by Mindy Clegg
“Well,” Lynch said, “imagine if you did find a book of riddles, and you could start unraveling them, but they were really complicated. Mysteries would become apparent and thrill you. We all find this book of riddles and it’s just what’s going on. And you can figure them out. The problem is, you figure them out inside yourself, and even if you told somebody, they wouldn’t believe you or understand it in the same way you do.” (from Variety by Chris Morris)
The director, musician, and artist David Lynch recently left us. I count myself as a fan. Twin Peaks, which aired when I was a young teen, was a revelation. Even today, few shows or films lay bare the utter weirdness and contradictions of American society in quite the same way. Lynch took the “normal” and showed its ugly face to the world. The mystery of Laura Palmer pulled everyone in, but it was the examination of small town life in America that appealed to many. His stories were full of contradictions, of how being normal can sometimes be a cover for bad intentions, while the social misfits are often the least morally compromised. As a kid who never got the knack of “fitting in” I found it easy to see these contradictions and so the elevation of the small town misfits resonated. Celebrities die all the time, and people who never met them often express sadness. We don’t know these people, but many of us feel like we do. But there are some who represent a strata of American society that often gets marginalized or stigmatized. Those deaths feel like real losses in a way that others do not. Lynch was one of those people, representing those who choose a life on the margins, despite being of the privileged class (white, middle class, etc). Lynch shared an important corrective to American exceptionalism: dark American weirdness.
Lynch offered up an important counter-narrative to the often celebratory version of Americana found in films and TV. Think of the way Steven Spielberg often invokes the imagery of small town America in his works. Lynch also loved the all-American small town, but he was drawn into the contradictions between the polite veneer and the often brutal reality. Rather than tales of typical Americans overcoming obstacles, he revealed how often aiming for that ideal and failing left people battered, bruised, even dead. In Twin Peaks Laura Palmer was a homecoming queen from a well-respected, influential, middle class family family in the pacific northwest. But her body washes up on the banks of a rushing river, wrapped in a plastic sheet. What begins as a tense “whodunit” proved to be an examination of the false veneer of small towns. The most aware and morally upright characters were not the city leaders, the “normal” men and women of Twin Peaks. Rather many of them were participating in the exploitation of teenage girls or at least ignoring that exploitation.
Over the course of the series, we see how many of the denizens of this mountain town held deep, dark, twisted secrets that contradicted their outward displays of piety. It’s the oddballs who live the most morally upright lives and have little to hide from the rest of the community, such as the Log Lady (and her non-judgmental log). The non-conformist can see deeper than anyone else what’s really happening in this slice of Americana and they show little fear in calling it out. The town of Twin Peaks is nothing as wholesome as the “real American” denizens pretend. Rather it is a place full of exploitative rot. And ultimately, everyone knows that, but pretend anyway until the death of Palmer tears away that veneer. Lynch illustrates the toll of the rot. But his stories express empathy for most of his characters, normal or weird. The crimes are a byproduct of supernatural evil in the figure of Bob. He was borne out of America’s obsession with death in the form of the nuclear bomb. His evil works via a kind of demonic possession as he directs people to do awful things. Lynch’s ultimate message is this: we are neither weird nor normal, good nor evil. It depends on our actions in this life. There is no normal, there is just getting through in a strange universe we can’t possibly comprehend. By making Bob a figure beyond our understanding but who emerges from something so deeply American as the building of one of the most destructive forces on earth, he offers the characters who act out destructively a kind of grace, as they can overcome his evil and “fix their hearts.” That’s just my own view of this work. For an interesting analysis of Twin Peaks, cultural critic Maggie Mae Fish eschewed the typical format of unraveling the mystery for you and focused on Lynch’s stylistic choices within the show.
Fish also has an ongoing podcast about Lynch’s films, LynchPins with Adam Ganser which is also a fun and enlightening listen.
I see David Lynch as a sort of ambassador to mainstream America from weird America. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how weirdness has become commodified just like everything else within capitalism. The mainstream corporate-dominated media has managed to get ahold of weird culture and attempted to make it safe for mainstream consumption. Weird culture is something of a byproduct of the mass mediate era, as artists sought a way to comment on the impacts of the rise of mass media itself. Each wave of artistic critique saw an attempt at commodification with some success, at times with the consent of the artists themselves. Think of Salvador Dali collaborating with Disney. This happened across the course of the era of mass media, in drips and drabs. There was no moment where weird became a commodity and lost any sense of authenticity and punch. This “selling out” often comes from people who see themselves as part of counter-cultural (or at least sub-cultural) movements and find some level of success within the mainstream entertainment industry. A new wave of commodification of the weird began in the 90s. During that time, the major record labels and film studios began a widespread hostile takeover of the independent culture that had percolated on the margins since the 1970s. In music, the seemingly unexpected success of Nirvana, who oozed a sort of punk rock authenticity, created a signing frenzy of bands from underground scenes. Around the same time, the New Hollywood movement conquered Hollywood (Lucas, Spielberg, Hopper, etc) since the 1960s, but their origins on the margins inspired outsider film makes like Lynch in the 1970s and 1980s. It was during the 1980s and 1990s that Lynch (and others like John Waters) had what we would consider mainstream success in film making. Twin Peaks really broke Lynch to a mainstream, middle America audience (although his earlier films garnered him some attention – from the Mel Brooks’ produced Elephant Man to the epic flop that was Dune). Twin Peaks appeared at a prime time slot and obsessed the country, despite the show’s oddities. He centered the weird and unfailingly illustrated how the bullies who often rise to the top can come to bad ends.
Which brings us to our present unfolding history here in the US and around the world. The avalanche of awful is fast and furious right now, both here and around the world. It’s hard to single out one thing to be concerned with as events spiral out of control. Much of the media seems unable to speak truth about an unelected oligarch and his coterie of young tech workers (more on DOGE’s attempted coup here). ICE raids are being carried out all across the country, which seem to be a bit of a failure, even as Trump aligned networks breathlessly cover raids. Government employees are being told to scrub their agency’s websites of anything that the President and his cult deem “woke.” Genocidally cruel policies have been issued with regards to the trans community. In addition to the mind-numbingly stupid tariff wars and saber-rattling at Panama and Greenland, Trump just announced a plan to aid Israel’s far right in their plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza (and no doubt the West Bank). I could go on with the stupidity and cruelty of this administration. But what does all this madness have to do the passing of a beloved director that many viewed as an empathetic and humanitarian (even if he dealt with acts of violence in his work)? David Lynch brought a keen eye for our shared humanity. He had no sympathy for bullies who punch down. Rather, he wanted to see those who struggled to fit in thrive. When they did not, it was a tragedy. That sense of humanity and empathy is something that those running this current administration utterly lack. Fascism, far from being an ideology underpinned by any kind of intellectual depth, is really just the political logic of the bully writ large and always has been. They don’t out think us, they just violent assert their will when they can, hence Hitler’s Triumph of the Will. The point is to tear down as much of the world as possible and unleash violence and pain on those deemed lesser than. Lynch (and no doubt all of us reading this) deplored that, even as he explored that mindset in much of his work. Let’s hope that many young directors, artists, and musicians today learned from his example and help us to see our common humanity, and move past this present, fascist moment in America. In the US and around the world, we are experiencing a firehose of inhumanity brought about by this bully turn in politics. It’s precisely the darkness Lynch often warned us about in his work. But he always offered light in the darkness, and encouraged everyone to “fix your hearts or die.” Let’s hope enough of us choose that path in these dark times and refuse to comply with the awfulness being shoved down our collective throats.
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