“The whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” — Lula Fortune in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart

Although I could write endlessly about Twin Peaks, that wasn’t how I was introduced to the work of David Lynch. The first time I experienced his genius was when my high school friends and I rented Mulholland Drive based simply on the DVD cover from Blockbuster. Firmly in our “pretentious film snob” era, we were drawn in by the photo of Naomi Watts (who starred in I Heart Huckabees, a movie we loved to debate at length), the cover’s vague description of the plot, and the bold “WINNER! Best Director – Cannes Film Festival” covering an eighth of the back cover design.

Sprawled out on the floor in my friend J’s parents’ house, we watched most of the film in abject confusion, constantly pausing to ask each other questions and going back to rewatch scenes we couldn’t parse. We didn’t possess nearly enough film (or life) knowledge to follow the film in the way it’s meant to be followed, yet we stuck with it. As we watched and paused and asked questions, I was immediately struck by the queerness of the film, of course, and the incongruity — the ways that dreamlike sequences bled into the lived reality of the characters, the strange coincidences, and the humor. In Mulholland Drive, the world of Hollywood is a nightmarish place where people take advantage of others, jealousy pushes people to the brink, and nothing feels coherent. But in this world, we also witness hysterical people engaging in hilarious behavior: the hitman Joe (Mark Pellegrino) killing two people because he botched the original hit, Dan (Patrick Fischler) fainting and dying when the “monster” of his dream turns out to be “real,” Adam (Justin Theroux) getting denigrated by his wife (Lori Heuring) while her lover (Billy Ray Cyrus) empathizes with Adam after he catches them in bed together, and the Castigliane brothers (Angelo Badalamenti and Dan Hedaya) derailing a serious meeting over a shot of espresso.

At 17, I couldn’t fully crack the code of the film, but the discordance touched the part of me that knew the world around me wasn’t nearly as serious as everyone wanted me to take it. After this initial viewing, I watched Mulholland Drive a couple more times for gay reasons, always coming away feeling this odd connection between myself and the man who was responsible for constructing this world. Mulholland Drive isn’t a glossy, upbeat portrayal of the world, yet these moments of humor, of the absurd peaking out beyond all of the sadness, stuck with me for days after.

I fully engrossed myself in Lynch’s film work about two years into college. By then, I felt like I was finally “smart enough” to digest the films the way they should be. (At the very least, the internet was now more helpful at answering my questions.) In the span of about three weeks, I watched all of his films in chronological order without any particular agenda except to keep exploring this connection I’d made in those viewings of Mulholland Drive. This same connection kept coming back to me as I made my way through each film — there is despair, disappointment, and horror but Lynch understood that within each moment of trauma, there is a kernel of something else waiting for us there, a moment of levity created by our specific circumstances and the fact that we’re all fully, fallibly, disgustingly human.

It’s easiest to assign this to a film like Eraserhead where the entire premise takes the common anxiety of impending parenthood to its most extreme and illogical point. Yet before we get to Henry’s (Jack Nance) infanticide at the climax of the film, Lynch’s sense of humor is on full display: the design of the characters’ industrial hellscape, the way the cornish game hen comes alive when Henry tries to carve it, the appearance of the baby, and Henry’s head fully popping off in response to a song. But even his most unsettling and upsetting films have this same characteristic running through them. Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) is a violent, unrelenting, gas-sniffing psychopath who we’re meant to fear and despise, but his behavior — from the “Baby wants to fuck” scene to the scene where he punches Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) and tells him to “Be polite” — is also so droll and clownish, it’s hard not to laugh at him. The violence, particularly against Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), in Blue Velvet is meant to be taken seriously, but as you continue watching Frank become increasingly erratic throughout the film, it’s obvious that Lynch is ridiculing Frank to help remind us that the scariest people we know aren’t above us or more powerful than us. Their violence is just as mundane and prosaic as anything else in our lives, and if we’re aware of that, we can defeat it.

Lynch’s follow-up to Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, brings this further into view. I’ve heard people call the world of the film “cartoonish” as a pejorative but I would argue the “cartoonish” nature of both the storyline and the violence of Wild At Heart is a positive, not a negative. Unlike Blue Velvet, the true evil of Wild At Heart isn’t nearly as front-and-center. It mostly happens on the periphery of Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor’s (Nicolas Cage) love story and is often presented to us frantically and feverishly through quick snapshots of Lula’s mother Marietta (Diane Ladd) or Lula’s and Sailor’s memories or the brief appearance of rotten-mouthed Bobby Peru (Willem Defoe). And through it all, we’re given funny moments of incongruity like Sailor’s obsession with his snakeskin jacket, the way he’s able to stop the heavy metal band to sing Elvis’ “Love Me,” and the entire final 30 minutes of the film. Everyone in this world is an absurd archetype of characters we know — the emotionally tortured damsel in distress, the Byronic hero, the evil and jealous mother, and the monstrous villain. This provides so many moments of hilarity yet similar to Blue Velvet, their incongruous and absurd behaviors and decisions help grant them a humanity that’s well-rounded and unique.

His two most confounding films — Lost Highway and Inland Empire — aren’t without these moments either. The nightmarish realities of these two films are much more visceral than Lynch’s others, but there are some scenes in both films that are just as deliciously dissonant and objectively humorous as anything else in his films, such as when The Mystery Man (Robert Blake) and Fred (Bill Pullman) first encounter each other at the party in Lost Highway and Kingsley’s (Jeremy Irons) interactions with Bucky the lighting tech (voiced by David Lynch) in Inland Empire. Here again, throughout the disturbing and harrowing events of these films, these moments of bizarre and radical uncanniness help bring forward the authenticity of the characters. In them, Lynch creates yet another tether between our lived reality and the mysterious and contradictory dreamlike realities of his films.

When I first began immersing myself in Lynch’s work, this incongruence felt like a language I was intimately familiar with. Growing up, I witnessed domestic atrocity after domestic atrocity, and I was determined to never get beaten down by them using the one tool I had at my disposal. When I could, I found the places in these moments where it was possible to exploit them for a joke or a private laugh for myself. As I grew older, I learned to assign this absurdist thinking to everything around me because without it, I felt as if I would never overcome the fatigue of living in a nightmarish world where grotesque and horrific events continuously happen despite our attempts to stop or prevent them. His work has given me the support I needed to help build this vocabulary out for myself, and his depiction of this bumbling, incongruous reaction to the absurdity of our world is a reminder of how much grace we owe one another.

Like so many of the characters in these films, we’re often pushed into experiencing one absurdity after the next outside of our agency and without our consent. He reminds us that we rarely, if ever, have the final say on what we see and what we do — only how we construct the world around us. Instead of portraying these characters as having control over these absurdities, Lynch leans in over and over again because sometimes that’s the only choice we have. When I watch or think of his work, they strike me as surrealist comedies. Like Mulholland Drive, all of his films are punctuated by a farcical study of how our writhing, hysterical humanity manifests within the most inane and villainous people among us.

This is what I always find when I watch these films. To immerse yourself in the worlds he constructed, you have to recognize the absurdity of our reality, the ridiculousness of the lives we’re expected to live, and the humor in fumbling to reconcile our desires, our nature, and our sense of righteousness against forces outside of our control.

Lynch’s films ask us to take the people, concepts, and circumstances that terrify us the most and turn them on their head. If we can look at them upside down, they generally have a lot less power over us. Perhaps, the fear we once had can lead us to find ways, to imagine new worlds for ourselves entirely.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!