The Horror, the Horror

Lynch’s seeming rejection of the modern world, coupled with his occasional vaguely Libertarian sounding pronouncements early in his career and his ’50s throwback aesthetics — including his love of early rock and roll and pop, his iconic pompadour, his preference for dark suits and ties, and his almost Boy Scout persona — led some to label Lynch an artist of the Right.

Lynch’s occasional embrace of certain symbols of American consumer culture, such as his well-known love of fast food (famously sharing Donald Trump’s taste for McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish) also contributed to his complex public persona. These trappings, however, were largely superficial.

In truth, despite seeming to celebrate the ’50s world of his childhood, Lynch offered a powerful critique of late modernity and postwar prosperity. To Lynch, the outwardly placid and friendly nature of traditional iconic small-town America concealed an undercurrent of depravity, alienation, and dread. He infused his work with a blend of surrealist humor and unsettling horror, exposing audiences to the disorientation and unease that arise from these conditions — sometimes giving way to violence, but always grounded in a deeper existential rupture.

A key element Lynch’s power as a filmmaker lies in his use of surrealism. His films were not simply straightforward narratives but surreal phantasmagorias that could appear opaque to casual viewers.

The films that Lynch referenced as touchstones in his work were significant modernist works. Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Boulevard is a prime example, with Lynch’s own Mulholland Dr. serving as a direct nod to it. Both films make the case that behind Los Angeles’s glitz and glamour lies a hellscape poised to consume the vulnerable. Lynch also drew inspiration from low-budget surrealist horror like Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, which clearly informed both the feel and noir aesthetic of his films.

Lynch was also a devotee of the French comic filmmaker Jacques Tati. Tati, who starred in his own films, expressed a pointed critique of the alienating effects of both modern society and technology. The borderline slapstick humor that occasionally surfaces in Lynch’s work is indebted to Tati.

Lynch, Oz, and the American Dream

Perhaps Lynch’s most important influence — and one of his personal favorites — The Wizard of Oz is a cornerstone of his artistic inspiration (he even included direct clips from it in Wild at Heart). The Wizard of Oz unfolds as a fever dream where nothing is quite what it seems. On the surface, the film is a very clear good-versus-evil conflict, yet the wizard himself is revealed to be nothing more than a man behind a curtain.

Similarly, in Lynch’s world, the idyllic facade of small-town America hides sinister undercurrents: secret networks of crime, exploitation, and corruption, including murder, human trafficking, and sexual violence.

Just as Oz is ruled by a charlatan, the American Dream — promising democracy and opportunity —often masks a labyrinth of imperial violence, covert operations, and brutal exploitation that keeps the system ticking along. Through his dreamlike narratives, Lynch holds up a mirror to modern life, exposing its hidden darkness.

While Lynch rarely provided direct explanations of his films’ meaning, he did occasionally provide cryptic suggestions. For instance, the original Mulholland Dr. DVD came with an insert on which was written an enigmatic collection of clues. However, a revealing and likely formative series of memories from Lynch’s youth were shared with filmmaker Jon Nguyen in his 2016 documentary, David Lynch: The Art Life.

In The Art Life, Lynch reflects on growing up in small-town Sandpoint, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington — towns not unlike those presented in Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet — before his family relocated to the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. Lynch’s father worked for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and after being promoted to the national office in DC, Lynch tells of how every morning his father would put on his full national park uniform and walk over the 14th Street Bridge from Northern Virginia to the USDA headquarters in the city. This anecdote seems to offer a glimpse into the wholesome “aw-shucks” boy scout persona that Lynch outwardly projected.

However, a more revealing memory comes from his time in Spokane, where, as a child playing in the yard, Lynch and his friends were approached by a naked woman covered in blood and crying, who muttered a few incoherent phrases and then ran off. This moment clearly left an indelible mark on the young Lynch, exposing cracks in the idyllic small-town veneer and revealing something far more disturbing just below the surface.

Judy and the Atom

This formative experience echoes throughout Lynch’s work, where the violence lurking beneath suburban normalcy takes center stage. Women often find themselves in peril, their fates controlled by the whims of unhinged men who preside over dark empires of crime and abuse. While his films reside in a dreamlike, sometimes free-associative space, those dreams often shift from ecstasy to nightmares, exploring the dark secrets of the primordial forces of evil embedded in the human estate.

Lynch was shaped by the post–World War II era of prosperity and US global dominance, yet his work reflects a profound ambivalence about the price paid for Pax Americana. His most explicit exploration of these themes appears in the eighth episode of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. The episode flashes back to the first atomic weapons test in Trinity, New Mexico, accompanied by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Through a haunting sequence, we are taken inside the atomic explosion from the inside in a series of images that are both beautiful and terrifying.

From this explosion emerges Judy, the underlying antagonist of the series, a malevolent entity that personifies corruption and despair, sowing death and sorrow wherever it goes. Judy corrupts everything in its path, feeding on human pain and perpetuating more misery as it goes.

Electricity also plays a central role in Lynch’s work, seeming to serve as an emblem of modernity itself. It is the substrate through which modern life operates, carrying the contradictory weight of humanity’s encounter with modernity — its promise of progress and innovation intertwined with alienation and destruction. In Eraserhead, the whimsical woman in the radiator is juxtaposed with the film’s oppressive, ever-present electrical noise and buzzing. In Twin Peaks: The Return, Doogie Jones, a tulpa of Agent Dale Cooper, is birthed through an electric socket and seem to embody the strange, often unsettling power of electricity as both a creative and destabilizing force.

Lynch’s America

The themes that seemed to preoccupy Lynch most revolve around postwar prosperity. Lynch seems to suggest that this prosperity brought not only dominance and wealth, but also psychological and existential contradictions. For all its material comforts, the era introduced new anxieties: the threat of thermonuclear annihilation and the alienating hum of technological progress. As the twentieth century unfolded, these technological advances increasingly served the interests of a wealthy few rather than the public good, from unfixable devices to the annihilation of the digital commons.

To Lynch, the forces that defined American global and technological supremacy carried with them the seeds of destruction — of both the psyche and society. True freedom, he seems to suggest, exists only in dreams. But dreams are fragile, easily punctured by the sorrows of reality and often transform into living nightmares. While much of Lynch’s work ends with nightmares giving way to even greater horrors, they also contain fleeting moments of transcendence, offering glimpses of something more.

For all his presentations of violence and horrors on screen, Lynch remained an eternal optimist. His belief in transcendental meditation as a tool to manifest a better world was central to his philosophy, a theme he often explored in his lectures. Now, as we face a world still defined by violence and horror lurking below the surface, we will have to make do without one of our greatest artists and visionaries. Lynch’s work reminds us, however, that if we can dream of a better world, we can also work together to will it into existence.