Johnson, Jeff. “Introduction: Blackbeard, Calvin and the Outer Banks of North Carolina.” Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2004. 5-12.

The point is that Hopper, since Blue Velvet, became only what he was in Out of Blue. The same thing happened to Lynch. After Blue Velvet, like Hopper, he became decadent—by which I mean redundant, Blue Velvet having become the final repository, the culmination and exhaustion of the motifs and images from all his earlier work. The first few episodes of Twin Peaks (1990-1991) were encouraging, but the series quickly spiraled into predictability. Wild at Heart (1990) was embarrassing. His most original film, The Straight Story (1999), turned out to be his most obtuse, a mawkish, sanctimonious portrait of a grouch. Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), to some degree, redeemed him, but even in those films Lynch plays it safe, revisiting territory he previously exhausted. 8

The breakdown of Lynch’s aesthetics prompted me to reevaluate his work less from a formal, artistic perspective than in a context of intention. Looking back comprehensively through his oeuvre, I noticed how some of his films that once appeared subversive were, in fact, reassuring. They reinforced a wistful benevolence, projected a vision of a nostalgic America that existed only in a Reaganesque, bright-eyed Eagle Scout’s good-deed diary. In hindsight (which is, after all, twenty-twenty), his films, instead of being iconoclastic, read like sermons: the good people, the elect, are beautiful, wholesome, well-balanced, with a penchant for fifties’ fashion and family values, which the bad people, ugly and carbuncular, deal drugs, engage in promiscuous sex, produce pornography and mock in blatant acts of blasphemy the virtues of the American hearth and Heartland. 8-9

Underpinning this doctrinaire vision of moral worth and ethical liabilities is the notion of desire as a destructive force, the root of evil, betraying Lynch’s Manichaean certainty in simple, self-evident truths about right and wrong, reward and punishment, salvation and damnation. 9

The Lynch I found, in retrospect, is not the radical groundbreaking filmmaker many make him out to be but a rather straightforward reactionary working within the tradition of typical Calvinist thought in American literature. The revised Lynch I mean to present is a puritanical, hyper-patriotic, idealistic conservative on a reformer’s mission, bent, actively through his films, on correcting what he sees as the scourges of American youth culture: drugs, alcohol and hedonism. Lynch promotes a return to the values inherent in a mythological, post-World War II America, embracing wholeheartedly Reagan’s reification of the fifties that he, like Tom Brokaw, considers America’s greatest generational decade. Lynch told David Edelstein in The Village Voice, “There’s such a good, clean, beautiful feeling after a war” (20). When asked how he felt about “the Reagan people who would like to see that kind of world again” (20), Lynch replied, “Yeah, I like the direction of pride…an optimistic feeling” (20). 9-10

Like Mark Lewis in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1959), Lynch seems to derive a kind of voyeuristic pleasure from indulging in what he condemns. 10

Reading Lynch through Freud is, of course, irresistible; but more than a method of analysis, Freudian readings of Lynch identify a framing device around which Lynch builds his narratives. Which means, conveniently, that my colonial analogy holds: Blackbeard, the id, is the Frank Booth of Bogue Inlet; the superego, Lt. Maynard, the Dale Cooper of Hampton Roads. Between these two extremes, which in this extended analogy form the go, are the residents populating Lynch’s landscape: the parochial, common-sense folk, righteous in their innocence but targets too of demonic forces: lust, greed, televangelists, politicians, land scammers, drug dealers, double-crossers and pornographers—pirates, essentially, governed by the king’s men. 11

If not exactly hypocritical, Lynch likes having it both ways. he reminds me of a debauched priest asking for prurient details during confession, or a judge who needs to read a pornographic text a few times too many before he deems the material obscene. 12

In response to this schizophrenic, sermonic presentation of his material—as I too morbidly indulge in scenes I condemn—the following chapters should be read as a correction as much as a critique, an exposé as much as an explication. 12