There’s a sort of evil out there,” says Sheriff Truman in an episode of David Lynch’s iconic TV series Twin Peaks.

That line gets to the heart of the work of the filmmaker, whose family announced his death on January 16, 2025. Lynch’s films and TV series reflected the dark, ominous, often bizarre underbelly of American culture — one increasingly out of the shadows today.

As someone who teaches film noir and horror, I often think about the ways American cinema holds up a mirror to society.

Lynch was a master at this.Many of Lynch’s films, such as 1986’s Blue Velvet and 1997’s Lost Highway, can be unsparing and graphic, with imagery that was described by critics as “disturbing” and “all chaos” upon their release.

But beyond those bewildering effects, Lynch was on to something.

Writer-director David Lynch, who made iconic films such as Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and pioneering TV series such as Twin Peaks, died on January 15. His work exposed the rot at the heart of American culture

His images of corruption, violence and toxic masculinity ring all too familiar in America today.

Take Blue Velvet. The film focuses on a naive college student, Jeffrey Beaumont, whose idyllic suburban life, framed with white picket fences, is turned inside out when he finds a human ear on the edge of a road. This grisly discovery draws him into the orbit of a violent sociopath, Frank Booth, and an alluring lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens, whom Booth sadistically torments while holding her child and husband — whose ear, it turns out, was the one Beaumont had found — hostage.

Beaumont nonetheless finds himself perversely attracted to Vallens and descends deeper into the shadowy world lurking beneath his hometown — a world of smoke-filled bars and drug dens frequented by Booth and an array of freakish characters, including pimps, addicts and a corrupt detective.

Booth’s haunting line, “Now it’s dark”, serves as a potent refrain.

The corruption, perversion and violence depicted in Blue Velvet are indeed extreme. But the acts Booth perpetrates also recall the stories of sexual abuse that have emerged from organisations including the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts.

As the exposure of such crimes continue to pile up, they become less an aberration but a dire warning of something that’s deeply ingrained in our culture.

These evils are sensational and appalling, and there’s an impulse to perceive them as existing outside of our realities, perpetrated by people who aren’t like us. What Twin Peaks, Lynch’s hit TV series, and Blue Velvet do effectively is tell viewers that those hidden worlds, where venality and cruelty reside, can be found just around the corner, in places that we might see but tend to ignore.

And then there are the uncanny and eerie worlds depicted in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. The characters in those searing films seem to live in parallel realities governed by good and evil.

Lost Highway begins with a jazz musician, Fred Madison, being convicted of killing his wife. He claims, however, to have no memory of the crime. Exploring the theme of alternate worlds, Lynch thrusts Madison into an illusory realm, inhabited by killers, drug dealers and pornographers, by merging his identity into that of young mechanic named Pete Dayton. In doing so, Lynch combines the worlds of “normality” and perversity into one.

In the 1990s, artists such as Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, whose music is included on the official soundtrack of Lost Highway, also confronted audiences with images of decadence and social decay, which were inspired by his own disturbing experiences in Hollywood and the music industry.

These dark themes have since been personified in rich and powerful men like Sean “Diddy” Combs, Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein who, for years, skated along the surface of high society with their perversions hidden from the public.

In his 2001 film, Mulholland Drive, Lynch turns his attention to Hollywood and the wretchedness that seems baked into its very nature.

A wide-eyed and innocent aspiring actress named Betty Elms arrives in Los Angeles with visions of stardom. Her struggle to achieve success — one that ends in depression and death — is certainly tragic. But it’s also not very surprising, given that she was trying to make it in a corrupt system that all too often bestows its rewards on the undeserving, or those who are willing to compromise their morals.

As with so many who go to Hollywood with big dreams only to find that fame is beyond their reach, Elms is unprepared for an industry so consumed with exploitation and corruption. Her fate mimics that of the women who, desperate for stardom, ended up falling into the trap set by Harvey Weinstein.

Lynch’s death comes at a time when America seems to be hurtling toward an ever-darker future. Perhaps it’s one foretold by politicians turning a deaf ear to acts of sexual assault, tolerating the vilification of victims, or even bragging that they can get away with murder.

Lynch’s vital body of work warns that the cruelty of such people isn’t really what we should fear most. It is, instead, those who laugh, cheer or simply turn away — faint responses that enable and empower such behaviours, giving them an acceptable place in the world.

When Lynch’s films were first released, they often appeared as surreal, funhouse mirror reflections of society. Today, they speak of profound and terrible truths we can’t ignore.

The writer is a Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver in the US

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 26th, 2025