Asked about David Lynch's surrealism, David Foster Wallace's perfect response involved peanut butter

Few artists create sounds or images so unique, their very names become adjectives. "Hitchcockian" conjures a highly stylized and unsettling flavor of suspense. "Beatles-esque" can point to dozens of different vibes, from psychedelic marching bands to sweetly sung pop-rock vocal harmonies. But the best example of this phenomenon might be "Lynchian": a somewhat abstruse term used to describe the surreal, largely disturbing, and often darkly hilarious films and TV shows—from Eraserhead to Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks to Mulholland Dr.—made by the late, great David Lynch.

It’s a difficult word to define, but the most profound attempt came from acclaimed author David Foster Wallace, a massive Lynch fan who wrote a famous essay about the director for Premiere ahead of the 1997 movie Lost Highway. "An academic definition of 'Lynchian' might be that the term 'refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter,'" he wrote. "But like 'postmodern' or 'pornographic,' 'Lynchian' is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it."

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In a later interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace gave a brilliantly bizarre, hypothetical example—and it involved, of all things, peanut butter.

"A regular domestic murder is not Lynchian," he told the host. "But if the police come to the scene and see the man standing over the body, and the woman's '50s bouffant is undisturbed, and the man and the cops have this conversation about the fact that the man killed the woman because she persistently refused to buy, for instance, JIF peanut butter rather than Skippy, and how very, very important that is—and if the cops found themselves somehow agreeing that there are major differences between the brands and that a wife who didn't recognize those differences was deficient in her wifely duties, that would be Lynchian."

Indeed, Lynch’s work lived at that intersection of the horrific and the humdrum. In Twin Peaks, wind rustling through trees could be a harbinger of evil; in Blue Velvet, ants crawl across a dismembered ear in a field of green suburban grass; in a climactic scene from Mulholland Dr., an elderly couple smiles wildly to the point of mania. This contrast is part of the Lynch lexicon—an essential tool on his belt.

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"Here’s something that's unsettling but true: Lynch's best movies are also the ones that strike people as his sickest," Wallace wrote in the essay. "I think this is because his best movies, however surreal, tend to be anchored by well-developed main characters—Blue Velvet's Jeffrey Beaumont, Fire Walk With Me's Laura, The Elephant Man's Merrick and Treves. When characters are sufficiently developed and human to evoke our empathy, it tends to break down the carapace of distance and detachment in Lynch, and at the same time it makes the movies creepier—we’re way more easily disturbed when a disturbing movie has characters in whom we can see parts of ourselves."

Lynch, who died in January 2025 at age 78, remains one of cinema’s most original voices—even if, or perhaps because, defining his uncanny tone remains a slippery task. Unsurprisingly, when Rose asked Lynch himself to summarize "Lynchian" in 1997, the filmmaker didn’t even try. "I haven’t got a clue," he said with a grin. "I think when you’re inside of it, you can’t see it, so I don’t know."

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