January 16, 2025 - 11:30pm

I can hardly believe that we won’t get to watch another David Lynch film. The director’s death at age 78 on Thursday leaves the US cultural scene psychologically flatter than it already is in the age of AI slop and BookToks. Lynch was one of the great American artists of his generation, gifted with acute insight into the workings of mind and desire, and the ability to translate that into sublime moving images and stories of immense power and mystery.

Watching his best work — Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Blue Velvet — is the closest we come to experiencing dream states while fully awake. These dreams are more often than not discomfiting. Indeed, they’re nightmares. But the discomfort serves a moral purpose: Lynchian subjects are always lost in the fantasies they weave to escape responsibility or having to confront the demands of reality.

This theme found its richest expression in 2001’s Mulholland Drive — Lynch’s “acknowledged masterpiece” (per The New York Times) and my personal favourite. I watched it on DVD a few years after its release, at a point in my life when I was deeply drawn to psychoanalysis; so much so that I came very close to undertaking psychoanalytic training before discerning that I would make for an awful therapist.

I mention this because Mulholland famously lends itself to Freudian analysis and, more specifically, the Freudian account of dreams as vessels for repressed desires. Even when we hit the hay, Freud taught, we can’t express such yearnings directly, but only in the garbled “code” of dream language. So it is with Mulholland’s protagonist, Diane (Naomi Watts), a failed would-be actress who sets out to assassinate her lover, Camilla (Laura Harring), after the latter takes a role from her and betrays her by marrying the director (Justin Theroux).

The plot doesn’t unravel in the tight, coherent manner my summary above suggests. Rather, the first two-thirds or so of the film takes the form of a dream of Diane’s in which the various elements of the real story are scrambled. Camilla becomes “Rita,” a mysterious woman who has lost her memory following a car accident; the “Camilla” who steals Diane’s role is some other actress; the director casts her only because he is coerced to do so by a mafia-like agency; Diane herself isn’t a failed actress forced into prostitution to make ends meet, but a naïve country girl just arrived in Hollywood; and so on.

Not everything is tied up neatly, of course, but that’s what dreams are. In Mulholland, Lynch achieved what can only be described as psychic verisimilitude: this is just how we desire; and it’s how fantasy helps us cope, to reconstitute our broken lives into self-legitimating narrative.

The amusing irony of the film is that all this unfolds against the backdrop of Hollywood — the ultimate fantasy machine. When confronted with the possibility of psychoanalytically diagnosing cultures, Sigmund Freud demurred in his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents. To put entire civilisations on the couch, he argued, wouldn’t pass scientific muster. But art is a different thing, and David Lynch ruthlessly interrogated Hollywood fantasy itself — in the Hollywood medium.

As bleak as the results could be, the upshot was always salutary: if the world is fundamentally disfigured or antagonistic — whether owing to the biblical Fall or the murder of the primordial father figure — then we do well to attend to the resulting wounds; to the ways we use fantasy to mask them; and to the dangers this poses.


Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari