Everything’s Coming Up Lynchian: Laura and Emily on David Lynch’s Influence

We’ve survived a year without David Lynch. Just barely. Though some magic is gone with no longer sharing the planet with Lynch, his influence remains–some good, some bad–as does the joy of digging deep into the work he left behind. In fact, doesn’t it feel like almost everything is being described as Lynchian these days?! What’s up with that? 

Laura Swanson and Emily Colucci are back with their conversational series, with a twist. In private, the twosome has been in a heated discussion about Lynch’s art, his ongoing influence, and what gets labeled as the Lynchian, inspired by Virginia Stroh’s Hurricane Ridge, the inaugural show of photographs and ceramics at Swanson Kuball’s new gallery space. So they decided to take the extensive chat public:

Emily Colucci: Increasingly, I’m beginning to feel that a lot of people don’t quite understand David Lynch’s aesthetics. Or at the very least, publicists and critics think they can label anything as Lynchian and get away with it. And it’s happening in all creative fields. Last summer, while in Montreal, I swung by the Fantasia Film Festival, choosing Julie Pacino’s I Live Here Now (2024), due to its description as “a vibrant and nightmarish psychodrama that reverberate [sic] with echoes of David Lynch, Dario Argento, and the Coen brothers.” Sold! Plus, there was the added bonus of Sheryl Lee, aka the ONE, aka Laura Palmer, featuring in the film itself (amusingly as the overbearing mother of protagonist Rose’s scum partner, played by over-fillered comedian Matt Rife). It could have been the salmon-scented onigiri the girl sitting next to me was devouring, but I mostly felt annoyed by the film, mainly because Pacino tried way too hard to make the film stilted, emotionally removed, and quirky. (Of note: the Argento description was also incorrect because people make similar errors about his aesthetics. Any colorful neon wash = Argento). That stilted, quirky tone–which reaches to the level of irony for some– is, for many, the core of the Lynchian on-screen. But, I don’t know if you could point to anything Lynch did that’s actually LIKE that! I don’t want to just pick on Pacino’s movie, which did attempt to interrogate trauma in a way I could tell meant a lot to the filmmaker, so I’ll note there are other examples, such as Under the Silver Lake (2018). There’s a self-conscious try-hard-ness to these movies that Lynch doesn’t have. Have you been annoyed at what is labeled as Lynchian but doesn’t quite nail it? What do you think they’re missing?

Laura Swanson: They are missing David Lynch himself. Calling something that was not created by Lynch “Lynchian” should be illegal. Most things I have seen labeled that way are not even close. Lynchian was overused as a descriptor for last year’s The Chair Company, which seemed odd to me because it undercuts both Lynch’s work and, especially, Tim Robinson’s absurdist humor and his ongoing obsession with the banality of corporate and domestic life. In other cases, the term gets applied to tropey homages to the iconic scenarios and visuals Lynch made famous, which end up feeling like parody or are outright parody. I swear Happy Gilmore (1996) is an unexpected Lynchian tribute. Happy’s grandma is played by Frances Bay, who also portrayed Mrs. Tremond in Twin Peaks. A short-statured man appears in the dreamlike “happy place” visions, recalling the Man from Another Place, while Mr. Larson, Happy’s boss, is strikingly tall, like the Giant. The Lynch inspired video for “Wishes” by Beach House, directed by Eric Wareheim and starring Ray Wise (Mr. Leland Palmer himself), ultimately reminds me far more of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle than anything that actually belongs to the Lynchian universe. Everything feels mixed up when it comes to Lynch, and it’s worth sorting out what makes him difficult to imitate yet so formative for artists.

Lynch’s work is too often reduced to familiar adjectives like “quirky,” “surreal,” or “weird,” flattening what makes it distinctive. This shorthand has contributed to a confused and fairly dismissive mainstream understanding of his work. I worry that being Lynchian is seen as a cliché, to the detriment of his legacy. Sometimes people misunderstand something that feels strange as being random. Nothing about Lynch is random. The above BTS video from Twin Peaks: The Return illustrates how he enacts the detailed vision he has in mind, and it is fascinating to watch him direct. He knows exactly what he wants and explains it clearly and empathetically to his actors and crew. As repeated in his memoir Room to Dream, his collaborators consistently describe having fun and completely trusting him. I cannot name another artist who combines such generosity and intention and is as beloved as Lynch.

Emily: I’m certainly guilty of felonious use of “Lynchian.” Part of my negative reaction to anything and everything being called Lynchian now is that, deep down, I know I contributed to the problem! Lynchian is a better term for real-life observations than sticking it to another piece of art: the curtain rods lined with Beanie Babies I saw in Fairmount, Indiana, the birthplace of James Dean. Lynchian! That waking Midwest fever dream actually relates to what I’d define as Lynchian now, which I think has changed as I’ve gotten older and less invested in the dark part of his films in some kind of edgelord way. I see the Lynchian as a genuine understanding and sincere love for the inherent strangeness of Americans. Think of those lovably silly interactions between Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) and Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) in Twin Peaks or the film I’d consider Lynch’s masterpiece, The Straight Story. Both are imbued with a real sincerity and warmth, for as goofy or “weird” as they can be. Much has been made of the darkness in Lynch’s films–or the “red ants” crawling beneath the beautiful facade of America, whether the Pacific Northwest or Los Angeles. But, if you look at his quote about the ants:

“My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree, there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow – and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.” 

The ants don’t erase the corresponding charm of the beautiful, idyllic world around them.

Laura: I guess Freud was right. We are all trying to chase what made us happy, or terrified, as children. While many of Lynch’s films are dark, people either do not know or forget that he was also very much invested in portraying comedy, connection, and innocence, and in promoting peace and happiness. The Straight Story, Twin Peaks, and What Did Jack Do? are prime examples of how that warmth and humanity appear in his work. The Straight Story approaches its characters with such sensitivity that it feels closer to a meditation on compassion than anything traditionally considered Lynchian. 

And as you mentioned, with Lucy and Andy in Twin Peaks, they are among the few truly guileless people in town. Even Lucy’s affair with Dick Tremaine, which was not exactly innocent, was handled with such levity that their interactions verge on slapstick. Even their son, Wally, DNA test pending, is hilariously portrayed by Michael Cera as a Marlon Brando send-up. It also feels fitting that Lucy and Andy ultimately emerge as the heroes at the end of the series. The same could be said for Dougie Jones. His presence causes goodness to happen around him. The poor become rich. Gangsters become caring. Perhaps that is why I think Twin Peaks is Lynch’s masterpiece, because its darkness is balanced with an equal amount of light.

Emily: What makes The Return masterful is that it rolls together every other strength in his previous work into one 18-hour project. That being said, there’s definitely less of a balance of light and dark in his Los Angeles-based films, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. Maybe that’s because Los Angeles is a deeply cursed city. It’s the worst city I’ve ever been to. I love it. Mulholland Drive has the lightness of Betty Elms’s wide-eyed Hollywood dreams, but that naivete is so doomed that I wouldn’t say it’s light either. Maybe Inland Empire comes closest with its transcendent ending, as Lost Girl, who spends most of the three-hour film crying in a room, makes her escape to Chrystabell’s “Polish Poem.” That scene always makes me cry, and I cannot for the life of me explain why exactly, because that movie is so non-linear it’s not as if it’s a plot point that pulls at the heartstrings. Really, it’s that Inland Empire touches the sublime.

Laura: Maybe it is because I have been in psychoanalysis for over a year and obsessed with the dream state in general, but what I understand Lynch to be doing in his films is extracting and making real the abstract images we see in our minds, whether while awake or in the unconscious while sleeping. Lynch has said that he views both himself and the audience as “the dreamer who dreams, and lives in the dream.” If we take seriously what Lynch has been insisting on from the beginning, things start to make much more sense. 

Last year, when I saw Memory Film (2012), a short in which Lynch tries to remember what Van Gogh’s self-portrait looks like, his modus operandi became clear. The film illustrates how the brain constantly fragments and reconciles images and memories floating in our consciousness in order to make sense of them as a whole. Watching Lynch’s films feels less like following a story and more like inhabiting a mental space, where images defy linear narratives and instead convey emotional states. That process feels closely aligned with psychoanalysis itself, where fragments, symbols, and repetitions slowly reveal something coherent over time.

Across all three seasons of Twin Peaks, each episode can be seen as a progression of Laura’s dreams, in which her unconscious attempts to come to terms with her real-life trauma and abuse. The interstitial shots of cracking and hissing electrical lines seen throughout the series read as a metaphor for how the currents in our brains generate images. Much like a recurring dream that grows increasingly complex over time, Lynch keeps returning to the same ideas in Twin Peaks, abstracting them again and again and pushing them as far creatively as they can go. Not so different from his paintings, if you ask me.

For instance, in The Return, we are introduced to Jack Rabbit’s Palace as a secret place buried in the woods that Bobby Briggs used to hike to with his father. That site later reappears in the Las Vegas storyline as a whimsical sculpture in the plaza of Lucky 7 Insurance, where Dougie Jones works. Neither of these sequences depicts reality. Instead, they function as separate dreams of Laura’s, in which Jack Rabbit’s Palace is reshaped into a place of safety instead of the site where her own father harmed her. Rather than reading the sculpture as a random surrealist gesture, I see it as Laura’s mind collaging memories, retaining the original shape of Jack Rabbit’s Palace while transforming it into a cherry pie topped with an excess of whipped cream.

So the plaza sculpture could be dismissed as one of Lynch’s bizarre ideas, or it could be understood as an illustration of the abstract connections Laura’s unconscious mind makes while healing from trauma. Also in The Return, the Arm reappears as a freaky tree-like body topped with a pulsing brain, electrical synapses firing. Random nightmare monster? Or a fragmented memory of a familiar but seemingly innocuous sight from the motel her father took her to? Lynch lingers on the motel’s parking lot island, planted with a leafless tree and a lamp post, electrical lines emanating behind it, for a reason. These are not easy or comforting ideas he is confronting, so it may feel safer to dismiss him as simply “weird” (or worse, to be afraid to fund his films). But doing so overlooks his determination to portray both the darkest and most beautiful parts of life and the extraordinary power of the mind to transform them.

Emily: I never thought about Twin Peaks being Laura’s dream, though, of course, Lynch’s primary form has always been in capturing the dream state, from Eraserhead, a living nightmare of sexual terror, to Inland Empire, which is when he came the closest to fully replicating the dream state. Inland Empire is my favorite Lynch film, and part of the reason is that I felt as if it broke down my need for narrative coherence. I learned to just buckle up and take the ride! And what a pay-off. I’ve been attached to it ever since.

But in terms of Twin Peaks, I actually don’t want to think of it as Laura’s dream, though I certainly see what you’re saying about her way of processing trauma. I’m closer to Lynch in that I want to preserve the mystery rather than explain it somewhat easily. As he said, “The more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is!” I like the idea of taking Twin Peaks at face value (at least to some extent). I WANT there to be a Black Lodge. There’s more magic in that to me. Isn’t real life, in some ways, just as wild as the dream state sometimes? Moments and images that repeat at strange intervals. That eternal return of themes? Maybe I’M the dreamer who lives inside the dream! And actually, I think it’s his confidence to allow these spaces for interpretation that makes his work much different from others vying for the Lynchian label. He distinctly does not want to provide answers for his audience but leaves it with us, which is why I can return to his work over and over and over again through the years and get something different.

But what about visual art? Thinking about this conversation, I did a quick Google and found this Artsy article, slammed out for mourning clicks after Lynch’s death last year. While some of their Lynchian choices I could see, like Tony Oursler, the presence of Nicola Tyson’s enormous, comically hideous paintings, which was one of the worst shows I saw all last year, is enough to make me dismiss this article entirely. To not seem like a total downer, there have been a lot of successful group exhibitions over the years based on Lynch, from long-gone Bushwick gallery Interstate Project’s The Black Lodge to Essex Flowers Gallery’s closet-sized AXxoN N: A Collective Commentary on David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Where do you see Lynch’s influence in the visual arts? 

Laura: As you mentioned, in group shows or critical writing, Lynch is invoked as a catchall descriptor, a kind of acronym for a dark vibe, without much attention to what his work is actually doing. I will admit that I did this with Swanson Kuball’s first show, Room to Dream. The title was inspired by his memoir, and I saw the work depicting the dream state in different ways across the exhibition. While the show stands on its own, perhaps I cited Lynch as a familiar entry point for the viewer.

Two pieces come to mind, though, that resist the tenuous connections curators and writers have often relied upon and instead honor Lynch’s work directly and earnestly. The first is an artist and work you have written about before: Christopher Culver’s Laura (2023). It is a gorgeous, rich charcoal and pastel drawing that places the viewer in the audience of a theater, watching the beautiful and tragic ending of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me when Laura Palmer’s angel appears. If you have seen the film, you know how devastating that scene is, and it is so nice to see how Culver’s drawing operates as a sincere tribute to Lynch, and to the profound way his work has affected both artists and audiences. 

Still (2019) by Luc Tuymans also stands out to me, though in a quite different way. The painting depicts the Cowboy in a still from Mulholland Drive and is less an homage to Lynch than a conceptual starting point. Many of Tuymans’s paintings are interpreted as expressing a distrust of mediated images and historical memory, but they do so in subtle and oblique ways. That approach is central to how Still operates. In a Zoom interview, the artist explains that he wanted to create paintings that felt both new and vintage, and, in the case of Still, distinctly Western.

What interested Tuymans about Lynch’s cowboy is that he is not a “real” cowboy, but a depiction of a performing cowboy. He points out that the figure is dressed like Tom Mix, the American actor and star of many silent Western films from the early twentieth century. In this way, Tuymans is responding to the same idea Lynch is working with in Mulholland Drive, not reality itself, but a mythic version of an image that already exists in our collective imagination. A hint that his first appearance in the film is not to be trusted. Later, we discover why: it was a dream.

Emily: There have been so many Lynch-related group shows that it makes me curious when and where the first ever was! It does feel like a very distinctly millennial concept. And despite there being so many over time, I’m a sucker for them nonetheless! I’m trying to think of other sincere tributes. One that sticks out in my mind from that Essex Flowers Gallery Inland Empire tribute exhibition was a small expressionistic painting of Lynch’s quintessentially eccentric advocacy for Laura Dern’s (sadly not to be) Academy Award nomination, sitting outside in a director’s chair, chain-smoking, with Georgia, the cow. I’m not sure who the artist was, and I only have a very fuzzy pic I snapped as it was way up on the wall in a salon-style hanging. It’s sadly not in any of the installation photos either. But the painting stuck with me for seven years, as it’s the only work I can recall from the show. I could research it more, but somehow my hazy memory is very…ahem…Lynchian. The answer is hovering just outside me. Part of the reason that painting called to me, beyond just the amusing image of Lynch and a cow, is that tributes to Lynch so rarely feature the man himself, even though he was also so iconic-looking. That swoop of grey hair! I’m resurrecting an ancient meme here, but I’m sure you’ve seen the comparison of Lynch’s hair to classic works of art?

Laura: I had never seen that meme before now. But now that you mention his hair, I have noticed that Maurizio Cattelan, the art world’s resident bad boy, has been fashioning his graying hair in a very Lynchian way. Quit copying him!

Emily: It’s funny, though. Despite the many Lynch-inspired artworks, none–or none that I know of—directly reference his OWN visual art. Even formally, there is a precision to both the Tuymans and Culver works you raise, whereas Lynch’s artwork is a delirious, unsettling mess, whether his black watercolors or his thickly rendered paintings, done with deeply hideous, muddy colors and water-logged Band-Aids like they were dredged from a pool drain. His paintings feature these sculptural, creepy figures and unsettling non-sequitur phrases, most reminiscent of the fragmented lyrics in his music like “Crazy Clown Time” (“Buddy, he screamed so loud he SPIT!”). Part of the reason most Lynch-derived art ignores his own art might be that it’s just alienating. Even I, a devoted fan, sometimes have trouble connecting with his paintings, though that, in itself, is a feat I can’t help but admire. The watercolors are more accessible because the colors he chooses for his paintings are viscerally repulsive. Puke colors! Still, there is so much crossover between his cinematic and visual art, I remember my friend Anna, who worked with Lynch, telling me the Giant levitating in Episode 8 of The Return came directly from an artwork done years before.

Laura: I admit that I have not spent as much time with his paintings and sculptures as I have with his films, for no other reason than my own apprehension. At first glance, his paintings scare the hell out of me. But I am setting that fear aside and beginning to really appreciate them through the same lens as his films, as layered abstractions of recurring images that he pushes as far as he can take them. What strikes me first about his paintings is how childlike they are, and how freely they break rules. You can see his mistakes, areas worked and reworked almost to the point of obliteration, handwritten text or tiny cut letters glued on like a ransom note, rudimentary images of airplanes, ants, and houses, mutilated bodies emerging from the canvas in relief, and speech bubbles. Like his films, he is trying out ideas and attempting to visualize them, and while the end result is something haunting for the viewer, there is an innocence to his approach. The paintings illustrate the fond and splintered memories of his childhood.

His short films are an interesting bridge between his paintings and his feature films. Many experiment with animation, collage, and sound, which I see as ways of bringing his paintings to life. One I think about a lot is Ant Head (2018), which is visceral and frankly pretty gross. What makes it compelling to me is that the idea came from an everyday situation in his life. He once had a problem with ants in his kitchen, and instead of exterminating them, he decided to make something out of the predicament. He sculpted a small head out of cheese and turkey, mounted it on a stick, and filmed a frenzy of ants devouring it. It is definitely disgusting, but his original intention is strangely charming and funny because it is not necessarily depraved. Lynch was not trying to be scary. He was trying to make art, without imposing limits on what that can look like. (It just happened to look scary AF.)

Emily: Ant Head reminds me of the A Spineless Chicken Shit (Moving Sullenly Through Its Own Desolate Environment), a poster that I recently bought from Sacred Bones Records’ Lynch warehouse sale, which I also coveted from his estate auction. Unlike Ant Head, I have absolutely no context for it, but it’s also berserkly charming somehow. 

Ant Head, of course, comes out of the original photo on the cover of Julee Cruise’s Voice of Love. In considering our conversation, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the genre that has been the most successful overall at channelling David Lynch’s inspiration and aesthetics is music. Of course, there are the musicians lucky enough to collaborate with Lynch on screen and off, like Julee Cruise, Chrystabell, Rebekah Del Rio, Dean Hurley, and Chromatics. And his own music, which, like his artwork, is very underanalyzed. But there are artists who never collaborated with Lynch that do inspired takes on the Lynchian sound. Some are more direct interpretations like Xiu Xiu’s Eraserhead performances and Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks album, while others take their names directly from Lynch’s oeuvre, like French doom jazz band, The Dale Cooper Quartet. Then, there are the bands and musicians that just have Lynchian vibes: Lana Del Rey, particularly at her most doomed Americana torch-singer eras of Ultraviolence and Honeymoon, evokes that same beauty, yet a subtle undercurrent of darkness, as Lynch does. Not to mention, she also has a song called “Wild at Heart”! Ethel Cain’s use of the same synths as Angelo Badalamenti in Twin Peaks gives a Laura Palmer theme to Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, along with her Perverts, which I see similarities with the ambient experiments that Lynch did with Dean Hurley for his The Air is on Fire exhibition in Paris (apparently Lynch DID listen to Perverts, which was released just days before he died). Oh yeah, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Laura Palmer’s scream in The Weeknd’s “The Hills” or Sky Ferreira’s spin on Laura Palmer for “Night Time, My Time.”  I can’t exactly articulate why music works more than film or artwork that draws on Lynch, but perhaps it’s that music can evoke that dreamy mood more easily than with visuals. 

Laura: Whenever someone says, “Have you heard Xiu Xiu’s cover of Twin—,” I am like, stop right there. I have heard it, and I do not like it. To me, their album of Twin Peaks covers feels hollowed out. The beauty, the hope, and the revelations of Angelo Badalamenti’s original score are gone. There is no balance between light and dark, only darkness. Xiu Xiu’s version of “Laura Palmer’s Theme” literally sounds like a bunch of forks and knives clanging around in a dish rack. While I am sure the covers are well-intentioned as an homage, the result feels stripped of emotional complexity and is genuinely difficult to listen to. Badalamenti’s soundtrack is full of melodrama and jazzy noir, and is inextricably tied to such iconic and heartfelt imagery that, without it, I am left wondering what the point is.

Emily: Hahaha! I love Xiu Xiu’s Twin Peaks album. Their version of “Falling” makes me want to stick a fork in a light socket like Dougie Jones (in a good way), but you have to enjoy the cacophony of forks and knives clanking around, which is one of my favorite genres. I’d argue Lynch’s too! Have you heard his Thought Gang project with Badalamenti? That’s a toughie for me, and I LIKE punishing listening experiences! 

Laura: Speaking of Lynchian music, I want to point out how important the Roadhouse scenes are in The Return, and how much meaning is packed into what might initially seem like a routine ending to each episode. During my first watch, and even during rewatches, I did not pay close attention to the music. I assumed it was simply Lynch showcasing some of his favorite bands while soap opera-style drama and cryptic conversations unfolded in the booths and on the dance floor.

During my most recent rewatch this past summer, I went down a Reddit rabbit hole, reading other people’s analyses of the show. That is when I learned that every song performed at the Roadhouse speaks directly to Laura’s experience, her dreams, and her attempts to break free from her trauma. I also learned that Ruth Radelet, the lead singer of Chromatics, was wearing a blonde wig meant to resemble Laura Palmer’s hair, and that she was wearing the same shirt Alice Tremond wears at the very end of the series. Alice Tremond, in turn, is wearing the same Laura Palmer wig. I was floored. What else have I missed!?

This was not just David Lynch putting on bands he liked. He was using the Roadhouse performances as another abstracted narrative device, layering meaning into the music and embedding visual clues and dialogue that echo across the entire series. He made every minute of airtime matter. I had always known this about him, but this time it struck me that he was a rare and thoughtful artist who took every opportunity, down to the smallest detail, seriously.

Emily: I can tell you went through a r/twinpeaks phase, as they enjoy trying to explain every little bit of the series. It’s like r/EthelCain fans’ autistic fixation on the lore. For both, I think they pick up things that aren’t necessarily there, which is fine as it’s really up to audience interpretation anyway. All to say, I could have sworn Ruth had that fringy hair before, but you’re right, maybe not quite so Laura Palmer femme fatale platinum blonde. I was obsessed with Chromatics for years before The Return, which made it feel like Lynch mined a bit of my subconscious for that scene, along with “James is cool, he’s always been cool.” Despite all the James haters out there, I’m firmly pro-James, even his Season Two-ruining motorcycle ride to cancellation AND “Just You.” Fuck the “Just You” haters! 

I was so struck by Chromatics’ appearance in the Roadhouse that it made me feel like I might just see myself in that crowd à la Jack Torrance in his 1921 party pic in The Shining. There is an out-of-time quality to the Roadhouse that I find really appealing. I never thought the musical performances were random. In all his movies and TV shows, Lynch uses music to further the mood, even if abstracted. Granted, some were more effective than others. That Nine Inch Nails appearance right before the nuclear bomb test?! Incredible. Rebekah Del Rio’s “No Stars” in her zigzag Black Lodge dress? Amazing. But, I can’t say I was that moved by the Au Revoir Simone or the lady who sang about the Wild Wild West.

Laura: Jumping in for a second to say that if you listen to the lyrics of “Wild West,” the song could easily be about Laura Palmer deciding to finally run away from her abusive home life. Yes, I am still deep in the analytical rabbit hole…and loving it!

Emily: It’s more so that when I saw that episode on the big screen at Metrograph last year, the song struck me as one of the only ones that seemed dated! Which is a rarity in Lynch’s work. Julee Cruise’s “The World Spins” is timeless. It makes me feel as if I’m falling through space, faster and faster. More than almost any filmmaker, though, Lynch really understood how music can articulate a mood better than any visuals or dialogue can. Rebekah Del Rio’s lip-synced Silencio performance of “Llorando” in Mulholland Drive is one of the greatest scenes put to screen, as is this scene in Inland Empire set to his own “Ghost of Love”:

Independent from the many times I’ve seen Inland Empire, I watch this scene on YouTube over and over again. Strange…what love does….When the Lost Girl asks, “Do you want to see?” I do! I do! Actually, much of what I associate with David Lynch is contained within this clip: the dreamscape, the industrial architecture, the LAMPS, the woman in trouble, the swooping sound at the beginning of “Ghost of Love” that sounds like a ceiling fan…I can’t look at a ceiling fan, a red curtain, certain lamps, anthropomorphized bunnies, or a skipping record player without thinking of David. 

Alongside these singular objects and images, we’ve also talked a lot privately about Lynch’s fixation on beauty, especially in natural landscapes, whether the mountains and dense, lush forests of the town of Twin Peaks, which are recalled (almost directly in some cases) in Virginia Stroh’s photographs in Hurricane Ridge, or the sprawling Midwestern cornfields of The Straight Story. Landscape for Lynch can be both breathtakingly beautiful or eerily ominous. Though I find the ominous landscapes for Lynch often include the man-made. I always think of the shot of the waving stoplight and, of course, the timber mill in Twin Peaks or the seemingly abandoned buildings in snow-covered Poland in Inland Empire. But, we also know that Lynch loved his factories, so perhaps I’m projecting foreboding on what he finds beautiful (or beautiful IS foreboding). So what IS it that screams Lynch aesthetics to you?

Laura: Location is a big one. I could not fully appreciate the beauty of the cinematography Lynch captured in the Pacific Northwest until I experienced it myself. During the pandemic, my husband Greg Kuball and I drove through Washington state, including Spokane, where David Lynch grew up, and Snoqualmie, where Twin Peaks was filmed. I was not prepared for just how majestic, romantic, and melancholic these places feel, much like they appear in the series. What stayed with me most was how imposing it all felt. You become aware of how small you are in relation to the world, and how little control you actually have. That realization is surprisingly refreshing and grounding. It may have been my first real encounter with the sublime.

The Return, especially, is filled with stunning images of Snoqualmie’s surrounding terrain. Enabled by UHD cameras, drones, and Showtime’s generous budget, the series showcases looming mountain ranges encased in fog, dense mythic forests, and rivers and waterfalls rushing with force. While the nature scenes in the original series were largely used as bumpers, as most of it was shot on a set in Los Angeles, much of what unfolds in The Return now takes place within the landscape itself. Dr. Jacoby lives off the grid in the woods. Miriam Sullivan’s trailer is nestled in a valley between mountains. Gersten and Steven have a very bad trip at the base of a giant tree. Having experienced this environment firsthand, I began to understand and appreciate Lynch even more. How does an artist capture something so beautiful and powerful without losing its visceral impact?

In May 2025, my good friend and artist Virginia Stroh shared a few 35mm photographs on Instagram from a trip to visit friends in Oregon and Washington. Seeing them brought back happy memories of my pandemic drive and reminded me how vividly David Lynch captured those same places. I was so excited to revisit that landscape through her photos that I decided to binge-watch all 18 episodes of The Return for the sixth time, analyzing how Lynch depicted the terrain and comparing it closely to hers. Both capture the same landscape, but perhaps with different emotional registers. Stroh’s photographs place you on the ground, hiding behind a tree in a crowded, prickly forest, standing at the base of a fog-covered mountain at the break of dawn, or walking up a steep hill marked by a jaunty diagonal line of evergreens. To me, they convey a gentle sense of solitude and discovery. You can almost feel the fog and smell the pine in the air. There is a dark, gothic quality to them, but they also feel calming and refreshing.

Around the same time I saw Virginia Stroh’s photos, Greg and I were planning to move Swanson Kuball out of our apartment and into a nearby warehouse to try our hand at running a commercial space. I envisioned the new gallery as an interpretation of David Lynch’s Thinking Room. Created for Salone del Mobile Milano in 2024, Lynch presented Thinking Room as a participatory experience into his own creative practice, sitting in an empty room and thinking of ideas, but also giving the viewer something powerful to look at. But unlike his installation’s super dark and dramatic design, I wanted to create a serene, carefully composed environment featuring work made by our friends. I imagined a calm and comforting space filled with natural light where people could spend time with the work and hopefully leave feeling rejuvenated or inspired. Stroh’s photographs were a no-brainer for the inaugural show. Basically, I just wanted a place where I could look at them every day.

Emily: I actually see similar emotional registers in some Stroh’s photos as Lynch’s landscapes. Maybe it’s because I tend to look at great expanses of American wilderness and think about just how many people die in National Parks (300+ a year!). But apart from just the overall moody, foggy gothic atmosphere, there are some more blatantly ominous elements in Stroh’s photos, like the singed tree in the foreground of the Untitled photograph of Hurricane Ridge. There’s a hint of violence right in front of your face (the result of a dropped cig that went up? A lightning strike? A pyromaniac?), but it could also be overlooked in favor of the grandeur of the rest of the landscape. It also gestures at the tenuous fragility of that beautiful landscape, a vulnerability that I think Lynch was very aware of, too. Not that the majority of Stroh’s show is that dark. There’s a lot of play there, especially with the ceramics.

Laura: Yes! Because the renovation of the space was going to take six months and we had already decided on the photographs for the show, I encouraged Stroh to experiment within her ceramic practice and shared Lynch’s anthropomorphized lamps and his depiction of ashtrays as potential sources of inspiration. In turn, she shared artists she had been looking at, including Valentine Schlegel and JB Blunk, sculptors who played with transforming bodily and otherworldly forms into functional objects.

What Stroh created for the show really surprised me. She arrived with three muscular and voluptuous stoneware vessels that shift between recognizable forms. They remind you of something, but you are not quite sure what. From different angles, you might see a heart valve, a Louboutin heel, a tree branch, a phonograph, a woman’s curvy hips, or a puckered flower mouth. Like Lynch, I see these unusual new works as having an innocent approach. Stroh was open to pushing beyond her comfort zone and found inspiration in artists who also resisted convention. Too many artists stay firmly within their wheelhouse. Playing around and having fun is something I love to see artists do, as it shows in the work.

Stroh’s most direct tribute to David Lynch is Ashtray Trio (2025). Instead of the lonely, overfilled ashtrays often seen in Lynch’s films, which to me symbolize desperation and reference his own habit, she, a non-smoker herself, created a communal one. I see it as both a play on the midcentury table ashtray and a conceptual gesture toward community. It makes me think about the recent return to smoking, and a growing indifference toward health or longevity in the face of an increasingly bleak future. Sarah Palmer embodies that extremity, chain-smoking alone through what she could not confront. But with Stroh’s ashtray, at least you have three friends to hasten the end with. Like her vessels, I love that the work is surprising and original, but also that it reads as a reflection on shared vice as a form of coping, and the truth that if we are going down, we would rather not go down alone.

Emily: Would be a perfect pairing with Mary-Kate Olson’s communal cig centerpieces at her wedding! Charli xcx may have had something similar at her wedding, too. When we first started talking about Lynch and Stroh’s photos, you pointed out the huge wall-sized print of presumably Twin Peaks in Gordon Cole’s office in Fire Walk with Me, an interior design choice echoed in the giant print of the nuclear bomb test in The Return. I’ll admit, I can’t look at Stroh’s photos now without thinking of that FBI office decor. It’s made me think about how Lynch uses visual art within his films. I’m also reflecting on the framed image of the hideously floral wallpapered room in Laura’s bedroom in Fire Walk with Me. So basically, what do you think THAT’S all about? 

Laura: I sort of see both iterations of Gordon Cole’s office as precursors to Lynch’s installation, Thinking Room. Much like the large photograph of a nuclear bomb hanging behind Cole’s desk in The Return, the throne-like chair in the Thinking Room faces a giant lightbox displaying an archival black-and-white photograph of a factory billowing thick black smoke. The chair itself includes compartments for markers and paper, inviting the viewer to sit, think, draw, or write down ideas. It is both conceptual and functional, and also kind of funny to me, as Lynch seems to be saying at the same time, “Take a look at this! Isn’t this nuts?”

In his memoir, family and friends describe Lynch’s real thinking room at home as a simple concrete box, empty except for a chair. In the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016), you catch glimpses of him there, smoking and enjoying his solitude. Like the ants origin story, the Thinking Room comes directly from his private life, pushed as far as possible to create a profound experience for the viewer, much like his films. His work stays with you in an unsettling way, reminding you that darkness is not something to avoid but something to contend with. At the same time, it makes room for beauty, humor, and tenderness. He understood that both are inseparable parts of life and was not afraid to show us. We are lucky to have what he made. Few artists have given us as much.

Emily: Truly. I had never actually SEEN the Thinking Room before we started talking. Even as a superfan who feels like I’ve somehow digested everything there is to consume from Lynch, there’s still so much out there to discover and then, as we’ve done here, geek out over.