David Lynch/Casting – David Lohrey
September 14, 2026
Looking for love?
David Lynch might or might not be, who knows? but clearly so are his female protagonists, although they never find it and that is a part of what the Lynchian universe consists of: lovelessness.
One reason the evil dark characters are so strong, so repellent, and so captivating is that the male lead characters are so decent and empty the women don’t want to fuck them. Lynch plays characters off each other. His male protagonists are partly tolerated because they are such safe alternatives to his vicious antagonists. Who would not run into Kyle MacLachlan’s arms if the alternative was being knocked about by a crazed Dennis Hopper? Same goes with dull Balthazar Getty who lacks charm, sex appeal, and brains. But who is he competing with? Robert Loggia, the combative mafia leader? And what about dear Robert Blake, the pale-faced devil figure with the lascivious grin (often called “shit-eating”)? Safe and sound is preferable to creepy.
This is one feature of the worlds David Lynch creates and presents. He gives us gorgeous, sexy female protagonists, faced with dull, boring, repressed male partners, and weird, ghastly haunting monstrous little antagonists, and then asks us to come up with an answer to what’s life all about.
The men in Lynch’s movies exhibit behaviors that would have to described as the opposite of masculine toxicity. Just think for a moment: there is Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet; Justin Theroux in Mulholland Drive; and Balthazar Getty and Bill Pullman in Lost Highway.
They are strangely passive, oddly sexless men; they are unmanly men but not in the least bit feminine. They are sexless like Ronald Reagan. They are male equivalents of Helen Hayes. In sharp contrast, Hopper, Dafoe, and Blake look like men who took so much Viagra that their penises never stand at ease.
When we compare freaky Robert Blake to pallid Bill Pullman at the cocktail party in Lost Highway, we witness the conflict between good and evil but also sexuality itself vs repression. We see this conflict again in Wild at Heart when Willem Dafoe hypnotizes Laura Dern with his memorably vulgar rant. Dafoe stands a tongue-length from (Laura Dern) Lula’s face. As Lula stands seemingly helpless before the sexually menacing Dafoe in their hotel bedroom, sexy Sailor (Nicolas Cage) – in his Marlon Brando snake-skin jacket – is out doing what he calls business with a bunch of lame-brains. In these two scenes, the male antagonists “fuck over” the passive, weak, defenseless, perhaps even pathetic victims, Pullman and Dern, who are disarmed in these confrontations and, once confronted, left confused, battered, and desperate, almost like actual rape victims.
Dafoe and Blake, in the first place, have striking, frightening appearances. The look is crucial. Dafoe wears a set of revolting dentures, with tiny dark seemingly filthy teeth, ground down to nearly nothing. Blake has shaved his eyebrows and appears almost to be in Kabuki white-face like a female geisha, although it has been said that he is not wearing any make-up at all. Both end their scene with triumphant grins, delighted with themselves. Their victims are left shattered. Dern is in tears and Pullman, whimperingly, demands to go home (no doubt to have a good cry, too).
What is so wonderfully distinctive about Lynch’s lunatics is how their madness has physical features. Hopper is a drug addict of some sort while Blake’s madness is a feature of his facial features. Blake’s bizarre appearance includes shaved eyebrows and an eerie facial paleness. Hopper, of course, is rather handsome in passing, but when high on narcotics his face becomes wildly distorted; after snorting gas through a face mask, he becomes an enraged maniac, actually a seething, red-faced, homicidal monster with an extraordinary grimace and bulging eyes.
While Dafoe and Blake could be said to offer thrilling performances, Hopper makes one sorry to have come to the theatre, at least for a second. He is no fun to watch. He is too scary. It is a performance that has to get to the audience. Rossellini is raped and worked over by Hopper and so are viewers. We hate him instantly and are delighted when Kyle finally shoots him between the eyes. Hurray! (The wicked witch is dead!)
Of course, hateful Hopper is doing a brilliant job and his part was written well, so much so I am sure that everybody sees Rossellini as the innocent and sees him as a psychotic monster. I understand that there was no improvising allowed on Lynch’s set. The lines were delivered exactly as written. Hopper, I read, walked onto the set with no rehearsals and did that scene in one take. Lynch had planned on using laughing gas but Hopper suggested instead that a different chemical should be used that would have a more mind-bending effect. He didn’t like the high voice that comes with the use of helium.
Dianne Ladd and Bonnie Aarons play Lynch’s female monsters. Bonnie does so without saying a word. She just scares the shit out of everyone by appearing with red eyes and a soot-blackened face, in the back of a diner in Mulholland Drive. Where does she sleep? Ladd who plays Lula’s mother in Wild at Heart, on the other hand, never shuts up. She is volcanic, spewing all sort of harrowing threats, a stream of rage and hysteria. Even the assassin she hires to kill her lovely daughter is afraid of her. The magnificent shots of her smearing red lipstick on her face are terrifying. No one, not even the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz when he is in his power-mad element, as it were, spewing smoke and fire, comes close to the size of Ladd’s untamed fury.
Ladd is unique among the Lynchian monsters whose behavior is not a permanent feature of her personality or character. Her behavior varies greatly depending on circumstances and mood. One could say, perhaps, that she is having a bad day compared to, say, Hopper’s character who is clearly mad as a hatter. Same goes for the other male monsters. Ladd, however, swings dramatically. At times, she can be pleasant but goes mad at the mere mention of her daughter’s boyfriend (that is, Sailor, played by Nicolas Cage). And, of course, she isn’t merely angry; this is not impotent rage. Oh, no. She hires a killer to get rid of him. She is the devil; a fantastic ranting explosive monument to maternal revenge, Medea times ten. Ranting, heaving, panting with rage. Nothing can touch her; no performance matches this. It also has to be said that among all of Lynch’s male protagonists, Cage is the only decent human being in the Lynch oeuvre who is also sexy. We understand why Laura Dern (Lola) wants to stay all day in bed with him. He is no Bill Pullman.
Love is hard to find in these Lynch pictures. In Blue Velvet? The Laura Dern character doesn’t love Kyle MacLachlan. She is too innocent for love, too young and too naive. Kyle’s character may “love” Rossellini, but he is just a child. And she is really not a love-character; she is in love with her son. She is more a maternal-figure, not a lover, however sexy she may seem. She certainly doesn’t love Hopper; she is terrified of him and wants him dead. What of Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway? Well, her divided character finds Balthazar’s sexual attentions appealing, but there is nothing between them. Nor is her double much interested in the mafia thug, played by the angry Robert Loggia, although she might love his Cadillac and the good life. Arquette really thinks and acts like a whore more than a romantic. She’s a vamp. Luscious, but not true blue.
Nobody loves Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (except David Lynch the director). She is a lost soul. Nobody really pays much attention to her. She performs brilliantly at the auditions and gets all sorts of male attention, with lots of shoulder rubs and little pats, but we later learn that the auditions were rigged and the part has been promised to another blonde nobody. All little Naomi is left with is playing with herself, literally, and the hope of getting something going with her stacked roommate, which goes nowhere and leaves little Naomi in tears.
Let’s face it: the men are so boring, so corrupt, and so distracted that sweet Naomi is simply turned off by men. None of the male characters is as beautiful or sexy as Laura Harring, her roommate and rival. Who wouldn’t prefer her to a dullard like Justin Theroux? It seems to me that the casting is elegantly keyed to the parts; Lynch asks very little of his male characters. Lynch writes weak, deliberately passive male protagonists who in the final analysis are appealing because although dull, stand like Lynch himself, as representatives of calm dignity and sanity in a world of menace and threat. Better no sex than rape.
The exceptions to all this of course are Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart. Here, the monster does not drive Laura into Nicolas’ arms. He is no consolation prize. Laura and Nicolas make a lovely, heterosexual couple. Willem Dafoe is never Nicolas’ rival. In fact, Sailor is the one seduced by Dafoe. Sailor hasn’t much sense but is seduced by money not by men. Willem is revoltingly dangerous but not a temptation. He could rape Laura but it is unlikely that she could ever be attracted to him under any circumstance. Unlike Rossellini in Blue Velvet, Laura does not play the victim. Her mother is a handful, all right, and a threat, but Laura finds Sailor (Nicolas) all by herself. They are in love and, boy, do they play red-hot lovers. They play a well-balanced couple. They are sexual equals. There is no hint of unrequited love. He is not the sexual aggressor; he doesn’t even always take the initiative. She is hot to trot. “Sailor, you better run me back to the motel, I’m about as hot as Georgia asphalt.” Here in Wild at Heart, Lynch produces what I would call a normal love relationship that works. They are surrounded by madness, to be sure, but their passion is real.
If we knew more about the wonderful director David Lynch, we could offer perhaps an analysis of his psyche and explain why he wrote so many heart-breaking melodramas set in hell-scapes. Some have called his works surrealistic. Somehow while this may describe his aesthetic accomplishments, my sense is that it distracts viewers from the possibility that we are being offered a glimpse into the lost highway of the director’s distressed heart.