Mestre Zen (do cinema)

In what seems the far-distant past of 2018, the critic Dennis Lim wrote that “the primal terror of Lynch’s films is an existential one, stemming from the ever-present possibility of things falling apart—the daily state of affairs, in other words, of Trump’s America.” But then things really did fall apart, and that destabilizing, anything-can-happen feeling at the foundation of Lynch’s pictures became right for a time of mutating lethal virus strains, QAnon cult conspiracies, bomb cyclones, Rudy Giuliani’s dripping temples, and sports teams cheered on by the piped-in reactions of cardboard-cutout fans. In the course of the past year, the world of David Lynch—which has never made logical sense—made perfect 2020 sense.