The blinding light of love

Early on in the David Lynch masterpiece Mulholland Drive, aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives at LAX from Deep River, Ontario with sparkling eyes and a heart full of dreams. Holding the hand of her grandmotherly seatmate, Betty shakes her head in disbelief. Her face is glowing, and the light that envelops her as she steps out onto the curb is bright and clear. Betty’s optimism proves to be foolish, and Betty powerless against the sinister forces that control the Hollywood dream factory. But for that one shining moment, everything is perfect. 

At the end of Wild At Heart, after a hellish road trip through the depraved criminal underbelly of the American South, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) is lying unconscious on the hot pavement after getting mugged by a gang of toughs. A flickering pink light appears above him, carrying an angel: Sheryl Lee as Glinda The Good Witch, a character drawn from Lynch’s lifelong obsession with The Wizard Of Oz. “Don’t turn away from love, Sailor,” she tells him, blowing him a kiss. He wakes up, and runs off to pursue his romantic destiny. 

The name “David Lynch” is synonymous with darkness and surrealism and all-around strangeness in popular culture, to the extent that “Lynchian” is now used as a catchall term for anything weird in media. (Imprecise, but now’s not the time.) His movies can be terrifying: The witch behind the Winkie’s dumpster is one of the scariest film moments of the 21st century, and the depravity and darkness in the final stretch of Lynch’s Lost Highway is nightmarishly potent. But underneath all that is an earnestness that makes his work heartbreakingly pure as well. 

Lynch loved things that were “ugly” and grotesque. He thought they were beautiful. He liked industrial landscapes best of all, going back to his debut feature Eraserhead in 1977. But he also sympathized with unique-looking humans—think The Elephant Man, or the giants and dwarves of Twin Peaks—and his work as a painter favored sooty color palettes and macabre imagery. The camcorder Lynch used to shoot Inland Empire is another example: Using a medium rejected by all but the most forward-thinking artists as ugly and crude, Lynch’s film believed in and sought out the gorgeous mystery between the pixels of primitive digital video. 

Lynch’s creativity was deeply tied to his transcendental meditation practice, as outlined in his book Catching The Big Fish; to oversimplify it, Lynch believed that, through meditation, artists can plunge into the depths of their subconscious minds, and “catch the big fish” that swim around there. The images Lynch pulled from his own dreams didn’t make rational sense, but he felt no need to explain them. Instead, he found sublime poetry in the union of opposites: Doppelgangers. Blondes and brunettes. Attraction and repulsion. Innocence and corruption. The banal and the bizarre. Good and evil. Hate and love. And love is the most powerful of them all. 

At times, Lynch’s paeans to the power of love can feel stilted, which is fair—the sheen of artifice was also an essential element of the filmmaker’s aesthetic. He was our poet laureate of kitsch, the artist who understood the gleaming artificial surfaces of American life, and their filthy undersides, better than anyone. He loved those surfaces, too, and knew intuitively that dark and light were two sides of the same coin. And he meant it, every time. 

When David Lynch came back to the screen as FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks: The Return and told transphobes to “fix their hearts or die,” he meant it. When he wrote the monologue Laura Dern delivers at the end of Blue Velvet, describing “thousands of robins” flying in and bringing a “blinding light of love” with them, “and it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference,” he meant that, too. Lynch appreciated robins and worms equally, as few others have before. 

But the most cathartic moment of devastating, lighting-to-the-heart love in Lynch’s filmography comes at the end of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Following the horrific end of her short life, Laura Palmer (Lee) leaves a world that has brought her nothing but trauma and suffering, and enters the curtained purgatory of Lynch’s Red Room. There, she is greeted by another angel, this one with big white feathered wings, who covers her in blue light and takes her pain away. She starts crying, then laughing, a smile of relief spreading across her face. 

David Lynch has passed through the darkness, and into the light. He has transcended the duality of life and death, and now he is one with everything. How lucky we were to have him.