David Lynch Knew Our Hearts Needed Fixing

I spend a lot of time – too much time, many are saying – thinking about ways to trick people into doing the right thing. 

Most of my Bad Faith Times writing over the past two and a half years has been dedicated, in one way or another, to considering how people develop their belief systems, the complexity of their politics in an age of unreality, and how pro-democracy forces – liberals, the left, whatever you want to call it – can do a better job at persuading folks not to follow society’s fascist pied pipers down their red-pilled rabbit holes. 

I’ve read and cited reams of research on how different people think of various political issues and exposed myself to an inhumane amount of right-wing writing and podcasts and videos in a (mostly) fruitless effort to rethink how the American left operates in an era defined by capitalist radicalization and all the democratic deterioration that comes along with it. 

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All this time, through all of this thinking and writing, I could have simply listened to David Lynch. Or more precisely, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole. It was Cole, played by the inimitable Lynch over three seasons of Twin Peaks, who cut right through the bullshit with which I have covered myself over these past couple years. 

In a 2015 exchange with FBI Chief of Staff Denise Bryan, a trans woman who had risen through the Bureau’s ranks since last we saw her in the early 1990s, Cole (Lynch) reminds Bryan (played by David Duchovny) that he had stepped up in her defense when others in the FBI had mocked her transition. Cole is trying to darndest to extract information from Bryan in what is proving to be the culmination of a 25-year cold case when he delivers the line that, when I first heard it while watching Twin Peaks: The Return with my Peaks-loving friend a decade ago, made me sit up and blurt out something indecipherable – something akin to “fuck yes.”

“When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die,” Cole says with so much earnestness it might make you well up if you’re not too careful. 

It was really that simple. Maybe it’s always been that simple, to grab those with hate and fear in their hearts and minds and to tell them to stop it, stop being assholes, stop treating as subhuman those who do not look or speak or think like you. Your heart is blackened, poisoned, corrupted. Lynch’s instruction was direct: Recognize the corruption of your heart, become conscious of it, and fix the fucking thing. Gordon Cole did not dance around the cultural and political leanings and influences of those who might have made jokes at the expense of a transgender colleague. He did not ignore their petty hatred and discrimination against someone who may have challenged their bedrock views of sex and gender, or excuse those views because they did not know better. 

He called them clown comics and told them they had two choices in how they would deal with Denise Bryan, who entered the FBI as a man and later found she identified as a woman: You can change your heart or you can die. 

I don’t see the latter part of Cole’s quote as a threat. It might generously be interpreted instead as a caution. A nonworking heart – one infiltrated by hate and greed and ignorance that corrodes the vital organ most closely correlated with love – threatens the person who relies on the thing to keep pumping blood through their body. See the things that have made your heart so hideous and so horrible and, consequently, so very weak, and fix it before it’s too late. Lynch, masquerading as Gordon Cole, isn’t threatening violence as a solution to those who hated Denise Bryan; he was pleading with them to recognize the moral corruption within themselves and to do something about it. 

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Such an approach comes down to agency, and the belief that everyone has the ability not to be a hateful little prick simply by choosing not to be a hateful little prick. It’s something on which I have missed the mark over these past couple years, writing essay after essay largely ignoring people’s agency and instead treating them like empty, thoughtless vessels that can be infiltrated and propagandized and ultimately tricked into adopting a worldview in which some humans are more equal than others. 

Certainly our poisoned information environment, becoming more harmful all the time as the oligarchs who run our social media world drift closer and closer to the international fascist movement in hopes of maximizing profits, has made it difficult-bordering-on-impossible for folks who accurately interpret reality. Certainly the breaking of the human brain via the weaponized algorithm has contributed to the political horrors of the past decade, and those to come. Human beings still have agency though, and there are millions of us who see the same posts and ingest the same messaging as our red-pilled friends and family members, and we somehow do not succumb to it. Our hearts, somehow, are not blackened with the soot of the kind of insidious evil that permeated everything in David Lynch’s work. 

I wrote in March 2023 about the eternal stream of bad faith necessary for the American right to believe in the myth of “wokeness” and to craft policies that extinguish the various forms of woke in American culture. Conservatives have used this construct, borne of the worst faith imaginable, to pressure corporations and universities into ending all efforts to increase diversity and guard against segregation, which is making a 28-3 Falcons-Patriots kind of comeback. I detailed a scene at the breakfast bar of a Phoenix hotel in January 2023, where three white men were griping about the previous night’s Grammy Awards, replete with guys dressed in insufficiently (traditional) masculine ways and, of course, black people. In the hearts and minds of these men, besieged on all sides by cultural forces unseen, they and their kind were under attack.

Instead of accepting their monstrously warped view of reality and figuring out ways to trick them into thinking differently, perhaps the Gordon Cole strategy is in order. Perhaps these men needed to be told to fix their hearts or suffer the consequences that come with a corrupted heart. Maybe "meeting them where they are" – a phrase that has infiltrated political culture thanks to bloodless, highly-paid Democratic Party consultants who do nothing but lose – is the wrong approach.

The hearts of so many people – including, I would guess, most Bad Faith Times readers – are not in need of fixing in this way because we have agency and we use it to reject the message that some people should be at the top of the hierarchies of oppression, and others are meant to be at the bottom of that hierarchy, and that’s just the way it is. With working hearts, we say no. We say to the clown comics among us, in the hotel lobbies of an suburban Arizona Marriott and at PTA meetings and around our own dinner tables: Shut the fuck up. Fix your fucking heart. 

David Lynch Was Not (Usually) Interested In Answers 

Lynch, who died this week at the age of 78 after a remarkable career in surrealist filmmaking that somehow, someway occasionally barged into the cultural mainstream, was so rarely straightforward with the message of his art. There are, in fact, hundreds (thousands?) of people online who have made a career out of analazying Lynch’s work, including The Return, the most stunning show in TV history. That it made its way to the small screen is baffling (if you want a clue as to how obsessive the analysis of Lynch’s work has become, consider I once read a 4,000-word essay dissecting what may or may not have been a morse code message reflected off the windows of an airplane in a scene of Twin Peaks: The Return). 

Lynch never offered answers to the questions about his artwork, always keeping his audience at a healthy distance and, with painstaking vagueness, urging people to stop looking for answers to the questions created by his movies and shows and short films. Lynch had a million opportunities over the past three decades to engage with these burning questions about what he meant by this or that, and he passed on all of them. He was like David Bowie in that way, refusing, in the end, to give everything away. 

“He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that makes us who we are,” Kyle MacLachlan, who played FBI Agent Dale Cooper – a stand-in for Lynch himself – on Twin Peaks, wrote on Instagram after Lynch’s family announced his death. “They are our breath.” 

This, I think, makes Gordon Cole’s line about fixing one’s heart all the more remarkable and so far removed from the Lynchian norm. His demand for people to stop being assholes – to make that choice – was as direct as anything you’ll see in any Lynch movie or show. There’s no analyzing that (though, I suppose, I am trying to do just that). It is what it is. Gordon Cole said what he said. There is no mistaking it, or finding an alternative meaning, or linking it to another part of Twin Peaks and therefore obscuring its message. Questions may have been the breath of Lynch’s art, but in that scene, with Denise Bryan on the other side of the desk, Lynch offered only an answer. 

It wasn’t only the do-good protagonists of the Lynch universe who used their agency as functional humans to do right by those around them. Even the asshole characters in Twin Peaks – created mostly by co-creator Mark Frost – had moments of heart fixing, of acknowledging that they had a choice to be good or bad, and they chose good. Most poignantly this brings to mind a scene from the second season of Twin Peaks in which FBI agent Albert Rosenfeld is confronted by Twin Peaks Sheriff Harry S. Truman, who has had enough of Albert’s shit.  

If you're familiar with Lynch's work, from Eraserhead to Twin Peaks to Mulholland Drive, you know that Lynch's stories almost always have supernatural forces directing the earthly carnage. While people toiled in the make-believe world of David Lynch, beings in some other, mostly unseen dimension controlled the good and the evil in their plotting and clashing and their collective desire to control life.

In Twin Peaks, this supernatural element was twofold: The black lodge, full of evildoing demons who infected and directed the doings of the show's antagonists, and the white lodge, headed by beneficent beings who tried – and sometimes failed – to guide those fighting the good fight with the black lodge and its on-the-ground foot soldiers. The lodges do battle throughout the show's three seasons, and in The Return, we get an extended look at the white lodge beings doing what they can to save a race bent on its own destruction, in need of fixed hearts.

How, you might ask, does this view of humanity as nothing but chess pieces in an eternal game between good and evil comport with an artist who seemingly believed people have agency to do the right thing, to have empathy for others? It's a fair question. It's one I surely can't answer to everyone's satisfaction.

But I think back to a soul-twisting scene in the second season of Twin Peaks in which Leland Palmer, the father of the slain Laura Palmer, confesses that he murdered his daughter and all at once – finally freed from the demon that had controlled him – comes to terms with the unspeakable acts he had committed.

With his dying breaths, Leland Palmer acknowledged the horrors he had wrought on his child and established his agency in the whole sordid affair.

"I loved her with all my heart," Leland cries out, his heart finally fixed.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.