Director David Lynch leaves the Elysee presidential palace after receiving the French Legion of Honor award in Paris in 2007. The filmmaker died this week. File Photo by David Silpa/UPI | License Photo
Jan. 17 (UPI) — “There’s a sort of evil out there,” says Sheriff Truman in an episode of David Lynch’s iconic TV series, Twin Peaks.
That line gets to the heart of the work of the filmmaker, whose family announced his death Jan. 16, 2025. Lynch’s films and TV series reflected the dark, ominous, often bizarre underbelly of American culture- one increasingly out of the shadows today.
As someone who teaches film noir, I often think about the ways American cinema holds up a mirror to society.
Lynch was a master at this.
Many of Lynch’s films, like 1986’s Blue Velvet and 1997’s Lost Highway, can be unsparing and graphic, with imagery that was described by critics as “disturbing” and “all chaos” upon their release.
But beyond those bewildering effects, Lynch was onto something.
His images of corruption, violence and toxic masculinity ring all too familiar in America today.
Take Blue Velvet. The film focuses on a naive college student, Jeffrey Beaumont, whose idyllic suburban life framed with white picket fences is turned inside out when he finds a human ear on the edge of a road. This grisly discovery draws him into the orbit of a violent sociopath, Frank Booth, and an alluring lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens, whom Booth sadistically torments while holding her child and husband — whose ear, it turns out, was the one Beaumont had found — hostage.
Beaumont nonetheless finds himself perversely attracted to Vallens and descends deeper into the shadowy world lurking beneath his hometown — a world of smoke-filled bars and drug dens frequented by Booth and an array of freakish characters, including pimps, addicts and a corrupt detective.
Booth’s haunting line, “Now it’s dark,” serves as a potent refrain.
The corruption, perversion and violence depicted in Blue Velvet are indeed extreme. But the acts Booth perpetrates also recall the stories of sexual abuse that have emerged from organizations including the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts.
As the exposure of such crimes continue to pile up, they become less an aberration but a dire warning of something that’s deeply ingrained in our culture.
These evils are sensational and appalling, and there’s an impulse to perceive them as existing outside of our realities, perpetrated by people who aren’t like us. What Twin Peaks, Lynch’s hit TV series, and Blue Velvet do so effectively is tell viewers that those hidden worlds where venality and cruelty reside can be found just around the corner, in places that we might see but tend to ignore.
And then there are the uncanny and eerie worlds depicted in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. The characters in those searing films seem to live in parallel realities governed by good and evil.
Lost Highway begins with a jazz musician, Fred Madison, being convicted of killing his wife. He claims, however, to have no memory of the crime. Exploring the theme of alternate worlds, Lynch thrusts Madison into an illusory realm inhabited by killers, drug dealers and pornographers by merging his identity into that of young mechanic named Pete Dayton. In doing so, Lynch combines the worlds of “normality” and perversity into one.
In the 1990s, artists like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, whose music is included on the official soundtrack of Lost Highway, also confronted audiences with images of decadence and social decay, which were inspired by his own disturbing experiences in Hollywood and the music in