David Lynch Was a Singular Filmmaker Whose Dreams Will Always Walk With Us
There are certain artists who are so visionary, so daring in their originality, whose work casts such a primal and enduring spell that it literally becomes hard to imagine the world without them. David Lynch, who died this week at 78, was one of those artists. Just to say that name, David Lynch (so ironic in its simplicity), is to conjure not merely a roster of immortal movies but a higher cosmos of the imagination: a darkly transfixing surrealist theme park where dreams could become real and reality felt like a dream.
Lynch, in his fearless way, reinvented movies, letting the homegrown avant-garde rapture of his brain flower into an aesthetic that turned the tropes of Hollywood inside out. My first encounter with a Lynch movie came in 1977, when I was in college and one of our campus film societies had the inspiration to put a giant image of the title character of “Eraserhead” on the background of its schedule. All semester long, that image hung on my wall; that’s all we knew of the film. At last, the night arrived when “Eraserhead” would be shown. The auditorium was packed, and to say that the movie lived up to that poster would be an understatement. The sound alone, a mass of whooshes and roars, was mesmerizing. The images — of Henry and his eraser hair, of the monster baby, of the Lady in the Radiator — were out of some outrageous pretzel-logic nightmare that somehow became your nightmare.
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And yet…it was gripping. In its walls-of-sanity-closing-in-on-you way, it told a story that had you hanging on every hallucinatory twist. “Eraserhead,” in New York, became a midnight sensation, but if you compare it to every other fabled midnight movie, they all feel straight out of that era. Whereas Lynch staged “Eraserhead” with a timeless bravura, so that if you watch it now it doesn’t look like some dated creepfest from the ’70s. It’s as eternal as “Psycho” or a canvas by Dalí or Bosch.
What do you do for an encore to “Eraserhead,” the most authentic dream–movie ever made? Lynch directed “The Elephant Man” (1980), a classical drama of elegantly restrained body horror and tragic humanity; it was a Hollywood movie, nominated for Oscars, and it was also every inch his own. Then he topped himself, and every other filmmaker of the time, with the film-noir-gone-mad genius of “Blue Velvet” (1986). Then came the dread-drenched soap opera of “Twin Peaks” (kicking off in 1990). The topsy-turvy sincere Americana wholesomeness of “The Straight Story” (1999). The “Vertigo”-on-acid Hollywood nightmare of “Mulholland Drive” (2001). Plus the paintings, the videos, the cartoons, the meditation…
David Lynch was a radical, his films filling the screen like gorgeous disturbing paintings that moved. Yet he was also a born storyteller who wanted to plug you into the moment and make you forget yourself with the kind of immersion that movies had exerted during the studio-system era. When Lynch was tapped by Mel Brooks’ production company to direct “The Elephant Man,” it wasn’t a surprise to see that he visualized John Merrick with an awestruck clinical horror that turned disfigurement into poetry. What’s surprising is that he proved to be such a master storyteller. He knew that telling stories and casting spells were really the same thing.
Though “Dune,” in 1984, was a debacle (commercially and artistically), I would say that Lynch made the right choice in directing it. Sci-fi spectacle had become the form of the age; it made sense for him to try his hand at it. And you could argue that he used the movie’s failure in an inspired way. Having signed on to make a blockbuster, and adapting someone else’s material, he went forward with a new kind of “never again” purity.
“Blue Velvet,” the movie that I still think is Lynch’s greatest masterpiece, followed “Dune” by emerging directly out of the unsettling depths of his imagination. It’s almost impossible to describe how disquieted audiences in 1986 were by the image of Frank Booth, the psycho who gets high on drugs and rage and fetishism. Yet the movie was a thriller, a romantic noir that, with a power worthy of a postmodern Hitchcock, turned the hero’s voyeurism into the audience’s.
In addition to being the greatest movie of the ’80s, I would argue that “Blue Velvet” was also the most important movie of that decade, because it launched the independent film revolution into orbit. Yes, that all supposedly happened three years later, with “sex, lies and videotape” and Harvey Weinstein and so on. But it was really “Blue Velvet” (with a bit of assist from “Blood Simple”) that reinvented independent film as a fractured, let-it-rip version of Old Hollywood. And you could make a comparable claim for “Twin Peaks,” in which Lynch dared to bring a “Blue Velvet” vision to the small screen, effectively kicking off the new golden age of television. It showed you what could be done.
Lynch, by then, had become a celebrity, his image burnished in the latter half of the ’80s by his romantic partnership with Isabella Rossellini, the fearless costar of “Blue Velvet.” And one of Lynch’s key inspirations, starting around that time, is that he had the instinct, or maybe it was the playful perversity, to treat his own life as a work of art.
He was never one to over-explain his movies, but he created a myth about himself that explained so much: the all-American boy born in Missoula, Mont., in 1946, who grew up in the ’50s and found that fabled conformist era to be at once comforting (the surface) and terrifying (what lies beneath); who attended art school in Philadelphia and experienced the city as such a bombed-out hellhole that he turned it into the ground floor of his imagination; who took five years to create “Eraserhead,” shooting its black-and-white magical hellscape on AFI soundstages in Los Angeles and never revealing how he created the diseased image of the monster baby (which prefigured the creature in “Alien”); who talked about going every single day to Bob’s Big Boy in L.A., where he drank coffee and milkshakes, because that’s how he felt safe enough to let his mind roam free; who dressed like a downtown dandy with his buttoned-to-the-Adam’s-apple shirts and wavy shock of hair, punctuating his speech with gee-whiz aphorisms that made him sound like a cracked Jimmy Stewart; who became a devotee of transcendental meditation, because it was another one of his neo-’50s safe spaces; and who never shot a foot of film he didn’t mean.
The film-critic establishment has come to view “Mulholland Drive,” released in 2001, as Lynch’s greatest work. And while I do think that film is a marvel, I’ve never shared the be-all-and-end-all view of it. I think critics are too in love with the way “Mulholland Drive” deconstructs itself. The movie plays with themes that, to me, had a more shattering boldness in “Blue Velvet.” And it reflected something in Lynch’s work that became more pronounced with the years — his tendency to recycle themes and moods and motifs. That first reared its head in “Wild at Heart,” a movie I’m not especially fond of (I find that Nicolas Cage’s strenuously stylized overacting undercuts it). And you could feel it, too, in “Lost Highway” and in parts of the fragmentary video wreck of “Inland Empire.” At the same time, Lynch kept pushing himself. His 2017 revival of “Twin Peaks” was television at its most insanely audacious.
In what is arguably the quintessential scene of Lynch’s career, in “Blue Velvet,” Dean Stockwell, looking like some sort of insane gangster clown, holds an industrial work light up to his rouged face like a microphone and lip syncs to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.” The lyrics go, “In dreams, I walk with you/In dreams, I talk with you/In dreams you’re mine, all of the time/We’re together in dreams.” Those words, as the movie will reveal, incarnate the outlook of Frank Booth, the drug-inhaling sadomasochistic greaser psychopath, played with scary brilliance by Dennis Hopper, who has planted the seed of his own darkness in Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), the film’s wholesome-on-the-surface hero. Yet those lyrics could just as well be speaking for David Lynch. His movies are dreams that talk to us, that walk with us, that invade us in a shivery and memorable way. Now that he’s gone, I want to say to him: Dream in peace.
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