David Lynch

On his unique legacy shading the history of Hollywood cinema

David Lynch and Mädchen Amick in Twin Peaks. (Greetings from Twin Peaks postcard from the Twin Peaks Definitive Gold Box DVD set released in 2007, from flikr user Steven Miller).

The following is an adaptation of my remarks during the panel “A Tribute for David Lynch” hosted by The Brooklyn Rail on April 17, 2025.

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Like a strobe light throbbing in a red-curtained room, film and TV was forever altered and energized by David Lynch. We’re living in a world where it’s taken for granted that classic visions of Americana can coexist with the surreal, where nightmarish dream logic can be punctuated by the offbeat humor of a non-sequitur, where anxiety and dread can lurk behind the dumpster of a diner that serves a freshly brewed cup of coffee.

There’s a recent piece by Abe Beame in the Los Angeles Review of Books that tries to identify what it means to be Lynchian, and it’s a really hard thing to pin down exactly. David Foster Wallace wrote that a “Rotary luncheon where everybody’s got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat…. and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not.” Dennis Lim, in his biography of Lynch, wrote that if you visit any bus station at night, you’ll probably find eccentric people who have seemingly walked off the set of a Lynch movie.

Lynch’s lens for perceiving the world can be many things, but that lens—strange, funny, scary—has influenced a lot of other filmmakers. We can see it in Rian Johnson’s neo-noir film Brick, with Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks aesthetics. We can see it in movies like Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, which has a lot going on, but the L.A. part of that three-timeline film feels really indebted to Lost Highway. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies also can’t exist without David Lynch’s attempt, and even Villeneuve has this shot of the dead Baron’s ear covered by beetles in the final minutes of Dune: Part Two that sort of tips his cap to Lynch. And you also can’t take in the Monstro Elisasue from The Substance without thinking about The Elephant Man.