5 scenes that define David Lynch’s ‘Lynchian’ vision

On By Littum

The directorial thumbprint of David Lynch spawned its own adjective decades ago, perhaps most thoroughly codified by writer David Foster Wallace. Sent by Premiere magazine to the set of Lynch’s 1997 film “Lost Highway,” Wallace gave a definition of Lynchian: “a particular kind of irony in which the very macabre and the very mundane are combined in such a way as to reveal the eternal confinement of the former in the latter.”

Put it this way: “Lynchian” evokes the bland health of an American Midwestern suburb, wrapped around something unnaturally disgusting — the discovery of five stray molars in a heavy pot. A man kills his wife? Not Lynchian. A man kills his wife because she keeps buying the wrong peanut butter? Beautiful Lynchian. If the police stand around the crime scene, discussing varieties of peanut butter and admitting that the murderous man had a point – well, that’s just pure Lynch.

Lynch was not only interested in bad behavior; he was as sure that men were capable of goodness and love as of violence. “Characters are not inherently evil in Lynch films,” Wallace explained. “Evil carries them.” It latches onto the backs of boring, ordinary people and just won’t let go, an unyielding suit made of screaming skin, a ghostly apparition you haven’t summoned and don’t want to see.

Evil threatens all logic. The world makes sense and doesn’t either. Any sunny day can give way to radioactive hail from the sky. There is a morbid hilarity to it all, a sense of the absurd. Which may explain why in recent years his work has come to feel like the only key to understanding the deeply Lynchian landscape of modern life.

Blue Velvet (1986)

Near the start of “Blue Velvet,” Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student who has returned to his home in North Carolina, walks through a vacant lot. He brakes near a collection of dirt in the grass, picks up a rock and throws it. It’s a sunny day. Everything is fine. But then, in the grass, he sees something.

Lowly offended, he discovers what it is: a human ear, severed and lying on the ground, covered in wandering ants and stained with mold. Jeffrey picks up the ear and puts it in a brown paper bag he sees nearby, then takes it to the local police station. The officer seems unperturbed. “It’s a human ear, okay,” he says, with the composure you might reserve for, say, a frog skeleton. A severed ear does not mean just a strange accident or crime, but a person or corpse who has been missing an ear out there for some time. It might be the perfect Lynchian moment: Violence, sure, but it’s also hard not to laugh a little.

Twin Peaks (1990-91)

The famous red room in Lynch’s ABC show “Twin Peaks” is a kind of waiting room, a portal into a mysterious dimension where things are not what they seem and where mysteries may live but will never truly be revealed. In this sequence, the little man (played by Michael J. Anderson) is actually a spirit known as The Man From Another Place. He talks and he dances as Agent Cooper (MacLachlan again) looks on. What is happening? Who knows?

The man from another place speaks sort of intelligibly, sort of not; subtitles decipher his words for the audience. To achieve this eerie effect, Lynch came up with a simple and yet somehow very disturbing technique. Anderson spoke his lines into a tape recorder. Lynch then played it backwards, and Anderson repeated the backwards speech into the recorder; then it was reversed once more. The effect is strange and uncomfortable and oh, so Lynchian: they’re just words, but something your brain is screaming is very wrong.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

In “Mulholland Drive,” Justin Theroux plays Adam Kesher, a Hollywood film director having, shall we say, a pretty bad day. Gangsters have threatened his life unless he casts a certain actress as the lead in his new film. When he refuses, they withdraw his funding. Then he has discovered that his wife is cheating on him and her lover has thrown him out of his own house. Now he’s confused to meet a cowboy (Monty Montgomery) in an empty rodeo arena.

The cowboy looks like he’s wandered in from the set of another movie, some kind of old-fashioned western—and there’s the Lynchian moment again, in a movie full of them. Standing opposite Kesher, the cowboy seems like the very soul of Hollywood Americana, all with gentle blondness and benign banter. But he clearly warns Kesher: Cast that actress or there will be hell to pay. He never directly threatens violence, but it is a threat nonetheless. “You’ll see me one more time if you do well. You’ll see me twice more if you do badly,” he says. Something wild lurks below.

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

When “Twin Peaks” returned for an extremely strange third season, 26 years after the original show went off the air, it felt like a huge Lynchian moment. From the start, it was never really clear what was going on, or what was real, or if reality even existed in the show’s universe in the first place. But it all came to a head in the eighth episode, titled “Gotta Light?” It’s hard to even describe the plot coherently, but early in the episode, a double for Agent Cooper is shot and then his body is stabbed and pawed over by ghostly figures often called “woodmen.”

Later in the episode, the woodsmen return, most memorably near the end. The episode is an origin story of sorts for a malevolent force that locates it somewhere in the first detonation of the atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945. By the end of the episode, it is 1956 and an elderly couple is driving their car home on an empty road, when the woodsmen descend upon them. One holds out his cigarette and repeatedly asks, “Would you like to light up?” It is of course a banal request, often made by one smoker to another – but the more it is repeated, the more threatening it seems. The man and his wife flee in terror, and we are no closer to figuring all this out than we were before. Which somehow seems right.

Lost Highway (1997)

“Lost Highway,” Lynch’s third collaboration with writer Barry Gifford, has plenty of nerve-wracking moments. There are the videotapes sent to Fred Madison, played by Bill Pullman, showing him and his wife sleeping in bed, filmed by an intruder. Or the passionate, some would say dangerous, saxophone solos that are apparently Fred’s specialty.

The movie’s strange weirdness is maximized when Fred and his wife attend a glamorous house party. Fred is approached by someone he doesn’t recognize, a man whose hair is slicked back and front in a Dracula-like top that forms a powder-white face and a baring crescent of teeth. The man doesn’t blink and has no eyebrows, and isn’t even identified as the Mystery Man until it ends. (He’s played by Robert Blake, whose real-world legal troubles bolster his creepy presence.) The man seems completely out of place and unseen by everyone else, claiming to be — impossibly — at Fred’s house at that very moment. “Call me,” he says, handing Fred a phone. The same voice replies, “I told you I was here.” Fred’s expression of utter dismay is mirrored by anyone watching the film. – Rumsey Taylor

Videos: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (“Blue Velvet”); ABC (“Twin Peaks”); Universal Pictures (“Mulholland Drive”); Showtime (“Twin Peaks: The Return”); CiBy 2000 (“Lost Highway”)

Produced by Tala Safie