Twin Peaks. 2017. USA. Directed by David Lynch. Courtesy of Showtime

On January 15, just days after being evacuated from his home as massive wildfires threatened his beloved Los Angeles, David Lynch succumbed to a battle with lung disease. A longtime devotee of Transcendental Meditation and a dedicated liver of “the art life,” Lynch would likely point out that he had merely shed his physical body. “It’s a continuum,” he once said, “and we’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.”

He was a filmmaker of singular vision, whose work often combined elements of Surrealism, horror, and melodrama with a seemingly naive—even parodic—brand of “aw shucks” innocence. Applied to Lynch’s films, the word “weird” often feels insufficient, so a new adjective, “Lynchian,” was coined. That word also falls short of encapsulating his work.

Below, four MoMA staff members reflect on Lynch’s work.

David Lynch at the 42nd Emmy Awards - Governor’s Ball, September 1990

David Lynch at the 42nd Emmy Awards - Governor’s Ball, September 1990

In Testament of Orpheus (1960), Jean Cocteau says, “The privilege of the cinematograph is that it allows a large number of people to dream the same dream together and show the fantasies of unreality with the rigor of realism.” Cocteau described what the Surrealists (and he himself) had been doing in cinema: to create surrealism, one doesn’t necessarily need to use special effects or show parallel universes. Instead, the artist must focus on the disturbing details of reality and see where they take us. Honoring this notion, David Lynch dove deep into the human mind, blurring the lines between love and violence, pleasure and chaos, innocence and perversion. In doing so, he reaffirmed that cinema is the most transparent of all mediums.

I was 18—close to the age of Kyle MacLachlan’s character—when I first saw Blue Velvet (1986) in a theater, and I still remember how it revealed things about myself that I was unaware of. The film showed that there was something scary and disturbing behind life’s pristine facades and blue suburban skies; I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Five years later, I was lucky to meet the director for an interview. The smoke of his cigarette and the strange twirl in his hair brought to mind his characters’ seductive, vertiginous curiosity as he patiently listened to me offering interpretations of his work. He rejected them, adding they were nothing but ideas born in the strange world we all live in. Once the interview ended, he invited me to talk about meditation.

“It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream…and the most terrible nightmare, all at once.” Those words still echo from when I heard them in Twin Peaks (1990–91), which haunted millions of TV viewers after they turned off their sets and went to bed. (The show’s third season, released in 2017, dared to go even further into the unexplainable realms of our psyches.) I first saw the pilot episode on a flight troubled by thunder and incessant turbulence—possibly due to my choice of inflight entertainment. David Lynch made no concessions in revealing the stuff that our dreams are made of, and knew that light and darkness go hand in hand, like coffee and cherry pie. I often think of their taste when giving myself to the film screen without resistance, like someone going into the night.
—Francisco Valente, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film

Twin Peaks. 2017. USA. Directed by David Lynch

Twin Peaks. 2017. USA. Directed by David Lynch

I am often asked what a producer does at MoMA, and usually I respond with something like, “Whatever is needed” or “I make stuff happen.” There is no better example of making stuff happen than when we had the distinct honor of presenting David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (aka Season Three, aka Twin Peaks: The Return) on the big screen as a part of our series The Contenders in January 2018. I can’t recall whose idea it was to make a run at Twin Peaks, but we have many Lynch fans on staff, and it could have been any one of us. The Department of Film has a long history with Lynch, including working with him to restore his debut feature, Eraserhead, and screening his under-seen concert documentary Duran Duran: Unstaged in the 2013 installment of The Contenders. Having worked on these collaborations, I was able to email Lynch’s longtime producer Sabrina Sutherland with our pitch; thankfully, she was enthusiastic.

The biggest hurdle was creating a digital file of the show that we could screen in our theater, which involved a rush order from our friends at the Fotokem film lab, who delivered the drive the day before the first screening. We broke the series down into three installments, with Parts 1–4 on Friday evening, Parts 5–11 on Saturday, and Parts 12–18 on Sunday. The screenings were free and open to the public, and each installment averaged over 250 attendees, with a handful of true believers who watched every minute of the series. During a break in between screenings on the last day, we treated everyone to cherry pie and a “damn fine cup of coffee” in our lounge, just as Agent Cooper would have wanted us to. To my knowledge, that was the only theatrical screening of Twin Peaks.
—Sean Egan, Senior Producer, Department of Film

The Straight Story. 1999. USA. Directed by David Lynch

The Straight Story. 1999. USA. Directed by David Lynch

David Lynch was a master of the dreamlike and macabre, yet what you see in his films is often exactly what you get. It’s not hard to understand why Mel Brooks nicknamed Lynch “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”; his public persona was far out while weirdly down to earth, all too appropriate for a Surrealist who was also a shrewd businessman and canny self-promoter. It’s true he famously refused to reveal how he fabricated the Eraserhead baby, but by and large, Lynch did not make his filmmaking sound like rocket science. Instead, even before he took to formally promoting Transcendental Meditation as a side hustle, Lynch pushed the idea that if he could make art, so could you. For me, that’s Lynch: an avant-garde filmmaker who managed to eke out an uncompromising career in a more adventurous period of Hollywood history, gifted with the ability to discuss his wackiest choices the same way you or I might talk about changing a lightbulb.

Rated G and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, Lynch’s eighth feature, The Straight Story, is something of an outlier in his filmography, maybe because it lacks the attention-grabbing trademarks that, in the hands of lesser filmmakers, become “Lynchian” clichés. The movie has no enigmatic blondes in captivity, no main characters haunted by psychotic doppelgängers, no elliptical dream montages or extended sequences in which somebody’s head gets smashed through a car window. Instead, Lynch and his screenwriter Mary Sweeney mine plenty of drama from the real-life story of Alvin Straight, a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War, who drove a John Deere lawnmower 240 miles (averaging five miles per hour) in order to reconcile with his estranged brother. If you’ve seen Lynch’s other films, you might spend this one anticipating something going horribly wrong along the journey of its 70-something protagonist, played with unfakeable grace by the actor Richard Farnsworth while he was dying of prostate cancer. (Alvin’s brother Lyle is played by Lynch regular Harry Dean Stanton.)

Lynch shows how Straight’s passing acknowledgment of past troubles—with drinking, with his brother Lyle, or in the trenches in WWII—can do more to shake the viewer than an elaborate flashback scene, a showstopping monologue, or a perfectly timed musical cue. (The score, by Lynch’s collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, does mix operatic and ambient registers, but it tends to thrum as background during scenes that refuse easy dramatic resolution.) Lynch gives us clues about the life of this stubborn old man before refracting them back onto the landscape, like a dream of better days remembered, possibly inspired by his lifelong obsession with Edward Hopper. By leaving the fireworks to the viewer’s imagination, The Straight Story offers a radical—and sublime—minimalist vision of a bygone America. It also serves (alongside The Elephant Man) as proof that, if he had wanted to, Lynch could have built a fine career as a more conventional dramatist.
—Steve Macfarlane, Department Assistant, Department of Film

Dune is David Lynch’s worst film. The critics despised it. Audiences avoided it. Lynch disavowed it.

Eleven-year-old me fell in love with it.

This love of Dune—the real Dune—has survived from that first time in the theater through VHS, DVD, and streaming versions, and I still watch it as often as my wife will tolerate. I cannot defend it as a coherent cinematic achievement, but it does contain glimmers of genius—and in a way it gave us the David Lynch we celebrate today.

When Roger Ebert proclaimed that Dune’s “portentious lines of pop profundity are allowed to hang in the air unanswered, while additional characters arrive or leave on unexplained errands,” he could easily have been describing Twin Peaks. In light of the unexplained weirdness that attracts so many to Lynch’s work, it’s tempting to argue that one man’s “incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time” is another man’s enigmatic, dreamlike, anti-commercial classic. But here’s the thing: David Lynch didn’t end up liking it either. Google can provide the details of its troubled production; suffice it to say the story was too big and the studio was too involved. “It was too much to tell in that amount of time,” Lynch later explained. “So it was like a fantastic Porsche car kind of compacted down into…it’s still a Porsche, but it’s hard to drive it and it doesn’t look so good anymore.”

The film Lynch described as a “nightmare” is no secret masterpiece, but it still contains sublime moments of bewilderment, abjection, and ravishing beauty that have become his hallmarks. It’s a broken window, and David Lynch comes peeking through the cracks. For Lynch it was a hard-learned lesson: “Don’t make a film if it can’t be the film you want to make. It’s a joke…and a sick joke. And it’ll kill you.” That lesson gave us Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart—unadulterated Lynch, the straight stuff. Dune also gave Lynch collaborators he would return to again and again: Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, Everett McGill, and the film’s star, a complete unknown named Kyle MacLachlan.

Lynch eschewed bitterness, picked the carcass clean, and got back to work. “Dune is a huge, gigantic sadness in my life,” he admitted. “But I’m still happy that you like it. I like many, many parts of Dune myself.”
—Jason Persse, Assistant Director, Content