As you’ve likely heard, David Lynch died yesterday, and I’m not happy about that. I wasn’t consulted, of course, as I never really am in these matters, but I think the world is a bit poorer for the loss of someone like Lynch, a genuine original and an artist I greatly respect. I want to write something about Lynch because he was someone I admired, and to pull that off I sort of need to find an automotive angle. Happily, that’s very possible, because David Lynch actually did some interesting thing with cars.
I think one of the things I always admired most about Lynch was how he could transform the most mundane, pedestrian-seeming environments and objects into portals for broadcasting the most unsettling, deep-in-the-soul sort of quiet terror. The environments and scenes that David Lynch’s movies took place in weren’t removed from our own daily lives, they were composed of the same players, the same objects, just recast and presented in such a way as to make you feel every strange subterranean thought of malice and fear.
For example, anyone who has seen Mulholland Drive probably feels the same sort of deep pang of ill-defined discomfort when seeing this image:
Yet, objectively, it’s just a phone, a dirty ashtray, and a lamp. Kind of a funny, tree-like lamp, even. And yet, thanks to Lynch’s peculiar gifts. I look at this and feel something akin to existential terror.
If somehow you’ve never seen a David Lynch movie, this likely seems absurd, but, I implore you to at least try watching one, and it’ll all make sense.
But we’re here to talk about cars! I’ve actually written about a peculiar intersection of Lynch’s movies and cars before, noting the strange parallel between the Renault 5’s headliner and the wall upholstery of the ornithopters in Lynch’s version of Dune (1984):
But that’s nothing, comparatively! Lynch actually directed some car commercials, like this one for Honda, for their rebadged Isuzu Rodeo, the Passport:
When it comes to Lynch , this commercial was really surprisingly conventional. A guy sees a Passport, and gets transformed into the woodiest version of himself. It seems the glassed-in Passport will keep doing this to any hapless soul that stands in front of it, possibly until the entire Earth is swallowed up in flannel and beards.
Lynch’s next foray into automotive advertising was in 2002, when he made a more typically-Lynchian commercial for the Nissan Micra:
I’d actually written about this commercial before, at the Old Site back in 2018, and found a quote from Lynch about the Micra, and the ad:
“I like the Micra, particularly the headlamps. They are like jewels. And I like the concept of ‘Do you speak Micra?’. I like modern and retro put together to make modtro — that’s a very good concept.”
The whole “speak Micra” thing Lynch really leaned into, making up words for those strange disembodied blue lips to say, like “spafe” and “aggrendly” and “simpology.”
In that previous article, I wondered about a throughline to other Lynch works via that particular vivid shade of blue, as seen in those lips:
The vivid blue color theme of the ad suggests something else to me, though, a bit of a continuity with the movie he would have made most recently to when he did this commercial: 2001’s Mulholland Drive.
In Mulholland Drive, that same color blue is used almost exclusively for some crucial supernatural and sinister elements: a key that indicates that a murder has been committed, and an otherworldly counterpart to that key, a stranger key that fits a strange box.
The same blue is also called out in the hair of an enigmatic woman found in a strange, secret club.
Lynch was good at the car-casting in his movies as well, selecting some striking and very well-considered cars for his characters. The main protagonist of Blue Velvet, for example, played by noted kwisatz-haderach Kyle MacLachlan, drove this fantastic Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale convertible:
In Wild At Heart, the 1965 Thunderbird chosen has just the right mix of American exuberance and a certain sinister quality, lurking just beneath the glossy paint:
In Mulholland Drive, I can’t think of a better car for an early 2000s up-and-coming-and-kind-of-dickish movie director to drive than a silver Boxster:
…and then there’s one of Lynch’s less typical but still wonderful movies, The Straight Story, about a guy who drives a riding mower pulling a home-made camping trailer, in a very Autopian-friendly sort of vehicle setup:
Then there’s Lynch’s seeming obsession with car crashes and wrecks; they show up in a surprising number of his movies, and sometimes they seem to exist just to feel their wild destructive potential, and don’t even necessarily direct the plot that much, or at all. The gruesome car wreck aftermath scene in Wild at Heart is a great example of this, though here we mostly see the aftermath:
His film Mulholland Drive begins with a brutal car accident as well, though this one does impact the plot:
Maybe Lynch isn’t the first name you think of when it comes to cars and movies and art, but the automobile definitely meant something to Lynch, and I think his relationship with cars and what they mean to people, how they fit into culture, and their remarkable ability to change the course of one’s life and actions, for good and bad, was a significant factor in his work.
Rest in peace, David Lynch. Thanks for making the world more wonderfully strange.
Saw Wild At Heart only once, a few decades ago, and the scene where they come upon the wreck still sticks with me,
25 years later, I still can’t forget Mr Eddy’s brutal black Mercedes 6.9: Up there with the Bulitt Mustang for me.
I enjoyed Lynch’s work, especially the stuff in the 80s when he was pushing artistic boundaries. As flawed as Dune is, and I’ve read a couple dozen of the Dune books, I still enjoy the movie for all the artistry that Lynch built into it. Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, and The Elephant Man all had an accessible blend of artistic, odd (or outright bizarre), and hand-crafted feel that, whether you love or hate what he made, made his work memorable.
I thought you were going to mention the scene in Blue Velvet where Frank and his buddies take Jeffrey for a ride in the black charger and mayhem ensues. That whole section of the movie is like a bad dream, and the car contributes to the menace.
This is it!
eH saw eno fo a dnik.
Try is the operative word in watching a Lynch movie.
“The Straight Story” You could show kindergarten to a senior home and I don’t think anyone would get offended. I showed it to my parents a dozen years ago, and they thanked me. Can’t say that about his other works.
Nice write up as usual, and thanks for Pee Wee in related, enjoyed again.
I love Sailor’s line to Lula in Wild At Heart–
“Stab it and steer.”
I’m a huge fan of his work and he seemed like a pretty good and unusual guy. The first movie of his that I saw was Lost Highway. I thought I was going to see some kind of odd vampire movie from the trailer, but what I got was something I couldn’t conceive. I didn’t know what the hell I just watched, but I loved it. Obviously, cars feature in there, particularly with the late, wonderful Robert Loggia’s Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent and his turbocharged MB. “This is where mechanical excellence and one-thousand, four hundred horsepower pays off.” Just before running a tailgater who flipped him the bird off the road and demanded he get himself a driver’s manual.
You beat me to it! Robert Loggia’s impassioned and profane rant about traffic safety is one of my favorite moments in that movie.
Robert Blake is haunting.
Definitely the weirdest and most darkly funny road rage incident I’ve ever seen.
Blake was great as the Mystery Man with the right amount of creep and menace. When he was arrested, I figured he probably did it because of how he had been in the movie (I know he’s an actor). Of course, he was acquitted and she had lived a life of making enemies by screwing people over, so maybe he really didn’t do it in spite of what seemed like a pretty sketchy defense to me (as I remember it—another line from Lost Highway!).
That’s one of my favorite Lynchian things – his characters exude uncertainty. Good guys might do horrible things, bad guys might not do horrible things, and you never know if someone’s going to be as they seem or, say, sing ‘In Dreams’ into a automotive worklight and reduce Dennis Hopper to tears.
He was truly the master of creating a scene on film that truly made you FEEL a very specific thing.
He did wonderfully weird, difficult to understand, and hauntingly beautiful art.
I often feel I do not fully understand a lot of what he created but I am deeply grateful he puts it out there.
I feel there are fewer and fewer people in the world willing to put their weird and wonderful ideas out in the public eye each year and we are all a little worse off for it.
This here! He said he set out to be a painter and started making movies as moving paintings. What are paintings, but evoking feelings with only a glimpse and where the viewer is left to imagine much of the story?
Don’t forget Leland Palmer’s ’75 Caprice convertible that BOB revs the hell out of at the gas station
Eraserhead and Twin Peaks are amazing.
The baby in Eraserhead is adorable and deserved better.
There is no one else blending the ordinary, the absurd, the surreal, and existential dread the way Lynch could. And I don’t think anyone is going to start taking that on. He truly created unique art. Though the world is poorer for losing him, it is richer for the existence of his art and for his presence for a few decades.
His visual patience in particular strikes me as hard to replicate. He’d let scenes normally and slowly unfold before the big payoff, like the Winky’s diner scene in Mulholland Drive. Very few directors – and sadly even fewer viewers – are willing to wait anymore.
Captain Picard hanging out with Paul Atreides. The Spice must flow.
I’m still not sure what those old little people coming out of the bag in Mulholland Drive is about, but my brain is a little more warped after having watched that movie.
Believe it or not, the Gurney Halleck role is what got him noticed for the Picard role. Imagine a world where Yaphet Kotto was Picard! And Jeffery Combs was Riker!
What, his performance in Lifeforce didn’t get him noticed?
Two words: Mathilda May
Rented that movie in high school for a monthly cheesy movie night. Most of those movies were forgettable, but we certainly remembered Lifeforce (and Zardoz, if for completely different reasons).