David Lynch: My Deformed Twin Brother

Hilde Susan Jaegtnes is a screenwriter, novelist and surrealist apprentice based in Yucca Valley. The introductory note contains a revised version of the dream poetics written as a foreword to her book single Sur på Art Garfunkel og andre drømmer (“Mad At Art Garfunkel and Other Dreams”) published by Flamme Forlag in 2018.

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O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. (Hamlet, act II, scene 2, William Shakespeare)

As a four-year-old in Pennsylvania in the 70s, I was traumatized by a brief sketch on the educational children’s TV show Sesame Street. In the two-minute short, an orange comes to life on a kitchen counter in creepily jerky 2D animation. After receiving buttons for eyes, a walnut nose, a rubber band mouth and pink petal eyelashes, the orange warms up its soprano voice and delivers a grinding rendition of the Habanera from Bizet’s opera Carmen (watch it at your own peril!).

For many years, I suffered serial nightmares about an oversized live orange with flames instead of peel chasing me through the house. Although the prototype had been a female opera singer, my orange was male, of that I had no doubt. His goal, I presumed, was to BURN ME UP because he was EVIL.

After endless chase sequences up and down the stairs, I would wake up screaming, run into my parents’ room and dive under the duvet between them to seek cover from the live orange. I developed a trick to shake my head hard to wake up, but it didn’t stop the orange from returning next time I managed to fall asleep.

As suggested by my wise mother, I wrote about my flaming tormentor in my diary: “he is a live orange he is made outv fire he Bethbrs [bothers] me”.

But the exorcism didn’t work. The live orange continued to haunt me.

In the end, I grew tired of living in a recurrent state of constant terror. I wanted freedom more than anything, and freedom, I reasoned, was the opposite of fear.

One night, I summoned the courage to stop running. Trembling and crying, I turned around and asked the oversize piece of fruit what he wanted exactly.

Finally, once confronted, the live orange didn’t have much to say. Flames shot out from his round shape, but didn’t burn me. The giant fruit just stood there staring at me with its rubber band mouth wide open. Perhaps he just wanted to make friends? But I hadn’t asked for this friendship. Why should he be allowed to have such power over me? How could I trust him after he kept scaring me for all those years?

That was the last time I saw the live orange. To my surprise, I found myself missing him dearly. With his regular, intense visits, the rolling fire had become an essential presence in my young life. An appetite for horror had been irrevocably ignited.

Sigmund Freud argued that dreams are distortions and accumulations of elements. People and symbols, usually by means of visual images, contain elements both from the past day and from childhood. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud points out the similarities between neuroses, dreams and poetical creation, thus comparing the dreamer to the poet:

Just as every neurotic symptom, just as the dream itself, is capable of re-interpretation, and even requires it in order to be perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation.

I’m quite sure Freud would have lauded dreamer-poet David Lynch for his masterful ability to portray believable audiovisual landscapes of dreams and nightmares. Lynch has stated that he can’t remember much of his night dreams, but that he likes to “dive into a dream world that I’ve made, a world I chose and that I have complete control over” (as quoted in Michael Chion‘s indispensable book David Lynch). Judging from his films and TV series, Lynch had a rare ability to consciously access his subconsciousness that most poets would kill for.

As so many young adults in the early 90s, I fell unconditionally in love with Twin Peaks, an explosively seductive, funny and horrifying highlight in my otherwise unsophisticated and mainstream audiovisual diet. Later, as my film horizon expanded, I was deeply entranced by the directors feature films Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), admiring how effortlessly Lynch blended Disney-like innocence and beauty with grotesque imagery and disturbingly twisted relationships and situations.

In the final semester of my MFA in Writing for Screen and Television at USC, I ingested the full body of David Lynch‘s works in professor Akira Mizuta Lippit’s critical theory class. Once I saw Eraserhead (1976), I realized the kinship between Lynch’s aesthetics and my own fledgling attempts at writing. The unappetizing and grotesque, yet vulnerable and lovable apparitions of the Six Men getting sick six times, the Grandmother, the disease-ridden reptilian Baby and Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead, the Elephant Man and the deranged puppet Rabbit Couple (and later, the pulsating organ tree in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) seemed to hail from the same universe as my Live Orange and had similarly complex natures and story functions.

When David Lynch passed away on January 15, 2025, I felt as if I had lost a deformed twin brother whom I admired greatly but also feared. As a homage to the great master of dreams and nightmares, I revisited the three papers I wrote in 2009 in professor Lippit’s deep-probing class. Hoping they might be of interest to other Lynchians, I decided to publish these papers with only a few adjustments, despite the somewhat musty academic style in which they were written.

Those of us who miss David Lynch may be consoled by revisiting the daily weather reports he posted on his YouTube channel. The last report was published on December 16, 2022, only a few days after his long-term collaborator and film composer Angelo Badalamenti passed away. In between his update on the Los Angeles weather, which for once is cloudy, Lynch shares a song he is thinking about: “Today I’m thinking of The World Spins, it was mine and Angelo and Julie [Cruise]’s favorite song we did together.”

It feels appropriate to send you into my analyses of Lynch’ works with the jovial all-American catch phrase that always concluded his weather reports: “Everyone, have a great day!”

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Blue Velvet: Having the cake and eating it too

According to cinema writer Todd McGowan in his book The Impossible David Lynch (2007), the “function of fantasy is to render the impossible object accessible for the subject” (p. 105). Within the realms of fantasy, the moral codes governing reality occur only as faint whispers and even serve to heighten the pleasure which the fantasy structure aims to deliver, in that the echo of morality confers upon the fantasy experience a thrilling taint of danger and illegitimacy.

One of David Lynch’s signature cinematic touches consists of his masterful creation and externalization of fantasy structures, and his careful choreography of characters’ movements into and out of such structures. This is certainly a device used thoroughly in his film Blue Velvet (1986), in which the protagonist simultaneously explores two different expressions of sexual desire. Although the protagonist breaks traditional moral codes such as monogamy, there is no punishment meted out in direct response to his moral transgressions.

If indeed Blue Velvet is an attempt to stage and explore Lynch’s own or a generic male fantasy of tasting the dark side of sexuality, the idealized fate of the protagonist and lack of adverse consequences (other than the severe beating he receives just for being present in the underworld) suggests a fantasy world in which a man can have his cake and eat it too.

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To Lynch, film as a medium allows for the audience’s consumption of “secret” (mysterious, taboo) images: “Film is really voyeurism. You sit there in the safety of the theatre, and seeing is such a powerful thing. And we want to see secret things, we really want to see them” (Lynch, 2005, p. 145).

In Blue Velvet, the protagonist Jeffrey (played by Kyle MacLachlan), a young man in small town America, pursues the simultaneous development of two relationships: An innocent bonding with Sandy (Laura Dern), daughter of a detective in Lumberton, and a sexual, sado-masochistic union with night club singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). He embarks on both relationships after he stumbles onto a criminal investigation of a severed ear he finds by coincidence.

The two women represent two opposing versions of Jeffrey’s sexual desire, two possible paths towards female companionship. They also illustrate different aspects of Jeffrey’s world, which exist side by side, but rarely intersect. In Lynch’s words, “There’s a very innocent, naive quality to life, and there’s a horror and a sickness as well” (Lynch, 2005, p139).

Each of the worlds illustrates what is missing from and threatens the other: The “innocent” or “light” world cannot sustain the introduction of violence, abusive sex and criminal activities, whereas the “sick” or “dark” world cannot continue in the presence of the moral codex of middle-class America.

The notion of two separated worlds – one of which is confined and hidden (Dorothy’s apartment), and the other out in the open (the public places where Jeffrey and Sandy meet) – allows Jeffrey’s participation in both worlds while keeping them apart. In fact, he seems to be able to indulge at will in both worlds without suffering from any visible guilt. However, Jeffrey strives to bring the worlds together in his quest to discover the dynamics of the hidden world, thereby depriving himself of the possibility to continue seeking satisfaction in both worlds.

Lynch’s device of letting the two women personify polar opposites allows Jeffrey to play out the narrative about a man being led by circumstances to indulge in both the light and dark. Jeffrey’s inquisitiveness, a virtuous quality by any standards, fuels his journey into fantasy and exempts him from becoming subject to judgment.

The film thus provides a narrative device to facilitate Jeffrey’s repeated encounters with morally reprehensible creatures without simultaneously causing a moral trial by his judgmental fellow citizens, a process that would no doubt have been in place had the filmmaker had a moral agenda with this piece. Lynch appears to be acting on his desire to explore fantasy constructs without judgment in a tale that is almost mythical in its polarization of good and evil and the stylized happy ending with the robin of love.

Jeffrey’s devotion to the dark fantasy world is tested when Frank (Dennis Hopper) – the omnipotent villain in the underbelly of Lumberton – forces Jeffrey to come on a joyride and severely beats him. The ultimate threat of a dark fantasy world – death – forces Jeffrey to reevaluate the dark world as a viable setting for his sexual exploits. As much as he craves the mystery, unpredictability and unhinged pleasure, he is forced to realize the danger imposed by the lack of restraint and madness possessed by players in the dark world. This danger jeopardizes both worlds and could suggest the unsustainable nature of dark fantasies as an ingredient in everyday life.

It is interesting to note that Jeffrey’s exploration of the two worlds begins after his father is hospitalized with heart failure. It is as if Jeffrey’s super-ego is temporarily deactivated, allowing him to pursue two different relationships in the absence of a tangible manifestation of a moral codex.

Indeed, Michel Chion (2006) points out that this “interpretation of fantasy is based on the suspension of our normal points of orientation: in this case, Jeffrey’s real parents” (p. 86) (Chion refers to Jeffrey’s mother’s lack of activity or expression throughout the film).

In this sense, Blue Velvet could be seen as the response to the question “What would happen if a normal young man had an excuse to try out both traditional versions of desire at once, naughty and nice, without fearing retribution from moral guardians?” Jeffrey is given such an excuse in the guise of the criminal investigation and the absence of his parents. We as the audience give ourselves this excuse when we watch Blue Velvet and pass moral judgment on the characters after having (perhaps secretly) enjoyed the journey into dark fantasies.

The two worlds are brought together when Dorothy appears naked in front of Jeffrey’s house, immediately after Jeffrey and Sandy have professed their love to each other at a dance. After discovering Jeffrey’s sexual relationship with Dorothy through Dorothy’s words “My secret lover,” Sandy suffers a traumatic reaction, but very shortly after says that she forgives Jeffrey and repeats that she loves him.

Thus, Jeffrey’s indulgence in his dark fantasies has almost insignificant consequences on his ability to continue his existence in the safe realm of reality. This could indicate a validation of men’s exploration of their innermost desires, even at the expense of loyalty to their chosen partners. It could also be seen as an illustration of a maturity process on the path towards male sexual expression: Encountering Dorothy and exploring illicit sexual impulses could be a necessary, but transient part of Jeffrey’s journey towards becoming a responsible, moral head of a “normal” family unit. Only if Jeffrey transcends his curiosity about the darker patches of his psyche can he maintain a legitimate union with Sandy without being tempted in the future to repeat such indulgence.

In Blue Velvet, the narrative concerning female sexuality, perpetuated by society, protects the male from having to endure similar stages of female partners’ sexual maturity journeys. A male subscriber to the gender-specific narratives and sexual fantasy structures can thus have his cake and eat it too.

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How to make angels even brighter

David Lynch’s movies are veritable angel factories, on par with Santa Claus’ toy assembly lines. As successful as Lynch is in creating highly distinct worlds with multiple levels of sophistication both with respect to characters and storylines, an element that is repeated in almost everything he creates is the presence of two-dimensional angelic figures alongside devils or demonic surroundings.

Both the angelic and demonic aspects deserve equal attention, but in this discussion, I shall focus more on the angelic in an attempt to identify Lynch’s method in manufacturing angels so radiant and heavenly good that they practically jump out of the screen and illuminate the dark movie theaters and millions of homes with television sets.

It can be argued that the primary device is mechanical rather than ethereal of nature: the method of contrast. Although angels belong in heaven, they will appear all the brighter when placed next to and allowed to interact with evil, impure and destructive creatures in dark, dangerous worlds. The attraction towards and healing effect of angels will be more powerful in demonic places, and this boosted effect can be wielded to steer audiences into the desired emotional track.

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Filmmaking itself as a process relies on contrast between light and dark by projecting a certain exposure of light onto a recording medium to produce images that communicate a story.

Further, contrast is one of the primary tools of learning. Our ability to define concepts is honed when we are shown what a concept is not. A star shape is a star – it is not a square, a circle, a triangle or a parallelogram. An angel is defined by its fundamental goodness, luminance, levity and place of origin: Heaven. But which will shine the brighter: An angel in heaven, or an angel in hell?

Once the characteristics of an angel are outlined, a storyteller can place it anywhere to serve the story or externalize characters’ psychological processes or dilemmas. Placing an angel in hell will yield the maximum brightness and make every good act even more remarkable by virtue of contrast.

Lynch’s films offer virtual spaces in which light and dark are contrasted to produce interdependent elements of good and evil. The brightness level of the angel will depend on how dark the devil is, and vice versa. Lynch uses polarization to recreate a child’s subjective, formative impression of good and evil, and often lingers at a juvenile, undifferentiated level, assimilating narratives (fairytales) told to children for educational purposes.

Although both angelic and demonic characters are well developed and have surprising, original idiosyncrasies, their predominant traits are unambiguously good or evil – unlike most of the heroes and heroines (Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Sailor in Wild at Heart (1990), Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me (1990/1992), who oscillate between the two poles, leaving the audience less clear on how to feel about them or judge them.

Lynch’s angels – present in the lives of heroes/heroines pulled between safe harmony and destructive danger – are externalized by characters larger than life or straight-out imaginary figures. Examples include The Grandmother, The Lady in the Radiator, Mrs. Kendal in The Elephant Man (1980), Sandy in Blue Velvet, and Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me.

Michel Chion (2006) notes that “The Lady in the Radiator is indeed a reappearance of the grandmother, representing an escape avenue from the hopeless hell of life on earth” (p. 43). His interpretation of their role, however, is that they (specifically The Lady in the Radiator) are “related to perfect love and the dream of incestuous fusion” (p. 43).

Perhaps the angel characters in each film fulfill the most urgent need of the protagonists: Mrs. Kendal in The Elephant Man reaffirms the Elephant Man’s value as a human and even presents the possibility of romance; Sandy in Blue Velvet becomes Jeffrey’s anchor to a sane, safe reality; and Agent Cooper is Laura’s post-mortem protector and deliverer of justice.

This externalization of a character’s ultimate desire – the opposite of what they fear the most – lends itself brilliantly to the medium of film, as it allows the audience to empathize with the main character and thus be drawn into the narrative.

An important and interesting exception, or rather a different incarnation, of the angel character comes with Laura Palmer. In Fire Walk With Me, Laura is a heroine with conflicting attributes (ranging from innocent Madonna to criminal whore), but who performs angelic actions (participating in Meals on Wheels, tutoring Audrey Horne’s autistic brother and Josie Packard, intervening when her friend Donna tries to copy her lascivious ways, and finally saving Ronette Pulaski from being killed by her father before being killed herself).

Laura as the embodiment of “the impossible object” (McGowan, 2007, p. 130), namely the object of all the other characters’ desire, bestows on her the role of a savior – whether as a vehicle to quell sexual urges, as a mentor, nurturer or role model. As such, Laura Palmer’s main role is defined by what she represents to others, not so much what she does for herself. McGowen rightly identifies that there is a “fundamental emptiness” at her core, as she is unable to achieve “any fulfillment or sense of identity from the role” (p. 131).

And therein lies the problem with the angels, however bright they may be. Are the angels anything beyond two-dimensional shells, beyond frail Christmas tree decorations, dangling cardboard toys with glued-on glitter and cotton wings? Are Lynch’s angelic figures merely metaphors for the goodness and perfection we imperfect sinners can only aspire to, or can they be taken seriously as representations of real-life human beings?

Some of Lynch’s success might be explained by his masterly command of hellish scenarios in which the hero escapes doom through the aid of shining ideals. Amid violent, desperate and gory realities, there is a promise of hope, redemption and beauty.

Without hell, an angel would blend in with the background and lose its significance and power. Without hope, life might just be too ugly and terrifying to go on living.

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The family hierarchy in David Lynch’s archetypes

According to Wikipedia (2009), the definition of an archetype is “an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype after which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all.” The use of archetypes is a traditional feature of fairytales across times and cultures and is also an analytical tool within psychoanalysis.

When watching all of David Lynch’s movies in succession, a certain repetition of roles – or, more accurately, types of roles – makes itself noticeable. It is possible to argue that Lynch within his body of work has defined recognizable archetypes specific to his stories. By reverting to these archetypes, Lynch can depart from clear and transparent storylines and still preserve the integrity of his narratives and themes.

Lynch’s archetypes thus serve multiple purposes: That of branding, of lending an idiosyncratic storytelling style to his films; and that of providing narrative shortcuts, in that the invocation of an archetype instills in the audience certain expectations of function, relationships and plot, which the filmmaker can then satisfy or contradict.

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Six Archetypes (being sick six times)

Following the presentational structure of a tarot card deck, the following archetypes are among the most recurring tropes in Lynch’s filmography:

The Imperfect Hero. He is immature, fearful, libidinal, mostly benevolent. He often drives the narrative with his quest for the good, which sometimes involves saving the Damsel in Distress. He may be morally ambiguous and is often drawn towards sexual gratification, sometimes embodied by the Sexual Villain. He must fight the Demon and receives protection from the Angel. Ultimately, he will set things right and be joined with the Strong, Beautiful Woman. This narrative often resembles a coming-of-age story, or the reluctant hero, especially with respect to the Hero’s gradual accumulation of power and corresponding loss of innocence.

Examples: Henry in Eraserhead. Jeffrey in Blue Velvet. Sailor in Wild at Heart. Fred Madison in Lost Highway. Adam Kesher in Mulholland Drive.

The Strong, Beautiful Woman. She is beautiful, intelligent, pure, morally irreprehensible, nurturing. She is either a support to and ultimate goal of The Imperfect Hero, or the main impetus of the narrative (Betty in Mulholland Drive and Nikki in Inland Empire). She embodies beauty, maternal virtues and benevolence.

Examples: Mrs. Kendall in The Elephant Man. Sandy in Blue Velvet. Chani in Dune. Lula in Wild at Heart. Renee in Lost Highway. Betty in Mulholland Drive. Nikki in Inland Empire.

The Damsel in Distress. She is sexually desirable, submissive, disadvantaged, disenfranchised. Her position towards her pain is often ambiguous – it is unclear whether she enjoys been tortured or wishes to escape from it. If the Strong, Beautiful Woman is the Madonna, the Damsel in Distress is the whore. She often introduces the Imperfect Hero to the darker sides of life and usually has a connection to the Sexual Villain.

Examples: Mary in Eraserhead. Dorothy in Blue Velvet. Lady Jessica in Dune. Marietta in Wild at Heart. Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me. Rita in Mulholland Drive.

The Sexual Villain. He is a sexual predator, powerful, grotesque, insightful, scary, amoral. He is repulsive, but simultaneously a seducer, and represents a force of sin and temptation that the Imperfect Hero must first identify with, then transcend. In psychoanalytical terms, he is the lowly, animalistic Id, devoted entirely to enjoyment and unmotivated destruction. Traces of the Sexual Villain can sometimes be manifested in the Imperfect Hero. The Sexual Villain is often a plot instigator and a strong engine in the story and must be conquered before the tale is resolved.

Examples: Father in The Grandmother. Baron Harkonnen in Dune. Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart. Leland Palmer/Killer Bob in Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me.

The Angel. He or she is perfection, purity, benevolence, divine love, salvation. The Angel often takes the form of a supernatural character or larger-than-life, stylized presence. The Angel usually functions more as an ideal than a driving force in the plot, an embodiment or reminder of the desired outcome. The Angel brings hope in moments of despair yet remains intangible and illusive.

Examples: Grandmother in The Grandmother. Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead. Mother in The Elephant Man. Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk With Me. (Note: Laura embodies multiple roles merged into one character, an exceptional use of archetypes.)

The Demon. He or she represents absolute evil, a deliberate and destructive force without mercy or restraint. He or she is the more abstract version of the Sexual Villain and stands in direct opposition to the Angel. Contrary to the Angel, the Demon has a more active role in the plot and will sometimes directly contribute to events and story development. This corresponds with the impression that evil is stronger than good in Lynch’s films, that good barely prevails over evil and always in a compromised manner – the compromise often being in the form of the Imperfect Hero’s loss of innocence.

Examples: Father in The Grandmother. Man In The Planet (and/or the Baby) in Eraserhead. Bytes in The Elephant Man. Juana Durango in Wild at Heart. Bob in Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me. The Mystery Man in Lost Highway. Mr. Roque in Mulholland Drive.

Family Hierarchy

By assigning family roles to Lynch’s archetypes, we may gain an understanding of the suggested correlations between them and begin to discern a constellation of personal attributes that from a macro perspective constitute different aspects of the same person, and from a micro perspective define individual character fates within a story.

In the following chart, I have attempted to place the Lynchian archetypes within a traditional family hierarchy. The positions comment on the power structure and most defined relationships between the roles (not excluding other possibilities).

In most of Lynch’s films, the action centers around the Imperfect Hero, who develops from adolescent to idealized father figure joined with the mother. The father and mother either strive to become or distance themselves from their superiors: The angelic grandmother or the demonic grandfather. The sexually villainous uncle remains a destabilizing and destructive factor as well as source/instigator of temptation. The child – damsel in distress – is always powerless and is subject to abuse, protection and/or salvation.

The Lynchian World

If we are to understand David Lynch’s films as vehicles for archetypal narratives, we may draw certain conclusions concerning his world view. The interpretative framework that Lynch uses centers prominently around family structures. The Lynchian world is dramatized as if seen from a little boy’s perspective, in which the most visible and influential human qualities emanate from close family members. In Lynch’s cautionary fairytales, the little boy is encouraged to associate a quality with a single family member to avoid confusion and the ontological danger of misallocating qualities to incompatible originators.

In one of Lynch’s first films, the 1970 short The Grandmother, the title character corresponds perfectly with the family member allocated to the archetype of the Angel. In this film, the main character of the Boy (archetype the Imperfect Hero) is raised by monstrous parents (both of whom are aligned with the archetype of the Demon) and finds comfort in a self-grown ally, the Grandmother.

Perhaps The Grandmother is the most obvious illustration of Lynch’s polarized perception of the nightmare contained within warped family relations, which recurs in many of his subsequent works, e.g. Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me. One could generalize the stories of these films as a coming-of-age stage in which the protagonists either successfully arrive at a more mature level or perish in the attempt.

The next stage of protagonist development is explored in those of Lynch’s films that are more specifically preoccupied with the quest for sexual identity. Lynch (2005) is not afraid of tackling the multiple dimensions of sex: “Sex is such a fascinating thing,” but “Certain aspects of sex are troubling – the way it’s used as power, for instance, or the way it takes the form of perversions that exploit other people” (p. 147-148). Examples of films containing such developments include Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.

The last developmental stage is explored in The Straight Story (1999), in which protagonist Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) embodies the Imperfect Hero carrying the Demon within him (memories of World War II) as he comes to term with the end of his life. It is also possible to read Inland Empire as an exploration of the final stage of Nikki’s life, the coda to her sojourn as the Strong, Beautiful Woman inside the seemingly perfect narrative of a loving and beloved wife.

These idiosyncratic elements constitute recognizable set pieces in Lynch’s films and may contribute towards explaining the magnetic effect his films have on their audiences. The use of the family as both archetypes and interpretative structure conjures highly charged emotional responses to the narratives, since the audience’s earliest memories and emotions are intrinsically linked to one or more family members.

In addition, the juxtaposition of the angelically good with the demonically bad serves to give each polar opposite an enhanced impact by virtue of contrast. As Michel Chion (2006) put it, Lynch expresses a “form of cosmic lyricism, destined to blossom […], which does not hesitate to bring the small into contact with the immense, the disgusting with the grandiose” (p. 21).

I believe that David Lynch deliberately uses narrative structures and building blocks like those employed in fairytales and religious stories to achieve the enigmatic, polarized, engaging and vivid imagery and plotlines associated with his films. It is possible that these structures reflect Lynch’s own world view, namely his perception of the nightmarish and idyllic possibilities presented by family members. If ever there was such as genre as family horror, Lynch certainly merits to be crowned one of its masters.

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References

Chion, M. (2006). David Lynch. London: BFI.

Lynch, D. (2005). Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley. New York: Faber and Faber.

McGowan, T. (2007). The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wikipedia. (2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype

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Cited Films in Chronological Order

The Grandmother (1970)

Eraserhead (1976)

The Elephant Man (1980)

Dune (1984)

Blue Velvet (1986)

Wild at Heart (1990)

Twin Peaks (1989)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

Lost Highway (1997)

The Straight Story (1999)

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Inland Empire (2006)