The filmmaker, who died in January, showed us what our world was becoming, and how we should respond, Jessica Winter writes.
They were not. In January, amid the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Lynch was evacuated from his home and died shortly thereafter, of complications from emphysema. Days later, on what would have been Lynch’s seventy-ninth birthday, Trump was inaugurated into his second term.
This coincidence of timing meant that, in the outpouring of public grief following Lynch’s death, viewers were discovering or returning to his life’s work at the same time that they were sustaining the first avalanches of cruelty and engineered disaster which have characterized much of the second Trump Administration. As the ghastly year dragged on, these streams of art and life kept converging. If, for example, you sensed that your corner of the world was being run by a psychopath and a cabal of goons who enjoy nothing so much as tearing an immigrant mother away from her child, your impressions would be reflected in “Blue Velvet” . If you were stunned by how many prominent citizens were linked to the trafficking and exploitation of teen-age girls, you might see flashes of prophecy in the original broadcast run of “Twin Peaks” and in the feature film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” . If you recoiled at the unleashing of violent and arbitrary forces that destroy people’s lives, livelihoods, and vocations for sport, you could find a black-comic riff on such phenomena in “Mulholland Drive” . And, if you read dystopia between the lines of Trump’s executive order launching the “Genesis Mission”—a “coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery” upon a defenseless public—you might just hear Lynch’s inimitable voice in your ear, that congenial blare of perfectly flat vowels affirming your worst fears: “THERE’D BE A LOT OF SADNESS AND DESPAIR AND HORROR.” Lynch’s films are often graphic in their depictions of violence and degradation, even as their characters and plots can be enigmatic and mutable. He was drawn to detective stories in which the principal investigators must not merely solve a mystery but accommodate themselves to a reality that is too terrible to be believed—or else repress or dissociate from that reality. BOB, the bogeyman who torments Laura Palmer in “Twin Peaks,” can be seen, in the words of the critic and film curator Dennis Lim, “as a projection of Laura’s, a defense against an unthinkable truth.” She is not the only one deflecting. “BOB is real,” Laura insists, seething, to her agoraphobic lover, Harold Smith, in “Fire Walk with Me,” but it’s unclear whether Harold believes her, or what he could do about it if he did. This dilemma played out again and again over the past year—pity, for one, the representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the onetime QAnon zealot who always knew that BOB was real, until, it seems, she saw BOB’s true face, and promptly resigned from Congress. The scalding potency of “Fire Walk with Me” derives from its compassion for Laura’s suffering and devastation, but also from its depiction of the sleepwalking complicity and learned helplessness that swirls around her. Everybody in Laura’s world kind of knows that something very bad is happening, and Laura kind of knows they know, and hardly anybody knows how to help or how to stop it, and isn’t it all a shame? These refrains that Francis so forcefully rejected, with their currents of fascism and eugenics, are why the Lynch film that felt most resonant in the year of his death—and of Francis’s death—is about a person who has no “value.” The woefully deformed young man whose carnival nickname provides the title of “The Elephant Man” will never pay taxes or hold a job. He has no family—no place in Vance’s ordo amoris—and no vocation. In the late-Victorian-era London of the film’s setting, his only path to economic survival is through his own exploitation, either as a circus freak or a medical curiosity. He inevitably places burdens upon others, and he is difficult to share space with. He is, in short, a stress test for our belief in innate human dignity and the sanctity of life. Through the apocalyptic lens of 2025, a forty-five-year-old period piece seems reborn as a countercultural statement. Loosely based on the short and blighted life of Joseph Merrick—called John Merrick in the film, and played by John Hurt—“The Elephant Man” was the most conventionally successful production of Lynch’s career, earning eight Oscar nominations and excellent box-office returns. I saw the movie on basic cable at some point in the early nineties, but, in the intervening decades, it’s become somewhat hard to find; the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray are out of print, and it’s not available to stream on commercial platforms or on Kanopy. It is also perceived as Lynch’s least Lynch-y film, and with reason. It’s his only film set explicitly in the distant past, and much of the black-and-white imagery and mise-en-scène would not look out of place in an early Shepperton Studios feature. The story is clear and linear, pivoting on whether Merrick can find a safe and permanent home at the London Hospital, where the surgeon Frederick Treves has brought him after his rescue from an abusive circus ringmaster , and where Merrick is secretly terrorized by a sadistic night porter . The production’s most crucial technical element was Hurt’s complex makeup and prosthetics, designed by Christopher Tucker; Lynch was also working alongside the legendary cinematographer Freddie Francis and a frankly outrageous roster of British actors, which also included Wendy Hiller and John Gielgud, the latter of whom played Hamlet in the West End long before Lynch was born. Under these blessed circumstances, any capable director could be expected to helm a very good film. But “The Elephant Man,” on a belated second viewing, struck me as not merely a very good film but a perfect one, an overwhelming emotional experience, discordantly beautiful and transcendently sad—a pure distillation of its director’s sensibilities and a complete rejection of our ugly, fake, and barbarous moment. It foreshadows the unity of Lynch’s moral and aesthetic vision in the improbable parallels between Merrick, the hideous sideshow outcast, and Laura Palmer, the homecoming-queen Jeanne d’Arc who sits at the center of Lynch’s canon. Both characters are preyed upon at night; both keep their tormentors’ secrets, for reasons they and we don’t fully understand. Both take cues from paintings hanging on their bedroom walls when they decide to half surrender to their own deaths. In “The Elephant Man,” on the night that Merrick dies, he visits a London theatre to see a pantomime, where the delightful spectacle includes a winged fairy in a diaphanous white dress, floating above the stage on invisible wires. As he takes in the performance, he offers faint little nods of fondness and gratitude—tiny gestures, but they made me gasp, because Laura Palmer performs the same gestures in the final scene of “Fire Walk with Me,” when, after she is murdered, she glimpses an angel much like the one in her bedroom picture, levitating above her. One of the thrills of Lynch’s work is in how he pushes ideas and feelings toward the edge of sentimental collapse without toppling over, and in how he sublimates words and images that might otherwise seem immovably hokey and clichéd. Sometimes it is a matter of keeping a calm distance. In the film’s most famous scene, Merrick is cornered by a mob in Liverpool Street station and cries out, “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” Lynch does not heighten the moment with a closeup but instead shoots from behind Merrick’s pursuers. When Treves, who is renowned in London’s medical circles as Merrick’s savior, begins to feel qualms about the integrity of his motives, he asks his wife, “Am I a good man or a bad man?” With a lesser actor, this might sound laughably simplistic, but Hopkins underplays the line in a near-monotone, so that it sounds instead like existential desolation, articulated in the starkest terms. I don’t entirely understand how Lynch achieves these vertiginous balances; the answer may lie beyond words or consciousness. In Hopkins’s recent memoir, “We Did O.K., Kid,” he invokes the scene in which Treves sees Merrick for the first time, in the cavernous space where the ringmaster hides him away between shows, and the camera moves in slowly on Treves as a single tear falls down his cheek. While filming the scene, Hopkins recalls, he stumbled over a step; he recovered and continued with the take, but the jolt, he writes, “sent something into my brain. It touched some core of terror that went back to childhood—the dark room, the shadow on the wall, the nightmare. I felt real fear of being in this pitch-black place. It was a supernatural feeling.” In recounting this story, Hopkins mentions Lynch only in passing, but the primal, possibly preverbal “core of terror” that the actor describes is the substrate of much of Lynch’s art—a landscape where the borders between nightmares and waking life are porous and largely irrelevant. This is, of course, the landscape where we all live now. It may interest some of our reigning billionaires and politicians to know that “The Elephant Man” includes a brief, anguished debate between Treves and the London Hospital’s chairman, played by Gielgud, about whether anyone could truly imagine what Merrick’s life is like—if it is possible, in other words, to empathize with him, suicidally or otherwise. Lynch’s answer, I think, is no. His characters frequently dissociate or trade minds and identities with each other , but Lynch never asks his audience, implicitly or otherwise, to imagine “what it is like” to be John Merrick or Laura Palmer. He was not an empathic director but, rather, an uncommonly compassionate one. The word compassion comes from the Latin for “to suffer with”; it means to be present in another’s suffering, which is, in essence, the experience of watching “The Elephant Man.” The ending of “Fire Walk with Me” is shattering not because Lynch asks that you see the angel through Laura’s eyes, but that you see Laura watching the angel through your own. In Catholic theology, to be present in another’s suffering is a means of breaking down false divisions between people. Love and community are inconceivable without compassion, and a void of compassion made possible the sadness, despair, and horror that shaped this past year. That void makes our humanity feel contingent, negotiable. Are you an animal or a human being? Am I a good man or a bad man? In the film, Lynch dissolves the scene before the question is resolved. Outside the film, no one who should ask is asking. ♦
Surrealism Year In Review David Lynch
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