In 1976, as the country commemorated its bicentennial, an aging Norman Rockwell, then at the tail end of his career as America’s preeminent illustrator, painted his last magazine cover, Liberty Bell (Celebration). It was a tender—and notably low-key—tribute to national unity that doubled as a capstone for his body of work. For a decades-long stretch in the mid-20th century, the illustrator’s memorable images of smiling families and gentle, small-town interactions had filled the pages of national magazines, serving up a portrait of American life that was upbeat, idealistic, and reassuring. It’s a vision that has felt far away amid this year’s celebrations, once again, of the nation’s birthday.But the Rockwellian vision of America has felt distant for a long while. That distance is why we have songs such as Lana Del Rey’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell.” It’s why the phrase like a Rockwell painting is often deployed, not simply as a descriptive but as an implicit critique of naive civic optimism. And it’s why Rockwell has served as enduring grist for artists who, although they have been influenced by his visual iconography, have at the same time been compelled to give voice to some of the more disturbing impulses that have shaped the American psyche.No one did this more compellingly than David Lynch, the director who, over and over, turned Rockwell’s depiction of American innocence on its head. Lynch liked to recount in interviews a comment that a sound mixer on one of his films had once made to him: that his work was “like Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch.” The filmmaker wanted to take Rockwell’s attractive but brittle surfaces, break them open, and plunge us into something deeper and darker. Understanding Lynch, in other words, is a way of understanding Rockwell. In particular, it’s a way of understanding one of the tragic effects of Rockwell’s influential vision: It’s so relentlessly benign and so morally pristine that it’s impossible to live up to. It’s an albatross slung over America’s shoulders.Early in Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive, which turns 25 this year, is a scene that doubles as one of Lynch’s many loving homages to Rockwell. The bright-faced, wide-eyed Betty (played by Naomi Watts) has arrived in Los Angeles, where she wants to become a movie star. On the flight over, she befriended an older couple, who walk with her through the airport.“Well, it’s time to say goodbye, Betty,” the old lady says. “It’s been so nice traveling with you.”“Thank you, Irene. I’m so excited and nervous. It was so good to have you to talk to.”“Remember, I’ll be watching for you on the big screen.”“Okay, Irene. Won’t that be the day!”They part, whereupon a look of horror cavorts across Betty’s face: Her bags are no longer at her feet!“My bags!” she says aloud. But her panic lasts only a moment. The Rockwellian universe is briskly restored: A friendly cab driver is putting her luggage in the trunk of his taxi. “Where to?” he asks.Only now, having toyed with us, does Lynch signal that everything we have just witnessed—the “kindness, comedy, and forgiving tristesse” that the critic Dave Hickey rightly saw as a hallmark of Rockwell’s sensibility—has been subject to a menacing undertow. Lynch returns us to the old couple, now leaving the airport inside a black limo. Strapped snugly into their seats, they’re reminiscent of overgrown children; their old heads swivel back and forth in slow motion like laughing clowns’, and their twinkling smiles suggest something just short of psychopathy.Universal Studios / YouTubeTheir grins are so unkillable, in fact, that what they most powerfully recall to me are the faces that crowd around the Thanksgiving table in one of Rockwell’s most famous images: Freedom From Want. This is one of four paintings he made from 1942 to 1943 to illustrate the “Four Freedoms” laid out by Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941, when he provided the moral framework for America’s involvement in World War II. (The other three are Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, and Freedom From Fear.) If you look closely at Freedom From Want, which is on permanent display at the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, you see first how utterly brilliant Rockwell was.Perhaps most striking is how monochromatic large parts of the painting are. There’s the opaque white tablecloth, a white apron, and translucent white curtains—but within all of that white is an astonishing level of variety. The round plates are glossy. The creased tablecloth is matte. A silver tureen is so shiny that it gleams white. The transparent water glasses cast silvery reflections with white highlights. And those curtains are gauzily radiant. It’s a bravura display.Is it also somewhat stiff and sepulchral? It is! And this could kill the whole painting, except that against this almost fanatically pure still life, Rockwell—following the same principle of contrasts at the heart of Lynch’s aesthetic—sets the sparkling, animated choreography of the family. Cut off from their bodies by the picture’s vertical edges, their love-flushed heads lean in, drawn together by high spirits, humor, and the same intergenerational respect Lynch wanted us to feel between Betty and Irene in Mulholland Drive. Rockwell studied faces closely, including his own in the mirror. (That’s him smiling out of the painting’s lower right corner, like Lynch popping up as a hard-of-hearing FBI chief on Twin Peaks.) Good illustrators use facial expressions to convey action and consequence. Rockwell always sought maximum expression. Here, your gaze ping-pongs back and forth across the table, involuntarily weaving a lacy web of loving rapport.Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. (CBS Photo Archive / Getty)Still, the intensity of their expressions starts to feel uncanny. The teenage boy at the far end of the table has a smile so impeccably amiable that you idly wonder whether he might ever have lost his temper. At which point the pigtailed girl next to him, who stares straight at the viewer, starts to convey something latently demonic. Next to her, you notice with a start, is a wrinkled and waxy, almost clawlike hand, which presumably belongs to the venerable paterfamilias who stands at the head of the table, but which is cut off from his body by the platter carrying the turkey.If it’s easy to imagine the whole scene as a movie, slowed down, subtly sinister—like the scene with the grinning retirees in Mulholland Drive—that’s because Lynch’s work so effectively gives the lie to Rockwell’s.[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]In the good-humored and reassuringly rational world that Rockwell constructed, there was no such thing as evil. His portraits of everyday life included pratfalls, minor moral lapses, and some genuine pain, but the arc of history was always bending the right way. In its fundamental integrity, Rockwellian America was as immaculate and charismatic as that Thanksgiving table.What is clear today is that the strain, so many decades on, of trying to make America conform to Rockwell’s softly arcadian image is too great. It’s a burden the nation cannot collectively handle and probably never could—which is why it continually demands forms of cultural release. These, over the years, have come in the form of not just Lynch’s creations but also novels such as Portnoy’s Complaint and American Psycho, and films such as Apocalypse Now. All are explosions of irrationality designed to release us from the whole Rockwellian racket and to renew our connection to darker truths.It’s not that Lynch’s take on America was any more real than Rockwell’s. It’s that his films expressed the absurdity of trying to make actual life match the illustrator’s gorgeous yet finally intolerable image of pleasantness and perfectibility. Since Rockwell’s heyday, this image has loomed over America like an impossibly kind, wise, and accomplished parent—and like a silent rebuke.On your way to the Norman Rockwell Museum, you may pass through the nearby town of Stockbridge, where Rockwell lived for a quarter century. He lovingly rendered its Main Street in a Christmas Eve scene painted in 1967, a year that also saw the Summer of Love, the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and another 100,000 American troops sent to Vietnam. Fifty years ago, during the nation’s bicentennial celebrations (and two years before Rockwell died), Stockbridge staged a parade of floats with tableaux inspired by the illustrator. The procession, in which 2,000 people participated, was attended by more than 10,000. No other American artist has ever received such a tribute.The most extraordinary room at the Rockwell museum is always the basement gallery, which is festooned with the artist’s Saturday Evening Post covers—more than 300 of them. Rockwell first walked into the offices of the mass-circulation weekly in 1916, carrying a portfolio of his artwork. His timing was excellent: This was near the beginning of a great era in illustration, when advances in printing technology transformed large-scale color illustration into an essential aspect of communication. His talent was quickly rewarded. Within four years, Rockwell had become the Post’s leading illustrator. By 1925, he was known around the nation, and before the Depression was over, he had been all but canonized—America’s leading “Painter-Patriot,” as his biographer Deborah Solomon wrote, its paragon of picture-making.Rockwell achieved his status by painting small-town America. “I do ordinary people in everyday situations, and that’s about all I do,” he said in his 1960 memoir, My Adventures as an Illustrator. He was so successful, and so much better known than just about any other American artist, that people had great sport comparing him with his avant-garde peers in the art world. (This reputation gave rise to some amusing images: Rockwell’s The Connoisseur, from 1962, for instance, shows a portly, fastidious-looking man in a light-gray suit standing in front of a parti-color splatter painting in the manner of Jackson Pollock. When he saw The Connoisseur, Willem de Kooning, Pollock’s friend and rival, quipped that the illustrator had done it better than Pollock.)Norman Rockwell, No Swimming, 1921. Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, June 4, 1921. (Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust)But Rockwell never pretended to be other than he was: an artist paid to make images in service to stories. Content to be called an illustrator, he was nevertheless unsure about the difference between what he did and fine art. His confusion was legitimate. Illustration, after all, is not inherently better or worse than any other style of art. Rembrandt was, to a large extent, an illustrator, a visual artist involved in the challenge of dramatizing Biblical stories; so was Winslow Homer, and not just in his magazine work. Narrative art is difficult for the obvious reason that it’s hard to show cause and effect (the core engine of narrative) with a single image frozen in time. The illustrator’s art lies in implying both cause and effect, so that a story—with its conventional, if artificial, movement from obscured buildup to crystalline consequence—unfolds in the viewer’s mind even as the image remains static. At this, Rockwell was brilliant.Still, professional illustrators are usually beholden to the directives of those who publish their work. In Rockwell’s case, this meant 47 years following the dictates of the Post, a magazine that sold 2 million copies a week and was avidly read by many more people. For decades, it also had an abhorrent policy (against which Rockwell chafed more and more until he finally severed ties with the magazine) of not depicting Black people except in subservient roles. After he left, Rockwell felt freer to address civil-rights-era issues, especially desegregation, which he did in such celebrated paintings as New Kids in the Neighborhood and The Problem We All Live With, his depiction, for Look magazine, of Ruby Bridges being escorted by federal marshals to her previously all-white school.To see the Post covers gathered together is to discern a cumulative, if highly prejudicial, portrait of America spanning more than four decades. Was it a portrait that helped America understand itself? Despite its cheesiness, and notwithstanding the Post’s appalling racism, I think it did—not just because Rockwell was so good at what he did but also because he was an artist in whom humor, grace, and loving appreciation easily commingled. These attributes were tethered, moreover, to a larger civic-mindedness. His best paintings are not only ingeniously constructed and brilliantly colored—they’re also richly humane. Stories are connected to our curiosity about how the world works, and for Rockwell, this curiosity was rooted in everyday life.“The commonplaces of America are to me the richest subjects in art,” he wrote in 1936. “Boys batting flies on vacant lots; little girls playing jacks on the front steps; old men plodding home at twilight, umbrellas in hand—all of these things arouse feeling in me. Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to become curious and appreciative.”Rockwell’s portrait of life in America is certainly kitsch. (Kitsch, Milan Kundera wrote, is “the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word”; it “excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”) Still, his vision has had an enduring afterlife. Inevitably, its narrative potency—in particular its appeal to nostalgia—has been exploited across the political sphere.Home for Christmas, 1967. Illustration for McCall’s, December 1967. (Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust)A Forbes columnist writing in 2012, more than three decades after the illustrator’s death, described the GOP primaries that year as “a process by which the candidate who demonstrates the most willingness to bring back Norman Rockwell’s America wins.” In 2020, shortly after he was elected, President Biden posted on Instagram a Hollywood ad agency’s reimagining of Rockwell’s United Nations mosaic, The Golden Rule, populated (in both the original and the adaptation) by a diverse group of Americans. And last year, President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security posted—without permission, prompting uproar—several of Rockwell’s paintings (including Salute the Flag and Working On the Statue of Liberty) to its social-media account.But it is not just this country’s politicians who are in Rockwell’s thrall. The painter’s affable pictorial rhetoric has cast a spell over holiday celebrations, modes of patriotic display, civic relations, even family relations. He was such a powerful image-maker that he created prototypes—ideals, really—of how life ought to be. And his work leaves a lingering sense that, if you want to be a happy American, you must (consciously or otherwise) reenact Rockwellian rituals.Rockwell in his studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, October 21, 1970 (Edmund Eckstein / Getty)What Rockwell visualized was, of course, suffocatingly narrow. The critic Robert Hughes once called it “a dream world of small-town America.” In this America, Hughes wrote, “kids did not snort angel dust and get one another pregnant; they stole apples and swam in forbidden water holes but said grace before meals. All soldiers were nice boys from next door; all politicians were benevolent or harmlessly bumbling.”Big cities were subject to the roiling forces of unchecked capitalism and the blights of anonymity, rootlessness, and exploitation. Small towns, in Rockwell’s view, provided antidotes to all this. (He died well before the peak of deindustrialization and the first wave of the opioid epidemic.) They offered daily connection, neighborly interdependence, and, always, the lubricant of good humor (qualities that oiled Lynch’s twisted soap opera, Twin Peaks, too).[Read: How Norman Rockwell captured the inner life of a nation]To say that Rockwell’s America never existed is not to say that Rockwellian virtues do not exist; they do, all around us, every day. It’s only to acknowledge that the starched-white fiction these virtues cumulatively illustrate is by now so stained and sullied that just trying to keep up the pretense can trigger a kind of collective hysteria.The psychic pressure of trying to live up to an impossible ideal deeply interested Lynch. It produced his bifurcated visions of Rockwellian naivete and raw malevolence. In Rockwell, a diner is a place where a policeman can buy a runaway boy a milkshake before taking him home to his parents. In Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Winkie’s Diner is where a tormenting nightmare becomes atrociously real.The night after I returned from Stockbridge, I rewatched Lynch’s Wild at Heart, his bizarre, hilarious, and very disturbing spin on Bonnie and Clyde. A lot of the action takes place in Big Tuna, a kind of anti-Stockbridge in the Texas badlands where evil thrives. The rusty, fish-shaped sign on the edge of town has been defaced with an expletive.The film’s main characters, Sailor and Lula (Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern), are deliberately cartoonlike, avatars of innocence transplanted to a context so malignant that it eats away at their mutual infatuation. When Lula picks up Sailor from prison, she brings him his favorite snakeskin jacket. “Did I ever tell you that this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom?” he declares, like a third-grader reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.“About 50,000 times!” answers Lula, with no hint of a rebuke, only adoration. But that Rockwellian earnestness is no match for a setting corrupted by a hit man, a depraved mother, and the sniggering malevolence of Willem Dafoe. When Sailor confesses to having once worked for the man who murdered her father, Lula becomes pensive: “It’s just shocking,” she says, “when things aren’t the way you thought they were.”Rockwell expressed a similar sentiment before he died. It had been his idea to paint the Four Freedoms. He first took the proposal to the United States Office of War Information, where it was rejected, but after the paintings were published in the Post and received a huge response (60,000 letters were sent in by readers), the OWI reversed course and printed 2.5 million posters of the paintings, which the agency used to sell war bonds.In 1977, near the end of his life, Rockwell said: “I really believed that the war against Hitler would bring the Four Freedoms to everyone. But I couldn’t paint that today. I just don’t believe it. I was doing this best-possible-world, Santa-down-the-chimney, lovely-kids-adoring-their-kindly-grandpa sort of thing. And I liked it, but now I’m sick of it.”Lynch saw and loved Rockwell’s America—really loved it, as a child loves their parents—but something compelled him to break its surface and turn it violently inside out. This was a psychic and an artistic reaction, which is very different from a civic or political one. Maybe what America has to do with Norman Rockwell, as all children must eventually do with their parents, is figure out how to love him and leave him at the same time.