On January 15, 2025, David Lynch died from complications of emphysema at the age of 78. I first heard of him when I was about 19, in 2015 or 2016. By then, it had been nearly a decade since Lynch’s last directorial feature, Inland Empire (2006). I wouldn’t watch Mulholland Drive (2001) until 2019. Then, I saw five of his films, one after the other, the last being Blue Velvet (1986).
🅘Obituaries can be many things — a celebration of a person, an opportunity to write freely what couldn’t be safely said when that individual was alive, especially if they could wield enough power or a moment that portends backwards into the work left behind in the wake of their demise. One can recollect Lynch’s support against Roman Polanski’s arrest in 2009, his shifting political stand from Republican to Democrat, his support for Bernie Sanders, and then for the libertarian Gary Johnson, his practice of transcendental meditation translating into a life-long following of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and his rocky relationship with women.
✤This is not necessarily an obituary; therefore, his personhood presents little concern. I am interested instead in attempting to answer why the younger generation — to whom 2006 might appear as atavistic — should find the time to watch his cinema. What does one find in a David Lynch film? And from where you might want to begin? First, the most equivocal of responses that you can associate with Lynch is the incipient dreamlike quality of his works. So, he is not wrong in maintaining that it is a crime to explain his films much like a painting, that the cinematic or visual language treads differently than the English language. For Lynch, each step forward in the act of this translation — from image to word — is a step towards the miscarriage of sense-making.
Yet, one persists criminally, not in the direction of explanation, but in his films’ desire to evoke feeling. Enigmatic, his cinema is populated with ghosts, not people. At the end of Mulholland Drive🧸, when all that remains is the apparition of Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring), the spectator is left wondering how women can easily swap bodies and identities in the film. Do they exist in several dimensions at once? How do they straddle along the realm of magic or dream and the world of imagined reality with such astonishing porosity? The unreliability of characters and their perspectives is taken to its absolute limit in Lynch’s world, where authenticity, morality, rationality, truth and logic seem like antiquated categories.
🦂As Betty and Rita come together — in intimacy, desire, restlessness, and pleasure — their faces coalesce into one like a ghostly sculpture. This portrayal of the union between two women — their lips impressed upon each other at a close distance and different parts of their faces paired together— is perhaps the most powerful image one encounters in Lynch’s cinema. For me, it has been one of the most memorable, if not the most joyful, shots in his entire oeuvre.
But to begin with Lynch, perhaps you will have to look elsewhere. Starting small with a short film (4 minutes) he made called The Alphabet 📖(1969) should be effective. Based upon an incident his first wife, Peggy Lentz, narrated to him about her young niece, the film builds on her experience of an unpleasant, almost predatory, dream. “In a darkened room, in a little bed,” recalls Lynch, “[she] was having a nightmare and repeating the alphabet over and over again.” In imagining this for the screen, the visual language of Lynch takes shape and, to a large extent, determines his trajectory as a filmmaker. Nightmares become the portal through which you enter any of his cinematic worlds. The ABCs a child studies for school turn from a childlike rhyme into a feeling of overwhelming terror. Memorising them opens her to the danger of discipline and punishment.
The girl (played by Peggy Lynch) on the bed — twisting and turning — seems ill-affected by her entry into the school system. Her nightmare becomes a moment where she re-enacts the alphabet perversely but freely. The first time you see The Alphabet, 🍎expect a certain sense of displacement; the black-and-white composition makes one think of early cinema, yet Lynch’s sensibility is avant-garde and relatively intimidating for a young person. The shots adhere to no structure, but the music — the lyrical recitation of ABC — keeps one following the trail of the young girl’s dream. Though the sound creates a sensation of dread, its familiarity allows you to look at the girl and peek into the chaos of her mind and the contraction and entropy of her body.
The next film on this list is his second feature film, The Elephant Man 🔯(1980). Regarded as one of his more comprehensible films, it finds inspiration from the life of a severely deformed man, Joseph Merrick, who used to live in London in the 1800s. The first time Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) looks at John Merrick (John Hurt plays the eponymous character) is a profound shot. While the spectator’s gaze lingers in shadows, the camera closes in on Hopkins’ face. His mouth is agape, eyes well up with tears, and Lynch stylistically draws feelings out to the surface of his face. As the teardrop rolls down his left cheek and the camera pauses, our imagination stirs to accommodate feelings of pain, miracle, revelation, and stupor.
꧒This deceptively simple shot invites us to inhabit the psychic sensibility of Dr. Frederick as he encounters creatureliness. Rather than finding the body obscene or disturbing, his experience is uniquely spiritual, not — as one might suppose — a scientific one. One can safely situate Frederick in the world of Guillermo del Toro, where creatures are looked upon with wonder, sophistication, and softness. John Merrick is, in the imagination of Lynch, as beautiful, tender, and vulnerable as he might be in del Toro’s. It is surreal because I have not seen such a character in Lynch to whom he surrenders so completely in faith and humility.
You can now proceed to one of his most polarising movies, Blue Velvet. The film is weird and atypical. Not even one moment that unsettles our established sense of morality gets assuaged. Lynch intuitively marries violence with voyeurism and dispassion such that, on several occasions, he inspires discomfort. With a sleight of hand, he constructs an absurd world where, on the one hand, wickedness finds room to breathe and decay; on the other, freedom, sensuality, and instinct reign supreme. However, the new spectators should be left to decide what they think about Blue Velvet. And then approach Mulholland Drive.
𒊎Afterwards, you are ready to venture into Lynch's spectacularly surreal works, which manufacture aporias at every turn, reconstruct myths, store mystical artefacts, physicalises ideas, play with abstraction, and deconstruct cinematic techniques. I leave you to explore many films this article does not include, hoping that you will watch some, marvel at how the human mind produces images, and shift slightly in your consumption of art. In our hyper-rational, technology-mediated 21st century, Lynch’s cinema perforates this tyranny of a totalitarian vision and spurs bewilderment.
Srishti Walia is a doctoral student of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
