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I apologize if I offended you, but if you "do this for a living" and can't appreciate Lynch... I have to seriously question your credibility.
You don't necessarily have to like his movies, but the fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today. His movies aren't anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial killers. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility and he's not interested judgments of characters. Rather, he's interested in those psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch's movies, usually wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet's Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and "the Well-Dressed Man." How Eraserhead's whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil yet how it's "poor" Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer.
Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e., people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but rather evil as an environment, a possibility, a force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants. In his movies, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported; they are possessed… a representation of evil potential that lurks within any mortal soul. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their most evil moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired... they have yielded themselves up to a darkness way bigger than any one person.
Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has extremely unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces have the potential to be everywhere, within anyone. Lynch's interpretation of evil moves and shifts, it pervades. Darkness is in everything, all the time; not ‘lurking below’ or ‘lying in wait’ or ‘hovering on the horizon': evil is here, right now... And so are Light, love, redemption (since these phenomena are also, in Lynch’s work, forces and spirits). In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in isolation from its opposite. It’s not just that evil is ‘implied by’ good or darkness by light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff, encoded in it. You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or even neo-Hegelian, but it’s also Lynchian, because what Lynch’s movies are all about is creating a narrative space where this idea can be worked out in its fullest detain or to its most uncomfortable consequences.
But then again,what do I know? I'm just a pretentious fan... you're the expert, right ?
