Lynchian
adjAU /ˈlɪntʃiːən/
Etymology From Lynch + -ian.
1
Of or pertaining to David Keith Lynch (1946–2025), American filmmaker and director whose surrealist films are characterized by dreamlike imagery, sound design, and narrative, juxtapositions of the mundane and the grotesque, and an air of mystery or unease.
- An academic definition of Lynchian might be that “the term refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter.” […] Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. […] I've noted since 1986 (when Blue Velvet was released) that a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures-grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances.1996 September 23, David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch keeps his head”, in Premiere, →ISSN:
- My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian. I think they are disgusting. Just imagine. Aren't these some kind of, how do you call it, vagina dentata, dental vaginas threatening to swallow you?2006, Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema:
4 more examples
- Lynchian sound practice is even more specialised. A kind of aural uncanny is produced, with classic pop ballads occurring in unexpected places and an unlocatable industrial hum subsisting with—or even muffling—dialogue.2008, Andrew Dix, Beginning Film Studies, Manchester University Press, →ISBN, page 154:
- This is not the first time, however, that the Trump Presidency has put me in mind of the Lynchian world. The primal terror of Lynch’s films is an existential one, stemming from the ever-present possibility of things falling apart […] the volatility of the self and of reality. For Lynch, disruption is generative: trauma, the recurring subject of his films, can rupture the fabric of reality.2018 June 29, Dennis Lim, “Donald Trump's America and the Visions of David Lynch”, in The New Yorker:
- Lynchian is the go-to adjective to describe any sniff of the uncanny and esoteric on screen, from Donnie Darko to True Detective. It will never be a mainstream quality, but it exists explicitly in orientation towards the mainstream, often represented by the discordant versions of 50s Americana that appear so often in his work. And so his destabilising vision has become a common lens for discerning the truth about the “normal world”: that white picket fence America paints over deviant and sometimes evil obsessions, as in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, or that Hollywood is in fact a nightmare factory, as in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.2023 January 9, Phil Hoad, “Deviant obsessions: how David Lynch predicted our fragmented times”, in The Guardian:
- Mr. Lynch’s style has often been termed surreal, and indeed, with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs and eroticized derangement of the commonplace, the Lynchian has evident affinities to classic surrealism.2025 January 16, J. Hoberman, “David Lynch, Maker of Florid and Unnerving Films, Dies at 78”, in The New York Times: