The Female Body as Conduit: Fleshy Corridors in the Worlds of David Lynch

A 2009 article about feminine and masculine embodiments in Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and more

This article originally appeared on Filthy Gorgeous Things, a now defunct online magazine about sex, art and photography, in 2009.

One of the most famous still-frame photographic creations by David Lynch is his ‘Nudes and Smoke’ project: a collection mostly of fully nude women, blowing smoke out of their bodies. The women are, like most all of Lynch’s central females, classically perfected: big tits and red lips, long hair—soft fortresses of flesh—each erupting from them a seeming glob or cloud of ruined air that somehow, in Lynch’s lens seems more than just burning—it is a medium brought up from somewhere else, rendered through the holes in the female body, a conduit to an ‘other’ zone, areas that on human can only loom, semi-contained—being what precisely makes them so indescribably terrifying and sublime.

If there is any major connective fiber in the Lynch terrain, it is the ‘Other,’ the manifestation of an untouchable real irreal: the Black Lodge, the place inside the radiator, Dorothy Valens’s apartment, the Inland Empire soundstages, etc. In each of these, there is an embodied presence, always male (BOB, Frank Booth, the creature behind Winky’s in Mulholland Drive, etc.), who seeks to connect these ‘other’ spaces with the everyday, the ‘human’ world. In each instance, though it is only through the flesh of the female body that the transference can occur—beautiful, half-naked bodies—though also, bodies clearly rupturing, in distress.