david lynch

A Damn Fine Espresso: November 2025

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Over the year, we’ve dedicated a number of episodes to the sadly departed David Lynch, his films, and his iconic TV series Twin Peaks. For our November espresso, Alan and Sam return to 2017 and to the third season of Twin Peaks that Lynch and his collaborator Mark Frost sprung on the world 26 years after we first tasted that cherry pie. For Sam, this was the first time he watched these 18 episodes, while for Alan it was an opportunity to revisit the entire series in one go. What are their thoughts on one of David Lynch’s last great works? How does it feel to return to Twin Peaks, Washington, the site of Laura Palmer’s murder, the focus of supernatural and surreal goings-on, after our loss of the man himself?

For more Lynch listening, don’t forget to check out these podcast episodes and posts:

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: September 2025

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Wow, Bob, wow: Twin Peaks forms part of the DNA of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – if our name and logo didn’t already make that obvious. And yet, some of us have come very late to David Lynch‘s seminal series: while Sam had seen a couple of episodes, he had never watched the entire (original) series when we recorded the first episode of our Lost Summer on the late, great director and purveyor of surreal unease. So, what better opportunity than this summer (which included espresso episodes on Wild at Heart and Lost Highway) to remedy this over some cherry pie and damn fine coffee? Join Sam and Matt in the Red Room as they talk about Twin Peaks and how it holds up for someone who, for decades has heard about the series but not watched it. (You’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve adjusted the audio so that no one is speaking backwards.)

And if you’re in a Twin Peaks mood after listening to our September espresso, you may want to check out our fourth ever podcast episode, in which O.G. baristas Mege and Matt talk about the fantastic, and harrowing, Twin Peaks episode “Lonely Souls”.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: August 2025

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Our Lost Summer continues, quite fittingly, with another David Lynch film: in our August espresso, Alan and Sam talk about Lynch’s most ’90s nightmare, Lost Highway, in which murder, mobsters, Mystery Men, Patricia Arquette (with black hair) and Patricia Arquette (with blond hair) abound. Add music by Nine Inch Nails, the Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein, plus a killer track by David Bowie, and you have a David Lynch film that, more than all his other work, very much is marked by the decade it was made, so much so that at times it feels like a feature-length video shown on MTV’s Alternative Nation. But does this make Lost Highway dated, or does this neo-Hitchcockian slice of jealousy and paranoia hold up in 2025? There’s only one way to find out: listen to us, because, as a matter of fact, we’re at your home right now.

For more Lost Summer listening about David Lynch, make sure to check out our June episode (dedicated to Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Drive) and the July espresso (on Wild at Heart).

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: From the wrong side of the tracks

MattLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Straight from Little Rock, this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees has Julie talk about what she had instead of Disney princesses: Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei and Jane Russell’s Dorothy.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: July 2025

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Our Lost Summer started with an episode in honour of David Lynch, the artist and director who’s been an inspiration to us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture. After last month’s espresso episode, in which Sam and Matt talked about the extended deleted scenes that were released for Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, we’re now continuing our tribute to the man with a stealth Second Chances episode: Alan, a big fan of Lynch, has nonetheless bounced off the director’s Wild at Heart (1990), while Sam has been a fan from the beginning, so the two of them have revisited the film. Has time changed Alan’s assessment? Have Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and a fantastic supporting cast ranging from Diane Ladd and Willem Dafoe to Harry Dean Stanton and a bunch of familiar faces from Twin Peaks, WA won him over – or, indeed, Sam’s enthusiasm for this pulpy pop thriller that nods more than just once or twice in the direction of camp classic The Wizard of Oz?

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: June 2025

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Our recent podcast episode on David Lynch, marking the start of our 2025 series Lost Summer, prompted us to pick up where that episode left of: for two of the films we discussed earlier this month, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, there are extensive sets of deleted scenes that, if they had not ended up on the cutting room floor, would have made both films into something very different. Sam and Matt watched these scenes – 51 minutes for Blue Velvet, a whopping 91 minutes for Fire Walk With Me – and talk about these and the notion of deleted scenes in general. Would Fire Walk With Me have been a better film if it had included all that material about the town of Twin Peaks, as fans and critics had hoped for when it was released? What can deleted scenes say about the virtues of leaving some things out? How do fan edits, a practice which has become highly accomplished in many cases, figure into this, and into the question of which version of a film is the real deal?

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #93: Lost Summer – David Lynch

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

This month’s podcast kicks off our summer series for 2025: the Lost Summer is all about what we’ve lost – directors, actors, films – and what this means to us. We’re starting with one that is very close to our heart at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture: in January, David Lynch died at the age of 78, so we’re taking this opportunity to talk about some of the films of his that meant the most to us. Join Alan, Sam and Matt as they talk about neo-noir mystery Blue Velvet (1986), much-reviled prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and L.A. nightmare Mulholland Drive (2001). How did we discover Lynch’s work and these films in particular? What do they mean to us, and why? How do they fit into Lynch’s oeuvre? And what is the legacy that Lynch has left behind?

For more podcasts on David Lynch and Twin Peaks in particular, check out these classic episodes:

Continue reading →

Criterion Corner: The Elephant Man (#1051)

Matt1 Comment

Was The Elephant Man (1980), David Lynch’s follow-up to his first feature Eraserhead, my first Lynch? I’m not sure: it’s possible that I saw Twin Peaks first, at least the first half or so of the series, in a German dub, or perhaps I caught Blue Velvet on television late one night. It is even possible that I watched Eraserhead first and am repressing that traumatic memory. But The Elephant Man is often brought up as a good way to get started on Lynch: it tells a fairly straight-forward story, one that is based (albeit loosely) on the life of Joseph Merrick, a man suffering from severe deformities who lived in late 19th century London. You can see what would have drawn Lynch to the material, but the resulting film does not have the expressedly avant-garde edge of Eraserhead or of many of his later works. Aside from The Straight Story, it’s probably the film by Lynch that I would recommend first to people who haven’t seen anything else by him, unless I knew that they were into surrealist art.

But does that make The Elephant Man less Lynch, somehow?

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Fix your hearts or die

MattLeave a comment

Somehow, losing David Lynch hits harder, not only because of his art, which is often beautiful and disturbing in equal measure, but also because of who Lynch seems to have been: a kind, strange, generous soul, as an artist and as a human being. As anyone looking at our front page and at the name of our site will be able to tell: Lynch had an impact on us, and his absence will be felt.

We’ll dedicate most of this week’s trailer post to the weird, frightening, wonderful worlds of David Lynch, but first, let’s have a look at what we did this week.

Continue reading →

Into the night: Angelo Badalamenti (1937 – 2022)

Matt2 Comments

I fell for Twin Peaks before I’d even seen a single scene of the series. I was fifteen and we were visiting with my uncle in the UK. Twin Peaks had just come out, and I was curious, but my parents weren’t watching it, and I didn’t think of recording it at the time, probably because I didn’t have any VHS tapes of my own. Anyway, there I was at my uncle’s, it was getting dark, and I discovered this CD on a shelf. Foggy mountains, some trees, a road curving to the left, and a sign: Welcome to Twin Peaks. I asked whether I could listen to it, they gave me some headphones, and I plonked down on a bean bag next to the stereo system.

And the night enveloped me.

Continue reading →