Nothing Is as It Should Be: Estrangement, Threshold-Crossings, and Cosmic Struggle in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Lost Highway

Abstract

This article examines estrangement as a structuring existential and aesthetic principle in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997). Through close, plot-attentive readings intended to remain accessible to readers unfamiliar with Lynch, it argues that the films stage three interlocking dynamics: becoming a stranger to oneself, the fracturing of the ‘ground’ of ordinary existence, and life as a cosmic struggle in which human agency is partial and contested. Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be provides the main theological–philosophical lens, clarifying how anxiety, non-being and courage shape scenes of desire, violence and transformation. Film-theoretical work on thresholds and cinematic irony is used to show how rooms, corridors, drapes and media devices – especially the camera and surveillance images – destabilise boundaries between waking and dreaming, private and public, and memory and record. The conclusion reads Lynch’s estrangement as cultural critique: not a rejection of reason or religion, but a challenge to modernity’s narrowed rationalities and fantasies of control.