Remembering David Lynch: A reflection on his work that most affected me.
David Lynch's "Blue Velvet", "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me", and "Inland Empire."
David Lynch was, in every sense of the word, an artist—a creator who shaped the world around him by showing us the strangeness of our own lives. His films are not easy to describe, not in the usual sense. They are unsettling, beautiful, terrifying, and often oddly comforting, as though he found a way to connect the parts of us we’re too frightened to examine. It is at least partly because he made that connection so deeply, and spread it so wide, that his name has become part of the culture, his work a common touchstone for whoever has ever dared look beneath the surface of things.
Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr. didn't just change film; they changed people. They entered our collective consciousness, and it's easy to talk about their craft or their boldness, but it's harder to talk about the ways in which they reverberate. Lynch didn't make movies; he opened windows. His work felt like peering into a world we'd always known was there, if only we might admit it.
Blue Velvet holds a special place in my heart: the first film that comes into my head when I think of him, and actually one of my favorite films of all time. More recently, with the intention of paying homage to Lynch's memory, I decided to watch through the rest of his movies. I still have a few left in my queue—the ones waiting for me include The Elephant Man and The Straight Story—but I finally saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which I'd saved until I finished the second season of the series; then there was Inland Empire, that three-hour labyrinth of a film that I'd sidestepped for years because I wasn't certain I was ready for it. Its reputation for being impenetrable and sprawling is fully deserved, but what did surprise me was how much of it lingered in my mind afterward, hanging around during quiet moments.
Lynch's work does not adhere to the dictates of storytelling as we are schooled in their meaning, yet it is as honest as anything I have ever seen. He trusted his instincts, and in so doing, taught us to trust ours. There's a kind of courage in his work, the willingness to step into the dark, not because the light isn't there but because there are things in the dark we need to see.
Blue Velvet (1986)
Blue Velvet is David Lynch's most incisive and unnerving investigation into the duality at the core of the American mind. It's a film that peels back more than the veneer of suburban life; it rips the layers asunder to expose surreal and malignant forces pulsing beneath its idyllic surface. In Lynch's world, nothing is safe or stable. The banality distorts into something grotesque; the beautiful and horrific exist within the same plane as morals collapse into the mire of lust and terror.
This vision—unmistakably crystal from the first frames—is a Lynch. The jollity of this opening montage is hyperbolic, so quintessentially Americana, nearly in parody, its brightness getting shatteringly splintered with a man falling onto his lawn, then comes the ear. This is a rupture quintessentially Lynch: an intrusion of the grotesque into the mundane, the reminder that no surface is ever truly smooth. That ear, metaphor and plot device in one, was the signal for the thematic excavation that was to follow—an aperture into a world where the edges of reality fray, and where listening is a dangerous act of intimacy.
Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey Beaumont serves as our surrogate—a protagonist whose journey is less about solving a mystery than about confronting his own latent contradictions. Here, Jeffrey is classically Lynchian: outwardly innocent yet inexorably drawn to darkness. Less plot mechanics than emotional mapping of his divided self are Jeffrey's relationships with radiant, near-ethereal Sandy and haunted, vulnerable Dorothy Vallens. Sandy represents a vision of purity and light that lifts him upwards, while Dorothy pulls him down into the abyss of eroticism, violence, and despair.
And then there is Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth, a creation so singularly terrifying that he turns almost mythic: Frank is all untrammeled id, and very violently wipes out the line separating cruelty from desire, rage from love. Hopper gives a truly terrifying, oddly hypnotic performance that makes the film almost unbearably taut. Frank's manic unpredictability is Lynch's masterstroke—a reminder that the real terror does not lie in the darkness itself, but in its proximity to the familiar.
What impresses me most about Blue Velvet some twenty years after it was made are its precision-aesthetic coherence, formal rigor. Lynch doesn't just record chaos but orchestrates it with a scrupulously exacting hand, constructing a world both dreamlike and hyperreal. Resulting in this film feeling disturbingly immediate—the reflection of an America in which the surface can never be trusted and the darkest impulses are nearer than we may think.
He allows these to stew, and leave us in a state of diseased disquiet with all the questions those create. Thus, Blue Velvet can hardly be said to be a mystery—that implies puzzle—but rather is a wound that cannot heal. The risk entailed in any deep seeing includes, of course, the chance that one sees much more than what is bargained for.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a harrowing plunge into the psychic and emotional hell of Laura Palmer, a film which discards any comforting distance that had hitherto defined the show for an unflinching confrontation with the cycles of abuse and trauma defining her existence. If Twin Peaks the series trafficked in the uncanny, with surreal tones and quirky surfaces, Fire Walk With Me strips away that veneer to lay bare a stark, pummeling portrait of hurt—one that foregrounds Laura as the locus of a tragedy at once intimate and systemic.
The bold tonal shift from the series is its most serious asset. Lynch digs through the insidious mechanisms of abuse infecting a life and reaches throughout, scarring even the fabric of this seemingly healthy community. In Lynch, Laura is not an idea, nor some symbol, but fully represented as a person of complexity: suffering both utterly particular and totally universally resonant. Her world is one of suffocating dualities: the smiling homecoming queen and the self-destructive addict, the beloved daughter and the tormented victim, the woman in control and the girl who is not.
Sheryl Lee's performance as Laura is extraordinary, not just for its intensity but for its detail. Lee gives voice to Laura's pain with a ferocity that is all but unbearable; her every gesture and expression sopped in the weight of her unspoken trauma. This is not a film to shy away from the horror of her reality: it is revealed (SPOILERS) that her father, Leland, is the abuser of Laura; devastating in both its content and the means in which Lynch implicates the very structures in place to protect. Leland's dual identity and that of the entity called Bob hint at abuse being other than an individual crime, but one of collective silence and complicity.
Lynch’s exploration of trauma is profoundly cinematic. His use of sound—discordant industrial noise, the eerie hum of electricity—creates a sensory experience that mirrors Laura’s fractured psyche. The film’s editing, with its abrupt cuts and temporal disjunctions, places us inside Laura’s disorientation, her inability to trust the reality around her. Lynch doesn’t aestheticize her pain; he externalizes it, making it visceral, immediate, and inescapable.
What lingers most about Fire Walk With Me is its refusal to offer easy catharsis. There is no resolution to Laura's story; instead, it ruptures into a wound extending far beyond the confines of the film itself. In the last moments, sitting in the Red Room with Laura's face lit by the otherworldly light, we get not closure but rather a kind of grace that even in deep suffering, there is allowance for transcendence.
But this grace doesn't erase the central truth of the film: that trauma reverberates, echoing through families, communities, and generations. In Fire Walk With Me, Lynch gave a stark, necessary reminder that to confront the darkness is not simply an artistic choice.
Inland Empire (2006)
Where coherent identity, space, and time are dissolved into a hallucinatory, deeply disturbing cinematographic experience—a three-hour plunge into the labyrinthine creation of David Lynch, aka Inland Empire. Much more than in any other film by Lynch, this one resists interpretation, as it appears to dive uncontrollably down into the subconscious—a totally artistic act without any thought to coherence in the narration. It's a movie about the act of watching as much as about anything being watched.
Shot on low-resolution digital video, Inland Empire turns a medium all too comfortable into an instrument of unease. Grained, smeared visuals of a quality that's unremittingly unstable produce an aesthetic as queasy as the unsettling effect caused by the dodging of the rules of conventional cinematic language. The frame itself turns unreliable, its faces blurring, space distorting, and light, that ubiquitous weapon veering between inviting and warm to searingly harsh. Lynch clutches on with this aesthetic since he's not letting off how much visceral horror is buried just in the images. In itself, this begets a kind of unnerving intimacy: We watch this in the feeling like we shouldn't.
At the center of it is the towering, almost inhumanly brave performance of Laura Dern as Nikki Grace, an actress whose life unravels as she entwines herself into the fractured narrative of the film in which she is acting. Or is it her life that's the film? Or the film that's her life? Lynch never lets us settle into a single interpretation. Dern travels through these layers with incredible physicality, her body and face contorting to the film's grotesque emotional landscapes. One moment she's delivering a heart-wrenchingly sincere monologue; the next, she's crawling down some shadowy alleyway, her face a mask of abject terror.
The imagery in Inland Empire is really what takes Lynch's exploration of horror into uncharted territory. There are no traditional jump scares or overt violence, but a sense of unease pervades every scene: a hallway stretches impossibly long with its end swallowed up in darkness; a woman's smile is too wide, her teeth too unnaturally white; a group of women, dancing in tandem to "The Locomotion," their joy imbued with foreboding energy. This is existential horror based on a feeling that the world we watch is fundamentally broken, unmoored from logic or morality or even time.
Of course, there is sound. It too figures in much of the experimentation in Inland Empire. The design of Lynch is a master class in auditory unease: distant hums, abrupt silences, and the kind of distorted whispers that seem to emanate from deeper than the speakers themselves. The sounds don't just accompany; they assault the viewer in such a way as to make it physical while amplifying the film's disorienting terror.
It is not a flaw, rather an expressively developed strategy that works at all levels. Lynch rejects all hints of linear narrative structures and creates fragments of scenes, images, and moments to piece up to create any form of coherent statement. The point is that the fragmentation forms the source of its power, thrusting the spectator into filling up the missing information with his fears and readings.
Inland Empire is less a film than an endurance test, a meditation, and a challenge. The ceaseless experimentation with nightmarish imagery creates something which does not fit under any category. It's a horror not of genre but as feeling, as sensation—a deeply personal coming to terms with the unknown. But to those who would open themselves up to anarchy, Inland Empire offers something no other film does—it reverberates long after the screen is darkened, haunting your dreams and maybe even your conception of reality.