5 scenes that define David Lynch’s singular vision

The directorial thumbprint of David Lynch spawned its own adjective decades ago, perhaps most thoroughly codified by writer David Foster Wallace. Sent by Premiere magazine to the set of Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, Wallace gave a definition of Lynchian: “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

Put it this way: “Lynchian” evokes the bland wholesomeness of an American Midwestern suburb, wrapped around something unnaturally vile — the discovery of five stray molars in a tuna casserole. A man kills his wife? Not Lynchian. A man kills his wife because she keeps buying the wrong peanut butter? Pretty Lynchian. If the cops stand around at the crime scene, discussing varieties of peanut butters and confessing that the murderous husband kind of had a point — well, that’s just pure Lynch.

Lynch was not merely interested in bad behavior; he was as certain that humans were capable of goodness and love as violence. “Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies,” Wallace said. “Evil wears them.” It attaches itself to the back of boring, ordinary folks and just won’t let go, an unshakable suit made of screaming skin, a ghostly apparition you didn’t summon and don’t want to see.

Evil threatens any logic. The world makes sense and also doesn’t. Any sunshiny day could give way to radioactive hail from the heavens. There’s a morbid hilarity in all of it, a sense of the absurd. Which might explain why, in recent years, his work began to feel like the only key to understanding the profoundly Lynchian landscape of modern life.

Blue Velvet: A Moldy Ear on a Sunny Day

Near the start of Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student who has returned to his home in North Carolina, is walking through a vacant lot. He slows near a collection of debris in the grass, picking up a rock and tossing it. It’s a sunny day. Everything’s fine. But then, in the grass, he sees something.

Crouching low, he discovers what it is: a human ear, severed and lying on the ground, covered in wandering ants and spotted with mold. Jeffrey picks up the ear and puts it in a brown paper bag he sees nearby, then brings it to the local police station. The officer seems unperturbed. “That’s a human ear, all right,” he says, with the equanimity one might reserve for, say, a frog skeleton. A severed ear implies not just a strange accident or crime, but a person, or corpse, who has been missing an ear out there for some time. It is perhaps the perfect Lynchian moment: violence, sure, but it’s also hard not to chuckle a little.

Twin Peaks: Disorienting Words in a Disorienting Place

The famous Red Room in Lynch’s ABC show Twin Peaks is some kind of waiting room, a portal into a mystical dimension in which things are not as they seem, and in which mysteries may dwell but will never really be revealed. In this sequence, the diminutive man (played by Michael J. Anderson) is actually a spirit known as The Man From Another Place. He speaks, and he dances while Agent Cooper (MacLachlan again) watches. What is happening? Who knows?

The Man From Another Place speaks kind of intelligibly, kind of not; subtitles decipher his words for the audience. To achieve this uncanny effect, Lynch came up with a simple and yet somehow very disturbing technique. Anderson spoke his lines into a tape recorder. Lynch then played it backward, and Anderson repeated the backward speech into the recorder; then it was reversed once more. The effect is weird and uncomfortable and oh, so Lynchian: They’re just words, but something, your brain screams, is very wrong.

Mulholland Drive: A Cowboy With a Warning

In Mulholland Drive, Justin Theroux plays Adam Kesher, a Hollywood movie director who’s having, shall we say, a pretty bad day. Mobsters have threatened his life unless he casts a specific actress as the lead in his new movie. When he refuses, they pull his funding. Then he has discovered his wife is cheating on him, and her lover has thrown him out of his own house. Now he has been badgered into meeting a cowboy (Monty Montgomery) in an empty rodeo arena.

The cowboy looks like he has wandered in off the set of another film altogether, some kind of old-timey Western — and there’s the Lynchian moment again, in a movie full of them. Standing across from Kesher, the cowboy seems like the very soul of Hollywood Americana, all bland-faced blondness and benign drawl. But he is clearly warning Kesher: Cast that actress, or there will be hell to pay. He never outright threatens violence, but it’s a threat all the same. “You will see me one more time, if you do good. You will see me two more times, if you do bad,” he says. Something savage lurks beneath.

Twin Peaks: The Return: Sinister Cigarettes

When Twin Peaks returned for an extremely strange third season, 26 years after the original show went off the air, it felt like one giant Lynchian moment. From the start, it was never really clear what was going on, or what was real, or whether reality existed in the universe of the show in the first place. But it all came to a head in the eighth episode, entitled Gotta Light?. It’s hard to even describe the plot coherently, but early in the episode, a doppelganger for Agent Cooper is shot, and then his corpse is prodded and pawed over by ghostly figures often called “woodsmen.”

Later in the episode, the woodsmen return, most memorably near the end. The episode is sort of an origin story for a malevolent force, locating it somewhere in the first detonation of the atomic bomb in New Mexico, in 1945. By the end of the episode, it’s 1956, and an older couple are driving their car home on an empty road when the woodsmen descend upon them. One holds out his cigarette and repeatedly inquires, “Gotta light?” It’s a banal request, of course, one often made from one smoker to another — but the more it’s repeated, the more menacing it seems. The man and his wife flee terrified, and we’re no closer to figuring all of this out than we were before. Which seems, somehow, just queasily right.

Lost Highway: A Mysterious Party Guest

Lost Highway, Lynch’s third collaboration with author Barry Gifford, has plenty of unnerving moments. There are the videotapes sent to Fred Madison, played by Bill Pullman, that show him and his wife asleep in bed, filmed by an intruder. Or the impassioned, some would say hazardous, saxophone solos that are apparently Fred’s specialty.

The film’s palpable strangeness is maximized when Fred and his wife attend a glamorous house party. Fred is approached by someone he doesn’t recognize, a man whose hair is slicked back and fronted in a Dracula-like widow’s peak that keystones a powder-white face and a blaring crescent of teeth. The man doesn’t blink and has no eyebrows, and isn’t even identified until the end credits, as Mystery Man. (He’s played by Robert Blake, whose real-world legal troubles bolster his sinister presence.) The man seems wholly out of place and unseen by everyone else, and claims to be — impossibly — at Fred’s house at that very moment. “Call me,” he says, handing Fred a phone. The same voice responds: “I told you I was here.” Fred’s look of utter consternation is one mirrored by anyone watching the film.