\n<\/p>\n
The directorial thumbprint of David Lynch spawned its own adjective decades ago, perhaps most thoroughly codified by the writer David Foster Wallace. Sent by Premiere magazine to the set of Lynch\u2019s 1997 film \u201cLost Highway,\u201d Wallace gave a definition of Lynchian: \u201ca particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former\u2019s perpetual containment within the latter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Put it this way: \u201cLynchian\u201d evokes the bland wholesomeness of an American Midwestern suburb, wrapped around something unnaturally vile \u2014 the discovery of five stray molars in a tuna casserole. A man kills his wife? Not Lynchian. A man kills his wife because she keeps buying the wrong peanut butter? Pretty Lynchian. If the cops stand around at the crime scene, discussing varieties of peanut butters and confessing that the murderous husband kind of had a point \u2014 well, that\u2019s just pure Lynch.<\/p>\n
Lynch was not merely interested in bad behavior; he was as certain that humans were capable of goodness and love as violence. \u201cCharacters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies,\u201d Wallace explained. \u201cEvil wears them.\u201d It attaches itself to the back of boring, ordinary folks and just won\u2019t let go, an unshakable suit made of screaming skin, a ghostly apparition you didn\u2019t summon and don\u2019t want to see.<\/p>\n
Evil threatens any logic. The world makes sense and also doesn\u2019t. Any sunshiney day could give way to radioactive hail from the heavens. There\u2019s a morbid hilarity in all of it, a sense of the absurd. Which might explain why, in recent years, his work began to feel like the only key to understanding the profoundly Lynchian landscape of modern life.<\/p>\n
Blue Velvet (1986)<\/p>\n
Near the start of \u201cBlue Velvet,<\/a>\u201d Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student who\u2019s returned to his home in North Carolina, is walking through a vacant lot. He slows near a collection of debris in the grass, picking up a rock and tossing it. It\u2019s a sunny day. Everything\u2019s fine. But then, in the grass, he sees something.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Crouching low, he discovers what it is: a human ear, severed and lying on the ground, covered in wandering ants and spotted with mold. Jeffrey picks up the ear and puts it in a brown paper bag he sees nearby, then brings it to the local police station. The officer seems unperturbed. \u201cThat\u2019s a human ear, all right,\u201d he says, with the equanimity one might reserve for, say, a frog skeleton. A severed ear implies not just a strange accident or crime, but a person, or corpse, who\u2019s been missing an ear out there for some time. It is perhaps the perfect Lynchian moment: violence, sure, but it\u2019s also hard not to chuckle a little.<\/p>\n Twin Peaks (1990-91)<\/p>\n The famous Red Room in Lynch\u2019s ABC show \u201cTwin Peaks<\/a>\u201d is some kind of waiting room, a portal into a mystical dimension in which things are not as they seem, and in which mysteries may dwell but will never really be revealed. In this sequence, the diminutive man (played by Michael J. Anderson) is actually a spirit known as The Man From Another Place. He speaks, and he dances while Agent Cooper (MacLachlan again) watches. What is happening? Who knows?<\/p>\n The Man From Another Place speaks kind of intelligibly, kind of not; subtitles decipher his words for the audience. To achieve this uncanny 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 backward, and Anderson repeated the backward speech into the recorder; then it was reversed once more. The effect is weird and uncomfortable and oh, so Lynchian: they\u2019re just words, but something, your brain screams, is very wrong.<\/p>\n Mulholland Drive (2001)<\/p>\n In \u201cMulholland Drive<\/a>,\u201d Justin Theroux plays Adam Kesher, a Hollywood movie director who\u2019s having, shall we say, a pretty bad day. Mobsters have threatened his life unless he casts a specific actress as the lead in his new movie. When he refuses, they pull his funding. Then he\u2019s discovered his wife is cheating on him, and her lover has thrown him out of his own house. Now he\u2019s been badgered into meeting a cowboy (Monty Montgomery) in an empty rodeo arena.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The cowboy looks like he\u2019s wandered in off the set of another film altogether, some kind of old-timey western \u2014 and there\u2019s the Lynchian moment again, in a movie full of them. Standing across from Kesher, the cowboy seems like the very soul of Hollywood Americana, all bland-faced blondness and benign drawl. But he is clearly warning Kesher: Cast that actress, or there will be hell to pay. He never outright threatens violence, but it\u2019s a threat all the same. \u201cYou will see me one more time, if you do good. You will see me two more times, if you do bad,\u201d he says. Something savage lurks beneath.<\/p>\n Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)<\/p>\n
\nDisorienting Words in a Disorienting Place<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nA Cowboy With a Warning<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nSinister Cigarettes<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n