Lynch and Bacon:

the Parallels of Sensation

article by Sophie Latch

David Lynch,

Lost Highway,

1997.

Watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), I was viscerally reminded of the paintings of Francis Bacon.

It was just not the uncooperative bodies or surreal landscapes that reminded me

of a Baconian work, but the sensation Lynch had manufactured.

Low vibrations within the soundscape stirred up

a surreal, unsettling atmosphere.

I felt as if contained within a Bacon painting.

Later, a quick internet search vindicated me;

Lynch often mentioned he was heavily inspired by Bacon. However, rather than merely mimicking Bacon’s work, Lynch is able to translate a Baconian sensation across media, demonstrating the affective power of film and its ability to grant new resonance to artistic aura.

David Lynch (1946-2025), dubbed “Hollywood’s reigning eccentric,”¹

began as a painter and later became a poet,

writer, musician and screenwriter.

¹ Greg Hainge, “Weird or Loopy? Specular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation,” in The Cinema of David Lynch. American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (Wallflower Press, 2023), 136.

His first feature film, Eraserhead (1977), was a surrealist horror. His uncanny films appear to lack any conventions that may provide orientation or ease.²

Similarly lacking apparent organisation is Francis Bacon’s (1909/1992) reconstructed studio installation at Hugh Lane Gallery. Located in Dublin, his place of birth, the studio is a chaotic yet curated mess, perhaps an immediate insight into his style.

The walls became his palette, with colour mixtures decorating the walls. Dozens of cut out canvases, magazines, photographs and books overwhelmed the space.

² David Lynch and Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch (Faber, 2005), x.

Bacon’s unsettling paintings contain abstract and disturbed figures.

Francis Bacon,

Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X,

1953, Oil on canvas, 153 x 118 cm,

Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines.

One such disturbed figure was Pope Innocent X.

Bacon was infatuated with reinventing Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, painting more than twenty-five variations of this work over a decade, “trac[ing] a sort of stop-action collapse of [an] enthroned protagonist.” ³

Immediately, a parallel can be drawn to Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), where one possible interpretation sees the collapse of the protagonist, as they attempt to rationalise a horrible crime they have committed.

³ Dennis Farr, Michael Peppiatt and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon: a retrospective (Harry N. Abrams in association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 1999), 10.

David Lynch,

Lost Highway,

1997.

The audience views this rationalisation through a dream-like de-personalisation, where an entirely new protagonist is followed through their own journey separate from anything we had witnessed so far.

David Lynch,

Lost Highway,

1997.

Whilst we can draw parallels between the two artists in these works, I argue Lynch’s translation of Bacon through film is not only limited

to themes, but a sensation.

Parallel

Sensations

Conceptualising sensation in art is no simple task. Gilles Deleuze does so however, through an analysis of Bacon’s works, describing “sensation” as transmitting a raw effect to the viewer, acting upon the nervous system.⁴

Bacon was acutely aware of creating a sensation in his works, and spoke of his work

“captur[ing] the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses.”⁵

⁴ Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 43.

⁵ “Homage to Bacon,” Tate, January 9 2008, https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-14-autumn-2008/homage-bacon.

Whilst an immobile, relatively flat object, the claustrophobia of Bacon’s paintings is compelling.

Toeing the line between representational and abstraction with distorted figures in liminal settings, Bacon renders the viewer confused on the narrative occurring.

Francis Bacon,

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,

1944, Oil paint on 3 boards, each 1162 x 960 x 80 mm,

Tate.

His lack of tonal variation in the background results in indistinct planes, contributing to the claustrophobic sensation.

This is demonstrated in the painting

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), with the vibrant burnt orange backgrounds. The contorted, seemingly anthropomorphic figures, are disturbing. The scene is unnatural, let alone confusing, contributing to an uneasiness when trying to interpret Bacon’s work.

Lynch once commented on the sensations created by an almost all-black painting, “I’m looking at this figure in the painting, and I hear a little wind, and see a little movement. And I had a wish that the painting would really be able to move.”⁶

Lynch always had the intent to make paintings move, and Bacon captured movement in his works.

This compelling parallel can offer an insight into the similar effective response evoked from both artists. Scholar Greg Hainge emphasises Lynch’s art foundations and how they contribute to his ability to manufacture a sensation, describing Lynch’s filmmaking style as using techniques “reserved for painting.”⁷

Furthermore, through this unique usage he could “break conventional narrative so as to bypass the intellect and reach the viewer on an effective, sensational level.”⁸

⁶ David Lynch and Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch (Faber, 2005), 37.

⁷ Greg Hainge, “Weird or Loopy? Specular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation,” in The Cinema of David Lynch. American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (Wallflower Press, 2023), 140.

⁸ Greg Hainge, “Weird or Loopy? Specular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation,” in The Cinema of David Lynch. American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (Wallflower Press, 2023), 140.

David Lynch,

Inland Empire,

2006.

Lynch, like Bacon, used distortion and spatial fear in manufacturing a sensation.

His film Inland Empire (2006) presents exaggerated figures, deformed faces, and impossible spaces.⁹

However, imagery alone is not just how Lynch manufactures

a sensation akin to Bacon’s, thus highlighting

the different power of film.

⁹ Allister Mactaggart, The film paintings of David Lynch: challenging film theory (Intellect, 2010), 151.

One of Lynch’s contributing tools is linking sound to story. Whether deep repetitive tones, droning music, whirring, echoes, or complete silence, sound is a hallmark of Lynch.

Volume is also a crucial tool; car crashes and bangs are loud and jarring. These disturbances alert you that something is not quite right amidst the landscape. Lynch manipulates sound to tell us how to feel, even when a setting presents seemingly innocuous,

or someone seems innocent.

Lynch has harnessed and fabricated a Baconian sensation in his work by creating an untrustworthy atmosphere through soundscape and visual disturbance.

Francis Bacon,

Two Figures,

1953, Oil on canvas,

152.5 x 116.5 cm,

Private Collection.

This translation of a sensation across media indicates how artistic aura continues to be not only preserved with incoming technologies, but heightened.

Transmedial Translations

and Aura

This translation of a sensation raises the concept of transmedia – exploring something, like a narrative or experience, across different forms of media.

Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) terms

“aura” as the uniqueness of an artwork, and “its presence in time and space.”¹⁰

Benjamin’s work was published when means of mechanical reproduction, such as photography and film, were emerging practices. He argued that the “aura” of art is de-valued through such mediums. Whilst Benjamin’s view is not widely agreed upon in the twenty-first century, it does raise the question of whether aura survives in film.

Daniel Worden suggests that “aura decays in modernity, yet transmedia production recuperates and refashions auratic art.” ¹¹

¹⁰ Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Harvard UP, 2008), 22.

¹¹ Daniel Worden, “The Work of Art in the Age of Transmedia Production (With Regards to Walter Benjamin),” Angelaki : Journal of Theoretical Humanities 28, no. 5 (2023): 59, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2243159.

Scholar Jay David Bolter also explores how digital media refashions other media, and how mediums cannot exist in isolation – that is, with no reference to other media. Rather than echoing Worden’s critique, I want to take this concept of aura and apply it to the context of transmedia. Lynch’s ability to fabricate a sensation through film akin to Bacon’s paintings suggests a collapse of medial boundaries.

Such similar affective experience gained from these different medias, Bacon’s paintings and Lynch’s films, demonstrates how reproductive media such as film refashions artistic aura, allowing it to achieve new resonance.

Lynch not only harnesses a Baconian sensation in his films, but builds on it, often using tools unique to film including soundscapes. Lynch, referencing his background as a painter, is able to reach the audience on a sensational level, akin to Bacon’s paintings.

Film has long been inspired by mediums which are considered traditional, such

as painting.

Yet, this connection between artists was something more than that.

Watching Lynch’s films evoked a sensation in me that

I had not experienced before.

I did not simply watch a Bacon painting unfold on the screen, I felt it.

References:

10. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn. Harvard UP, 2008.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: understanding new media. MIT Press, 1999.

4. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

3. Farr, Dennis., Michael Peppiatt., and Sally Yard. Francis Bacon: a retrospective. Harry N. Abrams in association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 1999.

1. 8. 7. Hainge, Greg. “Weird or Loopy? Specular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation.” In The Cinema of David Lynch. American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, edited by Erica Sheen and Annette Davison. Wallflower Press, 2023.

2. 6. Lynch, David., and Chris Rodley. Lynch on Lynch. Rev. ed. Faber, 2005.

Lynch, David, director. Lost Highway. October Films, 1997, Stan.

Lynch, David, director. Inland Empire. StudioCanal, 2006.

9. Mactaggart, Allister. The film paintings of David Lynch: challenging film theory. Intellect, 2010.

Powell, Jeremy. “David Lynch, Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze: The Cinematic Diagram and the Hall of Time.” Discourse 36, no. 3 (2014): 309–339.https://doi.org/10.13110/discourse.36.3.0309.

5. Tate. “Homage to Bacon.” January 9, 2008.https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-14-autumn-2008/homage-bacon

11. Worden, Daniel. “The Work of Art in the Age of Transmedia Production (With Regards to Walter Benjamin).” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 28, no. 5 (2023):56–77.https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2243159.

Lynch and Bacon:

the Parallels of Sensation

article by Sophie Latch

Watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), I was viscerally reminded of the paintings of Francis Bacon.

It was just not the uncooperative bodies or surreal landscapes that reminded me

of a Baconian work, but the sensation Lynch had manufactured.

Low vibrations within the soundscape stirred up

a surreal, unsettling atmosphere.

I felt as if contained within a Bacon painting.

Later, a quick internet search vindicated me;

Lynch often mentioned he was heavily inspired by Bacon. However, rather than merely mimicking Bacon’s work, Lynch is able to translate a Baconian sensation across media, demonstrating the affective power of film and its ability to grant new resonance to artistic aura.

David Lynch (1946-2025), dubbed “Hollywood’s reigning eccentric,”¹

began as a painter and later became a poet,

writer, musician and screenwriter.

His first feature film, Eraserhead (1977), was a surrealist horror. His uncanny films appear to lack any conventions that may provide orientation or ease.²

Similarly lacking apparent organisation is Francis Bacon’s (1909/1992) reconstructed studio installation at Hugh Lane Gallery. Located in Dublin, his place of birth, the studio is a chaotic yet curated mess, perhaps an immediate insight into his style.

The walls became his palette, with colour mixtures decorating the walls. Dozens of cut out canvases, magazines, photographs and books overwhelmed the space.

Bacon’s unsettling paintings contain abstract and disturbed figures.

One such disturbed figure was Pope Innocent X.

Bacon was infatuated with reinventing Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, painting more than twenty-five variations of this work over a decade, “trac[ing] a sort of stop-action collapse of [an] enthroned protagonist.” ³

Immediately, a parallel can be drawn to Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), where one possible interpretation sees the collapse of the protagonist, as they attempt to rationalise a horrible crime they have committed.

The audience views this rationalisation through a dream-like de-personalisation, where an entirely new protagonist is followed through their own journey separate from anything we had witnessed so far.

Whilst we can draw parallels between the two artists in these works, I argue Lynch’s translation of Bacon through film is not only limited

to themes, but a sensation.

Parallel

Sensations

Conceptualising sensation in art is no simple task. Gilles Deleuze does so however, through an analysis of Bacon’s works, describing “sensation” as transmitting a raw effect to the viewer, acting upon the nervous system.⁴

Bacon was acutely aware of creating a sensation in his works, and spoke of his work

“captur[ing] the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses.”⁵

Whilst an immobile, relatively flat object, the claustrophobia of Bacon’s paintings is compelling.

Toeing the line between representational and abstraction with distorted figures in liminal settings, Bacon renders the viewer confused on the narrative occurring.

His lack of tonal variation in the background results in indistinct planes, contributing to the claustrophobic sensation.

This is demonstrated in the painting

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), with the vibrant burnt orange backgrounds. The contorted, seemingly anthropomorphic figures, are disturbing. The scene is unnatural, let alone confusing, contributing to an uneasiness when trying to interpret Bacon’s work.

Lynch once commented on the sensations created by an almost all-black painting, “I’m looking at this figure in the painting, and I hear a little wind, and see a little movement. And I had a wish that the painting would really be able to move.”⁶

Lynch always had the intent to make paintings move, and Bacon captured movement in his works.

Furthermore, through this unique usage he could “break conventional narrative so as to bypass the intellect and reach the viewer on an effective, sensational level.”⁸

Lynch, like Bacon, used distortion and spatial fear in manufacturing a sensation.

His film Inland Empire (2006) presents exaggerated figures, deformed faces, and impossible spaces.⁹

However, imagery alone is not just how Lynch manufactures

a sensation akin to Bacon’s, thus highlighting

the different power of film.

One of Lynch’s contributing tools is linking sound to story. Whether deep repetitive tones, droning music, whirring, echoes, or complete silence, sound is a hallmark of Lynch.

Volume is also a crucial tool; car crashes and bangs are loud and jarring. These disturbances alert you that something is not quite right amidst the landscape. Lynch manipulates sound to tell us how to feel, even when a setting presents seemingly innocuous,

or someone seems innocent.

Lynch has harnessed and fabricated a Baconian sensation in his work by creating an untrustworthy atmosphere through soundscape and visual disturbance.

This translation of a sensation across media indicates how artistic aura continues to be not only preserved with incoming technologies, but heightened.

Transmedial Translations

and Aura

This translation of a sensation raises the concept of transmedia – exploring something, like a narrative or experience, across different forms of media.

Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) terms

“aura” as the uniqueness of an artwork, and “its presence in time and space.”10

Daniel Worden suggests that “aura decays in modernity, yet transmedia production recuperates and refashions auratic art.” ¹¹

¹¹ Daniel Worden, “The Work of Art in the Age of Transmedia Production (With Regards to Walter Benjamin),” Angelaki : Journal of Theoretical Humanities 28, no. 5 (2023): 59, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2243159.

Such similar affective experience gained from these different medias, Bacon’s paintings and Lynch’s films, demonstrates how reproductive media such as film refashions artistic aura, allowing it to achieve new resonance.

Lynch not only harnesses a Baconian sensation in his films, but builds on it, often using tools unique to film including soundscapes. Lynch, referencing his background as a painter, is able to reach the audience on a sensational level, akin to Bacon’s paintings.

Film has long been inspired by mediums which are considered traditional, such

as painting.

Yet, this connection between artists was something more than that.

Watching Lynch’s films evoked a sensation in me that

I had not experienced before.

I did not simply watch a Bacon painting unfold on the screen, I felt it.

References:

“aura” as the uniqueness of an artwork, and “its presence in time and space.”¹⁰

¹¹ Daniel Worden, “The Work of Art in the Age of Transmedia Production (With Regards to Walter Benjamin),” Angelaki : Journal of Theoretical Humanities 28, no. 5 (2023): 59, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2243159.