The decades-long valorization and near-deification of the late filmmaker David Lynch is a sign of declining cultural standards and decaying societal values.
Long ago, the public flocked to films by directors whose artistic visions, however distinct or personal, affirmed humanity’s best intentions: John Ford saluted American history; Frank Capra pledged allegiance to the American spirit; Leo McCarey celebrated the church.
Lynch, who died last week at age 78, can be said to have emerged from the same tradition only to degrade it openly. A native of Missoula, Montana, whose youth included stints in Idaho, North Carolina, and Virginia, Lynch was deeply familiar with the rhythms, inhabitants, and colloquialisms found in middle America, but in several of his best-known films and TV shows, including Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks series, and its various offshoots, he used his cultural context as mere fodder for gruesome violence, graphic sexuality, and repellant sarcasm. Again and again, he presented the superficial order and courtesies of small-town America as a cover for the sordid and profane. That Lynch nonetheless persisted in presenting himself, in interviews and appearances, as a darn-tootin’ everyman a la mode du Tim Walz reveals either his cynicism—his persona was part of the joke—or his complete lack of self-awareness.
The comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks, who produced Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man, coined a famous description of his protégé: Jimmy Stewart from Mars. With all due respect to Brooks, this characterization does a disservice to both Jimmy Stewart and to Mars: Stewart would never have wanted to be associated with the maker of movies as unseemly as Blue Velvet, and Martians, were they to encounter Lynch’s generally inscrutable films, would stand no better chance of comprehending them than ordinary Earthlings.
Lynch’s many defenders will point to his facility with filmmaking technique. Undeniably, Lynch could conjure unsettling moods, but he was not a natural or fluid filmmaker. Instead of orchestrating images and angles in furtherance of a story—the definition of directing as once given to me by Peter Bogdanovich—Lynch tended to settle on a single bothersome image for its own sake: the severed ear in Blue Velvet, or the smiling face of Robert Blake in Lost Highway, or the monster-like entity behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive. In his 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me, Lynch played a hearing-impaired FBI official named Gordon Cole who barks. his. lines. in. a. staccato. fashion. that. has. no. dramatic. justification.
Here Lynch betrayed his background as an art-school product: These images and moments would have been no less meaningful if ripped from their films and stuck on a gallery wall or presented as a part of a so-called “video installation.” Surrealism is a valid artistic mode, but when does a preference for the randomly weird signal a retreat from the real world?
Lynch aimed to perturb (or, more often, shock), but never to elucidate. Most of his films are literally incomprehensible, and if earnest effort is expended to identify a theme, it will generally end with a pedestrian platitude. Perhaps the industrial wasteland that provides the setting of Lynch’s 1977 debut film Eraserhead is a commentary on the defilement of the natural world, and maybe the shifting identities of several characters in his 2001 Hollywood soap opera Mulholland Drive is a statement about the multiple natures that exist within each one of us. But if such meaning can be extracted from these opaque movies, it proves only that Lynch was, deep down, a profoundly unoriginal thinker who cloaked his unoriginality in puzzles and pretension. As Roger Ebert put it when writing of the depraved behavior of the characters in Blue Velvet: “What are we being told? That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.”
In truth, Lynch seems unlikely to have been driven by ideas as much as impulses. He spoke of conceiving whole films on virtual whims—as when he said he got the idea for the Dennis Hopper character in Blue Velvet by seeing a random stranger walk to the counter at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. Uh-huh. Such anecdotes, usually relayed with a wry smile by their teller, fed into Lynch’s guru-like status. To become a fan of Lynch’s movies meant becoming conversant with their maker’s entire shtick, including his straitlaced manner of dress, his ceaseless cigarette-smoking, and his hokey kernels of wisdom. His YouTube channel used to feature him squawking out weather reports from Greater Los Angeles. This was no mere movie director, but a sage for those in search of one—like Ayn Rand or Bob Dylan.
Lynch has been revered for so long—he was given an Honorary Oscar in 2019—that the truly indefensible awfulness of his worst films has been forgotten. He scorned his 1984 adaptation of Dune only because he lacked complete control over it; he never apologized for its utter ugliness and total tedium. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was described this way by the New York Times critic Vincent Canby: “Its 134 minutes induce a state of simulated brain death, an effect as easily attained in half the time by staring at the blinking lights on a Christmas tree.” Hear, hear.
For years, the Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert was the most committed detractor of Lynch. In invigoratingly censorious terms, Ebert objected to both the content of Lynch’s films and their director’s glib attitude towards that content. “He wants to deal with the most shocking possible imagery—he wants to deal with subject matter that involves violence and images that are sure to absolutely repel the audience—and then he wants to always end with a punchline that’s a joke,” Ebert said in his review of the truly horrendous 1990 film Wild at Heart. Indeed, Lynch displayed deep knowledge of the adolescent sensibility by always encouraging derisive laughter at extreme situations. Alas, Ebert backed off his critical stance of Lynch when reviewing his best film—the G-rated Disney release The Straight Story (1999), about an Iowan who takes to his tractor to visit his faraway dying sibling—and, disappointingly, the universally-admired Mulholland Drive. (Full disclosure: I once recorded an appreciative audio commentary for a Blu-ray release of The Straight Story—a nice little movie.)
Lynch either outlived his increasingly lonely detractors or, in the case of Ebert, finally coopted them. He might have started out as a stranger in a strange land, but given the depth and breadth of his fan club, those who dissent are the ones left out in the cold. R.I.P.
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