David Lynch died on January 15, 2025 at age 78. We celebrate this important auteur with the following analysis of some of the less remarked Lynchian themes and his work in the context of the Sirk, Chabrol, and Todd Haynes.
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To note that Lynch has his moments of self-aware kitsch and deep sincerity, though, does little to explicate his peculiar magic – especially since these two moments often occur as one. What exactly, then, is this curious engagement with the kitsch that serves as a hallmark of the Lynchian?
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We don’t know who wrote it, nor where and when it was written, though we can make reasonable guesses. One: an adult male between the ages of 18 and 49, based on the comment’s casual, irreverent violence; two: somewhere in the United States of America, likely within close distance of Los Angeles; and three: in the summer of 1986. No doubt remains, however, over what it was – a test screening response card – and what it said.
David Lynch should be shot.
In the months following, our unknown author found a crowd. Blue Velvet opened that autumn to, as much as stunned amazement, mass walkouts, booing, and hissing. A band of critics followed. A young Mark Kermode stormed out of his screening and lambasted the film’s “puerile” sexual politics. Roger Ebert, in a scathing review, bemoaned its “sophomoric satire and cheap shots.” Four years later, Wild at Heart did little to change his detractors’ minds.
There is something inside of me that resists the films of David Lynch. I am aware of it, I admit to it, but I cannot think my way around it. I sit and watch his films and am aware of his energy, his visual flair, his flashes of wit. But as the movie rolls along, something grows inside of me – an indignation, an unwillingness, a resistance. At the end of both “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” I was angry, as if a clever con-man had tried to put one over on me.1
Ebert reminds us of something that the eulogising following Lynch’s sad death last month might obscure: that he was a director who provoked – and continues to provoke – resistance. With the sole exception of his U-rated The Straight Story, no Lynch film goes down smooth. They cling uncomfortably to the viewer, they shock, they offend; there’s even a curious sense that they disrespect cinema as an art form. And this is what Ebert secondly reminds us of: that what is commonly resisted in Lynch is not the infamously surreal impenetrability – which can safely be integrated into the avant-garde canon as “energy” or “visual flair” – but rather his obviousness. The films lacked tact, they lacked grace; they were “sophomoric” and cheap. If all art employs trickery and illusion, Lynch committed the cardinal sin of employing it without conceit. Ebert didn’t care that he was being conned; he cared that he had, supposedly, caught the con-man in the act.
Though Ebert’s judgement of Lynch’s trickery as empty was misguided, his resistance signals something true: that what is offensive in the Lynchian is not the mysterious absurdity or the gnomic utterances (“the owls are not what they seem”; “that gum you like is going to come back in style”), but rather its curiously literal depiction of suffering, violence and evil – as well as hope, tenderness, and love. Lynch was never one for emotional subtleties. Melodramatic piano keys hammer home the emotion with frightening effect in Twin Peaks; Blue Velvet’s arch-villain Frank Booth shouts “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” with all the nuance that the caps-lock suggests; the baby in Eraserhead not only becomes covered with fungal-looking spores but ends up spouting blood and sickly white foam. In all these moments and more, Lynch demonstrated a certain comfort with the vulgar and the lowbrow that not only gave the adjective “Lynchian” its particular piquancy – as well as an awkward, stilted comedy – but also secured the director’s place in the canon as an intermediary between the mainstream and the avant-garde.
To reduce Lynch’s work to this gauche layer of vulgarity and kitsch, however, would be a Ebertian misreading. Lynch’s engagement with the lowbrow was much more multifaceted than his detractors suggest, often managing to go beyond it to produce moments of genuine terror and profundity. Indeed, as critic Max Nelson makes clear in his recent tribute, at the centre of Lynch’s work is almost always a searingly honest emotional core, often revolving around a woman’s suffering. (Filmmaker Chris Rodley speculates to the director in Lynch on Lynch that the reason Fire Walk with Me received such negative press on release was because it “reminded people that at the centre of Twin Peaks was a story of incest and filicide” – “Maybe so,” Lynch replies.) To note that Lynch has his moments of self-aware kitsch and deep sincerity, though, does little to explicate his peculiar magic – especially since these two moments often occur as one. What exactly, then, is this curious engagement with the kitsch that serves as a hallmark of the Lynchian?
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A start is to compare Lynch to his numerous cinematic bedfellows who have made an engagement with the lowbrow central to their styles. Melodrama, which many of Lynch’s works owe a debt to, has long been present within the cinematic highbrow, even if this presence was only gradually and precariously secured. German theatre director Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierck) arrived in the US fleeing the Nazis in 1937 and, inspired by Expressionism, came to direct a series of era-defining melodramas (Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows) characterised by their bold, garish colour palettes and delirious moments of emotional intensity. Like Lynch, these frequently veer into moments of kitsch excess, most famously a scene in Written on the Wind where, upstairs in the vast mansion inhabited by the family members of a Texas oil dynasty, the daughter Marylee (Dorothy Malone) dances feverishly to a recording of the big band-cum-mambo hit “Temptation” while her father dies slowly of a heart attack below. In another similarity to Lynch, he was misunderstood and dismissed by critics at the time, written off as a director of “women’s pictures” and criticised for the “glossy” nature of his work. But where Sirk differs from Lynch, as hinted at by the scene above, is his irony. The sickly, lavish worlds of Sirk’s bourgeois subjects are designed to ironically remind us that despite their material plenty and worldly virility, spiritually and emotionally they are dead. “People ask me why there are so many flowers in my films,” said Sirk in one interview: “Because these homes are tombs, mausoleums filled with the corpses of plants. The flowers have been sheared and are dead, and they fill the homes with a funeral air.”
Sirk’s films were never didactic – his romances such as All That Heaven Allows show a genuine sympathy for their romantic leads – but the ironic thread was always there to relativise his characters and place them in relation to a wider social world. (This is unsurprising considering Sirk’s politics: he was a committed socialist who adapted Brecht for stage and actively supported the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.) The kitsch in Sirk, via its excesses, was thus designed to mediate the artwork into some kind of broader social, moral, or political language. This, needless to say, is not how it is present in Lynch.
Perhaps, then, Lynch’s kitsch has more affinity with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Todd Haynes, both of whom have employed tacky, melodramatic elements in their work while also avoiding the clear morality that underlies Sirk. Haynes’s recent May December tells the story of actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who arrives in Georgia to research her role adapting the true story of Gracie (Julianne Moore), who, 23 years before, made tabloid headlines for raping 13-year-old Joe (Charles Melton) while she was 36. Gracie has served her prison sentence and is now married to, and has a family with, Joe, but Elizabeth’s presence stirs up the secrets of the family’s dark past and origin story. Throughout, the film takes its tonal cues from tacky Lifetime movies, using graceless zoom shots and melodramatic incidental music as Elizabeth struggles to find any depth in Gracie – who continues to stubbornly deny any wrongdoing, claiming Joe seduced her – or encounter any clear “message” to the story at all. Like Sirk, the use of the kitsch in May December is clearly ironic, though shorn of a moral certainty: rather than the bourgeois, Haynes’s target is instead the spectacular, exaggerated lens that the media uses to represent and understand social trauma, and its stunning inability to do either of those things. Haynes’s channelling of the kitsch and melodramatic is thus meant to ironically negate itself and force us to reflect on how we mediate and understand those scandalous, amoral events that occur in the underclass beneath polite society. The results of that reflection, however, are left up to the viewer; Sirk’s clear “message” has instead been demoted here to “social commentary.” In this ambivalence Haynes is perhaps closer to Lynch, but the use of irony for social comment nevertheless puts the former starkly at odds with the latter.
In contrast to Sirk and Haynes – and more in line with Lynch – French director Claude Chabrol deploys a pulpy tackiness in his film La Cérémonie in a way that, though not exactly sincere, is also clearly not ironic. In the film, adapted from the English country house mystery novel A Judgement in Stone, illiterate, introverted maid Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) befriends uninhibited postal worker Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), leading to a series of growing tensions between Sophie and the bourgeois family that employs her. The tone, like May December, is reminiscent of a telenovela: brazen strings exaggerate key emotional beats while characters behave with childish single-sightedness and, in the case of Sophie and Jeanne, vulgarity. The film ends with an act of crude, spectacular violence on the pair’s part, but pitches it in such a way that the moral resolution of the film is unclear: both the bourgeois family and their plebeian antagonists are subject to equally ruthless critique, the former for their hypocrisy and petty delusions of superiority, and the latter for their conniving untrustworthiness. Much like in Lynch, the moments of vulgar excess are uncanny and disturbing, unmediated by irony into some broader social “message” and instead left to hang in the air, unresolved, with all their difficult indifference to morality. In another similarity, by avoiding clear social comment La Cérémonie’s kitsch takes on a cosmic resonance: “It clearly wasn’t your fault,” says one emergency worker in the wake of the ending’s violence: “It was just fate.” Nevertheless, the film’s kitsch remains far too socially grounded to echo the Lynchian. Though the tacky excesses do not culminate in social comment, they do originate in it. Much like in May December, the tackiness in La Cérémonie is aligned with a certain “underclass” (Sophie and Jeanne) who take on their meaning in opposition to a more powerful and “civilised” class opponent (the bourgeois family). Though the kitsch is not ironised, therefore, it is relativised: it is shown to have a certain class basis, just as the bourgeois family’s middlebrow “civility” has.
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When placed against these three filmmakers, Lynch’s use of the kitsch appears remarkably blunt, separated entirely from any societal concern and veering dangerously close to the cheap. It is true that, as in Haynes and Chabrol, his kitsch is frequently aligned with an underclass, which for Lynch usually takes on the avatar of the neglected small town (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet) or a criminal underworld (Lost Highway, Wild at Heart). But unlike those two directors, there is no civilised class opponent in Lynch to mediate this underclass or lend its kitsch a social, political, or moral resonance. Instead, its dark underworld seems to exist in-itself as an eternal spirit of the cosmos. Gangster and arch-villain of Blue Velvet Frank Booth is not evil because of some traumatic past connected to, say, an impoverished upbringing – in other words, a social narrative that could “rationalise” his malevolence – he simply is evil. Channelling a distinctly American mythology, Lynch’s universe is a curiously classless dreamland in which every individual, unshackled from any social label, is charged with a spiritual force that allows them to commune directly with the cosmos.
When Lynch, in a moment of kitsch excess, then, has Frank Booth shout “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES,” this is what is evoked: not cheap effect, not ironic social commentary, but the entire cosmic worldview that gives “Lynchian” its descriptive precision. There is no transcendent, omnipotent God in that universe: rather a dark, conflict-ridden immanence, where Manichaeistic forces of good and evil fight it out amidst coffee and cherry pie to gain the upper hand. And if this universe is what is signalled by Lynch’s kitsch, then it begins to take on a seriousness that, if not moral, is certainly spiritual. For if there is no transcendent Creator to safeguard the good in the Lynchian cosmos, then it is up to his characters, and no one else, to realise it. Their opponent is an evil that is not merely the absence of good, as in traditional Christianity, nor a social evil that exists “out there” in society without our involvement, but instead a sickly, dense blackness that has an immediate presence before us: a definite form, figure and face.
Black has depth . . . you can go into it. . . . And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.2
Evil had substance in Lynch – forms, avatars, representatives – and it was this very idea that was so gauche and unacceptable to his detractors, for whom it was childishly direct. But it was this very directness that gave his kitsch its spiritual seriousness, reminding us that evil exists not only here and now but also within our very bones. Doppelgangers and possessing spirits abound in Lynch as emblems not only of the density of evil but also of our implication in that fact: since it is our weakness, our willingness to give up our body to it (for the opposite would be riskier), that helps give evil its bodily consistency. In this Lynch has affinities with the Kierkegaard of The Sickness unto Death, for whom the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith, and the primary victim of sin is not the sinned upon but the sinner. Major Briggs’s famous dictum on the dreamer in Twin Peaks could, indeed, be rewritten thusly: We are like the sinner who sins and then lives inside the sin.
Whether evil is fundamentally human or cosmic is, however, a tension that Lynch necessarily leaves unresolved. The two spark against and slip into one another constantly, and this, really, is what defines Lynch’s kitsch: the removal of the intermediary layer of the social that would stabilise the system. The kitsch in Sirk, Haynes, and Chabrol, tacky and excessive as it often is, retains a social resonance, which means it (ironically) comes off as poised and refined – something that stands in stark contrast to Lynch, whose kitsch is uncanny, volatile, and unstable. Women literally give birth to alien babies; it provokes not only a cosmic sense of the fundamental alterity and hostility of the universe, but also the very human anxiety of fatherhood. Leland Palmer rapes and abuses his daughter, and the event is at once, sans mediation, a human tale of the trauma of incest and sexual abuse and a cosmic one of evil’s persistence in the universe. (He looks in the mirror: he sees himself, then BOB, then himself again, all in abrupt succession.) If the kitsch is always concerned with the relationship between a higher value – typically beauty – and the cheap, mass-produced kitsch object itself that seeks to imitate it, Lynch took that relationship to the very extreme, forcing the two ends right up against each other. The result was not beauty, an aesthetic category that middlebrow critics are always comfortable with, but something far more unsettling: the sublime. Douglas Sirk once said in an interview that “there is a very short distance between high art and trash.” And for Lynch, this was the sublimity: that within the most wretched detritus of the world resides both the grandest evil and the purest good.
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All images are screenshots from Eraserhead, All That Heaven Allows, and Blue Velvet.
