David Lynch, True Detective

This is the first of a series of essays on significant cultural and artistic figures written for paid subscribers.

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A few months ago, eccentric film director and painter David Lynch passed away. Lynch is known for his violent, surreal films that often seemed to defy linear time and logic.

I have been pondering over some of his work this year.

What struck me in the aftermath of his death was how the people who had worked with him closely remembered him as a supremely calm and gentle person.

He died during the Los Angeles fires and Laura Dern, whose career he had kickstarted with the mystery film Blue Velvet, wrote of his passing:

I know you were worried for everyone’s heartbreak and loss, and yet still, like your films, while horror is happening, you always believed in the light and the goodness in people and held hope for our city and all those who live here…

On Blue Velvet, you took me and Kyle MacLachlan under your wing and treated us as essential collaborators. Your deep inclusion of us as partners and peers profoundly shaped us both. You believed in the ritual of art and the grace that deserves to be given to it. My first memory of this was a warm wind floating over us on a Wilmington, N.C., summer night where you played Shostakovich while we filmed so we could understand the feeling of mystery you longed for…

Kyle MacLachlan, pictured above in his Twin Peaks role as FBI Agent Dale Cooper, wrote:

What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.

Another Twin Peaks actress, Lara Flynn Boyle, recalled her days on the television show by saying:

We were at the helm of a piece of heaven on Twin Peaks and we just went where David Lynch told us. That might sound very obscure but it really is true. How he sees the world is how we should all see the world.

Twin Peaks, for those who do not know, is about the investigation of a brutal murder of a high school girl in a small American town, an investigation that only gets darker and more eerie as time passes.

I would never, initially, have imagined anybody describing the making of such a show as ‘a piece of heaven.’ Yet such a description is of a piece with how so many people have described a man whose stories and images never strayed far from brutality and darkness… He was in touch with something…

His mix of the quirky and the horrific led to his own adjective. Just as we read of the ‘Dickensian’, it is common parlance to refer to the ‘Lynchian’.

For most critics, ‘Lynchianism’ is the juxtaposition of innocent, nostalgic Americana (such as quaint small-town diners and picket fences) with violence and horror, in a bid to expose the duality and dark underbelly of the American dream.

But I don’t think that is what he was saying, not at all.

What he was saying is, in fact, almost the reverse of this, and it is this which makes him an important artist in an epoch of deconstructive postmodernism and cynicism.

David Lynch was not a cynic. Nor did he have a kind of Tarantino-esque violence fetish. Despite his depiction of extreme violence, it was never done to ‘stylize’ violence but to jolt the audience out of a kind of complacency.

In an interview, Lynch once said:

The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids’ heads that it’s not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn’t hurt that much. That’s a real sickness to me. That’s a real sick thing.

The premise of Twin Peaks was to take the detective genre and make it shocking and awful to watch. There was only ever going to be the focus on the one murder, the one investigation. And his initial plan was for it to never be solved until the last episode. The audience was going to be made to feel the violence and horror of this death in an ongoing, unresolved story.

This was to be Lynch’s personal assault on the age of television and casual violence, of food wrapped in plastic and bad coffee…

The show continuously returns to the sound of wind, wind blowing through trees, air moving from an electric ceiling fan. Sound and imagery of electricity features too. Power lines crackling. Fire.

These are symbols of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the ‘something’ in the air. This spirit, according to Lynch, is a spirit of American anxiety and fear. People had moved away from settled neighbourhoods. The television, cities, drugs had changed the zeitgeist.

Lynch was going to use this medium, this zeitgeist, this electricity, as a kind of magic to wake the audience:

Through the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds… ‘Fire walk with me!’

The fire walk is a kind of hero’s journey, into the deepest darkness, because on the other side of that is where the light is found, the light responsible for the simple, good things of the everyday, which are constantly under threat.

Another motif in Twin Peaks is the city Philadelphia. After growing up in small-town America, Lynch had spent time in that city, a place he describes as his greatest artistic influence, owing to its filth, horror, violence, and crime.

In the interview book, Lynch on Lynch, he contrasts these modern experiences with the 1950s:

It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways... there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling that you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then for a disastrous future. All the problems were there, but it was somehow glossed over. And then the gloss broke, or rotted, and it all came oozing out.

It is fashionable to lambast the 1950s as a source of false nostalgia, an age of conformity, boredom, racism. Lynch genuinely believes in its goodness. There was something different in the air to later decades.

But, at the same time, he could already feel the ‘groundwork’ of disaster, a disaster which came oozing out.

In Twin Peaks: The Return, released 25 years after the original series, he would pinpoint this ‘groundwork’ to a specific moment: the detonation of the Trinity atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945. At that moment, strange deities return to earth, one of them being the grotesque mother-figure ‘Judy’, and another being her ‘offspring’, the infamously abstract villain of the show, ‘BOB’.

Ten years later, again in New Mexico, a grotesque figure is hatched, a kind of reptilian/insectoid demon. An Abraham Lincoln figure, all burnt out, seizes control of a radio station, and chants a strange poem over the airwaves: “This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.”

The horse is the pale horse of the Apocalypse, and comes to be associated with the Judy figure. The chant induces unconsciousness in all its listeners, and the creature enters the mouth of a young girl.

The goodness of an era emerging from the darkness of the first half of the twentieth century succumbs to the darkness that had lain dormant. An ugliness takes over. A few decades later and the daughter of the young girl, Laura Palmer, is killed, her body found wrapped in plastic in the river that runs through the small town of Twin Peaks. FBI Agent Dale Cooper then arrives to investigate…

For Lynch, this investigation is a kind of redemptive arc - until, ironically, it is cut short by television executives who had demanded closure and finality.

But the point Lynch was trying to make, and makes again in The Return, is that this demand for closure is to yield to the spirit of the age. It is a refusal to believe in a transcendence to come from elsewhere. The Return shows a Twin Peaks town that has yielded fully to the plastic. Chinese drugs have replaced cocaine. The citizens are literally sick.

In a way, Lynch is the progenitor of another great detective show which would make the same point, True Detective. As the infamous Rust Cohle points out, nothing is ever really fulfilled, not until to the very end…

What is to be done then? Rust learns at the end, after he has a vision of another world, and is ‘cured’ of his prior, nihilistic rejection of life, consciousness, and the soul:

He learns that there is one story. Good versus evil. And our lives contribute to the dimming of that, like stars in the night sky, of fighting for that substance of love that is anterior to the darkness.

In Twin Peaks, this contribution is alluded to by intermittent reference to the Grail quest and Arthurian legend, by the necessity of these questors in facing their own darkness as they pierce the darkness of the world, of being true detectives rather than television detectives.

This was a point Lynch had made earlier in the macabre forerunner to Twin Peaks, the film Blue Velvet, where Jeffrey Beaumont (also played by Kyle MacLachlan) can only grow up by coming face to face with what lurks on the other side of his idyllic town, across Lincoln Street, a depravity which lurks in him too. But once he does, he can earn the vision offered to him by Sandy, his final reward: