David Lynch’s Unsolvable Puzzles

Critics at Large | The New Yorker · Feb 6, 2025 · 51m

David Lynch, who died last month at seventy-eight, was a director of images—one whose distinctive sensibility and instinct for combining the grotesque and the mundane have influenced a generation of artists in his wake. Lynch conjured surreal, sometimes hellish dreamscapes populated by strange figures and supernatural forces lurking beneath wholesome American idylls. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz revisit Lynch’s landmark works and reflect on their resonance today. They discuss his 1986 film, “Blue Velvet”; the television series “Twin…