The Sound of Anxiety: David Lynch, Bertolt Brecht, and Me
How David Lynch attracted a huge cult by making films that repulse his audience.
1. My Introduction to Mr. David Lynch
I first saw Mulholland Drive on a date. I was twenty-five years old, and had met her at a downtown performance art open mic. I’m not withholding her name out of any sense of decency; it was our second and last date. Our first had been over at her apartment to use a shirt painting kit I’d bought to support a special school for autistic children attended by a friend’s son.
The last time I ever saw her, she jumped out of a car on Allen Street to say hello before telling me she had moved to Jersey City with a woman and goodbye. The relationship didn’t even begin. The romance with David Lynch’s work is ongoing.
I hadn’t been a fan of David Lynch’s up to that point. I liked Twin Peaks when it was on, and my friends and I had rented Eraserhead when I was nineteen and video rental stores still existed. But other than that, I, having grown up in a world of action heroes and broad comedies, had found his reputation as serious director of art intimidating. And then she told me something that completely changed the way I watch David Lynch’s movies.
“David Lynch movies,” she said as we walked up the steps from the N/R train platform, “don’t work on your conscious mind. They go straight to the back of your brain, and your subconscious mind works on them while you sleep.”
2. Who is Bertolt Brecht?
My grandmother spent her career teaching theater at the LaGuardia School for the Performing Arts. I don’t know why I feel obligated to almost apologize for knowing who the playwright Bertolt Brecht is - maybe it’s because I like to preserve my blue collar working class authenticity - but all you need to know is Brecht was hugely influential in the world of theater, especially German theater. Here are three interesting facts about the man:
He was part of a wave of German artists, writers, and intellectuals who fled to Southern California to escape the Nazi regime.
He worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. His only credited film that he wrote here was a co-write of a Fritz Lang film, The Hangman Must Die! I’ve never seen it.
His work that’s probably most familiar to contemporary American Audiences would be his collaboration with Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera, from which we get the song ‘Mack the Knife.’ In addition, the song ‘Pirate Jenny’ was a huge influence on the American folk movement of the 1960s, directly inspiring the work of Bob Dylan.
And so, I now understand David Lynch creates his films with an eye to a Brechtian view towards using theatricality as a means of forcing the viewer to maintain a distance from the film they’re watching, from losing themselves in the story. By using a confrontational sound design, directing his actors towards a less-natural style of acting, and editing that, especially as his career progressed past the films we’ve seen in class, leaves a beat or two of space between the last line of a character’s dialogue and the cut to the next scene.
But even in his earlier work, this idea of theatricality is often implicit, with characters acting stiffly as if characters in a play, or shots that look staged rather than naturalistic. But they can also often be explicit, as in the Woman in the Radiator singing in her tiny showroom in Eraserhead, or most clearly, John Merrick’s laid out as a series of “performances” in various venues, from carnival to medical examination to his private room where he plays host to the cream of society, who have come to gawk.
Whereas Brecht, through his epic theatre movement, used alienation in his work to give his audience room to think about social structures and invite political critique, Lynch’s work creates a space where, rather than feel enlightened the audience is invited to feel uneasy. Through his sound design, his editing, his choice of camera angles, the audience is invited into a world where the actors behave in ways that constantly remind us that they are performing..
While The Elephant Man is the least typical film of Lynch’s in this regard – Tony Hopkins and John Hurt topline a cast that give naturalistic, absorbing performances that draw one into the plot – even here there are moments that we think of as typically “Lynchian”. For instance, the moment when the camera pans from Jim Renshaw the night porter knocking at Merrick’s window to Merrick’s hood hanging on the wall, and slowly zooms into the eyepiece. Within the darkness of the hood is an industrial world of men working on steel and pipes, and most importantly the discordant industrial soundtrack which Lynch had used in his previous work, the shorts The Alphabet and the Grandmother as well as Eraserhead, to force the audience to take a step back to create a space for the unconscious and the grotesqueries on display therein.
Please note that I’m not discussing Dune, as that is a mess for which Dino DeLaurentis bears as much, if not more blame than David Lynch.
3.Mulholland Drive, or The Sounds of Silence
Looking briefly ahead, Mulholland Drive shows how Lynch’s sound design evolves. Where his early work builds overwhelming walls of noise, here silence and absence of ambient sound achieve the same alienating effect. This later example helps clarify how strategies first used in Eraserhead and his short films deepen across his career.
While Lynch’s early work creates a wall of noise to separate the viewer from the “reality” of the world in his films, the sound design for Mulholland Drive does the exact opposite.
The first two thirds of the movie are a fantasia, a romance out of a Douglas Sirk film (and here we come back to our Germans). Naomi Watts’ Betty arrives at LAX and befriends an elderly couple, to whom she lays out her dreams of Hollywood stardom. Two things alert us to a sense of unreality in the film, the first being that Watts enters as such an over-the-top “movie character.” It’s as if she knows that she’s the star of a movie of her own life.
The second and most important aspect, though, is the absence of any background noise associated with Los Angeles International Airport. There’s no airplane noise, no people talking to each other, no car engines. The intention is to subconsciously clue us to the fact that in no way is this film taking place in the real world.
In what is possibly the movie’s most celebrated scene, two men dressed in suits sit at a diner called “Winkie’s.” One describes to the other a recurring dream about a monster that lives behind the building. He’s come to rid himself of the terror the dream inspires. But Lynch has designed this scene so that it’s a nightmare of its own.
The camera floats around the two men’s heads as if reality itself has detached. More importantly, other than the police siren that leads us into the scene, there is no noise other than that created by the two men. In a diner full of patrons, there is no background chatter, no footsteps, no music. We see traffic zoom by outside the window, but we hear no cars. The only noise is that created by the two principals –dialogue, a spoon hitting a saucer (a sound that returns significantly in a later scene about monstrous figures behind the scenes of Hollywood). Even paper currency being unfolded is amplified and uncanny. Even the room tone is gradually replaced by Angelo Badalamenti’s droning score.
And finally, in the long walk to the dumpster where the monstrous “Bum” lives, even the dialogue fades in and out as if the characters are speaking underwater. (As a side note: perhaps this scene was inspired by a real-life experience Lynch had getting into the dumpster behind Bob’s Big Boy where he found out that his beloved milkshakes were made from unnatural chemicals. You can find this story in a YouTube video titled “David Lynch on the Quest for the Perfect Milkshake.” I’ve placed it at the end of this essay. You’re welcome.)
4. The Sound of Anxiety: Eraserhead
In much the same way, Lynch uses every element of production in Eraserhead to alienate the viewer, to make sure that the audience never experiences a comfortable moment. It’s about the closest I’ve ever found to an anxiety disorder being accurately depicted onscreen.
Henry enters the home of his girlfriend Mary’s parents for the first time. The world outside is a howling nightmare of high speed wind noise (although there’s no wind evident onscreen) and eventually the hum/whine of an industrial air conditioner. Every piece of furniture has an accompanying squeak or grind, so that the audience understands that it’s uncomfortable.
Puppies suck at their mother’s teat with an almost unbearable squeaking, foreshadowing the disgust with which Henry, and by extension ourselves, feel when we meet his baby for the first time.
The squelching sound of the man-made chickens drives Mary’s mother to orgasm, followed by a scene in which the lighting, the dialogue, and the performance suddenly enter us into soap opera land (a place we’ll visit again in Twin Peaks), in which the familiar old-fashioned dialogue and performance remind the audience suddenly that what we are watching is just a movie. Ironically, this helps maintain the unnatural and unreal theatricality of the piece, and ties it together in a way that continuing to repulse the audience and add layers of overwhelm do not.
It creates a space in the conscious mind where the subconscious can comfortably contain the information we’re receiving.
In the end, Lynch’s films use sound, image, and editing to keep us off-balance. The noise in Eraserhead or The Alphabet doesn’t just set a mood—it overwhelms us. The staging of The Elephant Man reminds us that even compassion can look like spectacle. Instead of letting us disappear into the story, Lynch makes sure we always feel the performance, and that unease is the point. His movies remind us that identity, like film itself, is a performance that can slip at any moment.
Lynch’s films don’t just tell stories—they make us feel the strangeness of being alive in a world that’s always just a little off.
5. The Quest for the Perfect Milkshake
From The Filmosophers’ Show episode, “A Conversation with David Lynch.”
Like Lynch’s movies, this blog works best when it lingers in the back of your mind. Hit subscribe so the next essay sneaks into your inbox.
And if you share it with a friend, you might just drag them into the uncanny with you.
You can buy the header illustration on a shirt.