Deciphering the indecipherable: What does ‘Lynchian’ mean?
It’s often said that a filmmaker doesn’t arrive as the fully-formed version of what they’re destined to be remembered as, but David Lynch tends to blow that preconception out of the water single-handedly, considering his debut feature Eraserhead was the living, breathing embodiment of Lynchian.
For almost 50 years across nine further features and three TV shows, Lynch has continued to refine and hone the term, even if it’s not something he intentionally strives to attain. Whether it’s his recurring usage of dreamscapes and surrealist imagery, the juxtaposition between the foreboding and the every day, the repeated use of industry as an ominous backdrop, physical and psychological deformities, an obsession with the 1950s post-war culture he grew up in and around, female characters playing dual roles, and certain figures within his stories carrying an almost supernatural quality, the concept of Lynchian cinema has been largely unchanged since 1977.
His Dune movie from 1984 stands out as the most stark failure of his career, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the least Lynchian by far. As a creative mind, he’s clearly least effective when trying to squeeze himself into somebody else’s imagination, and it’s also entirely true that his greatest works allow him to throw off the shackles of cinematic convention to tell a completely unique, mind-bending, bizarre, and intoxicating tale that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll.
Lynchian has become such an accepted part of the cultural lexicon that it was even entered into the dictionary, cementing its evolution from a catch-all term designed to describe one filmmaker in particular into its own distinct offshoot of cinema. Many movies and TV shows have been labelled as such, but with a back catalogue of unmistakable classics to his name, the originator of the word is never going to be bettered.
What other filmmakers have followed ‘Lynchian’ into the dictionary?
Cinema has given rise to a number of era-defining talents who’ve found their names being repurposed into a descriptor, and Lynchian is far from the only auteur-driven terminology to have been accepted into the dictionary as a genuine turn of phrase.
Along similar lines, Tarantinoesque denotes films “characterised by graphic and stylized violence, non-linear storylines, cineliterate references, satirical themes, and sharp dialogue,” which pretty much defined any independent thriller made in the post-Pulp-Fiction years.
Kubrickian, Altmanesque, Spielbergian, and Capraesque have also been welcomed into the dictionary to pay homage to the influence of Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, and Frank Capra, respectively, so Lynch is far from being alone on that front.
What movies not directed by David Lynch are ‘Lynchian’?
Although there’s only one true purveyor of Lynchian cinema, and it’s become a hard thing to quantify in films that the man himself hasn’t directed, there are nonetheless several spiritually similar films that evoke the same feelings and utilise the same motifs prevalent in Lynch’s work.
Among them are Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky. The commonality isn’t only that they deal in dreamscapes, augmented realities, surrealism, and a fear of the unknown, but the majority of their writers and/or directors have endorsed Lynch as one of their major inspirations in one way or another.