A few days ago, David Lynch died. It was like losing someone whose work understood me, even though we never met. Some artists create worlds for you to escape into; Lynch created a world that had always existed but that most people tried to ignore. He peeled back the skin of reality to reveal the strange, humming undercurrent beneath — the dream logic we all experience but pretend isn’t there.

His films never felt like fiction to me. They felt like a mirror, angled just slightly wrong, reflecting not what we see but what we sense. The absurd encounters, the too-long stares from strangers, the way a perfectly normal space can suddenly feel like it’s holding its breath — this was life as I had always known it. And yet, before Lynch, I never had the words, or perhaps the courage, to articulate it.

There are moments in life that feel less like reality and more like cinema — specifically, the kind of cinema that David Lynch directs. These moments are not mere coincidences or fleeting oddities but full-bodied experiences that defy conventional logic. They unfold with an eerie slowness, bathed in the fluorescent glow of hyper-reality, punctuated by gestures and words that seem loaded with hidden meaning. They are the kind of experiences that leave you wondering whether you’ve stepped into a dream or if reality itself has momentarily forgotten the script.

The Geometry of Unease

The first sign that something is amiss is usually spatial. The world doesn’t just exist; it performs. You walk into a room, and the furniture is arranged almost too symmetrically, the lighting too stark, the silence too charged. There’s an artificiality to it, like a set piece meticulously designed but missing the warmth of a real, lived-in space.

The hushed opulence of a luxury boutique five minutes before closing feels empty except for a watchful sales assistant and the faintest scent of leather and jasmine. The shoes gleam too perfectly, the handbags rest in their illuminated glass cases like relics of an ancient religion. A lone customer lingers, slowly trailing a hand over a velvet display, their expression unreadable. You feel like you’ve walked into a scene where something is about to happen — but nothing does. The stillness itself becomes the event.

This is the geometry of unease. Lynch understood it intuitively. His spaces are never merely locations; they are psychological landscapes. The unnerving perfection of a diner where the coffee is always hot, but the waitress’s smile lingers a fraction too long. A hallway that seems to stretch further than it should. A nightclub bathed in crimson light where people sway in slow motion, caught between reality and a dream. He made the familiar unsettling not through grotesquery, but through precision — an almost mathematical manipulation of space and time.

Real life, I’ve found, operates on the same principle. There are places that feel too composed, too constructed, as if they were waiting for something beyond ordinary human movement to activate them. I once attended a private fashion viewing in Paris, an invitation-only affair in a grand apartment with impossibly high ceilings and antique chandeliers. Everything was arranged just so — mannequins positioned like frozen spectres, glasses of champagne balanced on trays that never seemed to tip, the murmur of polite conversation never quite reaching a natural crescendo. And yet, beneath it all, there was a strange stillness, a sense that if you looked too closely at the room, you might see the edges peeling away, revealing a different set entirely.

Some spaces are designed to make you feel powerful — palatial hotels, exclusive clubs, art galleries where the silence is as expensive as the paintings. Others, however, lull you into a state of unreality, making you question whether you are merely an actor in a scene directed by someone unseen. Monaco, where I’m in at least once a month, is a city built on this kind of dream logic. The glamour is so polished, so absolute, that at times it feels less like a real place and more like a perfectly rendered simulation. The yachts in the harbour, the casinos with their plush green tables, the mirrored elevators that never quite reflect you the way you expect — it all exists in a suspended state of artificial elegance, as if the entire principality were a set designed for a film that never ends.

But the true markers of Lynchian space are not just aesthetic — they are behavioural. The way people act in these places, as though bound by invisible rules. Have you ever been in a hotel lobby at an hour when no one should be there, yet there is always someone? A lone man in a suit, sipping an untouched drink, looking past you as if waiting for a signal only he will recognise. Or a restaurant where the patrons all seem eerily quiet, their conversations clipped, their movements choreographed. You sense something off, though you can’t explain why.

I walked into a near-empty bar in Tokyo few weeks ago past midnight, a place hidden so well that finding it felt like stumbling into another reality. The polite bartender nodded, pouring a drink as if I had ordered it in a language neither of us knew. A jazz record crackled in the background, but the sound seemed distant, muffled by the deep red walls. At the back of the room, an older man sat alone, staring into his glass, unmoving. I felt no threat, only the peculiar sensation that I had walked into a moment that had existed long before I arrived and would continue long after I left, unchanged, indifferent to time.

Lynch’s films teach us to see these moments not as mere coincidences, but as clues — signs that reality is not as stable as we pretend. His characters often find themselves trapped in places that seem to breathe around them, locations that hold a secret they are never quite able to decipher. And perhaps that’s the point. We spend so much time trying to impose logic on the world, forcing the uncanny into neat explanations, that we forget how much of life exists just beyond comprehension.

So when you step into a space and feel that flicker of unease — that sensation that something is not quite right — pause. Don’t look away. There is meaning in the stillness, in the perfectly arranged furniture, in the way the light casts shadows that seem almost deliberate. This is not just a place. This is a performance. And whether you realise it or not, you have just become part of the scene.

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Blue Velvet (1986)

Characters Without Context

Lynch’s films are filled with characters that feel both familiar and alien. They operate within the same world as the protagonist yet speak and move as if governed by an entirely different set of rules. Their presence is never incidental; they do not simply exist within the frame, but rather seem to have arrived there from a different narrative altogether — one we are not privy to, one that may never be explained. You encounter them in the real world, too.

Once, at a gallery opening in Paris, an elderly man in an impeccable Tom Ford cream suit approached me with an exaggerated slowness. His gaze was unwavering, as if he recognised me from another life. Without preamble, he said in French, “You remind me of a painting I once saw, can’t remember its name though.” Then, just as smoothly, he walked away before I could respond. Was it a line? A memory? A warning? The ambiguity made it more unsettling. I never saw him again, but his voice lingers in my mind like an unresolved chord.

This is the essence of a Lynchian figure: not merely strange, but strangely deliberate. His characters are unsettling precisely because they do not acknowledge the fundamental expectations of social interaction. They are not just odd, they are out of sync — with time, with space, with the protagonist’s understanding of reality.

Mulholland Drive’s Cowboy, who materialises in a shadowy corridor to deliver a cryptic monologue about attitude and choice, is calm, methodical, but his presence is wrong — not in the sense that he does anything overtly terrifying, but because he exists in a different rhythm. “You’ll see me one more time if you do good. You’ll see me two more times if you do bad.” It is not a threat, nor a promise. It is simply a statement, delivered with the kind of quiet authority that suggests he is merely a messenger of something far greater, something the protagonist — and the audience — will never fully grasp.

Whereas Twin Peaks’ The Man from Another Place, speaks in riddles, moves in unnatural syncopation, his words reversed and reassembled into something vaguely recognisable yet deeply alien. He does not speak to you so much as speak at you, as if you are simply another participant in a preordained script. There is no small talk in Lynch’s world. Every character who steps forward has already rehearsed their lines in another realm, and they will deliver them whether you are prepared or not.

Lynchian figures do not concern themselves with context, because they do not require it. Their existence does not hinge on logic, backstory, or continuity. They appear, they speak, and then they disappear, often without explanation or resolution. In Lost Highway, the Mystery Man confronts the protagonist at a party, claiming they have already met — despite this being impossible. He invites the protagonist to call home, where he, the Mystery Man, somehow answers the phone. The encounter is brief, chilling, and unprovoked. The protagonist does not seek him out; rather, he is chosen to receive this knowledge, whether he wants it or not.

This is the power of characters without context — they impose themselves upon the story, rather than fitting neatly into it. Unlike conventional antagonists or supporting players, they do not serve the protagonist’s journey, nor do they exist merely to drive the plot forward. They are interruptions, glitches in the narrative fabric, heralds of a deeper truth that will never be fully revealed.

In the real world, these moments manifest in unexpected encounters — the stranger who delivers a sentence with the weight of prophecy, the figure who watches a little too closely, the person who moves as if bound by a different gravity. Lynch understood that what unnerves us is not always what is overtly threatening, but what resists explanation.

Perhaps the elderly man in the cream suit was simply playing a role, or perhaps he truly saw something in me that reminded him of a painting he once knew. Either way, I was never meant to understand it. That is the beauty of Lynch’s world: some doors are meant to remain closed, some figures are meant to remain unknowable, and some words are meant to linger forever, unresolved.

The Elephant Man (1980)

Conversations That Almost Make Sense

Lynchian dialogue is often structured around statements that should make sense but don’t — words that seem to dangle just outside the realm of coherence. His characters speak in riddles, in half-formed truths, in sentences that feel as though they have been translated from a language we were never meant to understand. And yet, they are not nonsense. They are almost logical, almost graspable, like trying to recall a dream just after waking. This, too, happens in real life.

There have been moments when someone has said something to me that felt like it was on the verge of revelation — just one more sentence, one more clarification, and I would understand. But the explanation never comes. A stranger at a dinner party who leans in and tells you, in a voice heavy with meaning, “You look like someone who’s already been here before.” A receptionist who, when you ask if they have a free table, simply replies, “It depends on who’s asking.” Not quite cryptic, not quite absurd, just... off. The meaning sits just beyond reach, inviting you to chase it, knowing you never fully will.

This is the structure of Lynchian speech. Words that imply something greater, but refuse to resolve. Twin Peaks is full of it — the Log Lady dispensing wisdom that feels profound but defies logic: “One day my log will have something to say about this.” Or Leland Palmer, his grief morphing into theatrical performance, singing “Mairzy Doats” while his face cracks into an expression that is neither joy nor sorrow but something stranger, something that sits between emotion and madness. These are not just lines of dialogue, but verbal illusions, sentences that sound like they should mean something definite yet never fully land.

Perhaps the most famous Lynchian conversation is the diner scene in Mulholland Drive, where a man describes a nightmare he’s had — only to then experience that nightmare in real time. He explains his fear in meticulous detail, speaking with the kind of hesitant certainty that suggests he knows what he is saying makes sense, even if we do not. He describes a man lurking behind the diner, something that should not be there but is, something that fills him with an unshakable dread. When he finally goes outside to confront it, the thing is there, exactly as he feared, yet nothing about it is explained. The conversation has led to an answer, but the answer only deepens the mystery.

Lynchian dialogue is unnerving because it functions the way speech often does in dreams — structured correctly, yet fundamentally askew. The cadence is slightly too slow, or too fast. Pauses stretch just a little longer than they should. Responses feel like they belong to a different conversation entirely. In Lost Highway, the Mystery Man greets the protagonist with an impossible claim: “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” When the protagonist denies it, the Mystery Man persists: “At your house. As a matter of fact, I’m there right now.” It is not a question. It is not a taunt. It is merely a statement, delivered with absolute certainty. And this is what makes it terrifying.

Lynch understood that speech is not just about meaning — it is about rhythm, tone, and the expectation of meaning. In Eraserhead, the Lady in the Radiator sings a lullaby-like refrain, her voice sweet, her words nonsensical: “In Heaven, everything is fine.” It is soothing, but why? The phrase is neither comforting nor explanatory, yet it lingers in the mind as though it should hold comfort, as though it should make sense.

In reality, we often brush past these moments, excusing them as quirks of conversation, tricks of the mind. But Lynch magnifies them, isolates them, makes us listen. He does not let us dismiss the way words sometimes slip away from meaning. He forces us to sit in that discomfort, to confront the unease of language that should, but does not, align.

So when someone says something to you that almost makes sense — something that feels significant but refuses to explain itself — pause. Listen. It may be nothing. Or it may be the key to something larger, something waiting just behind the veil of the ordinary, refusing to be seen but whispering nonetheless.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Hyperreality and the Illusion of Control

Some spaces feel too pristine, too curated — so much so that they become unsettling. Luxury environments often carry this uncanny quality, their perfection so absolute that it begins to erode the sense of reality itself.

London has these moments. The private members’ clubs with their velvet armchairs and silent, watchful staff; the boutiques where each handbag is displayed like an ancient artefact, untouched by human hands; the glass-walled penthouses where the city outside is reduced to an aesthetic backdrop. Everything is arranged just so — an environment too smooth, too controlled, as though reality itself has been edited for maximum appeal.

There is something profoundly Lynchian about these spaces. His films revel in the eeriness of artificial perfection, in the way a place can feel too much like what it is supposed to be. Mulholland Drive plays with this idea constantly — Los Angeles is both a dreamscape and a nightmare, a city where the illusion of glamour is so convincing that it becomes sinister. The glitzy party scenes, the flawless houses on the Hollywood Hills, the performances of wealth and success — all feel like they are teetering on the edge of collapse. The control is an illusion, and once that illusion cracks, reality shifts into something terrifying.

London is a city that thrives on illusion. In Chelsea, you might find yourself in a restaurant where the lighting is so flattering, the conversation so expertly modulated, that time itself begins to stretch. You glance at the table next to you and see a face that feels eerily familiar — but not in the way one recognises a casual acquaintance. Rather, it is the sense that they belong to another time, another version of this moment that has played out before. A dinner party where the guests seem to be playing out roles, their laughter perfectly timed, their dialogue curated, as though they are following a script.

Lynch would lean into that feeling, push it further. He understood that control is, at its core, a fragile thing. The more a space insists on its perfection, the more likely it is to reveal its cracks. Twin Peaks’ Red Room with its impossibly symmetrical design, its perfectly polished floors, its deep red curtains, is a space that should feel elegant, yet everything about it is unsettling. The way people move, the way they speak, the way the room seems to shift around them — it is a space that mimics control but is, in fact, governed by something entirely beyond human understanding.

Luxury spaces often have this quality. They present themselves as effortless, as controlled environments where nothing is out of place. But perfection, when observed too closely, always becomes uncanny. The silent corridors of a five-star hotel at 3 a.m., where everything is too still. The showroom of a high-end car dealership, where the vehicles gleam but never move, suspended in a kind of capitalist limbo. The penthouse with its sprawling view of London, where the city below seems more like a painting than a living, breathing place.

Lynch’s characters often experience a profound loss of agency in these hyperreal environments. They step into spaces that appear familiar, only to find that they no longer function by normal rules. In Lost Highway, the protagonist moves through a house that seems to rearrange itself, where time fractures and identity dissolves. In Inland Empire, a Hollywood actress finds herself trapped in a reality that shifts like a malfunctioning film reel, scenes repeating and distorting without her control.

This is the real horror of hyperreality — it is not just that the world is artificial, but that it no longer belongs to you. The illusion of control is the first thing to go. And once that illusion shatters, all that remains is the unsettling feeling that you are merely a guest in a world that has already decided what role you will play.

Twin Peaks (1990-1991)

Expanding the Lynchian Lens

While Lynch’s work is a masterclass in the uncanny, he is not alone in exploring these themes. His vision is part of a broader artistic lineage, one that stretches across literature, philosophy, and film — a tradition of storytellers who understand that true horror is not found in the grotesque, but in the subtly, persistently off.

Kafka’s The Trial is perhaps one of the clearest literary predecessors to Lynch’s work. A man is arrested for a crime that is never explained, forced to navigate a bureaucratic maze that offers no logic, no escape, no resolution. The deeper he ventures into the system, the less he understands it. The world functions, but not in any way that makes sense to him. This, too, is the condition of many Lynchian protagonists. In Lost Highway, reality shifts under the protagonist’s feet, turning his own identity into a riddle he cannot solve. In Mulholland Drive, a seemingly conventional Hollywood story dissolves into fragmented, dreamlike horror, leaving the audience as bewildered as the characters caught within it.

Jorge Luis Borges presents another angle to this distortion of reality. His endless labyrinths and recursive structures echo Lynch’s fascination with loops — narratives that fold in on themselves, places that seem larger on the inside than the outside, stories that refuse to end. Borges’ The Library of Babel describes an infinite library containing every possible book, arranged in a way that ensures most are incomprehensible. Lynch’s Inland Empire does something similar with film itself, layering multiple realities on top of each other until the protagonist — and the viewer — loses track of what is real. Characters become trapped in versions of their own stories, much like Borges’ vision of men lost in an infinite archive of meaningless texts.

Even contemporary filmmakers continue this tradition, building on the Lynchian sense of unease. Yorgos Lanthimos, in The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, crafts worlds that function by a logic just slightly removed from our own. His characters speak with a robotic detachment, their emotions either exaggerated or entirely absent, their fates dictated by rules they do not fully understand. Much like Lynch, Lanthimos creates a reality that is recognisable yet fundamentally alien, where human behaviour is not entirely human and meaning is always just out of reach.

But Lynch’s work does not just exist within the artistic tradition — it can also be understood through psychoanalysis. Freud’s concept of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) is central to his aesthetic. The uncanny occurs when something once familiar becomes strange — when a doll looks too lifelike, when a double appears where there should be only one, when a repeated phrase takes on a sinister new meaning. Lynch builds his films on these moments. Think of Twin Peaks’ Red Room, where the human body moves unnaturally, or the way characters in Blue Velvet speak with a politeness that is just a fraction too slow, a fraction too rehearsed. The words are ordinary, the tone is not. The result is deeply unsettling.

Jung, too, offers a way into Lynch’s world. His theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious might explain why certain motifs reappear throughout Lynch’s films — the doppelgängers, the shadowy figures, the flickering lights that signal a shift from one reality to another. These symbols resonate because they belong not just to Lynch, but to something deeper, something primal. They trigger recognition in the viewer, even if they cannot articulate why.

To watch a Lynch film is to enter a dream where the logic is not entirely yours. It is a world shaped by literary nightmares, philosophical paradoxes, and psychological hauntings. And yet, for all its surrealism, it never feels foreign. It feels like something we have seen before, in half-forgotten dreams or the shadows of our own anxieties. That is why Lynch’s work lingers — because, much like Kafka, Borges, and the great surrealists before him, he understands that the most terrifying thing is not the unknown. It is the almost known.

The Lingering Sensation

Lynchian moments don’t announce themselves with fanfare; they unfold quietly and settle into the mind like a whisper. They don’t demand explanation because they exist in a world beyond logic.

The real world, much like Lynch’s films, is stranger than it seems. It is filled with encounters that hover between the dreamlike and the disturbing, places that feel as if they are waiting for something unspeakable to happen. And perhaps that is the key: life, like Lynch, isn’t about answers. It’s about the lingering question, the unresolved note, the feeling that something just beyond our comprehension is watching, waiting, whispering in the dark.

Lynch’s work never needed to explain itself to be understood — it spoke in a language beyond words, one we felt in our bones. Rest in peace to a visionary who made the familiar strange and the strange familiar.