David Lynch, Unexplained
The late, great auteur offered us questions and emotions rather than answers.
In an interview with Jason Barlow for BAFTA in 2007, David Lynch remarked that Eraserhead was his “most spiritual film.” When asked to elaborate on that, Lynch replied, “No.”
Lynch, who passed away last week at 78, consistently held this viewpoint. He once remarked that people want to discuss a film with him as soon as it’s over, but “the film is the talking.”
I came to David Lynch after I graduated college. While I saw Blue Velvet in high school and Mulholland Drive in college, I didn’t get hooked on Lynch like my peers (I didn’t even start watching his and Mark Frost’s seminal TV series Twin Peaks until last year). It was nothing against Lynch, but I didn’t grow up with his movies (while Lynch reaches across generations, I’ve noticed he’s particularly special to Gen Xers) and no one in my life sought to introduce his work to me, so I only had the vague understanding of his work as strange. This Simpsons joke sums it up:
It took until adulthood for me to understand Lynch on his terms, and what I came away with was a deep well of emotions unafraid to eschew the typical modes of expression. While things could be described as “Lynchian,” there was only one David Lynch, and no one else could quite manage his signature blend of earnestness and unsettled reality.
This is all to say that attempts to “decode” Lynch are ultimately futile because he’s not trying to obfuscate in the traditional sense. He’s not making puzzle boxes as much as he’s making dreams, and working off dream logic, you will inevitably run into dead ends or open ends. His films invite interpretation not because he’s vague, but because he’s pushing his audience to go to uncomfortable places where answers may not provide comfort. Where he sees darkness, it’s not as a cynic, but as someone who seeks to express genuine pain and anguish at the evil that men do. Answers serve as a kind of armor; knowledge that can protect us. Lynch wanted us to feel the emotion rather than intellectualize it.
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on his work (I still haven’t seen the second season of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: The Return, Fire Walk with Me, or Inland Empire), but I’m grateful that I now understand the limits of my understanding. When I watched Mulholland Drive in college, I brushed it off. I felt the film was too confusing to grasp, and not entertaining enough to merit the effort of engaging with it. I wish I had been a better student of film at eighteen, but alas.
Coming back to it now, I know not everything in the film fits neatly into a critical reading. The film is meant to wind you up in a dizzying dance of identity, dreams, desires, regrets, fears, and premonitions. But that doesn’t mean the film is empty ambiguity straining for interpretation. Every choice Lynch makes, from where he chooses to drop certain scenes, to seeming non-sequiturs, to the big narrative swings, is within the scope of the drama he seeks to convey.
I hope that if you’ve seen one of Lynch’s movies and thought, “Not for me,” try to give him another chance. Instead of worrying about if you’re “getting it,” sit and absorb it. Lean into the emotions—the uneasiness and confusion are part of the experience, not a director punishing you because you haven’t cracked every piece of symbolism or subtext. Even if you don’t love his movies, that’s okay. Watching a David Lynch movie, there’s never a doubt that as dark as he gets, he loved using cinema to express his unique vision of the world.