“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?

Amidst all their similarities, however, there are important differences between Lynch and Tarkovsky. Both wonder about other worlds that are distinct from our humdrum lives, but Lynch depicts that ‘other place’ as grotesque and disturbing, even sinister, whereas Tarkovsky portrays it as metaphysically humbling and ennobling. The ideal harboured by most of Lynch’s characters would be to remain unperturbed in their respective petit-bourgeois worlds: their diners, their living rooms, and their high school pep rallies. What does Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, for instance, long for more than to enjoy his coffee and slices of cherry pie in peace? Why, the pregnant couple in Eraserhead (1977) ask, have they been cursed with a mucous dinosaur (delivered by a demented stork) and not a normal baby?⁶ Quite oppositely, Tarkovsky’s characters actively seek out contact with the divine, with soothsayers, and with cosmic energies, which, they hope, might lift them out of the morass of their grey lives under communism. Tarkovsky’s protagonists beseech the supernatural, whereas it besieges Lynch’s. Though Lynch was keen towards the paranormal, he did not think it especially auspicious when found.

Personality-wise, too, Tarkovsky and Lynch could not have been more different. Lynch’s aw-shucks and taciturn persona sharply juxtaposed Tarkovsky’s moralistic, self-serious, and ponderous presentation of self. Whereas Lynch took an interest in weather forecasts and doodles, Tarkovsky had a habit of opining about the state of humanity’s collective soul to whomever would listen. Lynch’s interdimensional films, despite their existential concerns, are never without camp, comedy, and eccentricity; they looked to soap operas for inspiration as much as they did string theory. Tarkovsky’s films, in turn, gave little oxygen to lightheartedness and absurdity. These differences perhaps explain why Lynch, certainly familiar with Tarkovsky, never cited him as an influence, even though the two admired many of the same directors: Fellini, Hitchcock, Tati. Though there are Tarkovskian elements to the Lynchian universe, there is comparatively little Lynchian about Tarkovsky’s visual worlds. Tarkovsky, ever the classicist prude, would have been repelled by many scenes in Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, considering them erotic gobbledygook. For Lynch’s influence on Russian film, we now turn to a different director, another luminary of the (post-)Soviet screen.

Eraserheads and elephant men: Lynch and Balabanov

In 1998, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London launched a film series featuring the work of a then little-known Russian director (at least outside his home country) named Aleksei Balabanov. Galvanised by the release of Balabanov’s scandalous period piece Pro urodov i liudei / Of Freaks and Men (1998, Russia), which follows the exploits of an early twentieth-century pornographer, the ICA hoped to promote Balabanov at a time when Russian film reviewers were heaping scorn on him. (Their criticisms, in hindsight, anticipated the nationalistic riptide of the Russian film industry, which only intensified under Vladimir Putin a few decades later.) For their part, London’s more open-minded critics applauded Balabanov for his daring and quirkiness, which offered a unique view of Russian society after communism. One writer, Richard Clarke (1991) of the Independent, hailed Balabanov as “Russia’s David Lynch”. This comparison was then used by foreign distributors to champion Balabanov’s work abroad, particularly his first two films Schastlivye dni / Happy Days (1991, Soviet Union) and Zamok / The Castle (1994, Russia). Both these pictures suggest that Balabanov drew inspiration from Lynch, which he communicates vis-à-vis subtle aesthetic and thematic allusions, just as Lynch did with Tarkovsky.

The first scene of Happy Days, for instance, evokes an unmistakably Lynchian realm. Before the opening credits, Balabanov presents a black-and-white image of a misty and desolate street in Saint Petersburg, which is backdropped by gusts of wind. A tramcar screeches across the frame, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. At first glance, it seems that Balabanov locates us at the start of the twentieth century in Russia, yet he does so at its end, in the twilight years of the early 1990s. Suddenly, this urban setting morphs into a doodle – a sloppily hand-drawn image of itself – with a stick figure waving at us from a doorway. An arrow points to the drawing, under which we see the funny self-disclosure: “This is me” (Eto ia). The comic-book-like stick figure is no longer paired with the sounds of the wind or the tram, but old-timey jazz music. We hear the song “Too Many Tears”, written in 1932 by Harry Warren, a now mostly forgotten American film composer who penned such classic Hollywood hits as “I Only Have Eyes for You” (1934) and “Jeepers Creepers” (1938).

In just these few seconds, we see how Balabanov fuses the Tarkovskian elements of Lynch’s filmography with its signature Lynchian qualities. That is, Balabanov generates on screen a haunting atmosphere, seemingly removed from time, that sets viewers up for a film in pursuit of strange meaning. Yet this evocative visual space becomes somewhat comical, childish. The appearance of a doodle belies the film’s apparent seriousness, and the jazz standard lightens the mood. Like Lynch (and unlike Tarkovsky), Balabanov marries contemplativeness with eccentricity, the macabre with the absurd, which makes for an aesthetically disjointed picture. Balabanov, it appears, prefers Lynch’s weirdness to Tarkovsky’s ponderousness. The inclusion of a Hollywood jazz standard in Happy Days, moreover, channeled Lynch’s proclivity to pair his visuals with Hollywoodised music: the deformed radiator lady singing “Heaven” in Eraserhead; a killer’s lip-synched rendition of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet; the crooner who serenades Agent Cooper with “Sycamore Trees” in the Red Room of Twin Peaks; and a couple’s lovebird reunion to Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” in The Return, a song which, per Lynch’s admission, made him “cry like a baby” every time he heard it (Miller 2017).

In Happy Days, Balabanov proceeds to take us into a hospital room, where we meet the protagonist, an unnamed man with a head injury played by Viktor Sukhorukov – an actor as important to Balabanov as MacLachlan was to Lynch. The cranially injured man clearly has no idea where, or even who, he is; whatever happened to his head seems to have wiped his memory. He is, quite literally, an eraserhead. Here, then, Balabanov gives us a Lynchian version of Judy Garland’s Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz who likewise suffered a head injury – struck by a windblown door – before waking up in an unknown land. Since Happy Days was one of the last films released in the Soviet Union before the country’s collapse, Balabanov uses his protagonist’s Dorothy-like disorientation to represent the blank slate of his new society, as if all of Russia had woken up after a coma, with its head reeling, in a new world. Lynch’s amnesic characters (more eraserheads) suffer concussions whenever they find themselves transported to unfamiliar, yet uncanny, settings: Rita in Mulholland Drive, Fred Madison in Lost Highway (1997, United States), Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart, and Bob in Twin Peaks. After the unnamed man in Happy Days exits the hospital, he traipses around Saint Petersburg as if it were another planet.

Though Balabanov modelled Happy Days after a 1961 two-act play by Samuel Beckett, the film has little to do with the original other than, as film scholar Nancy Condee points out, “a stance of grim mockery and a stylized portrayal of disenfranchised life” (Condee 2009: 298). The more fitting companion piece to Happy Days is Lynch’s Eraserhead, which itself has evoked comparisons to Beckett among reviewers (Cheal 2008). Though Lynch shot Eraserhead in Los Angeles, he based it on his experiences of living in a rough-and-tough neighbourhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia in the late 1960s. The perceived bleakness of Philly was all the more pronounced if compared against Lynch’s idyllic upbringing in the American Northwest, a mountain world that resembled the timbered setting of Twin Peaks. Eraserhead presents the city as a nightmarish maze that overwhelms its characters, particularly Lynch’s protagonist Henry Spencer, a role played by Jack Nance, whose shock-haired complexion, used for theatrical posters, has seared itself into the pantheon of film history. His blown-out hairdo gives it the look of being an alien-like attachment to his body, not unlike a pink eraser to a pencil. The built environment in Eraserhead is a source of mystery and threat, and it is backdropped, if not by wind, by ambient mechanical groans and humming. Nance and his family seem to be the only inhabitants on this desolate, post-industrial moonscape, which is inundated with garbage and chemical waste.

We encounter the exact same sort of uninhabited and decrepit city space in Happy Days. Describing Balabanov’s treatment of the urban, Condee writes:

Balabanov’s characters, tending toward anonymity and effacement, are ideally suited to this modern environment. His city, typically a dynamic, modern ironworks of unrelenting repetition, of aggressive and mechanized return, processes its human material by recurrent modes of mindless compulsion […] Balabanov’s city is the metal id, amoral, primal, compelled toward acquisition and gratification. In no way the crowning achievement of human progress, Balabanov’s city is instead the articulation of the human’s primal drives, dominant among them, the death drive (Condee 2009: 223).

The city, for Balabanov, is a place of cruelty and terror, overflowing with litter and scrapyards, that grinds down those who get caught in its gears. It is fitting that the last image of Happy Days is one of Balabanov’s hero withdrawing from urban life by locking himself in some sort of metal basin, a makeshift coffin, that he finds in a back alley. Balabanov suggests that urban modernity has turned human beings into disposable things – nowhere men – to be mourned by no one. The man’s ‘death’ might be read as Balabanov’s analogy for the victims of Soviet communism, for those citizens who died namelessly for nothing, for a country that no longer even existed.

Like Lynch, though, Balabanov’s Happy Days is not merely a document of gritty urban realism. There is ample room for play and peculiarity. For much of the film, Balabanov’s unnamed protagonist carries around with him a hedgehog, an enduring symbol of traditional Russian folk life. In Slavic mythology, hedgehogs are conventionally portrayed as helpers whose craftiness aids those struggling against great odds. In some cases, hedgehogs, because they can burrow underground, are said to bear knowledge of the underworld. They are cuddly emissaries from hell, a Lynchian talisman if there ever was one. Throughout Happy Days, the unknown man cradles the hedgehog and exchanges secrets with it; the animal, it appears, is the only “character” with whom he enjoys companionship. This peculiar interspecies communication reminds us of the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) from Twin Peaks, who consults a piece of wood to reveal secrets about the Palmer murder.⁷ Each of these characters’ culturally specific amulets acquires a supernatural charge whose significance is never elucidated. Lynch and Balabanov inject absurdity into their films that, paradoxically so, lessens and intensifies their mysteriousness; almost everything becomes grotesque. What better descriptor could we find other than the term “Lynchian” to describe the scene of the protagonist in Happy Days riding a donkey across a bridge in Saint Petersburg, like Christ entering Jerusalem astride an ass on Psalm Sunday, as he witnesses a street fight and then gets punched in the face himself?

The innocent and childlike nature of the unnamed hero in Happy Days (as with Christ) deepens the pity we feel for him as he is used and abused by those around him. Besides the shock-haired man from Eraserhead, Balabanov’s hero also reminds us of the protagonist of Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980). Loosely based on the life of Joseph Merrick – man with a genetic disorder who lived in late nineteenth-century London where he acquired his “pet name” after being exhibited at a freak show in 1884 –, The Elephant Man relays a tale of social ostracism and petty cruelty toward those who, for whatever reason, are marked different. At one point, the Elephant Man cries out at a mob: “I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being!” We feel identical moral pinpricks while watching the hero in Happy Days, whose deformities beneath his bandages we never see, but assume are quite severe, elephant-like.

The elephant men of Lynch and Balabanov’s settings – and the oppressive urban worlds to which they’ve been condemned – reprise the nineteenth-century Russian literary trope of the “pitiable man” (zhalkii chelovek), pioneered by the great and eminently weird writer Mykola Hohol. Prominently featuring in Hohol’s’s spectral tales of urban life – Shinel’ / The Overcoat (1842), Nos / The Nose (1836), and Zapiski sumashedshego / Diary of a Madman (1835) – pathetic men struggle to find meaning for themselves in inhospitable and twilight cityscapes, where even the weather works against them. “Occasionally”, Hohol writes about one of his characters in The Overcoat, “a gusty wind interfered with him, suddenly bursting from God knows where and for no apparent reason, cutting at his face, throwing lumps of snow into it, hoisting the collar of his coat like a sail, or suddenly, with supernatural force, throwing it over head, thereby causing him the eternal trouble of extricating himself from it” (Gogol 1999: 234). As in Tarkovsky’s Mirror, we again hear Lynch’s voice in the distance, “more wind”, which lifts Hohol’s narrative out of the ordinary into the paranormal. Like Hohol, Lynch and Balabanov have the outlandish and the darkly comical befall those who seem to deserve it least, those who have everything to lose. Lynch has even been referred to as the “American Gogol” (Horton 2000), and Lynch himself accredited The Nose for inspiring some of his earliest paintings, such as Woman with a Tree Branch (1968) and Gardenback (1968-70), which depict characters with supernaturally large appendages (Lynch 2019). (The disembodied nose of Hohol’s story is surely another source of inspiration for Lynch’s preoccupation with severed ears.) The descriptor “Lynchian”, connoting something that “evokes the bland wholesomeness” of ordinary life while nevertheless being “wrapped around something vile” and enigmatic, is a cousin of the adjective “Gogolian” (Wilkinson 2025).

If Tarkovsky and Hohol set a precedent for Lynch’s squishy universes – their porousness to unknown forces emanating from shadowy otherworlds (inside and outside of us) – then Lynch and Hohol inspired Balabanov’s grim absurdism. Each Lynch and Balabanov portray collisions between our knowable reality and ‘the other place’ as menacing, especially to society’s “little men”: its starving artists, ex-soldiers, naïve actors, low-level bureaucrats, and other nomads and misfits. Another apt literary comparison for Lynch and Balabanov is, of course, Franz Kafka, who, like them, had also been an admirer of Hohol’s work.⁸ Could there be, after all, a more Hoholian/Lynchian hero than Gregor Samsa, the overworked and underpaid travelling salesman who, slipping out of the knowable world, wakes up one morning as a beetle in Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis (1915)? “Kafka suggests that once one’s existence is no longer regulated by language, by the convergence of language and body, the entire world is thrown into an animated state of disarray” (Lippit 2000: 146). Kafka’s ‘little men’ – like those of Hohol, Balabanov, and Lynch – have their humanity eroded to the point of unrecognisability. Pulverised and humiliated by their urban societies, they come to resemble elephants (Lynch), hedgehogs (Balabanov), insects (Kafka), and dogs and automatons (Hoholl). It is not by chance that Balabanov’s second film is an adaptation of Kafka’s last, and unfinished, novel Das Schloss / The Castle (1926) about a man named “K” with a shadowy biography, another eraserhead, who grapples with a soul-crushing bureaucracy in a feudal village.

In Gogol’s and Kafka’s imagery […] two worlds meet: one coincides with the empirical; the other contradicts it. The secret of their writing is found in their continual reciprocal penetration of that which Camus designates […] natural and extraordinary […] That which is generally regarded as absurd is for such figures a concrete and the one possible reality which the critic must reckon with” (Karst 1975: 68).

Balabanov found in Lynch a filmmaker in the tradition of Hohol, Kafka, and Beckett who depicts both the reality of the absurd and the absurdity of the real. These artists do not reduce inexplicable things to the status of allegory, but have us confront the weirdness of their fictional worlds as things that actually take place.

Where Balabanov did not take from Lynch, however, was Lynch’s penchant for melodrama. While the spirit of Balabanov’s work approximates Lynch’s far more than Tarkovsky’s, Balabanov still never indulges the corniness and schmaltziness that undergird Lynch’s work. There is nothing histrionic about Balabanov’s metallic and grungy, if at times surreal, hellscapes. The stakes of Balabanov’s films are always terrifyingly high, a matter of life or death – war zones, gang turf, medieval fortresses – that forgo the warm-and-fuzzy, even in their more comical moments. Though Balabanov and Lynch eschewed Tarkovsky’s solemnity, perhaps Balabanov felt that Lynch’s flare for the soap opera only diluted his nightmares. Balabanov blackens Lynch’s aesthetics and themes with existential gloom; he makes Lynch more ‘Russian’, as it were: hopeless, bleak, cynical. By negative example, Balabanov reminds us just how ‘American’ David Lynch is, a cockeyed optimist despite all the darkness. In thrall with sultry Hollywood noirs and dimestore romance novels, Lynch indulged broken hearts and love affairs at every turn, which help account for the popularity of Twin Peaks in post-Soviet Russia.

Wild at Heart: Russia’s Love Affair with Twin Peaks

Despite Gorbachev’s rumoured affection for Twin Peaks, the series did not premiere in Russia until November 1993, a full year and a half after the unexpected series finale in the United States and about two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By then, it had been revealed who killed Laura Palmer: her father, possessed by the interdimensional spirit named Bob, who inhabits creamed corn before springing into people. Given the show’s popularity, it was twice re-broadcast on Russia’s primetime networks, once in 1995 on Channel One (ORT) and again in 2003 on the then newly established RTR-Planeta.

Some of the earliest and most widely read discussions of Twin Peaks, which helped catapult its reputation, occurred on the pages of the daily newspaper Today (Segodnia), one of the first privately managed newspapers in post-Soviet Russia that began circulating in 1993 (Tkachev). In the subsection “Art” (Iskusstvo), the commentary on Twin Peaks unfolded under the heading “Dialog of the Week” (Dialog nedeli) in which two prominent critics or intellectuals – sometimes psychologists, sometimes philosophers, sometimes cultural historians – teamed up to unpack the mysterious significance of all that had transpired on screen in every episode, which they analysed in pairs (i.e., each ‘dialogue’ dealt with two episodes). Their commentary, highbrow for a general readership, captured the complexity of Lynch’s series. Here is an extended example of such writing, the start of a conversation between the literary critic Viacheslav Kuritsyn and historian Vladimir Levashov, about two second-season episodes titled “Variations on Relations” and “The Path to the Black Lodge.”⁹

V.K. The structure of Gogol's Old-World Landowners is quite simple.¹⁰ There is the world of old people, the world of pancakes and jam (Here). Then there is the world of the Forest, of evil and wild cats (There). There is a little grey cat – a mediator. She has been to There but has returned to Here: she punctured a hole, ushering a foreign and destructive energy into the bucolic old world. The old people then die. An inverted plot is also possible here: Old-World Landowners, written from the perspective of the Forest world. The cat lived peacefully, but a messenger from a foreign world [Here] appeared There, and the Forest died. In both versions, there is a sharp contrast between Here and There. Both foreign worlds are hostile to each other.

V.L. However, the binary structure of Twin Peaks is developed at the most obvious narrative level, starting from the title. But if we go a level deeper, the structure of the plot and, consequently, the show’s worldview becomes more complex. It can be reduced to the relationship between fragment and whole, with the whole being invisible to us up until its boundary lines, which are always beyond our field of vision, and we are involuntarily drawn into it. Thus, Lynch’s narrative strategy hews to a more multifaceted nature.

V.K. Lynch destroys the binary at all levels. A whole cast of characters either do not understand in which world they exist, or they exist simultaneously Here and There. Laura, her father Leland, Horn (who is also General Lee), the illustrious Cooper, and of course, Leo, the guy with the orchids…

V.L. This is exactly the theme of Old-World Landowners: agoraphobia leads to death.

V.K. Not so much death itself, but the penetration into the Other. Furthermore, Catherine, who is also Japanese, the butch woman Denise, Moriarty Windom, sweet Nadine, and the one-armed major with the silly habit of disappearing – they all demonstrate that there are no impenetrable boundaries between worlds.¹¹ So, one can draw a comparison to a dream. All these people are essentially mediums, so naturally close to opposite poles that they have erased the category of polarity. Together, they all act as a stand-in for Gogol’s little cat, as it were. That’s perhaps why there are no cats in Twin Peaks (there aren’t any in the film, but in Laura’s diary, there are, indeed, kittens).¹² On the other hand, owls are the ornithological equivalent of cats. They are the apotheosis of mediation and indistinguishability.

V.L. Yes, all these owls-cats, through their shuttle-like movements, rupture the mutually exclusive strangeness of opposites and turn metaphysics into physics – but the physics of a whole, complete world. And they place us inside it (at least because the finale is unknown to us). I suspect it will never be known. Judging by the narrative logic, which corroborates the openness of the world at every step. The technique of such openness is simple and effective: broken narrative threads; the same phrases placed in different contexts, which, thereby, losing their singularity; visual images that outpace their narrative explanations; characters with decentralised consciousness each of whose subsequent actions are not connected to the previous ones (and, therefore, must be connected to something else?). Do you remember the horse that appeared in Sarah Palmer's hallucinations?

V.K. Or the fish in the coffee pot in one of the early episodes…

V.L. All of this, acting on the subconscious level, creates suspense, generates a sense of instability in the narrative, its extreme fragmentariness, no matter how much you try to expand or prolong it over time […]

We see here two critics astutely reaching into psychology, literature, philosophy, and history to make sense of Lynch’s visual conundrums, conveying the deep level of engagement that Twin Peaks elicited in post-Soviet Russia. The series seemed to capture the feverish energy of social dislocation taking place in the former USSR: the weirdness, the wackiness, the criminality, the mystery, and the rampant irony that came to saturate everyday life. As the Russian critic Dmitry Bykov wrote (2017a) upon the premiere of the long-awaited third season of Twin Peaks: “The show stood as a huge monument to the bloody, wild, glamorous, and stupid 1990s, and it remains a wonderful work, full of subtle devices and wondrous riddles.”

Here is another snippet of commentary on Twin Peaks from the pages of Today, this time a dialogue carried on by the late film critic Valentin Mikhalkovich and the historian Modest Kolerov (who, it should be noted, is currently held in contempt by most of the European Union for his bellicose support of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine). They are unpacking two first-season episodes titled “May the Giant Be with You” and “Coma”.¹³

V.M. The name “Laura” is also a reference to Old Hollywood, but slyly so, at least for us. Laura is associated with the title character from Otto Preminger's 1944 film Laura. The predecessor to our heroine was also thought to have been murdered – a body was even found –, and the detective investigating the case fell in love with her. Then, suddenly, Laura, alive and unharmed, appears before the smitten detective. It turned out they had killed another woman in her place. Furthermore, the twin sister of Laura in Twin Peaks is named Madeleine Ferguson. There have already been references to Hitchcock in the Twin Peak dialogues of Today […] But, in Vertigo, a detective suffering from acrophobia is assigned to follow a blonde woman who commits suicide. The heroine does, indeed, throw herself off a bell tower, but the detective meets a woman with the same face – only she's a brunette, and, it turns out, she is his former love. She had only been playing the role of the victim. Hitchcock's character is named Madeleine, and the detective's surname is Ferguson.

The critic here correctly identifies Lynch’s fixation with classical Hollywood cinema – particularly Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958, United States), which deeply informs Mulholland Drive – and how it structures the palimpsestic world of Twin Peaks, a world that is as allusive as it is elusive. For the post-Soviet Russian intelligentsia, Twin Peaks was a kind of intellectual catnip (owl-nip?), a touchstone for all those previously taboo topics: American film, psychoanalysis, historical trauma, and foreign literature that had been either outright banned or, at the very least, frowned upon by Soviet officialdom. Twin Peaks helped discharge the pent-up intellectual energy of scholars and critics who, in the early ‘90s, enjoyed unparalleled opportunities for debate and self-expression. The open-endedness of Lynch’s playful mysteries offered Russian intellectuals an experience of interpretive freedom that they had seldom enjoyed.

Yet the show also reached far beyond Russia’s intellectual class. Twin Peaks not only cast-off taboos on highbrow matters that animated the intelligentsia but also offered frank depictions of comparatively lowbrow matters – crime, domestic violence, drug abuse, and sex (Laura, we learn, was a sex addict) – that excited the masses, who had grown weary of the enforced optimism and prudishness of official Soviet cultural life. As Bykov admiringly wrote (2017b), “David Lynch exists on such a strange razor’s edge – between the arthouse and pop culture”, one of the “only people who managed to create a cult series with meteoric ratings”. These more scandalous elements of Twin Peaks imbued it with the feel of a B-list daytime television drama, despite all its esotericism. The show’s refusal to turn its gaze away from the seedier aspects of life is what recommended it to ordinary Russian viewers in the early ‘90s, who had developed an appetite for the genre known as ‘Soviet darkwave’ or, in Russian, chernukha. The bleak schlock of Twin Peaks, in other words, entered a fertile media market.

As an aesthetic mode, chernukha – whose root, ‘chern-’, means ‘black’ – referred to cultural texts that centred the unrelenting negativity saturating the daily experience of late Soviet life. It gave voice to the long-repressed miseries that were part and parcel of a sclerotic communist country. As a rule, chernukha inverted Russian culture’s most sacred tropes: “notions of the dignity of man, the nobility of womanhood, the integrity of the family, the redemptive function of suffering, the refuge of domestic life, the righteous purposefulness of the mission, the innocence of childhood, the transcendent wisdom of animals, the sanctity of romantic love (and its concomitant suppression of the sexual), and the hygienic potential of the body as a secular temple” (Condee 2009: 62).

The gloomy tone of chernukha, which especially cast its spell on cinema, became the culprit to blame for why, by the late 1980s, Soviet filmgoing had collapsed, both in terms of quality and attendance rates.¹⁴ Yet, as Condee points out, chernukha films served as a scapegoat for elite Russian tastemakers on which to pin their anxieties about their changing society. “Russia’s most outstanding filmmakers found the aesthetics of chernukha as a richly productive source of individual experimentation, to which the audience responded more readily than to other offerings of the period” (Condee 2009: 63). In fact, in years when theater attendance was dropping, chernukha films like Vasilii Pichul’s Malen’kaia Vera / Little Vera (1988, Soviet Union), Petr Todorovskii’s Interdevochka / Intergirl (1989, Soviet Union), Pavel Lungin’s Taksi-bliuz / Taxi-Blues (1990, Soviet Union), and Iurii Kara’s Vory z zakone / Kings of Crime (1988, Soviet Union) drove up box-office returns. The popularity of these films was not in spite of chernukha’s aestheticisation of sex, crime, profanity, and urban decay, but because of it.

The true explanation for the fall-off in Soviet filmgoing was the increased presence of television sets in Soviet households. Generally, in the years after World War II, television sets were extremely expensive in the USSR. They cost “several times the monthly salary for urban professionals”, had minuscule screens, and often malfunctioned (Chernyshova 2013: 189). Due to investments in the consumer economy under Leonid Brezhnev in the 1960s-’70s, the price of television sets came down considerably and purchases spiked. “Ownership of TV sets in the cities tripled, from 32 sets per 100 families in 1965 to 95 sets in 1981 […] In 1985, out of 100 families (rural and urban), nearly 99 had TV and radio sets […] In urban areas, one in ten households had two television sets” (Chernyshova 2013: 186). The at-home entertainment afforded by television had replaced filmgoing by the mid-1980s.

Caught in this light, Twin Peaks ushered the chernukha aesthetic into the early post-Soviet home, domesticating the genre’s cheap thrills. The opening scene of the series, in an episode entitled “Northwest Passage”, presents itself as an unmistakable example of the darkwave. It consists of a grizzled fisherman discovering Palmer’s cellophane-wrapped corpse on a rocky coastline. We see at first only a shot of her matted, mermaid-like hair, conveying that she has been murdered, brutally so. The grey and rainy backdrop, the heavy police presence, and the threat of a killer on the loose with more violence to come integrate Twin Peaks into chernukha’s semantic field. Shortly after the discovery of Laura’s body – and the havoc the news of it wreaks on the town’s domestic life, another hallmark of chernukha –, we watch two teenagers, Shelly Johnson and Bobby Briggs, make out in the front seat of a car. A leather-clad bad boy à la James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955, United States), Briggs then drinks from a flask on his drive home. These violent, sexy, and roguish images of youth culture would have been legible to contemporaneous Russian viewers who had been habituated to the sights and sounds of chernukha.

its darker elements with steamy moments befitting a soap opera: affairs, broken hearts, and teenage romances.

We even notice a similarity between the electronic music that begins Twin Peaks and Little Vera, the (black) pearl of late Soviet darkwave. The former, composed by the American arranger Angelo Badalamenti, blends ambient music and soaring strings against images of a lumberyard in the Pacific Northwest. The latter, composed by the Russian musician Vladimir Matetskii, consists of lush ethereal synths that backdrop a few shots of the smoggy port city of Zhdanov (present-day Mariupol, a Ukrainian city now razed by the Russian army). These technically distorted, yet meditative, soundtracks fill us with ghostly dread but also romantic longing. The opening music of Little Vera and Twin Peaks signal that, despite all the grimness, it is not all bleak all the time. Both are also beholden to the tropes of the soap opera that tease love and romance amid their gloom.

As detailed by Russian media scholars Alexander Prokhorov and Elena Prokhorova, one of the most popular television genres of the late Soviet era were soap operas, especially those of foreign origin. “In the late 1980s and early 1990s previously unavailable imported dramas filled Soviet television screens […] Latin American telenovelas and North American soaps mesmerized audiences in Russia […] viewers identified with characters of Los Ricos También Lloran (The Rich Also Cry, Televisa/Mexico, 1979-1980; released in USSR 1991-1992) and Santa Barbara (NBC/USA, 1984-1993, released in Russia in 1992-2002), despite foreign locations and less than perfect dubbing” (Prokhorov and Prokhorova 2017: 188-189). Indulged from the safety of one’s home, soap operas served as an escapist form of entertainment for viewers who lived through the collapse of society. Soapy daytime television enabled audiences to “gain privacy from the outside world”, helping them “switch off mentally” by “transporting them emotionally to another setting” (Chernyshova 2013: 200). The love affairs, long-awaited reunions, and will-they-or-won’t-they moments of Twin Peaks – those shared between Ed and Norma, Harry and Josie, Andy and Lucy, Cooper and Audrey, James and Laura (and James and Donna and James and Madeline) – made it as much of a soap opera as a supernatural freak show. The show’s melodrama, at times sexy and at times sappy, endeared it to ordinary viewers, who, while in thrall with chernukha, also turned to soap operas for necessary distraction. Twin Peaks fused aspects of the two principal genres of the post-Soviet media landscape, along with requisite grist for Russia’s newly unleashed intellectual class.

Fittingly, throughout Twin Peaks, Lynch frequently shows his characters watching a fictitious daytime show called Invitation to Love – a soap opera within the soap opera – that winkingly discloses the cloying nature of certain moments within Twin Peaks. It is first introduced in the third episode, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”. We see Shelly Johnson, bearing a bruise of domestic violence on her face – a talisman of chernukha’s ever-present motif of spousal abuse – watching television in her kitchen. We hear in the background a schmaltzy Days of Our Lives-esque narrator say, “Each day brings a new beginning, and every hour holds the promise of an invitation to love”. Then, on the screen within the screen, we see a woman’s manicured hand place a wedding invitation on a bundle of (blue) velvet. Shelly longs for the sort of easy, TV-style romance that would jettison her out of her predicament with her abusive boyfriend, who spends most of his time with crooks and demons in the dark woods.

The soap-obsessed characters of Twin Peaks made contact with the experience of post-Soviet Russian audiences who likewise turned to soap operas as a way to offset their trauma and tumult; life on screen mirrored off-screen reality. As bizarre as the alien visitations, dwarves, zigzags, and vanishing giants seem in Twin Peaks, it all felt unnervingly relevant for those reeling from wanton gang violence, economic freefall, and ever-shifting borderlands that defined the Russian ‘90s: one inexplicable tragedy after the next. Twin Peaks entailed both true-to-life naturalism (chernukha) and escapist romance (soap opera), a paradox Lynch surely would have relished. Caught in this light, the world of Twin Peaks felt like the uncanny valley of late Soviet Russia: a universe caving in on itself whose doomed inhabitants sought refuge in the soap opera.

It Is Happening Again: The Return of Twin Peaks in Putin’s Russia

After the unanticipated cancellation of Twin Peaks in 1991 – ABC’s response to the show’s declining ratings and its high production costs – rumours swirled for more than two decades about a series reboot, which took a variety of forms: a proposed movie trilogy, a collection of graphic novels, and a spin-off show that eventually morphed into Mulholland Drive. Finally, in 2015, Lynch came to an agreement with the American network Showtime to film a third season that would consist of eighteen episodes, over which Lynch would exercise complete directorial control.

The series, featuring most of the original cast, premiered in 2017 to acclaim, particularly in Russia, where commentators noted that, for the most part, Lynch had shorn the series of its lighthearted and soapy trappings in favour of its darker and more disorienting ideas and aesthetics. “It’s a bit of a pity for those viewers”, wrote the Russian media critic Maksim Sukhaguzov (2017),

who, enchanted by the magic of the previous seasons – after having thoroughly enjoyed the inane gifs of coffee, doughnuts, and Cooper – naively expected a continuation of the same nostalgic celebration of the spirit of the ‘90s. What we have now is a different Twin Peaks […] Those who considered the dancing dwarf as peak weirdness and who did not want to delve further into Eraserhead or Inland Empire were not ready for this side of Lynch.

Underpinning much Russian commentary on The Return was a recognition that the show had entered an entirely new cultural terrain. The comparatively dystopian reboot seemed to channel the ominous atmosphere of Putin’s Russia, just as the first two seasons had captured the eccentric, playful, and seedier elements of late and early post- Soviet life. The excitement, and resultant disappointment and alienation, among Russian viewers in response to Lynch’s third season paralleled the dashed optimism of the 1990s. If anything, in the intervening years since the cancellation of Twin Peaks, Lynch had become more like Balabanov: pessimistic, embittered, ambiguous, and indulgent of his deepest and darkest fantasies about the modern world.

Natalia Antonova, a Ukrainian-American journalist and associate editor at openDemocracy Russia, intuited the depressing likenesses between The Return and the Russia that Putin has built.

The same sense of unreality that made the original Twin Peaks so popular frequently shines through with its cold light […] are the 1990s even over? Or have they merely taken the form of a demonic spirit like Twin Peaks’ very own Bob, capable of possessing and subverting an entire society? (Antonova 2017).

Having come of age on Twin Peaks lore in post-Soviet Ukraine, Antonova compares herself – and all her compatriots caught up in Putin’s web of deceit and dispossession – to Laura Palmer:

Laura Palmer is dead, and yet she lives. I am a grown woman, and I am the little girl stepping into a smoky, dark hallway in Kyiv. I want to tell that little girl that it’s OK, that the fire will not walk with her out of that building and into the rest of her life – not unless she invites it, anyway. I just can’t speak for those who move history around her like a current of water (Antonova 2017).

The anarchic play of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks – sometimes exhilarating, sometimes terrifying – had been hijacked in service of authoritarian consolidation. The regime, claiming to safeguard its subjects from chaos, has itself become a chaos agent, fueling dystopian fantasies at home and abroad. Putin’s Russia has engineered an alternative reality whose consequences are all too real. Echoing Antonova, Lynch himself posted an impassioned video on YouTube criticising his recklessness after Russia declared war on Ukraine in February 2022 in apocalyptic rhetoric.

Mr. Putin, you are sowing death and destruction […] All this is going to come back and visit you, and in this big picture we are involved in, there is an infinite amount of time, life after life after life, for you to reap what you are sowing (Sharf 2022).¹⁵

The Return reads as a kind of prophecy for what happened to post-Soviet Russia since the ‘90s. “There’s fire where you are going”, the Log Lady says to the detectives, “My log is afraid of fire”.

The very last sequence of Twin Peaks consists of Agent Cooper and a Laura Palmer look alike (a role played by Sheryl Lee, the actress who also played Laura Palmer) driving to the Palmer family home in Twin Peaks. They knock on the door, and the woman who answers – a character played by Mary Reber – is the actual homeowner of the real-life property that doubles as the fictional Palmer residence, located in Everett, Washington. Cooper inquires whether Laura’s mother, Sarah Palmer (a role hauntingly performed by Grace Zabriskie), is at home. Reber tells him that no one by that name has ever lived there. “What year is this?” Cooper wonders. A few seconds later, we hear the distorted echo of Sarah Palmer’s voice calling for Laura as she had in the debut episode of Twin Peaks, before she learned her daughter had been murdered. The Laura Palmer look alike then emits a bloodcurdling scream and the episode and, by turn, series ends. Television has become reality, and reality has become TV; life, it seems, is a media simulacrum in which anything goes. With this finale, Lynch gave present-day Russia – a TV-obsessed society drunk on state lies about everything from Jewish Nazis in Ukraine to disappearing Malaysian jets – one of the most powerful political metaphors of our time.

Laura-Palmer lookalike experiencing a psychological breakdown as she loses her grip on reality.

Detailing the media savvy statecraft of Putin’s Russia, the journalist Peter Pomerantsev, a specialist on disinformation technology, might as well have been describing the final episode of Twin Peaks:

The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action […] For the Soviets, the idea of truth was important – even when they were lying. Soviet propaganda went to great lengths to “prove” that the Kremlin’s theories or bits of disinformation were fact […] In today’s Russia, by contrast, the idea of the truth is irrelevant. On Russian “news” broadcasts, the borders between fact and fiction have become utterly blurred. Russian current-affairs programs feature apparent actors posing as refugees from eastern Ukraine […] If nothing is true, then, anything is possible […] We’re rendered stunned, spun, and flummoxed by the Kremlin’s weaponization of absurdity and unreality (Pomerantsev 2014).

Laura’s scream, as reminiscent of Edvard Munch as it is Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960, United States), gives voice not only to Russia’s, but the whole world’s reaction – a frustrated and frightened trauma response – of being too online too much of the time, bombarded with content and struggling to determine what is real. Far beyond America, then, Lynch left an enduring legacy in Russia. The reception his work generated among (post-)Soviet filmmakers and viewers sheds light onto the cultural and political dynamics of the three most recent chapters of Russian history: the late Soviet period, the era after communism’s fall, and Putinism. In its own peculiar way, Lynch’s creative evolution – from obscure arthouse cinema to eccentric exuberance to dystopic pessimism – parallels present-day Russia’s.

Raymond De Luca
Emory University
raymond.scott.de.luca@emory.edu

Bio

Raymond De Luca is an Assistant Professor at Emory University in the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures (REALC). He is the author of the forthcoming book, And the Cow Burned: Animals and Philosophy in the Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (Indiana University Press; January 2026).

Bibliography

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Chernyshova, Natalya. 2013. Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era. London.

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Condee, Nancy. 2009. The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema. Oxford.

Didion, Joan. 2008. Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays. New York.

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Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener. 2015. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New York.

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Haglund, David. 2014. “Did Gorbachev Really Ask George H.W. Bush to Find Out Who Killed Laura Palmer?” Slate. https://slate.com/culture/2014/11/gorbachev-a-twin-peaks-fan-producer-says-russian-leader-asked-george-bush-to-find-out-who-killed-laura-palmer.html. February 15.

Hoberman, J. 2025. “David Lynch, Maker of Florid and Unnerving Films, Dies at 78.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/movies/david-lynch-dead.html. February 15.

Horton, Andrew James. 2000. “Lynch Pin? The Imagery of Aleksei Balabanov.” Central Europe Review. https://www.pecina.cz/files/www.ce-review.org/00/18/kinoeye18_horton.html. February 15.

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Kuritsyn, Viacheslv and Vladimir Levashov. 1994. “Black and White Wigwams.” Segodnia.

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Filmography

Balabanov, Aleksei. 1991. Happy Days. Lenfilm.

Balabanov, Aleksei. 1993. The Castle. Lenfilm.

Balabanov, Aleksei. 1998. Of Freaks and Men. Lenfilm.

Buñuel, Louis. 1929. Un Chien Andalou. Centraal Bureau voor Ligafilms.

Fleming, Viktor. 1939. The Wizard of Oz. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Hitchcock, Alfred. 1958. Vertigo. Paramount Pictures.

Hitchcock, Alfred. 1960. Psycho. Paramount Pictures.

Kara, Iurii. 1988. Kings of Crime. Kino Studio Gor’kogo.

Lungin, Pavel. 1990. Taxi-Blues. Lenfilm.

Lynch, David. 1977. Eraserhead. American Film Institute.

Lynch, David. 1980. The Elephant Man. Paramount Pictures.

Lynch, David. 1986. Blue Velvet. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group.

Lynch, David. 1990. Wild at Heart. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment.

Lynch, David. 1990 – 1991. Twin Peaks. Lynch/Frost Productions.

Lynch, David. 1992. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. New Line Cinema.

Lynch, David. 1997. Lost Highway. Ciby 2000.

Lynch, David. 2001. Mulholland Drive. Universal Pictures.

Lynch, David. 2006. Inland Empire. StudioCanal.

Lynch, David. 2017. Twin Peaks: The Return. Lynch/Frost Productions.

Lynch, David. 2018. Ant Head. Lynch/Frost Productions.

Philippe, Alexandre O. 2022. Lynch/Oz. Dogwoof.

Pichul, Vasili. 1988. Little Vera. Kino Studio Gor’kogo.

Preminger, Otto. 1944. Laura. 20th Century Fox.

Ray, Nicholas. 1955. Rebel Without a Cause. Warner Bros. Pictures.

Spielberg, Steven. 2022. The Fabelmans. Universal Pictures.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1972. Solaris. Mosfilm.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1975. Mirror. Mosfilm.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1979. Stalker. Mosfilm.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1983. Nostalghia. Opera Film Produzione.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1986. The Sacrifice. Faragó Film.

Todorovskii, Petr. 1989. Intergirl. Mosfilm.

Suggested Citation

De Luca, Raymond. 2025. “‘Kto ubil Loru Palmer?’: David Lynch and (Post-)Soviet Culture and Cinema”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 20. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00020.381.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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