Is Reality Weird in a Bad Way?
The ear in Blue Velvet.
HOBOKEN, SEPTEMBER 11, 2025. My daughter Skye comes over for spaghetti and a movie. Skye liked Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, wants to see Wild at Heart, which a friend recommends. I say sure. I saw Wild at Heart back in 1990 but remember little about it.
As we watch, Lynch’s whole schtick comes back to me. Oh yeah, I think, this shit. Wild at Heart is, ostensibly, a love story. Two crazy kids, played by Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern, drive across the country having adventures and sex. They hoot, holler, dance, triumph over adversity.
But Wild at Heart is a love story only in the sense that Twins Peaks is a murder mystery. Lynch’s plots give him an excuse to rub our faces in the world’s weirdness. The weirdness is bad. Grotesque, creepy, menacing. Like the leering psycho with the rotten teeth played by Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart.
Question: Is Lynch’s vision accurate? Even, in some sense, objectively true? Is the world weird in a bad way?
I go on and on about how the world is weird in a good way, meaning infinitely improbable and hence miraculous. Because what is a miracle but something infinitely improbable? The miracle of our existence--which science, for all its power, cannot explain away--should leave us wonderstruck, overwhelmed with gratitude. We’re so lucky to be alive! And so on.
Lynch, were he alive, would surely agree that reality is infinitely improbable and inexplicable. But far from filling us with wonder and gratitude, this weird, weird world should make our flesh crawl. So Lynch’s works suggest.
The difference between Lynch’s weirdness and mine is captured by the trips of two 20th-century brainiacs. When Aldous Huxley took mescaline in California in 1953, he saw everything as weird in a good way.
His trip, which he describes in the hippy favorite The Doors of Perception, corroborates what mystics from many eras and cultures report: Everything is divine, all is one, thou art that, there is no death only endless transformation, it’s all good, baby!
Contrast that vision with Jean Paul Sartre’s, who took mescaline in 1935 in Paris. According to this account, Sarte “felt submerged against his will in a miasma of sensations that assailed him viscerally at every turn, a world of grotesque extreme close-ups in which everything disgusted him.”
Sartre was also “haunted for weeks after by lobster-like creatures scuttling just beyond his field of vision.” Yikes, monsters. That’s a bad trip. But you don’t have to encounter monsters to see the world as monstrous.
In high school, I had a bad trip triggered by hyperventilation plus weed. Smoking dope with several buddies at Jim’s house, I hyperventilated, huffing and puffing. Then I took a big hit from a pipe and held it in while Jim grabbed me from behind and squeezed my chest until I passed out. Yup, that’s the outcome I sought.
When I woke, I was lying on the floor, looking up as if from the bottom of a well at leering, jeering demons. Gradually I realized these fiends were my friends, and my life rebooted. But for weeks after that episode, everything seemed weird in a bad way. I felt estranged from my buddies, family, everything.
The terrible thing about this mode of perception is that it feels accurate. Dead on. You think, Oh shit, this is how things really are. My estrangement faded, fortunately. But it creeps up on me now and then, like when a trip goes awry, or I watch a Lynch flick.
Lynch was an evangelical meditator. I’m guessing he meditated to keep the dark at bay. In Blue Velvet, you see something lying in a field. What is it? When the camera zooms in, you see it’s a human ear. You’re reminded that even when attached to a healthy person, ears are weird. Right? Look at your ear in the mirror. A detached ear is even weirder, in a bad way.
Lynch keeps zooming in on the ear. You see blood on it, ants crawling over it. Yuck. Lynch doesn’t stop there. The camera transports you through the ear canal into a vast roaring darkness, the void that lies at the core of things, even in an all-American town like Lumberton.
I want to reject the everything-is-weird-in-a-bad-way vision, Lynch’s vision, as pathological, delusional. I want to see the world as weird in a good way: lovely, entrancing, filled with love and friendship and fun and bonbons. Sure, there’s darkness, but without darkness there’s no light, right?
But at times my perspective feels wildly inaccurate, sentimental, a product of my wishful thinking and naivete. At the very least, I must acknowledge that reality is weird in a bad as well as good way. Just as life should make us happy and sad, or gladsad, so it should fill us with horror as well as delight.
If you see the world as weird in a good way, you might convince yourself that a benign intelligence lies at the core of things. But what sort of god would create a world that is weird in both a good and bad way? Or worse, a world that’s more bad than good? Clearly, that god would be really fucked up. Insane, or malicious, or both. Maybe more demon than god.
I’m brooding over these questions because the bad weirdness seems to be eclipsing the good. Lynch’s schtick, rather than pathological or cartoonish, is beginning to seem apt—in the same way that Pynchon’s perverse masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, which I finally finished last spring, seems apt.
Lynch likes making us see the bad weirdness of cute things. Take the robin perched on a windowsill at the end of Blue Velvet. The robin looks adorably perky at first, but as Lynch zooms in you see its motions are jerky, robotic, unreal. Uh oh, there’s something very wrong with this robin, and with everything else in the world.
My feelings of bad weirdness might be triggered by something I encounter while wandering around Hoboken, like a raggedy man screaming at a ghost. But the feelings really surge when I’m reading about the latest eruption of demonic violence or the cruel antics of people who possess great power.
At these moments, I suspect Lynch is correct. Reality is grotesque, creepy, horrifying--weird in a bad way. We’re inside the ear.
Further Reading:
The Election and the Problem of Evil
Costa Rica and the Problem of Beauty