There’s a treasure trove of David Lynch film reviews at Unz.com, most of which are written by Trevor Lynch (no relation to David that I’m aware of).
Some excerpts below.
Death My Bride: “Lynch ends [Lost Highway] as he begins it: rocketing down a nighttime highway to Bowie’s ‘I’m Deranged.’ But by ending and beginning in the same place, Lynch encloses the restless intentionality of modernist Faustian striving within the circle of classical self-consciousness and self-limitation. So we return to the beginning with a difference.”
Now It’s Dark: “There is a strong spiritual-religious element to Blue Velvet, as with all of Lynch’s work. Although Lynch himself is a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, which makes him a Hindu of sorts, the spiritual imagery of his movies tends to be Western, primarily Christian but also Gnostic. I read Eraserhead, for instance, as a Gnostic anti-sex film. Like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet treats sex as a form of bondage to subhuman powers, both animal and demonic. But Blue Velvet is far less nihilistic than Eraserhead. The demonic forces are balanced out by angelic ones, represented by robins and light from above, as opposed to electric light, which for Lynch has demonic connotations.”
Twin Peaks — Fire Walk With Me: “Lynch made Fire Walk with Me because he wanted to go back to the world of Twin Peaks. So did his audience. But instead of delivering damn fine coffee and cherry pie with a scoop of nostalgia on top, the logic of the story led him into a Stygian darkness where the critics and audiences did not want to follow. That’s a shame, because once you walk through the fire, the angels win out in the end.”
And here are some of the most interesting Lynch/Twin Peaks analyses I’ve found elsewhere in recent years.
Twin Peaks as Islamic Process Metaphysics: “The show’s piloting consciousness steers bright dark religious-type negotiations into hell. Formerly embraced and humanized archaic forces plus energies of indistinct feeling converse in simple, profound terms. They are struggling with elemental, chaotic images that are continually becoming more primitive. It has become a place of demons. All we register is a prophetic absence, the emptiness, loneliness, vastness, meaningless of signals…Each scene is a little factory of irreducible detail wielding a story. Each one is like a somnambulant fumbling with ancient stories that are never exhausted. They carry their own implications. They are pictures dedicated to final realities that are not pictures. Each picture stops us dead in our tracks. They demand sacrifices we wouldn’t otherwise have conceived.”
Twin Peaks Finale: A Theory of Cooper, Laura, Diane, and Judy: “I suggest that Laura Palmer was meant to function as a capacitor: storing a huge accumulated charge of suffering which could then be discharged at the precise moment. ”