Defining “Lynchian”

Abe Beame traces the history of a curious term.

By Abe BeameFebruary 28, 2025

• Film

THERE IS NOTHING worse, nothing lazier or more hack, than opening an essay with a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary. But I like to think that David Lynch, a lover of the well-worn American cliché, would appreciate something so trite. So according to the OED, Lynchian (adj.) means “characteristic, reminiscent, or imitative of the films or television work of David Lynch. Lynch is noted for juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace.” It is a succinct if dry summation of a borderline undefinable, impossibly complex filmic language and worldview.

According to that OED entry, the first known use of the term Lynchian dates to a September 1984 double issue of the film journal Cinefantastique that features Lynch’s 1984 film Dune on its cover and a retrospective of his 1977 debut Eraserhead within. Sixty-four of the issue’s 111 pages are dedicated to those two Lynch films, including reports from the Dune set at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, spanning a year of sporadic visits; a detailed account of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed attempt to launch his own Dune project three decades before the subject would merit its own documentary; interviews with Dune’s production designer Anthony Masters and illustrator Ron Miller; and a retrospective journal and long-form analysis of Eraserhead by the film writer turned Dune crew member and eventual film editor Kenneth George Godwin.

These critics were admirable for putting their chips down early on a truly unique artist. They started the work that would and will carry on for generations, defining Lynch and how his films operate. It’s remarkable considering how little they had to go on: two short films, The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970); Eraserhead; his most “traditional” assignment, the Best Picture– and Best Director–nominated The Elephant Man (1980); and what was at the time the unfinished Dune project. At one point on the set of Dune, Cinefantastique writer Paul M. Sammon asked Lynch, “Well, isn’t DUNE a little, well, weird, too?” Lynch responded: “Oh yeah […] I like to go into weird worlds”—a now obvious declaration of taste that, at the time, still wasn’t quite understood.

Because of their anticipation—that Dune might become a Star Wars–level sensation and Lynch a blockbuster director—the critics at Cinefantastique projected an impending mainstreaming of Lynch’s style, an either self-imposed or major studio–assisted reining in of what made Lynch Lynchian. So the first use of the term is, perhaps inevitably, tautological. Toward the conclusion of his Eraserhead retrospective, Godwin writes: “Lynch has already been signed to write and direct DUNE II and III. But ERASERHEAD is likely to remain his most distinctive, purely Lynchian film until he has the box office power to control his own projects.”

Both Cinefantastique writers, but Godwin in particular, spend a great deal of time attempting to define the style and what the term would mean at this early stage in Lynch’s career, with limited access to his mind and his eye, and the work that battery would go on to produce. Yet here is as good a description as I’ve ever read explaining how Lynch eases the viewer into the internal logic of his work:

By showing us the familiar in the strange, Lynch makes us aware of what is strange in the familiar. Normalcy is a habit; but what is normal to the people of ERASERHEAD’s world seems strange to us. Yet they view it all with the same habit of acceptance that we ourselves have in relation to the “real world.” Thus we become aware of the habit itself as a distinct part of our own experience.

And also the unsettling, alien yet familiar form in which the director renders this logic: “Lynch has managed to capture not only the matter of a dream, but more importantly, the manner, also. His film is […] not simply a fantasy related to us and labeled ‘dream,’ something which we stand apart from as passive observers. It is the dream experience itself.”

Back to that OED entry. Here are the listed synonyms: Keatonesque, Eisensteinian, Hitchcockian, Wellesian, Capraesque, Fordian, Bergmanesque, Bressonian, Tatiesque, Buñuelian, Godardian, Hawksian, Sirkian, Felliniesque, Langian, Kubrickian, Warholian, Altmanesque, Scorsesean, Herzogian, Tarkovskian, Spielbergian, and Tarantinoesque. This crowded field of directors turned adjectives lists the definitional giants of global cinema, the most important filmmakers of the past century-plus. But putting them in conversation with Lynch as vocabulary terms only serves to highlight how singular he was as an artist. You could use some of these words to describe composition or camerawork or tone or thematics or style of dialogue, or any number of important but limited techniques or flourishes that refer specifically to aspects of making movies. None have the same capacity to relate brain-remapping imagery and ideas, the same surreality, the same folding of space and time both in and outside of film that “Lynchian” describes.

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Another inflection point in Lynch’s career. It’s 1996, after Lynch had hit bottom following the perceived failure of Dune. He then rebounded, returning to the “Lynchian film” far sooner than Godwin foresaw, making his redemptive, Rosetta stone project that launched his mature period, Blue Velvet (1986), which netted him a second Best Director nomination. From there, he made the Palme d’Or–winning Wild at Heart (1990), then the culture-hijacking first season of Twin Peaks (1990). This, of course, was followed by the cratering of the show’s second season over the next year, the similarly misunderstood (masterpiece) film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), and a show I admittedly have never seen called On the Air (1992), which sounds very bad.

At this juncture in history, Lynch was still wearing some of the controversy Blue Velvet provoked, still viewed with unease due to his near-constant focus on violence towards women, and still disliked for the perception that he allowed his actors to be degraded or abused on-screen (despite the constant glowing testimonials the Missoula Eagle Scout received from those actors stating that he was a consummate professional who was deeply concerned with their comfort and well-being on set). There would always be critics, admiring but wary detractors, who resented the darkness he asked them to confront. Which is why the production of Lost Highway (1997), 20 years into Lynch’s career, was a tense and pressurized atmosphere.

Another extended effort to define the constantly evolving idea of what Lynchian means was offered by the author, occasional journalist, and self-described “fanatical Lynch fan” David Foster Wallace. In the profile “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” which appeared in the 1996 September issue of Premiere, Wallace reported from the set of Lost Highway. The setup was quite different from the yearlong sojourn Sammon enjoyed in his reporting on Dune: Wallace was afforded three days, a few weeks before the release of his massive novel Infinite Jest (1996), on a production he describes as closed with “redundant security arrangements and an almost Masonic air of secrecy”; he never actually got to speak to Lynch. The arrangement has all the hallmarks of a director who has been through the creative ringer and come out the other side damaged and guarded.

Cinefantastique’s understanding of “Lynchian” is concerned mainly with how his films look and feel, what I will simplistically reduce to the oneiric texture and internal dream logic the director achieves in his early work. It thus focuses more on the “how” than the “what.” (In an essay-length appreciation of Eraserhead, Godwin points to the film’s acceptance of the monstrous baby as perfectly normal in order to illustrate how Lynch plays with reality, as we accept the surreal logic of a dream.) Wallace’s opening gambit diverges from this purely textural framing: As he sees it,

an academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that’s ultimately definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it.

Retaining the “normal in the weird reveals the weird in the normal” aspect of the term, Wallace has stapled on a thematic characterization only possible after Blue Velvet—with its detached, rotting, ant-swarmed ear in the brush just below the surface of a white picket fence–encircled lawn, ghost whispering the American psyche. That ear is the embodiment of the discomfort and unmooring a young Lynch experienced when he witnessed a naked, crying, inebriated, bloodied woman stumbling down his middle-American block as a child, as described in the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, and then the professed discomfort he felt when landing in Philadelphia with its teeming urban depravity, far from the Americana that had shaped him. Wallace doesn’t have access to much of this biographical information and so understands Lynch the way many fans and critics at the time did, as a dark prince weaving a specific style of American nightmare.

Wallace uses this framing to bounce around the culture, defining what Lynchian is and isn’t at this moment:

Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims’ various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody’s got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not.

Wallace seizes on the mask of a particularly absurd version of American civility, the thin patina of order and normalcy that screens chaotic violence, a horrorscape of animalistic savagery. “[T]he unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal”—as Wallace would later put it in an interview with Charlie Rose.

But what is fascinating, hilarious, and appropriate is that, even at his best, Wallace is slightly off the mark. Ted Bundy, the charming former law student with dark eyes and a bright, easy smile who was also a sadistic serial-murdering psychopath—and who briefly attained teen-heartthrob status on trial and would eventually be portrayed in a biopic by Zac Efron—is exactly as Lynchian as Dahmer, if not more so. But it’s telling that even the great man of letters couldn’t quite get a handle on an all-encompassing definition of what Lynchian meant at that point in history.

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It’s 2015. We are nearly 40 years removed from the release of Eraserhead. If there had been any doubt left as to exactly what Lynch was and what his work meant to our culture following the commercial disappointment of Lost Highway, those doubts have been erased by the unqualified back-to-back triumphs of The Straight Story (1999) and Mulholland Drive (2001), the latter of which earned Lynch another Best Director nomination. Lynch released what would somewhat tragically prove to be his final “film” five years later, Inland Empire (2006). It has already been announced that, in 2017, he will return to the world of Twin Peaks for what will become The Return, an approximately 18-hour serialized masterpiece that will stretch the definitions of what constitutes both television and film.

For this publication, Lara Zarum interviewed Dennis Lim—the former Village Voice film editor and current artistic director at Film at Lincoln Center—about the Lynchian sensibility. Lim had recently released a biography of the filmmaker that year (David Lynch: The Man from Another Place) that had spent years bouncing around in his head. While writing the book, Lim had the opportunity to ask Lynch himself to define “Lynchian.” The director changed the subject.

Lim is a decade younger than David Foster Wallace, part of the first generation of critics to be raised with Lynch’s work, style, and impact on culture woven into their reality. As such, his critical approach is shaped by the process of working backward toward an understanding of the term, aided from the start by Lynchian’s widespread acceptance as a given article of pop culture rather than the subversive, marginal perspective it once was. He opens his book by writing that Lynchian has become “an adjective for our time.”

The word has worked its way into common usage by 2015, and Lim also identifies its frequent misuse in criticism. “I think now it’s basically just a synonym for ‘weird,’” Lim says. “I think a lot of the popular writing on Lynch does tend to just leave it as, ‘He’s a weirdo and the films are strange and he talks funny and weird things happen in his films.’” Lim finds nuance in the unnerving quality Wallace understood as visceral and formally subversive in the late 1990s. This is perhaps partially thanks to Lynch himself beginning to open up about his work and creative process, in both his own writings and in Chris Rodley’s book-length interview Lynch on Lynch (1997). In interviews Lim conducted with Lynch (which would only be further underlined with documentaries like the aforementioned Art Life), Lim identifies the personal; the terrified confusion that unifies the stilted dialogue and jarring, sudden violence; the disjointed narratives; the kid still grappling with the bloodied woman who wandered onto his street and shattered his reality. “I think the Lynchian is in many ways a very phobic sensibility,” Lim tells Zarum. “Fear is something that’s very important to him.”

With the ability to consider most of Lynch’s full body of work at once, Lim is able to see the director as a defining voice of this period rather than as an outsider artist, the role he was often relegated to until the final cementing of his legacy with Mulholland Drive. Somehow this filmmaker, who expressed himself through violent and discordant dreams, never strayed far from the center of culture, coming back again and again to uncannily capture the rotten core of American life.

It’s how Blue Velvet’s infantile, nitrous-soaked monster, Frank Booth, explains the Reagan era without trying to, or how Lost Highway captures our relationship with celebrity and voyeurism in the wake of the O. J. Simpson saga, or how the bifurcated protagonist of Mulholland Drive explains turn-of-the-21st-century disillusionment with the hollow promise of the dying American project. Lim sees Lynch as something of a seer, if not a shaman, receiving the big fish of revelation, tapped into a cosmic truth he may not even fully comprehend. “If you think about it, every period of Lynch’s career has had some work that kind of defined the period,” Lim says,

Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive—these are certainly not niche works. They were popular works, and I think if you look at each one, there’s a reason. There’s a way the film reflected something in the culture […] certain ideas of good and evil, of fear, innocence. Lynch is an artist who draws from his own unconscious and who tries to activate something in the unconscious of his viewers.

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In August of last year, David Lynch announced that he was homebound and needed an oxygen tank due to emphysema, caused by his lifelong love of another American staple, the cigarette. And yet, when he died on January 16, his death stunned his legion of fans and acolytes. We had all deluded ourselves, believing that Lynch couldn’t end, that he would live forever, that nothing will die. And we were right. The proof lay in the intensity and density of the tributes that poured in, testimonials befitting less the death of a dark oddball filmmaker than the passing of a religious figure, maybe even a saint.

Many of the tributes featured a return to the idea of the Lynchian and considered how the term had been so frequently abused. David Ehrlich tweeted that “‘Lynchian’ is so overused because it’s a viscerally understandable word without any known synonyms. I can’t imagine a more beautiful artistic legacy than that.” The X account Taste of Cinema confirmed this thesis with a prompt requesting “the best Lynchian movie not directed by David Lynch”—which, by the time of writing, has received 896 replies and 1,500ish retweets/quote tweets.

Answers ran the gamut, including films by clear descendants like Darren Aronofsky and third-gen admirers like Jane Schoenbrun; cult classics made in his image, such as Donnie Darko; works of anime and horror; Sopranos episodes; and even 1990s Nickelodeon after-school totem The Adventures of Pete & Pete (Author’s note: correct). Many folks chimed in to refute the Lynchianness of several of the works referenced in the thread, tsk-tsking and tongue-clucking as know-it-all assholes have for decades when it comes to the label. I would like to be as certain as some of these annoying guys, but as time passes, it becomes harder and harder to find narratives in film and on television that you can safely claim contain no trace, however filtered or refracted, of Lynch’s work. Whether you agree or disagree with the user-generated canon, it is staggering to see the either real or imagined influence thousands of people trace from his oeuvre, touching every corner of culture over the past 50 years.

In the weeks since he died, in the midst of a distinctly nightmarish second Trump administration, Lynchian is once again a buzzword at the center of culture. Lynch’s work both anticipates this moment, in its timeless relationship with dumb and absurd American darkness, and serves as a balm for our current state of normal surreality.

Twin Peaks: The Return ended up being Lynch’s final statement, and it serves as a kind of perfect closure to his career, the end of a tidy narrative arc Lynch would never have allowed in his own work. The Return, by contrast, is complete subconscious flow state, with narrative incoherence and long periods of tone-setting discomfort baked in, shattered by occasional moments of extreme graphic violence, chaotic unmotivated malevolence, raw emotion, and strange sincerity.

The series is the final revolution in how we think and talk about “Lynchian,” a notion that surfaces in all his work but most overtly in The Return, The Elephant Man, and The Straight Story. It’s the revelation that his art is rooted in extreme empathy, that he is concerned for you in your most vulnerable moments, that he is a deeply emotional and moral artist who lays his fears and vulnerabilities bare on-screen. “He was committed to making us feel the shape of absence, the slow and deranging time of bereavement,” Dennis Lim writes in Film Comment; in doing so, Lynch helped us reckon with our own griefs, and thus feel less alone. It’s a humanist ideal that would appear to contradict the early ideas of Lynchian as being defined by strangeness and ugliness, but this ideal has always been embedded beneath the surface of his art.

The near full day that is Twin Peaks: The Return is brimming with indelible moments, but perhaps the final lasting beat comes in episode eight, which is just fucking perfectly referred to as “Gotta Light?” “Gotta Light?” is as much an art installation as it is an episode of television, silent for long stretches, a mostly plotless fantasia that also explains the entire mythology behind Twin Peaks and what Lynch’s work is and has always been concerned with. In the episode, Lynch delivers an origin story for the figure of Bob, the spiritual manifestation of human evil, the way a child might: he is a disembodied head flying out of an atomic mushroom cloud, a moment that represents the birth of a sort of modern evil, but an evil you can easily imagine flying out of a severed head during the Crusades, or Christ’s wrists as he’s nailed to the cross, or the apple Eve is biting into before being ejected from the Garden of Eden. It’s the war of competing human impulses, a conflict that is ancient and incredibly simple.

I think “Lynchian” resides somewhere in this idea and how Lynch is able to relate it. Whether happy or sad or scary, it’s the ability to express your very specific impossible interiority, your emotion and feeling and personal history, which lies beyond language, visually, in a way anyone can feel if not easily articulate. This obviously demands a great facility with cinematic art that very few filmmakers have ever had or ever will have. Which is why Lynchian as an adjective ultimately isn’t all that helpful—because it isn’t teachable, and is barely definable, a mindset only one person on earth ever had access to, in a way that isn’t true of any other filmmaker who inspired their own descriptor.

I’ll end this in a manner I think David Lynch would approve of, with a cliché that was present in many of the eulogies for the director—which, like all clichés, taps into some universal truth. It was a truth Lynch chose to deliver himself, in the finale of The Return.

The core of any working definition of Lynchian, now and in the decades to come, for generations that will continue to discover and wrestle with the term and what it means, has to contain the ultimatum that you must fix your heart or die.