By Kenyon Geiger
Before the internet, there was the office break room, the proverbial watercooler, the porch stoop, the cafeteria, the living room. In the fall of 1990, the question, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” echoed throughout these spaces. It was everywhere—festooned across t-shirts, used in the monologues of Johnny Carson, parodied in sitcoms. The mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder on the hit TV show Twin Peaks became an indelible part of the zeitgeist in the last decade of the millennium. What makes this moment remarkable, a show capturing the curiosity and imagination of millions at once, is that the show was exceedingly strange. It was mystical, abstract, supernatural, often illogical. How the man behind the series, David Lynch—the auteur director who recently died at the age of 78—pulled off this notable feat with such experimental, avant-garde material has much to do with how he synthesized his own artistic obsessions with the conventions and tropes of the detective genre.
“We all love mysteries,” Lynch said to Charlie Rose in a 1997 interview. “Life is filled with them.” In a BBC interview from the 90s, Lynch intoned with his trademark nasally voice, “We’re all detectives trying to figure out what is wrong, or, you know, what is going wrong.” What is evident through the myriad interviews, Youtube videos, books, documentaries and other media appearances, is that David Lynch had a definite philosophy on life, and knew what was essential to him as both a person and an artist. His ability to create art out of the muck and ichor of his own experiences and life philosophy serves as a worthy example for all genre writers, for it’s his use of genre tropes that allowed him to best express himself.
For Lynch, art was everything. He talked often of living “the art life,” which for him involved transcendental meditation, having reverence for ideas and creativity, exploring the world of abstraction, and engaging with the mysteries of life. Lynch started off as a painter, going to art school in Philadelphia. Living in the city was a disturbing and terrifying experience. It was the most “fear-ridden city imaginable” according to him, as well as being, he claimed, the biggest influence on his art thereafter. Lynch was a master at incorporating his own fears into his films. His first film, the cult hit Eraserhead (1977), involves a needy, squirming larvae that the protagonist helplessly tends to as if it’s an infant. Lynch has admitted multiple times that having a baby at the young age of 22 with his first wife was a deeply harrowing, unnerving experience. The surreal, discomfiting, often horrifying Eraserhead was Lynch artistically expressing these parental fears, the horrors of living in crime-ridden areas of Philadelphia, and the abstract desperation that he experienced at that time.
Lynch was only able to make Eraserhead because he was accepted into the American Film Institute film school in Los Angeles, saving him from both anonymity and the cold, merciless northeast. Lynch would later liken this change in environment and circumstances to going from hell to heaven. The upturn in fortune was for Lynch mystical and mysterious, as the corners and folds of life are.
In the 1970s, Lynch would begin practicing transcendental meditation, which he credited as the key to his success and development as an artist, allowing him to enter what he referred to as “the ocean of pure consciousness.” After the underground success of Eraserhead, Lynch made the jump to mainstream with the critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated The Elephant Man. While not the surreal experiment that Eraserhead was, The Elephant Man combined an affecting emotional core with masterful technical skills, as well as more than a touch of Lynchian weirdness. The ways that many people mistreat the protagonist is often exaggerated in a way that is both surreal and somehow piercingly honest. Lynch was using the surreal, consciously or unconsciously, to portray certain truths of existence, of the human experience, that are nearly impossible to convey in a literal sense.
However, it wasn’t until the failure of his next film, Dune, that David Lynch became David Lynch as he’s thought of today: the ultra-surreal, gifted creator of confounding, disturbing, transformative works of cinematic art. Dune was a box office failure, a creative failure, and a personal failure. Editorial control and what’s known as final cut was taken away from Lynch, famously, during post-production. This infuriated Lynch, and he made a promise to himself that he would never again give up creative control, for any reason.
After Dune, he agreed to take significantly lower pay so that he could direct the picture he had his heart set on, Blue Velvet. Another notable characteristic of Lynch is his integrity as an artist. As David Foster Wallace pointed out in his article for Première magazine in September of 1996, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” Lynch had turned down substantial sums of money in order to make the art that he wanted to make.
This is the film that introduced Lynch and his obsessions, his fears, his very soul—even more than Eraserhead—to the wider world. Blue Velvet is a weird movie. It features a nitrous-oxide inhaling villain with mommy issues, a lounge singer who is being tormented by him, a severed ear crawling with ants, a man dying of a heart attack as his little dog drinks out of the garden hose next to him, not to mention the unsettling juxtaposition of the dreamlike and feel-good title song played against unsettling violence and sexual assault. It poses uncomfortable questions regarding sex, love, and gender dynamics. There are moments of fear that seem to climb down the back of your spine and into your soul, though it’s not a horror movie even remotely. Despite Lynch’s adroitness with crafting terrifying moments, haunting sound design, and his ability to make the ordinary terrifying, Lynch never made what could be called a horror movie. Often associated with the horror genre, it’s actually the detective genre that Lynch owes the most debt to, a fact that has often been missed in the wider discussions of Lynch and his genius.
The detective genre acted as not only a container that Blue Velvet could fit into, ordering the surreal in a way that suited the medium and satisfied the viewer, it was a means for Lynch to fully express himself, to get at that so-called truth as he saw it. This is the artistic adeptness of Lynch, but it’s also the power of taking genre tropes and conventions and using them as a kind of toolkit for expression.
Jeffrey, the protagonist played by Kyle MacLachlan, is a young man in the suburbs who finds the severed ear with ants. The lost appendage thrusts him into an underworld he was previously, naively unaware of. Jeffrey becomes his own detective. Lynch uses the conventions of the genre to get at the mystery of existence itself, as lofty and abstract as that sounds. Jeffrey is not only trying to find the answer to who the ear belongs to, and eventually, who is tormenting the lounge singer and why, but also, what the very meaning of life is for him. Lynch implies by the end of the film that what is most salient for Jeffrey is love in the face of the bizarre and violent disorder of the world that exists in the shadows.
It was short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, credited by many for eliding the detective genre with more sophisticated literary fiction, who said that, “[The detective genre] is safeguarding order in an era of disorder.” Lynch indeed uses the tropes of the genre as an organizing principle in a chaotic world beset with darkness and evil.
The detective genre as we know it today has an evolutionary history intertwined with both Los Angeles and the movie industry. Yet it started where David Lynch started, in the despairing northeastern climes of the United States. Edgar Allen Poe’s hyper-intelligent detective C. Auguste Dopin inaugurated the genre. The tales that featured him created many of the conventions that still exist today, such as the detective being someone with no personal life or family and who has remarkable powers of deduction. Poe’s Dupin stories were a direct influence and inspiration for Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The genre underwent significant change with the advent of pulp magazines and the subsequent, aptly-dubbed noir subgenre. Crime noir, also referred to as hard-boiled detective fiction, is a style of detective fiction that was largely invented in and around Los Angeles and features many of the tropes that Lynch would go on to borrow.
Hollywood, beginning in 1941 with their adaptation of Hammet’s popular novel, The Maltese Falcon, ushered in a decade of films like Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, writing and working in Los Angeles following in the wake of Hammet’s success, were the novelists largely responsible for the enduring popularity and malleability of the genre. The conventions that Lynch would draw off of were invented by these two men more than anyone, and then popularized with the screen adaptations of their stories.
Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep has much in common with Blue Velvet. Both are about a seedy, violent underworld where illicit sex is used as a metaphor for generalized evil, fear, and the degradation of the soul. Chandler’s detective, Philip Marlowe, is wily, unattached, and harried in many ways, though nevertheless a man of unshakeable principles. Lynch used this “man of principles” idea for Jeffrey. While not adhering strictly to the tropes and conventions laid down by writers like Chandler and Cain, Lynch instead used them to his advantage, contorting the tropes and subverting them to suit character and thematic purposes.
Take for example the so-called “femme fatale” trope of noir fiction. The character of the lounge singer, played by Isabella Rossellini, is a potential femme fatale, which would be known to viewers familiar with the genre. She begins to lead Jeffrey down a path of self-destruction, a hallmark of the archetype. However, Lynch subverts this by having Rossellini’s character, Dorothy, be both a surrealistic and realistic portrayal of a woman who is being abused. She nearly goes out of her mind from the trauma and dark reality of her situation. Though Jeffrey makes some morally questionable decisions—which is in keeping with the noir genre—he and Dorothy eventually help each other find the reunification with self and love that they so desperately seek. Finding oneself through darkness and suffering, and then, in turn, being able to better connect with others and the world around them because of accessing the deep self is a spiritual idea that was central to Lynch’s philosophy on life.
Twin Peaks would be Lynch’s follow-up to Blue Velvet. Combining elements of the TV crime procedural with detective fiction and the noir genre, Lynch along with his co-creator for the series, Mark Frost, would craft a world and a mystery both unique and transformative, a lightning rod moment in pop culture. Lynch did not shy away from difficult subjects for the small screen, once again tackling the effects of abuse on a woman, in this case, teenaged Laura Palmer. The answer to the question that everybody had leading into the second season of the series in 1990—who killed Laura Palmer?—was her father, who was possessed by a demon named Bob at the time of the murderous assault.
Having an overtly supernatural premise, as well as dealing in the mystical in nearly every episode, marked a new stage in the evolution of Lynch. It was also a subversion of the noir genre in many ways. Noir fiction of the 1930s and 1940s nearly always featured a world of corruption and malevolence operating underneath the seemingly anodyne, everyday world, much like Twin Peaks. However, with noir fiction, cynicism and randomness were the abiding worldview. Murder and evil happened because the world was a chaotic, disordered and an ultimately meaningless place. This was not Lynch’s worldview. Meaning is there to be found, if only we have the courage to look for it in the difficult and strange places it’s hiding in.
As weird and surreal as the show was, it is, in retrospect, relatively staid in comparison to Lynch’s works thereafter, such as Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Cult hits Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive continued to use the detective genre to explore the mystical, abstract, and profound.
Lynch returned to the town of Twin Peaks in 2017 with Twin Peaks: The Return. The long-awaited third season of the series was in many ways more surreal and experimental than its original run. Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan and the central character of the original series, is catatonic throughout almost the entire third season—he wakes up and remembers who he is in episode sixteen of eighteen. There is also a talking plant, implications of evil originating in nuclear weaponry, and an episode featuring a zombie-like man in a mackinaw and covered in black grease shuffling along asking anybody he encounters, “Got a light?” The plot is open to interpretation, and is, at times, maddeningly opaque. What it has, though, is a series of characters acting as their own detectives, often lost, trying as much as they can to find the answer to life’s most pressing questions, questions about the nature of life and death, the enduring question: why is life so inscrutable and strange?
The answer is ultimately unknowable. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the question. David Lynch, through his use of the detective genre to express his deepest self, shows us that we are all detectives, and that art is the platform in which to explore the mysteries each one of us is trying to solve.
Author Bio
Kenyon Geiger is a teacher and fiction writer in the Boston area. He’s currently enrolled in the MFA program for Creative Writing at Emerson College. You can find him on Instagram @kafkaburnedsupper.
