Though known for its darkness, perhaps the most surprising quality of David Lynch’s art was its hope

David Lynch (1946 – 2025), pioneer of the American surreal and visionary filmmaker who died last week after a long battle with emphysema, developed a reputation in certain circles as a difficult artist. His films — from early masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986) to the nightmarish Mulholland Drive (2001), often touted as one of the best films of the twenty-first century — are said to be hard to understand, and even harder to sit through and watch. The joke about Lynch is that the way to parody him is put something upsetting against something bizarre.

Of course, that was only one of the streams of conversation about the director. He was also nominated for multiple Academy Awards, heralded by filmmakers and critics alike, and had a massive mainstream hit with his television show Twin Peaks (1990–1991). But even his admirers pushed the idea that he was fascinated by darkness, establishing him as one of the great investigators of the horrors of the suburbs, peeling back the veneer of civility and finding the pain within.

^{In “Blue Velvet”, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) gets himself caught up in a sordid world he doesn’t understand. (Photo by De Laurentiis Entertainment Group/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)}

It is certainly true that there are gruelling elements to any Lynch film. Take Blue Velvet, a perfect work of art in a filmography mostly composed of perfect works of art. Within its first ten minutes, the father of Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan) suffers a heart attack. As the older man collapses, Lynch moves his camera from the scenic world of the suburbs — all white picket fences and blue skies — to a subterranean world beneath the soil, filled with vicious, roaming bugs.

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). 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.

^{Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) exhibits an unrelenting yet pathetic violence towards Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) in “Blue Velvet”. (Photo by De Laurentiis Entertainment Group / Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images)}

Throwing up these two disparate forces — good and evil — was the modus operandi of Lynch’s one-of-a-kind career. Twin Peaks unravelled 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 (1990), one of the more underrated films he ever made, plunged a loving young couple, Sailor (Nicholas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), into an impossibly evil world. And The Elephant Man (1980), a black-and-white muted howl of pain, saw a man with disabilities try to find hope among objectification and cruelty.

^{John Hurt plays John Merrick in “The Elephant Man”. (Photo by Images Press / Getty Images)}

So yes, the idea that David Lynch was a dark master, capable of depicting on-screen violence with more edge than most, has some truth to it. 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, but 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.

^{Michael Ontkean as Sheriff Harry S. Truman (left) and Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper, eying donuts arrayed on a table in the pilot episode of “Twin Peaks”. (Photo by CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images)}

Hence the model of the archetypal Lynch hero: Dale Cooper (MacLachlan, again), the handsome, profoundly odd detective hero of Twin Peaks. Coop 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. Coop 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.

^{Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee) lies deceased, wrapped in a plastic sheet, on a rocky beach in the pilot episode of “Twin Peaks”, originally broadcast on 8 April 1990. (Photo by CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images)}

This complicated optimism was also at the heart of Lynch’s profoundly inspiring life outside of filmmaking. Like Dale Cooper, Lynch was a famous lover of little treats, the kind of tiny slivers 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 art life allows one to see the things that make us, at the end of the day, so blessed. So loved.

^{A robin, sitting on a windowsill with a bug in its beak, in the final scene of “Blue Velvet”. (Photograph: Allstar / Warner Bros.)}

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 windowsill. 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.

Joseph Earp is a poet, journalist and philosophy student. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Sydney, studying the work of David Hume. An earlier version of this article was published by The Ethics Centre.