“Kto ubil Loru Palmer?”:

David Lynch and (Post-)Soviet Culture and Cinema

Author

Raymond De Luca

Abstract

The celebrated American filmmaker David Lynch died on January 21^st, 2025. His death has sparked numerous reflections about his significance for American culture and cinema. Lost in most of these accounts, however, is Lynch’s popularity in Russia. This article considers Lynch’s Russian legacy. What did the name “David Lynch” mean to the last generation of Soviet filmmakers in the 1970s-80s and to the first generation of post-Soviet filmmakers in the 1990s? How might Lynch have been shaped by developments unfolding in Soviet cinema when he began making movies, and what drove Twin Peaks’s raucous response in early post-Soviet Russia? This article begins by uncovering the feedback loop of creative influence shared between Lynch and two luminaries of late Soviet cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksei Balabanov. The article then turns to Twin Peaks in Russia, arguing that it attracted such attention because it fused the two dominant genres of post-Soviet cultural life: the Russian darkwave (chernukha) and soap operas. The article concludes by exploring Lynch’s reception under Vladimir Putin after the release of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). It argues that the darker turn of Lynch’s reboot paralleled the trajectory of Russian society as it transitioned out of the wacky ‘90s and into the dystopic 2010s.

Keywords

David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovskii, Aleksei Balabanov, Franz Kafka, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, The Wizard of Oz, post-Soviet film, chernukha, soap opera.

Introduction

In 2014, Brad Dukes, a dyed-in-the-wool fan of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s legendary television series Twin Peaks, published an ‘oral history’ of the show, which famously aired on ABC between 1990 and 1991 before its unceremonious and altogether unexpected cancellation. Penning a kind of love letter to the wacky and weird world of Twin Peaks, Dukes recounts – through interviews with many of the show’s actors, creators, and producers – its unlikely origins and enduring success twenty-five years after its release.

Among its many highlights, the book, entitled Reflections (2014), includes a remarkable story retold by the media mogul Jules Haimovitz, who once worked for the now-defunct production company Spelling Entertainment Inc. (formerly Aaron Spelling Productions) that produced Twin Peaks. As Haimovitz retells it, Twin Peaks had aired in the Soviet Union as the country began unravelling under the reformist leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. The unanticipated series finale of Twin Peaks premiered in the United States on June 10, 1991, only a few months before the ill-famed August Coup, which all but sounded the death knell for the USSR. Apparently, Gorbachev had been a fan of the show, and he placed a call to then President George H. W. Bush, inquiring about the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer, the murder victim whose death becomes the show’s narrative catalyst and its central mystery (Dukes 2014: 99). Bush then called Carl Lindner – one of the president’s deep-pocketed Republican backers who kept ties with the television industry – and urged him to get the name of the Palmer murderer so he could pass it along to the Russians as a gesture of goodwill. Linder called the executives at Spelling and got in touch with Haimovitz, who phoned Lynch himself. For his part, Lynch kept mum and refused to divulge the identity of the killer, which, for Haimovitz, confirmed that even “David had no idea who killed Laura Palmer” (Dukes 2014: 99).

This comical anecdote, as if the Palmer murder could have somehow played a part in ending the Cold War, made the rounds on Russian and American news outlets in 2014, but, when a journalist for The Moscow Times asked Gorbachev himself – who passed away in 2022 – about the incident, he claimed that he had no recollection of Twin Peaks.¹ It appears, moreover, that Twin Peaks debuted in Russia only after the Soviet Union’s dissolution, specifically on November 4, 1993 (on the Ostankino TV channel), just a few weeks after Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, ordered a military strike against Russia’s parliament.²

Whether or not Gorbachev’s phone call – and the uproarious game of telephone it elicited – actually happened, Haimovitz’s anecdote nevertheless raises a series of interesting questions that are worth exploring in greater detail. Just what was the status of Twin Peaks in Russia in the early 1990s, and why might it have generated such appeal? What did, if anything, the name ‘David Lynch’ mean to the last generation of Soviet filmmakers and, equally as important, to the first generation of post-Soviet filmmakers? How might Lynch himself have been shaped by developments unfolding in Soviet cinema when he began making movies in Philadelphia and Los Angeles in the 1960s-70s? I want to suggest that there existed a mutual feedback loop between Lynch and his contemporaneous (post-)Soviet filmmakers as each imported and exported various themes and aesthetics from the other, which were, we will see, equal parts disturbing, grotesque, existential, and histrionic.

This reflection on Lynch’s legacy in Russia – originally conceived as a presentation for the annual conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in November 2024 – is even more timely in light of the filmmaker’s recent death. On January 21, 2025, Lynch’s family announced on social media that he had passed away from complications with emphysema, which he developed after years of smoking. (Lynch’s onscreen worlds are, indeed, shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke.) One of the last traces of Lynch in Hollywood – he had evacuated his Los Angeles home on, of all places, Mulholland Drive as a result of the recent wildfires, the most destructive in California’s history – was a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film The Fabelmans (2022, United States). Lynch played the part of the legendary filmmaker John Ford, “the maker of Westerns and the grand old curmudgeon of American cinema” (Hoberman 2025). This was a perfect self-ironising send-off for Lynch who, unlike Ford, was never embraced by Hollywood and eschewed its aesthetics and its mythologies throughout his career. Lynch’s death has prompted scores of eulogies about his significance for American cinema, so this seems like the ideal occasion to explore what Lynch meant to Russia’s film culture.

More Wind: Lynch, Tarkovsky, Ears, and Oz

Early in Lynch’s fourth feature film Blue Velvet (1986, United States) – arguably the movie that thrust the term ‘Lynchian’ into the mainstream – the boyish protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan, a Lynch favourite) unexpectedly finds a severed human ear in a vacant lot. Crouching down to get a better look at the ear, Beaumont sees ants swarming atop it and crawling in and out of its crevices.³ Beaumont recoils at first but decides to take the ear to the police, which sets into motion a detective search for the culprit (and now-earless victim).

A few scenes later, Beaumont is walking down a leafy suburban boulevard, whereupon the scene cuts back to the earlier image of the severed ear. Lynch enacts this transition, moreover, through what film editors call a “lap dissolve”, which is achieved by laying the celluloid frames of one image on top of another as the former gives way to the latter. This sort of superimposition briefly results in a blurry, indistinct fusion of the two images as the first (i.e., Beaumont) turns into the next (i.e., the ear). Through this merger, Lynch suggests that the camera has access into Beaumont’s mind and can glimpse at his thoughts, which are, as we see, still dwelling on his disturbing discovery of a human ear.

Once the ear has come into full view, Lynch has the camera magnify it until the screen goes black, as if plunging us into the depths of the ear’s canal. Lynch’s camerawork, then, takes us inside the thought of a thought. That is, the camera snakes itself into Beaumont’s head, as if through his ear canal, and winds its way into the depths of the ear he is imagining. The camera heads into Beaumont’s subconscious, the layer of mental activity beneath his waking thoughts. The ear, for Lynch, functions as a passageway, a wormhole, into the mysterious nether regions of the psyche that structure conscious behaviour. For the rest of the film, Beaumont enters a shadow world where he becomes a detective and the detected – hunter and prey – and begins to doubt whether he knows anything about himself: who he is, what he wants, what motivates him. At the end of the film, the camera’s gaze zooms out from a close-up of Beaumont’s eardrum, as if pulling itself out of it, suggesting that the whole film had been a fever dream. The ear is like a telescope into the seedier and mysterious realm lurking beneath Beaumont’s waking reality, just behind the blue velvet curtains of his neatly manicured suburban world.

It appears that Lynch’s close-ups of ears in Blue Velvet channel the insistent fascination that the renowned Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky also harboured toward human ears in his sci-fi epic Soliaris / Solaris (1972, Soviet Union). Though Lynch rarely advertised his thoughts or opinions about Tarkovsky, it would not at all be surprising if Lynch had encountered Tarkovsky’s cerebral, even psychedelic, movies as a neophyte artist working in Philadelphia (first as a painter) and then in Los Angeles (as a filmmaker) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lynch would have likely been most familiar with Solaris, which, of all Tarkovsky’s films, enjoyed the least complicated and widest international release; it garnered reviews, albeit mixed, in Time, the New York Times, and Film Quarterly (Johnson and Petrie 1994: 101). The close-ups of human ears in Blue Velvet could very well be Lynch’s nod to the great Russian auteur.

About an hour into Solaris, after Tarkovsky’s astronaut-protagonist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) has entered the space station to investigate its renegade crew, he walks into the room of one of his colleagues, Dr. Snaut (Jüri Järvet). There, Kelvin startlingly notices a little person, likely a child, asleep in a hammock above Dr. Snaut’s workspace. The camera, as if enacting Kelvin’s astonishment, rapidly zooms in on the little person’s earlobe before Kelvin is chased out of the room. We come to learn that the mysterious planet Solaris can produce lifelike simulations of the astronauts’ deepest desires, fantasies, and traumas, of which they themselves are not fully cognizant, in order to have them play out their repressed psychodramas aboard the spacecraft. The planet’s alien gaze, like Lynch’s camera in Blue Velvet, infiltrates characters’ subconscious to unearth information about themselves. What, then, does this little person mean to Dr. Snaut? Given Tarkovsky’s lifelong Teutophobia, as informed by his experiences of evacuation and famine during World War II, is Dr. Snaut, implied by his German surname, a twisted researcher like the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele? Or is he some sort of run-of-the-mill pervert or pedophile? Or, less sinisterly, is Dr. Snaut the father of the child? Might he himself be the child? Tarkovsky does not address these matters. What is clear is that Tarkovsky uses an image of an ear to signal how human interiority, experiences of inner space, interface with those of outer space. As in Blue Velvet, the ear signifies a threshold site between two worlds.

Similarly, at the end of Solaris, while Kelvin contemplates how to escape the spacecraft, Tarkovsky’s camera zooms onto his ear and holds its gaze on his canal zone for ten seconds. The next shot presents a descent through the clouds, as if we have initiated a space landing, into the recesses of Kelvin’s mind vis-à-vis his ear, not unlike the ants in Blue Velvet. In a confounding final sequence, Kelvin appears to disembark on the planet Solaris, where he finds a replicant of his father and childhood home. Does Kelvin actually make contact with these alien simulacra, or are they more of his Solaris-generated fever dreams? Tarkovsky leaves open all possibilities. The close-up of Kelvin’s ear reiterates how Tarkovsky portrays ears as permeable spaces, literal blackholes, between our waking reality and the domain of our fantasies, memories, and dreams, which, in Kelvin’s case, meant his longing to return home (a desire Tarkovsky himself felt during his exile abroad in his final years of life). The enigmatic end of Solaris makes us uncertain where Tarkovsky takes his film: somewhere outside Kelvin’s eardrum (i.e., physical reality) or somewhere inside of it (i.e., the matter of his mind)? The movie maroons us between two space-times, just as all of Tarkovsky’s finales do.

We are reminded here of the otherworldly act of telekinesis performed by a girl named “Monkey” (Martyshka) in her family’s kitchen at the end of Stalker (1979, Soviet Union); the relocation of a Russian cottage into a crumbling Italian abbey in Nostalghia (1983, Italy); the intergenerational mashup of characters from the 1930s and the 1970s in Mirror / Zerkalo (1975, Soviet Union); and the nuclear holocaust that happened – but didn’t – in The Sacrifice / Ofret (1986, Sweden). As film scholar Nariman Skakov has written, Tarkovsky has characters

enter an intermediary domain of abstract illusion and concrete reality, and face situations where the boundaries between the nominally real and nominally illusory events are unstable, or at times even completely effaced. Their temporally anomalous and spatially abnormal journeys do not lead them to greater clarity, but into uncertainty wrapped in a sense of cosmic homelessness (Skakov 2012: 221).

The same could and, to be sure, has been said of Lynch. For example, the media theorist Akira Mizuta Lippit discusses how Lynch

divides the world into separate sides, halves, dimensions, fragments that appeared to be formed along conventional lines of opposition: past and present; high and low; day and night; light and dark; the beautiful and the monstrous or grotesque; the straight and narrow and wide and twisted […] but also painting, photography, and various other audio-visual media; the actual and metaphorical […] the material and the spectral; this and that (Lippit 2011).

Like Tarkovsky, Lynch dwells in a liminal ground, a zone, between two states of being where waking reality becomes more dreamlike and fantasies uncannily lifelike. “In place of wholes”, Lynch and Tarkovsky give audiences “holes: secret, unimaginable, anomalous moments, modes, and instances of contact between the sides” of disparate realms (Lippit 2011).⁴.Or, as Lynch put it, “We all have at least two sides. The world we live in is a world of opposites. And to reconcile those opposing things is the trick […] And that means there’s something in the middle. And the middle isn’t a compromise, it’s the power of both” (Lynch 2005: 23). The invisible mental and metaphysical currents inflecting our experience of everyday reality are what absorb Lynch and Tarkovsky.

The leitmotif of ears in Solaris and Blue Velvet moreover calls attention to the aesthetic significance that Tarkovsky and Lynch both accord noise in their visual ecologies. Per the film theorists Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Lynch and Tarkovsky rely on eerie noises that are unanchored to locatable images – Tarkovsky on barking dogs, fog horns, and rainfall, while Lynch on owls, screams, and industrial clangour – to leave spectators “in a state of irreducible uncertainty or ambiguity” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2015: 177). These unattributable sounds generate “mental universes of pervasive paranoia, pure interiority, or immense catastrophe” (ibid.). Tarkovsky and Lynch’s haunting sounds fuel an impression that ordinary reality falters and glitches in its collisions with unknown dimensions and underworlds.

In Lynch’s cinema, this sonic otherworldliness is no more apparent than whenever we hear the sound of wind, which strangely occurs in indoor spaces (often near thick show curtains). That wind is felt and heard, but not seen, made it a perfect Lynchian metaphor for the pulses emanating from some unknown realm that bring his characters into alternate states of being, place, and mind. Lynch, it has been said, would implore his actors to play with “more wind” whenever he wanted to heighten a scene’s sense of mystery (MacLachlan 2025). Immaterially so, wind makes everything different, even if nothing has ostensibly changed, as in the famous, dreamlike sequence in Winkie’s Diner in Mulholland Drive (2001, United States)). It is no wonder that Lynch was a fan of the evocative “wind recordings” made by the award-winning (and blind) sound designer Alan Spelt, who began a career-long collaboration with Lynch after working with him on the windblown soundtrack of Eraserhead (1977, United States).

Lynch also launched an on-again-off-again television series called Weather Report in 2005, where he provided daily updates about the climate in Los Angeles, an infamously windy city, whose gusts, liable to stoke brush fires, can have apocalyptic consequences. The most recent spate of wildfires, the worst in L.A.’s history, had forced Lynch to evacuate his home before his death, which, a result of emphysema, may have been hastened from all the smoke (Ruimy 2025). One wonders whether Lynch, a lifelong (and unrepentant) smoker, took to cigarettes as a way of playing out his fascination with wind, of turning his own breath into a haze of smoke, fire, and ash. Lynch’s lifelong obsessions with wind, cigarettes, and the darker side of Hollywood, a candy-coloured netherworld, reminds us of Joan Didion’s suavely ominous writings:

Easterners commonly complain that there is no ‘weather’ at all in Southern California […] In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rain,” which, given the “incendiary dryness” of L.A., “invariably means fire […] The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself […] Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse […] The winds show us how close to the edge we are (Didion 2008: 143-144).

Didion’s descriptions of California’s winds as capricious and perilous make it sound like she could be describing a David Lynch film. Lynch wanted to make movies in a place where people lived and died on the currents of the wind, hence the tagline of Twin Peaks: “fire walk with me”. The essence of Hollywood, both Lynch and Didion understood, was fated by wind, metaphorically and meteorologically: the winds of chance and change, but also the Santa Ana winds.

Lynch’s fixation with wind further resonates with Tarkovsky, who – besides being another incorrigible smoker, dying from lung cancer in 1986 – also betrayed curiosity about the wind. The very beginning of Mirror, Tarkovsky’s most autobiographical film, portrays a solitary woman (Margarita Terekhova) sitting on a wooden fence and gazing onto a windswept field while she enjoys a cigarette, as if inviting the wind inside of her. She notices a man approaching in the distance, who, we learn, is not her ex-husband with whom she longed to reunite. Still, the two end up having a flirtatious and curiously philosophical conversation about the hidden lives of plants. Sensing his advances have been rebuffed, the man heads back into the distance, and as he trudges across the field, a heavy gust of wind overpowers him and brings him to a halt. He turns around for one last glance at the woman and almost loses balance because of the wind’s force. Inexplicably, Tarkovsky then presents the exact same sequence of the man walking away, turning around, and being buffeted by the squall. This strange double shot lifts the action of Mirror out of the realm of the ordinary, suggesting that, despite its recognisable setting, Mirror will not cohere to our perceptual version of reality. The wind makes things strange, uneven, uncanny; it sets the stage for what becomes Tarkovsky’s most digressive film – a visual tornado – that churns through decades, places, and peoples, real and imagined. We can almost hear Lynch’s voice in the background, “more wind”.

The wind in Tarkovsky’s cinema estranges the perception of his characters (and our own) from reality: the sandstorms in Stalker, the child’s dream of a windstorm in Mirror, the blizzards of The Sacrifice. The wind alienates Tarkovsky’s characters and settings from their humdrum realities, just as it does Lynch’s. We hear wind, for instance, when the prophetic giant materialises before Agent Cooper at the end of the second season of Twin Peaks to warn him that “it is happening again”, and we hear it again in Mulholland Drive (in a night club called “Silencio”, no less) as Lynch’s two heroines open – and mysteriously evaporate into – a blue cube. Lynch’s habit of making wind heard in indoor spaces parallels Tarkovsky’s tendency to bring weather, particularly rainwater, inside. The importance each attributed to wind shares a common origin: Viktor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939, United States), one of the most influential works in global film history. As made obvious by the re-creation of Glinda in Wild at Heart (1990, United States), Lynch openly acknowledged the film’s influence on his imagination. “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz”, Lynch is reportedly to have said at a press conference, recounted in Alexandre O. Phillippe’s remarkable documentary Lynch/Oz (2022, United States). Tarkovsky’s creative debt to The Wizard of Oz is more subtle, but nevertheless discernable.⁵

In Stalker, when Tarkovsky’s characters escape their rusty Soviet industrial town, which Tarkovsky presents in sepia-toned footage, they enter the Zone. This numinous space, by contrast, is presented in technicolour film. Their entrance replicates Dorothy’s arrival at the Wonderful Land of Oz, another kind of Zone, awash in dazzling colour, which juxtaposes the black-and-white visuals of her careworn home in Kansas during the 1930s Dust Bowl. Since Fleming was one of the first directors to experiment with the aesthetic possibilities afforded by colour film stock, Dorothy’s trip to Oz can be read as a meta-cinematic commentary on film technology’s ability to perceptually transport viewers into shimmery new worlds. The Zone, like Oz, represents an experience of cinema, the capacity of film to submerge viewers in a virtual world and confuse the coordinates between real life and life on-screen, real and reel. The lesson of Oz, for Tarkovsky and Lynch suggest, is that every movie is a journey across an event horizon (or a trip into an ear canal). Film presents not just another way of seeing the world, but of being in the world, cinema as a philosophy of space-time, a philosophy of the rainbow. Dorothy’s cinematic experience, moreover, is made possible by wind: the tornado that blasts her into an alternate dimension (hence her surname “Gale”). The wind, Tarkovsky and Lynch believed, made cinema happen, and their films seem to be asking: from where does wind come, and where can it take us?