14 January 2026

David Lynch is only getting weirder

What was it that gave the director, who would have been 80 this month, an aura all of his own?

Photo by Jerome Bonnet/ Modds / Camera Press

There’s a test you can perform, after swallowing a tab of acid, to tell whether the drug’s hallucinogenic properties have kicked in: look at your hand. Do your knuckles wriggle? Do your fingers inflate and shrink? Does the entire limb feel like a prosthesis, its motor control a mystery for which you are no longer confidently responsible? Any of the above probably means you’re tripping. Or – and this is the problem with the test – you’ve stared at your hand so long, with such unusual intensity, that it has become strange. This is how David Lynch looked at America.

As well as ten feature films, three seasons of Twin Peaks, an assortment of commercials and shorts, several books, two solo albums (not counting film score collaborations, notably with composer Angelo Badalamenti) and innumerable paintings, sketches and collages, the folksy north-westerner, prone to exclaiming “gee wiz” and “golly”, also bestowed on the American century one of its most evocative adjectives: “Lynchian”. The term was defined by David Foster Wallace as a “kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” – a great summary of Lynch’s method, offered in a report from the set of Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). But it misses a key element of the Lynchian affect: it’s fun.

Noticing something Lynchian, or acting in a Lynchian fashion, is now a pastime, a reflex ingrained in the psyche of those who grew up in America’s cultural shadow. We know the Lynchian when we see it, or feel it; it’s an adrenaline rush caused by a sudden feeling of being adjacent to normality, a sensation the director produced through his use of discordant camera speeds. By slowing down, or speeding up, we occupy a position outside life’s usual tempo, able to observe the cognitive dissonance at work in maintaining “normal” when deep down we know, as Laura Dern repeats throughout Inland Empire (2006) that “something’s wrong”.

Remarking on this wrongness, or leaning into it, is a relief; perhaps this is why Lynch’s work triggers so much laughter, even when the content is schlocky and violent. Two examples of Lynchian recursiveness recently observed in the wild: a couple seen picnicking by Lynch’s grave this summer – something it is hard to imagine die-hard fans of, say, Stanley Kubrick doing; and RuPaul posting on X that listening to the soundtrack of Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Drive on a ride through LA gave the journey “this spooky, sexy David Lynch quality” – proof that a cultural object made by Lynch is not required for a Lynchian episode to occur.

Lynch’s work is treated as a multi-decade puzzle game that could one day be “solved”. Welcome to Lynchland, a French documentary premiering as part of the BFI’s January retrospective of his work, certainly takes this approach: we see a Dictaphone click into life, as the narrator-director, Stéphane Ghez, tells Diane his investigation will proceed from the observation “David Lynch: une énigme”. The French have always loved Lynch, and have always got him a bit wrong (in the same way that they are obsessed with Halloween without grasping that it’s a holiday for children, not a costumed critical theory seminar). His reverse-mirror shots might well be Lacanian, but so is looking in the mirror. If his work contains references to the great theorists of the age, it’s only because he’s drawing from the same material that they did, and reaching the same reductio ad absurdum conclusion: being alive is strange.

Dismissing the French for being too pompous is all well and good, but it leaves us empty-handed when trying to understand what makes Lynch Lynchian. A lesser-watched piece of the Lynch oeuvre, one that stands out by being the least formally strange, gives us the greatest insight into what he was up to. The Straight Story (1999) is a concept that sounds like a joke: a Disney-distributed Lynch film. Someone, somewhere in Mickey Towers, thought it a good idea to market the director of Eraserhead as a maker of family features. What’s most surprising is that they were right.

The Straight Story is Lynch’s only G-rated movie; it’s also, in his words, his “most experimental”. It’s based on the true story of Alvin Straight who, after receiving a bleak prognosis from his doctor and having his driver’s licence revoked, sets off on a tractor to make amends with his estranged brother. The journey takes him from Iowa to Wisconsin, through a maple-syrup sweet landscape of autumn foliage, encountering a regular bunch of normal freaks along the way, each of whom receives a slice of Alvin’s homebaked wisdom. In one of its most moving scenes, Alvin falls into conversation with a man at a bar; we learn, through their mutual recognition of something a little broken in each other, that both are veterans, both struggling with the knowledge of what one man can do to another as they navigate the rest of their lives. The movie’s speed is as slow as the tractor’s, but it’s as consistent, too – unrushed, and sure of its destination. Richard Farnsworth, who played Straight, was diagnosed with terminal cancer before shooting began. His difficulty in walking is part of his life, as well as his performance. He killed himself shortly after the film’s release.

One problem with the retrospective format is that the programme usually ends up including too much; at the same time, it overlooks morsels that the critic considers indispensable. The BFI’s Lynch season does not break with this tradition. It contains no fewer than three documentaries. Beyond providing biographical detail – easily available in the run of obituaries that followed his passing last January, from emphysema-related complications in the aftermath of the LA wildfires (even his death, when considered for a moment too long, becomes Lynchian) – it is hard to specify what insight these non-fiction spins offer. Lynch was never an erudite glosser of his own work: once, when asked to elaborate on his description of Eraserhead as his most “spiritual” movie, he answered: “No.” Indeed, The Art Life (2016), in its hagiographic portrayal of the artist at work, risks making Roger Ebert’s dismissal of Lynch as a naif seem accurate. Lynch is not Godard; he is not for pondering, but for watching – ideally in a format cushioned by commercial breaks.

It’s the commercial breaks that are missing at the BFI. Some of Lynch’s best short films were music videos and adverts; the shorts screening in this programme, by contrast, are meandering and repetitive. When viewed, as they were intended, alongside “normal” versions of their forms – the ads and music videos of mainstream popular culture – these shorts reveal their infectious Lynchianness. See, for example, the music video for Chris Isaak’s goth-croon classic “Wicked Game”, in which the boredom playing on the model’s face slowly takes up more and more screentime as Isaak’s pawing begins to feel more frantic and desperate; or the screaming scorpion-filled mouth that explodes in a spasm of pain as a runner, in Adidas trainers, breaks through “the wall”. Then watch any other music video or advert. See? Something’s wrong.

Should you make it to the BFI for Lynch season, I’d suggest skipping the Q&As; instead, walk ten minutes south, to the Waterloo roundabout, for a chaser. There, in the middle of the junction, you’ll see a giant glowing rotunda: an Imax cinema, wrapped in luminous adverts for all manner of objects that, blown up to that scale, quickly seem absurd. Traffic circulates, and people generally ignore the 30ft Coca-Cola cans dangling over their heads. But stop and stare at the everted cinema for a minute too long – if possible, while smoking – and you can have yourself a damn fine Lynchian moment. Spooky. Sexy. Strange.

“David Lynch: The Dreamer” is at the BFI until 1 February

[Further reading: David Lynch on meditation: Heaven is a place on earth]