Deviant obsessions: how David Lynch predicted our fragmented times | David Lynch

Beyond his holiness Saint Keanu, if there is another universally beloved figure online it is David Lynch. He is the internet’s eccentric grandpa: unfailingly ringing in the day with his daily weather reports, banging the gong for transcendental meditation and crafting miniature farmyard barns for his youngest daughter, Lula.

His other line, perhaps the most overtly Lynchian, is his daily lottery in which – for seemingly no other reason than gratuitous delight and enigma – he draws a random numbered ball. A confirmed numerologist, his preferred integer is seven. Dorothy Vallens’s apartment – the nexus of lust, violence and voyeurism in Blue Velvet – was on the seventh floor. So was the Philadelphia office of Gordon Cole, the FBI chief played by the director in Twin Peaks. On 20 January, David Lynch will be 77. So there is no better time to ask: how did this once-cult artist – whose work is filled with seething psychopaths and funky dwarves and who for the past 20 years has reverted solely to his most experimental and challenging work – become such a cosy cultural presence?

This turn of events seems all the more unlikely when you consider his position in the mid-90s. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a harrowing, humour-free sojourn with incest, was booed by the press at Cannes in 1992, and five years later Lost Highway wasn’t much more warmly received. If “Lynchian” – defined by David Foster Wallace in his seminal 1996 essay as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” – was a quantifiable sensibility, it either remained marginal, or people were already tiring of it, or both.

Weirdly, that is not the case now. Lynchian is the go-to adjective to describe any sniff of the uncanny and esoteric on screen, from Donnie Darko to True Detective. It will never be a mainstream quality, but it exists explicitly in orientation towards the mainstream, often represented by the discordant versions of 50s Americana that appear so often in his work. And so his destabilising vision has become a common lens for discerning the truth about the “normal world”: that white picket fence America paints over deviant and sometimes evil obsessions, as in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, or that Hollywood is in fact a nightmare factory, as in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Lynch playing John Ford, maybe the most establishment of all golden age directors, in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is a neat joke about his skewwhiff relationship with the mainstream.

Maybe the most naturally Lynchian congregation are the hipsters, among whom subversion and irony thrive and where Pabst Blue Ribbon – recommended beverage of Blue Velvet’s resident psychopath Frank Booth – is drunk. Lynch himself has the boho quiff, the retro fetish and a single-minded commitment to his art that the hipster contingent would approve of.

This is the man who toiled for five years to make Eraserhead, breaking off during night shoots to do his paper round delivering the Wall Street Journal. Since the fiasco of Dune, he has been fiercely uncompromising to the point where he managed to persuade a major TV network to effectively fund an 18-hour avant garde drama in the third series of Twin Peaks. He’s a living, nicotine-hoovering paladin of personal creativity, who despite appearing in documentaries and penning books bigging up what he calls “the art life” maintains a hilarious obstinacy in never revealing anything specific about his process, or the meaning of his work.

Flowing out from this single-mindedness is the radiant sincerity filling Lynch’s films, something missing in Foster Wallace’s irony-based classification. This, as much as the trademark freakiness, is what continues to draw people to him in this era of social-media posturing and fakery. He consciously amps up this earnestness in Twin Peaks’ lead character Dale Cooper, and it is most clearly visible in the almost embarrassing levels of romanticism in The Elephant Man and The Straight Story.

But Lynch is sincere about all sorts of other feelings, especially the unbidden and the inadmissible. Wallace calls it a “psychic intimacy” delivered from a primitive part of the director’s psyche. Few could make innocuous childhood learning a source of blackly comic primal dread, as in his 1968 student film The Alphabet. Almost everything he does, no matter how ostensibly offbeat, is underscored by authentic emotion: compare the first 17 episodes of Twin Peaks, when Lynch was fully involved, with the heavy-handed, self-conscious kookiness of much of what followed. Occasionally, this spelunking of his inner self becomes too intense: there’s a one-note quality to both Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway. But it is never less than completely unfiltered.

He is disturbingly forthcoming with sexual violence, too, often meted out towards a gallery of victimised women that parallels Hitchcock. Post-#MeToo, you would have thought this might render him unpalatable – or at least put him in the crosshairs of some heavy discourse. Dorothy Vallens, Laura Palmer, Lost Highway’s dismembered dame Renee, the bitter Tinseltown washup Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire’s “woman in trouble” Nikki Grace: Lynch definitely has a type.

But he consistently inverts misogyny and flips the male gaze by fully inhabiting these women with a fervour that’s rare for a male director. He plays with the Madonna/whore dichotomy of film noir women, but transmutes it into something higher. After we learn that Twin Peaks’ prom queen Laura Palmer was a doomed classic femme fatale, she is resurrected as a metaphysical symbol of the capacity to withstand cycles of violence.

In his structural masterpiece Mulholland Drive, it is ultimately ambiguous whether bushy-tailed ingenue Betty Elms is the dream-creation of homicidal failure Diane, if this dream is more real than the reality, or if it even matters which is correct. But this magnificent suite of role-playing contains Hollywood in all its aspirations and sordidness, and Diane’s infatuation and bitterness with the dream factory are our own. These besieged women come to us as ghosts of past systemic oppression, but end up disordering it in a way that keeps Lynch on speaking terms with current gender politics. As the recent documentary Lynch/Oz puts it, in his work trauma is a source of transcendence.

If Lynch is capable of this radical empathy, sometimes I wonder if the darkness in his films is equally his. As much as the stricken women, his films are populated by exuberantly coiffed straight men who seem like his proxies; hapless bystanders to monsters such as Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth but haunted by the possibility of becoming them. Which is what happens to Bill Pullman’s frenzied saxophonist Fred, another Lynchian stooge, in the grip of a “psychogenic fugue” in Lost Highway. It’s striking not only that Lynch directed the pivotal episode of Twin Peaks himself – Lonely Souls, where the identity of the demonic killer Bob is finally revealed in shockingly brutal style – but how personally he stamps it. “Leland says you’re going back to Missoula, Montana,” Bob rages at his latest victim, referring to the director’s hometown.

That sort of displacement is the artist’s prerogative, and Lynch is by all accounts a good egg in real life: open to collaboration and protective of his actors. He gives excellent meme, such as nominating Vladimir Putin for the ice bucket challenge, and has canonical hair. But he remains strongly part of the zeitgeist for deeper reasons: the times have caught up with him and become more Lynchian, more bewildering, fragmented and subject to shocking disruptions. The US of Twin Peaks: The Return was not the rose-tinted nostalgic haven of the first; in fact, it actively rubbished that sentiment. Or as Pullman said recently about Lost Highway: “Maybe that reality is what we’re living in now. Where people suddenly say things where you can’t believe they’re the same person.”

Online especially, we respond to this fragmentation with ever-more polarised positions, ones that seek to permanently separate virtue from vice. But Lynch’s great moral conviction has been to show us to what extent good and evil are inextricably wound around each other and coexist in the same person. Excessive zeal, like stainless Agent Cooper, is replaced by his scowling, mullet-haired doppelganger. Corruption and entropy are part of life; not exactly a commercial proposition, which is probably why Lynch hasn’t made a feature in more than 15 years. But even if not everyone wants to lend their ear, he burrows onwards – as in Blue Velvet – down into the cochlea and inside our heads. Happy birthday, Mr Lynch, and thanks for showing us the way to seventh heaven.