David Lynch Was the Great, Golly-Gee Chronicler of American Darkness
“I love the logic of dreams… Anything can happen and it makes sense.”
—David Lynch
The first thing I thought of were the bugs.
If you’ve seen Blue Velvet, then you remember the opening — and whether you love or hate David Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece of curdled Americana, it’s not a film you’re capable of forgetting. The camera pans down on a white-picket fence, as Bobby Vinton croons his 1963 version title track. The roses dotting the bottom of the frame as so Technicolor red that it hurts your eyes to look at them. A fire truck, complete with a dalmatian on the sideboard, drives by. A crossing guard helps schoolchildren cross the street. A woman in a suburban living room sips coffee and watches a movie on TV. Her husband is watering the yard outside. It’s a picture-perfect day in Smalltown, USA.
Then the man tries to untangle his hose and, without warning, falls to the ground. A dog snaps his jaws at the upward spray as a toddler with a lollipop wanders in from the background. And then the camera begins to go down, down, down into the grass. An unholy chatter fills the soundtrack and what appears to be dozens upon dozens of shiny black bugs squirming and gnashing as each other. They may be beetles, given the slight glare off their carapace, or they may be ants — the latter soon make an appearance skittering across a severed ear. But regardless, these creatures are rummaging around right underneath the placid, straight-outta-the-Eisenhower-era surface. Everything looks swell above ground. What’s happening underground, however, is another story entirely.
Lynch, who passed away at the age 78, loved to trot out a quote that a sound designer gave his mystery involving the boy next door running headfirst into the gas-huffing bogeyman down the street: “It’s like Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymous Bosch.” When he was asked about the film by Chris Rodley in the book-length interview Lynch on Lynch, however, the director gave an even more revealing description: “This is the way America is to me. There is a very innocent, naive quality to life, and there’s a horror and a sickness as well. It’s everything.” That interzone between the two is where Lynch lived his entire professional life: in his paintings and writings, shorts and TV shows, and even his daily online weather reports, which somehow took on both a boyish and a menacing quality. But it’s especially there in his movies, where dreams — a lifelong preoccupation of Lynch’s — could turn into nightmares faster than you could down a damn fine cup of coffee.
Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch grew up all over the United States, thanks to his father’s job in the U.S. Department of agriculture; he spent his formative years in Spokane (Washington), Boise (Idaho), Durham (North Carolina), and Alexandria (Virginia). The director described his childhood as “elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it was supposed to be.” He was an Eagle Scout whose troop was at JFK’s inauguration. When people were asked to describe what it was like to collaborate with Lynch, the first thing they’d usually mention was how traditionally “nice” and “clean-cut” he was. The constant stream of “golly-gees” felt so antiquated, and so dissonant when coming from the guy whose films were suffused in darkness and true deviancy, that they swore it was a put-on. This was really how he spoke. But he was also well-versed in what kind of bugs were wriggling around underneath all that nicety, too.
Having gone to Philadelphia and enrolled in art school on the advice of his good friend and future collaborator Jack Fisk, Lynch had set out to be a painter. He soon found himself gravitating toward film, making a handful of shorts notable for their surrealist, unnerving mood and mix of animation and live-action. He eventually moved to Los Angeles with his wife Peggy and their young daughter, Jennifer; his uneasy feelings about both parenthood and his time in the industrial neighborhoods of Philly, however, would greatly his feature debut. It took close to five years, several grants and a lot of stops and starts to make Eraserhead, a black-and-white parable of a man named Henry — played by longtime Lynch associate Jack Nance — distinguished by his extremely vertical hairdo. Henry has unexpectedly become a dad, and must deal with a screaming, mewling baby that resembles a small skinned animal. (Asked how he created this screen newborn in the book Midnight Movies, Lynch deflected the question, admitting only that “you really don’t want to know.” Considering he later photographed what he called “chicken kits,” i.e actual chickens whose disassembled parts were made to resemble the model airplane kits he made as a kid, we almost assuredly do not want to know.)
Any resemblance to Henry’s unease around his baby and the real-life feelings about fatherhood on the part of the movie’s writer-director were likely not coincidental — you got the sense that no matter how hallucinatory and otherworldly things became, this was a personal transmission from Lynch’s shadow self. Unleashed upon an unsuspecting public in 1977, Eraserhead initially left crowds confused and bewildered. It wasn’t until producer and exhibitor Ben Barenholtz started screening the film around the country at midnight that the movie gained a cult following of freaks and head cases tuned in to its odd, disquieting wavelength. “[It’s] not a movie I’d drop acid for,” claimed the brand new Village Voice reviewer assigned to cover it, a young man named J. Hoberman. “Although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars.”
Somehow, word of the film found its way to Mel Brooks, who screened it and loved it. His production company Brooksfilms was producing The Elephant Man, a biopic about Joseph Merrick (his name would be changed to John in the film), whose deformities due to a genetic disorder made him a 19th century celebrity of sorts. Lynch had said he’d chosen the script according to the title, and Brooks fought to hire him to direct it despite the money folks questioning why the guy who’d made that strange movie was the right fit for this prestige drama. The result earned The Elephant Man eight Oscar nominations, including a Best Director nod for Lynch. He’d now become a bankable commodity in Hollywood, the kind that had both George Lucas and Dino De Laurentiis asking him to helm big-budget sci-fi blockbusters. He chose De Laurentiis’s option, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s bullet-stopper of a novel Dune. It would nearly derail his burgeoning career and break the director in two.
Lynch’s version of an interstellar messiah finding his mojo has undergone a massive critical re-evaluation in the last decade or so, but at the time it came close to permanently landing him in director’s jail. He still owed De Laurentiis another project, however, so he began working on the script based off a vision he claims to have had one night. “I didn’t like the song ‘Blue Velvet,’” Lynch said in his 2018 hybrid biography/memoir Room to Dream. “Then I heard it one night and it married with green lawns at night and a woman’s red lips seen through a car window — there was some kind of bright light hitting this white face and red lips.”
Blue Velvet may be the defining movie of the Reagan era circa 1986 — a throwback to a bygone age that violently punctures the shining-city-on-a-hill myth and asks that we turn our attention to the candy-colored sandmen doing unspeakable things behind closed doors. It’s where the term “Lynchian” was born as a descriptive for his particular blend of surrealism, irony, deadpan humor and dead-serious horror. The adjective defined all of his work afterward, whether it was in comparison to that sensibility or in contrast to it. (The most shocking film Lynch ever made by a country mile is still The Straight Story, his 1999 Disney film about an elderly man who takes a cross-country trip on a lawnmower to visit his estranged brother, simply because he plays it completely straight.) And if his follow-up, the warped Wizard of Oz homage Wild at Heart (1990), initially suggested that Lynchian was an acquired taste, his other project that year soon proved that the mainstream was primed to receive a small-screen version of his signature storytelling style.
It’s tough to sum up both how radical and how popular Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks was when it hits the airwaves at the beginning of the 1990s, or how quickly its oft-cited “Peyton Place on acid” vibe and eccentric characters became part of the everyday vernacular. Lynch was on the cover of Time Magazine, and everybody wanted a piece of the cherry pie. It famously tanked during its second season, but by then, Lynch and Frost had revealed that this template for future dead-girl procedurals was really a story of abuse. Another perfect suburban facade, another saucer full of secrets being messily slurped in the shadows. A 1992 prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, leaned into the familial trauma aspect even heavier — again, audiences at the time recoiled and again, the movie became recognized as rough gem years later — and by the time Lynch finally returned to Twin Peaks with Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, he dosed the nostalgia with even stronger, more lysergic narcotics. Its eighth episode, in which the root of modern evil is traced back to the Atomic Age’s big bang, remains one of the most harrowing things to ever air on premium cable.
Lynch would keep dumping his patented nightmare sauce into the collective water supply, giving us good films like Lost Highway(1996); great films like Mulholland Drive (2001), which started life as an aborted TV series and may well be the one true Los-Angeles-Eats-Itself masterpiece of the 21st century; and inscrutable whatsits like Inland Empire (2006). He had forsaken film for digital video before it became standard operating procedure, less out of industry standards and more out of artistic ones — video better resembled the visual texture of his dreams. He’d played a recurring character in Twin Peaks, the nearly deaf FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole, and would continue to do the occasional turn in front of the camera in everything from Louie to Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans, playing no less than John Ford. (The idea to cast him as The Searchers auteur apparently came from film historian Mark Harris, whose husband Tony Kushner had written the screenplay.)
There were documentaries like Lynch (One), which followed him around as he directed Inland Empire — you can catch it on the Criterion Channel — and David Lynch: The Art Life, which let you ride shotgun as he puttered around his studio in the Hollywood Hills. He continued to paint, write and maintain a dedicated online presence. Occasionally, there would be rumors and rumblings of something new on the horizon. When John Mulaney was doing his meta-talk-show Everybody’s in L.A. last year, he mentioned that he invited Lynch on as a guest. The filmmaker turned the offer down, saying that “I am working right now and need to keep my eye on the donut.” In a cover story in Sight & Sound last September, the lifelong smoker revealed that he had emphysema, but had no plans to retire. Fans held out hope that we’d at least get one more Lynch film, one more TV show, one more series of WTF shorts.
Now David Lynch is gone, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work that charts the New, Weird America he witnessed firsthand, and at the very moment that the bugs lurking beneath the manicured lawns of our nation are working their way above ground en masse. He was the great, golly-gee chronicler of American darkness. But first and foremost, he was a true artist who followed his singular muse past the barriers of imagination and rational thought. “The art spirit sort of became the art life,” he admitted in a 2016 documentary, “and I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it…. Basically it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.” Mission accomplished.