Now, It’s Dark: David Lynch in Memoriam

The world David Lynch created and left behind is endlessly illuminating, compassionate, and strange. His work—however dark—examines the beauty of the human condition and the confounding world we surround ourselves with. Throughout his career, he remained a defining voice of American film and television, making his mark as a truly one-of-a-kind talent with a transformative vision. His absence will be felt for the years to come, but how lucky we are to have so much to appreciate and enjoy. We will spend the rest of this piece doing just that.

Eraserhead

Eraserhead is the big bang from which the rest of David Lynch’s universe sprang. While some of his favorite recurrent narrative devices would initially appear in later projects, the pure cinematic mechanics that would carry on throughout his filmography are on full display in his first feature outing, to a near-overwhelming effect. Lynch believed that cinema “is sound and picture moving together in time”, and he proves his mastery of the former here with a lush, punishing aural blanket that emanates from the first frame to the last. The constant churn of industrial humming, electrical buzzing, distant drones of unknown origin, and infantile wailing are married perfectly to the procession of startling stark black and white imagery. In those images, we are introduced to the visual touchstones that would come to define “Lynchian” cinema: vacant, dilapidated urban spaces; stunted conversations captured in long takes; beings of unclassified species brought to life through puppetry and stop-motion; chevron tiled floors. 

Despite Lynch’s many returns to this visual language, the key difference between the world of Eraserhead and all of Lynch’s subsequent longform works is that, with Eraserhead, the surrealist imagery presented isn’t the dark underside to some familiar sunny “reality” — it is its own time, place, and feeling. Recalling his childhood, Lynch once described the hidden darkness of the world as “milllions of red ants” oozing just out of view beyond picket fences and cherry trees. In Lynch’s subsequent works (such as Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks), characters existing in the “real world” pull back a curtain to reveal the red ants underneath. In Eraserhead, there is no curtain—it is all red ants. Lynch spent five years making Eraserhead – much of that spent living on set, cobbling together funding in fits and starts, in order to hand craft the images and sounds that constitute what he later called his “most spiritual film.” The intensity of this production calls to mind the brick walls that entomb Eraserhead’s Henry inside of his apartment. The resulting work represents a space seemingly constructed from Lynch’s exorcized demons—one he would never fully inhabit again, but would return to by way of doppelgangers, time loops, and red rooms. With Eraserhead, Lynch immersed himself in the intensity of his own red ants so that he could later show us the incredible delight to be found in jukebox tunes; a slice of pie; a cup of coffee. Toward the end of Eraserhead, after an onslaught of parental anxieties and social interactions in a hellish industrial dreamscape, a lady in the radiator of Henry’s apartment sings him a haunting song of vague reassurance, and later embraces him in brilliant white light. With Eraserhead, Lynch leveraged the entirety of his creative toolbox to immerse us in what looks and sounds like nothing but a nightmare, while ultimately assuring us that, in heaven, everything is fine. [Mike Johnson]

The Elephant Man

David Lynch’s masterful direction of The Elephant Man (1980) displays a genius that starkly dramatizes the spectacle that is the atypical. Though the movie is hardly a true account of the real Joseph Merrick (referred to as “John” in the feature), the film brilliantly portrays the bleak existence of the physically-deformed individual who is put on display by both the cruel circus showman and the kind doctor. Lynch infuses the film with a permeating trepidation, with audiences hypnotically observant of both Merrick’s form and his eventual fate. However, Lynch understands that the real horror of the film is not with Merrick’s appearance but with the disgust film audiences will have for the 19th-century crowds that poorly treated the human being. The black-and-white cinematography captures this world as a moral quandary, so in need of distraction that it must make an exhibition out of a misshapen man. Perhaps most shocking of all, Lynch was personally recruited to direct this feature by Mel Brooks, who produced The Elephant Man uncredited as to not deter audiences from this powerful drama. [Paul Feinstein]

Dune (1984)

Dune, the first and last big-budget David Lynch production, was destined to be a mess. It’s only appropriate that a filmmaker so mercurial, so obsessed with intuition and feeling, would meet his match in adapting the New Testament of sci-fi door stoppers once director after director aborted the infamously unfilmable novel. That the budding surrealist who made Six Men Getting Sick worked with Toto and Sting to accomplish this goal feels like a particularly ridiculous cosmic joke (“Prophecy Theme by Brian Eno”). Indeed, the final result is at odds with itself: the movie reinterprets Frank Herbert’s supergiant of microdosing and political maneuvering as a tale of spiritual awakening, but nonetheless crams endless details into a nonstop deluge of spoken information. The script, packed with exposition within exposition, is an overwhelming, often hilarious infodump in which every line compounds a breathless narrative existing only to explain itself. Lynch disowned the film and critics panned his creation—the curt, clean, pop moviemaking of Star Wars this was not.

But beneath the word barf of astral heads and dream-talking expositors, Lynch shines through. As so famously intoned, “the sleeper must awaken.” This particular dream follows threads that radiate outwards into the rest of the director’s career: surreal transmissions from a realm beyond our own, the first collaboration with a baby-faced Kyle MacLachlan, a ducal signet ring treated with the same obsession as its dark Twin Peaks successor, and metal hellscapes which feel both the logical continuation of Eraserhead and direct precursors to The Return’s black-smog industrial nightmares. It helps that Dune is impeccably designed—the handmade effects and marriage of sci-fi opulence to Gigerized grotesqueries provide a fully realized aesthetic; unmatched by the weightless sci-fi shooter vibe of Denis Villeneuve’s later attempts. Lynch has always been a master visual stylist; in this the film succeeds tremendously.

Even though Dune forever remains a black sheep of Lynch’s filmography, it proves irresistibly endearing as his reinterpretation of the classic pulp sci-fi mode; filled with ominous alien overlords and laser guns and space nobility and elemental good and evil. It shines too as his most outwardly campy work: recognizable faces of the Lynch stable and scene-to-scene incongruity of tone create something not unlike a head-trip Muppets production of the source material, underlined by an absurd credits sequence featuring saccharine rock ballads and performer headshots. Nothing but love for the ridiculousness of an uncanny psycho-hacker toddler (“GET OUT OF MY MIIIIND!!”) and the repeated establishing shots of an ominously wobbling cube and the phrase “NEW POISON GAS TOOTH” and the man himself appearing as a cameo, barking in that iconic voice: "but Sire, we can't leave all this spice!” [Morgan Hyde]

Blue Velvet (1986)

Three features into his career, David Lynch had already weathered the highs and lows of the showbiz rollercoaster, reeling from the grant-funded esotericism of Eraserhead (1977) and critical laudits of The Elephant Man (1980) to the big-budget debacle Dune (1984). Adrift in the mid-1980s, his reemergence came down to a cryptic premise: Curious teen finds severed ear in field.

Blue Velvet (1986) represents the perfect synergy of form, content, and that secret third thing Lynch tapped into so effortlessly. Fellow Dune refugee Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey Beaumont, a bored college student on summer break in his hometown Lumberton. He teams up with a cop’s daughter, Sandy (an incandescent Laura Dern), to solve the mystery of the detached ear, unwittingly falling into a criminal conspiracy that plays out like a Hitchcock mystery on PCP. 

If you’ve heard of this film at all, you’re probably aware of Dennis Hopper’s career-defining performance as the unhinged villain Frank. An iconoclast of New Hollywood, Hopper had to practically beg for the part, due to a career slump that may have had something to do with his audition sales pitch: “I am Frank.” But it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. (Scanners baddie Michael Ironside has said it was written with him in mind). Hopper-as-Frank is the black hole of immense gravity that holds the film’s roiling bug-hell of surrealistic horror together.

Not unlike the previous decade’s Chinatown (1974), Lynch sculpted his post-modern noir from the bones of the previous generation’s black-and-white thrillers: everyday Americana unsettled by the dark dealings of crooked cops and sexy sirens. And like Polanski’s dark-hearted classic, Lynch’s creation features a level of perversity strong enough to create loud aesthetic dissonance to those inspirations. But Blue Velvet’s sublime balance of bone-headed corniness (“That’s a human ear all right!”) with nightmarish depravity was something else altogether, a mythic blend of moviemaking’s most disparate tonalities, Norman Rockwell via Francis Bacon.

For a peek into the mainstream’s reaction at the time, look no further than Roger Ebert’s essay “My Problem With Blue Velvet.” Spoiler alert: he hated it, mainly due to what he felt was Lynch’s mistreatment of leading lady Isabella Rossellini. (Lynch and Rossellini later became a couple.) It’s true that Rossellini shows extreme vulnerability on-camera as her character, nightclub singer Dorothy Valens, endures Frank’s torments. But what’s interesting is the judgment placed on these moments, as if they simply shouldn’t exist in a film that also has jokes about lumberjacks. 

Lynch tangles these wildly clashing vibes together as only he could, with a deep, messy humanism that somehow makes it all work. Did Ebert (may he rest in peace) miss the scene where Jeffrey  breaks down in his bedroom after coming face to face with true evil? Blue Velvet is full of moments like this, where characters withstand incredible pain in search of the mysteries of love. [Matthew K. Seidel]

Wild at Heart

There was a novel released in 1990, the first of a series, titled Wild at Heart. Within a year, Barry Gifford’s novel had been adapted into David Lynch’s take on a road movie: the story of Lula and Sailor, two young lovers on the run in a convertible. The film, like their romance, is brimming with equal parts sex, violence, and music. Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) have been reunited after Sailor’s stint in jail. As the trip unfolds, so does the backstory of Sailor’s arrest, and we learn that the law isn’t their only foe: Lula’s mother Marietta (played by real-life mother Diane Ladd) has been pulling strings behind the curtain, and she certainly doesn’t approve of their reunion. On the journey, the couple runs into increasingly twisted situations and characters until they meet the stomach-churning Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), who might be the one person who truly can tear these two apart. 

By this time, Lynch was already establishing a name for himself as an auteur. Audiences were down to get freaky with Lynch’s style, but it was the violence that really endangered the film’s success. Advance screeners saw audience members leaving mid-film in droves, and the film was threatened with the death knell X-rating. Lynch proudly explained in an interview with The Today Show that he evaded that kiss of death not by removing anything, but rather by layering shots to conceal the most objectionable moments. It should be emphasized, though, that the movie contains so much more than just bloodshed: the chemistry between the two stars is palpable, and already-dynamic performances are underlined by a killer soundtrack, which includes Elvis favorites and the then-slept on “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak. Lynch, of course, understood the necessity of good music, explaining in another interview that it “plays a huge role in creating a sense of place and mood… another one of those elements that you have to try to get right so that the whole thing jumps up into the stratosphere.” And we certainly do enter the stratosphere in this film. 

Lynch’s attention to detail comes as no surprise, of course. Dafoe, whose portrayal of Bobby Peru remains haunting, reminisced in a February 2019 interview with GQ about the role and specifically about those teeth. Dafoe explained that while many directors focus on world-building and work with the actor to flesh out characters, “the best experiences are always when you get a good setup, and David Lynch gave me such a good setup.” He goes on to explain that Lynch had already picked out a costume and, rather than using special effects makeup for the teeth, had Dafoe in custom dentures, “and they were the key to the character.” 

This is just one of countless anecdotes from actors about their experience working with Lynch, and I’ll end on another. After Lynch passed, Nicolas Cage gave this statement to Deadline: “[Lynch] was a singular genius in cinema, one of the greatest artists of this or any time. “He was brave, brilliant, and a maverick with a joyful sense of humor. I never had more fun on a film set than working with David Lynch. He will always be solid gold.” Amen. [Kathryn Bailey]

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

It wasn't the movie anyone wanted. After Twin Peaks was cancelled in 1991, season two ended with a (spoiler warning) shocking cliffhanger in which Special Agent Dale Cooper, the beloved series lead, had been possessed by the malevolent paranormal force BOB that originally killed Laura Palmer and set the events of the show in motion. It was, for many fans at the time, a deeply frustrating experience. When Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was announced, there was a hope (an expectation, really) that the film would tie up the loose ends and remind viewers of the reasons they fell in love with the show in the first place. After the second season's lopsided quality and negative reception, audiences were primed for a film to deliver Dale drinking coffee, palling around with Harry Truman, and saving the day.

That was not what they got. Instead, Fire Walk With Me follows Laura in the week leading up to her death, forcing the audience to recognize her not as the MacGuffin that drives the plot or the damsel in distress that Cooper was too late to save, but a living, breathing girl with hopes and dreams, filled with both kindness and hate. This Laura's death is a tragedy, not because of how her absence affects the town and not because her uncovered secrets shock her friends and family, but because she was her own person. Sheryl Lee gives the performance of a lifetime, finally able to play the real Laura—not her doppleganger cousin, not her dream-self in the Black Lodge, and not the perfect prom queen that only existed in memories and photographs. Lee instills such a complex volcano of inner conflict and fear and desire that it feels like the whole world is bursting out of her when she screams in anger and horror. There's barely any Dale Cooper in the film (Chet Desmond, the agent investigating the pre-show murder of Teresa Banks, is a cynical contrast to Cooper's aw-shucks delight), and almost none of the goofy interactions that characterized the residents of Twin Peaks on the show. Instead, we're stuck with Laura, as isolated from the cheery world of Twin Peaks as she was. The show asked "Who Killed Laura Palmer," but Fire Walk With Me removes the mystery narrative to focus on Laura herself. It's a brave, beautiful film that refuses easy answers and comforting moments to search for some truth in tragedy and to find some comfort in grief. [Ziah Grace]

Lost Highway

There are so many ways to describe David Lynch, namely dreamy, scary, romantic, sexy, and critical. Lost Highway (1997) is all of those things plus a cinematic albeit heterosexual love letter to LA (re: Mulholland Drive). While many argue that Inland Empire is Lynch being his most Lynch, its dark predecessor, Lost Highway, takes the cake. David Lynch subverts the typical noir film tropes and consumes and regurgitates them to make a film that oozes pure evil. Perhaps that seems harsh, but a film ultimately about how white men should not create jazz because it leads to them acknowledging their unbearable inadequacies and brutally murdering and dismembering their hot wives feels pretty evil. 

The nightmarish ambiance of Lost Highway is aided by the sound design. Sound is crucial to Lynch’s films because it bridges gaps left in his dreamscapes. Following Bill Pullman’s character, Fred and his wife, Renee (played by the incomparable Patricia Arquette) in the first half, his anxieties are punctuated by an ominous score creating an atmosphere of fear and dread as he traverses the darkness of his mind and home. Moreover, police sirens establish the twisted cycle in which Fred is trapped. In the second half, in the presumed shadow realm, the grating soundscape transitions to industrial rock as all of the smut of the ‘90s is put on display. Hearing Marilyn Manson croon “I Put a Spell on You” makes one feel as though they are watching a Hitchcock parody through a deranged fun house mirror filter. 

Patricia Arquette particularly stuns as Renee/Alice. The former being a Betty Page goth type, while the latter being a blonde Marilyn Monroe surrogate. In a typical noir, women are used as manifestations or projections of the male leads’ object desires and fears. For these characters, the frequent nudity would be gratuitous in another director’s hands, but Lynch is an exceptional auteur. Because of his reverence for women—which can only be described as lesbian in nature—and Patrica Arquette’s own genius, Renee/Alice deliver an autonomous sensuality while sauntering and seducing men. “Song of the Siren” could not be more apt.

There is so much more to say.! The Mystery Man who is terror incarnate. Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy, the unhinged gangsters crusading against tailgating! Even Fred’s young avatar, Pete. The snuff films, Möbius strip, Marilyn Manson, and everything in between! Lost Highway is so special, apocalyptic, and stunning. It is dense with symbolism and therefore endlessly rewatchable. Lynch was a master at depicting the complexities of trauma, perversion, insecurity, and the fragmentation of self in  the roundabout way that our brains subconsciously process them. A once in a millennium artist. [Aja Nicely]

The Straight Story

Despite being G-Rated and the Walt Disney logo sitting bizarrely close to the credit “Directed By David Lynch,” the midwestern masterpiece The Straight Story is an uncompromised odyssey through the past, beyond acceptance, and arriving at heartbreak. 

The titular story is that of 79-year old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), and his 240-mile pilgrimage on a lawn mower across Iowa and Wisconsin to see his estranged brother. Alvin has bad eyesight, bad hips, smokes cigars, needs two canes to walk, yet he refuses help time and time again, insisting “I have to do this my own way.” Alvin achieved self-acceptance many, many years ago and what he’s left with is his memory, his regrets, and confronting the reality that time is running out.

Along his journey, Alvin meets a wide variety of colorful characters that range from being grounded and real, to feeling more in tune with the colorful characters of Twin Peaks. However, all of them are treated with a sense of appreciation and humanism. No one is malicious, and there is no antagonist. Lynch doesn’t find the absurdity of human beings a fault, in fact, he wants us to relish it the way he does. 

Every piece of wisdom from Alvin feels like it had been gestating in his heart and soul for years. He doesn’t moralize or preach to the people he meets on his journey, instead it’s diamonds of truth that can only be formed from a full life lived. A pitch-perfect Sissy Spasek plays his daughter Rose, and she too is carrying the weight of tragedy and longing. 

Bizarrely, The Straight Story is the most unconventional of Lynch’s films because it’s told in a more conventional way. All of his works contain a thoughtful emotional core, but in the absence of surrealism or extreme violence/sex, it becomes his most exposed, introspective film. The tone of the movie feels like you’re holding back tears the entire runtime, and these deep feelings are never cloying or ironic, it’s sincere. Even the most impassioned Lynch detractors won’t deny the heart and maturity of The Straight Story. It’s a reminder of the quality that makes Lynch universal; his compassion. 

Few artists in our lifetime have had such a diverse, inspiring, and strange career as David Lynch. Clearly that man felt more interested in personal expression and authenticity over making art accessible, conventional or profitable. It’s a testament to his character that he dove into the well of his soul time and time again, found the need to express a love and acceptance of people despite ourselves. [Jason F.]

Mulholland Drive

“I heard that the man at ABC who was making the decision whether to accept the pilot or not saw it at six a.m. He was watching television across the room while having some coffee and making some phone calls. And he hated what he saw; it bored him. So he turned it down.” 

That was an excerpt from Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish and it’s the only time I’ve ever been happy an executive said no to David Lynch.

Mulholland Drive, originally supposed to be a television series, is one of those films that really understands the sentiment of inner investigation. The idea that to unlock a story or resonate with a piece of art, you have to take the art for what it is and investigate your own feelings and emotions. On the surface, it’s an approachable story. Two young women move to Hollywood to pursue their dreams of acting. Lynch uses assumed cultural knowledge to invert the story. It’s unorthodox and hypnotic, and it almost demands introspection. 

What Lynch does so well is he gives you room to breathe. He’s a fantastic world builder, and quite accessible when it comes to premises. Once you’re within his world, then it’s up to you to make your way through it. 

Of course, he’s not going to leave you stranded, your waypoints are his actors. He’s a really terrific director of actors, possessing the ability to cater the performances to his style. Naomi Watts and Laura Herring in this film are absolutely golden (to steal a Lynchian idiom). They are your guides through the heartbreak, tragedy, and love that is ever present on Mulholland Drive. 

In the same way that cinema is a collision of sight and sound that delivers a uniquely specific feeling, Mulholland Drive is a collision of dreams and reality. To Lynch, the two are inseparable or intertwined, they are his link to the art of filmmaking. Our dreams are as much of a reality as we allow them to be, and it’s within those parameters that we find our nugget of truth. It’s a world that is populated by dreamers and it asks the dreamers who are watching to live there too. It asks us to accept the truth of our subconscious. 

Mulholland Drive remains Lynch’s gift to the world. It’s a story of love and adoration and how that can intermingle with expectations and dreams. How close are we to the person we want to be? Where do we place our priorities of acceptance, within ourselves or on the shoulders of others? It’s all there for you to discover. Lynch will lead you to the precipice of the cliff, it’s up to you to take that plunge and go find that big fish. [Eli Fischer]

Inland Empire 

Lynch’s final film, Inland Empire, was never intended to be his goodbye to feature-length filmmaking. Still, the three-hour dreamlike film-within-a-film odyssey released in 2006 might actually be the purest and most potent iteration of his surrealist vision. Not only was Lynch the writer, producer, director, cinematographer, camera operator, and sound designer for the film, but he also fully funded the venture independently. Completely unimpeded by studio overhead, Lynch and frequent collaborator Laura Dern take a hammer to their chosen subject matter—an actor’s psyche fracturing while starring in a supposedly cursed remake—and spend three blissfully painful hours picking up and examining each bloody piece. 

While many Lynch joints lean more towards odd and unsettling than true horror, Inland Empire revels in genuinely frightening cerebral imagery and ambiance. Nikki Grace, played by Dern, endures the haunted house of her mind as dialogue from the film she’s starring in starts appearing in her everyday conversations. She thinks she’s falling in love with her co-star, just like her character in the film. At one point she finds herself trapped inside the set, unseen and unheard by everyone around no matter how loudly she screams. 

Lynch achieves deeply felt discomfort by embracing the everyday quality of digital video, thrusting a widely available home camcorder right up against his actors’ faces for uncomfortably intimate shots. We associate this particular mid-2000s pixelated quality with things like early YouTube vlogs, amateur pornography, and home videos, and Inland Empire takes advantage of this familiarity by accompanying it with narrative freefall where the shaky ground the film props itself up on is pulled out from beneath viewers within the first half hour. Although this film in particular out of all of Lynch’s works resists interpretation and analysis, the arduous visual stream-of-consciousness and slow descent into complete reality fracture might be most accessible if looked at as a meditation on the creative process and a masterclass in what can be achieved with cheap cameras and a low budget. [Jess Buie]

Twin Peaks (1990-1991)

In Twin Peaks, David Lynch created a place that further refined his interest in the dissonance of American life and distilled the absurdity of our everyday existence into a specific place. With the help of co-creator and writer Mark Frost, he also made something that encapsulated another of the filmmaker’s themes: balancing the scales of unimaginable darkness and unrelenting hope. Watching the series, it’s easy to get lost in the quirky townsfolk, the well-meaning shenanigans of dashing F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan), and the crimson curtains of the Black Lodge’s “waiting room.” However, the show’s heart was, and always has been, Laura Palmer. As the show unravels, the townspeople and audience are forced to reckon with Laura as a complicated, whole person. A person who was in unspeakable pain, and sought to numb it  through self-destruction. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, Laura’s story would be salacious, shallow. Luckily, Lynch’s approach was empathetic and rooted in a real attempt to wrestle with humanity’s deep capacity for evil and whether or not we can even resolve it. There are no straightforward answers, but there are moments of comfort and faith in people. I often think of Major Briggs’s speech to his son, Bobby, or Cooper talking about “Seeing beyond fear,” and “looking at the world with love.” Love, like in many of Lynch’s works, is the salve for the uncertainties and fears of this world. In one of the Log Lady introductions Lynch wrote for the show when it entered syndication on Bravo, she muses: “Love, like blood, flows from the heart. Are blood and love related? Does a heart pump blood as it pumps love? Is love the blood of the universe?” Love abounds in Twin Peaks because David Lynch believed in it. Love is what he left behind in his work, and what better legacy is there than that? [Alejandra Martinez]

Twin Peaks: The Return

Like most of Lynch’s works, Twin Peaks: The Return has been proselytized, picked over, and discussed to great length, but to this day, few see it. This is surprising, considering the number of podcasts, column inches, and Dougie memes dedicated to its staggering impenetrability. 

It takes almost four episodes, a glacially long time, for Cooper to leave the Black Lodge and inhabit the life and identity of Dougie Jones, for the purpose of the gold shovels to be revealed, for us to learn the origin of Bob (during the show’s most famous episode, Episode 8), or for us to even see many of the characters we know and love from the original run of Twin Peaks. 

When we see these characters again, Bobby’s floppy brown hair has become grey, a representation of his shift from a teenage criminal to an upright member of the Twin Peaks PD. Lucy and Andy are married and have a Wally Brando. There’s still Truman as sheriff. Norma is married to a man franchising the Double R. Big Ed still holds a torch from her and has separated from Nadine. As far as we can see, Ben Horne has quit his criminal activities, and James works as a security guard at the Great Northern. 

These aren’t exactly happy endings for these characters, but they are a ray of light compared to the fates of many other beloved characters. Sarah Palmer’s grief has completely consumed her. Shelly has raised a drug-addicted Amanda Seyfried. Jerry Horne wanders in a weed-filled haze around the wilderness and cannot feel his foot. Albert and Gordon are no closer to solving the mysteries of the Black Lodge. And Audrey is… well, almost no one can say where or what is going on with Audrey. Twin Peaks was always about the cyclical cycle of evil and its omnipresence. Though it's new characters, like Richard Horne and Mr. C, Lynch goes deeper into the ugliness of his previous work and rarely gives the audience the satisfaction of seeing old characters do the old Twin Peaks again.

Yet, the light comes through, through Dougie, through Janey E, through those Roadhouse performances and small grace notes between characters. Peggy Lipton, Catherine Coulson, Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Forester, Warren Frost, Walter Olkewicz, and Miguel Ferrer all made final screen appearances on The Return. Watching it back in 2017, many critics noted that this made The Return an elegiac and loving memorial to Lynch’s close collaborators and friends. 

As Cooper looks at some of the core cast of The Return, he says, “I hope I see all of you again, every one of you.” When he tries to rescue Laura from her fate later in the same episode, he grabs her hand and leads her out of the woods, but eventually, she disappears, fading from view. Even as the evil Bob wrought is conquered, the light that Laura gave the town before her passing, the lives touched by her existence also fades. Rewatching the scene today, it's hard not to think about Lynch’s passing, of the hope of seeing him again fading.

Luckily, he left Twin Peaks: The Return and gave the world something better than a cliche legacy reboot where old characters do the same old stuff. Instead, he created a monument to the show that changed everything on his terms, an ode to his cast and crews, a memorial to his singularity waiting to be discovered. [Nate Archer]

Short: “Premonition Following an Evil Deed”

Completed for the centennial of the Lumière brothers’ invention of the Cinématographe, “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed” is a testament to the power of constraints. The 41 filmmakers who participated in the project were asked to abide by three rules: 1. Their shorts had to be no longer than 55 seconds (per the original camera’s magazine size) 2. No synchronized sound recording 3. No more than 3 takes.

For a filmmaker whose magnum opus, The Return, clocks in at over 1000 minutes, it’s a wonder that “Premonitions” is nearly as complete a distillation of “Lynchian” themes. Three policemen discover a corpse. A mother nervously waits for her daughter's return. Then, in one of the most indelible images of Lynch’s career, the camera glides through a chamber of deformed men doing the bidding of some unseen malign force, hammering on a nude woman suspended in fluid in a giant test tube, before the image dissolves into flames. The flames transition us back to the mother in her living room as she’s visited by a solemn policeman, hat in hand, while a shadowy figure lurks in the window.

The menace of these images is magnified by some of the most ominous work by key Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. The orchestration is rendered nearly indiscernible by the crunchy, period-accurate recording, but the effect of its dirge-like melody is haunting. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Lynch project without a symphony of sinister industrial noise: zaps, clangs, [ominous wooshing], and all.

The density of feeling crammed into each one of “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed’s” 55 seconds should serve as a powerful inspiration for creative people everywhere: use the constraints and limitations imposed on you to your advantage. [David Goeller]

Series: DumbLand

David Lynch’s animated webseries DumbLand is a cheerful celebration of all things ugly, vulgar, and crude. Across eight five-minute episodes, Lynch primitively scribbles scenes of graphic violence and unrestrained destruction drizzled over with bodily fluids of all types and stripes. This is a DIY project through and through. Lynch animated the entire series himself, along with providing the voices for the characters and creating the droning score. The drawings are very simple. The viewer is basically looking at squiggly black lines moving slowly on top of a white background. However, despite the simplistic crudeness of the aesthetics, there is no doubt that DumbLand came from David Lynch. It is fascinating to watch someone with his refined artistic eye creating such crude images. It is also fascinating to regard the time in which DumbLand was created and released. Back in 2002, web animation was still relatively new and established artists of Lynch’s status were not embarking on projects such as this. It is important to keep that context in mind because Lynch’s embracing of consumer tools such as digital video and Flash Animation this early on legitimized the kind of filmmaking that can be done by the average person. Lynch was not one to gatekeep artistic methods. By making quick and cheap projects such as DumbLand, he proved that absolutely anyone can turn their ideas into a film, no matter how many Oscar nominations they may or may not have. Upon first glance, this may seem like the slightest of projects for someone of Lynch’s stature but DumbLand is a genuine expression of the joy of creation. One can clearly feel the joy from Lynch discovering this burgeoning form of filmmaking. And the fact that you can feel joy from scenes of a man screaming obscenities while his pants fill with bile is one of the many, many reasons that David Lynch will forever be cherished. [Jer Moran]

Web Series: Rabbits

David Lynch’s “Rabbits” (2002) is an under-appreciated gem in the director’s esoteric body of work. The experimental series is a haunting deconstruction of the sitcom genre, blending surrealism, absurdity, and existential dread to challenge traditional narrative conventions. 

Set entirely in a dimly lit, sparse living room, Rabbits features three anthropomorphic rabbit characters—played by Laura Harring, Naomi Watts, and Scott Coffey in rabbit masks—engaging in cryptic, fragmented conversations (although they feel more like fragmented monologues). Lynch evokes the format of a sitcom with recurring characters, a domestic setting, and even a laugh track, but subverts it completely. Instead of humor, the laugh track serves as an eerie intrusion, emphasizing dissonance rather than joy. By transforming this familiar format into a nightmarish distortion, Lynch redefines the boundaries of the sitcom, exposing its artificiality and creating a deeply unsettling atmosphere.

Lynch does not explicitly expect his audience to interpret Rabbits, but instead subtly encourages them to piece the puzzle together. This silent invitation to engage with its puzzling narrative is a defining feature that makes Rabbits uniquely distinguishable. Some may interpret the rabbits as trapped souls or inhabitants of a purgatorial space, while others see it as a meditation on the monotony and alienation of modern life. Lynch’s refusal to provide answers underscores his belief in art as a deeply subjective and emotional experience.

As a seminal example of Lynch’s modern works, Rabbits foreshadows themes explored in Inland Empire (2006), where fragmented storytelling and surreal imagery dominate. Both works challenge traditional cinematic norms, proving Lynch’s mastery in reinventing form and evoking the subconscious. Rabbits isn’t just an eerie, discomforting web series; it’s a profound experiment in redefining what television and cinema can be, all under an hour. [Manny Madera]