Ten cult scenes from David Lynch

A journey through David Lynch’s filmography in ten key moments, which helped define the adjective Lynchian – a mixture of strangeness, anguish, glamour, violence, and black humor, like coffee.

Eraserhead ‘s Baby (1977)

First feature, first slap! David Lynch’s graduation film, as experimental and broke as it is fascinating, already prefigures the mysterious atmospheres of Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive, with its black and white scenes that seem to come straight from the dreams of the future filmmaker. Or from his nightmares?

As lost as its protagonist played by Jack Nance, we can’t look away from this ” radiator woman” , strangely sexualized, nor from this screaming baby. Disturbing and at the same time so fragile that we want to protect him. Do you mean weird? No, Lynchian.

I am not an animal, I am a human being” in Elephant Man (1980)

Lynch is a filmmaker-musician. Through the combined power of editing and mixing, he knew how to create operatic movements. The sequence in the station of Elephant Man is exemplary. The symphonic music at its strident peak is superimposed on the bell of the locomotive, the puff of smoke it releases from its entrails, the frightened cry of a child, the sly murmur of the crowd…

All this hubbub rises until it stops abruptly and lets us hear in a solemn silence this ” I am not an elephant, I am not an animal, I am a human being…” which tears the heart and space apart.

Baby Wants Blue Velvet” in Blue Velvet (1986)

The creepiest psychopath in the Lynchian bestiary? We can reasonably put a play on Frank Booth, a lecherous, sadistic gangster, doped up on oxygen and bourbon, who sexually assaults Dorothy played by Isabella Rossellini, gets off on perverse scenes, screams sick incantations (” Baby wants to fuck!” , ” Baby wants blue velvet!” ) before chewing on his prey’s blue velvet dress.

Hidden in a closet, Kyle MacLachlan watches, dumbfounded, the most disturbing number ever delivered by Dennis Hopper. David Lynch said: ” Dennis Hopper is Frank Booth and he’s the only one who could have played him. That’s both good news and bad news. The bad news is that he’s Frank Booth.

Twin Peaks and Dale Cooper’s “damn good coffee” (1990)

If Twin Peaks struck the public with its mysteries that were very difficult to unravel and the very dark background of its investigation, the series by David Fincher and Mark Frost is also at times an excellent comedy. The filmmaker also offered himself a particularly stimulating role, Gordon Cole, to give the reply – loud and clear! – to his main actor and friend Kyle MacLachlan. His Dale Cooper is just as funny at times, the actor bringing his undeniable charm to this unusual agent, addicted to coffee and cherry pie , and ready to open his mind to unorthodox methods of investigation.

He will come across the worst of humanity while trying to find out who killed Laura Palmer, but also unforgettable good people, like “the woman with the log” with wise advice, or the bubbly Lucy, the secretary at the sheriff’s office. All is not lost, as long as we have good coffee.

The Red Room from Twin Peaks (1990)

At the end of episode 3, special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) enters the world of dreams. A magical antechamber decorated with red curtains, where the deceased Laura Palmer and the shaman host Michael J. Anderson await him, who speaks like a tape recorder that is rewound and chains together cryptic statements sounding like old fifties adverts: ” There’s always music in the air” ,

That gum you like is going to come back in style” … before shaking his hips to a jazzy tune. Imagine the hallucination of the spectators of the time, who saw their police series derail live and suddenly go rummaging in the land of dreams. The series was never the same after that evening.

Nicolas Cage sings Elvis in Sailor and Lula (1990)

At the time, Nicolas Cage categorized two types of films, “sexual” or “cerebral”, placing Sailor and Lula a little too quickly in the latter. However, here it is only a question of physical tensions and impulses. Otherwise, why choose two erotic canons from the King’s repertoire to electrify the film from the inside? Love me tender to conclude on the bodywork, and especially Love me on the dancefloor. ” Treat me like a fool, Treat me mean and cruel, But love me…” Cage plays the King in front of a languid Laura Dern.

The red of the neon lights finishes embracing the frame. Sailor, the man with snakeskin, microphone in hand in front of an overexcited audience, asks, in fact, only one thing: ” to be loved “. Lynch continues his playlist of a vintage Americana soluble in his vast, colorful world. Rock’n’roll attitude.

David Bowie’s cameo in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

A rock-star filmmaker, Lynch loved to hang out with musicians, old idols or creative partners, from Roy Orbison to Chrysta Bell. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (aka The Last 7 Days of Laura Palmer ), a prequel to the TV series, hated at the time, and adored today, he cast David Bowie ( Black Tie White Noise period ) as a disoriented, hallucinating FBI agent who messes with surveillance cameras and speaks in riddles (” We’re not going to talk about Judy” ) – riddles that Twin Peaks fans are still trying to solve today.

The two Davids (Bowie and Lynch) come face to face here, with the director playing Gordon Cole, a slightly eccentric FBI chief, a sort of Tryphon Calculus of the Feds. Bowie will return from beyond the grave in season 3 of Twin Peaks in the form of a… giant teapot. But that’s another story.

The appearance of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway (1997)

At a Hollywood party, Fred (Bill Pullman), a musician with severe paranoia, meets a “mystery man” with a painted face, played by Robert Blake, the actor from Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (and the series Baretta ). Blake explains to Fred that they have met before. That they know each other. The proof: he is at home right now. Um… excuse me? Fred calls home to check and… the Mystery Man answers, before bursting into a demonic laugh.

As the two men talk, note the noises of the party around them, or rather their sudden absence – they have been replaced by a kind of threatening vibration. This is the beginning of the slow descent into the unfathomable darkness of Lost Highway. How to chill the blood with a simple conversation in shot-reverse-shot.

The Winkie’s Monster in Mulholland Drive (2001)

Rarely has an appearance scared us so much on screen. Except perhaps that of Bob, who seems to emerge straight from Hell in Twin Peaks? David Lynch knew like no one else how to make the audience feel uncontrollable fear. Is it because he emerges preceded by all the strangeness of this story between the (American) dream and reality? Is it thanks to the warning from a visibly frightened Patrick Fischler himself?

We can turn this monstrous vision over and over, but it is difficult to understand precisely why it is so striking. And that is certainly its strength: returning to primal fears, which we are unable to explain. Did the filmmaker film them to better exorcise them? Or to better haunt us?

The atomic test in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

Returning to Twin Peaks after a 25-year absence, with a third season ( The Return ) that turned the brains of those who followed it religiously in the summer of 2017, David Lynch expanded the mythology of the series, and the backstory of Laura Palmer, by diving into the nuclear mushroom cloud of the Manhattan Project, during an episode (the eighth) that instantly entered the history of television. Imagined by the French visual effects company Buf, this atomic trip mutated into a journey to the cosmos, in the style of 2001:

A Space Odyssey, to the funeral tune of Thrène in memory of the victims of Hiroshima, by Krzysztof Penderecki, a composition that we heard in… The Shining. A double homage to Stanley Kubrick, among other follies of this labyrinthine and nightmarish episode entitled ” Gotta Light?”. Or ” Do you have a light?” – the ultimate Lynchian question.