This Is the Girl: David Lynch (1946 - 2025)

One night, when David Lynch was very young, he and his brother were playing in their quiet suburban neighborhood when a woman approached them out of the darkness. She was naked, and  crying, and bleeding from the mouth. 

“I’d never seen an adult woman naked,” Lynch later recalled. “And she had beautiful pale white skin… And she kinda came strangely… walking strangely across Shoshone and came into Park Circle Drive. And it seemed like she was sort of like a giant. And she came closer and closer, and my brother started to cry. Something was bad wrong with her. And I don’t know what happened, but I think she sat down on a curb, crying. But it was very mysterious, like we were seeing something otherworldly. And I wanted to do something for her, but I was little, I didn’t know what to do. And I don’t remember any more than that.” 

This one image seems to have been the genesis for nearly all of his work. Ever since Blue Velvet, where Kyle McLachlan watches in silent terror from a closet as Isabella Rossellini is raped in front of him, David Lynch has been telling this story: The beautiful, naked, victimized woman and the boy who sees her and learns that evil exists in the world.  

In the wake of Lynch’s death, some strikingly pointless social-media debates have broken out: Was Lynch one more Hollywood misogynist capitalizing off rape and violence against women? Or were the people raising these concerns a buch of dumb, hysterical girls who didn’t know how to think about Art? It’s not that the debate was completely pointless — I really enjoyed Lily Osler’s thoughts on “Fire Walk With Me,” which I am not linking to because I am not completely convinced that Bluesky lets you link to anything, or that it even exists as anything other than a mass hallucination — but for the most part, the debate was as reductive, repetitive and sexist as you would expect from a dynamic old enough to have its own electroclash song. 

The truth, I think, is that Lynch can’t really be processed in the terms of this strict binary. He was, from moment to moment and project to project, both a misogynist and a genius. He routinely moved back and forth over the line of identification vs. objectification in ways that make his work both deeply troubling and a profound source of catharsis for survivors — and, given that what you get out of art is at least half comprised of what you bring to it, it could be both things in the same moment, depending on who was looking.  

Having a take on Lynch is less important or useful than understanding the actual work as it unfolds in front of you. This story — the boy waiting in the dark, the woman walking out of it to greet him — provides one key.