Another one of my heroes dead. https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...aks-and-muholland-drive-director-dies-aged-78 David Lynch, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive director, dies aged 78 Film-maker who specialised in surreal, noir style mysteries made a string of influential, critically acclaimed works including Wild at Heart and Eraserhead Andrew Pulver David Lynch, the maverick American director who sustained a successful mainstream career while also probing the bizarre, the radical and the experimental, has died aged 78. “It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” read a Facebook post. “We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.” It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.” Last August, Lynch said he had been diagnosed with emphysema and in November, spoke further about his breathing difficulties. “I can hardly walk across a room,” he said. “It’s like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head.” Deadline reported that sources had said Lynch’s health took a turn for the worse after he had to evacuate from his home due to the Los Angeles wildfires. Naomi Watts and David Lynch on the set of Mulholland Drive. Lynch ploughed a highly idiosyncratic furrow in American cinema: from his beginnings as an art student making experimental short films, to the cult success of his surreal first feature Eraserhead, and on to a string of award-winning films including Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive, as well as the landmark TV show Twin Peaks. He received three best director Oscar nominations (for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive), and was given an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2019; he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival for Wild at Heart in 1990. Lynch also avidly practiced transcendental meditation, setting up the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005; he also produced paintings, released albums (including collaborations with Julee Cruise, Lykke Li and Karen O), created a long-running YouTube weather report and opened a nightclub in Paris in 2011. In 2018 he explained his reclusive lifestyle to the Guardian: “I like to make movies. I like to work. I don’t really like to go out.” In 2024 he revealed his lifetime cigarette habit had resulted in debilitating emphysema. Isabella Rossellini and producer David Lynch on the set of Zelly and Me. Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch went to art college in the 1960s and made his first experimental short, Six Men Getting Sick, while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1971 and studied film-making at the AFI Conservatory, where he began filming his first feature Eraserhead. Finally finishing it in 1976, the surreal black-and-white fable was received largely with bafflement, and rejected from most film festivals, but in the late 70s became something of a success on the late-night “midnight movie” circuit. Eraserhead’s impact led to an offer from Mel Brooks’ production company to direct The Elephant Man; starring John Hurt in a biopic of Joseph Merrick, the film about the disfigured 19th-century man was nominated for eight Oscars and secured Lynch’s Hollywood status. After turning down an offer to direct Return of the Jedi, Lynch agreed to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel Dune, but the film was substantially recut in postproduction and proved a commercial and critical disaster. Instead of a planned Dune sequel, Lynch decided to make a more personal film: his dark noir thriller Blue Velvet was a cult hit and a hugely influential critical success on its release in 1986, and it resulted in Lynch’s second best director Oscar nomination. David Lynch at Cannes film festival, 2002. Lynch then embarked on another noirish project, the opaque and surreal murder-mystery Twin Peaks that – unusually for notable film directors of the period – was envisioned as a TV series; Lynch developed it with former Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost. A mix of small town comedy, police procedural and surreal dreamworld, and described as “the most hauntingly original work ever done for American TV”, Twin Peaks defied early predictions of failure on its broadcast in 1990; as a pioneer of “high-end TV” it is arguably Lynch’s most influential work. A second series was broadcast later in 1990, a feature film prequel Fire Walk With Me was released in 1992, and a third series launched more than a quarter of a century later in 2017. As Twin Peaks went into production, Lynch began working on a feature film adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart, and cast Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern in the lead roles in a violent, haunting road movie with echoes of The Wizard of Oz. Wild at Heart premiered at Cannes in 1990 and won the Palme d’Or. In 1997 Lynch began to edge back to his avant garde roots with Lost Highway, a surreal thriller starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette, which flopped at the box office. In complete contrast Lynch released The Straight Story in 1999, a bluntly straightforward story about an elderly man (played by Richard Farnsworth) who drives 240 miles across the country on a motorised lawnmower. Dean Stockwell, Francesca Annis and David Lynch on the set of Dune. Lynch then embarked on another highly successful project: Mulholland Drive. Initially it appeared to go disastrously wrong, as Lynch had pitched it as a Twin Peaks-style TV series. A pilot was shot and then cancelled by TV network ABC. But the material was picked up by French company StudioCanal, who gave him the money to refashion it as a feature film. A noir-style mystery drama, it was another big critical success, secured Lynch a third best director Oscar nomination and in 2016 was voted the best film of the 21st century. Lynch followed it in 2006 with the three-hour surreal thriller Inland Empire, shot on video and starring Dern as an American movie star who appears to mysteriously transport into the Polish original of a film she is working on. Thereafter Lynch appeared to step back from feature films, with only the third series of Twin Peaks in 2017 representing a big film-making project, although reports suggest he had been working on a series for Netflix. Lynch took acting roles in other people’s work, most notably as Gus the Bartender in Seth MacFarlane’s The Cleveland Show, and as legendary director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s loosely autobiographical 2022 movie The Fabelmans. Lynch was married four times and had a long-term relationship with his Blue Velvet star Isabella Rossellini. https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...urrealist-who-made-experimentalism-mainstream David Lynch: the great American surrealist who made experimentalism mainstream Peter Bradshaw From disturbing debut Eraserhead to his masterpiece Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s dark tales combined radical experiment with everyday Americana David Lynch. It could be the title of any of his films. Lynch saw that if the US dreamed of safety and prosperity and the suburban drive and the picket fence, it also dreamed of the opposite: of escape, danger, adventure, sex and death. And the two collided and opened up chasms and sinkholes in the lost highway to happiness. Lynch was a film-maker who found portals to alternative existences and truffled in them like they were erogenous zones, moist orifices of existential possibility. He was the great American surrealist, but his vision was so distinctive that he became something other than that: a great fabulist, a great anti-narrative dissenter, his storylines splitting and swirling in non sequiturs and Escher loops. Lynch was unique, in that he took a tradition of experimentalism in movies such as Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon and brought it into the commercial mainstream, mixing it with pulp noir, soap opera, camp comedy, erotic thriller and supernatural horror. Freakish but conventionally plotted … Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt in The Elephant Man. Who did Lynch most resemble? Maybe Luis Buñuel from the pioneering 1920s, Douglas Sirk from the Hollywood 1940s, Alejandro Jodorowsky from the counterculture 1970s. Or maybe Edward Hopper (whose painting Office at Night has something Lynchian to it) or Andrew Wyeth and his mysterious midwest tableau Christina’s World. But “Lynchian” could as well mean mainstream or even conservative. Lynch himself was not joking when he talked about his pride at being an Eagle scout in his boyhood. And he could direct conventionally plotted (if generically freaky) films such as The Elephant Man, with John Hurt as the exploited Victorian fairground attraction, and his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s SF standard Dune – and even the emotional and gentle The Straight Story (whose title concedes its outlying quality), based on the true story of an old man who drove his lawn tractor from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his estranged brother. Lynch was always passionate about Americana, and Steven Spielberg shrewdly cast Lynch as the western movie legend John Ford in his film The Fabelmans. Yet with films such as his disturbing, sepulchral debut Eraserhead and (what for me is his masterpiece) Mulholland Drive, a dark fantasia of Hollywood despair, he showed that the challenge to normality was itself erotic. He underlined it with the throbbing and groaning sound design and inspired musical scores from his longtime collaborator, composer Angelo Badalamenti. I will always remember milling around with everyone at the Cannes film festival after the first showing of Mulholland Drive in 2001, all of us dizzy and jittery with how very sensual and strange it had been, how witty and how erotic. Dark … Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet. Perhaps most remarkably of all, Lynch’s ongoing smallscreen project Twin Peaks anticipated by decades today’s cultural prestige of streaming longform television. And in fact none of today’s Sopranos and Mad Men match Twin Peaks for auteur television. Watch the first two seasons of Twin Peaks from the 90s, the story of a straight-arrow FBI man (played by Kyle MacLachlan) investigating the metaphysical mystery of a violent murder, and see how the second ends with a promise to pick up the story in 25 years’ time – and it actually did. The brightly lit, theatrically soapy look of 90s TV drama was replaced in the third season by the darker, gloomier look of 21st-century high-class TV production. But it was Lynch, through and through. “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top!” wails Laura Dern’s distraught Lula in Lynch’s Wild at Heart, anguished in her wretched motel bedroom, pregnant with her lover’s child – that is, the convicted killer Sailor, a Presleyesque figure played by Nicolas Cage. It’s actually not quite a description of the world as Lynch sees it. In the macabre Blue Velvet from 1986, the world is normal on top, weird underneath, but these layers can’t exist without each other. A clean-cut guy played by MacLachlan, walking home in a suburban American utopia, finds a severed ear on the ground: a symbol, perhaps, of the director’s own hypersensitive perception of underground stirrings and the hidden America. Soon this man is to conceive an obsession with a nightclub singer: part of Lynch’s own longstanding obsession with secret cabarets and occult theatrical rituals, and his particular rapture for the red curtain, rippling and stirring with the mystery it conceals. A Freudian image, yes, but maybe Lynchian is the superseding adjective. Eroticism and despair … Mulholland Drive. Lost Highway, in 1997, was one of his doppelganger hallucinations, in which Bill Pullman’s troubled sax player and his wife (Patricia Arquette) are terrified by an anonymous tormentor who leaves video cassettes on their doorstep with footage of the outside of their house – an idea later borrowed by Michael Haneke in his movie Hidden. But for me Mulholland Drive is his masterpiece of eroticism and despair, a brilliant riff on how in Hollywood disillusion is a toxic-waste byproduct of the dream factory. The relationship of Naomi Watts’s saucer-eyed ingénue and Laura Harring’s enigmatic troubled woman is one of the great fraught friendships of modern American cinema. I myself met Lynch only once, and that was online: a video-linked Q&A for the unveiling of his photographs at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. One of the questioners was someone who had been a walk-on in The Elephant Man and Lynch was instantly hugely excited and insisted on her being brought up to the platform so that he could see her face; he could hardly be persuaded not to simply make the rest of the evening his reminiscences with her. Lynch was always plotting ways to smuggle his audience into new territories of fear, desire and pleasure.
The master at work, in one minute flat. He will be greatly missed. "Premonitions Following An Evil Deed" - David Lynch (1995). I think this is a fitting tribute. Part of the film "Lumiere and Company".For the 100 year anniversary of the Lumiere camera, forty directors made one minute film segments using an original restored Lumiere camera. The ground rules were rigidly enforced: a continuous shot to be captured in a maximum of three attempts, no artificial light sources, no sync sound, and that this shot last a maximum of 55 seconds (the length of one reel of film for the camera). Lynch's short cost around $6000 to film and involved several different location changes. He skirted the rules by using his allowed three takes to close the shutter on the camera and move to a different set, thus creating the appearance of five different locations edited together.
His last interview: https://people.com/david-lynch-smoking-at-age-8-now-he-needs-oxygen-copd-exclusive-8743594 David Lynch Started Smoking at Age 8 — Now He Needs Oxygen to Walk: 'It's a Big Price to Pay' (Exclusive) Two years after the "Twin Peaks" director, 78, was diagnosed with emphysema, he finally stopped smoking — and now he's urging others to quit too Eileen Finan Try Googling “David Lynch” and you’ll likely come upon photo after photo of the Academy Award-winning director with a cigarette in hand. For most of Lynch’s life, that’s exactly the image he wanted to portray. “A big important part of my life was smoking,” says Lynch, 78. “I loved the smell of tobacco, the taste of tobacco. I loved lighting cigarettes. It was part of being a painter and a filmmaker for me.” But, he admits, “what you sow is what you reap.” Four years ago, the Mulholland Drive director was diagnosed with emphysema, a chronic lung condition that causes shortness of breath and which is a type of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD. David Lynch on the set of the 2001 film Mulholland Drive with Naomi Watts. Today he relies on supplemental oxygen for anything more strenuous than a walk across the room — and he wants to warn other smokers that the same could happen to them. “In the back of every smoker’s mind is the fact that it’s healthy, so you’re literally playing with fire,” he says. “It can bite you. I took a chance, and I got bit.” Lynch’s habit was almost literally lifelong. A native of Montana whose father was a forestry research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, Lynch grew up in rural Idaho and Washington and began smoking at the age of 8. By the time Lynch released his first indie film, the nightmarish Eraserhead in 1977, smoking was part of his brooding art-house persona. And cigarettes were an indelible part of his onscreen oeuvre. From 1986’s Blue Velvet to his groundbreaking ’90s TV series Twin Peaks and its 2017 revival, smoking was intertwined with Lynchian characters and his dreamlike cinematography. Sherilyn Fenn and Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch's '90s cult classic 'Twin Peaks'. Over the years Lynch tried to quit “many, many times, but when it got tough, I’d have that first cigarette, and it was a one-way trip to heaven,” here calls. “Then you’re back smoking again.” In 2020, Lynch was diagnosed with emphysema, but even that alarming news wasn’t enough to get him to stop. It took two more years before he finally gave it up. “I saw the writing on the wall. and it said, ‘You’re going to die in a week if you don’t stop,’” says Lynch, who has four children, including a 12-year-old daughter, Lula (he’s currently in the midst of a divorce from his fourth wife, Emily Stofle). “I could hardly move without gasping for air. Quitting was my only choice.” He says his long-time practice of transcendental meditation helped him quit (he meditates twice a day every day and started a foundation dedicated to the practice) and keeps him optimistic. “I have a positive attitude focused on the body healing itself,” Lynch says. But, he admits, “it’s tough living with emphysema. I can hardly walk across a room. It’s like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head.” The disease, which makes him more vulnerable to other respiratory illnesses, keeps him essentially homebound. “I never really liked going out before so it’s a nice excuse,” he jokes. And it’s also kept him from doing one of his favorite things: “I love being on set,” he says. “I love being right there, able to whisper to people.” But he’s also open to trying to direct remotely in the future. Lynch on the set of 'Blue Velvet' with Laura Dern in 1986. David Lynch, 78, Is 'Homebound' After Emphysema Diagnosis, Says He Would Have to Direct Films 'Remotely' Although the consequences of smoking have been a “big price to pay,” Lynch says, “I don’t regret it. It was important to me. I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.” And he insists he wouldn’t change a thing about including cigarettes so frequently in his work. “I never thought about it as glamorizing it,” he says. “It was a part of life. Some characters would be smokers, just like in real life.” But he says he hopes his own experience will be something of a morality tale for other smokers.“I really wanted to get this across: Think about it. You can quit these things that are going to end up killing you,” he says. “I owe it to them — and to myself — to say that.” COPD: The Facts COPD includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis and is a progressive, incurable disease More than 11 million people live with COPD in the U.S Smokers are seven times more likely to develop COPD than never-smokers COPD sufferers have a higher risk of pneumonia and flu complications Source: American Lung Association
Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the most profound audio/visual experiences I have ever encountered. I've only watched it once and I am still in a sense of complete bewilderment which, I'm sure, repeated viewings will not diminish. Not many have been able to conjue up an experience like that. He could also do something completely conventional too, such as in the very touching The Straight Story.
Is that the one with 2 people on the sofa and then something wierd starts happening in that vase like structure ?? That was bloody wierd.....
I've just heard this news now. Omg. A total legend in television drama and a force in screenings. Twin Peaks was one of my favourite shows growing up. Lynch was a master of mystery his direction was second to none. RIP - a legend of stage and screen. xxx
His work was not generally to my taste (although The Elephant Man was brilliantly directed) but I can appreciate his creativity and outstanding talent. In a time dominated by remakes and franchises his uniqueness will be missed.
Episode 8 was how evil was created involving the atomic bomb, some male and female components, framed by a homeless guy, who is even now stopped in the street and asked "Gotta Light?".
Lost Highway was criminally underrated, a Film Noir of doppelgangers, a mysterious creepy, spectre-like messenger, straddling parallel worlds, and a recurring nightmare. Oh yeah, and the final feature film performance of Richard Pryor. I originally watched this on Laser Disc and eventually got to see it on the big screen during a special matinee screening in the Cambridge Arts Cinema with Intro by some Theatre Thesp in the late 90s.
From B3ta: "IMAGE CHALLENGE David Lynch The director of the pregnancy test commercial 'Clear Blue Easy' died and you played tribute in the only way you know fit: by f*cking with his more iconic moments, not from that advert, using Paint Shop Pro." https://b3ta.com/challenge/davidlynch/
BBC 4 are repeating Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man this evening. Also, David Lynch Scene By Scene from 1999 is on at 9pm with the films following on after: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027xkd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00283l0 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hrgj
Hopper's performance in Blue Velvet was really something else. Thinking about it probably the most unsettling character I can remember and certainly anincredibly powerful bit of acting. Was he still on the sauce at that time or was he sober by then?
Just watched Blue Velvet on iplayer, it’s got a regular story to it compared to films like Lost Highway. I thought it was awesome. Dennis Hopper plays an excellent part as one of the baddies. I LOVED the soundtrack to Lost Highway. Trent Reznor, Rammstein, Bowie etc Twin Peaks was something a lot of my friends at school watched, Fire Walk With Me is one of my favorite films. The clip with Bowie in the police station is a complete headfuk. His music was quite very Avante Garde. Quality
Seeing this on the big screen when it first came out was actually very unsettling birdering on the terrifying. When coaching/discussing Hopper through the scene, Lynch was very reluctant to utter the swear words he had written in the script. Hopper found it amusing. This was a big comeback for Hopper as he'd been in the drink/drugs addiction backwaters for quite a while.
Ha. Look what I've found!!!!! Posted in respects of the late David Lynch (1946–2025). All of Lynch's feature-length content. https://archive.org/details/filmography-david-lynch Q2 is famous in the Fanedit community for his fantastic David Lynch film extended cuts. All the deleted scenes seamlessly edited back in to the main feature. These are both fantastic. Highly recommended. https://archive.org/details/blue-velvet-q-2-extended https://archive.org/details/twin-pe...e-last-seven-days-of-laura-palmer-2014-hd-raw I'm also a big fan of Lost Highway, it's definitely worth tracking down the Soundtrack. Ah, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjDvaXwceFJToZgUXb3o-DWYfAVrfwAKR
I haven't watched it for years but I'm going to try and find it and see it this weekend to see if Hopper has a similarly chilling impact as I remember
From the sub-reddit, r/twinpeaks: David Foster Wallace wrote an essay on how Lynch treats the subject of evil. The essay touches on Twin Peaks Discussion/Theory David Foster Wallace was a huge David Lynch fan and I found this excerpt from his essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head" very insightful. The original version of this essay appeared in Entertainment Weekly, but that version didn't include this section. The full version can be found in a collection of Wallace's essays entitled "A supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." Towards the end of this excerpt Wallace specifically talks about Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me; these insights definitely apply to The Return, and I wish he was still alive to give his thoughts on it. I'd recommend reading the whole essay, but this was my favorite part. The Theme of Evil in the films of David Lynch One reason it’s sort of heroic to be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don’t like your art to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist. A fair number of critics object to David Lynch’s movies on the grounds that they are “sick” or “dirty” or “infantile,” then proceed to claim that the movies are themselves revelatory of various deficiencies in Lynch’s own character, troubles that range from developmental arrest to misogyny to sadism. It’s not just the fact that twisted people do hideous things to one another in Lynch’s films, these critics will argue, but rather the “moral attitude” implied by the way Lynch’s camera records hideous behavior. In a way, his detractors have a point. Moral atrocities in Lynch movies are never staged to elicit outrage or even disapproval. The directorial attitude when hideousness occurs seems to range between clinical neutrality and an almost voyeuristic ogling. It’s not an accident that Frank Booth, Bobby Peru, and Leland /”Bob” steal the show in Lynch’s last three films, that there is almost a tropism about our pull toward these characters, because Lynch’s camera is obsessed with them, loves them; they are his movies’ heart. The claim, though, that because Lynch’s movies pass no overt “judgment” on hideousness/evil/sickness and in fact make the stuff riveting to watch, the movies are themselves a- or immoral, even evil—this is bullsh1t of the rankest vintage, and not just because it’s sloppy logic but because it’s symptomatic of the impoverished moral assumptions we seem now to bring to the movies we watch. I’m going to claim that evil is what David Lynch’s movies are essentially about, and that Lynch’s explorations of human beings’ various relationships to evil are, if idiosyncratic and Expressionistic, nevertheless sensitive and insightful and true. I’m going to submit that the real “moral problem” a lot of us cinéastes have with Lynch is that we find his truths morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort is used to set up some kind of commercial catharsis—the retribution, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood heroine, etc.—i.e. unless the discomfort serves a conclusion that flatters the same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.) The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and “the Well-Dressed Man.” How Eraserhead's whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil… yet how it’s “poor” Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV’s Twin Peaks and cinema’s Fire Walk with Me, “Bob” is also Leland Palmer, how they are, “spiritually,” both two and one. The Elephant Man’s sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treeves—and Lynch very carefully has Treeves admit this aloud. And if Wild at Heart’s coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically the same thing, i.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them. This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopper’s exultant “I’LL F*CK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it’s devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of Bob’s look of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired: they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from. Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are—at least potentially—everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time—not “lurking below” or “lying in wait” or “hovering on the horizon”: evil is here, right now. And so are Light, love, redemption (since these phenomena are also, in Lynch’s work, forces and spirits), etc. In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in isolation from its opposite. It’s not just that evil is “implied by” good or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff, encoded in it. You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or neo-Hegelian, but it’s also Lynchian, because what Lynch’s movies are all about is creating a narrative space where this idea can be worked out in its fullest detail and to its most uncomfortable consequences. And Lynch pays a heavy price—both critically and financially—for trying to explore worlds like this. Because we Americans like our art’s moral world to be cleanly limned and clearly demarcated, neat and tidy. In many respects it seems we need our art to be morally comfortable, and the intellectual gymnastics we’ll go through to extract a black-and-white ethics from a piece of art we like are shocking if you stop and look closely at them. For example, the supposed ethical structure Lynch is most applauded for is the “Seamy Underside” structure, the idea that dark forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green lawns and PTA potlucks of Anytown, USA. American critics who like Lynch applaud his “genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath” and his movies for providing “the password to an inner sanctum of horror and desire” and “evocations of the malevolent forces at work beneath nostalgic constructs.” It’s little wonder that Lynch gets accused of voyeurism: critics have to make Lynch a voyeur in order to approve something like Blue Velvet from within a conventional moral framework that has Good on top/outside and Evil below/within. The fact is that critics grotesquely misread Lynch when they see this idea of perversity “beneath” and horror “hidden” as central to his movies’ moral structure. Interpreting Blue Velvet, for example, as a film centrally concerned with “a boy discovering corruption in the heart of a town” is about as obtuse as looking at the robin perched on the Beaumonts’ window-sill at the movie’s end and ignoring the writhing beetle the robin’s got in its beak. The fact is that Blue Velvet is basically a coming-of-age movie, and, while the brutal rape Jeffrey watches from Dorothy’s closet might be the movie’s most horrifying scene, the real horror in the movie surrounds discoveries that Jeffrey makes about himself—for example, the discovery that a part of him is excited by what he sees Frank Booth do to Dorothy Vallens. Frank’s use, during the rape, of the words “Mommy” and “Daddy,” the similarity between the gas mask Frank breathes through in extremis and the oxygen mask we’ve just seen Jeffrey’s dad wearing in the hospital—this kind of stuff isn’t there just to reinforce the Primal Scene aspect of the rape. The stuff’s also there clearly to suggest that Frank Booth is, in a certain deep way, Jeffrey’s “father,” that the Darkness inside Frank is also encoded in Jeffrey. Gee-whiz Jeffrey’s discovery not of dark Frank but of his own dark affinities with Frank is the engine of the movie’s anxiety. Note for example that the long and somewhat heavy angst-dream Jeffrey suffers in the second act occurs not after he has watched Frank brutalize Dorothy but after he, Jeffrey, has consented to hit Dorothy during sex. There are enough heavy clues like this to set up, for any marginally attentive viewer, what is Blue Velvet’s real climax, and its point. The climax comes unusually early, near the end of the film’s second act. It’s the moment when Frank turns around to look at Jeffrey in the back seat of the car and says “You’re like me.” This moment is shot from Jeffrey’s visual perspective, so that when Frank turns around in the seat he speaks both to Jeffrey and to us. And here Jeffrey—who’s whacked Dorothy and liked it—is made exceedingly uncomfortable indeed; and so—if we recall that we too peeked through those closet-vents at Frank’s feast of sexual fascism, and regarded, with critics, this scene as the film’s most riveting—are we. When Frank says “You’re like me,” Jeffrey’s response is to lunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose—a brutally primal response that seems rather more typical of Frank than of Jeffrey, notice. In the film’s audience, I, to whom Frank has also just claimed kinship, have no such luxury of violent release; I pretty much just have to sit there and be uncomfortable. And I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go to see a movie. I like my heroes virtuous and my victims pathetic and my villains’ villainy clearly established and primly disapproved by both plot and camera. When I go to movies that have various kinds of hideousness in them, I like to have my own fundamental difference from sadists and fascists and voyeurs and psychos and Bad People unambiguously confirmed and assured by those movies. I like to judge. I like to be allowed to root for Justice To Be Done without the slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either. I don't know whether you are like me in these regards or not… though from the characterizations and moral structures in the U.S. movies that do well at the box-office I deduce that there must be rather a lot of Americans who are exactly like me. I submit that we also, as an audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and exposed. We like this stuff because secrets’ exposure in a movie creates in us impressions of epistemological privilege, of “penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath.” This isn’t surprising: knowledge is power, and we (I, anyway) like to feel powerful. But we also like the idea of “secrets,” “of malevolent forces at work beneath…” so much because we like to see confirmed our fervent hope that most bad and seamy stuff really is secret, “locked away” or “under the surface.” We hope fervently that this is so because we need to be able to believe that our own hideousnesses and Darknesses are secret. Otherwise we get uncomfortable. And, as part of an audience, if a movie is structured in such a way that the distinction between surface/Light/good and secret/Dark/evil is messed with—in other words, not a structure whereby Dark Secrets are winched ex machina up to the Lit Surface to be purified by my judgment, but rather a structure in which Respectable Surfaces and Seamy Undersides are mingled, integrated, literally mixed up—I am going to be made acutely uncomfortable. And in response to my discomfort I’m going to do one of two things: I’m either going to find some way to punish the movie for making me uncomfortable, or I’m going to find a way to interpret the movie that eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible. From my survey of published work on Lynch’s films, I can assure you that just about every established professional reviewer and critic has chosen one or the other of these responses. I know this all looks kind of abstract and general. Consider the specific example of Twin Peaks’s career. Its basic structure was the good old murder-whose-investigation-opens-a-can-of-worms formula that’s right out of Noir 101—the search for Laura Palmer’s killer yields postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer = Homecoming Queen by Day & Laura Palmer = Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that mirrored a whole town’s moral schizophrenia. The show’s first season, in which the plot movement consisted mostly of more and more subsurface hideousnesses being uncovered and exposed, was a huge smash. By the second season, though, the mystery-and-investigation structure’s own logic began to compel the show to start getting more focused and explicit about who or what was actually responsible for Laura’s murder. And the more explicit Twin Peaks tried to get, the less popular the series became. The mystery’s final “resolution,” in particular, was felt by critics and audiences alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was. The “Bob”/Leland/Evil Owl stuff was fuzzy and not very well rendered, but the really deep dissatisfaction—the one that made audiences feel screwed and betrayed and fueled the critical backlash against the idea of Lynch as Genius Auteur— was, I submit, a moral one. I submit that Laura Palmer’s exhaustively revealed “sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to those sins. We as an audience have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these certainties need to be affirmed and massaged. When they were not, and as it became increasingly clear that they were not going to be, Twin Peaks’s ratings fell off the shelf, and critics began to bemoan this once “daring” and “imaginative” series’ decline into “self-reference” and “mannered incoherence.” And then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch’s theatrical “prequel” to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since Dune, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura’s existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid black/white construct—Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie, in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas—plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter—as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura was no longer “an enigma” or “the password to an inner sanctum of horror.” She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers. This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do—maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological context of the series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie—and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying. The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of Fire Walk with Me, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: “We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and f*cked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it’s hard to know whether it’s terrible or a tour de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready:] or both.” Or both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both “good” and “bad,” and yet also neither: she’s complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this “both” sh1t. “Both” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate, that's what we criticized Fire Walk with Me’s Laura for. But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours’ f*cking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself—this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we’re going to feel, in Premiere magazine’s own head editor’s word, “Betrayed.” More discussion about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/196159r/what_do_people_see_in_lynchs_blue_velvet/