
David Lynch’s most surprising, important quality? His hope
Opinion + AnalysisSociety + Culture
BY Joseph Earp 17 JAN 2025
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – the film that turned an outsider auteur into something approaching a genuine cultural sensation – is, even after all these years, a hard watch.
The film sets up its thesis almost immediately. A montage of quaint images of small-town life, all blue skies and white picket fences, is disrupted by tragedy – the father of the film’s hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) collapses in his yard, killed by a heart attack. The man’s dog laps at the hose clung in his dead, tight hands. And then Lynch’s camera, still exploring, does something both beautiful and terrible: it burrows under the soil, where a nightmarish cacophony of insects forage.
So there it is, Blue Velvet’s message – that beneath Americana, with its bright smiles and cups of coffee, lies horror. From that starting point, rape, torture and abuse abound, as Jeffrey’s voyeurism sends his path crashing into the orbit of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper, in one of cinema’s most terrifying performances, all gritted teeth and mummy issues). We watch Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) get tortured in various ways; we see Jeffrey beaten and humiliated. And perhaps most unsettlingly of all, we come to realise that the likes of Frank, a personification of pure evil, are more plentiful than we might ever want to believe. Even, if not especially, here, where the skies are blue.

The world is wild at heart and weird on top
Much has been made of this quality found in the films of Lynch, who died today after a battle with emphysema – the contrast between ethical virtue, and deep ethical horror. Throwing up these two disparate forces – good and evil – was the modus operandi of Lynch’s one-of-a-kind career.
Twin Peaks, his hit television show, unraveled the angelic exterior of murdered teenager Laura Palmer, and pit her against another of Lynch’s satanic figures, the supernatural drifter Bob. Wild at Heart, one of the more underrated films he ever made, plunged a loving young couple, Sailor and Lula, into an impossibly evil world. And The Elephant Man, a black-and-white muted howl of pain, saw a man with disabilities try to find hope amongst objectification and cruelty.

But what is not often discussed about Lynch is that he did find beauty, time and time again. Contrary to what some have written, Lynch’s veneer of smiles and blue skies wasn’t some ironic posturing, established merely to make the horror more horrifying. Other filmmakers have untangled the way that evil thrives in darkness, out of sight – that’s not what made Lynch special.
Lynch’s power – his genius, even – is that he believed fully in both of the forces that make the world what it is, the darkness and the light.
This is a rare sort of ethical dialectics: rare both in art, and in our personal lives. Believe too deeply in the evil of the world, and you will simply never get out of bed. Ignore that evil, and strive forward as though it isn’t there, and you will fall prey to an ignorance that will make you a poor ethical actor. The real trick in all things is to understand that truth, if we ever find it, exists in the middle of extremes.
Hence the model of the archetypal Lynch hero: Dale Cooper (MacLachlan, again), the handsome, profoundly odd detective hero of Twin Peaks. Dale has a goofy, almost unrepentant enthusiasm. He loves coffee; he loves pie; he loves the town of Twin Peaks. He’s all broad smiles, and dorky thumbs up, perpetually grinning to the small town residents that come to love him. But this optimism doesn’t exist in spite of the darkness of the world – it exists because of it.
That understanding is expressed through his deep affection for Laura Palmer, the dead young woman he never met. The more he learns about Laura, believed by the town to be the perfect all-American girl, the more he loves her, even as he comes to see the precise shape of her demons.

Lynch’s lesson is contained here. Cooper doesn’t choose to believe in the goodness of people at the expense of acknowledging their capacity for great harm. He understands that the world is built, in many ways, for cruelty to flourish; for abusers to thrive, for casual unkindness to go unremarked upon. And he also understands that, surprisingly, time and time again, human beings will decide to love each other.
The art life
This complicated optimism was also at the heart of Lynch’s deeply inspiring life outside of filmmaking. Like Cooper, Lynch was a famous lover of little treats, the kind of tiny slithers of goodness that aren’t just a distraction from the world – they are the world. There are countless memes of Lynch expounding the beauty of a good cup of coffee; enjoying two cookies and a Coke in the back seat of a car; and, perhaps most movingly of all, speaking lovingly of the importance of what he called “the art life.”
For Lynch, the art life was painting, thinking, and making things with your hands. “I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it”, Lynch said once, happily. There is horror in this world, but being an artist isn’t just an aesthetic choice – it’s an ethical one. Being an artist means being curious; looking; creating.
Rather than being swamped by the inexorable downward slide of humanity, the artistic life allows one to see the things that make us, at the end of the day, so blessed. So loved.

Blue Velvet contains that hope in its final scene. After taking a long drive through hell, the film wraps up not with an image of suffering or pain. Instead, one of its last shots is a robin sitting on a branch. A robin – that most ordinary of birds, so small as to be invisible, but a symbol, built up over the course of the film, representing love itself. “Maybe the robins are here,” Jeffrey says, cautiously. But, despite it all, they are.

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