January 30, 2025
by Titus Techera
David Lynch has died at the age of 78. With his death, we have lost the most eccentric of the directors who made their name in the 1980s and 1990s, at the apex of American confidence. The present moment of confusion makes that situation almost unimaginable. But perhaps even more surprising is the post-modern and yet conservative attitude with which Lynch confronted his era. Lynch predicted and dramatized the collapse of the shared American pop culture that triumphed in the mid-20th century America in which he was born and which he loved.
Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, like the great Bronco, John Elway. He grew up there, like the great writer Norman MacLean, who wrote A River Runs Through It and, more topically, Young Men and Fire. It’s a beautiful, all-American place by all accounts, including Lynch’s, yet seems to confront American heroism, even manliness, with the terrible limits of humanity. Although he didn't make Westerns, this confrontation is all over Lynch’s cinema.
Blue Velvet (1986) tells such a story of coming of age, loss of innocence, and the confrontation with evil. Kyle MacLachlan plays a college kid returning to his small hometown—his father had a heart attack, he has to become the man of the house. He falls in love with Laura Dern, a detective’s daughter not yet out of high-school, as they investigate something no one else has noticed. They discover a troubled beauty, Isabella Rossellini, who sings in a nightclub, and a violent madman, Dennis Hopper, who terrorizes everyone.
In Blue Velvet, just a few steps separate placid suburbia from the apartment building where the protagonist loses his innocence and eventually learns to act like a man. Lynch stages a confrontation between the virtues of small-town life and a more sophisticated, yet more criminal world of the city. For a man who loves the '50s, Lynch seems to be suggesting that the most interesting stories are about how it falls apart, since it must exclude so much of human experience.
In Twin Peaks (1990), Lynch orchestrates the confrontation the other way around. MacLachlan, now a very experienced FBI agent, comes from big city America to a small town in the Pacific Northwest. There, he tries to save the somewhat rustic community he quickly falls in love with, or at least to save one girl, Laura Palmer. The evil he gradually comes to face takes on a cosmic character, although it still retains the features of familiar pathologies—drugs, serial killers—and it still starts out in the violent passions of teenagers who live incredibly sheltered lives.
Technology and the occult in Twin Peaks take the place that was held in Blue Velvet by music. Both productions ask similar questions: What really has power over the American mind? Hw rational are we really? Are we as free and independent as we like to think? If we are, why aren’t we happy? If we’re not, why do we think we are?
The questions are serious, but the unique character of Lynch’s movies is their mix of surrealism and earnestness. The former quality is famous. Lynch's name is synonymous with dream-like sequences and mysteries that fans can spend their lives trying to unravel, searching for a meaning that could justify somehow the pleasure we take in the disturbing character of his movies. But the earnestness of his protagonists is much less noticed, perhaps because moral virtue has a bad reputation nowadays. Yet Lynch juxtaposes the two to suggest that America is has become unintelligible to itself and that we must somehow hold on to morality even as we realize that our moral demands are what makes it so difficult for us to recognize reality—which we confuse for surrealist fantasy. Lynch would be better understood as commenting on events or as moralist than as “creative.”
In Lost Highway (1997), the setting is modern L.A. rather than the heartland, and the protagonist (Bill Pullman) is an artist, a hot jazz musician, rather than a man of action. There’s a murder, which is then reinterpreted as a noir story in which the initial protagonist is replaced by a young ‘50s greaser who, like Bob Mitchum in Out Of The Past (1947), is a car mechanic who gets in trouble with a mobster and his treacherous mistress. Nostalgia is still the basis for Lynch’s storytelling, but now it’s more obviously about art or the imagination rather than the reassuring memory of a simpler way of life. Another reversal connects to this problem—in the film's urban setting, evil is somehow tied up with beauty, which is the element of storytelling.
A third movie completes this comparison of the older and newer Americas, the rural and the urban, moral virtue and the dangerous complexity of the arts. Mullholland Drive (2001) offers another crime mystery. A rarity for Lynch, though, the protagonist is female, an aspiring actress who goes mad in L.A. The story strongly recalls Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), a highly-moralizing drama of glamour and corruption in Hollywood that is built around a mediocre aspiring artist. The beautiful but unreliable Bill Holden plays that protagonist and, paradoxically, gets to tell his story to our satisfaction, posthumously. So also Lynch has Naomi Watts, a beautiful blonde, play a nice girl from a small town, who seems neurotic and likes to play the victim. She, too, gets to tell her own story, but cannot make it add up.
Lynch's later movies incorporate, it seems, the confused reaction of the audience to Lynch’s storytelling in the attitude of the protagonists who cannot make sense of the contradiction between their good intentions and the murders they’re involved in. This is one last image of innocence in an America that has generally abandoned that ideal in storytelling. But instead of earnestness reinforced by a healthy community, we get the individualism of the city, in which innocence is nothing but self-pleading. And the evil is not cosmic, out there, but inside people.
Over his career, Lynch seems to have lost his hope for America. Perhaps that is connected to his loss of hope for the power of his art to show America to Americans. Lynch largely gave up film and TV and only made Inland Empire (2006) and the rather grim Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) in the last two decades. Without Lynch, we no longer have articulations of the confrontation with evil, the sacrifice of innocence for the sake of a deeper understanding and decisive action, the goods of individual and community life.
Lynch's work chronicles the trouble we have with putting together the story of America, whether from the point of view of justice or art, whether we look to men or women as protagonists. Lynch was always thinking about America and his celebration of normal American life was patriotic, since it was the proper backdrop for courageous action. He often came up with stories that evoke the strengths of American character, suggesting that we need to look more closely at the ordinary, not to neglect the ugly or terrible things, but that we also need to hold on to our loves. Far from offering surrealism as a fantasy, he wanted to encourage us not to remain trapped in illusions.
Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and hosts the ACF podcasts. He tweets as @titusfilm.