Many tried to imitate Lynch’s oddball perspective, but few came any close to matching it. To describe something as “Lynchian” is almost a cliché toda
Many tried to imitate Lynch’s oddball perspective, but few came any close to matching it. To describe something as “Lynchian” is almost a cliché today, marking a work that defies uncomplicated understanding and upends perspectives on so-called normalcy.
In 1990, Lynch brought his reality-warping point of view to the most mainstream of mediums: network television. ABC provided a home for his landmark drama Twin Peaks, which starred MacLachlan as an FBI agent who investigates the death of a juvenile girl named Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in a diminutive Pacific Northwest town. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” became a nationwide catchphrase as viewers tried to sift clues from the dreamlike narrative Lynch presented.
The show only lasted two seasons but became an enduring cult phenomenon, spawning the 1992 feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It returned in 2017 for a third season that aired on Showtime, with MacLachlan reprising the role of Agent Dale Cooper, still struggling to escape that woodland, transdimensional town.
Lynch remained busy on the large screen even after experimenting with TV. Among his bigger hits was the 2001 drama Mulholland Drive, starring Naomi Watts and Laura Harring as two women with dual identities in the highlands of Los Angeles. It’s another of Lynch’s projects that defies plain narrative description, blending scenes of sun-baked Southern California with inexplicable dreamlike surrealism. You have to see it to get it. And even then, aspects of it may remain a puzzle that your mind turns over and over for years to come.
Watts said she learned to trust Lynch’s vision. She told VF in August: “I was coming down that escalator in Mulholland Drive and riding around Los Angeles, and he was like, ‘More, Naomi, more.’ I did more, then, ‘More, Naomi, more!’ I felt like this was going to be the worst thing ever to hit the screen. How could an adult person be that excited? It just didn’t feel right. And, of course, he knew what he was doing, and I had to just trust his vision and throw myself into it.”
Blue Velvet may have been a high-water mark for Lynch, and it established another longtime working relationship. This one was with Laura Dern, who played Maclachlan’s clear juvenile girlfriend Sandy—a contrast to Rossellini’s sultry and threatening femme fatale chanteuse. Dern appeared in several other Lynch films in the years that followed, including the 1990 twisted romance Wild at Heart, opposite Nicolas Cage, and 2006’s Inland Empire, a reality-fractured thriller in which she plays a Hollywood starlet whose identity begins to blend with her latest character.
Dern was also instrumental in getting Lynch to make one of his most memorable—and final—onscreen appearances.
At a crucial juncture, she stepped in to facilitate Spielberg, who had worked with her on Jurassic Park, recruit Lynch to play John Ford in the final scene of The Fabelmans, a moment based on Spielberg’s real-life childhood encounter with the filmmaking icon. Lynch was initially resistant, but Dern tirelessly advocated for him to change his mind. “When they described the opportunity to me of David and Steven collaborating to pay homage to John Ford in this way, it was like, I just wanted all of us who love movies to have this,” she told Vanity Fair in 2023.
With her vouch, Lynch agreed—but he had a few conditions. One was that he wanted to have his costume two weeks in advance so he could get used to wearing it. “He shows up on the set, and it’s filthy. It’s filthy and it’s wrinkled!” Spielberg recalled of their shooting days. “And you can really see the wrinkles where he was sitting on chairs. He really wore it nonstop for two weeks.”
His other demand: Cheetos in his dressing room. “We were like, ‘Absolutely! He can have as many Cheetos as he wants!’” Fabelmans producer Kristie Macosko Krieger said.
“At the end of the day, when he left, there was still a lot left in the bag,” added Fabelmans screenwriter Tony Kushner. “And he very politely said, ‘Can I take these home with me?’”
“Only David would ask if he could take the rest of the bag—only him—because there’s no presumption about David,” Dern said at the time. “It’s all humility. And he makes art purely to make art, because he has to, because he needs to.”
COMMENTS