When the American Dream Becomes a Nightmare: On the Loss of David Lynch

Adam on what we lost when David Lynch died

I first came across the name “David Lynch” when I was only 10 years old. My cultural knowledge was limited. I don't think I knew much about film and certainly didn’t know anything about art house. I did know rock n’ roll, though. I became aware of Lynch through one or another of my childhood rock heroes. Maybe it was Trent Reznor or maybe it was Billy Corgan or maybe it was Marilyn Manson—I don’t recall who exactly. All I remember is hearing Lynch’s name in one of their interviews and about the strange, influential films that he made, and suddenly it became very important to me that I seek out his work.

I wouldn’t have to look that hard. My mom, as it turned out, was a fan.

Though she knew little about his broader filmography and couldn’t care less about the formal or thematic touchstones of Lynch’s postmodern deconstruction of the television form, my mother was an avid watcher of Twin Peaks, a nightime soap created by an avant-garde filmmaker as a nighttime soap. The series functioned on two very different formal levels. A normie (like mom) could enjoy it as a highly addictive, mysterious, sexy and at times even cozy television series. An aesthete could enjoy it as a work of conceptual art in which a cinematic master and iconic eccentric deconstructed the form of the soap opera itself.

“My interest in soap operas came from Twin Peaks,” wrote the host of The Perfume Nationalist podcast Jack Mason in a Lynch eulogy posted to X, “Which demonstrated the beauty of this narrative form by making it just surreal and otherworldly enough to make you see them in a new light.”

I think this is a key point, because it demonstrates the fact that Lynch never meant to undermine the soap opera form, but instead saw artistic potential within it. He didn’t hold contempt for the cultural forms of Americana. He didn’t prioritize “high” culture over “low” culture or vice versa. For him, the new mediums that were being produced by American mass media; movies, television, soap operas; were just as exciting as sculpture or painting (which he also was accomplished in.) This approach also has a utilitarian function. The problem with the art world is that the academia embedded in it reduces its audience’s ability to have genuine emotional responses to art. Imagine an artist goes before a class at SVA, gets naked, and then starts cutting himself up with razors before writhing around in his own blood. The students will likely just sit there and make notes. They won’t be shocked or stimulated in the least, because they’ve been conditioned to interpret everything as “art”. Lynch likely understood that people go to movies and watch TV to be thrilled, to be moved, to dream. By placing art in the mass media, he could engage audiences far beyond the confines of a gallery space, maximizing audience engagement.,

“Film to me is a magical medium that allows you to dream in the dark,” he once said.

Lynch’s love of America was not limited to its pop culture forms or mass media. It extended outward to the very concept of America, the American dream. One of the most brain dead justifications that leftists make for enjoying Lynch’s work, for instance, is the claim that he aimed to expose the “dark underside” of American life that the veneer of the proverbial white picket fence seeks to obscure.

“Perhaps that’s one way to define ‘Lynchian’: the lifting away of the facades and illusions of so-called normal life—and so-called normal movies—to reveal something that speaks to our darker selves,” wrote Jordan Mintzer for The Hollywood Reporter.

It’s not that Mintzer is necessarily wrong—Lynch does facilitate the viewer getting in touch with his darker self. Jeffrey Beaumont voyeuristically watching Dorothy Vallens be savagely raped by the evil Frank Booth in Blue Velvet is the central metaphor for Lynch: he who shines a light on evil, by watching it from a safe remove. What critics like Mintzer get wrong is the assumption that Lynch’s juxtaposition of the light and dark of America should be read as some indictment of America. What should instead be gleaned from Lynch’s approach is a celebration of the American dream despite its dualities; one where evil exists but good often triumphs. His work is undeniably a celebration of the American ideal as the stately 1950s image—Lynch referred to the 1950s as the most “dreamy” of all decades in a 2018 essay—that he so often fetishized in his work. David Foster Wallace’s definition of the “Lynchian” as “something unbelievably grotesque existing in a union with the unbelievably banal” is a far more useful one than Mintzer’s. Lynch’s work is not an indictment of America, but a depiction of America as an aspirational image that thrives despite all the evil that lurks within it.

There is good, and there is evil, Lynch suggests, but Lynch’s America at the very least is clearheaded in its assessment of what distinguishes good from evil. Blue Velvet ends with Jeffrey shooting Frank from the very same closet where he watched the aforementioned violence unfold. To vanquish evil, we first must see it.

Lynch had no use for the cliché of the artist as a tortured soul. For him, making art was a joyous practice. The art life, as he said in an interview with ArtForum, is a “great life”:

“It’s coffee and cigarettes and maybe some red wine. It’s catching ideas and translating them into one medium or another. It’s a dream to get in there, and find things that you love.”

Lynch suggests something here that, for me, is a radical notion: that a happy, well-adjusted and ultimately positive person is more suited to capture darkness than an artist who lives in the darkness full time. This is what makes Lynch such an essentially American artist: His work proposes that the America he grew up in in the 1950s was not actually a spiritually suffocating and conformist culture, but one that facilitated dreaming and creativity. To dream peacefully, you need comfort and safety. Lynch was a trained fine artist who came to see the most mainstream and American pop culture forms of cinema and, later, television as the most liberating forms he could work within. The commercial confines of American life were, for him, not stifling, but emancipating. American creature comfort (coffee, cigarettes, Los Angeles sunshine) allowed him to open his mind and traverse the darkness.

Since Lynch’s death last week, critics like Tony Brownfield have compared the director to Norman Rockwell. “Rockwell said he painted America ‘as I would like it to be,’ whereas Lynch would show you the pretty facade before pulling back the (red) curtain on the ugly truth,” Brownfield wrote in an essay for The Saturday Evening Post. But the better comparison would be to American painters like Edward Hopper and, to a slightly lesser extent, Andrew Wyeth. For these artists, and for Lynch, darkness and alienation are perpetually present in all life, and in American life in particular. This doesn’t speak to some corrupt lie at the heart of America, it’s just reality. These painters, like Lynch, sought to show how America IS beautiful despite the evil and darkness within it. Dualities are a constant fascination for Lynch. There are the dualities of Hollywood in Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive, where dreams of making it big are undercut by nightmares of careers gone horribly wrong. There are the dualities in women, emphasized by the split characters such as Diane/Betty (Naomi Watts) in Mulholland Drive or Laura Palmer/Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks. And there are the dualities of America. Dualities, Lynch suggests, don’t cancel each other out. They just are, in commune with one another and in battle against tone another. Every image has a yin and yang, and America is no different.

Lynch represented not just a great American filmmaker, but also a certain kind of American modernism that finds beauty and light AND ugliness and darkness in all the mundanities of our country’s culture. No one else can approximate what he created and even when other artists try – they botch it. Thus, this is sad not just for the death of the man, but for the sensibility that dies with him. There is no avant-garde formalist, not DFW or Pynchon or Burroughs or Cy Twombly, that is so canonically Americana. Maybe Warhol, nigh, only Warhol comes close to matching Lynch’s avant-American fervor.

Lynch rarely if ever discussed his worldview, politics, or even his artistic aims. But there has always been a palpable Luddism in his work, a fear that technology was taking us further away from the dream. In his debut cult classic, Eraserhead, there’s a technological menace emphasized by the harsh and industrial soundtrack, composed by Lynch himself. His luddite nature grew more pronounced over the course of his career, and I think it’s safe to say that he was deeply concerned about the state of America toward the last decades of his life. For one, he is probably the only artist of his stature that I can recall speaking positively of the first presidency of Donald Trump, who he said could go down as one of the great American presidents for how much he was able to disrupt “the thing.”

But what is “the thing”? To answer that, I think we need to look toward what I consider to be his masterpiece. For me, Twin Peaks: The Return, the long awaited follow-up to the original series after a 25-year gap, is the encapsulation of everything he’d ever been working toward. When The Return came out in 2017, one of the main complaints about it by audiences was that it “wasn’t Twin Peaks.” The critics, for once, were right. Twin Peaks and what it represented—an idyllic American community safely tucked away from the encroaching darkness of postmodern, post-Information Age American life, no longer existed. The death of Twin Peaks represents the death of the American dream, and this is exactly what Lynch was trying to express with the series.

The Return only spends part of its time in the actual town of Twin Peaks. It goes to Vegas, New York, and countless American towns hollowed out by deindustrialization and opioids. When it does spend time in Twin Peaks, the series barely can distinguish that beautiful Pacific Northwestern town from the rest of this postapocalyptic America being shown, all of it reduced to a singularly bleak mood by technology and social rot. The youth of Twin Peaks. , who were so beautiful and upbeat in the original series, are now on drugs, and fucked up in ways that teenagers never were before. The Double R diner, which in the original series represented a space where the town could enjoy the comfort of small community, delicious pancakes and hot coffee, is now a restaurant where shootings happen right outside its doors in The Return. Something about America, the series suggests, has been fundamentally changed, as if the dark force that has always laid within it has accelerated and become ubiquitous and omnipotent, swallowing whole the beauty and idealistic Christian decency that it was founded upon.

Did he identify that evil? Lynch was never as obtuse as people think he was, and in the eighth episode of The Return, the artist takes us inside the explosion of the Trinity test where we witness the birth of the demon BOB by the ancient evil spirit Judy (visualized as a Bob face orb emerging like a sperm from Judy floating in the chaos of mushroom cloud.) The evil, Lynch says, is technology. Energy, electricity (the midget who lives in the alternate dimension of the Black Lodge constantly says “EEEE-LEC-TRICITYYYY” as the Black Lodge metastasizes its influence on the real world.) Circuitry rapidly dispersing images across channels, TELEVISION, the Internet. These forces corrupted America by making evil no longer something we needed a light to shine upon, but something that we didn’t need any light to see. Evil exist in the light now, plain as day, everywhere and anywhere, watched and consumed by billions who increasingly can no longer distinguish it from good. Twin Peaks: The Return is, ironically, the most powerful work of political art of the decade.

If Lynch’s entire career had been a poetic ode to the beauty of the American dream, Twin Peaks: The Return is a eulogy for the death of that dream. There is no more Twin Peaks, the series suggests. There is no idyllic American town that has any safety or remove from the encroachment of postmodern darkness. The dream of America that Lynch was in love with had become overrun by its inverse nightmare. With Lynch gone, the nightmare has gotten just a bit darker.