In Memoriam
01.31.25
David Lynch Beatrice Loayza

A reflection on the joy and agony of dark truths in the late director’s films.

David Lynch in 2007. Courtesy Getty Images. Photo: Larry Armstrong.

1946–2025

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For all the battered women David Lynch depicted in his films, I always found myself willing to forgive him the cliché that a male genius can get away with being fascinated by misogynistic violence. I’m certainly not alone in this respect. Among the outpourings of love and admiration in the wake of his death on January 15, at the age of seventy-eight, I was tickled by one social-media user’s observation that Lynch was the rare man whose four marriages seemed only to reaffirm the impression that he was loved by women. Lynch, that sly dog, must’ve known he had game: in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the aurally impaired FBI director Gordon Cole—played by the filmmaker himself with his nasal bray on full blast—enjoys a romantic rendezvous on the clock. When younger colleague Albert (Miguel Ferrer) shows up to Gordon’s hotel room, he is sipping a “fine Bordeaux” with a frisky French woman he picked up at the bar. And who could forget the photographs of Lynch at the Cannes premiere of Mulholland Drive in 2001? There he is wearing a tux and a tight-lipped smile, his fabulous leading ladies evoking the starlets of vintage Hollywood. Naomi Watts (in a golden flapper dress) and Laura Harring (in a crimson floor-length gown with a plunging fur neckline) squeeze his arms and kiss his cheeks.

Naomi Watts, David Lynch, and Laura Harring at the 54th Cannes Film Festival in 2001. Courtesy Getty Images. Photo: Pool Benainous / Duclos.

Lynch may have been something of a ladies’ man, as was abundantly evident in the way his camera imbued many of the women in his films with the glamour and gravitas of Technicolor heroines. See, for example, Patricia Arquette channeling the ice-blonde allure of Veronica Lake in the second act of Lost Highway (1997), or the amnesiac played by Harring in Mulholland Drive, who dubs herself “Rita” after catching a glimpse of Rita Hayworth on a Gilda poster. The men Lynch modeled after himself were fearful fathers (Eraserhead, 1977), perverts with a conscience (Blue Velvet, 1986), and straight-shooting oddballs (Twin Peaks, which aired on ABC from 1990 to 1991 and returned for its third season on Showtime in 2017). Yet his women are the ones who linger in my brain for their strength and savagery, their wounds and longings. If Lynch was drawn to feminine archetypes, he also upended and turned them inside out, making Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet, for instance, a femme fatale one moment, a distressed damsel the next. Still, neither of these categories could ever contain the ambivalence of her desires, the torment in her eyes, which feel to me far more unsettling than the gas-huffing lunacy of Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth. Lynch’s women, for all their beauty and mystique, possess dark truths that cut through his worlds of heightened artifice like blades.

Laura Harring as Rita in Mulholland Drive. Courtesy Getty Images. Photo: Archive Photos.

Lynch lived and worked in Los Angeles for most of his adult life, though he was born in Montana, in 1946, and moved around the country with his parents, enjoying what he has often described as a perfectly unremarkable childhood. He didn’t think to become a filmmaker until his twenties. While studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he gravitated toward moving images, making a string of short films distinct for their eerie blend of the abject and the juvenile.

In the five decades since his feature debut, Eraserhead, a quasi–student film he made in part during his time at the American Film Institute directing conservatory, Lynch never abandoned this taste for the primitive, in all senses of the word: his affinity for the logic of dreams; his stark conceptions of good and evil; even his predilection for cheap effects (the animatronic robin at the end of Blue Velvet or the chintzy VFX in Twin Peaks, like the rubbery stick trees in the Red Room) all summon this crude and unrefined spirit. As Kyle MacLachlan wrote in his recent tribute to the director for the New York Times, Lynch’s work is “outside language,” which is not to say it’s impenetrable. Despite its refusal to be solved by our usual cultural and psychoanalytical tools of interpretation, it is, miraculously, for us. This has less to do with his particular narrative obsessions (women in trouble, cops and hit men and mobsters caught in Manichean struggles) than his insistence that we connect to works of art by purely intuitive forces—thus his famously terse and blank-faced interviews when asked to talk about his films. For Lynch, the most powerful images throw us back into the shock, wonder, and confusion of our greenest years, when everything in the world seemed to be happening for the first time.

Still from Inland Empire. Courtesy Cinetic Media.

In his superb essay for the New Left Review, Max Nelson writes that Lynch experienced something of a “primal scene” when, as a youngster, he and his brother were approached on the street by a naked woman who seemed to have escaped a brutal encounter. That Lynch’s work would ultimately concern the corruption of innocence and render such formative experiences as cataclysmic, unreal, and time-and-brain-bending phenomena was his way of privileging those earliest of traumas: the gut feelings of right and wrong that seem to dull with age and its gray space of relativity, the sensitivities that made childhood feel so loud and raw and true.

Lynch articulated this upending by way of his own life, as one reared during the time of Elvis and the jitterbug and Stepford suburbia. In the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, the explosion of an A-bomb unleashes demonic woodsmen into the world, literalizing the weapon’s toxic ripple effects upon the planet in the form of flesh-and-blood villains. Civilizational catastrophe, its fathomless horrors and complexities, is broken down to the instinctual stuff of dark fairy tales.

Laura Dern as Nikki Grace in Inland Empire. Courtesy Cinetic Media.

Infusing his work with space-alien humor and a gritty, atmospheric sense of danger, and riffing off the classic melodramas that stunned him as a kid—like The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie (1952)—Lynch portrayed damaged women like a kind of naive spectator admiring the awe-inspiring grandeur and beauty of a princess or a witch. But if playing the voyeur is one way into Lynch’s work, so much of my own relationship to his films has functioned like the approach taken by Mulholland Drive’s Rita, attaching herself to the tragic figure of Hayworth, or like Laura Dern as Nikki Grace / Sue Blue in Inland Empire (2006), transformed by her different personae. Women like Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer may be the victims of cosmic injustice, and yet the mystery Lynch shrouds them in pulls us closer to them, always as detectives on quests to see them clearly, knowing that the image of pristine probity embodied by Laura’s portrait—or the angelic ingenues played by Dern in Blue Velvet and Watts in Mulholland Drive—contains more than meets the eye. This realization, perhaps counterintuitively, I have always found deeply comforting. Lynch’s work may be about the end of innocence, but it is also about the joy and agony of discovering who we truly are. As such, it’s no coincidence that his characters’ identities are often tangled, deceptive, or lost altogether. The world presses upon us with a force that blurs and blinds. It’s in the searching that happens in spite of this that we see ourselves in Lynch’s characters, who live in hunger to find themselves amid the chaos. In other words, they live in dreams.

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, the Nation, and other publications.

A reflection on the joy and agony of dark truths in the late director’s films.
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