Death is meaningless in 99% of horror movies. Teenagers are torn apart in increasingly fetishistic ways and at the end the viewer either gets a nihilistic ending or gets to watch the final girl/guy walk away and move on with their life. I realize this is a sweeping statement, and there are horror movies that attempt to be something more than typical slasher/ monster movie fare. But even among the most highbrow of the horror genre, it is hard to find instances where death is something more than a means used as an endpoint for gruesome bodily harm. And then… there is David Lynch.
In episode 6 of Twin Peaks: the Return there is death scene that is the worst thing I have ever seen in creative media. It is the culmination of 3 apparently disparate points of view. We see a cute, chubby teacher talking with a waitress about pie in the Double-R Diner. We see an old man get dropped off at a park. And, finally, we have been following a day in the life of Richard Horne, who is basically a two-bit thug who does not know he is a two-bit thug. Horne is driving angry and under the influence, while we see the old man watching a young woman play with her son. And before the viewer can register what is happening, Horne runs a stop sign and straight into the young woman’s son. Horne never evens slow down. And all of this would be bad enough, but Lynch lingers at the scene. The mother scoops up her son’s lifeless body, and begins to wail. The old man (played with overflowing gravitas by Harry Dean Stanton) walks over to the woman and puts a hand on her shoulder, but he knows and the viewer knows that it is a meaningless gesture. The actual deathblow may have happened in a flash, but the grief of losing a loved one, well, that is the real horror. After watching that scene I put Twin Peaks away. I still have not finished The Return. Congratulations Mr. Lynch, you beat me.
I have a weird relationship with Halloween. I don’t hate the holiday, and I do not think it is sinful to celebrate. But the basis of the holiday is the celebration of death, and the honoring of those who have passed on into the afterlife. But, and I say this as a Christian who believes that death has ultimately been defeated, I do not particularly like death. Death is trauma. Death is grief. Death is the understanding that, at least in this life, there are holes that will not be re-filled. And the reason that David Lynch is the only Master of Horror is that he realizes every single one of these fundamental truths about death and forces his viewers to come to grips with the reality of life after a loved one dies. Once one sees this in his works, one cannot unsee it. I had often wondered why everything I have watched by Lynch lingers in my thoughts, and now I realize it is because instead of lingering on how someone dies he instead lingers on how the people who are affected by the death react. Literally the entirety of Twin Peaks is based on this premise.
The pilot episode of Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of Laura Palmer’s body. We do not see her get murdered, instead she is already dead, famously, “wrapped in plastic.” With that established, the first half of this episode is people finding out about her death and reacting to the news. And the reactions are just brutal. It becomes apparent very quickly that this little town is about to be torn apart. Lynch, being who he is, even finds a way to make the call to Laura’s mother more devastating than normal. Most directors would make this scene a quick one. No need to make the audience uncomfortable. But Lynch shows us Sarah Palmer receiving the news and then we watch Grace Zabriskie scream in horror. And it goes on. And on. And on. The viewer can almost trace Sarah Palmer’s grief trajectory through Zabriskie’s performance, starting with an initial scream of shocked horror and moving towards a low moan of grief. We witness it all.
What Lynch understands about horror is that the emotions that come from losing a loved one can be more horrific than the threat of being brutally murdered. Most of us will not have a run-in with an axe murderer, or know someone who is possessed by demons, but every one of us will experience the loss of loved ones. And even if you, as a viewer, do not understand the, sometimes, labyrinthine plotlines of his works, you, as a human being with feelings, will understand the emotions that he captures. Mulholland Drive, for example, is a movie that seems to take 2-3 viewings to fully understand. And yet, the very first time I watched it I was incredibly moved by the Club Silencio scene. I honestly had no clue what was going on, but as our heroines, Betty and Rita, began to cry while listening to an A Capella, Spanish, version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” I became engrossed by the emotion of the moment. The grief of the moment only becomes apparent when the viewer realizes that what is being experienced is all a dream. It is an illusion created by Diane (played by Naomi Watts) to cope with the grief she feels for having her lover, Camilla, killed by a hitman. And the sad reality is that even within the perfect dreamworld she creates in her head, grief finds a way to invade the sanctuary of her dreams.
Lynch views grief as horror. While most of society sees the grieving process as something that everyone must go through, Lynch reacts against grief’s status as a natural feeling. In his works, grief is interpolation, an interruption that fractures lives. And that is why I find Lynch’s work to be consistently terrifying. People stand a chance against ghost and serial killers, but no one escapes grief. In one of the more famous scenes in Twin Peaks, the Giant tells Dale Cooper “It is happening again.” In the immediate sense, the Giant is referring Maddie’s death at the hands of a possessed Leland Palmer. But in the over-arcing sense of the show, the Giant is telling the audience that the horrors of grief will happen to us again and again. Some of us will be broken by the sorrow. Some of us will come through the other side as better people. But none of us can escape the experience. And by shining a light on grief, which is an experience we all wish we could hide, David Lynch invites viewers to experience true horror.
