With his passing, Lynch’s sideways, often disturbing depiction of American dreams and acceptance of the unknown are a stark reminder of what has been lost in Hollywood, Northeastern screen studies experts say.
David Lynch, the seminal filmmaker responsible for such visions of the American surreal as “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” and “Twin Peaks” has died at the age of 78, leaving behind a rabbit hole full of work that tapped into the uncanny, darker side of Americana.
In the aftermath of any artist’s passing, it can be difficult to understand their legacy in the moment. But Lynch’s impact has been so thoroughly absorbed into the cultural firmament that it’s impossible to ignore and even more relevant in the current state of Hollywood and American life, screen studies experts say.
“Both with ‘Twin Peaks’ and his films, I can’t think of any other contemporary filmmaker who has a word,” says Nathan Blake, a teaching professor of communication studies at Northeastern University.
“Lynchian” has gone beyond filmmaking to become a synonym for anything strange, surreal or dream-like, a testament to the filmmaker’s obsession with “diving into the unconscious.” Although Lynch was rooted in the works of classic Hollywood, he was more of a bridge to avantgarde and European art cinema sensibilities that flew in the face of mainstream Hollywood tastemakers.
From his 1977 debut feature “Eraserhead,” which started as a film school experiment, to what are generally regarded as his masterpieces –– the psychosexual Hollywood-set ”Mulholland Drive” and groundbreaking TV series “Twin Peaks” –– Lynch was consistent in pinpointing a kind of strange normalcy.
Even when he placed the audience in a familiar setting, whether it’s the dream world of Hollywood in“Mulholland Drive” or a small town in the Pacific Northwest in “Twin Peaks,” there was always “a sense that something’s not quite right” under the surface, Blake says.
“We [were] at this moment of American exceptionalism and optimism in the Reagan ’80s, and he’s saying it’s a surface, a façade,” Blake says. “It’s that noir sensibility: You look under the surface or you peel back the mask of this idyllic Americana that he’s showing and there’s this corruption. It’s both a political thing but tied to a psychoanalytic understanding that we have these dark drives and desires buried within us that we can’t confront.”
Laurel Ahnert, an assistant teaching professor of communication studies at Northeastern, says “the allure of the uncanny” that Lynch conjured through images, sound and words is evident in so many filmmakers who followed him. But his work on the TV show “Twin Peaks” remains perhaps his most influential.
First aired on ABC in 1990, it was a landmark moment for Lynch, who got exposed to a much wider audience, but it also “changed the nature of television as we know it,” Ahnert says. It was at the tip of the spear for TV shifting from an episodic to serialized format, telling one story –– a young woman’s murder in a small town in the Pacific Northwest and the ensuing investigation –– across multiple episodes and seasons.
A classic detective story in so many ways, it also arrived with Lynch’s offbeat humor, dark surrealism, eccentric, offkilter characters and obsession with the darkness lingering beneath American idealism. There was nothing else quite like it.
“It’s hard to imagine a show like ‘Severance’ without David Lynch,” Blake says.
But Lynch’s allure as a filmmaker went beyond his signature style, Ahnert says.
“For me, when I think of him, I think of him as having this uncompromising authorial vision,” Ahnert says. “He very famously has clashed with producers and television executives. … That’s part of his allure and strength: the integrity he has to his own creative vision.”
The idea of a singular auteur guiding a movie or TV show has fallen by the wayside in a contemporary entertainment landscape defined by corporate mergers, streaming and a lack of non-IP media. In that way, Lynch is “of a moment and maybe that moment has passed,” Ahnert says.
However, it’s for that very reason that he and his work remain a vital reminder for audiences of what art can do: provoke us and get us asking questions, Ahnert says. Lynch’s comfort with the unknown –– asking questions and providing no resolution –– runs counter to a Hollywood obsessed with explanation. One where Netflix is telling screenwriters to have characters announce what they’re doing so people who are watching in the background can understand what’s happening.
“There’s still an audience that wants to sit and feel confused, feel wonder, not fully understand and be satisfied –– and that’s part of the pleasure,” Ahnert says. “There’s this tension right now between wanting everything explained, put in dialogue and exposition and the pleasure of just being content with no resolution or no answers. Maybe that’s an invitation to audiences to explore Lynch. Enjoy the experience of not knowing because right now it feels like we’re supposed to know everything.”