David Lynch’s beautiful nightmares

David Lynch was a filmmaker like no other. The director behind Twin Peaks (1990-2017), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) was a true visionary, who turned the unsettling and the surreal into cultural touchstones. His death this week aged 78 has sparked an outpouring of tributes from fellow creatives, collaborators, celebrities and ordinary fans. It prompted a rare moment of unity, cutting across the often polarised lines of modern cultural discourse. You did not have to love everything he made in his more than four decades of filmmaking, but judging from social media, it seems as if everyone who has encountered his works loved something he has done – or perhaps simply loved the man himself.

Doubtless this is in part because Lynch was from a time before the current culture war. His loss has brought out a nostalgia for when ‘coolness’ still existed. Lynch himself was the epitome of cool – an ineffable mixture of authenticity, style and creativity. His idiosyncrasies – the snappy dressing, the immaculate quiff, his devotion to transcendental meditation, the coffee and cigarettes – were part of a persona that defied easy definition or politicisation.

Lynch’s great skill was in translating ‘affect’, the unreliable evidence of our senses, on to the cinema or television screen, allowing us to share and engage with sensations that would otherwise be confined to individual experience. His genius lay in taking something profoundly familiar, the experience of life through images (the more well-established and clichéd the better), and reshaping this experience into something strikingly uncanny, shot through with unsettling undertones. The term ‘Lynchian’ has come to epitomise this distinctive aesthetic.

Lynch changed both what film showed and how it showed it. He reinvented Hollywood’s cinematic language, juxtaposing contrasting images to profoundly unsettling effect, as in Blue Velvet, where the camera introduces us to the mundane, wholesome Americana of white picket fences, only to drift into the rotting, putrid earth underneath.

He also subverted cinema technique itself. In Mulholland Drive (2001), by using a shaky handheld camera instead of an ‘invisible’, steady shot, Lynch turns a normally straightforward, Hollywood-style narrative shot into a beautiful nightmare. The camera’s ethereal movement, combined with intimate, warping close-ups and rhythmic editing, establish the dreamlike, amorphous fabric of reality that Lynch wants to convey.

Lynch’s urge was always to play with and reimagine the form and content of Hollywood cinema. From the heightening of Hollywood feminine tropes – the Blonde, the Femme Fatale, the Good Girl – to the dismantling of traditional narrative styles in Inland Empire (2006), his work illustrated how Hollywood constructs fantasy.

The fact that just about everyone agrees on the genius of Lynch’s work speaks to the fact that he stands for a time that has already passed. He was not the voice of today, but of a particular historical moment. His works defined the 1990s and early 2000s. This was an era when postmodernism still seemed full of promise – when it could be a playground for imagination and intellectual exploration, before its later retreat into cynicism.

Lynch’s works stand as testament to a time when postmodernism wasn’t just a theoretical concept – it was also a way of seeing, questioning and reshaping the world. He captured the essence of a world poised between the familiar and the absurd, at a time when reality itself felt open to reinterpretation, and this freedom was equal parts promise and nightmare.

With the loss of David Lynch, people mourn not only the loss of a great artist, but also the death of a recent past, when the unknown was a possibility to be explored no matter how freakish it may seem.

Maren Thom is a senior research fellow at MCC Brussels.