Remembering David Lynch: A Master of surreal cinema and boundless creativity

At the age of 78, David Lynch – fine artist, maker of films and television, proponent of Transcendental Meditation – has died. It is something of a cliché to suggest that we live on through our works and the memories of our loved ones, but David Lynch is immortalised by his very name.

Only a small number of directors have given us meaningful eponymic adjectives – Hitchcockian, Cronenbergian, Tarantino-esque – used, and sometimes abused, to summarise an entire, idiosyncratic style and vision, and while ‘Lynchian’ is at times lazily deployed as a mere synonym for ‘oneiric’, ‘surreal’ or just ‘strange’, it also encapsulates something singular and instantly recognisable across his œuvre, while pointing to his preoccupations, tics and quirks.

For Lynch liked to place wide-eyed innocents into vicious, corrupting worlds, or to let the not-so-innocent imagine a better place or an alternative life, or to expose the dark underbelly of a shimmering Fifties-style American dream. He liked arcing electricity, he liked liminal, otherworldly spaces, he liked ethereal songs and unnerving sound design, and he liked mesmerising flames. Indeed, the fire is, as he often said in interview, part of what he loved so much about smoking, a habit that he picked up when he was eight years old and maintained compulsively until he was recently diagnosed with emphysema. Like so many of his characters, he was drawn to fire, and it would eventually consume him.

Lynch got the filmmaking bug as a 21-year-old student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After deciding that he wanted to see his paintings move, he purchased the cheapest camera that he could, and the resulting short film, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), was a 60-second animation designed to be projected six times in a loop on some male busts that he had sculpted. Delivering its title’s promise in a repeating spasm of engorging bellies, colourful emissions and (of course) marginal flames, this brief cin-emetic work of alarming, agonising, ultimately ecstatic expression saw the arrival of Lynch as a maker of a literal ‘moving picture’. Other shorts – The Alphabet (1968), The Grandmother (1970) – would follow, each longer and more ambitious than the last, and then, after a prolonged five-year gestation, his feature debut Eraserhead (1977) was born.

It was a disturbing monochrome portrait of an awkward, alienated man who spends his vacation escaping into reveries about his dream girl, until his real ex reveals that he is father to a swaddled, sickly creature, and leaves him to negotiate alone his conflicting feelings about the paternity that has been thrust upon him. After the film’s ill-attended première at Filmex, an upset Lynch would imitate his protagonist’s acts of carving and cutting, taking a knife to his baby’s negative to remove several entire sequences (now lost forever) – but what was left of this shadowy, unsettling meditation on the (pro)creative process would gradually gain a cult following on the Midnight Movie circuit, and is now recognised as a neurotic, nightmarish masterwork. Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas became big fans. I am one too – indeed, it is my all-time favourite film.

Lynch would next attempt to enter the mainstream – in his own inimitable way – finding sentiment and sympathy for a ‘freak’ in his mannered period drama The Elephant Man (1980). Then, after turning down Lucas’ request to direct Return of the Jedi (just imagine what might have resulted), he directed a different space opera with a cosmically proportioned budget, Dune (1984), for Dino De Laurentiis – and despite managing, with help from his young lead Kyle MacLachlan, to breathe quirky life into the novel’s dull protagonist, and to turn the whole universe into a colourful freakshow, he was unhappy with studio interference and drastic cuts which, unlike in Eraserhead, were not his own. The film bombed – yet Lynch’s next project for DeLaurentiis, the smaller and more personal Blue Velvet (1986), would reunite the filmmaker with actor MacLachlan (a collaboration that would span a lifetime), and would feel, in its small-town setting and dark themes, like a dry run for the pair’s ground-breaking two-season TV series Twin Peaks (1990) and spin-off movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), in which a northern timber community falls prey to hidden abuse and/or cosmic horror. These would bring Lynch’s special brand of probing, challenging oddity to a primetime viewership, changing the narrative possibilities of television forever and still influencing the medium’s forms today – and even if Lynch’s subsequent small-screen forays (On the Air, 1992; Hotel Room, 1993) would not catch fire in the same way, in 2017 his belated 18-hour extension to the Twin Peaks universe would mesmerise, bewilder and exasperate even more than the first two seasons. Obscure, experimental and uncompromising, yet also very funny and highly rewarding to those who stayed the distance, this would prove to be Lynch’s long-form swan song, as well as a fitting summation of his ideas and obsessions.

David Lynch’s collaboration with actor Kyle MacLachlan would span a lifetime and began with the 1984 space opera Dune.

While working on the first two season of Twin Peaks, Lynch also released the feature Wild At Heart (1990), a hyperviolent, romantic road trip that was also a demented reckoning with The Wizard of Oz, paved with beguiling fire. In fact it would form a loose trilogy of Lynch-directed road movies. For his The Straight Story, released in 1999, is a good-natured film tracking an old man heading cross-country on a tractor mower to be reconciled with his ailing brother.

Even as its title suggests, it is the one work in Lynch’s filmography that seems a misfit, and yet it remains an eccentric vision of rural America, with hidden depths, and is inevitably, literally Lynchian. Between those two came Lost Highway (1997), a story which, for all its barreling trajectory, is less straight than non-linear and confounding. Here a man is racing down parallel roads in the dark, and it is left to the viewer to determine which of his double lives is real and which imagined, which the main theme and which the fugue.

Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), developed from a TV series that never saw production, would pick up the double-helix structure of Lost Highway while inverting its order and swapping the protagonist’s sex. It was also, amid its heroine’s deathbed delusions, a deconstruction of the fantasies that fuel Hollywood, and the bleaker realities that the dream factory suppresses. Both Lost Highways and Mulholland Dr. set viewers on a circular route through an enigma of identity, but given their parallel plotting, either one served as a map to find our way through the other, and to reach something like a satisfying solution to their narrative mysteries.

Yet for all the challenges that they raised to the viewer, they were merely as basic primers to understanding Lynch’s final, and most impenetrable feature film, INLAND EMPIRE (2006). Shot on cheap consumer digicam, but exactingly lit like a dream, this three-hour ‘home movie’ – a self-produced, self-released epic of the uncanny – takes us, at least ostensibly, through the fragmenting psyche of a fallen Hollywood actress (Laura Dern, another Lynch regular) in a place “where stars make dreams and dreams make stars.”

Yet there is so much more to the film – so many conspiratorial subplots and chronological leaps, so many confusions of actor and character, of starlet and street-level ‘crack whore’ – that in the end you too will feel lost in the ‘cursed’ screenplay at the film’s centre, and wonder if you can ever truly find your way out of its labyrinthine complexity.

David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr was developed from a TV series that never saw production.

Lynch was a fine actor in his own right, suitably last seen in Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022) playing John Ford (another great and influential director).

Lynch was also a cartoonist, a furniture maker, a musician, an admirer of factories, a describer of weather, an ‘ant wrangler’, and a very talented painter to the end. With his films’ contradictory blend of aw-shucks decency and utter darkness he would equally enchant and creep out his viewers, leaving us to cope with the disturbing dual image of ourselves in his movies’ distorted mirrors. While there are many other filmmakers now who openly mimic his disorienting ‘Lynchian’ style, there is, or was, only one Lynch, showing mainstream America its fiery, freaky side. R.I.P.


Main image credit: @Parzanka


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