This story discusses several plot-critical deaths in David Lynch movies; as such, spoilers abound beyond this point.
It’s hard not to get self-conscious talking about the redemptive power of love. But when David Lynch died this January, I—like thousands upon thousands of others—could not stop thinking about how one of the artists most attuned to human cruelty had also argued so forcefully, and so convincingly, that there was something beautiful lurking just beneath and just beyond us. I’ve spent the last several months watching, rewatching, and considering the ways death—including, but not limited to, the literal, physical version—functions in Lynch’s work. What follows is an incomplete list of (mostly) human Lynch characters whose departure from the world of the living tells us something about how the artist saw the next life.
1. “Girl In Accident” (Sherilyn Fenn), Wild At Heart (1990)
Samuel Goldwyn Films/Everett Collection
Lynch’s adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel grafts onto the cursed love story of Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) the tantalizing notion of redemption at the end of a near-endless journey. It’s a decision he apparently worried, during production, would make the film too commercial, when in fact that saving-grace coda would become as strange and powerful as anything he ever put to screen. Though beset by Lula’s domineering mother, quasi-poverty, a truly horrifying small-town criminal, and the penal system, the couple’s solipsism is capital-R romantic, an American myth all its own. (Sailor, who cannot or will not break from his Elvis affect, likes to say that his snakeskin jacket is “a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.”)
When Sailor is released from prison for the second time, he goes immediately to see Lula and the child he’s never met in the flesh; he leaves them in a jag of panic, but is stopped by an angel (Sheryl Lee) who leads him back to Lula, to Love. What Lynch is arguing, though, is not that this is the inevitable arc of life—rather, that love of this kind is so precious as to be sought and protected at any cost. For all the elements conspiring against Sailor and Lula, the thing that proves toughest to shake is a shard of innocent Americana stripped from its context and shattered in the desert.
Earlier in the film, they encounter a girl (Twin Peaks‘ Sherilyn Fenn) on the side of the highway, the only survivor—for the moment, at least—of an offscreen wreck. Disoriented, with blood pouring down from her hairline, this girl asks if the couple has seen her lost wallet. “My mother’s going to kill me,” she says. She rubs the “sticky stuff” in her hair. She lays down; blood bubbles lavalike up through her esophagus. “Get my lipstick,” she says with her last breath. “It’s in my purse.”
2. Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), Twin Peaks (1990-91), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
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