David Lynch, Norman Rockwell, and American Darkness

Two creative giants with surprising similarities.

(Shutterstock)

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As an avowed David Lynch fan for most of my life, the passing of the storied director hit me hard. I was admittedly surprised at the public outpouring from all corners; it’s not every day that NASA and Sesame Street post tributes upon the death of an avant-garde filmmaker. But this is a very appropriate place to eulogize Lynch, because critics have mentioned him in the same breath as one of the pillars of The Saturday Evening Post: Norman Rockwell.

The opening scene of Blue Velvet (Uploaded to YouTube by A Film Channel)

An initial comparison of Rockwell and Lynch is one of surfaces. For example, in his piece memorializing Lynch in The Washington Post; Ty Burr writes, “Watching his movies and TV shows was like peeling the top layer off a Norman Rockwell painting to find one of Francis Bacon’s writhing, inhuman faces.” The stereotype of Rockwell is that he painted a particularly sunny version of America, full of white picket fences and firefighters interacting with the neighborhood (in this ATO ad); it’s appropriate then that Lynch uses those exact images in the opening of Blue Velvet. Rockwell said he painted America “as I would like it to be,” whereas Lynch would show you the pretty facade before pulling back the (red) curtain on the ugly truth.

Rockwell’s depiction of a certain kind of Americana is indisputable. In addition to his 323 Post covers, he painted pieces for Boy Scout calendars and Coca-Cola ads, and even did presidential portraits (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, for the record). His “Four Freedoms” series from 1943, keyed off of remarks by Franklin D. Roosevelt, are considered some of his most important works as they represent some of the country’s most treasured concepts.

The Club Silencio scene from Mulholland Drive (Uploaded to YouTube by aoemni)

If Rockwell took America for what it should be, Lynch took it for what it is: a place that has the light of ideals but an undercurrent of darkness. Lynch understood that opposition, and he articulated it with the surrealistic and the supernatural, creating dream puzzles that sometimes confounded viewers. His masterpiece, Mulholland Drive, is a direct commentary on Hollywood as the city of dreams, but with a dark underbelly. The famous “Club Silencio” scene suggests that almost any kind of entertainment is fake at its heart, but can nonetheless pull emotion out of you. And although he included a “10 Clues” insert in the Mulholland Drive DVD, Lynch never really cared to explain his movies; he was content if you got it, he was content if you didn’t, and he was content if your interpretation was different than his.

In Lynch’s body of work, three pieces stand out as the most overtly “Rockwellian.” Blue Velvet paints a picture of a picture-perfect small town with brutal crimes going on underneath the surface. In Twin Peaks, secret affairs abound, the prom queen is involved in drugs and prostitution, and the majestic woods contain a portal to otherworldly darkness. Both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks take innocent small town stereotypes that Rockwell often painted and gleefully subvert them. The third work, The Straight Story, which is based on the true story of a man making a 240 mile trip across Iowa and Wisconsin on his riding lawnmower to visit his sick brother, is Rockwell played straight, as it comes packed with any number of images of fields and folks that could have been a Post cover.

Ruby Bridges, then-President Obama, and the Rockwell painting at the White House. (picryl.com)

Rockwell showed more of his social concerns in later paintings. In fact, perhaps his most famous work out side of the Post was The Problem We All Live With for Look magazine; it’s a stark examination of racism through the lens of young Ruby Bridges walking to her previously all-white school. Lynch focused on outsiders in films like The Elephant Man, and he also pointed at society’s propensity for violence toward women in a number of his films (like Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me). Interestingly, his most heroic character, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, was a government lawman, perhaps the exact opposite of what you’d expect from a Lynchian protagonist (which, in retrospect, is probably exactly why he and co-creator Mark Frost did it).

With Rockwell’s lean toward the political in his later work, and Lynch’s ever-ready willingness to dig into societal darkness, it’s possible that the two creators were more alike than we thought. Rockwell’s paintings seemed to indicate that there was always the possibility of a better world, and Lynch’s work frequently held out hope, from the Lady in the Radiator singing “In Heaven” in Eraserhead to the notion that the past could possibly be changed in Twin Peaks: The Return.

In the final analysis, both men were giants, enormously influential and quintessentially and uniquely American. Their respective impacts were so profound that their names are adjectives now. Rockwell pictured a better world, and Lynch found the beauty in its weirdness and darkness. The upside is that their art will continue to endure and inspire, making people ask the big questions even if there will never really be answers. And Lynch probably would have loved that.

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Comments

  1. I can never forget watching Eraserhead with friends at a midnight movie in the early eighties. ( Weren’t the midnight movies a great idea? Why did they ever stop? The midnight movie phenomenon lasted from approximately 1975 – 1985, and if someone hasn’t already written a book about it, someone should. Now, somebody, sneer, “Okay, Boomer,”to which I will respond that we Boomers were the last generation whom older people could reasonably assume were literate. )

    I had seen ads for the movie, with Jack’s iconic face and hairdo, in the late 1970s, when Eraserhead died a painful American death at the box office, had wanted to see it because instinct had told me there was something wonderful there, and was delighted that finally, I was able to.

    Doesn’t every Lynchian have a movie he wishes Lynch had made? For reasons I don’t know, possibly the endemic steam and griminess in the black and white Eraserhead, I would have loved to see a Lynch movie about the United States circa 1910.

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