There's a certain kind of artist who knows exactly what they're doing, even if nobody else does. David Lynch (1946–2025) might have topped that particular tree. It's why so many have tried – and none succeeded – at capturing something we call 'Lynchian', a quality as recognisable as it is indefinable. Imitators furnish their knockoffs with billowing red curtains and grumbling jazz, philosophy-spouting sleuths and kooky-as-heck ensembles. It's easy to mistake 'Lynchian' as a mood, or to confuse it with randomness. But though open to serendipitous mistakes and happenstance, Lynch was driven by an ironclad logic, a very strict methodology of art practice that he always maintained was there in plain sight.
Most of all, people wrote Lynch off as weird. It's not like he recoiled from the accusation. There's the time he sat with a cow on Hollywood Boulevard to convince passersby that Laura Dern deserved an Oscar. The strange, sometimes hilarious weather broadcasts he put out daily during lockdown. The short film in which he interrogates a monkey, or the one where he taught us how to cook quinoa.
Then there's the work itself: Lynch is best known for the films and TV series he wrote and directed, whose strangeness is only matched by the strangeness of the fact that they found such a massive audience.
The pilot episode of Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990–91) was viewed by more than 34 million Americans, all lured in by the same question: who killed Laura Palmer? At the time, the entire US population was 250 million. A seventh of the country watched a movie-length drama featuring an FBI agent who used dreams and Tibetan Buddhism to solve crimes, a woman whose dead husband's spirit lived in a log, and scowling, cigar-chomping villains straight out of a daytime soap.
That surface-level oddity is what many took away from the show, whose ratings declined across the following two seasons. Twin Peaks lost some fans, but its influence can't be overstated. It got the world talking – over water coolers, in gushing op-eds – and that pre-internet virality spurred producers to greenlight TV projects that otherwise would have been seen as too risky.
Hits like The X-Files (1993–2018) and Northern Exposure (1990–95) wore their Peaks influence proudly, while showrunners behind everything from Lost (2004–10) to The Sopranos (1999–2007) to Fringe (2008–13) have been explicit about the show's impact.
For all their playfulness, though, these shows still followed the logic of TV drama generally, and as cosy quirkiness came to replace the genuine surrealism of Twin Peaks, the seminal series began to seem weird-for-weird's-sake. A dancing little man who inhabits a strange dream realm where everyone speaks backward? Who had time for that?
For those who persevered, it was hard to deny that some deeper logic was driving the show. You felt it when Lynch and Frost left the production mid-season two after executives demanded that they reveal Laura's killer. The remaining episodes were some of the worst TV ever aired, uncanniness replaced by cheap scares, uncomfortable humour swapped out for slapstick. When Lynch returned to direct the season finale, the result was as surprising as if a corpse had suddenly sat up in its coffin. About as disturbing, too.
Lynch would always insist that there was no right way to interpret his work, and interviewers steering too close to questions about their meaning would be slapped with a flat “no”. The meanings of even his most straightforward works are always multiple, contradictory, elusive. There's no 'right' way of understanding Lynch's art.
But there are a hell of a lot of ways to misunderstand it. If you're looking for a way into his less accessible output, you could try one of the following. Let's rock.
It’s all one work
Lynch began his career studying painting at art school and continued to create visual art throughout his life. It was only when a gust of wind sent a ripple through one of his canvases that the notion of a moving painting came to him, and every work for the screen that followed can be seen as just that. His visual style was always known for its sensual colours and painterly framing, and he was a master at staging scenes that didn't conform to narrative conventions.
Then there's the iconography: it's striking how little has been made of the fact that Lynch employed certain motifs across his entire career. I'm not talking about the big ones, like fire and smoke and wind. I mean a sycamore branch jammed into a mound of clay that appears in the background of a shot from his feature debut Eraserhead (1977) and will become an important character half a century later in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). The sound of a distant freight train's horn punctuates so many of his films, while the famous zigzag floor pattern of Twin Peaks' otherworldly Red Room is there in the first 10 minutes of Eraserhead. A distinctive variety of pot plant – dracaena trifasciata – is one of the only decorative touches in the foreboding home at the centre of Lost Highway (1997). It's no surprise when they show up around Lynch's own home in the documentary The Art Life (2016), and once again pop up in The Return.
If we consider Lynch's oeuvre not as a series of standalone works but as one long, sustained investigation into the things that fascinate him, it allows us to understand each more deeply by looking at others. The terrifying, scorched being that lives behind Winkie's Diner in Mulholland Drive (2001) is a definite echo of the blackened Woodsmen that appear throughout The Return, and keen-eyed viewers will spot a similarly burnt person scurrying in the background during one scene of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me a decade earlier.
Imagery recurs with such regularity across Lynch's works that taking any as an object of contemplation almost always leads to new thoughts: you can pick up any of his films, for instance, and look for the inexplicable presence of orbs at key moments. Turn to his paintings, and you'll find human heads constantly depicted via the same imagery. Flames and smoke are there from the very get-go, in his 1967 student film Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), and are almost omnipresent in the works that follow.
The Metaphysician
For decades Lynch tried to realise his early screenplay Ronnie Rocket. He said it was about “a three-foot tall guy with red hair and physical problems, and about 60-cycle alternating current electricity.” It was subtitled 'The Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence,' words that would be uttered verbatim in an early episode of The Return.
It's a phrase that could be applied to any of his works, all of which are both absurd and mysterious.
But what if we take him literally? What if his work isn't really about love and evil and all that high-level business, and the fire and electricity and ominous soundscapes and undulating darkness are what we should really be paying attention to? What if all those glowing orbs are the molecular building blocks of Lynch's universe?
Philosophers such as Kant argued that our senses are only able to detect partial and deformed reflections of the basic reality of the universe. Most scientists would agree that most of nature is imperceptible to us directly, and that what we do perceive is merely a tiny fraction of what's really going on. Could it be that Lynch's project was to attempt to render sensible the 'strange forces' that exert their effects on all of creation, of which humans are just a fragment?
Merrily, Merrily
“Tell a dream, lose a reader,” is a common adage in writing courses, and there are few things as dull as someone recounting at length their sleepytime adventures. And yet, perhaps the most obvious through-lines connecting Lynch's work are dreams.
There are the literal dream sequences. There are the songs, from Blue Velvet's (1986) unforgettable weaponisation of Roy Orbison's ‘In Dreams’ to Lynch's own compositions: ‘The Big Dream’, ‘Star Dream Girl’, ‘Pinky's Dream’. His autobiography is titled Room to Dream, and many of his paintings featured similar names.
When it comes to capturing the bizarre logic that guides our subconscious worlds, few can match Lynch. He could juxtapose the unsettling and the mundane in ways that both defied understanding while somehow making perfect sense on an unconscious or emotional level. Everything feels imbued with meaning, even if that meaning is just beyond our grasp.
This is most famously seen in Twin Peaks' Red Room sequences, in which FBI agent Cooper is given cryptic clues about Laura Palmer's killer by a disembodied arm in the shape of a little man, as well as someone or something that may or may not be Laura herself.
There are countless moments in which his characters declare that they live inside a dream, too. Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Inland Empire (2006) can easily be read as the nightmarish reveries of their protagonists, many of whom suspect that they might be living inside an illusion.
There's a heavy meta-textual aspect to Lynch's deployment of dreams. The simultaneous attraction and repulsion that Lynch felt towards Hollywood – 'The Dream Factory' – is evident throughout Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, and he often spoke of films as a kind of dream projected onto the screen. During a late moment in The Return, Lynch himself – as FBI Director Gordon Cole – relates a dream he's had that concluded with a question that could be applied to all of the artist's work: “But who is the dreamer?”
There are endless theories: all of Twin Peaks is the dream of Cooper, or of Laura herself, or the overlapping fantasies of a host of characters. There's an equally compelling argument that we are the dreamers, though, and to understand that will take a minute of quiet (or twenty).
An ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness inside each one of us
Much of Lynch's mainstream success came during the 1990s. There was a deep aversion to sincerity in popular culture in that moment, and the folksy cheesiness that runs through Lynch's work was understandably interpreted through the lens of irony. If there is a wrong way to interpret his work, though, it's as ironic. There have been few artists as cloyingly sincere as Lynch, or as willing to extend compassion. His practice of meditation, he claimed, had revealed that at the base of the universe is something connecting all things. He called it love.
When David Lynch would start banging on about transcendental meditation – as he inevitably did – you could feel the world's collective eye-roll. He didn't just pay lip service to the practice, however. He meditated for twenty minutes, morning and night, and purportedly kept that up every single day for more than fifty years. That has got to have had an influence on his work, and once you dig in, it increasingly appears the key to unlocking it.
The form of spirituality to which Lynch subscribed teaches that our perceptions of the world are only the tip of the iceberg. Our desires and prejudices, hopes and fears drastically limit our view of reality, and cause us to distort what we do perceive according to those personal biases. Meditation can help us loosen our blinkers and encounter a much broader field of existence without applying judgement to whatever we find.
That's why any one of Lynch's works may be alternately terrifying, seductive, hilarious, embarrassing, confusing and, alarmingly often, boring. That's existence. Or rather, those are just a few of the ways we interpret existence. Lynch attempted to provide the full scope of human experience, letting us see in his creations our own internal worlds reflected. He liked to follow ideas wherever they took him, without imposing any particular judgment on the outcome, and in confronting us with visions that leap from the disturbing to the comforting and back again, he may have hoped that we would develop our own ability to remove the lens of ego and find the kind of cosmic acceptance he claimed meditation fosters.
Straight Stories
As esoteric as all of this might sound, there's also the fact that Lynch's work is deeply, honestly personal. The giant cowboy-esque statue that occupies such a puzzling position in The Return? That's Lynch's own dad, based on a selfie he took while working on a fire tower in the woods.
The mysterious Twin Peaks kid credited as 'the magician'? Lynch's son Riley. His daughter was twenty-two when she wrote The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, and co-creator Mark Frost's family is all over the show as well – the friendly town physician Doc Hayward was played by his dad, Warren, while his brother Scott wrote a bunch of episodes.
The log lady? Lynch's old classmate Catherine E. Coulson. Her then-husband, Jack Nance, was the star of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks' Pete Martell.
The Lost Highway house with all those flame-like plants was Lynch's own place. Those disturbing tapes its occupant receives are literal home videos. Guess what road his backyard overlooks? Mulholland Drive.
For all their impenetrable aspects, a lot of Lynch's works are just a guy exploring his interests with a heap of his friends. He loved the quiet calm that came with sweeping up his studio, for instance, and when he noticed a stagehand's mad skills with a broom on the set of The Return, he gave him two-and-a-half minutes of uninterrupted screen time to do his thing.
And while he was known for his tight-lippedness around the meaning of his work, he was also extremely available for interviews. There's an endless amount of video and written words online in which he talks at length about meditation, compassion, hope, life and death.
And wood.
Wood
Lynch loved a shot that went on far longer than required, as if urging us to shake off our addiction to narrative urgency and take some time to contemplate the scenery. In the case of Twin Peaks, that backdrop is almost always based around wood. The sawmill. Ghostwood Forest. Sparkwood and 21, the last place Laura was seen alive. Blue Pine Mountain, and the twelve sycamores that mark the entrance to the Red Room. The all-timber interiors of the Great Northern Hotel, the Double R Diner, the Sheriff's Department. Almost every scene is punctuated by cutaways of trees twisting in the wind.
The soul of one character even ends up imprisoned within a wooden drawer-knob, while the little man evolves into a sycamore sapling crackling with electricity. The Return introduces us to a host of terrifying entities named The Woodsmen, and their more benevolent counterpart, The Fireman.
The first thing Agent Cooper does upon arriving in town is ascertain the name of the magnificent trees that cover the region. They're Douglas Firs. When he's reduced to a mindless, amnesiac version of himself, he's given the name Dougie. In his brown pants and oversized green jacket, Dougie is even dressed as a tree.
Lynch gave a short speech at the launch of Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces. It went like this:
“There is an abundance of fish in the sea, but tonight I would like to speak about wood. There are many times in the world when the phone rings and someone is enquiring about wood. This happens primarily at lumberyards, and in this case, it is necessary to have a phone. It is only natural that trees are growing and that they are made of wood. Much happiness can come from observing a tree, and the same can be said about observing the many shapes fashioned out of wood. Quite often when we are talking about beauty, we are talking about wood. Thank you very much.”
It goes without saying that nobody in their right mind would suggest that Twin Peaks was a show about the dream life of trees.
But David Lynch knew what he was doing. Even if nobody else did.
– John Bailey is a Melbourne writer and arts journalist.
