Frames & Forms: David Lynch & the Postmodern Dreamscape

Cinema and design have always been secret collaborators. This series, Frames & Forms, traces the ways filmmakers and designers borrow from one another, shaping the way we see the world. We begin in David Lynch’s dreamscapes — where red curtains breathe, fluorescent lights hum, and everyday Americana tips into the uncanny.

The Mood Called “Lynchian”

The word “Lynchian” has been in circulation for decades, and while it resists definition, most critics agree it points to the uncanny collision of the banal and the macabre. David Foster Wallace famously described it as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine.”

What matters for our purposes is that Lynch is not just a storyteller but a designer of moods. The sterile glow of a fluorescent light, the oppressive geometry of an apartment block, the lurid gloss of a cherry pie: these are not incidental. They are carefully chosen design elements that act as characters in his films. Lynch’s work suggests that interiors, textures, and objects are never neutral; they can be conspirators in atmosphere, amplifiers of dread or desire.

Industrial Dread & Brutalist Overtones

Lynch’s first feature, Eraserhead (1977), was filmed in abandoned industrial sites around Philadelphia, where he had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The film’s world of endless corridors, cracked plaster, and hulking machinery recalls the sculptural massing of Brutalism.

Though Brutalist architects like Alison & Peter Smithson or Paul Rudolph sought a kind of social idealism in exposed concrete, by the late 1970s many people experienced such buildings as alienating or hostile. Eraserhead takes that hostility to its logical conclusion. Its interiors feel less like shelter than like a trap — echo chambers of anxiety. Lynch never named Brutalism as a reference, but the resonance is unmistakable: architecture here becomes psychology.

Blue Velvet & the Irony of the Suburb

If Eraserhead was industrial nightmare, Blue Velvet (1986) stages suburbia as dream-turned-nightmare. The film opens with white fences and crimson roses, a postcard vision of Americana, before zooming beneath the lawn to reveal a seething colony of insects.

This ironic staging parallels what was happening in design at roughly the same moment. In Milan, Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis collective were dismantling modernist seriousness with bright laminates, zig-zag patterns, and toy-like silhouettes. They reveled in contradiction: serious design that winked at its own artifice.

Lynch does something similar with suburbia. His kitchens, diners, and living rooms are exaggerated to the point of menace. Like Memphis design, they expose the instability of cultural symbols: the fence isn’t just a fence, it’s a mask. Whether by coincidence or cultural synchronicity, Lynch and Memphis both embraced irony as a design tool.

The Red Room as Dream Design

The Red Room of Twin Peaks (1990–91) is perhaps Lynch’s most iconic set: swaths of red velvet curtain, a black-and-white chevron floor, and furniture arranged with unnerving symmetry. The elements are familiar, even banal, yet in combination they feel like a stage set for the subconscious.

Critics have traced the chevron to Art Deco graphics and the drapery to theatrical design traditions. Lynch fuses these into an interior that is placeless yet unforgettable. Designers and art directors have borrowed its grammar ever since, not always citing him but clearly drawing on its mood. When checkerboard floors or heavy curtains appear in fashion editorials or hotel lobbies today, they often carry a Lynchian charge: the sense that space itself might be conspiring against us.

Sound, Space & the Avant-Garde

If Lynch reimagined interiors, he also reimagined sound. Collaborating with Alan Splet and later Dean Hurley, he layered his films with industrial hums, mechanical drones, and abrupt silences. The effect recalls the avant-garde compositions of John Cage or La Monte Young, where noise and absence become structural.

This sonic texture interacts with the built environment onscreen: a radiator hisses like an instrument, a ceiling fan whirs like a metronome. It is not difficult to see affinities with the avant-garde in other fields - Brutalist architects emphasizing raw materiality, or Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons collections, which turned “ugliness” into beauty. All are concerned with estrangement, with making us notice what we usually ignore.

The Afterlife of Lynch in Design

Here we must tread carefully. Lynch’s influence on design is less a matter of direct lineage than of atmospheres that circulate. He did not invent the checkerboard floor, nor did he cause velvet drapery to return to interiors. What he did was fix these elements in the cultural imagination as signifiers of strangeness.

Fashion has been the most explicit. Raf Simons titled his Fall/Winter 2019 collection Blue Velvet, directly citing the film and channeling its tension between innocence and menace. Comme des Garçons has long worked in a parallel register, dressing models in uncanny silhouettes that echo Lynch’s love of grotesquerie.

Elsewhere the trace is subtler. Advertising campaigns, photography editorials, even Instagram moodboards borrow Lynchian tropes: neon diners, eerily empty streets, small-town Americana rendered strange. These borrowings rarely acknowledge their source, but they participate in a mood Lynch helped normalize - one where design is always a little off, a little suspicious, a little alive.

Why It Matters

What makes Lynch relevant to design discourse is not that he “inspired” a style but that he reframed the terms. He showed that beauty does not have to be comforting or coherent. A space can be beautiful because it unsettles us, because it exaggerates its own artifice, because it stages a contradiction.

This is precisely what much of postmodern and avant-garde design sought in the late 20th century, and it is what continues to animate design culture now. Whether or not designers consciously channel Lynch, they operate in a world where his atmospheres have become cultural shorthand.