David Lynch Decoded

Introduction

            Everybody’s got that moment. If you love film, you had a moment at some point in your life. Think back on it and you’ll remember it eventually if you don’t already. It’s that moment when you had an epiphany, you realized what film was really capable of, what it could do, how it could reach you. And you wanted more. You wanted to see more, learn more, and that’s exactly what you did. Your moment resulted in a love of film, which is probably why you’re reading this. My senior year of high school was when I had my moment. It’s when my love of film first grabbed me by the ear and made me pay attention. I went to see a late showing of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me and I was instantly hooked on film forever. No filmmaker had ever affected me the way Lynch did with that film and I had to have more. I had to know more about this new world that he had created and what it all meant. So, I did the only thing I could think of to feed my hunger. I went to the video store.

            When I first started watching the films of David Lynch, what struck me the most about them was the other-worldly characters that seemed to populate his works. They are seldom central characters, but they have significant influence on other characters as well as on the events of the films. These characters seem to come from other realms or realities and frequently manifest unusual powers or pass on information that seems to be quite privileged. Characters such as Eraserhead’s Lady In The Radiator, Twin Peaks’ Killer Bob or Lost Highway’s Mystery Man invade what we shall call, for the sake of the discussion, the “real world” in Lynch’s films and they all seem to have an agenda of some kind.

            I find that many things about Lynch’s work upset people, and it’s easy to see that these unusual characters are one of those things. Some people seem to dismiss this aspect of Lynch’s films as just being “weird for weirdness’ sake” and contend that these characters are just a gimmick that Lynch employs to disorient viewers. However, after seeing the care and attention to detail that Lynch takes with all of his works, I began to wonder if these characters were there for a more significant reason. So, after a great deal of examination, I have come to the conclusion that these characters are connected to each other, that they are connected in specific ways which repeat themselves thematically and visually throughout the majority of Lynch’s filmed works, and that over time Lynch has developed a visual language that we can interpret with regard to these characters and the strange world they come from.

            The best way to analyze these characters, their themes and language cues is to first examine their placement in Lynch’s works. By dividing up the works into sections, I will point out the important elements that we will be dealing with and then, as we move along from section to section, show how they build on one another. Through this approach, we will then be able to come to some conclusions not just about this other world but also how to view Lynch’s films as a whole.