Guest Post by Anonymous, ENTP

Dominant Introverted Feeling (Fi): Lynch talks a lot about his personal vision when making movies and he stands by this vision, if a film cannot be made in the way he wants it then he will leave production. Lynch was given the chance to direct the Return of the Jedi by George Lucas but turned it down as he said that the film would more Lucas’ vision than his own. Lynch seems to understand his emotions well because he is usually able to talk about feelings he has experienced as examples to audiences during question time. He also made the comic series The Angriest Dog in the World at a time when he was personally feeling great anger. Lynch enjoyed painting and arts when in school and once considered it as a career choice before turning to films. Lynch never tells the meaning of his films as he wants people to have their own interpretation of it [FiNe]. David Lynch’s characters are usually individualistic in most ways as they all have their own quirks and are typically idiosyncratic to the viewers making them not relatable on a universal level and this makes his films hard to watch for some.

Auxiliary Extroverted Intuition (Ne): David Lynch is symbolic, Surreal and just disturbing with his films. The films are almost never told in any linear order and nothing is what it seems, this can be seen in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire which all work on a dream logic. Lynch has always described an idea as something that doesn’t come as a whole but in fragments, where one part will come and you take that fragment, write it down and save it until the next fragment comes and it eventually starts to catch more ideas like bait on a hook and it keeps growing and then you will have a script, or a painting. Lynch travelled a lot with his family as a youth, he originally joined Boy Scouts thinking he could quit it but he ended up achieving the rank of Eagle Scout. He had multiple jobs when he was young and he said that he was okay with getting fired from a job because it led to so many possibilities of what he could do next. When working on a film lynch tries his hand at everything and will work on more than one aspect of the film [NeTe] such as sound editing, art etc. He also loves all kinds of cinema as he has worked on multiple genres of film and his humour consists greatly of non-sequiturs as seen in his comics and Internet series.

Tertiary Introverted Sensing (Si): Like fellow INFP Neil Gaiman, Lynch is almost always dressed the same way in every picture with the same hairstyle as well. Lynch refers a lot to his past, most of his movies take place in rural USA cities like the one he was born in, and he is good at details when it comes to filming. He also at lunch at Bob’s Big Boys for lunch almost every day for eight years in a row. His films usually contain a lot of sensory elements like strobe effects or the “bad part of town” to disturb viewers. He also reuses the same actors in a lot of his films.

Inferior Extroverted Thinking (Te): Lynch is a very hands-on director as he takes control of most of the aspects of making a film. He can be blunt and occasionally rude, which is like his dialogue where it can be very direct on the surface( Eraserhead was only 20 pages of screenplay when he wrote it). Lynch can occasionally have budgeting issues with his films that he can work on and can usually keep a schedule, with that said he didn’t do well academically as a kid. He created his own animated show almost on his own

Author’s Note: I had a bit of trouble deciding if David Lynch was Ni or Ne because lynch talks a lot about transcendental meditation which felt more like a Ni process but I decide that was more Fi in the that he was using it to deal with emotions. The thing that hit me to decide Ne was watching Dumbland, The Rabbits and reading The Angriest Dog in the World these are all non sequitur humor and random unsolved plot lines that make little sense, this just screamed Ne to me