A Farewell to David Lynch 1: At the Traffic Stop

 

 Image Source: Lost Highway via Medium.

When David Lynch died on 16 January 2025, I stated that I would later comment on his artistic influence on my work. I'll break my thoughts down in a series of posts, not least with reference to my Patreon series on the occult symbolism of traffic lights.

Above all, Lynch introduced me to two things that all writers should know when trying to portray our layered reality: 

1.  A juxtaposition of dream states, illusions, lies, truth, reality, extratemporal and extradimensional interlopers all in one linear narrative, which is a form of surrealism.
2. Ironically, Lynch also introduced non-linear narratives at the same time to mass audiences, most notably in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.

My understanding of the first idea - a linear narrative which juxtaposes insanity with sanity, private thoughts, nightmares, illusions, and imaginings with public identity - crystalized while watching the scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), when Laura Palmer and her father are stuck at a traffic light. The Twin Peaks Blog described the scene, including the original filming location, here. 

 

Source: Youtube. 

In the scene, the One-Armed Man's surreal warning tries to break apart the carefully-constructed illusion and denial of the Palmer family's horror. What has happened to Laura? Who did it? It's him! It's your father! But for both Laura and her father who are trapped in a compartmentalized existence, with a normal-looking surface, the One-Armed Man character - Mike - looks crazy. This is how truth looks to those who deny the truth. This was how Lynch was able to convey the truth, the lies, the abuse, the insanity posing as sanity in the Palmer family. Everything was laid out neatly a linear fashion: 1, 2, 3, 4 ....

Having studied History in university, I was fascinated by the idea that one could tell the whole history of reality. At that time, Postmodern theory rejected fixed or objective meanings, other than the very rejection meaning itself. That is, the rejection of objective truth was (hypocritically) taken as an objective truth, in a secular, self-righteous moral sense.

Beyond the domineering rejection of ultimate knowledge, any Platonic concept of an absolute or an ideal was anathema to the late 20th century intellectual establishment. In literature, dramatic moments depended upon ellipses, unexplained domestic strife, or empty spaces. I thought of Postmodern stories, films and novels which made a big deal out of leaving things hanging and unexplained. Empty moments could not be filled with higher values. This nadir, this cultural victory of emptiness, was presented with an air of smugness about anti-truth. Nothing could ever be fully pinned down. 

Instead, it became more artistically acceptable to focus on the minutiae of existence. In the early 2000s, I remember reading a novel excerpt from a highly-promoted twenty-something UK writer, in which a scene focused on the pinch of the character's thong. One could become a sensation by describing tiny, gritty, grubby, nasty details about everyday reality. Beyond the artful accumulation of tactile and material moments, there was nothing one could say. It was like an artistic demonstration of Ludwig Wittgenstein's maxim on our inability to describe reality fully and accurately with language: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).

By contrast, Lynch used surrealism to explore dreams, the subconscious, the extra-dimensional, the regions carved out by lies, secrets, and delusions. Where normally this material was hidden, censored or erased to prop up a compromised, incomplete and barely-functioning reality, these terrifying truths could be placed in order alongside mundane and ordinary aspects - and alongside the illusions which concealed them. I felt that this method of telling the 'whole story' would shatter the self-deception and selective memories of self-serving egotists. 

 

Source: Youtube.

 

This concept - that one could line up the seen and unseen next to each other and thereby understand those empty Postmodern moments - became the foundation of my idea for Dark Matter Literature, which I have outlined here. If one could only see all the visible matter and all the dark matter together, if one could see - the present and the absent, the acknowledged and the dismissed, the known and unknown, the described and the indescribable, the voiced and the voiceless, the promoted with the censored, Earth One and Earth Two - then the insanity would no longer be insane. Following this rationale, in my own literary works I set out to present 'the whole story.' 

 

For this reason, I owe Lynch an enormous debt for his artistic inspiration. I felt that this broad scope was a remedy for social hypocrisy and therefore it took a moral position against lies, deceptions, secrets and illusions. Lynch was a master at airing secrets. There was something karmic (and red-pilled?) about showing perfectly constructed, socially acceptable, projected images of the characters next to their buried, forgotten, subconscious angels and demons. 

 

This is an approach to literary writing which allows for fantasy without descending into formula and industrialized corporate book-writing, as critiqued here. It also points the way towards styles of literature such as Magical Realism, without become enslaved by genre. 

 

When Lynch turned shadowy Jungian impulses into whole characters like BOB or the One-Armed Man, he echoed what had already been done with comics characters like Batman. This helps to elucidate how a Jungian shadow character can be villainous or heroic. Either way, we find our way out of the Postmodern cul-de-sac back to an archetype or even an ideal.

 

I began my other blog, Histories of Things to Come, with a deep dive into modern comics' destruction of heroes and heroism. You can see a similar commentary echoed here. And indeed, if our broken reality is made whole again, warts and all, by a kind of red-pilling or awakening process, if the scales are to drop from our eyes, what kind of awakened, all-encompassing heroes do we need?  

 

I will discuss my thoughts on Lynch's non-linear narratives in another post. But as a starting point, I propose that as time and society are changing beyond recognition, it is time to develop new narrative structures and models. Just as the authors of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) or Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett) shook up narrations and narrative structure to address the sensibilities of their times, Lynch revealed how and why one must build non-linear narratives. For example, Lost Highway uses a narrative structure shaped like a Möbius strip, an infinite loop that folds back on itself, rather than a straightforward linear story progression.

 

As with heroism, perhaps the only way to recover a linear effect, a rationalization of the anti-rational or the irrational, is to write non-linearly. I will discuss how that new narrative architecture might appear in subsequent posts. Are my novels shaped like Möbius strips? Or should they follow another geometry? How does the geometry of a narrative equate to revelation and growth past a limited viewpoint? And how does one retain a radical re-imagining of narrative structure in the world of industrialized, profit-driven publishing? Can one even get published? Can one get past the editors with a story that is not shaped like a line?

 

The main work where Lynch consolidated his surreal idea - normal-meets-not-normal - was in Twin Peaks (seasons 1-2, Fire Walk with Me, season 3). I'll be interested to see his re-edited version of season 3, outlined below, because it may show his final thoughts on narrative structure, or anti-structure. 

 

Lynch was not pleased with Showtime's editing of Twin Peaks season 3; and he immediately ordered his sound guy, Dean Hurley, to do a theatrical cut of all 18 episodes (see my related posts here and here). This weekend (5-6 July 2025), the theatrical cut, Twin Peaks Circa 2017, was shown at Metrograph Theater in Chinatown, 7 Ludlow Street, New York City. Oh, how I wish I could have been there. Metrograph has a streaming service and perhaps it will be streamed in the future.

 

 Image Source: Twin Peaks via Tumblr.

See all my posts on David Lynch at Histories of Things to Come.