AVQ&A: What's your favorite David Lynch moment?

David Lynch is my favorite filmmaker, so choosing one moment from his films would be impossible. But if there’s a scene that encapsulates the degree to which David Lynch taught me and maybe the world to understand cinema, it’s communicated by his polar opposite: Steven Spielberg. Appearing in the finale of The Fabelmans, which now doubles as the last time he was ever captured on celluloid, Lynch plays a cigar-chomping, lip-stick strewn John Ford, appropriately inhabiting the physical space of his and Spielberg’s generation’s greatest of all time, a slot now occupied by the late Mr. Lynch. In the scene, as Lynch so often did, Ford simplifies his entire moviemaking ethos into a single credo: “When the horizon’s at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s at the top, it’s interesting. When horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit.” Lynch would also reduce his massive body of work into short aphorisms (“focus on the donut, not the hole”) that would crack his dreamy, seemingly unapproachable visions of America wide open. To close the scene out, Spielberg-surrogate Sammy Fabelman thanks Ford. “My pleasure,” he replies. It’s a poignant cementing of Lynch’s place as a titan of American cinema and a fitting final screen appearance, akin to the many Lynch himself filmed for Twin Peaks’ third season. But as lucky as we are to have the scene, we’re even more fortunate to have been around at a time when David Lynch could make an unprecedented string of masterpieces, giving us his vision of America that was never boring as shit. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Long before he revisited his dreamy town 25 years later and made tangible the time and mortality that so compelled him in Twin Peaks, David Lynch gave us one of the most lovely and big-hearted conversations in TV history. In the first episode of the second season, Major Briggs (Don S. Davis) sits down with his goofball bad boy son Bobby (Dana Ashbrook) at the diner, and wants to share something with him. He then recounts a vision he had; not a dream, but something far more real. He speaks of a home in specifics, but one that is inherently abstract. It is the ideal of “home,” and at the home’s door is his beloved son. He speaks of harmony and togetherness with his boy, and a perfect embrace between them, bringing Bobby—and the rest of us—to shocked tears. It’s raw, beautiful, parental. It rattles Bobby, and has an immediate effect on his character. He sits there, stunned and, in future episodes and The Return, he’s a changed man. The scene has stuck with me since the moment I saw it, partially because, to me, it reveals David Lynch at his core: deeply spiritual, unabashedly left field, and poignantly optimistic. [Jacob Oller]

Few needle drops (or scenes, honestly) are as tough to shake as Ben (Dean Stockwell)—a pimp donning white face paint and a lounge-singer tuxedo shirt and jacket who’s hoisting a cigarette holder with his busted hand—launching into a lip-sync of Roy Orbison’s classic weeper “In Dreams,” his face illuminated by a lightbulb he’s fashioned into a mic for his performance. It’s the sort of moment only David Lynch could have concocted and pulled off, one that’s at once unsettling and intoxicating, like an arty, beautifully soundtracked fever nightmare. That the striking sequence ends with Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth yelling “Let’s fuck! I’ll fuck anything that moves!” before—poof—disappearing from the frame is a weirdly perfect cherry on top. [Tim Lowery]

May 11, 2020, wasn’t a particularly notable day. It was two months into the COVID-19 pandemic and the world was still trying to understand what was going on and how long lockdown would last. But there was one small, peculiar ray of hope that morning: David Lynch uploaded a 32-second video of himself delivering a weather report from his home in sunny Los Angeles. He offered no explanation about why he’d chosen to do this or whether we could expect more weather updates from him. The video was a strange cultural artifact wearing the mask of something mundane. A typical weather report is banal. The specific weather report Lynch delivered was similarly unremarkable in its content. But the context turned it into something surreal: Why was David Lynch, of all people, doing this? What was he trying to tell us? What could we learn from David Lynch’s weather reports, which he’d continue to post every day until December 16, 2022, when the uploads stopped just as abruptly as they began? The answer to those questions is the same as so much of Lynch’s work: We don’t know why this exists, what it means, or what Lynch was trying to tell us, but we’re extremely lucky to have experienced it anyway. [Jen Lennon]

The chances of everyone sitting slack-jawed after finishing any David Lynch project are high to very high. Such was the power of his ability to bring his nonconformist, freaky, contemplative, and extraordinary ideas to the screen. I felt it the most watching Twin Peaks and his 2017 trip back to the fictional Washington town. A singular piece of media, The Return has its passionate lovers and haters, but I’m firmly in the former camp. Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost’s intrinsic understanding of their complex world made it easy to slip back into the sequel season from start to finish. Speaking of that ending, though, I can’t remember the last time I was as taken aback as when Laura Palmer screamed into oblivion in the final few moments. Lynch knew once again how to extract a blood-curdling performance out of Sheryl Lee as a director, making it an all-timer TV scene. This isn’t where I debate or theorize about why Laura does that, and what it signifies for the show’s mythology. But this is where I commend Lynch for closing out his beloved Twin Peaks saga on this note. I still shudder thinking about it, and for me, that cements Lynch as a singular creative force unafraid to take risks or reinvent a formula for the sake of unforgettable art. [Saloni Gajjar]

It’s easy, when writing about Lynch’s work, to fall back on certain easy signifiers of his style—most especially “nightmarish” or “dreamlike.” And yet, how else can you describe the most irresistible sequence of 1997’s Lost Highway? Bill Pullman is just trying to survive some shitty party with too-loud music (and some guys who seem very familiar with his wife), when suddenly a man walks into his eyeline. Ostensibly a man, although few people have ever looked less human than former Baretta star Robert Blake does in this moment: eyebrowless, widow’s peaked, and possessed of an endless smile and perpetual cold amusement in his eyes. As the Mystery Man closes in like a monochromatic shark, Lynch abruptly fades the music down to a low, disorienting hum. Blake (in his final acting role, and a few years out from being tried for actual murder) delivers some of the most chilling dialogue of Lynch’s long career with a soft matter-of-factness that belies his alien appearance. (“As a matter of fact,” he responds when Pullman questions whether this monster has ever been to his house before, “I’m there right now.”) And then, after a few more mind games, he’s gone, the music crashing back into the world as soon as Pullman’s out of his radius. As if he could ever truly escape: That’s not how a nightmare works. [William Hughes]

I’ve spent the vast majority of my life on the East Coast, and it wasn’t until 2024 that I finally visited Los Angeles. It wasn’t until I did that I realized that the work of David Lynch is somehow both far truer to life, and far more bizarre, than I could have imagined. His impressions of the city, particularly in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, were my way of learning about L.A. and they completely colored how I took in the city for the first time. It made the place seedy and uncanny and occasionally horrifying, particularly when I visited the Hollywood Walk Of Fame and could not stop remembering perhaps the most terrifying scene ever committed to Sony camcorder. In the twisted events of Inland Empire, Laura Dern’s Nikki/Sue is stabbed while fleeing down Hollywood Boulevard, and lies bleeding on the sidewalk beside a group of people who are apparently living there. No one helps her, and one person talks endlessly about taking a bus to Pomona to visit her friend Nico, who has a monkey and something wrong with her intestines. The term “dreamlike” is often used to describe Lynch’s work because it’s an accurate one. But I don’t know if any piece of film ever has given me such a feeling of being trapped in a waking nightmare as much as this one. It affected my whole trip to California, and it affects me now each time I think of it. I think of it a lot. [Drew Gillis]