They don’t make them like David Lynch anymore

There is a scene in Twin Peaks pilot that starts with the normal, monotonous and boring rhythm of everyday life. We are in a high school where a student smuggles a cigarette, a boy is called to the principal, and attendance is checked in class. But then a policeman enters the classroom and whispers to the teacher. Suddenly, a scream is heard and a student is seen running through the courtyard outside the window. The teacher holds back tears. There will be an announcement. And then David Lynch points the camera at an empty seat in the middle of the classroom, and two students, looking at each other across the room, suddenly realize that their friend Laura Palmer is dead.

Lynch has always been good at capturing the superficial details of life, but that’s because in his work he couldn’t help but isolate those details – according to Lynch, there was always, just always, something lurking beneath the surface that was just not right.

In many ways, this moment in Twin Peaks is David Lynch’s definitive scene because of how simply and subtly it sets the thematic contours of his career. But on the other hand, it’s also a lot NO David Lynch’s ultimate cameo because he had so many moments for fans to point to over his 40-plus years of work in film, television and art. Ask any Lynch fan who drinks coffee, watches weather reports, and carries cards, and you’ll likely get a very different answer on this matter.

And that’s the crux of what is one of the hardest things to accept his departure for us, the fans. Here is an artist with such a unique voice, whose appeal to everyone lies in a different place.

There are few people who can claim to deserve a completely new adjective. Everyone has their own style, their own trademarks, and there is no shortage of films described as “Spielbergian” or “Scorsese”, but this misses the point. They always describe something specific, such as lighting or a theme. But there is also a word “Kafkaesque” that can be applied to almost anything that is truly unpleasant and confusing. It’s a broader concept than the specifics of the work that coined it, and it’s to this exclusive club that “Lynchian” belongs.

If you can’t quite figure out what’s wrong, it might as well be Lynchian. It is this unnerving, dream-like quality that has made David Lynch a legend, and his status as such is unlikely to change.

Watching a classic Lynch movie at midnight Erasing head was something of a rite of passage when we were budding movie buffs, although none of us knew that decades later his teenage son would be partaking in the same rite (with his dad right next to him). But it wasn’t just because I (Scott) was telling the kid he had to watch Lynch stuff. No, one day a kid and his girlfriend just started bingeing Twin Peaks on their own accord. (At this point they were in the Windom Earle era of Season 2, God bless.)

There was just always something about this guy’s work that made them timeless in a strange way – perhaps the term “weird” applied here. How else to explain than when Twin Peaks: The Return finally happened in 2017, Lynch decided to give the little kid from the show a bedroom that looked like it belonged to a 10-year-old from 1956, cowboy accessories and all? (Lynch, perhaps not coincidentally, would have been 10 years old in 1956.) Of course, this kid from The Return also happens to live in a truly fucked-up world that only David Lynch could dream up, where his father is someone in kind of clone from another dimension and where there’s another evil clone that practically punches a guy in the face at one point.

“The Comeback” came at the height of the “let’s greenlight every nostalgia piece” we might call the Hollywood boom, but Lynch obviously took that green light and did what he wanted with it. This included leaving viewers as dry and dry as any in television history by refusing to bring back the most important characters from the original Twin Peaks in any meaningful way. And why should he? That would be the most unlinchian thing he could do.

Look what happened when Lynch he did play by the rules of a more conventional Hollywood game. His Dune is one of the most famous duds of the last half-century, but it is also a very specific one David Lynch movie, even if it was an Alan Smithee movie. The filmmaker was famously anxious while making Dune – a topic you can fully explore in our friend Max Evry’s book, A masterpiece in disarray. And while the legend of Paul Atreides, the Fremen, the Harkonnens and all the rest is present in Lynch’s version, it’s all peppered with imagery that could only come from the guy who, a few years earlier, gave us the most disgusting chicken dinner ever put to celluloid. I mean, who other than David Lynch invents the cat and rat milking machine? You can almost hear him now: “It’s the future, people!”

But there is also beauty in Lynch’s paintings, no matter how strange, funny, disturbing or anachronistic. His second feature film, The Elephant Man, is as close to an Oscar as this guy has ever come, but it’s also an incredibly moving and beautiful film set in an incredibly disturbing time and place in history, in the world, in where sideshow freaks actually existed, where their mistreatment was very real, and where a gentle soul like John Merrick had no chance in the world. Until he did.

This is fucking Lynchian too, guys.

Defining his work, assigning it to a genre, theme, or whatever else we’re trying to use is a fruitless effort, but damn if it’s not easy to pick a David Lynch movie from the lineup. That was his magic. His work in film and television was dark, funny, dreamlike, surreal and very genuinely weird, but in an organic way, and included a million other things that his admirers will surely highlight in the coming weeks, just as we do now. One of the things we love most about his films is that he was obsessed with the world beneath the one we live in and pulling back the curtain (sometimes literally) to reveal what lurks behind it.

To take Blue velvetfor example. On the one hand, it’s a pretty standard noir, with Everyman becoming something of an amateur detective who follows clues and catches the bad guy. The setting is a Norman Rockwell picture, full of white picket fences and girls next door, but Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey steps past that façade into a world of gas-sucking drug dealers and laid-back lip-synchers that’s anything but “standard.” Rooted in a façade of mid-century America that is clearly presented as at least “not the whole truth,” all of Lynch’s work was tinged with a healthy dose of surrealism and completely unconcerned with grounding. There’s a great documentary exploring Lynch’s relationship with The Wizard of Oz that takes that particular yellow brick road even further, but the point is that the influences working on his films, including Blue Velvet, are a set that simply doesn’t exist anymore, and we probably won’t see each other again.

At this point in film history, we are actually the second or third generation of filmmakers inspired by previous generations. In the early days of cinema as an art form, there were artists from other fields who chose film as a medium. As more of the road stretched behind us, filmmakers wanted to make movies similar to the ones they grew up watching. Lynch, of course, is one of them.

But for an artist as unique as he was, at some point he stopped being a distinct set of influences and became an influence himself, and that’s where we go back to the term “Linchian” and why we’ll probably never have it. seeing someone like him again.

There’s a moment in the middle of one of 2024’s more unexpected hits, I Saw The TV Glow, where the characters are in a bar listening to live music. The way the camera hovers in the air, the singer’s theatrical attire, the red flashing lights moving to the rhythm of the song – it’s all there to create atmosphere, and it’s a Lynchian scene like we’ve seen in a while. Jane Schoenbrun’s film follows a surrealist style familiar to Lynch fans and was actually inspired by Twin Peaks. One of the great things about a term as broad as “Lynchian” is that you can see its influence on a wide range of films and filmmakers.

Yorgos Lanthimos has a dark, comedic sensibility that tears down the layers of polite society. Think of The Lobster and how he takes people out of the real world and locks them in a hotel where they must find love or risk being turned into an animal. It’s an absurdist examination of the everyday things we take for granted that reveals there’s something Lynchian beneath the surface. Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse is an avant-garde slice of nightmare, as is Ari Aster’s Midsommar. We have “It Follows” and “Under the Silver Lake” by David Robert Mitchell and “Salburn” by Emerald Fennell. There’s “Donnie Darko” by Richard Kelly and another standout hit from 2024, “Love Lies Bleeding” with Rose Glass. Lynch is clearly on the list of filmmakers Tarantino wants to pay homage to, and there are even pre-release films from fellow Dune director Denis Villeneuve, such as Enemy and The Maelstrom, that have an otherworldly quality to them that owes to David Lynch .

David Lynch may not be your favorite filmmaker and maybe you haven’t seen all of his films or you just don’t like him, but it’s important to recognize him as someone who represents the end of an era. Like his films, which draw on times gone by to explore a world beyond our usual point of view, he has left behind an influence he has had on filmmakers today and tomorrow. We, for one, will always search just below the surface, hoping to find those “Linchian” things.

Header photo: Stefania D’Alessandro/Getty Images