His films are tricky, to say the least. When someone thinks of a movie about fatherhood, the industrial revolution, and depression, Eraserhead is probably the last thing that comes to mind, and that’s only for some viewers. 40 years later, and still no one can agree on the same interpretation. Generally, David Lynch films are loose in regard to meaning, interpretations are often suggested but rarely confirmed. David Lynch himself says “It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else” (Lynch). Watching a David Lynch film is like journeying through the subconscious, some meaning is clear, most meaning is vague, but the voyage itself can still be satisfying. Underlying moments of sex and violence often provide the most material for interpretation. These moments resonate most clearly in Blue Velvet, Fire Walk With Me, and Mulholland Drive. In Mulholland Drive, random and sporadic violence drifts through Rita and Betty’s journey. Hitmen, aggressive directors, and dead bodies frequently pop in and out. In Fire Walk With Me, BOB (an evil force) possesses Leland Palmer and perverts Leland’s role as a father. BOB is responsible for when Leland sexually abuses his daughter Laura. In Blue Velvet, Frank Booth regularly engages in sexual and violent acts, typically at the same time. Frank is unpredictably violent. When these moments are considered alongside the settings where they occur – Hollywood, Twin Peaks, and Lumberton – it’s hard to ignore the implications that Lynch is making about the American Dream. Through analyzing Betty’s dream of movie star fame, Laura’s fatal battle with the force BOB, and Frank Booth’s rule over the seedy underbelly of Lumberton, it becomes clear that Lynch is suggesting that there are two sides to the American Dream. The first side is the one we’re all too familiar with: the nuclear family, the rags to riches journey, etc.… The second side, however, is something entirely different altogether. It’s on this side where bizarreness and surrealism run rampant through unique portrayals of bizarre sex and random violence. This dichotomy – ingrained within the “American Dream” – provides the structure for many interpretations of Lynch’s cinematic work.
Featured in Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watt’s Betty/Diane journeys towards moral depravity as she attempts to reach stardom. Betty flies to Los Angeles from her hometown of Deep River, Ontario with the intention of becoming famous. She’s arranged to stay at her aunt’s house, and she’s prepared to start seeking roles. It’s important to note that Betty’s aunt is also an actress. In terms of analysis, Betty fulfills the trope of the “young country girl seeking fame in the big city”. Additionally, Betty’s aunt’s job as an actress encourages the premise that stardom is attainable and abundant in Hollywood. With these two terms established, Lynch begins to introduce his subversion of the American Dream. Immediately after, Betty meets Rita (Laura Harring) and Betty’s life begins its turn for the worst. Before that point, Rita has been a mindless wanderer. She has no clue who she is, she feels alone and isolated. Rita resembles other familiar Lynch characters. Film Critic Melissa Anderson describes that “In Lynch’s world, the mere fact of existence and of consciousness can be cause for terror. It does not get any more irreducible than that. Just being in the world is totally destabilizing” (Anderson, 3). As Rita begins to regain her memory (and her sense of stability), Betty begins to fall short. They soon fall in love (a variation of the aforementioned “from country to city” trope), hinting at the relationship they used to share before Camilla replaced Diane with Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). Although Betty’s not yet transitioned to Diane – and thus not yet acting against Rita/Camilla’s “betrayal” – Betty’s affectionate relationship with Rita cannot permanently remain. Club Silencio is the peak of their relationship, before Betty transitions to Diane. It’s here where Anderson comments “that Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive will always make me weep. Because I know that the beautiful romance between Betty and Rita is about to end” (Anderson, 6). As soon as their romance ends, Lynch goes full force with the underbelly of his “American Dream”. Diane is left with Camilla’s prior “terror” and “destabilization”, and Camilla achieves the goal that Diane had so desperately wanted. For Diane to try to continue her journey towards stardom, she must have Camilla killed. Diane’s decision to have Camilla killed consequently reveals that much of the prior violence in the film – the hitmen, the dead body, the car crash – were actually the result of Diane’s desperation. LA Weekly’s Bilge Ebiri notes that “The evil, in other words, comes from within. It comes from us. Maybe that’s why Lynch’s works, for all their backward-looking dreaminess, never end with us wanting to keep on living in these environments. They end with us exhausted, anguished, screaming to get out. They end with us awakened from both the nightmare and the dream” (Ebiri, 9). The evil that had previously dominated and obstructed the Betty/Rita sequence was, in fact, a parallel to Betty’s “American Dream” motivation. Lynch shows that Betty is equally as responsible for her moral corruption as she is for her originally innocent dream, but her virtue is sacrificed in the goal of obtaining that dream.
The character of Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee in Fire Walk With Me) is the most direct embodiment of Lynch’s “American Dream”. It’s important to note that before FWWM, Twin Peaks’ “ultimate narrative enigma concerned the mystery of the woods, and not the initial murder mystery established in the pilot” (Shimabukuro, 122), as noted by Cinema Journal writer Karra Shimabukuro. FWWM, in these terms, differed greatly by instead focusing on the last week of Laura’s life. By making this narrative choice, Lynch sought to change audience perceptions of Laura and to maintain her character’s journey as the key focus of the Twin Peaks narratives. It’s through Laura’s journey that Lynch boldly emphasizes the dichotomy of his “American Dream”. It begins in simple terms: Laura is the homecoming queen, she’s dating the star quarterback, and she’s dead because of unknown and illicit behaviors. She fulfills the requirements of an “ideal American girl”, except for the fact that she’s been murdered. FWWM expands this dichotomy. Laura’s relationships with Donna and James are fleshed out, Laura’s charity work with the Meals on Wheels program is revealed; everyone appears to be in love with her. As these play out on screen, various 1950’s quirks subtly dominate the background. The Double-R diner is distinctly 1950’s with its uniformed waitresses, set design emphasizes nostalgic styles and patterns, and Laura’s family appears to qualify as a “nuclear family”. Leland (Ray Wise) works from 9-5, and Sarah (Grace Zabriskie) takes care of household chores. Although FWWM’s 1950’s emphasis is considerably odd – the film was released in ’92 and the story takes place in ’89 – the era underlines Lynch’s focus. Lynch notes that “The fifties are still here. They never went away…. It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways…. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then for a disastrous future” (Lynch). The “disastrous future” that Lynch refers to is the other side to FWWM’s dichotomy. Laura’s afraid of her best friend Donna following in Laura’s footsteps, Laura is cheating on Bobby with James, Laura is addicted to cocaine, and nearly everyone in love with her is trying to use her. While these parallels seem soap opera in quality, they’re second to the biggest “hidden evil”. When considering Laura’s life, it is impossible to exclude BOB’s role in shaping it. BOB, for terms of this essay, is the embodiment of evil. He has been molesting Laura since she was 12, leading her to the other negative situations. Lynch truly affirms his portrayal of the dark side of the “American Dream” in the scene where Laura discovers that, since the beginning, BOB has been (in some way or another) her father, Leland. Through this reveal, Lynch fully subverts his 1950’s aesthetic, attacking the “all apparent virtues” of that decade, specifically the nuclear family. Bilge Ebiri accurately captures this juxtaposition between assumed virtue and underlying depravity, writing that “beneath the quaint Fifties-isms of Twin Peaks lie some of the most grisly acts ever seen on network television. But the wistful indulgences of the original show don’t work despite the horrors — they work because of them. The terror and the nostalgia are locked in a mutually dependent, parasitic embrace: The madness of Twin Peaks is fed by the repression and aw-shucks atmosphere of its setting. In exchange, that atmosphere serves as an escape from the show’s darker edges” (Ebiri, 4).
Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) is, irrefutably, a deviant; it is his status as a deviant that drives Lynch’s “American Dream” subversion in Blue Velvet. Booth operates out of Lumberton, USA. Lumberton is portrayed as the idyllic small American town, a community built around American values. Everyone knows everyone; peace is rampant. The town’s jobs aren’t high-stakes businesses, they’re a mix of small family owned stores and lumber themed establishments. Even the radio embraces the spirit of the town, the main radio station has its own “lumber” themed jingle before each song. Lynch’s opening is most direct of this apparent pastoral vision: it’s a montage of white picket fences, beautiful roses, friendly firemen, and playful children. Film Comment’s critic Violet Lucca notes that “This collage of pleasantness and purity is contrasted with the details through which composes Lumberton’s seedy underworld” (Lucca, 3). This underworld – Frank’s kingdom – begins with the discovery of an ear in a field. It’s Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) that discovers the rotting flesh among the settling beetles, setting off his collision course with Frank. Lucca writes that “just as there are beetles gnawing away under the dark earth of a freshly cut suburban lawn, so is our fresh-faced protagonist capable of shadowy pursuits such as rough sex with someone else’s wife and blowing a drug dealer’s brains out” (Lucca, 1). The ear, hidden in the field, is similar to Frank as he hides behind the rustic nature of the town. It’s Frank Booth that will cause Jeffrey’s voyage alongside depravity. When it comes to crime, Frank is a jack-of-all-trades. As a result of Frank’s behaviors, particularly his relationship with Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini), Jeffrey is enticed. He, like the audience, enters the story as a curious boy scout yearning for adventure. Having grown up in Lumberton, Jeffrey never expects Frank’s depravation until he himself engages in behaviors similar to Frank’s. Whereas character is the foreground in Mulholland Drive and FWWM, setting has the biggest focus in Blue Velvet. Lumberton’s picturesque qualities is merely a façade for seedy and heinous behaviors, providing an analogy for Lynch’s “American Dream”. Lynch’s concluding statement in Blue Velvet is hidden within the robin, as Lucca interprets: “The finale’s other pointed detail is a mechanical robin holding a large, writhing bug in its beak, a restoration of order foretold in Sandy’s dream—but its falseness can be viewed as making this restoration ironic, or not real” (Lucca, 2). Within Lucca’s analysis is a possible interpretation of Blue Velvet and Lynch’s “American Dream”: is Lynch’s emphasis on the “dark underbelly” of the American Dream actually a statement that the American Dream is (as Lucca writes) false?
Among other things, Lynch is a master at suddenly switching between subtle pleasantry and unsurmountable evil. Although he doesn’t identify as a horror director, his natural ease for incorporating banality and overwhelming terror is present in all of his work. Ebiri emphasizes that “the contrasts of Twin Peaks are also there in Blue Velvet (1986), with its white-picket-fence, gee-whiz small-town milieu punctured by the presence of unspeakable evil. The menace gathers and becomes even more overwhelming in the later films: Mulholland Drive (2001) goes quickly from an opening of aggressive, jitterbugging quaintness to a nightmare of fractured identity and pervasive gloom” (Ebiri, 7). Lynch’s subversion of the banal is reflexive of his subversion of the American Dream; through both he implies that there is a great evil that hides within the seemingly innocent. Lynch fuses idealized settings and characters with startling depravation and appalling evil, suggesting that the American Dream has been corrupted. Ultimately, this motif within his films is one of the most tangible aspects amongst his work. Whereas Lynch’s films vary in levels of surrealism and incomprehensibility – Blue Velvet is relatively simple, Inland Empire and Eraserhead are anything but – Lynch’s motif of his “American Dream” is a unifying factor among his films; it motivates character, thematically ties together worlds, and makes a grand statement about society and human nature.