5 Scenes That Define David Lynch’s Singular Vision

The director developed such a distinct style that “Lynchian” became a go-to term for any sort of surrealism onscreen. These scenes from his work get to the heart of what that term embodied.

The directorial thumbprint of David Lynch spawned its own adjective decades ago, perhaps most thoroughly codified by the writer David Foster Wallace. Sent by Premiere magazine to the set of Lynch’s 1997 film “Lost Highway,” Wallace gave a definition of Lynchian: “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.”

Put it this way: “Lynchian” evokes the bland wholesomeness of an American Midwestern suburb, wrapped around something unnaturally vile — the discovery of five stray molars in a tuna casserole. A man kills his wife? Not Lynchian. A man kills his wife because she keeps buying the wrong peanut butter? Pretty Lynchian. If the cops stand around at the crime scene, discussing varieties of peanut butters and confessing that the murderous husband kind of had a point — well, that’s just pure Lynch.

Lynch was not merely interested in bad behavior; he was as certain that humans were capable of goodness and love as violence. “Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies,” Wallace explained. “Evil wears them.” It attaches itself to the back of boring, ordinary folks and just won’t let go, an unshakable suit made of screaming skin, a ghostly apparition you didn’t summon and don’t want to see.

Evil threatens any logic. The world makes sense and also doesn’t. Any sunshiney day could give way to radioactive hail from the heavens. There’s a morbid hilarity in all of it, a sense of the absurd. Which might explain why, in recent years, his work began to feel like the only key to understanding the profoundly Lynchian landscape of modern life.

Near the start of “Blue Velvet,” Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student who’s returned to his home in North Carolina, is walking through a vacant lot. He slows near a collection of debris in the grass, picking up a rock and tossing it. It’s a sunny day. Everything’s fine. But then, in the grass, he sees something.