Carolina, Idaho, Virginia and beyond: How “Middle America” shaped David Lynch
Lynchian is often hard to pin down, just as any kind of understanding or categorisation of the director’s work is. There are black and white sequences, neon lights, and musical moments. But I’d argue that there is nothing as foundational and essential to David Lynch’s vision as a simple, boring, run-of-the-mill American town.
Once you have that, you’ll find that everything else seems to fall into place. It wasn’t that Lynch was just throwing stuff at the wall, picking a random setting and then chucking in a bunch of fantasy characters, odd places and strange happenings. Of course, to the extent that his work was fiction, he was, but anyone who has ever spent any time in a weird, not quite middle-of-nowhere but definitely not something type of town, they’ll have seen a good amount of stuff that could be described as Lynchian just on their wanderings.
In Lynch’s work, overwhelmingly, his stories are set in the suburbs, or at least just away from the action, such as Blue Velvet, where all happens in the sleepy town of Lumberton, North Carolina, Wild At Heart is also set in North Carolina, but in Cape Fear, and Twin Peaks is obviously set in the fictional town of Twin Peaks, but the place is meant to be a stand-in for really any remote-ish, Pacific Northwestern town, such that a majority of the show was filmed in a similar setting of Snoqualmie, Washington.
While Eraserhead, with its buzzing electrical wires and general gloom, could be anywhere, even in his later projects, when his new home of Los Angeles crept into his work, there was still distance, where Mulholland Drive is away from the buzz of downtown, feeling like a world within a world, making it another perfect setting.
It seemed that Lynch had no interest in busy places where weird things happen all the time, and instead was fascinated by these odd, interim towns that have their own ecosystems. In a small town, you can have good guys, bad guys, mysteries and huge ruptures as one event can touch everyone, and you also find those surreal moments Lynch loved, like when you seem to be driving for miles and then pass by a glowing neon sign for a sex shop on a highway, or when you’re passing through a quiet town and see a bar that is bustling and all too glamorous for its setting.
Lynch was enamoured by the strangeness and beauty of that, and he had been since childhood, recalling in Lynch On Lynch in 2005, “My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be.”
As a child who moved around a lot, living in North Carolina, Idaho, Virginia and beyond, clearly there was always a sense of comfort in the clean, normality of suburban life like that.
But in each new place, he’d find things under the surface. “On the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out, some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it,” he said as the ultimate metaphor, found in his childhood backyards.
“I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath,” he added, which is surely the Lynchian mission statement.
