A car drives down a road at night. As far as we can tell, it’s the only vehicle on the road, a lonely wayfarer ripping through the darkness. The night is so consuming that the headlights reveal only what’s in the car’s immediate path. We can see the twists and turns in the road as they come into view, but nothing further ahead than a few feet. There’s no way to know what’s coming. We could turn back now, but what might we find if we drive a little further?
That question occurs again and again in David Lynch’s filmography. It’s one of the millions of queries one might have watching his films, which are all distinctly different in tone and genre, yet bleed into one another, falling under that ever-cryptic umbrella term, “Lynchian.” The expression was born from a desire to designate an intangible feeling, similar to the sense one gets deep in one's stomach watching something Lynch made. But funnily enough, a good chunk of Lynch’s films aren’t so difficult to dissect; all one needs are the right tools.
