A Place Both Wonderful and Strange

By Patrick Flynn

Galway’s Pálás Cinema closed its doors on 27 February, despite a vigorous campaign by trade unionists, local artists and activists to force Galway City Council to intervene. In many ways, it was apt that the very last screening held in the cinema’s eight-year history – already sold out by the time I tried to purchase tickets – was Mulholland Drive, one of the many Lynch films shown in the venue since the director’s death in January 2025. For me, the cinema’s closure so soon following the death of Lynch had ironic parallels. Just as Lynch’s struggle to get funding for his works in his final years was indicative of how myopic the film industry has become, so too did the cinema’s closure illustrate how disinterested Galway’s city council had become in the arts locally, despite its enthusiasm to coast on the city’s reputation as Ireland’s ‘cultural capital’.

“David Lynch’s unique, dreamlike surrealism - often grotesque, often terrifying, often beautiful, often funny - immediately connected with me...”

Lynch’s works have meant a lot to me since I first came across them in college, and his death earlier this year – the Los Angeles fires had tragically worsened his emphysema – came as a shock. His unique, dreamlike surrealism – often grotesque, often terrifying, often beautiful, often funny - immediately connected with me, though I soon learned it was an acquired taste. I fondly remember organising a showing of Eraserhead at my university’s film society, which garnered a lot of appreciation but also an irate audience member who confronted me afterwards and exclaimed, to my eternal amusement: ‘What the fuck was that?’ Detecting my enthusiasm, a friend I knew through activism gave me a hard drive filled with his short movies. I gradually worked my way through his whole filmography, and, prompted by another friend at a Halloween party dressed as Audrey Horne, took the dive into watching Twin Peaks, a series my mother had often mentioned as having watched soon after I was born. This was at a time when Irish TV viewers followed watching Ireland’s 1990 World Cup run with the Dale Cooper hunt for the killer of Laura Palmer. While his greatest films - Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive – were all masterpieces, in many ways the entire Twin Peaks project, including the 2017 final season, was his magnum opus. Twin Peaks satirises American television while being infused with Lynch’s trademark surrealism.

Even his rare misfires like his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune - which is famously a mess and compresses the entire second half of the book into far too short a time – are worth watching, if nothing else for still being more visually imaginative than Denis Villeneuve’s objectively better paced and adapted, but more sterile Dune movies. Lynch’s influence on subsequent film and television cannot be understated – a Lynchian footprint can be discerned in everything from the X Files – David Duchovny got his first outing playing an FBI Agent in Twin Peaks - to Tony Soprano’s dream sequences and his glorified crew’s encounters with surreal Providence mobsters, to the powerful queer cinema of Jane Schoenbrum, whose I Saw The TV Glow was reviewed by Robin Koenig in our last issue.

“A key theme of his films... was the toxic underbelly of ‘corruption, violence and toxic masculinity’, underneath the idyllic façade of American society.”

But what of Lynch’s politics, and why an obituary in a socialist magazine? To my knowledge, he never identified as a socialist - though when Donald Trump once bizarrely claimed at a rally that Lynch was a MAGA supporter, he was quick to refute that Trump had quoted him out of context and he had voted for Bernie Sanders. But I think, watching his films, there are a lot of reasons why socialists, in my experience, gravitate towards his work. After Lynch’s death, a lot of commentary focused on the nostalgia in his work for the America he grew up in, particularly the Pacific Northwest – one socialist obituary described him as, in a sense, “politically conservative, yearning for the simpler, more optimistic times of the 1950s”. As the obituary then acknowledges, however, it would be wrong and superficial to say he took this view at face value.[1] A key theme of his films, quite literally displayed in the opening scene of Blue Velvet, was the dark underbelly of ‘corruption, violence and toxic masculinity’ underneath the idyllic façade of American society.[2] The third season of Twin Peaks made this clear, portraying the United States’ first use of the atomic bomb as literally the act that brought the series’ antagonist, Bob, into the world. He showed visible solidarity with Trans people: his stand-in character in Twin Peaks telling transphobes to ‘fix their hearts or die’, while violence against women in modern capitalist society, whether in the home or in the film industry, was a consistent focus.

David Lynch leaves behind a cinema landscape which is a lot less interesting and with a lot less space for independent filmmakers to break through. He was no unthinking nostalgist – the third season of Twin Peaks was in many ways a refutation of the facile fan service which dominates a lot of contemporary cinema, with Dale Cooper only fully appearing as a character near the end. In contrast to some younger filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, he enthusiastically embraced using digital video and abandoning ‘scratchy and dirty’ celluloid. However, the world of modern streaming - instanced by Netflix’s endless algorithm of anodyne, heavily exposited programmes, ‘made specifically for background viewing while you scroll on your phone or laptop’[3] - was anathema to him. He believed that filmgoing was something you immersed yourself in at the cinema, and pithily told those squinting at movies on their propped up mobiles that ‘it’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone: get real’. As the streaming giants came to dominate, he increasingly struggled to get funding for his projects in his final years, the Twin Peaks final season being a rare exception.

For socialists, another lesson from Lynch’s legacy is the need to defend the arts and artists who aren’t afraid to be weird and dreamlike and messy, rather than a future under capitalism where linear, uncomplicated TV shows designed to appeal to the algorithm get funding while independent filmmakers struggle. We also need to demand funding for arthouse venues like the Pálás, without whose existence I wouldn’t have been able to see exciting new movies like I Saw The TV Glow in the cinema, and likely won’t be able to see other interesting films in their ideal format in the future. Lynch transported us to ‘a place both wonderful and strange’, to borrow Dale Cooper’s words, and our best tribute would be to keep the way there open.

[1] Daniel Morley, ‘David Lynch: the Abstraction in Human Form’, Marxist.com, https://marxist.com/david-lynch-the-abstraction-in-human-form.htm,  22 January 2025.

[2] Billy J. Stratten, ‘David Lynch exposed the rot at the heart of American culture’, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/david-lynch-exposed-the-rot-at-the-heart-of-american-culture-247670, 17 January 2025.

[3] Dominique Sisley, ‘David Lynch and the shrinking value of imagination’, Dazed, https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/66154/1/david-lynch-shrinking-value-of-imagination-contemplation-art-attention-economy, 21 February 2025.