5 scenes that define David Lynch's “Lynchian” vision

Director David Lynch's thumbprint spawned its own adjective decades ago, but it was perhaps most thoroughly codified by writer David Foster Wallace. Wallace, who was sent by Premiere magazine to the set of Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway, defined a Lynchian: the latter. “

To put it this way, “Lynchian” is the bland wholesomeness of Midwestern suburbia that encapsulates something unnaturally sordid: the discovery of five dislodged molars in a tuna pot. evoke. A man kills his wife? Not Lynchian. Did a man kill his wife because she kept buying the wrong peanut butter? Quite a Lynchian. If a cop were to stand at a crime scene, discuss types of peanut butter, and confess that her murderous husband had a point, that would be lynching.

Lynch wasn't just interested in bad behavior. He believed that humans were capable of goodwill and love as much as violence. “In Lynch movies, the characters themselves aren't evil,” Wallace explained. “Evil wears it.” An unyielding suit made of screaming skin that sticks to the backs of bored ordinary people, a ghostly apparition you didn’t summon and don’t want to see. .

Evil threatens all logic. Sometimes the world has meaning, and sometimes it doesn't. Even on a sunny day, radioactive hail can fall from the sky. There's a morbid cheerfulness to it all, a sense of absurdity. This may explain why in recent years his work has begun to feel like the only key to understanding the deeply Lynchian landscape of modern life.

Blue Velvet (1986)

Moldy ears on a sunny day

Near the beginning of “Blue Velvet,” Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student back home in North Carolina, is walking through a vacant lot. He slowed down near a collection of debris in the grass, picked up a stone and threw it. It's a sunny day. Everything is fine. But then he spotted something in the grass.

Crouching low, he discovered what it was. A human ear was cut off and lying on the ground, covered in wandering ants and covered in mold. Jeffrey picked up the ear, placed it in a nearby brown paper bag, and delivered it to the local police station. The officer doesn't seem fazed. “It's a human ear, I understand,” he said with the calmness that reserved, say, a frog skeleton. A severed ear portends a strange accident or crime, as well as a person who has lost his ear for some time or a corpse. It's probably the perfect Lynch moment. It's certainly violent, but it's also hard not to laugh a little.

Twin Peaks (1990-91)

Disorienting words in disorienting places

The famous red room in Lynch's ABC show Twin Peaks is a waiting room of sorts, leading you into a mystical dimension where things are not as they seem and where mysteries may exist but are never really revealed. This is the entrance. In this sequence, the little man played by Michael J. Anderson is actually a spirit known as “The Man from Another Place.” He talks and dances as Agent Cooper (McLachlan again) looks on. what's happening? who knows?

A man from another place speaks clearly in some ways, but not in others. Subtitles decipher his words to the audience. To achieve this eerie effect, Lynch came up with a simple, yet somehow very disturbing technique. Anderson said his lines into a tape recorder. Lynch played it backwards, and Anderson repeated the reverse speech into the recorder. Then it was reversed again. The effect is strange and unpleasant and, oh Lynchian, those are just words, but something screams at your brain that something is very wrong.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Cowboy giving a warning

In Mulholland Drive, Justin Theroux plays Adam Kesher, a Hollywood director who's having a pretty rough time. Rioters are threatening her life unless she casts a certain actress as the lead in a new movie. When he refuses, they withdraw his funds. Later, his wife's affair is discovered and her lover kicks him out of the house. Now he meets a cowboy (Monty Montgomery) at an empty rodeo stadium.

The cowboys look as if they've wandered in from another movie, some kind of old western set. And the Lynch moments are here again, a movie full of them. The cowboy standing across from Kesher is the very soul of Hollywood Americana, all bland blonde hair and gentle withdrawal. But he clearly warns Kesher. “Get that actress in, or you'll pay in hell.” He doesn't overtly threaten violence, but violence is still a threat. “If you do good things, you'll see them again. If you do bad things, you'll see them two more times,” he says. Something barbaric lurks beneath it.

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

evil cigarette

When “Twin Peaks” returned for a very strange third season, 26 years after the original show went off the air, it felt like a huge Lynchian moment. From the beginning, it was never clear what was going on, what was real, or whether reality even existed in the show's world at all. But it all came to a head in episode 8, titled “Gotta Light?” It's hard to even explain the plot coherently, but early in the episode Agent Cooper's doppelgänger is shot and killed, and then his corpse is often pecked and trampled by ghostly figures called “lumberjacks.” Sometimes it happens.

The second half of the episode, most memorable, is near the end, when the lumberjacks return. This episode is something of an origin story for a malevolent force, pinpointing the location where the first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico in 1945. At the end of the episode, the year is 1956, and an elderly couple is driving home. When the woodcutters attack them on an empty road. One person holds out a cigarette and repeatedly asks, “Do I have to light it?” Of course, this is a commonplace request made frequently by one smoker to another, but the more it is repeated, the more threatening it seems. The man and his wife run away in fear, but we're no closer to figuring everything out than we were before. That somehow seems eerily right.

Lost Highway (1997)

mysterious party guest

“Lost Highway,” Lynch's third collaboration with writer Barry Gifford, is full of unsettling moments. A videotape sent to Fred Madison, played by Bill Pullman, shows him and his wife sleeping in bed by an intruder. Or, some might say, the passionate and dangerous sax solo, which is clearly Fred's specialty.

The film's overt weirdness is at its fullest when Fred and his wife attend a glitzy house party. Fred approaches a person he doesn't recognize. The man's hair was slicked back and pushed forward in a Dracula-like widow's peak, highlighting his snow-white face and glistening crescent teeth. The man doesn't blink, has no eyebrows, and is a mysterious man whose identity is unknown until the end credits. (He is played by Robert Blake, whose real-world legal troubles add to his sinister presence.) The man seems completely out of place and invisible to everyone else. , and claims to be at Fred's house at that very moment–impossibly. “Call me,” he said, handing the phone to Fred. The same voice replies, “I told you I was here.” The look of utter amazement on Fred's face is reflected in everyone watching this movie. — Ramsey Taylor

Video: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (“Blue Velvet”). ABC (“Twin Peaks”); Universal Pictures (“Mulholland Drive”). Showtime (“Twin Peaks: The Return”); CiBy 2000 (“Lost Highway”)

Created by Tara Safi