The dark side

As David Lynch turns 77 – for him, a number of significance – how did his esoteric visions become such a normalised part of screen culture?

- Phil Hoad

BEYOND HIS HOLINESS SAINT KEANU, if there is another universally beloved figure online, it is David Lynch. He is the internet's eccentric grandpa: unfailingly ringing in the day with his daily weather reports, banging the gong for transcendental meditation and crafting miniature farmyard barns for his youngest daughter, Lula.

His other line, perhaps the most overtly Lynchian, is his daily lottery in which - for seemingly no other reason than gratuitous delight and enigma - he draws a random numbered ball. A confirmed numerologist, his preferred integer is seven. Dorothy Vallens' apartment - the nexus of lust, violence and voyeurism in Blue Velvet - was on the seventh floor. So was the office of Gordon Cole, the FBI chief played by the director in Twin Peaks. David Lynch turns 77 on 20 January. So there is no better time to ask: how did this once-cult artist - whose work is filled with seething psychopaths - become such a cosy cultural presence?

This turn of events seems all the more unlikely when you consider his position in the mid-90s. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a harrowing, humour-free sojourn with incest, was booed by the press at Cannes in 1992, and five years later Lost Highway wasn't much more warmly received. If "Lynchian" - defined by David Foster Wallace in his seminal 1996 essay as "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" - was a quantifiable sensibility, it either remained marginal, or people were already tiring of it, or both.