After Eraserhead, Lynch’s reputation as an oddball loomed large. And sometimes in ways that did a discredit to his art. His well-earned renown as a conjurer of campy and self-consciously “weird” images—a lady in a radiator, a little person in a cherry-red suit dancing madly, an eyebrow-less Mystery Man (played by Robert Blake) cackling into a ’90s portable telephone, a sinister cowboy berating Justin Theroux at an abandoned Hollywood Ranch, a spinster in a chunky sweater communing with a log—could itself be flattened into kitsch; reproduced as T-shirts and enamel pins and memes proliferating across social media. His body of work could evoke the uncharitable description offered by Moe, the grumpy bartender from The Simpsons, when asked to define postmodernism: “weird for the sake of weird.” Countless imitators who have striven to reproduce truly Lynchian images—i.e., those that juxtapose the menacing against the everyday, the banal with the surreal and sublime—risked making the director’s approach look like little more than a bag of tricks. Scratch such superficial surfaces, however, and (in Lynchian fashion) an even more revealing underbelly appears.
What is most discomforting about Lynch is not his foregrounding of abuse, venality, or the general rot that gnaws away at the edges of America’s middle-class, white-picket-fence fantasies. It is his profound—and profoundly unfashionable—moral seriousness. His is a moral cosmos of right and wrong, of virtuous good, railing against a more seductive, corrupting inequity. The conflict is explored at length in his ABC (and, later, Showtime) primetime soap, Twin Peaks. It is ostensibly a straightforward detective drama, about the eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan, whose boyish charm and square-jawed good looks made him a recurring Lynch proxy) dispatched to a small Pacific Northwest town to solve the murder of a high school prom queen, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). In the process, Cooper unravels an epic, dimension-spanning battle over the souls of man, waged by daemonic inhabits of a hellish “Black Lodge” and the more angelic agents of the “White Lodge.” Cooper’s quest, more than solving the murder, is about navigating the tension between these realms of unambiguous good and evil.
This clear-cut delineation between right and wrong—combined with the artist’s “gee golly” affect—have led certain critics to brand Lynch and his work reactionary. Owen Gleiberman, writing in Variety, called Lynch an “ironic cultural conservative” who “dug President Reagan for the same reason that he loved sitting in diners in L.A. drinking milkshakes and coffee: It made him feel that the ’50s of his youth was still going on, that Fortress America was still there to protect him.” Roger Ebert, another longtime Lynch-agnostic, was galled by the provocations and violence of 1986’s Blue Velvet, which set “cold-blooded realism” against “deadpan irony.” “What are we being told?” Ebert wondered, rhetorically, in a pan. “That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.” (Ebert, and a great many others, would come around by the time of 2001’s tinseltown fantasia Mulholland Drive, which is about as fine a film as has ever been made in America, or anywhere.)
