David Lynch’s Errand Into the Wilderness
He never lost faith in America
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic 1835 story “Young Goodman Brown,” set in the New England of two centuries prior, tells the story of a young Puritan’s loss of faith not only in God but in his wife and his community. Wandering out into the woods one night, the eponymous hero finds all the respectable folks of his town engaged in a Satanic rite resembling those described in the testimonies of the Salem Witch Trials. Brown and his wife, Faith (as you likely know, Hawthorne went hard on allegory), turn out to be the only townspeople yet to be initiated into the demonic conclave, and the ritual is to mark their initiation. Brown implores Faith to resist; it is unclear whether she does. The next day, he wonders if it was all a dream, but the story concludes with a somber account of his subsequent confusion, cynicism, and disillusionment. At Brown’s death, the story ends, “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”
Like much of Hawthorne’s work, “Young Goodman Brown” is astonishing, haunting, and foundational to the American literary imagination. It is also, like his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter (1850), an early expression of the countercultural critique of American society that was already widespread in literature by the early 20th century and became (ironically) hegemonic after the 1960s. In The Scarlet Letter, the author—while never entirely discarding the deep concern with sin and depravity of his ancestral culture—left us a memorable portrait of Puritan small-mindedness, sadism, prurience, and hypocrisy, which would provide a template for many other mordant literary accounts of the heartland. “Young Goodman Brown” is, if anything, starker: It gives us an ostensibly decent, respectable small town whose prominent citizens turn out to be members of a clandestine Satanic cult.
David Lynch, whose death was announced yesterday, was among many other things one of Hawthorne’s successors in the age of film and television. The scenario his greatest work returned to a number of times was strikingly similar to the one laid out in “Young Goodman Brown”: an innocent is confronted with a profound evil lurking beneath the surface of American life. Yet unlike Hawthorne’s protagonist, Lynch’s greatest heroes do not succumb to cynicism and even hold onto their cheerful optimism. Paradoxically, this is because they—like Hawthorne, despite his agnosticism, and like Lynch himself—maintain a metaphysical belief in evil.
As David Gibbs notes in Compact today, the popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s was awash with negative caricatures of rural and small-town Americans—think of Deliverance and Easy Rider—in the lineage of Hawthorne’s, but with a key difference. The more recent distaste for the heartland has emphasized faults—ignorance, bigotry, backwards social values—ultimately understandable as matters of stubborn resistance to the social engineering projects of well-intentioned elites. America’s heart of darkness, for Hawthorne, brought us face to face with metaphysical evil; for most countercultural artists of the late 20th century, the problem was far more mundane, social pathologies probably best dealt with by public schools, social, workers, fact checkers, and other benevolent managers.
Lynch came up as a filmmaker at the 1970s peak of countercultural auteur cinema, but his breakthrough achievements of the post-’70s “morning in America” era—Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, followed by Twin Peaks—were unmistakably marked by an earnest patriotism and sincere admiration for small-town America and its people. This basic animating spirit stood in productive tension with Lynch’s explorations of the seamy underside of the American dream.
The aw-shucks patriotism that pervaded Lynch’s body of work has been widely observed since his death: Mel Brooks’s description of him as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” the director’s devotion to the all-American cinema of Frank Capra, and his wholesome G-rated road movie The Straight Story have all been noted. However, this dimension of his output often seems to be classified as merely aesthetic—one ingredient of his eclectic surrealist Americana—when it is also moral and metaphysical.
Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont, in Blue Velvet, is Goodman Brown’s descendant, but with a crucial difference. As the film’s opening sequence memorably foreshadows, the events of the plot will force him to confront the seething horror beneath the façade of provincial decency and respectability that surrounds him. The nuclear family, brought into crisis by Jeffrey’s father’s heart attack, is grotesquely parodied in the brutal sexual pantomimes performed by Dennis Hopper’s Frank and Isabella Rosselini’s Dorothy. “It’s a strange world, isn’t it?” Jeffrey famously remarks to his sweetheart Sandy (Laura Dern). And yet the film concludes not with Goodman’s bitter disenchantment, but with a reprisal of the opening small-town idyll. Jeffrey, unlike Hawthorne’s protagonist, returns from the woods with his faith intact.
Special Agent Dale Cooper, the protagonist of Twin Peaks and the epic hero of the Lynchian oeuvre, can be read as a grown-up Jeffrey Beaumont. Like Jeffrey, he uncovers the monstrosities and depravities barely concealed beneath the wholesome exterior of Twin Peaks; and like Goodman Brown, he soon discovers these evils are metaphysical in nature. His investigation of the murder of Laura Palmer reveals that the respected local attorney and patriarch Leland Palmer is a serial incestuous rapist possessed by the demonic spirit “Bob,” and that others of the town’s inhabitants (as well has Cooper’s fellow FBI agent Windom Earle) have long trafficked with the occult locus of evil that is the Black Lodge. Even when Cooper is trapped in the lodge and replaced by an evil Doppelgänger, it is never in doubt that the “good Dale” still exists and will return, as he eventually does in The Return.
Hawthorne, unlike the 20th-century bohemian writers and filmmakers who later followed him, still believed in the devil and evil, even if he wasn’t sure about God; Goodman Brown’s disenchantment reflected the author’s struggle to muster faith in any countervailing metaphysical principle of goodness. The exact nature of Lynch’s religious beliefs is somewhat unclear—he was a noted advocate of Transcendental Meditation, but by some accounts maintained some of the Christian creed in which he was raised. What is clear is that his work displayed a consistent conviction that there was profound goodness as well as evil in America, and that one could come back from the woods—or the Black Lodge—and keep that faith. This is part of what makes his work, like Hawthorne’s, an enduring contribution to the American canon, something that can be said of few other Hollywood filmmakers of his generation.
This week in Compact
I already mentioned David Gibbs’s latest in Compact, a searing account of how the left became not just elitist, but perhaps the most elitist force in US politics. One source of this elitism is the long tradition of bohemian suspicion of the heartland, of which Hawthorne’s story is an early instance and David Lynch’s work is both an expression and antidote.
Other highlights:
Adam Kirsch’s haunting essay on the LA fires and the long history of literary Angelenos who dreamed of apocalypse.
Nathan Pinkoski’s in-depth account of how multiculturalism undid liberalism in Britain, and the imperial roots of multicultural rule.
Juan David Rojas on the latest power grab of Nicaragua’s self-proclaimed “Christian socialist” leaders, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
Emmet Penney on the promise and perils of Trump’s energy agenda.
James Hankins on the American Historical Association’s misguided vote to condemn “scholasticide” in Gaza.
Ryan Zickgraf on the blind spot of gender-focused analysis of the 2024 election results: class.
Fabio Vighi on the deeper roots of South Korea’s current crisis, and what it may portend for the rest of the US-led global order.
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Possibly the best thing written about Lynch since his passing; certainly the best of the lot I’ve read.