2025 Was David Lynch

In the summer, the actress Natasha Lyonne relayed an anecdote about the late director David Lynch, in which he told her that A.I. in the creative arts would soon be as ubiquitous and indispensable as the pencil. Lyonne, who happens to be the co-founder of an A.I. studio, seemed to be implying that the revered filmmaker had offered his approval to the same nihilistic and destructive technology that recently enabled President Donald Trump to imagine himself as a king in a fighter jet dropping payloads of diarrhea on the people he’s sworn to serve. But Lynch’s public statements about A.I., like his public statements about lots of things, mixed earnest, generalized optimism with dread. In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine in November, 2024, he said that, on the one hand, “the good side” of A.I. could be “important for moving forward in a beautiful way,” and, on the other, “if money is the bottom line, there’d be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror.” He added, “I’m hoping better times are coming.”

They were not. In January, amid the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Lynch was evacuated from his home and died shortly thereafter, of complications from emphysema. Days later, on what would have been Lynch’s seventy-ninth birthday, Trump was inaugurated into his second term. This coincidence of timing meant that, in the outpouring of public grief following Lynch’s death, viewers were discovering or returning to his life’s work at the same time that they were sustaining the first avalanches of cruelty and engineered disaster which have characterized much of the second Trump Administration. As the ghastly year dragged on, these streams of art and life kept converging.

If, for example, you sensed that your corner of the world was being run by a psychopath and a cabal of goons who enjoy nothing so much as tearing an immigrant mother away from her child, your impressions would be reflected in “Blue Velvet” (1986). If you were stunned by how many prominent citizens were linked to the trafficking and exploitation of teen-age girls, you might see flashes of prophecy in the original broadcast run of “Twin Peaks” (1990-91) and in the feature film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992). If you recoiled at the unleashing of violent and arbitrary forces that destroy people’s lives, livelihoods, and vocations for sport, you could find a black-comic riff on such phenomena in “Mulholland Drive” (2001). And, if you read dystopia between the lines of Trump’s executive order launching the “Genesis Mission”—a “coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery” upon a defenseless public—you might just hear Lynch’s inimitable voice in your ear, that congenial blare of perfectly flat vowels affirming your worst fears: “THERE’D BE A LOT OF SADNESS AND DESPAIR AND HORROR.”

Lynch’s films are often graphic in their depictions of violence and degradation, even as their characters and plots can be enigmatic and mutable. He was drawn to detective stories in which the principal investigators must not merely solve a mystery but accommodate themselves to a reality that is too terrible to be believed—or else repress or dissociate from that reality. BOB, the bogeyman who torments Laura Palmer in “Twin Peaks,” can be seen, in the words of the critic and film curator Dennis Lim, “as a projection of Laura’s, a defense against an unthinkable truth.” She is not the only one deflecting. “BOB is real,” Laura insists, seething, to her agoraphobic lover, Harold Smith, in “Fire Walk with Me,” but it’s unclear whether Harold believes her, or what he could do about it if he did. This dilemma played out again and again over the past year—pity, for one, the representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the onetime QAnon zealot who always knew that BOB was real, until, it seems, she saw BOB’s true face, and promptly resigned from Congress.