Things go kerflooey

David Lynch’s​ films seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would be thinking about Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’; the next thing he knew, a severed ear was lying in a field. ‘That’s why I don’t think I can take credit for anything I’ve ever done,’ he told an interviewer in 2019. Even the idea of making films took him by surprise. One evening in 1967, he was working in his studio at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he found himself imagining the wind wafting through one of his canvases: ‘Oh, a moving painting.’

When Lynch died earlier this year, aged 78, from complications relating to emphysema following the fires in Southern California, he had directed ten feature-length films – seven of them, by my count, anybody else’s masterpiece – and created, with Mark Frost, the show that ‘changed TV for ever’, Twin Peaks. At least to begin with, he took anyone who met him by surprise. Mel Brooks, who produced his second film, The Elephant Man (1980), ‘expected to meet a grotesque, a fat little German with fat stains running down his chin’, but Lynch was a well-groomed Northwesterner of mild manners and earnest cheer, the still wet behind the ears son of committed Presbyterians. ‘I’m not all that strange, really,’ he would tell journalists. For years, his biography on press releases was just four words long: ‘Eagle scout, Missoula, Montana.’ He wasn’t just American, but freakishly American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream avant-gardist, reactionary visionary, pervert in a top-buttoned shirt – it could be reduced to something essentially ‘Lynchian’: a form of irony, in which everything was also something else.

This was part of his charm. No other director made films so obviously shaped by personal obsessions while advocating such an extreme form of ‘any interpretation goes’ relativism. There were criticisms: he was too misty-eyed about Eisenhower; the women in his films were gawked at, humiliated or left for dead; he was too corn-syrupy, like Capra, or not sweet enough; and wasn’t there something a little screwy about all that transcendental meditation? Audience reactions (run-outs, not walk-outs) got him down, but he didn’t mind the critics. When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave Lost Highway (1997) ‘two thumbs down!’, he quoted them on the poster as ‘two more great reasons’ to see the film. (Ebert often emerges as the arch-loser of the Lynch story, sulkily admitting that he felt ‘jerked around’ by the weirdness of the films.) By the time I came to Lynch’s films, in the mid-2010s, the scores had been settled: he had shaken off the prefixes ‘pseudo’ and ‘faux’, and ‘genius’ was no longer followed by ‘or an idiot’. Blue Velvet (1986) was the film Fredric Jameson got wrong. Viewers could now enjoy with impunity everything that had so upset feminists and conservatives and jobbing film reviewers. The new line was that you shouldn’t – and, anyway, couldn’t – do anything as crass as to interpret Lynch’s films: they were there to be ‘experienced’, perfect little mysteries, shiny hydrophobic surfaces that repelled any drop of explication.

Still, many have tried. Since the early 1990s, there have been sweeping studies of the filmography (the first and best by Michel Chion), several biographies (including the memoir-biography Room to Dream), themed scholarly anthologies, brilliant but exhausting Lacanian decodings, two surprisingly hefty books of interviews, at least one sloppy hit job, and dozens of monographs that have expanded Lynch studies laterally: Lynch and dreams, Lynch and authorship, Lynch and sound etc. Mike Miley’s David Lynch’s American Dreamscape falls into the last category. It sets out to place Lynch’s work on ‘an aesthetic continuum that extends beyond cinema’, linking each film to ‘popular literary and musical cultures’.

Lynch and music aren’t an odd coupling. His films are inseparable from 1960s pop songs, slinky jazz and the woozy ‘angel-on-Quaaludes’ ballads of Julee Cruise. In a career shaped by lasting collaborations, his greatest was with his composer, Angelo Badalamenti, the Herrmann to his Hitch, who could meet even the vaguest brief (‘Be very Russian’). There’s a video on YouTube of Badalamenti describing the way he and Lynch composed Laura Palmer’s theme for Twin Peaks (‘OK, Angelo, we’re in a dark woods now, and there’s a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees’) that is the closest you’ll get to crawling inside Lynch’s head. The idea of a literary Lynch is more curious. By his own admission, he was not a big reader and his aversion to putting things in words is well noted. (Miley opens his first chapter by quoting a notorious exchange with an interviewer: ‘Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film.’ ‘Elaborate on that.’ ‘No.’) In an early short, The Alphabet, a young girl is hounded by the ABCs – ‘a little nightmare about the fear connected with learning’.

But Lynch did have a distinctive approach to language; there were the mantric repeated phrases in each film, the backwards speech of Twin Peaks, and his own way of talking, which was marked by non sequiturs and folksy slang (‘peachy keen’). His voice was magnificently reedy, and one of the great jokes in Twin Peaks is that he cast himself as the hearing-impaired regional FBI chief who can’t help shouting secrets out loud. His main rhetorical mode was hyperbole inflected by a homebrewed Manicheanism: good things were ‘dreamy’, ‘solid gold’, ‘killer’; anything bad was ‘the worst’ or ‘like death’. He liked to measure things by the hair, which he’d do while fluttering the fingers of one hand. Just a hair of fear. A hair of abstraction.

David Lynch’s American Dreamscape doesn’t chart ‘direct and unambiguous’ musical or literary influences, which Miley sees as a ‘losing game’: ‘Artist A influenced Artist B: so what?’ It’s a fair point to make about Lynch, who refused to say much about his heroes. (Kafka: ‘I really dig him.’ Tati: ‘I love that guy.’ Bacon: ‘The guy, you know, had the stuff.’) Instead, under the auspices of Julia Kristeva, Lynch is ‘best understood intertextually’, by looking at what was ‘in the air’ around him. The resulting essays, some more enjoyable and convincing than others, situate the films alongside the flotsam and jetsam of postwar America: Twin Peaks and the teenage tragedy song; Blue Velvet and children’s literature; Wild at Heart and rock’n’roll at the crossroads. It’s an anti-auteurist approach, resisting ‘definitive, reductive or “correct”’ readings, and therefore Lynch-approved, but when you return to the films, this sanctioned obliquity – so often the result of Lynch’s own refusal to talk about his work – begins to grate. The films demand some confrontation. What are they? And what kind of person dreamed them up?

David Lynch with Isabella Rossellini and Kyle MacLachlan on the set of ‘Blue Velvet’ in 1985.

Lynch was born in 1946, the same year as another director and eagle scout, Steven Spielberg. His childhood was a time of ‘euphoric … chrome optimism’, as he put it: everybody smiling all the time. It was almost embarrassing, he admitted, to be so ‘normal’, to have a mother called Sunny and a father who worked for the Department of Agriculture and left the house each morning in a ten-gallon cowboy hat. The obvious contrast between the sylvan dream of his upbringing – Douglas firs, rainbow trout – and the nightmarishness of his films was hard to ignore, not least because he played up to it. ‘As an eagle scout in Missoula, Montana, did you have such graphic visions of violence?’ a reporter asked at the premiere of his most lurid film, Wild at Heart (1990). ‘Even worse,’ Lynch replied. There aren’t many children in his work, yet he is sometimes accused of Blakean naivety, of innocence and wonder unencumbered by experience. It isn’t just that logging towns reappear, or that he regularly invoked the 1950s (‘They never went away’), but that his apparent amorality – less glaciated or obviously affected than Warhol’s – resembled a child’s sado-curiosity. Of the notable events (or images) in his childhood, two stand out: the first is of the young Lynch registering with horror the black, ant-infested sap oozing out of a cherry tree, a sign of the ‘wild pain and decay that accompanies everything’; the second is of Lynch and his brother playing on the street one evening, when a naked woman with a bloodied mouth stumbled ‘out of the darkness’ – a memory which he described, helplessly and uneasily, as ‘beautiful’.

Lynch decided to become a painter after reading The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (Edward Hopper’s teacher), which convinced him that ‘the art life’ was the ideal form of American self-expression. This conviction carried him to art schools in Washington DC, Boston and Philadelphia, and briefly to Europe, on a failed odyssey to train under Oskar Kokoschka. Once he realised paintings could move, he made his first short, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), and then The Alphabet, which earned him a spot at the American Film Institute in LA. ‘It was completely chaotic and disorganised, which was great … They wanted to let people do their thing.’ He quickly put the school’s resources to work. When one of the administrators realised the new test stock had been used to make a short about an amputee having her stumps tended, there was no need to ask: ‘Did Lynch have something to do with this?’

Lynch’s first feature-length film, Eraserhead, is the only one of his works whose origin he called attention to: it ‘came out of the air in Philadelphia’, ‘a very sick, decadent, decaying, fear-ridden place’, which had made a strong impression on him as an art student. He remembered its factories and the ‘smiling bags of death’ in the morgue across the road. Eraserhead tells the story of Henry, an awkward, anxious man with a six-inch pompadour the shape of a mushroom cloud. He inhabits a derelict, industrial planet. The film was made in a live-in studio on the grounds of the AFI, with only six or seven main cast and crew and a grant of $10,000, supplemented by Lynch’s job delivering the Wall Street Journal. Jack Nance, who would become his friend and long-term collaborator, was cast as Henry. Lynchian figures move at strange speeds, and Nance has the waddling gait of Chaplin’s tramp. Almost every shot of him is a reaction shot but he reacts slowly or not at all (his close-ups are lightly befuddled; ‘Just be a total blank’ was Lynch’s direction). Henry can be tetchy, but there’s something cutesy about him, which has everything to do with his smallness (Lynch liked to imagine Nance at home ‘wearing his little slippers’). His appearance suggests we might be in a slapstick world of harmless dysfunctionality, so it’s unsettling when things go kerflooey in violent, erratic ways: bodies are beset by epilepsy, nosebleeds or rictus grins, and Henry’s girlfriend gives birth to a monstrous baby, a mewling, bulbous, pustulant thing, which seems less a child than a messed-up product of this ‘very sick’ place.

It isn’t clear what the baby in Eraserhead is, and the fact that it fares about as well as the calf’s eye in Un Chien Andalou led some to denounce the film as a ‘sickening bad taste exercise’, while others (Miley included) have found in it a ‘reactionary core’: Henry’s liberation is achieved only by the destruction of self and others, as is often the case in Lynch’s world. Eraserhead exhibits all the hallmarks of his later works: eerie interiors; creepy singing; the camera moving into darkness; heads falling off (part of Lynch’s obsessively acephalic imagery, which has something to do with the head as the place where ‘bad thoughts’ happen). It’s not just bodies that act up, the camera itself is paroxysmic, moving from crawling long takes to sudden close-up inserts. The most unusual aspect of the film is the musique concrète soundscape by Alan Splet (whom Lynch discovered making industrial films in Philadelphia), particularly the low rumbling noise that returns in nearly every Lynch project. Like the shrill wind soughing through Fellini’s films, overdubbed and not always aligned with the image, the Lynchian rumble seems to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Lynch was lucky throughout his career to find collaborators, promoters and money men who were either amazed by his work or at least canny enough to see its appeal. Eraserhead might have vanished if it hadn’t been for Ben Barenholtz, the king of New York’s midnight movie scene, who had also popularised Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘acid Western’ El Topo and John Waters’s ‘filth epic’ Pink Flamingos. Waters – a direct contemporary but no eagle scout – was another early Lynchhead. Eraserhead isn’t what we now associate with 1970s ‘cult’ cinema – it isn’t camp or explicitly countercultural and it wasn’t thrown together quickly or roughly. Lynch wasn’t a cineaste like Tarantino, but he wasn’t a purveyor of anti-establishment perversion either: he was film school-educated, with a better grasp of classical cinema than he let on (a recent auction of his archive included a number of film books). Eraserhead was odd and strange-looking, but it was also well acted, well made and not impossible to follow. And if you wanted a pop-psychology spin, Lynch was a new father at the time. Brooks, who was looking for someone to direct The Elephant Man, got it immediately: ‘It’s an adolescent’s nightmare of responsibility.’

The Elephant Man and the film that followed, an ill-fated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, were Lynch’s works as a hired hand, interesting for the ways his signature slips into the frame. A mid-budget Victorian period drama starring genteel English thesps was hardly a natural project for Lynch and he had a miserable time making it. His ‘four dark days’ came in a garage in Wembley as he tried to make John Merrick’s prosthetics out of glycerine, latex and baby powder. Everything remarkable about The Elephant Man was there in Eraserhead, only now it had been, depending on your view of the film, either domesticated or clarified by the more conventional genre apparatus. One of its many fans was Dino De Laurentiis, Carlo Ponti’s only rival as Italy’s greatest tycoon-producer, who chucked $42 million at Lynch to make Dune (1984). (Americans were always bad at giving him money; he was better served by the less risk-averse Italians and French.) I’m not in the line of defending Dune – that’s bad business – but it’s easy to see why Lynch was drawn to the Jungian dream-junk of Herbert’s novel, and his oily Baron reaches levels of grotesquery to which Denis Villeneuve’s remakes, for all their aggressive competence, could never stoop. Still, there’s no getting past the worms.

What these early films have in common, apart from not being set in America (Miley’s justification for omitting The Elephant Man and Dune), is Lynch’s embrace of the 19th-century industrial gothic – smoke, steam, thumping machinery. He has been called a ‘fetishistic’ director, in the Hitchcock-blonde way, but there are other types of image he returned to just as obsessively. ‘No one has gotten the power in cinema that I feel there is in industry and factory workers,’ he said about Dune. ‘This notion of fire and oil.’ This ‘notion’ is there in the later films, in the car crashes, smoking engines, chromework and tailfins, the polished gun barrels, shots fired, matches struck, cigarettes lit, houses gone up in flames. All those combustible and fissile things. It culminates in two crazed images at the centre of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017): the Trinity test, no longer a photograph on Henry’s wall in Eraserhead but recreated onscreen for nine nightmarish minutes, and the appearance of a terrifying figure called ‘the Woodsman’, a dishevelled Abraham Lincoln impersonator slicked in oil, with one question on his lips: ‘Gotta light?’

Dune gave Lynch two gifts. The first was Kyle MacLachlan, the young boy from Washington who played its lead. Lynch wasn’t known for obvious casting choices and sometimes he picked actors from magazines or for ‘the look in their eyes’. Extras might be found on the street or, in one case, in a bothersome studio exec visiting the set (‘Get him to hair and make-up!’). Frank Silva, the equine-faced, scraggly-haired set dresser on the pilot of Twin Peaks, was moving furniture in Laura Palmer’s bedroom when Lynch had his eureka moment: here was BOB, Twin Peaks’s embodiment of pure evil. But it’s not hard to see why MacLachlan – peachy keen, with just a hair of Lynch’s gee-wizardry – would work as his surrogate in his next film, Blue Velvet. The second gift was a financial lesson: a big budget meant next to nothing if he didn’t have full creative control. When De Laurentiis gave him a modest six million dollars but also the final cut for Blue Velvet, ‘it was just a euphoria. And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances.’

In February 1987, five months after the release of Blue Velvet, the BBC’s Arena aired an episode ‘presented by David Lynch’ in which he introduced a number of clips from early Surrealist films (by Jean Cocteau, René Clair and Max Ernst, among others) and declared: ‘I’m very happy to be a fellow traveller with any of these guys, for sure.’ Yet when he introduces a clip from Blue Velvet – the opening montage of small-town kitsch – it looks more like the hard-edged Technicolor of a Douglas Sirk melodrama than anything by Cocteau. If Lynch was ‘the first popular surrealist’, as Pauline Kael described him in 1986, the ‘pop’ part was just as important as the surreal.

Lynch inherited from Sirk the basic tenets of melodrama: that the objects, people and gestures that seem most simple, even clichéd, are those most burdened by meaning, and that a world which proffers total transparency – what Peter Brooks called the melodramatic ‘world of hyper-significant signs’ – actually yields nothing of the sort. Blue Velvet is the story of Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student played by MacLachlan, who discovers a seedy nether-city of sexual violence, kidnapping and murder within his small all-American town. Miley likens its ‘maturation plot’ to children’s literature, ‘tools of social instruction and citizen-making’, and it’s true that the film has a picture-book literalism – the lumber town is called Lumberton, its Sandra Dee-style ingénue Sandy – and Jeffrey’s detective style is more Hardy Boys than hard-boiled. The discovery of a severed ear leads him to a nightclub singer called Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who is trapped in an uncomfortable sadomasochistic arrangement with Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper (‘I am Frank Booth,’ the audition-cum-threat went). Rossellini’s character, ‘degraded, slapped around, humiliated’, as Ebert put it, upset the critics, though some of their remarks now read like a particular kind of pearl-clutching: how dare she, who has her mother’s face and low voice, look so cheap? But her tawdry turn isn’t great just because it made the nuns in Rome pray for her; it’s great because she seemed to understand, more than most, that everything in Blue Velvet, and in melodrama more generally, is in bad taste because it’s painfully exoteric, on the surface, refusing depth. The film demands that she weep and wail and wield a big knife, looking less like a Hollywood femme fatale with a secret than a giallo scream queen: cheaply bewigged, garishly styled, excessively ‘foreign’, too much what she seems.

It is sometimes argued that Lynch couldn’t be an ironist because he believed sincerely in the distinctions he depicted: good v. evil, small-town dream v. urban nightmare. He’s been claimed and disclaimed as a conservative filmmaker. One of the boneheads at the National Review even praised him for exposing the deviance of American life: ‘Someone has noticed!’ Lynch was susceptible to Reagan’s cowboy shtick and hooey about neighbourly love, but it’s hard to take seriously the claim that Blue Velvet was ‘a call for a return to the 1950s’. The mock-arcadia of its ending, returning to the white picket fence of the opening but with everything slightly off, leaves us in little doubt that the dream and the nightmare inhabit each other. Jeffrey and Frank are two halves of a whole: MacLachlan’s boyish face sometimes flickers with dead-eyed resignation, while Hopper is terrifying precisely because he seems so infantile – wildly unregulated, clutching his scrap of blue velvet like a blankie, soothed by his friend’s freaky lullaby. When Lynch was asked about the ending, his characteristic ambivalence began to sound a bit like realism: ‘You apprehend things, and when you try to see what it’s all about, you have to live with it.’

Lynch’s​ next project, Twin Peaks, was an extension of Blue Velvet’s pop-fuelled fantasia. It was created with Mark Frost, an experienced screenwriter with whom Lynch had originally planned to adapt Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. The usual line is that Frost contributed the more prosaic beats of the police procedural and soap opera – which is hard to dispute when what we know of their writing process is that Lynch lay on a chaise longue while Frost typed. There was something glossy and irreal about Twin Peaks, the town ‘five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line’, where a high schooler could look like Elizabeth Taylor in saddle shoes and MacLachlan, as Special Agent Dale Cooper, had the same quality Kael detected in Cary Grant: ‘Being the pursued doesn’t make him weak or passively soft. It makes him glamorous.’ It was, really, an advert – for the Northwest, yes, but mainly for Lynch’s childhood, only this time it was better because the bikers were beatniks and the sheriffs were named after presidents. It was shot on rich 35 mm film, radiating log-fire warmth (the colour blue was banned from set, which is one reason Palmer’s blue-lipped corpse looks so alien). The trick wasn’t so much the inclusion of soap opera stock characters alongside Lynchian weirdos – the best is the Log Lady, who cradles her ponderosa pine pietà-style – but that ‘those who are not mad do not find the eccentric characters eccentric,’ as Michel Chion put it. And why would they? The comically overwrought relationships of the soap opera characters (the sheriff is sleeping with the mill-owner’s widow, and so on) are no easier to follow than the supernatural hoopla behind the red curtain.

The show’s ‘structuring absence’ is Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee), the homecoming queen found ‘dead, wrapped in plastic’ in the first episode. She – or really her hair, fatally blonde – recalls other small-town scandals, from Lolita and The Naked Kiss to the 1960s TV hit Peyton Place and the early Reagan vehicle Kings Row, which had its own share of murder, incest and lopped-off limbs. But unlike those works, Twin Peaks was envisaged as a ‘never say goodbye’ story, its secrets not to be revealed. Palmer’s near comical impossibility as the girl who knew everyone – she was busier than a screwball dame – is what made the fantasy structure of Twin Peaks possible. Lynch’s dream that the mysteries of the town might keep unfolding depended on the suggestion that Palmer had an infinite number of hidden lives, that there would always be another secret diary, another secret lover. When they were forced by the network to unmask the killer midway through Season Two, Lynch abandoned ship and it became a different, less unified show (for one thing, Cooper’s suit became a lumberjack shirt). The second half of Season Two has its appeal, but it’s a bit like watching Shakespeare’s B-plots seize the reins – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern set loose in timber town. In 1992, Lynch returned to the world of Twin Peaks with his much maligned prequel film, Fire Walk with Me. (Buñuel once joked that he had stones in his pockets at the premiere of Un Chien Andalou in case the audience attacked him; Lynch should have done the same.) What he was really returning to was Laura Palmer.

The question that hovered around the edges of Twin Peaks was whether a network TV show that traded on genre pastiche and flirted with allegory (of a supernatural kind) was able to address serious acts of perversion and predatory abuse without producing effects endemic to its form: bathos, gratuitousness, cynicism. Fire Walk with Me, which follows Palmer during her final days, begins with the destruction of a TV set. It undoes the show’s central conceit by making present its ‘structuring absence’, stripping back the layers of zaniness and soapiness that made the series popular. The result is white-knuckled horror – more terrifying than anything he ever made – in which everything that was previously latent is now made manifest.

Lynch’s idiom is so personal that it is sometimes easy to forget that he relied on the storehouse of Gothic tropes – doppelgängers, omens, missing limbs – and an established cinematic grammar of suspense. Take the scene in Season Two when the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of Palmer’s killer is revealed. It’s set up as a standard shot/ reverse shot in which a character looks in the mirror and another face, the killer’s face, appears in its place. Given the identity of the killer, the ‘wrongness’ of the reverse shot compounds its moral horror. The home, Lynch once said, is ‘a place where things can go wrong’, and it’s often the emergence of the ‘wrong’ amid his usual ambivalence that absolves him of knowing irony (‘Things are not as they seem’), instead revealing a horrifying illogic and injustice (‘Things are not as they should be’).

‘Everything is about Marilyn Monroe,’ Lynch said, talking about Laura Palmer. In the same way, one has to assume, everything is about Elvis and, of course, about Oz. Once the production of Twin Peaks was underway, Lynch set out to make his next film, Wild at Heart. He cast Laura Dern as a ‘gum-chewing Marilyn’ who takes to the road in a Ford Thunderbird with an Elvis-impersonating Nicolas Cage, and, at the end of the film, once they’ve trawled the many horrors of Americana, Sheryl Lee appears as Glinda. Total kitsch, you might say, or ‘abject’, as Godard – the only Frenchman who didn’t like Lynch – put it. Wild at Heart is Lynch’s most violent film and his most image-obsessed, a quality that Tarantino and Oliver Stone would immediately rip off in Natural Born Killers, though neither would touch the sweet side of kitsch that Lynch embraced. He understood that what made Hollywood over the top – its clichés, its emotionalism, its moral polarisation – was also what made it mythic, and so Wild at Heart is excessive in every way: too edited, too talkative, too referential. For many, the goofy-sweet ending brought Lynch’s credulity into question. He protested that he ‘wasn’t trying to be commercial’, but after all, Lynch couldn’t talk about It’s a Wonderful Life without weeping; why would anyone doubt he was being sincere? Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or, but the domestic response was less laudatory.

By the mid-1990s, with as many commercial and critical flops to his name as triumphs, Lynch seemed far from fixing that promised union between populism and surrealism. His second TV venture, a parody sitcom called On the Air, was taken off air after only three episodes (Foster Wallace is right here: it’s ‘bottomlessly horrid’), and he struggled to get funding for a number of projects, including an adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis that he’d been working on since the early 1980s. His last two films of the century seem like unintended responses to the suggestion that the ‘Lynchian’ had now descended into self-parody: Lost Highway, which doubled down on the perversity of Fire Walk with Me and Wild at Heart, was the first in a loose ‘LA trilogy’ (with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire), while The Straight Story (1999) was suspiciously without perversion, a sweet Midwestern road movie rated ‘G for General’. ‘Isn’t it odd that there are two directors named David Lynch?’ someone said at a preview screening.

The best essay in David Lynch’s American Dreamscape is about the soundtrack to Lost Highway, which thrashes and clangs from the first frame, a mix of industrial rock, nu-metal, dream pop and jazz, heavy with sub-bass, droning and reverb. Covers by Lou Reed, Marilyn Manson and This Mortal Coil, where ‘orienting, pleasant comforts have been stripped away’, play at ‘moments of recurrence, resurrection, repetition’. Like other aspects of Lost Highway, this estrangement only achieves déjà vu. It was his most wildly expressionistic film since Eraserhead, with the same sense of the protagonist’s ‘bad thoughts’ leaking into the surroundings. At times the camera is overcranked or undercranked, so the frame rates are uneven, an unpredictable speed written into the film, and shots might be murkily underexposed, with vignetting around the frame, or front-lit and blindingly white. It’s as if something had got into the reel and possessed it. Lost Highway wasn’t cursed but it had an unfortunate legacy: it was Robert Blake’s last role before he was charged with his wife’s murder, and Nance (who appears as a mechanic in the second half) died before its release after a dust-up outside a doughnut shop.

There’s a story about Lynch’s team protesting after a disastrous US test screening of Wild at Heart: ‘This is a Disney crowd – we need a David Lynch crowd.’ The Straight Story was that even weirder thing, a Disney-distributed picture with a Lynch audience. It shows a side of Lynch totally exorcised from Lost Highway: cornfed Middle American goodness. Written by his editor and then partner, Mary Sweeney, it was a different kind of road movie from Wild at Heart. Richard Farnsworth is Alvin Straight, a nearly blind widower whose various medical problems (including emphysema) prevent him from getting a driver’s licence, so he rides a lawnmower 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his sick brother. An early exchange in a hardware store – ‘What do you need that grabber for, Alvin?’ ‘Grabbin’!’ – lets us know how unadorned the film will be (not a dancing dwarf or mutant baby in sight). The camera movement is conventionally beautiful – in that golden, early Malick kind of way – and American weirdness is shown at its most benign. Each person Alvin meets en route is approached with the affectionate, old-fashioned humanism of an early Jonathan Demme film. Ebert, a Demme fanboy, loved it, as did nearly every mainstream outlet; after almost a decade of ridicule and condemnation, the consensus seemed to be that the enfant terrible, now in his fifties, had finally grown up.

It’s easy to regard The Straight Story with suspicion, and I often have. It can seem a conservative, not to say mawkish, celebration of a Middle America that never existed. Miley draws an interesting comparison with the folk revivalists of the 1950s and 1960s, who adopted ‘antiquated, anachronistic forms and styles’ to celebrate ‘the old, weird America’, though I’m not sure a septuagenarian on a lawnmower is quite the same as ‘roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels’ (as Bob Dylan put it). It’s true, though, that there’s something going on beneath the surface of The Straight Story, and when you realise Alvin’s stoicism is really a kind of stubbornness, he fits more naturally in Lynch’s stable of monomaniacs, each trapped by his own compulsions. One character seems to have crashed onto set from another, weirder film (perhaps by that other David Lynch), wailing to Alvin that she can’t stop accidentally hitting deer: thirteen in seven weeks. ‘And I love deer!’

Lost Highway and The Straight Story separated out the aspects of Lynch’s filmmaking that in his most famous projects, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, sit side by side. Those three projects demonstrate, on a larger scale, Foster Wallace’s pseudo-academic definition of ‘the Lynchian’ as ‘a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter’. Which is to say they’ve ascended to the pantheon of Good Taste on the grounds of formal perfection and tonal coherence. Of course, that isn’t really the case. The scene from Blue Velvet of Dean Stockwell, as one of Frank’s goons, lip-syncing to ‘In Dreams’ is in some ways an example of the Lynchian bait-and-switch: take something as uncool as a Roy Orbison song and show how weird it has always been, with its freaky falsetto and no section the same. But the appearance of Stockwell (who has all the same 1960s counterculture associations as Hopper) is deliberately hard to read, and the poles of ‘very macabre’ and ‘very mundane’ don’t seem sufficient. Hopper watches him perform with teary eyes, reacting either appropriately or inappropriately – it’s impossible to say. If Lynch’s films are ironic, this isn’t a classical kind of irony, where meaning can be reconstructed through negation, but something closer to what Wayne Booth called ‘unstable irony’: ‘We know that something is being undermined … we don’t really know where to stop in our underminings.’

There’s a standard gloss of Mulholland Drive: the first half is the Hollywood dream, with Naomi Watts as Betty, a buoyant actress set for stardom, while the second half reveals her to be a personal and professional screw-up, stewing in envy and hatred. As Todd McGowan has argued, it’s the ‘dream’ section of the film rather than the ‘reality’ that adheres most closely to a kind of cinematic realism – well-lit, smoothly edited. One reason Lynch’s films, especially Mulholland Drive, have appealed so much to Lacanian film critics, and disciples of Christian Metz in particular, is that, in this self-conscious association of dreams with the cinematically normative, the old ideological fear about film – that it hides the production of fantasy – is gleefully laid bare.

On the first viewing of a Lynch film, there are striking images, mostly faces, that are hard to forget – Grace Zabriskie’s tilted head in Inland Empire comes to mind. On rewatching, a second order of images, less immediately arresting but just as affecting, begins to emerge, often linked to shadowy systems of control within the films. In Mulholland Drive, for instance, you have Watts dreamily dissolved against endless rows of palm trees, but there are also those indistinguishable men in suits in wood-panelled rooms. The background plot in Mulholland Drive concerns a Hollywood mob interfering with the production of the film within the film. It’s presided over by a figure called Mr Roque (Michael J. Anderson), whom Tom McCarthy describes in his essay on Lynch’s ‘Prosthetic Imagination’ as ‘almost pure prosthesis, his already tiny, crippled body dwarfed yet further by the spacious, hi-tech chamber from which … he calls the shots’. The film seems to be goading us into pointing out its artificiality. But when, in its most hypnotic scene, a song keeps playing after the singer has collapsed onstage and it doesn’t matter either to the characters watching or to the viewer, we can’t be certain that it’s never our own disbelief being suspended. Mulholland Drive is easily Lynch’s most acclaimed film, but it began as a failed TV pilot, only becoming a full-length feature after the French company Canal+ allowed him to reshoot and edit the footage, piecing it together from the cutting-room floor.

Where​ could Lynch go next? For a while it seemed as if he might not make a feature film again. In his mid-fifties, he’d become an unlikely and enthusiastic denizen of Web 2.0, setting up camp at DavidLynch.com, where you could find his experiments with Flash animation and Photoshop (‘a miracle to me!’), home movies ranging from puerile to inspired to ‘Dead Mouse with Ants’, and later his daily ‘weather reports’: always hot. There was also a chatroom, but Lynch managed only two questions before it was closed: ‘Is there still gold in Fort Knox?’ and ‘How did a 757 airplane get into the Pentagon through an eighteen-foot hole on 9/11?’ As his peers decried the advent of the digital, and particularly digital cameras, Lynch was happily sounding the old medium’s death knell: ‘Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit.’

The result, in 2006, was Inland Empire, his final full-length film, ‘shot for a nickel and a cup of coffee’ on a low-grade prosumer camera. Inland Empire couldn’t be called formally neat. Ostensibly there’s a plot – Laura Dern plays an actress who assumes the identity of her character, along with some other personae, during the remake of an apparently cursed film – but the result looks like the early years of YouTube set to autoplay, sliding between different plotlines and places (present-day Hollywood Boulevard, a backyard in Southern California, a sitcom about people with rabbit heads) that seem tangentially connected. It is Lynch’s only truly anti-narrative work, the ultimate perversion of the hokey Hollywood film Dern’s character has been cast in. The triumph of Inland Empire lies in Lynch’s approach to film’s digital future: where most early converts were drawn to its promise of sharper, hyper-realistic images, Lynch was attracted to its ‘bad quality’, its smudgy and pixellated frames out of which anything could emerge.

Miley ends this chapter of David Lynch’s American Dreamscape on the credits sequence of Inland Empire, which, after nearly three hours of mania, finishes with the characters dancing to Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’, along with other Lynchian figures (Laura Harring from Mulholland Drive, a chainsawing lumberjack, a capuchin monkey). Miley sees this as a visual demonstration of the never-ending party that an intertextual approach to Lynch ushers in; others have seen it as indulgent, nothing more than a catalogue of his obsessions. I tend to think back to the sound mixer’s description of Blue Velvet as ‘Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch’. Lynch kept a reproduction of The Garden of Earthly Delights over his desk (Spielberg owns Rockwells), and the final scene of Inland Empire is Lynch going full Bosch.

Lynch, of course, hated endings, and it’s fitting that his final project was to reopen the story he never wanted to close. Twin Peaks: The Return, like Inland Empire and unlike the original series, is not a ‘neighbourhood story’ but terrifyingly expansive, taking place not just in the small Northwestern town, but in Las Vegas, New York, Philadelphia, Montana and Texas – an America more alienated and spaced-out than Lynch had portrayed it before. It’s slow, taking eighteen hours, and senselessly violent, so clinical, at times, that it has the feel of a J.G. Ballard story. Lynch fans asked, less out of criticism than in awe: had he forgotten what Twin Peaks was about?

After all those impossible head injuries, the women stumbling bleeding out of wrecked cars, still alive but no longer knowing who they are, Twin Peaks: The Return turned out to be his great amnesiac project. It had to be – the last we saw of Cooper, in the final episode of Season Two, he had smashed his forehead against a mirror and seemed to have become someone else. He spends most of The Return in a near catatonic state while his doppelgänger – the Spenserian kind, a false double – roams the country, only to return to his old self, briefly, at the end. When he delivers the final line of the series, it’s a travesty of the amnesiac’s familiar question: ‘What year is this?’ The film critic Serge Daney once lamented that cinema had become ‘an eye that is constantly getting sharper and a memory that is constantly becoming blunted’. That dilemma is Lynch’s career-long wager, finding ways to make the already seen look wildly new.

Lynch had a peculiarly subtractive aesthetic. Just as the more you see, the less comprehensible it becomes, the less you can see (the lower the lighting, the poorer the quality) the more there is to look for. It’s the equation he’d wanted to test with the original series of Twin Peaks: that you might go to a town, look around, meet the locals (all 51,201 of them), keep looking around and never get bored. What a dream! To see everything and remain the naif. Lynch continued to paint throughout his filmmaking career, but his paintings aren’t what you might expect – not Hopper, or Bacon, or Bosch. They are large canvases, art brut-style, squished with dead insects and horsehair and other things. Some are very dark. Darkness, Lynch once said, is ‘like a little egress; you can go into it … and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in’. The best thing about the painting that set Lynch on track, that he started to imagine moving, was that it was ‘almost all-black’.