“Kto ubil Loru Palmer?”

David Lynch and (Post-)Soviet Culture and Cinema

Abstract

The celebrated American filmmaker David Lynch died on January 21st, 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.