The Bright Future of American Art

In 2025, few care anymore that David Lynch didn't hate Donald Trump enough.

Here’s the spontaneous tribute to the late ultra-American (yet aesthetically European) director David Lynch that has emerged at the Bob’s Big Boy on Riverside Drive in Burbank, CA, where he’d have lunch everyday at 2:30 PM: one of Bob’s super-thick chocolate milkshakes and a cup of coffee. (Lynch was a caffeine aficionado as you could guess from Twin Peaks and the tributes from fans.)

It took me a long time to appreciate David Lynch, but that’s to my discredit, not his. Obviously, he was a great artist, merging European surrealism with American hyper-normality.

Lynch’s Bob’s was my favorite restaurant when I was a little boy in the 1960s because it seemed so futuristic.

I was totally into The Future after visiting the World’s Fair in New York in 1965. I can recall thinking at age seven that “1966” with its cool repeating sixes looked much more futuristic than old-fashioned “1965” and that my friend’s little sister was lucky to be born three more years into the future than I was.

I loved eating my Bob’s double-deck hamburger in the back seat of our Pontiac Catalina. At the far limit of my memory, I wonder whether the waitresses were on roller skates in the early 1960s. By the mid-1960s they definitely were not, but something says that earlier they were on roller skates. Or at least they should have been.

These days, the food at Bob’s isn’t that good by today’s standards, but the ambiance remains extraordinarily stable: Postwar Prosperity Euphoria. They still have a classic car show every Friday evening. I wrote in 2013:

The heart of Googie America might have been the stretch of the eastern San Fernando Valley between Lockheed Airport (now called the Bob Hope Burbank Airport) and the movie studios near the Hollywood Hills. Burbank would have been a fitting home for Disneyland (where the Googie Tomorrowland was the culmination of SoCal futurism). But Walt Disney, whose contributions to the 1964 World’s Fair inspired Iron Man 2, couldn’t find enough contiguous land near his studio.

Today we are constantly informed that the American Dream is about immigrants coming to America, but back then, it was about Americans, after years of sacrifice during the Depression and WWII, finally being able to afford to drive a new car to a new restaurant. When average people such as my mother and father (who, after a spell at a flying car company, worked at Lockheed for four decades) had some cash, they liked to go to the sweeping metal-and-glass Bob’s Big Boy drive-in on Riverside Drive in Burbank. Bob’s was just down the street from the hot-rod studio of George Barris, the King of the Kustomizers, who helped inspire Tom Wolfe’s literary breakthrough The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

While getting a Ph.D. at Yale, Wolfe had spent years hanging out with architecture students being indoctrinated in Yale’s dour Bauhaus purism. Wolfe’s 1963 visit to Southern California, with its flat class structure of skilled technicians who could afford to spend money pursuing their own techno fantasies, came as a liberation that ignited his titanic career in American letters.

Likewise, Lynch’s work frequently references that postwar golden age. His 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive (which begins a few miles south of the Bob’s) is nominally set in the present, but also often appears to be taking place in about 1959. He said of the 1950s:

"It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways ... there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork for a disastrous future."

Lynch’s dad, who worked for the US Department of Agriculture, moved the family around a lot. Lynch insisted upon a title card at the end of his movies describing himself as “An Eagle Scout from Missoula, Montana,” but he lived many other places as well. Strikingly, despite being really into bugs, he had no problem making friends at each new school.

He was that rarest of artists, the Weird Kid who was also the Popular Kid.

In 2018, Lynch expressed some open-minded agnostic optimism about Donald Trump, for which the Establishment came down upon him like a ton of bricks.

Yet, if even David Lynch, who had a reasonable claim to be America’s Greatest Living Artist, isn’t allowed to express any off-message sentiments, you know your culture is in trouble.

Fortunately, upon his death in 2025 at 78, the great post-11/5/2024 vibe shift has meant that Lynch has been acclaimed with universal affection, with practically nobody feeling it necessary to apologize that Lynch didn’t feel sufficiently hateful toward Trump before going on to praise him.

This may bode well for the future of American art.