David Lynch’s Unsolvable Puzzles

David Lynch, who died last month at seventy-eight, was a director of images—one whose distinctive sensibility and instinct for combining the grotesque and the mundane have influenced a generation of artists in his wake. Lynch conjured surreal, sometimes hellish dreamscapes populated by strange figures and supernatural forces lurking beneath wholesome American idylls. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz revisit Lynch’s landmark works and reflect on their resonance today. They discuss his 1986 film, “Blue Velvet”; the television series “Twin Peaks,” whose story and setting Lynch returned to throughout his career; and “Mulholland Drive,” his so-called “poisonous valentine to Hollywood.” Lynch’s stories often resist interpretation, and the director himself refused to ascribe any one meaning to his work. In a way, this openness to multiple readings is at the heart of his appeal. “Reality, too, offers many unsolvable puzzles,” Cunningham says. “The artist who says, ‘I trust that if I offer you this, you will come out with something—even if it’s not something that I programmed in advance’—that always gives me hope.” 

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Eraserhead” (1977)
“Blue Velvet” (1986)
“Twin Peaks” (1990-91)
“Mulholland Drive” (2001)
“Dune” (1984)
“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992)
“Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017)
“David Lynch Keeps His Head,” by David Foster Wallace (Premiere)
David Lynch’s P.S.A. for the New York Department of Sanitation
“Severance” (2022—)
“David Lynch’s Outsized Influence on Photography,” in Aperture
Comme des Garçons SS16
Prada AW13
David Lynch’s Weather Reports

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