8 Great Things David Lynch Taught Me
Few artists and creators have bent television to their will quite like David Lynch. Equal parts surrealist storyteller and culture/community provocateur, Lynch built a reputation on uncanny films like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire which made the everyday feel quietly sinister. But it was his groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks that cracked open the entertainment mediums, blending soap opera, crime drama and dream logic into something entirely new and beautifully bizarre.
The series follows the surreal investigation into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer in a fictional Pacific Northwest logging town. Here, the everyday mundane are turned into things altogether thrilling, dangerous, sometimes even fatal (indeed, it starts with a scene of Laura’s dead body fished out of the town lake while throwing the viewer right into the deep end).
What starts as a standard who-done-it murder mystery soon spirals into a mind-bending, fever dream filled with backward-talking, decadently decorated rooms whose walls hold dark secrets, and alternate dimensions. If audiences turned to television to escape, ‘Twin Peaks’ took them way out of this world.
When the series first aired internationally in April 1990, it sparked a sense that strange things in popular culture were about to become, well, more popular and even stranger. It was quite possibly the first television series to question normalcy, challenging traditional stereotypes, and basically putting the fucked-up condition of being human (dead or alive) on mass display for all to ogle and feel oddly familiar with. You could say Twin Peaks was the blueprint for all the alternative television that permeates TV guides today.
Decades on, Twin Peaks’ influence still hums beneath modern – mostly steam – TV. So what exactly did Lynch teach us?
Antonino Tati
1. That red is a naughty colour
Whether it’s the cherry whose stem Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) ties into a knot with her tongue, or the tall velvet curtains that bled against the black-and-white zig-zag flooring in those warped rooms, red was where it’s at when it came to Lynch’s colour palette and, indeed, palate. His taste for the colour was as impeccable as Akira Kurosawa’s knowledge of it being a potent, seductive, sometimes unnerving colour. Marketers know this full well, which is why different reds are the most shades you see in lipstick collections, and why every brand – from McDonald’s to Coca-Cola – loves to see the colour bleed from their neon signs and logos. Put on rose-coloured glasses, and you won’t see the red. Glasses off, then…
2. Small towns aren’t as innocent as they seem
Behind white picket fences, nice cherry pie, and darn good coffee lies something darker. Twin Peaks revealed that beneath the façade of wholesome Americana lurks secrecy, violence – including rape and murder – and moral ambiguity.
3. Dreams are a language worth listening to
Lynch doesn’t treat dreams as narrative fluff; to him they held relative clues. Symbolic, disjointed and emotionally charged, dreams often carry more truth than the waking world.
4. Tone is everything
Humour and horror can coexist. One moment you’re laughing at a deadpan exchange; the next, you’re unsettled by something you can’t quite explain. Lynch showed that tonal whiplash can be a feature, not a flaw.
5. Not every mystery needs solving
In a culture obsessed with answers, Twin Peaks embraced ambiguity. Some questions remain open, inviting viewers to sit with uncertainty rather than resolving it.
6. Sound and mood are excellent storytelling tools
From Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting score to the persistent hum of electricity to silent atomic explosions going off, atmosphere does as much narrative work as dialogue. Lynch teaches us to feel a story, not just follow it, and a lot of that comes from sound or the lack of it in intense moments. In the end, Twin Peaks isn’t just a show – it’s a mood, a puzzle, and a quiet dare to see the world differently. And in our uncanny digital age, combined with socio-economic stressors and the death of context in media, we’ve pretty much got no choice but to view the world from a new, alternative perspective.
7. The beauty and importance of Transcendental Meditation
In real life, David Lynch talked a lot of the benefits of Transcendental Meditation (or TM for short). TM is a simple mental technique in which you silently repeat a mantra to allow the active mind to naturally settle inward, accessing a state of “restful alertness”. It helps you reduce stress and can take the mind to great places. For more information about TM, click here.
8. That art doesn’t need to make sense.
Lynch famously argued that art doesn’t need to make rational sense, noting: “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.” As well as television and film-maker, David was a wonderful artist who painted regularly. He actually studied fine arts and only began making films as a way to animate his paintings and bring movement to his canvases. A true multimedia artist, then.
Brilliant and outré film and TV director David Lynch has died, aged 78
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That Madonna and Kylie collab is out and it’s pretty fab, but wait, did Madonna just throw shade at Pepsi at the end of the video?
By creammagazine,
We’re on each others’ team: Madonna and Kylie Minogue, both looking sharp and sounding fab on ‘Love Sensation’ (Afterhours Mix).
Loving the new Madonna X Kylie collab, Love Sensation (Afterhours Mix). I’m happy it came out sooner than some time in the near future. They say tomorrow is now really in this hyper-real world. And something had to come from all that talk about a duet between two of the world’s greatest pop sensations. And I will call it a duet because duets don’t have to be mushy and slow and this track is less of a collab and more of an event. It had to come out now. After all, hype is futile without followup, and in today’s InstaWorld that means it ought to have been out yesterday. For devotees in the LGBTQIA communities, the song ought to feel instantly likeable, perhaps even a little familiar – hope and devotion can do those things to your mind. Before you know it, you’d imagine the song was pretty much written for you. And that intent, the natural chemistry, the familial connections, the doing away with too much trickery, that better clarity in vocals, the chiller beats per minute, and that universal message connects instantly with the audience it’s intended to gift. The others will catch on by summer’s peak.
I like this new version better than the album one, actually. It’s got more of a potent vibe to it. And of course, it’s got Kylie! It’s no real Freud-laced OTT confessional banger like, say, Charli XCX’s Wink Wink, nor spunky-as-heck call-to-arms charmer like, say, Tori Amos’ Gasoline Girls – but it’s very catchy and the sentiment is certainly there. I like the ‘Universe is in you and you’re in the Universe’ type vibe, because I do love a little raison d’être to the art I tune into. That, and a good little dance on occasion.
But something stuck with me after I watched the clip. Not just the naughty earworm that crawled out of the catchy-as-heck song. Not the flashing graphics that for all I know might have read, “You must love Madonna and Kylie or you will perish in hell” (for all I know). And not just the joy of finally seeing two brilliant pop artists coming together to bring their learn-ed all to the contemporary pop scene. It was a little joke Madonna makes at the end when she orders “Coke and ice” on her cellphone.
Now it’s not the statement I’m really questioning here: a classic Coke/coke joke is a classic joke. My pondering was more along the lines of why the statement at all? Call it overanalysing but when it comes to music icons, well, that’s kind of what I do.
So I started asking myself… Was it to sound cool with the kids? Was it possible shade at Pepsi for some odd royalty dispute from yore? Was it payola from a competitive big beverage brand? Was it street-talk hinting that a mix of cocaine and meth might just be where enlightenment’s at? (not tried that combination and probably won’t ever). Was it a woman not having to mind her Ps and Qs (because in a free-speech democracy we shouldn’t have to hold our tongue) and just letting some silly quip slip through her lips in place of silence? As a Leo myself, I know it’s really difficult to keep your mouth shut, especially when much that comes out of it is golden. See what I did there?
Anyhoo, the cocaine-was-once-an-ingredient-in-Coke jokes probably began some time in 1930 – a few months after the beverage became completely-cocaine free in 1929 (I’m guessing it took a few years for everybody to get over the Charlie hangover). Like all good jokes, it has longevity and, quite frankly, I think it has purpose. If there’s good reason for the joke’s survival and random injection into the popular vernacular, I’d like to think that it was that any soft drink, with or without the excess sugar, is probably a better stimulant to help you reach a certain (even small) level of conscience or higher consciousness (seriously, because there really is nothing that you can’t do) than, say, coke, or ice, or a combination of the two.
I’m not sure why I really tried to analyse that one. Just something about it stuck. Like so many of the things Madonna has said since blessing us with her ultra-presence all those decades ago. But I do kind of feel someone needs to sit this woman down and give her a dose of her own Leo medicine. Or a nice cup of herbal tea and a chat. Or a Tequila cocktail or Coke with ice, even. The point is the bridge between legacy art and disposable pop is already fairly broad, and today, quality repertoire and positive public relations is now out of everybody’s hands. Well, kind of in everybody’s hands. Actually, I’m not sure anymore because AI has a pretty big mouth, too. Iconic one-liners might just be bandied about the wrong way if an artist’s delivery is too ambiguous.
What one needs is a good guide or mantra to help practice the marrying of the natural with intention with any desired material result – in this particular case, stream this song, or love me when I’m gone from your phone screen. [He wrote after seeing the video an hour ago and is still thinking and writing about it.]
Point being: genuine intention is good. When that’s in place, everything else follows effortlessly.
Antonino Tati
Strike a pose. No. Not yet. When I tell you to.
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