“Something is on the horizon for you to see and hear,” mewled the filmmaker David Lynch in a captivating video posted online this past spring. This brief clip served as a teaser for an upcoming music project and immediately caught the eye of the public, thanks to the director’s timeless charisma — his dark shades and upswept silver locks framed in close-up. However, it was another aspect of the video that truly held attention: the unique jangle and blare of Lynch’s reedy voice.
Larger-than-life screen personalities are inherently watchable, but some also possess a mysterious quality that makes them listenable. Lynch is one of these rare individuals, belonging to a small pantheon of filmmakers whose mystique is partly rooted in the textures of their speech. This group includes the gorgeous intonations of Orson Welles, the nostalgic tones of Agnès Varda, and the exuberant enthusiasm of Quentin Tarantino.
Throughout his extensive career, Lynch has delivered a series of locomotive thrills. It all begins with that unmistakable voice — a sound that the director Mel Brooks once described as a “kind of crazy Midwestern accent.” Indeed, Lynch’s family frequently relocated during his upbringing, and his childhood unfolded across a diverse tapestry of midcentury America. In this process, his voice developed a subtly comic quality: thin and quavering, with a hint of helium, reflecting both the potential for a whine and the chirpy approachability characteristic of an archetypal 1950s suburbia.
Lynch is a raconteur of considerable renown; he has regaled audiences with tales of Wookiees, crumbling factories, and an overindulged Chihuahua that resembled “a water balloon with little legs.” He revels in folksy turns of phrase, often proclaiming “Golden sunshine all along the way” during the online weather reports he used to share. He also offers intriguing maxims, such as “A washed butt never boils.” Lynch believes that ideas are pre-existing “gifts” that artists can “catch.” This pursuit is palpable in his interviews, where he occasionally speaks as if reciting words from a faintly heard incoming transmission, gesturing with his fingers and closing his eyes in concentration.
Even his most mundane remarks can resonate with an air of profundity, lingering in the mind long after they are spoken. And at times, they linger in the ears as well. Lynch “needs his megaphone to amplify his voice, which sounds even more nasal,” according to actress Naomi Watts, who described his on-set carnival barking. “He’s just two feet away from you, and it’s something else entirely.” He has a tendency to stretch out words like “beautiful,” infusing them with the deep emotion of an explorer recounting tales of fleeting miracles. His diction, shaped by a childhood in the ’40s, adds another layer of strangeness: Lynch, a self-identified Eagle Scout, can be heard in one documentary repeatedly and earnestly exclaiming, “Oh my golly.”
