Meeting David Lynch on the Dreaming Plane

The director who plumbed the dark depths of consciousness died this week.

Modern Age has kindly allowed me to republish here today my appreciation for David Lynch, which appeared on their website yesterday. I encourage my readers to return the favor, check out their website more generally and, if you like what you see, subscribe. Under the leadership of editor Daniel McCarthy, I’ve found it a consistently congenial place for which to write, in large part because he has always been more interested in whether a piece of writing propels discussion in an interesting direction than whether it advances a particular ideological agenda—or a particular aesthetic. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lynch, whose political views were highly idiosyncratic, were revealed to have been a subscriber himself.

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A Lynch anecdote. It’s 1988, and I’m a senior in high school. I make my first college visit, on my own, planning to stay with a sophomore who was an alumnus of my high school, whom I knew from the debate team. My first night there, I go to the student film society screening of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. I like movies, and have gone readily to Hollywood’s mainstream offerings of the 1980s, from Back to the Future to Platoon, and laughed and cried as intended. This is something else, operating on a wholly different level. The film is in part about becoming aware of those different levels, about exposing the dark currents coursing under American suburbia. But I don’t receive it in terms of theme, much less message. I receive it as I would a dream, a dream of ant-infested severed ears and naked women hiding in the bushes.

Movies in general operate something like a dream; it’s likely our own experience of dreams that prepares us to understand the basic language of film, like how to interpret a cut from one shot to another. But Blue Velvet was the first film I’d ever seen that felt like a dream, that was such stuff as dreams are made on. This brave new world was new to me, and while I wasn’t sure whether to call that world “movies” or “college,” I knew I had to explore it.

But did I? Another Lynch anecdote. It’s 2001, and I’m working on Wall Street. I still go to the movies, of course, but I have less time than I used to, and have almost forgotten that experience of possession. A friend and I go to see David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive. I’m confused by it, disoriented. Lynch seems to be playing a game of candy-colored tropes with a sinister undertone that I can’t take seriously; it feels like it’s all artifice. Then suddenly the film turns inside out, and reveals itself to have been a dream, layered over a reality that is its negative, all dim, a world of frustrated longing and failure. What does it amount to, though? I can’t find any real people there, anything solid to grab hold of; it feels like an insubstantial pageant, and leaves not a rack behind when it has melted into air.

My friend and I walk out. He says to me, “That was arse,” and I don’t disagree. But that night he goes home to his wife, tells her what he thought of the film, and it’s his life that turns inside out. She’s furious, she’s outraged: if he doesn’t understand the film it’s because he never understood women, never understood her. She’s been having an affair for months and he never noticed, and she throws this revelation in his face before stomping out. It feels to him like a nightmare, but it’s his prior life that was the dream, and this really is the end. Within weeks, his wife has left not only him but her entire life: her home, her career, even the country.

Movies are as insubstantial as a dream, but when we meet them on the dreaming plane, their power can be overwhelming. My friend’s wife met David Lynch there, on that plane, and so I understand how, even if their marriage hadn’t already been falling apart, hearing “that was arse” about that dream, a dream that had become her dream, might have caused her to wonder, who am I even married to? I heard the story from my friend, and I wondered: How different from him was I? Had I forgotten how to dream?

That experience, of meeting the audience on the dreaming plane, is what Lynch excelled at above any other director I can name. More than Luis Buñuel, or Ken Russell, or David Cronenberg, or Hayao Miyazaki, when I watch Lynch, I feel like I have been invited into his private dreams. Sometimes, as with Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, the result is an extraordinary feeling of communion. Other times, as with Inland Empire, I feel unable to meet him there; the world is too hermetic, and these are not my dreams.

I’m not sure if that’s why Mulholland Drive—ranked by Sight and Sound as one of the ten best films of all time—didn’t touch me the first time, and still has never affected me the way it does some viewers. Seeing it again, years later, I appreciated it far more, understood it better, but still, we were not dreaming together, and I think the reason is that the film is less a dream itself than a commentary about their manufacture.

David Lynch is probably best known for his work in television, specifically for Twin Peaks, the series which ran for two mind-bending seasons in the early 1990s, then spawned a film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and a third season a quarter century after the original. But Twin Peaks has never been my lodestar. Perhaps that’s because I’m not really a television person; I like things with corners, dreams that begin when I lie down and end when I rise up.

I think, though, that if Twin Peaks is a dreamscape, then it is a dream that has been colonized by television more than it is television that has been colonized by David Lynch’s dreams. The characters in the series behave as if they know, sometimes, that they are in a television show, as though they were dreaming lucidly. It imparts a persistent uncanniness to the action, but only if we are to take it as television; if we are to take it as a dream, then why are its inhabitants so clearly bounded by a set? Is this what happens to dreamers when they spend their lives in the dream factory?

I thought about that question while watching a 2024 film, I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. The film owes a clear debt to Lynch for its surreal take on the suburban American experience, but I think its deeper debt is revealed in its explicit subject matter. Its two lonely, disaffected teenagers are obsessed with a television show, The Pink Opaque, that feels more real to them than real life. The show-within-the-film is a quirky piece of young adult genre television, about two teenage girls with a telepathic connection who battle a monster of the week sent from the Midnight Realm ruled by Mr. Melancholy. The snippets we see seem to have traveled here from the dreaming plane, but I am not sure whether the dreams belong to the kids or to the showrunner.

I experienced that film as a cautionary tale about how not to let a work of art possess you, a caution that not only these troubled teens but many Lynch fans and even perhaps the filmmaker herself should take to heart. When we meet on the dreaming plane, it should be a communion, not a colonization. When we mine Lynch’s work for a treasure trove of lore, we’re mistaking dreams for reality, which means we’ve forgotten how both dreams and reality operate, and that neither is merely a puzzle to be solved, but an experience to be lived.

David Lynch left our plane of reality this week. He will never get to take us to the dreaming plane again, and that is an incalculable loss for us all. But I am eternally grateful that, through the magic of film, we can still meet him there, and never cease to dream anew.