{"id":38547,"date":"2025-01-17T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-17T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=38547"},"modified":"2025-01-18T06:32:48","modified_gmt":"2025-01-18T06:32:48","slug":"david-lynch-exposed-the-rot-at-the-heart-of-american-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/david-lynch-exposed-the-rot-at-the-heart-of-american-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"David Lynch exposed the rot at the heart of American culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Billy J. Stratton<\/a>, University of Denver<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a sort of evil out there,\u201d says Sheriff Truman in an episode of David Lynch\u2019s iconic TV series, \u201cTwin Peaks<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That line gets to the heart of the work of the filmmaker, whose family announced his death Jan. 16, 2025<\/a>. Lynch\u2019s films and TV series reflected the dark, ominous, often bizarre underbelly of American culture \u2013 one increasingly out of the shadows today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As someone who teaches film noir and horror<\/a>, I often think about the ways American cinema holds up a mirror to society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lynch was a master at this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of Lynch\u2019s films, like 1986\u2019s \u201cBlue Velvet<\/a>\u201d and 1997\u2019s \u201cLost Highway<\/a>,\u201d can be unsparing and graphic, with imagery that was described by critics as \u201cdisturbing<\/a>\u201d and \u201call chaos<\/a>\u201d upon their release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But beyond those bewildering effects, Lynch was onto something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His images of corruption, violence and toxic masculinity ring all too familiar in America today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Lynch in a 1990 photograph. AP Photo<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Take \u201cBlue Velvet<\/a>.\u201d The film focuses on a naive college student, Jeffrey Beaumont, whose idyllic suburban life framed with white picket fences is turned inside out when he finds a human ear on the edge of a road. This grisly discovery draws him into the orbit of a violent sociopath, Frank Booth, and an alluring lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens, whom Booth sadistically torments while holding her child and husband \u2013 whose ear, it turns out, was the one Beaumont had found \u2013 hostage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beaumont nonetheless finds himself perversely attracted to Vallens and descends deeper into the shadowy world lurking beneath his hometown \u2013 a world of smoke-filled bars and drug dens frequented by Booth and an array of freakish characters, including pimps, addicts and a corrupt detective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Booth\u2019s haunting line, \u201cNow it\u2019s dark,\u201d serves as a potent refrain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The corruption, perversion and violence depicted in \u201cBlue Velvet\u201d are indeed extreme. But the acts Booth perpetrates also recall the stories of sexual abuse that have emerged from organizations including the Catholic Church<\/a> and the Boy Scouts<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the exposure of such crimes continue to pile up, they become less an aberration but a dire warning of something that\u2019s deeply ingrained in our culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These evils are sensational and appalling, and there\u2019s an impulse to perceive them as existing outside of our realities, perpetrated by people who aren\u2019t like us. What \u201cTwin Peaks<\/a>,\u201d Lynch\u2019s hit TV series, and \u201cBlue Velvet\u201d do so effectively is tell viewers that those hidden worlds where venality and cruelty reside can be found just around the corner, in places that we might see but tend to ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there are the uncanny and eerie worlds depicted in \u201cLost Highway<\/a>\u201d and \u201cMulholland Drive<\/a>.\u201d The characters in those searing films seem to live in parallel realities governed by good and evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLost Highway<\/a>\u201d begins with a jazz musician, Fred Madison, being convicted of killing his wife. He claims, however, to have no memory of the crime. Exploring the theme of alternate worlds, Lynch thrusts Madison into an illusory realm inhabited by killers, drug dealers and pornographers by merging his identity into that of young mechanic named Pete Dayton. In doing so, Lynch combines the worlds of \u201cnormality\u201d and perversity into one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1990s, artists like Trent Reznor<\/a> of Nine Inch Nails, whose music is included on the official soundtrack of \u201cLost Highway,\u201d also confronted audiences with images of decadence and social decay, which were inspired by his own disturbing experiences in Hollywood and the music industry<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These dark themes have since been personified in rich and powerful men like Sean \u201cDiddy\u201d Combs<\/a>, Bill Cosby<\/a> and Jeffrey Epstein<\/a> who, for years, skated along the surface of high society with their perversions hidden from the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his 2001 film, \u201cMulholland Drive<\/a>,\u201d Lynch turns his attention to Hollywood and the wretchedness that seems baked into its very nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A wide-eyed and innocent aspiring actress named Betty Elms arrives in Los Angeles with visions of stardom. Her struggle to achieve success \u2013 one that ends in depression and death \u2013 is certainly tragic. But it\u2019s also not very surprising, given that she was trying to make it in a corrupt system that all too often bestows its rewards on the undeserving or those who are willing to compromise their morals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As with so many who go to Hollywood with big dreams only to find that fame is beyond their reach, Elms is unprepared for an industry so consumed with exploitation and corruption. Her fate mimics that of the women who, desperate for stardom, ended up falling into the trap set by Harvey Weinstein<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lynch\u2019s death comes at a time when America seems to be hurtling toward an ever-darker future. Perhaps it\u2019s one foretold by politicians turning a deaf ear to acts of sexual assault<\/a>, tolerating the vilification of victims or even bragging that they can get away with murder<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lynch\u2019s vital body of work warns that the cruelty of such people isn\u2019t really what we should fear most. It is, instead, those who laugh, cheer or simply turn away \u2013 faint responses that enable and empower such behaviors, giving them an acceptable place in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Lynch\u2019s films were first released, they often appeared as surreal, funhouse mirror reflections of society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today they speak of profound and terrible truths we can\u2019t ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Oct. 25, 2019<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Billy J. Stratton<\/a>, Professor of English and Literary Arts, University of Denver<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Billy J. Stratton, University of Denver \u201cThere\u2019s a sort of evil out there,\u201d says Sheriff Truman in an episode of David Lynch\u2019s iconic TV series, \u201cTwin Peaks.\u201d That line gets to the heart of the work of the filmmaker, whose family announced his death Jan. 16, 2025. Lynch\u2019s films and TV series reflected the dark, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":38548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293,279,8025,7,10,39,4],"tags":[15941,5865,2753,12321,335,4946,885,891,886,860,15940],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38549,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38547\/revisions\/38549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}