Donald Trump’s America and the Visions of David Lynch | The New Yorker

Before his brief stint in the social-media shooting gallery this past week as an alleged Donald Trump supporter, David Lynch was more closely associated with a different Republican President: Ronald Reagan. The opening sequence of “Blue Velvet” (1986), the film that came to define Lynch in the popular imagination, is a heightened, slow-motion vision of idyllic, picket-fence America, complete with a friendly fireman and crossing guard. Its imagery almost exactly matches a Reagan campaign commercial from two years earlier, a soft-focus, feel-good montage that opens with the promise of a new dawn: “It’s morning again in America.” “There is sin and evil in this world,” Reagan declared, in one of his most famous speeches, and “Blue Velvet” emphatically concurs. In one of the film’s most quotable monologues, its wide-eyed hero, Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), wonders, “Why is there so much trouble in this world?”