In Heaven, Everything Is Fine.

David Lynch was a dreamer. Every artist, regardless of the medium, begins their journey with a dream. A dream of success— whether it comes in the shape of fame, wealth, or a mastery of the craft— can motivate any artist to create. But dreams are more than just fantasies of triumph. They are a peek into our true selves, unfiltered and messy. David Lynch understood this and spent his entire career trying to give us a glimpse into his very chaotic, but empathetic world.

I was first exposed to Lynch’s work in the same way many of his fans are— a college course. I was about 20 years old and still learning about my own taste in film and art in general. Needless to say, I found his movies incredibly challenging and bewildering. We were shown most of his filmography with a few exceptions (“Twin Peaks” and “The Straight Story.”) I found myself connecting with his more narratively straightforward films like “The Elephant Man” and “Blue Velvet” as their relatively traditional structures made me feel at ease and secure. At least I could follow their stories and understand what was happening. 

“Eraserhead” is Lynch’s “most spiritual film,” according to his own words. It is also his first feature film. The first time I viewed this, I fell asleep. I could not connect with this movie and did not understand a single thing I was watching. I tried watching it again the next day only to fall asleep yet again. It wasn’t until years later that I watched it for a third time that it finally clicked for me. I stopped trying to solve it and just experienced it.

There is no one correct answer for what David Lynch was trying to communicate with his art. He famously never explained himself when constantly asked for any sort of elucidation on his many nontraditional stories. And I’m so glad he never did. 

“Eraserhead” feels like a nightmare and this isn’t the first time it’s been said. The hypnotic atmosphere and pace have a dreamlike quality that is only exacerbated by the increasingly bizarre sequences and visuals Lynch exposes us to. So many questions we have as an audience are never explicitly answered. Why did Mary give birth to the weird alien baby? How was it born in such a short time? Why doesn’t anyone else in this world care at all about this seemingly new species? Why are people eating tiny man made chickens? These questions don’t matter. This is just how Lynch expresses himself to us. There is no literal meaning for much of what we see, yet he is expressing fairly obvious feelings about parenting throughout.

Lynch would follow his nightmare on film with two big budget studio films. The first for Mel Brooks’ Brooksfilms with “The Elephant Man.” This would be Lynch’s one good experience as a director for hire. Mel Brooks saw “Eraserhead” and thought “now this is the man to make a tender, classy biopic on Joseph Merrick.” Thankfully, Brooks could see talent, and even unofficially gave Lynch final edit on the film, resulting in a gorgeous and haunting portrait of a kind, unfortunate soul. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. 

Following his critical success, Lynch stayed in the studio system once more where he was given the reigns to adapt a story that up until that point and even afterwards maintained a reputation as being unfilmable all the way until 2021. In 1984, Universal Pictures released “Dune” directed by David Lynch. The history behind adapting Frank Herbert’s highly influential science fiction series is about as dense as the novels themselves. All that matters here is that Lynch had such an awful time making the movie under the studio’s many constraints and was so displeased with the final product, it led to his decision to never sign on to direct a feature that he wouldn’t have final edit on. Also, the movie is bad.

The remainder of his career is what many consider to be the golden age of his filmography. Two years after his disappointment with “Dune” he came out swinging with one of his most iconic works to date. “Blue Velvet” was initially met with a fairly divisive reaction at the time with critics like Roger Ebert giving it an especially negative review and his television review show co-host Gene Siskel calling it one of the best of the year. Lynch was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director and it has since become a staple in his career. “Blue Velvet” is where Lynch’s dreamlike storytelling feels most tangible and comprehensible. When put in context with the films that followed, it only feels like he was giving us a taste of what was to come.

“Twin Peaks” feels like an extension of everything he was trying to express in “Blue Velvet.” From the naivete that comes with life in a small town, to the ugliness inherent in humanity, “Twin Peaks” is where Lynch fully explores his dreams and nightmares. Dreams play such a significant role both thematically and narratively in “Twin Peaks.” The show is centered around the investigation of a teenage girl’s murder and is not told in typical whodunit fashion. So many of the hints we are given are abstract and clearly meant more as symbolic or metaphorical. The clues feel more like poetry that the viewer needs to try and find meaning from, not solve like a puzzle. Characters are given clues through actual dreams and visions, many of which are shared between several players in the story. As the show leaned more into supernatural territory, it would have been very easy to lose sight of the very mature themes present in the story, which season 2 later proved; but in it’s prime, the series retained its severity when necessary.

Around this period in Lynch’s career is when he would explore his darker side far more. “Blue Velvet” was the start of a recurring theme of violence against women that would become more and more prevalent in his films. The abuse that Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens goes through in the film is still shocking and upsetting to this day. Even this character would prove to be just the beginning of Lynch’s disturbing portrayals of abuse.

Laura Palmer’s existence in “Twin Peaks” is entirely tragic. Unfortunately, I only started watching the series fairly recently following Lynch’s passing and I haven’t finished season 2, seen “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” or the third season as of writing. I don’t have much to say beyond what I do know about the character of Laura Palmer from the first 17 episodes of the show which is that Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost were not interested in writing easy characters. Laura was not the picture of perfection the town believed her to be, but that doesn’t make her death any less devastating. Every new piece of information we learn about her only informs us more of the complete nightmare that was her life.

“Lost Highway” and “Mullholland Drive” feel like the films David Lynch wanted to make his whole career. This isn’t to take away from his previous work, but these two come closest to feeling like actual dreams. The type of dream that starts off feeling fairly mundane and then slowly or sometimes suddenly will unravel or completely change scenery before you’ve had the chance to even understand the present. Maybe it would slowly become a nightmare or maybe you’d just wake up before you realized you were done dreaming. This would seemingly mark an end in his career making any sort of commercial Hollywood film and a signifier that the general movie going public could no longer connect with Lynch. That is, until The Return.

I didn’t cover every David Lynch film here. “The Straight Story” and “Inland Empire” are still blind spots for me and I will watch them soon, but I didn’t want to just go through his movies and review every single one. His art truly affected me in ways very few other artists have. I remember watching these films for the first time and feeling conflicted with every one of them. I may still not love every movie of his, but I can’t deny that his work is incredibly valuable to me. He made me look at cinema through a completely different lens than I was used to and I will always be grateful for that. There’s so much more I could have said about him, from his shockingly strong presence in front of the camera, to his personality off camera and the endless wonderful stories told by the many actors and filmmakers who got to know him. In the end all that’s left to say is this: rest easy Mr. Lynch. Thanks for showing us your dreams. I hope everything is fine.

Written by Carlos De la Luz