David Lynch & the Metaphysical Miasma

Self-indulgent Edition

I finally get around to this belated obituary. David Lynch, the creator of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, died on January 15th, 2025, just five days before his 79th birthday.

I listed his most famous movies to spare myself a filmographic litany. If you are not familiar with Lynch’s work, you can look it up elsewhere. Suffice it to say that he was the rare case of a true-blue avant-garde underground artist and filmmaker who managed to enter the mainstream without ever “selling out”. In fact, he changed our very notion of what is artistically possible within the mainstream, at least in the niche areas of it.

For most of my life he and his work meant quite a lot to me. I know it’s silly to cry about departed celebrities whom you never knew personally, but I have to say that the news of David Lynch’s death really drove a pain into my chest. He was not only a great filmmaker, but he seemed a decent, honest, thoughtful and unique man. I felt as if a good spirit had left this earth.

I first became aware of him in 1987 at the age of eleven, when I read a negative review of Blue Velvet in Austria’s biggest tabloid newspaper. The reviewer was shocked and disgusted by such a perverted, ugly film. It seemed incomprehensible to him what sick mind could come up with such a monstrosity.

Around the same time I saw clips on TV from the movie’s most infamous, with Dennis Hopper doing his horrifying frenzied “Baby wants to f——” shtick. I was a very innocent child, raised in a similar way as Lynch himself, and I was utterly shocked.

I think the first film of his that I actually saw was The Elephant Man, again on public TV. I was very moved, without realising any connection to the director of Blue Velvet.

In 1991 Twin Peaks was also hyped and broadcast on German and Austrian television. I wasn’t really a “fan” back then; after a few episodes I realised that the ever-growing mysteries would pile up incessantly but never be solved and felt frustrated about that. But I also owned a CD of the marvellous soundtrack and like many teenagers was mesmerised by Julee Cruise’s title song Falling.

In 1995 I would see Eraserhead for the first time, appropriately at midnight on a cinema screen in Vienna, together with pals from my Goth clique. It’s a unique film of unmatched dark atmospheric beauty, made with basically no budget, purely with light, shadows, sound and imagination.

Contrary to its reputation, I don’t think it is very hard to “get”, once you tune in to its dreamlike anti-storytelling and vibe. One key is young David Lynch’s anxiety over unexpected fatherhood, and maybe it can also be read as an allegory on abortion and the feelings of guilt that come with it.

The film certainly goes far beyond that, expressing an almost “gnostic” fear about being incarnated as a mortal body at all, “inter faeces et urinam”, as St. Augustine famously put it. This is an “existentalist” feeling you have to know by yourself to understand what is (probably) happening here.

Within the Goth subculture I was part of, Lynch was of course a revered figure. When Lost Highway was released in 1997, it was an incredible hit in my peer group, not least because of its fantastic “scene-related” soundtrack, featuring among others Rammstein (back then the newest, hottest stuff around), Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor, Peter Christopherson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, This Mortal Coil, Barry Adamson and Smashing Pumpkins. Everybody had to see it and everybody had an opinion about it.

One day in early 1998 or so, I met an old school friend on the train to Vienna who, with a manically radiant look in his eyes, announced that he had finally deciphered the film after watching it for the third time or so. He was very excited as if he had stumbled upon a great, thrilling mystery.

It’s typical for Lynch movies to require repeated viewings. The first time you see them you may be confused and even angry at the strange goings-on and seemingly random plot twists, when the movie halfway through seems to turn into something entirely else. After the second, third, fourth viewing things begin to fall more and more into place.

The “sense” they start making after that is not necessarily rational, but operates on a different level you have to open up to. Lynch movies work best if you are ready to give yourself over as if you were on a “trip”, putting rational thought aside (but not switching it off) and willingly letting the director lead you into a world full of emotional rollercoasters, where beauty is only the beginning of terror.

Lost Highway resonated deeply within me and has haunted me ever since. To this day I consider it Lynch’s most accomplished and visually beautiful film. Even after repeated watching, it remains scary as hell. I prefer it a lot to the subsequent and in many ways similar Mulholland Drive (2001) which for some reason got far more critical praise (I like it very much, but, being based on an aborted TV series, it seems a bit incomplete, fragmentary and too TV-ish to me).

When I was at film school in Berlin in the early 2000s, Lynch was a living god to us film students, a model to study, admire and imitate (which was of course impossible). Among contemporary, active directors only the equally “idiosyncratic” Lars von Trier came close.

It was also in Berlin, in 2007, when I had a “live” experience of David Lynch. I will tell you about that later, because this is the “self-indulgent” edition of this article, and I have to get some thoughts out of my way, which may very well be blind leads. But there we go.

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The 20th of January, Lynch’s birthday, was also the day of the second inauguration of his generational colleague Donald Trump (also born in 1946), who Lynch once said could go down in history as one of “the greatest presidents of the United States” thanks to his disruptive power – if only he would stop “causing suffering and division”.

As a teenager, Lynch had attended a presidential inauguration in person, again on a January 20th: in 1961, on his 15th birthday, as a member of a Boy Scouts delegation that paid tribute to the new President John F. Kennedy.

Lynch was proud of his boy scout career for his whole life: his Twitter biography simply read: “Filmmaker. Born Missoula, MT. Eagle Scout.” The latter is the highest rank a boy scout can achieve.

Two future presidents and one past president attended the inauguration, so young Lynch was able to experience four consecutive US presidents up close: Kennedy, his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower, his vice president and successor Lyndon B. Johnson, and the losing candidate Richard Nixon, who became the American head of state in 1969 after his rival Robert F. Kennedy was mysteriously assassinated.

The assassination of Robert’s brother John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 was America’s great national trauma of the 20th century. To this day, in the minds of many Americans, it marks the end of their country’s “golden age”. It is often precisely this period before the Vietnam War and the cultural revolution of the 1960s that they have in mind when they say “Make America Great Again”.

Even though the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone wolf” narrative is still “officially” the accepted version, according to reports the majority of Americans today believe that Kennedy was in fact the victim of a conspiracy by the “deep state”. It is the most widespread and most socially accepted “conspiracy theory”.

“Kennedy” has become a cipher for the ever-growing loss of trust in American institutions since the 1960s, with such a strong symbolic effect that it is also used by Donald Trump to prove that he is serious in his (alleged?) fight against the “deep state”. For example, he announced that he would release the still classified files on the Kennedy assassination to the public. The appointment of Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health also has a symbolic significance in that respect.

In a film by Laurent Guyénot about the assassination of the Kennedy brothers (ignoring whether the theses it presents are correct), I came across a quote from the author that stuck with me:

The Kennedy assassinations are obsessing the American psyche and corrupting its character. The sense of a terrible truth, hidden by the government, is making America deeply neurotic, like a repressed family secret affecting the whole personality. This lie, buried within the deep state, has rendered Americans vulnerable to other lies, just like any lie creates a predisposition for new lies, and even the need for new lies to cover it up.

It was probably this deep-seated sentiment that helped 80 year-old Bob Dylan make a curious comeback to the Billboard charts in 2020. The sixteen-minute piece Murder Most Foul, performed in a dry spoken-word manner, addresses Kennedy’s assassination as a lasting scar on the American soul.

I have a love-hate attitude towards Dylan, but I think this is a fascinating piece. Dylan also doesn’t seem to believe in the “lone gunman” theory:

President Kennedy was riding high
A good day to be living and a good day to die
Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb.

(...)
You got unpaid debts and we’ve come to collect
We’re gon’ kill you with hatred and without any respect
We’ll mock you and shock you, we’ll grin in your face
We’ve already got someone here to take your place
The day that they blew out the brains of the king
Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing...

(...)
What is the truth and where did it go
Ask Oswald and Ruby – they ought to know
Shut your mouth, says the wise old owl
Business is business and it’s murder most foul.

“The wise old owl” of the Illuminati order? The owl effigy at the Bohemian Grove? “The owls are not what they seem”?

“Murder most foul” is of course a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play about the covered-up regicide that poisons the “State of Denmark” as an open secret and drives the murdered king’s son into madness.

I was not surprised to find out that in his memoirs, Room to Dream, Lynch had expressed the suspicion that Lyndon B. Johnson was involved in the assassination (“We’ve already got someone here to take your place”). Agent Dale Cooper, the boyscout-like hero of the groundbreaking 1990–91 Twin Peaks TV series, also expresses interest in the case and doubts about the established narrative on several occasions.

Even more than that, Lynch expressed doubts about the “official” version of 9/11 in an interview in 2006 after he was shown Dylan Avery’s film Loose Change. The things he had seen did not seem to fit well with the story he had been told by the media: for example, the all too small hole in the Pentagon and the absence of an airplane, the collapse of WTC 7, which just like the collapse of the Twin Towers (Twin Peaks?) looked suspiciously like a controlled demolition.

The implications of this are very disturbing. Lynch commented:

Now it’s just an event that has many questions and no answers. And the suggestion that the American government is behind it? That’s too big for people to think about. It’s too big. (…) It’s just, you know, it’s like something no one wants to think about.

I for myself believe, among other things, that Oswald was “just a patsy”, and the WTC buildings were brought down by explosives, not airplanes.

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I hope you forgive me this little digression into conspiracy land.

It would certainly be misleading to give these things too much weight in order to understand David Lynch. However, I am convinced that they play a subliminal role in his films. In his world, evil spirits have undermined and taken possession of America and its institutions, exemplified in the small town of Twin Peaks, which proves to be riddled with lies, murder, corruption, crime, drug trafficking, dark family secrets, perversions, incest, rape, conspiracies and literally demonic forces.

David Lynch himself had spent a happy childhood with loving parents and two siblings in an idyllic world of densely wooded small towns and suburbs in Montana, Idaho and Washington in the 1950s.

It was only as an art student in Philadelphia that he got to know the rough, dirty, ugly side of his country, which made a lasting impression on him. The theme of the loss of innocence, of shock at the realisation of the existence of evil, corruption and cruelty, runs like a red thread through his films. Following Blake (William, not Robert), his films may be seen as poetic “songs of innocence and experience”.

Lynch’s idyllic childhood seems to have left a lasting positive impression on his character. The same man whose films (and paintings) are so full of fear, violence, darkness and terror on the edge of horror was (seemingly) in private a mysteriously relaxed, humorous, enthusiastic person with a sympathetic face and friendly eyes, a physiognomy that is not often seen among Hollywood people. So far, I have not been able to find a single negative judgment about the man Lynch: his employees and collaborators, often long-standing personal friends, always spoke highly and lovingly of his professional and social behaviour.

In 2007, I was able to experience Lynch in person in Berlin, at an event where he promoted a project of the “Transcendental Meditation” organisation he adhered to. Afterwards, I felt as if I had witnessed a UFO landing. Suit-wearing representatives of the self-declared “global country of world peace” wanted to buy the Teufelsberg in Berlin to build a meditation centre that they seriously referred to as the “University of Invincible Germany.” Due to strong public resistance to this “cult,” it never came to pass.

Lynch was a life-long dedicated follower of this Indian spiritual movement created by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which had also briefly captivated the Beatles in the 1960s. One can view the activities of this organisation very critically, as the German filmmaker David Sieveking did in his documentary David Wants to Fly, which was inspired by Lynch’s Berlin appearances of that time.

In any case, the practice of “transcendental meditation” seemed to do Lynch himself an extraordinary amount of good. Until the end of his life, he enthusiastically promoted this practice, extolling it as a purification from stress, anxieties and worries, and an ecstatic gateway to creativity and happiness, to the eternal and indestructible (ultimately, I guess, to God).

He believed in a life of the soul after death, in angels and other supernatural powers and entities. This spiritual aspect of his thinking is also reflected in his films: the forces of good and evil were not fictions or metaphors for him, but real things.

However, he also believed that beyond personal spiritual growth “transcendental meditation” could also usher “world peace” and make other utopian benefits happen. Of course, that seemed rather naive. He was not a person who beyond his religion was particularly interested in or knowledgeable about politics. According to Wikipedia, he called himself a “Democrat” who hated Democrats because they supported smoking bans. In 2016, he endorsed Bernie Sanders, a kind of left-wing populist “middle ground” between Trump and Hillary Clinton for many white Baby Boomers such as Lynch.

Nevertheless, there are some who have identified him as kind of “crypto-right-winger”.

For example, in an obituary for the Austrian right-wing magazine freilich, Russian-German writer Ilia Ryvkin called him the “last, perhaps the most lucid witness to the slow disappearance of traditionalist consciousness”; Greg Johnson, a leading intellectual of American “white nationalism” who uses the pseudonym “Trevor Lynch” for his film reviews, categorised the late director as a kind of conservative, implicitly “pro-white” moralist; and one Washington Post writer even considered him “America’s greatest conservative filmmaker” (“Sorry, Clint Eastwood”);

As evidence, he cites, like many others who point in this direction, Lynch’s now almost forgotten film The Straight Story (1999) - a G-rated, Disney-distributed story about an old man’s last journey on a riding lawn mower, who, before his imminent death, wants to reconcile with his estranged brother:

The Straight Story is the closest Lynch gets to epitomizing mainstream conservative art and politics. It’s a love letter to small towns, neighborly affection, the ties of family, the geography of the Midwest, and (let’s be honest) the myths and orthodoxies of White America.

Lynch’s love for “traditional” America, its landscapes and people and their ways of living, was undoubtedly sincere.

His “conservatism” was, however, notoriously ambivalent. As an artist, he was always searching for forms, expressions and experiences beyond conventional restrictions.

The Washington Post writer remarks:

He was a filmmaker for whom conventional electoral politics were as sterile as conventional realism was stifling. But as Mel Brooks supposedly said, David Lynch was actually “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”. He was both all-American and something alien.

Why an “alien”?

His films, often (somewhat lazily) labelled “surrealist”, are notoriously difficult (though, contrary to popular belief, not impossible) to “decipher”. Lynch, who was also a painter and musician, was a dyed-in-the-wool artist who drew his imagery not from other films, but mainly from his own subconscious mind.

He created a bold, unique style, for which there is now even a special adjective, “lynchesque” or “lynchian”. No other director was able to capture the emotional “logic” of dreams and nightmares as intensely and precisely as he did, and to recreate them with their hellish, magical, bizarre, whimsical states of consciousness, with their exciting plots and riddles that captivate the sleeping self, only to burst like soap bubbles upon awakening, always at the moment when their apparent “solution” seems dramatically imminent.

Those who have experienced intense nightmares will recognise them in many of Lynch’s scenes, which are charged with an incomparable and inexplicable atmospheric tension. Often it is not clear what is “happening”; the director plunges the viewer himself into a dream-like, trance-like state, which is interrupted, but not ended, by sudden shocks.

Lynch also explored closely related areas that are even more frightening and dangerous than mere dreams: his characters are haunted by psychoses, amnesia, trances, waking dreams, somnambulism, personality splits, delusions, dissociative states, and even literal demonic oppressions and possessions.

In Lynch’s films, external reality and the individual ego are only shaky constructs, like flickering candle lights in the wind of mysterious “hidden” powers, that may originate in one’s own psyche as well as in realms beyond the visible world. The criminal conspiracies that his heroes uncover always have this psychological and spiritual dimension.

Film, the supreme machine to create illusions and manipulate time, is the perfect medium for depicting these things, and Lynch used this instrument with stunning virtuosity.

In his heyday, no one would have thought of putting Lynch in a “conservative” pigeonhole. He was rather considered an “iconoclast” and had few inhibitions when it came to taboo breaking and explicit and often shocking depictions of sex and violence. However, in his films, sex is generally a kinky and alluring, yet suspicious, shady thing, a drug that is as heavenly as it is dangerous, and one that only rarely (as in Wild at Heart, for example) appears as a clearly positive force.

The quintessential film that most directly unlocks Lynch’s universe and his attitude to the world is undoubtedly Blue Velvet from 1987. If you want to “understand” the director, this is the best place to enter the rabbit hole.

When it came out, Blue Velvet was recognised as an extraordinary but also deeply disturbing work, subversive of the “triumphalist” patriotic spirit of the Reagan era, which is emblematised today by films like the Rambo trilogy and Top Gun.

In fact, Lynch was no leftist and had actually voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. Evidently, his “case” was more complicated than it appeared to some.

Blue Velvet is set in an idyllic small town called Lumberton (the name refers to forests and lumberjacks), which looks as if it has been taken from one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, in a strangely anachronistic “uncanny valley” time zone where the 1950s and 1980s merge visually.

The famous first shot, accompanied by Bobby Vinton’s 1963 (the year of the Kennedy assassination) crooner ballad Blue Velvet , shows a white fence against a blue sky, lined with red roses – adding up to the colours of the American flag. Next, we see a bright red vintage fire engine driving along a street at a leisurely pace, with an elderly firefighter waving cheerfully at the camera on his footboard, a panting Dalmatian at his feet, followed by a grey-haired female crossing guard or teacher guiding happy schoolchildren across a crosswalk in slight slow-motion.

Lynch begins his story in a seemingly harmonious “high-trust” society, such as he himself grew up in, depicted with a kind irony (the irony of the grown-up who knows a bit better know.)

Almost immediately after this set-up, the forces of death and darkness are breaking in: In the very next scene, the father of the main character Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) suffers a sudden stroke while watering the lawn with a garden hose.

Meanwhile Jeffrey’s mother watches a crime thriller on television (stylised as a black & white image of a hand holding a gun), signalling the intrusion of violence into the domestic idyll (which is, as in Hitchcock’s proto-Lynchian thriller Shadow of a Doubt apparently also somewhat boring and requiring the entertainment of fictional crimes).

Lynch’s camera now literally goes underground: beneath the green meadow teems with slimy, smacking insects with shiny black shells.

This elemental evil, inherent in nature itself, is followed by the discovery of human evil. During a walk in the forest, Jeffrey finds a cut-off ear, half-eaten by ants (some think of Bunuel-Dali’s Un chien andalou here), apparently evidence of a violent crime. This discovery awakens in him a passion for amateur detective work that leads him deep into the underworld of Lumberton.

Together with Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of a local police official, who is the same age as Jeffrey and as clean, naive and lovable as apple pie, he sets out to find the culprit. He comes across the nightclub singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini).

In what is arguably the most iconic and infamous scene of the film, Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy’s apartment and, hiding in a closet, witnesses the singer being abused by a sadistic, psychopathic, black leather jacket-wearing gangster named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). He is holding Dorothy’s son and husband captive in order to blackmail her into performing perverse sexual favours and role-playing games.

However, the darkness that Jeffrey discovers has unexpected layers. To his horror, he realises that Dorothy is a masochist who enjoys Frank’s beatings and abuse. He begins an affair (is it reality or just fantasy?) with the obviously mentally disturbed woman and discovers in himself tendencies and possibilities that deeply frighten him (notably, he has strong voyeuristic tendencies). Evil and perversion also lie dormant in the hearts of the good, who can be corrupted by its temptations at any time.

The forces of evil are embodied by Frank and his bizarre gang of freaks, whores, drug addicts and homosexuals (nobody who saw it will ever forget Dean Stockwell’s eerie lip-synching performance of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, also from 1963). Like the other characters in the film, they are pure fantasy products with no claim to realism.

Frank, still one of the most terrifying villains ever to appear on screen, resembles a walking “id” from a Freudian textbook, constantly under the influence of drugs (he uses a kind of laughing gas to lustfully intensify his frenetic fits of rage), constantly driven by violent and sexual impulses. He is also often haunted by mysterious emotional outbursts. Lynch suggests that Frank’s monstrous character may also be a product of early childhood trauma, violence, incest or abuse. He uses the word “fuck” incessantly, but is possibly impotent.

Some details suggest a national context beyond the exemplary small town: (John Wilkes) “Booth” was the name of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin; “Lincoln Street” is the name of the street where Dorothy’s apartment is located. Jeffrey uncovers a criminal conspiracy in the course of his amateur detective work: Frank and parts of the police force are in cahoots. (Does all of this subliminally refer to Kennedy and the national divide that his assassination marked?) However, the police are not completely corrupted, and in the end the old order is restored.

Blue Velvet is by no means a “deconstruction” of the small-town America in which Lynch grew up. The world of friendly teachers, firemen, policemen and neighbours, of intact families, integrated blacks and blonde apple pie girls is not a “façade”. Rather, it exists “Manichaean style” alongside the world of criminals, murderers, sadists and sexual deviants.

At the end of the film, the forces of good seem to have triumphed. Dorothy is free and reunited with her child, Sandy forgives Jeffrey his sexual adventures, and the young couple is miraculously visited by a robin that perches on their windowsill with a huge black beetle in its beak, symbolising the victory of love over darkness.

Lynch, however, has built in an irritation: uncommented by the protagonists, the bird is obviously a mechanical model. Is it all just “fake”? Can this peace and idyll be trusted?

Lynch would go on to make two more films with “happy endings”: the outlaw romance Wild at Heart (1990) and The Straight Story (1999). Since Twin Peaks, the forces of evil have been gaining the upper hand in his films, and not even “pure” characters like Agent Cooper are immune to falling under their spell. Had the director grown more pessimist? Do “bad endings” make a better story?

Unlike Robert Eggers, one of the last representatives of “auteur films”, David Lynch was able to look beyond evil and terror. He was neither a nihilist nor an accomplice of demons like many other artists of fear. I’m not even talking about the occasional happy ending or the appearance of angelic forces in his movies. I rather think of Lynch’s never-ending sense of wonder or his (often odd and quirky) humour, a feature that Eggers completely lacks (always a bad sign).

More important is the fact that his movies betray an honest interest in human beings and their emotions, and most of all that they do have a clear moral sensibility about what is right and wrong. Even if Lynch may have felt that life is like a dream within a dream, he seemed to care for the truth. He believed that there is actual truth out there, also spiritual, transcendent truth, and that lies cause evil and evil causes lies.

The escape from truth, the hiding of truth, the distortion of truth is the cause of many of the evils in his films. It poisons marriages, families, communities, towns and even nations. It invites evil and avenging spirits, it causes the psychiatric dissociation phenomena, compulsive disorders and nightmares that haunt Lynch’s guilt-ridden and traumatised characters. Obscuring the truth and selling lies is the business of Hollywood, which the director portrayed as being ruled by literal satanic entities.

Many think that the “key” to understanding Mulholland Drive is that the last third of the film reveals the “real” background story about the emotionally abused actress Diane getting her former bisexual lover whacked by a contract killer, while the first two thirds of the film are “imaginary”, a fantasy in Diane’s mind designed to bury the truth about her heartbreak, her failed career and her murderous guilt. When those defence mechanisms break down, she is hunted to death by Furies in the shape of an infernal elderly couple.

That interpretation may not explain everything, but it does makes a lot of sense. Simple truth may sometimes be much scarier than any “Mystery Man”, BOB or Frank Booth. The suppression of truth may very well conjure such demons, or at least draw their attention.

Trevor Lynch has emphasised Lynch’s moral sense as well and interpreted Blue Velvet in an almost theological way:

What is the political philosophy of Blue Velvet? I read Lynch as fundamentally conservative. The typical sneering Leftist take on Lynch’s opening is that the idyllic surface of Lumberton is fake and kitschy, whereas the truth about Lumberton is the bloody struggle of vermin in the dark. But Lynch’s own view is far more nuanced.

Lynch knows that civilization is artificial, a construct, a triumph over nature. But Lynch is not a liberal or a Leftist because he does not think that nature is good. Thus he does not conclude that the conventions that constrain nature are bad. Lynch thinks that nature is profoundly dangerous, especially sex and sadism, which for him have a supernatural, demonic quality. Lynch does not believe in the “natural goodness” of man. He believes in the natural—and supernatural—badness of man. Which means that human nature needs to be constrained by human conventions.

Frank Booth is Lynch’s portrait of what you get when nature is liberated by the breakdown of social repressions. The French Revolution ended with the Terror. The Sixties ethic of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll didn’t lead us back to the Garden of Eden. It gave us the Tate-LaBianca murders, the Weathermen, and Frank Booth.

This is one possible way of looking at the film, but it is certainly not the only one.

Lynch said in an interview that Blue Velvet is about the “mysteries of darkness and love”, the discovery of a “strange sickness” in the fabric of human society (not only America) and in the depths of the human heart.

In his private life, Lynch believed he had found a cure for this metaphysical “miasma” in the form of transcendental meditation; in his films, he invited viewers to cathartically see, feel, experience, and perhaps better understand those forces.

If a true artist is exploring mysteries, don’t expect “messages” or “solutions”. To figure these out for yourself is the one thing he can’t take away from you.