No director in the history of cinema is as synonymous with the word "strange" as David Lynch, and the way he presents sexuality in his films is no less strange than everything else in his entire filmography. His very first film, Eraserhead, may not have any nudity in it, but it's got an insanely warped view of sex and relationships that would form the foundation on which Lynch would build his entire career.
Join me as I take a look at some of the various nude scenes in Lynch's films over the years, and how they're of a piece with his worldview. Sex and violence become inextricably linked, and the dreamlike state in which many of his films exist allow him to both sexualize the nudity and completely divorce it from reality.
Since it's not a film, I won't be covering his return toWashington statefor last year's Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime, but there is some great nudity to be found in there. There's also brief nudity in Inland Empire, which I'm ashamed to admit I've never seen. Let's start in 1986 with...
Blue Velvet
Thirteen years before the critical community rallied around American Beauty's portrayal of the suburbs as a twisted and malicious place full of secrets and torrid sexual desires, David Lynch did those same themes better in his fourth feature film. Blue Velvet opens with a shot of a severed ear in an otherwise idyllic field, letting the audience know that nothing is as it seems, and that there is no safe place in Lynch's world.
Kyle McLachlan stars as Jeffrey, a young man terrified by his own sexual desires and torn betweenhis virginal suburban girlfriend Sandy (Laura Dern) and tawdry nightclub singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini). The film explores sex in a way that's more at home in horror, with the dirty deed inevitably leading all who practice it on a path of destruction—self-inflicted or otherwise.
Rossellini made her nude debut in the film, though Lynch chose to de-sexualize her nude scene by having her mimic the famous "Napalm Girl" picture that brought the Vietnam War into American homes in the most uncomfortable of ways. Never before had a Hollywood legend made such a brutal and confrontational nude debut, and it remains among the most powerfully unsexy nude scenes ever put on film.
And none of this is to even mention Dennis Hopper's unhinged performance as sex-crazed maniac Frank Booth, whose perverse relationship with Dorothy makes him both a physical and sexual threat to our hero...
The film would earn Lynch his second Best Director Oscar nomination—following a nom five years earlier for the skinless flick The Elephant Man. It would also cement his reputation as the go-to guy for dreamlike films with challenging subject matter.
Wild at Heart
Four years later, Lynch wouldtake a break from filming his series Twin Peaks to make this story about star-crossed lovers (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) on the run from a hitman (Willem Dafoe) hired by the girl's mother (Diane Ladd). Based on a book of the same name by Barry Gifford, Lynch changed the book's downer of an ending to fit with Lynch's notion that sometimes a "happy ending" can be even more depressing.
Perhaps the most notable thing about the film is that it got Laura Dern to waive her "no nudity" clause, setting up a lifetime of amazing nude scenes from this legendary actress. Dern said in interviews that she struggled with playing a ditzy blonde, but it helped demonstrate her versatility as an actress and would be key in helping her land her Oscar nominated role inthe same year'sRambling Rose.
While there is a cold detachment in the nude scenes, they're not overtly un-sexy in the way the nude scenes in Blue Velvet were, and there's some truly spank-worthy nudity in here. The problem with it is that it's either fleeting—like Dern's scene above or Charlie Spradling's scene below—or so bizarre that it's hard to tell if you're supposed to be titillated or disturbed.
A pattern was beginning to emerge, however, in that Lynch seemed to exploit American audience's view of sexuality and nudity as taboo. Like a true provocateur, it's almost as if he is challenging the viewersto become aroused by the nudity in his film. It's far more subtle then the way someone like Brian De Palma or Paul Schrader used nudity, though they seemingly all intended to arrive at the same conclusion—if you enjoy sex and nudity, you'll inevitably feelshame for having done so.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
A year after Twin Peaks was unceremoniously cancelled by ABC—thanks in no small part to the fact that the second season was something of an unfocused mess—New Line Cinema swooped in and dropped ten million dollars in Lynch's lap to give us a prequel to the series. The biggest advantage of this was that it gave the lovely and talented Sheryl Lee more to do as Laura Palmer, whose murder kicked off the series.
The film covers the events leading to Laura's murder, and they're not pleasant. She falls into a spiral of drug and sexual abuse, that allows Lynch to further explore the correlation between sex and violence. Just look at this slow pan up Lee's body he does in the film's climactic scene...
What starts out as a sexy shot ofLeeseductively gyrating in satin lingerie with her nipples exposed turns to horror once you see her face and the clear state of distress the character is in. We know where this is all heading, since we know how the series begins, but it's no less tragic to watch it play out.
Sadly scheduling conflicts prevented Lara Flynn Boyle from reprising her role as Donna Hayward, but thankfully she was replaced by Moira Kelly, who was never shy about showing some skin!
The film failed to connect with audiences in America and Lynch's rumored five hour cut of the film has never been seen in public. The Criterion Collection came to the rescue when they released the film on Blu-ray late last year and included a ninety minute compilation of deleted and alternate scenes edited together by Lynch himself. Nevertheless, it's probably the least seen and most under-appreciated film in his entire filmography, but it's strangely one of his most accessible films. Unlike his next effort...
Lost Highway
Cribbing its title from a line in Wild at Heart author Barry Gifford's book "Night People," Lynch's seventh feature film rivals his feature debut Eraserhead for the mantle of strangest film he ever made. Lost Highway takes the dream logic of Lynch's other films and cranks it up to 11, complete with a circular plot that I and many others, frankly, still don't fully understand.
Saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) find themselves being harassed by a character known only as Mystery Man (Robert Blake), who is videotaping the couple in their home as they sleep. It isn't long before murder is on the menu, asone of the videos shows Fred standing over Renee's mutilated corpse. Charged and convicted of her murder, Fred is sent to jail where one day, he is mysteriously replaced in his cell by a young auto mechanic named Pete (Balthazar Getty).
Things only get more surreal from there as Pete is drawn into a web of deceit involving a crime boss named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) after beginning an affair with Mr. Eddy's mistress Alice (also played by Patricia Arquette). In what is probably the film's most sensual nude scene, we get an early topless scene from Natalie Wood's daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner when she strips for Balthazar Getty in a car (seen above).
The themes of infidelity and a total lack of trust in every relationship are laid on heavily, but never in a way that detracts from the narrative. There's also, once again, a strong correlation between sex and violence, evidenced by the scene where Mr. Eddy forces Alice to strip for him at gunpoint...
Juxtapose this scene with her outdoor nude sex scene with Pete, which are much more sensual, and Lynch's point becomes all the more illuminated (in this case literally thanks to a car's headlights)...
It's shot much more sensually, and has an overt eroticism that's totally lacking in her other nude scenes in the film. I don't know what Lynch thinks about love, necessarily, but I can tell that his view of men comes down to two types: naive innocents and masochistic maniacs.
Nearly a decade later, Lynch claimed to have taken inspiration for the story from O.J. Simpson's murder trial, saying the following in his book"Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity"...
What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh. He was able to go golfing with seemingly very few problems about the whole thing. I wondered how, if a person did these deeds, he could go on living. And we found this great psychology term -- "psychogenic fugue" -- describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape some horror. So, in a way, "Lost Highway" is about that. And the fact that nothing can stay hidden forever.
I don't know that the statement is necessarily the Rosetta Stone to help make sense of Lost Highway, but it was a rather uncharacteristic bit of candor from a director that revels in keeping his films' meanings tightly under wraps.
Mulholland Dr.
For his ninth film—following the G-rated 1999 film The Straight Story—Lynch took a television pilot he had been working on and reworked it as a feature film when ABC declined to pick it up. The result is perhaps his masterpiece, a mind-bending, genre-bending dream of a film that rightly earned its place atop many "Best Films of the 2000s" lists.
On the surface, it's something of a mystery story concerninga hopeless romantic with dreams of Hollywood stardom named Betsy (Naomi Watts)who crosses paths with a mysterious woman (Laura Harring) who dubs herself Rita after being struck with amnesia following a car crash on the titular road. Not unlike Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, however, the film plays more like a cautionary tale of the dangers of Hollywood for idealistic young women,only devoid ofany of that film's sense of camp.
A little more than halfway through the film, everything goes sideways and—like Bill Pullman's character in Lost Highway—the two lead actresses wake up as someone new. Unlike that film, however, the actresses themselves stay in the film, just as new characters. The new characters, however, are involved in a torrid love affair that culminates in one of the sexiest lesbian encounters ever put on film.
The scene is sexy in a way Lynch has almost never allowed in any of his other films. Prior to this, almost all of the nudity in Lynch's films was divorced from sexuality, but here, he goes for broke, giving us a tender and incredible love scene between Naomi Watts and Laura Harring that remains a gold standard for A-list lesbian scenes nearly 20 years later.
The scene is something of an anomaly within Lynch's filmography, and being an outlier only makes it more amazing. Frankly, it's the kind of sex scene we never expected from David Lynch, which is a huge part of the reason he is who he is. The film earned Lynch his third—and, to date, final—Best Director Oscar nomination, though he would lose to Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind, a film no one talks about or analyzes the way they do Mulholland Dr.
I hope you enjoyed this trip through one of the most surreal filmographies in all of cinema, and that you leave here with new interpretations of Lynch's work, as well as an eye toward spotting the many ways which Lynch uses sexuality. Sound off in the comments section below with your thoughts on David Lynch and his many challenging works!
