . [a] nihilism eating away at the interior of the creature.
For Metz, the antidote to this nihilism is storytelling. Telling stories that call forth the “dangerous memories” at the heart of human salvation, and not just Christ’s passion, but also historical cataclysms, like Hiroshima, the atrocities of Vietnam, epidemics of drug addiction, and systems that prey upon the vulnerable (Lynch definitely saw Hollywood in this light) moves us to remember, and in remembering we are invited to reflect on the mystery of suffering, the mystery of evil. In doing so, we are being extended a kind of grace.
“Narrative,” Metz writes, “operates on a ‘small-scale,’” and so it is often dismissed and underestimated when really it has the power to “shed light on all the dark pathways in history before one enters them and walks down them.”
Metz’s understanding of the power of storytelling recalls a small, but crucial scene in Lynch’s The Straight Story, in which Alvin stops into a roadside bar. We learn that he has not had a beer in many decades, the implication being that some trauma from the war led to a drinking problem. Alvin proceeds to tell the origin story of a grief that has haunted him for years to a complete stranger, a patron sitting on an adjacent barstool, who, we learn, also served in the war. The way these two men regard and listen to one another is so deeply touching that there is a feeling of confession and absolution. In sharing his tragic war story, Alvin, and the audience, are offered a modicum of grace.
In St. Pope John Paul II’s “Letter to Artists” he is clear that even, and sometimes especially, artists that “explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil . . . give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption.” He continues:
Even beyond its typically religious expressions, true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that, even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience. In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery.
The fruits of David Lynch’s imagination are no doubt dark, oftentimes troubling, and always deeply mysterious. They challenge us to take seriously the roots of the violence we encounter every day, in our personal lives, and on the radios in our cars, and the app notifications on the phones in our pockets, the sum of which hangs over us like a dark cloud affecting our moods, circumscribing our imaginations, limiting our capacity to extend and offer love beyond what feels safe.
“The atmosphere gets stranger,” Lynch said in an interview conducted just after the LA riots:
and you pick up on that. Physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies get affected by it, whether you realize or not. There’s a tension in the air, and it’s not going away: it’s building. And there’s a feeling that you can’t plan for the future. You think more short-term: get it while you can because the way things are going it ain’t gonna be there after a while. So you don’t clean up after yourself. You don’t build things that are beautiful, you just slap something together and it’s like a tent instead of a house. Everything is like junk. There’s no joy to building.
David Lynch leaves us with a body of work that despite its dark surface is actually a bridge to a place where the robins always, eventually, return.