“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me!”
- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

IN LITERATURE there is the concept of the Great American Novel, a work that is exceptional in its depiction of contemporary life in the United States. Authors like Melville, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Lee are recognized among a special breed of artist, uniquely capable of distilling the lived historical experience of a generation into a singular work. People who are so in touch with contemporary culture that their work serves as a mirror held to society; showing its values, idiosyncrasies, and inherent contradictions.

In thinking on David Lynch’s recent passing, I’m convinced his work should be considered among this crowd. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Lynch’s films offer morbid parables for America as it drowns its social woes in consumption, foretelling future cataclysm. Lynch’s films serve as a window into the American soul, and the dread, paranoia, and anxiety that lies within. Like doomsayers of old his cryptic warnings were resigned to mere spectacle; and just as Paris ignored Cassandra, America ignored Lynch.

Looking back at the last century of American cinema, a director like David Lynch achieving any sort of notoriety should be seen as a sort of miracle. A hundred years ago the fledgling film industry was shedding its vaudeville roots as it shifted away from silent films in favor of the “Talkies” that would dominate thereafter. And as the Studio System of Old Hollywood eventually calcified, its creative minds bent more towards commercial output than genuine artistic expression. Great films like Citizen Kane and Casablanca were still being produced, but these films stood in contrast to the wider output of the industry’s collective effort, and by the outset of the post-war era a new wave of creative talent was needed for the medium to grow. The crop of directors now known as the New Hollywood movement were among the first generation of American film students, with many graduating from film schools (USC, UCLA, etc.) growing up around Hollywood.

Lynch, a standout among this group, burst onto the scene in 1977 with his debut independent film, Eraserhead, a visceral body horror film that set the tone for a career focused on capturing the banal horror of modern society in gruesome detail. While the work of peers like Spielberg, Scorcese, and Coppola represented detente between finance capital and artistic expression, Lynch never compromised his artistic vision. There are no feel-good films in Lynch’s filmography, and in fact his works can be quite disturbing and can provoke deep feelings of unease. As a result, his films never garnered the commercial success of his peers, despite many becoming cult classics in their own right. Films like Blue Velvet were critically well regarded, shining a light on the cultural and societal rot underlying the facade of American cultural hegemony; and even managed to revive interest in Pabst Blue Ribbon. 

By 1990 Lynch looked to television to explore his dark surrealist themes; resulting in Twin Peaks, a landmark series in the history of television. Like his films, Twin Peaks was largely overlooked by the mainstream on first arrival, and its initial run was cancelled after only two seasons. Still, it became an influential cult classic with television directors from David Chase to Donald Glover lauding its influence on their work. Chase, the creator of The Sopranos went so far as to say: “Anybody making one-hour drama[s] today who says he wasn't influenced by David Lynch is lying.” For Chase, himself a giant of American television, Lynch’s adoption of the medium marked a pivotal shift. In a way I think David Lynch should be considered the father of modern television as he provided a new cultural framework for critically analyzing late stage capitalist America in a highly digestible format. Lynch offered the showrunners that followed a socially acceptable means of exploring the deep-seated psychological trauma inherent in American society. With this in mind, is there any wonder that the premise of the first mainstream hit of this intellectual movement was “What if a mobster went to therapy?”

And what a time for this movement to take off. Fresh from the collapse of the Soviet Union, America found itself as the uncontested global hegemon. And while the likes of Fukayama were taking a cultural victory lap, celebrating the triumph of liberal democracy, directors like Lynch, Chase, and David Milch saw a reckoning on the horizon. As Tony Soprano once mused, modern Americans have missed getting in on the ground floor of the American Empire but have arrived just in time to witness its decline and inevitable collapse:

“Tony Soprano: It's good to be in something from the ground floor. And I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.

‍Dr. Melfi: Many Americans, I think, feel that way…"
-The Sopranos, Episode 1.01

This sentiment grew even more pervasive in the days following 9/11 as the War on Terror revealed itself to be both tragedy and farce. American television served as the new societal mirror, showing a society in decline; and in many ways this cultural movement presaged the modern political turmoil of today. Shows like OZ and The Wire examined the violence and psychopathy inherent in the American consciousness through its depiction of decaying social institutions and the bureaucracies that sustained them. Deadwood and Boardwalk Empire force us to reckon with the violent and corrupt past that birthed these institutions; and Mad Men shows us how corporate advertising supplies nostalgic narratives to smooth over the unseemly details. Breaking Bad and Mr. Robot showed us the psychosis that stems from the cognitive dissonance necessary for a society like this to function. Viewed together, this body of work represents an extremely interesting study of the American Consciousness as the empire began to unravel in the wake of its high water mark.

By viewing the surreal dreamscapes and socially maladapted characters of Lynch in the context of the work he inspired we can unlock what Twin Peaks has to offer the culture. And its setting is the key, as Lynch takes an intimate look at America through a personification of its idealized self-image: the rural small town. This concept of a self-image is born out of the cultural practice of adopting signifiers that galvanize a society’s founding social, political, and economic relationships into a singular unified political-economy. To Lynch, America’s self-image is rooted in post-white flight rural and suburban America. In fact, the fictional town of Twin Peaks could be the setting of a John Hughes or even a John Millius film. And this reactionary-coded America is central to Lynch’s framing of American society.

Set in rural Eastern Washington, a heavily forested region where timber is among the main exports, Lynch taps into America’s frontier spirit. And Lynch’s choice of Washington is immensely fascinating as since the early 1990s the state has come to represent the core divide in American society. The so-called Cascade Curtain represents both a physical and metaphorical divide in Washington’s state politics. Here, much of the political, social, and economic capital is concentrated in the state’s western coastal region around Seattle, a hub of technology and coastal elitism that has come to represent neo-liberal technocracy. This political dynamic frustrates communities on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains as it seems reminiscent of the extractionary colonial relationships that America was founded on. You have to wonder how the residents of Twin Peaks would have voted over the last decade as the natural beauty of their community was systematically destroyed to subsidize Amazon’s state and local tax credits. It's almost poetic really: A company, named after a natural arboreal wonder being destroyed by consumer capitalism, partially subsists on stripping the forests of its home state. 

Here is where David Lynch transcends to greatness. In exploring the uncanny, disturbing, and surreal, Lynch is tapping into the force of alienation one feels when experiencing the cold hand of extractionary capitalism. This sort of societal dynamic creates an overwhelming sentiment of aggrieved entitlement, resentment spurred by a perceived denial of social entitlements, that fuels the type of reactionary populism that has swept America since the early 1990s, when Twin Peaks first aired. So much of American society is reinforcing the idea that the land and resources America stole to build its empire was not only justified, it was God ordained. So when people who represent the colonizer are forced to live like the colonized what self-image is society reinforcing? That they deserve to be dominated? How does that work in a settler-colonial society built on the ideals of hyper-masculine self-sufficiency? The founding of America shows what happens when the frontier bourgeois feel humiliated and emasculated through the perceived denial of economic and political rights; they take all the guns lying around and upset necessary political and economic functions. January 6th anyone? Through this framework we can see how Lynch successfully identified the prevailing social trend of his time and framed it in a way that emphasizes the core psychological motivators of his society and gave a nod to disassociation and social maladaption as a likely outcome. That sounds like a capital “G” Great Work to me. 

Twin Peaks offers a blueprint for understanding the disjointed, alienated, and socially atomized America that emerged from the 1990s, wholly unprepared for the shock of 9/11. From Eraserhead to Mulholland Drive Lynch applied a nihilistic critique to American society. Much like Doestevsky’s Raskolnikov, the protagonists of a Lynch film serve to show the hollowness of society and the founding myths and grand narratives that shape its social order. Like the opening of Blue Velvet Lynch’s America is the white picket fence surrounding the lush green lawn hiding the hobbesian crush of maggots and cockroaches underneath. Lynch’s America is a product of a settler colonial past — a repressed, violently racist, and misogynistic society inhabited by people struggling to parse their own reality. His surrealism offers an entrypoint to view America, not as we superficially experience it, but through a Freudian lens that strips the American consciousness of the Ego and Superego, offering only the Id. Like the homunculi that grace the work of David Cronenberg, Lynch presents America’s distorted self-image; a logical, if sensationalized, view of the endstate expressed by the country's culture and the ideals reinforced by it.

For all the moral licensing and projection America needs to sustain the facade of the Shining City on the Hill, at its core America more closely resembles the violently horny and deranged underworld offered by Lynch. Abu Ghraib, white phosphorus, and the atrocities that followed 9/11 aren’t an aberration, they’re who we were all along. As the not-so-prestige TV show Westworld (and Shakespeare) once said: These violent delights have violent ends. A society ruled by its violent and antisocial impulses can’t persist. This warning went unheeded, and Troy was sacked. Will we listen to the next Cassandra?