Spoilers for Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, Eraserhead, and Blue Velvet follow.
David Lynch is most likely the best description of an auteur, avant-garde, American director of the last 30-40 years. Lynch is not only a filmmaker but also a visual artist, musician, and actor. Lynch was born in 1946 and went to college to study painting. To support his family, Lynch began to experiment with short films that incorporated a mix of animation and live-action. After the success of early short films, Lynch, his wife, and his daughter moved to Los Angeles, where Lynch began studying film at the AFI Conservatory. After some trouble at AFI, and a scrapped project, Lynch began working on what was then supposed to be a 42-minute film entitled, Eraserhead. The rest of David Lynch’s career is history. While many people love to talk about David Lynch films for their dream-like state, and incomprehensible plots and themes, there is another corner of interest that resides in Lynch’s work that I would like to dissect, that being his sound design. Lynch is most known for his avant-garde writing and directing style for such classics as, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and the television series Twin Peaks. While you won’t find a bigger fan of David Lynch’s work in a visual sense, I want to look at Lynch’s aural style. I want to look at Lynch’s aural style in three ways, his abstract use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, the role of sound relating to key themes, and the inventive use of speech.
David Lynch on the set of his 1977 film Eraserhead.
The first topic that I want to discuss that relates to Lynch’s aural style is the way he uses diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. The easiest and most glaring example of this instance is in his first film, Eraserhead. Eraserhead is a 1977 film that tells the story of a man who is trying to care for his newly born, deformed child in a stark industrial landscape. Lynch and longtime sound collaborator, Alan Splet, both worked on the sound design for the film. The most obvious avant-garde way of using sound in the film is the almost constant presence of brown noise. The brown noise that is present in the film is not entirely diegetic or non-diegetic. The static noise flows and shifts in different scenes, sometimes in a diegetic way to create a backdrop of industrial machinery’s loudness, and other times in a non-diegetic way to create a sense of fear and unknown for the audience. Most of the time in a film or music when the viewer or listener hears white or brown music it is in the background and supposed to be background music, but Lynch and Splet use the brown noise in Eraserhead to be at the forefront of viewers' minds, creating a mesmerizing and confusing experience solely from the sound design. Even when the characters in the film are talking, or other hard sound effects occur, the brown noise stays constant, sometimes even swallowing up the other sounds of the film. The amazing point of this type of sound design is that when the sound emanating from the screen is sometimes coming from outside of the world when it should be coming from inside of the world and vice versa, that forces a reaction from the audience that influences the visual elements of the film. This is sometimes that almost never happens in the film, the sound influencing the picture, as it is almost always the other way around. This is possible because of how hands-on Lynch is in the production and post-production aspects of sound. Lynch once said that “People call me a director, but I really think of myself as a sound man.” Lynch understands the importance of sound related to a visual form of art, which enables him to play around with sound in a truly unique way that no one else has heard before.
Sherilyn Fenn (left) and Kyle MacLachlan (right) in Twin Peaks (1990-1991).
Secondly, Lynch uses sound in a unique way of relating themes of a film through sound design. One example of this is the auteur's sense of surrealism and dream states throughout all his films, and how the sound relates to this. Many times, in a Lynch film you won’t be able to tell if something is really happening, or if something is just a dream. In Twin Peaks, when it is sometimes hard for the viewer to tell, Lynch will throw in hard sound effects and sounds that we have heard previously in the diegetic sense if what we are watching is happening. On the other hand, Lynch will use score or abstract sounds to relate to the audience that what they are seeing is a surreal moment or not actually real in the context of the story. Going back to Eraserhead, Lynch cleverly uses brown noise, clattering metal, screeching, and screaming to create an industrial landscape that helps shape one of the themes of the film. Without these sounds, one of the themes that Lynch is trying to relay to his audience (that technology and industrialization are dangerous) would maybe not have come across at all. These sounds impact the main character in Eraserhead to associate the industrial surroundings as horrific, scary, and suffocating. Another example of sounds relating to key themes is in the film Blue Velvet. In Blue Velvet, the main antagonist, Frank, is very powerful and very feared. To relate this idea sonically, Lynch gives Frank all the power sonically, as other characters never talk over him, and his volume is mixed higher than the other characters. He is also given a mask that serves narrative and sonic purposes, but I will touch on that later.
Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me (1992).
In Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, near the end of the film as we finally see Laura Palmer’s death Lynch decides to play the final movement to Luigi Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor. The song was “written in 1816, commemorating the execution of King Louis XVI”. The classical piece of music is representing the “king” like status that Laura Palmer had in the town of Twin Peaks, and the collapse of it. The piece is played over blinking images of the gory death scene, and the only sounds we hear are the whooshes of the knife going up and down on Laura. The absence of sound other than the classical piece of music and the knife sounds put an emphasis on the theme that no matter how good or important you are it is still very easy to get killed and die.
Lastly, one of the most abstract traits of Lynch’s sound design is the inventive use of speech in his films. This inventive use of speech is present in Lynch’s very first feature film, Eraserhead. Earlier, I discussed the plot of Eraserhead about how a man must care for his newborn child that is deformed. Because of the child’s major deformity, the child basically mews, whines, and screeches for the entirety of the film. Normally for a newborn child, we would hear mainly whining, but Lynch and Splet want the viewers to dissociate the child from being human, so the child is reproducing harsh animal noises. This later enforces the idea of the child’s death, at the hands of non-other than the father. The father was hearing the child as an animal and by the end of the film couldn’t stand it any longer and killed it. Again, this reinforces the idea that Lynch uses sound to enhance the picture, not vice versa.
Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet (1986).
Another fascinating example of the use of speech in Lynch’s films is the use of a mask for Frank’s character in Blue Velvet. In the film, Frank uses a mask to breathe in gas from a tank that is most likely filled up with helium. This produces a very high voice when Frank takes the gas throughout the film. The interesting choice to put something that will change his voice so much in the film is supported by the fact that it makes the world more surreal, and the character more horrifying. When the antagonist of a film randomly produces a high voice while screaming and cussing at characters, that is a great way to get the attention of your audience and to put a unique touch on a film. Another very noticeable example of this is the extremely odd use of ADR (automated dialogue replacement) in Mulholland Drive. There are many discussions online about why the ADR of Mulholland Drive is so bad, but I think this is a very wrong way to look at the dialogue of the film. While watching Mulholland Drive you will very quickly notice that the dialogue in some scenes does in fact seem unsynchronized. Lynch has stated that some of the ADR is unsynchronized, and heavily processed because this creates a surrealist state for the characters. Many of the characters' lines are heavily processed and slightly off sync furthering the idea that most of the film is not taking place in what the viewers would call the “real world”. Like before, Lynch’s obsession with dream states and surrealism lend themselves to enabling sound designers, ADR artists, foley performers, etc. to take chances that they couldn’t before.
Naomi Watts (left) and Laura Harring (right) in Mulholland Drive (2001).
In conclusion, David Lynch truly uses sound in his film like no other writer or director. Lynch has given numerous interviews specifically stating the importance of sound coupled with the visual medium that film is, and I think viewers can clearly see that he values sound. In closing, I will leave you with a quote that Lynch once said that sums up everything perfectly, “Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual.”.
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