"Lynch is a kind of Jacques Cousteau of the postmodern nightmare," commented
Salon.com writer Brian Libby, "where our cartoonish notions of family values and the American dream are ravaged by an undercurrent of forbidding treachery." Noting that Lynch's body of work comprises "one of the most ominous visions in cinema," Libby explained the thread connecting Lynch's vision as "about decent people cornered by obsessive evils we can't clearly see." Despite such subject matter, most Lynch films have been popular and profitable, garnering the director several Academy Award nominations. "Lynch," declared Sheila Benson in the
Los Angeles Times, "has become a master at giving form to what is not permitted--rage, revulsion, our darkest imaginings--and by making them tangible, lets us acknowledge them."
Living with Extremes
Lynch's early life moved between extremes of beauty and ugliness. As Richard Combs observed in Monthly Film Bulletin, the director "often talks of the 'blue skies, red flowers, white picket fences and green grasses'" he knew as a child, when he lived in small, quiet towns and explored the woods with his tree-scientist father. But in the mid-1960s Lynch left home to study painting in Philadelphia, and as Combs quoted him, "I went to the big city and it scared me.
