Surreal Dreams: David Lynch’s Art of the Strange

In 1986, my sixteen-year-old self went to see Blue Velvet in the theater, alone. I guess I didn’t have any friends at the time who were weird enough to see it with me. But from the moment I saw that severed ear in the grass, I was hooked.

The contemporary era that was portrayed in the film was a prim, fifties-style culture that was actually seething eccentric and grotesque underneath its shiny exterior, and it fully resonated for teenage me growing up in the conservative, wealth-driven eighties.

From the pure, dreamy Laura Dern (who seemed older than 16, even though she actually was) to the easily-influenced Kyle MacLachlan, to the freaky Dennis Hopper, and of course the sexy, 30-something Isabella Rossellini, the characters all offered something I didn’t even know I wanted: reckless courage in the face of an heretofore unseen, enigmatic foreboding.

I loved all the dangerous and uncanny moments. It felt familiar and wholehearted. It was exactly what I was looking for.

Two years later, in college as an art major, I found my people when I was invited to a weekly Twin Peaks viewing party. Every Thursday evening we gathered in some art student’s living room, walls covered in amateur paintings, and sat on thrifted couches around the TV drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon as the lilting music of the opening credits poured through the room. Every week was a new lesson in freakish surrealism.

I’m pretty sure David Lynch’s work was part of what has made us Gen Xers more acutely aware of what’s underneath the facade of our culture, and what kept us unsurprised by anything that came crumbling through the wall occasionally (and now even more than occasionally).

Thanks David Lynch, for the counterintuitive comfort of cozying up to the liminal spaces, for uncovering what’s real, and for influencing our art and lives with the mystical realities of what it actually means to be human.

Below: Some of the creative cohort in our house from my college days. Photo by either me or Katrina, since we aren’t in it.