“Lynchian” is a word that gets thrown around a lot, especially in music criticism. This site alone has used it at least 60 times, as my editor recently pointed out. (I’m guilty myself.) It is invoked when ethereal, synth-driven melodies remind writers of Badalamenti’s soaring Twin Peaks score, or if singers grasp at the gossamer dream pop Cruise recorded for the show. Lynch might as well have put the “dream” in “dream pop”; his films created an all-new cinematic language for the fluidity of the dream state. The dead walk again, words stall and hiccup like gnawed tape reels, a single soul can slink between bodies with zero narrative disruption.
Some reserve the word “Lynchian” to simply describe a guitar or saxophone riff reminiscent of the skewed lounge music in so many of Lynch’s films. Even the lounge noir aesthetic of those scenes—blood-red drapes, geometric flooring, tragic women done up like silver screen idols—has seeped into musicians’ visual lexicon. Johnny Jewel, whose band Chromatics was one of several groups to play the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks: The Return, is especially dedicated to the vamped-up vintage look Lynch mastered, though his interpretation is far less painterly.
At the core of Lynchian art is unnerving contrast: a picturesque lumber town home to a heinous murder; a gleaming Hollywood production corrupted by insidious mobsters; a Reagan-era golden boy who slips all too quickly into sexual violence. The latter case refers to Kyle MacLachlan’s Blue Velvet character Jeffrey Beaumont, who uncovers a deranged criminal conspiracy lurking in the shadows of his picture postcard hometown. “I’m seeing something that was always hidden,” Jeffrey tells his companion Sandy (Laura Dern) as he rifles deeper into a cesspool of kidnapping, rape, drug trafficking, and murder. Lynch’s scope of humanity, specifically of middle-class American humanity, was both compassionate and dismal. As the malignant Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) says to Jeffrey in a pivotal scene: “You’re like me.”
Songwriters like Lana Del Rey and Ethel Cain, both of whom have been called “Lynchian” artists countless times, utilize the central contrast in so much of the filmmaker’s work. Del Rey, a longtime Lynch fan, often pits sweeping, cinematic flourishes against gritty and imperfect reflections of womanhood. Cain’s 2022 debut, Preacher’s Daughter, meanwhile, mined the grim underbelly of the American South and transposed it all into airy pop anthems. But Cain’s new album, Perverts, smacks of an earlier Lynch; its dark ambient groans and machine-like dissonance underscores the flesh-bound sensations of sexual shame and bodily discomfort. Bill Callahan’s early work, primarily under his Smog moniker, felt almost diseased with Lynchian imagery: flatly-sung, plain-lit displays of violence, perversion, and rural delights.
