David Lynch is dead at the age of 78. By any measure the most influential filmmaker of our time, the Missoula, Montana-born artist left such a mark that his very name became an adjective. There’s Hitchcockian, and then there’s Lynchian.
Controversial, visionary, and absolutely singular, his films from “Eraserhead” and “Blue Velvet” to “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive” were immersive plunges into rich cinematic landscapes of twisted psyches and luscious surfaces.
The news of Lynch’s death was confirmed on his official Facebook page.
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’”
“It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”
That’s a fitting sentiment for the man with the aw-shucks, Jimmy Stewart demeanor we saw post weather report videos on his Twitter feed in the last years of his life. For all the demented killers and weirdos in his films — the nitrous-oxide huffing abusers and albino cowboys, the sadistic, sexually abusive fathers, not to mention Bobby Peru — his films were also startling evocations of Americana: The picket fences at the beginning of “Blue Velvet,” the small town diners and gas stations of “Twin Peaks,” the gentle rural rhythms of “The Straight Story.” Jonathan Rosenbaum once criticized Lynch’s aesthetic for being really not afield from that of Walt Disney and Main Street U.S.A. One time, when Lynch was asked to provide a biography, he simply stated “Eagle scout. Missoula, Montana.”
Born there on January 20, 1946, Lynch’s life itself was one of unabashed Americana. As an Eagle Scout, he attended the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. From an early age, he was interested in painting and becoming a professional artist was his sole preoccupation for much of his early life. Unhappy experiences at the Corcoran School of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, led to him traveling around Europe for three years with his friend and fellow artist, Jack Fisk, who would become the production designer on many of his films as well as a legendary collaborator of other filmmakers from Terence Malick to Martin Scorsese.
Eventually, Lynch settled in Philadelphia and enrolled in the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. Painting is something he’d continue throughout his entire career, but while in Philadelphia he experimented for the first time with filmmaking. Or rather, animation. His short “Six Men Getting Sick” from 1967 is a repeated animation showing symbolic vomiting. It’s eery and unsettling, exactly what you’d think he might have made as his first film. And these years in Philadelphia proved troubled ones: As the city’s industrial life was hollowed out, Lynch became obsessed with its factory smokestacks and pervasive smog. In his exhibitions of his photography throughout his life, you could see Lynch’s obsessions with industry and its decay. And these years proved a huge influence on the ambient industrial sounds in “Eraserhead” and the role of factory in “Twin Peaks.”
More short films followed in the years after “Six Men Getting Sick,” films which have since been collected on DVD and prove instructive for the development of his aesthetic. “The Alphabet” was another work in animation. “The Grandmother,” however, was a particular leap forward: Having sent “The Alphabet” and his premise for “The Grandmother” to the American Film Institute, the still-new academy awarded him $7,200 to make this most ambitious short. It combined animation with live action to tell the story of a young boy whose parents speak in dog-like barks and who appears to “grow” his own grandmother, like a plant in soil, to take care of him. It’s tender, and sad, and affecting, and disturbing all at once. Just the way “Twin Peaks” could go from a trio of teenagers singing “Just You and I” in the manner of The Fleetwoods to a gruesome murder.
When it was completed in 1970, “The Grandmother” ran 33 minutes. His first marriage to Peggy Lentz was breaking up, and he began a romance with Jack Fisk’s sister, Mary. Studying at the American Film Institute as an artist in residence (to this day, Lynch may be the single greatest alumnus ever of the AFI, and he was featured regularly in their annual tribute shows, including in their lifetime achievement ceremony for Mel Brooks, who produced Lynch’s “The Elephant Man”), the academy supported the development and production of his first feature, “Eraserhead.”
“Eraserhead” inverted the dynamic of “The Grandmother.” This time it was about an adult having to take care of a child. And what a child at that. Looking like the cross between a spermatozoon and a tadpole, this needy, frail little infant is wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes, resting on the dresser and then the drawer of poor Jack Nance’s apartment in an industrial hellscape. Nance, who would appear in multiple other Lynch productions as part of what became a quasi-stock company for Lynch, sports a towering bouffaint of curly hair: an eraserhead. More sperm-like imagery pervades the movie, as strange larvae fall around Nance and the mysterious Lady in the Radiator (Lauren Near) as she performs the song “In Heaven.” Is it a dream? Is it a hallucination? Is it merely an expression of all the Nance character’s fears? It all culminates in the infant suddenly busting through its swaddling clothes when Nance tries to kill it and becoming a devouring monster. And maybe the world ends too.
This particular combination of the cutesy and the absolutely disgusting would become a Lynch signature. Just as industrial imagery yet again pervades “The Elephant Man,” set in hazy, smokestack-filled 19th century London. Where “Eraserhead” was provocative, earning raves from the likes of Rosenbaum, but condemnation from mainstream critics such as Roger Ebert, “The Elephant Man” was surprising for just how extraordinarily, overwhelmingly moving it was. Lynch could combine genuine, heartrending emotion with unsettling material in a way no one else could touch. It’s what you feel when you hear Laura Dern’s Sandy relate her dream about a flight of robins spreading love over all the world. Or Major Briggs in “Twin Peaks” sharing his vision about his son, all scored to transcendent Angelo Badalamenti synths.
It’s what made Lynch’s first and only foray into blockbuster filmmaking such a misguided idea, when he accepted an offer from Dino de Laurentiis to direct an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” in Mexico City after “The Elephant Man” earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture at the 1981 Academy Awards. Lynch had previously said that he met with George Lucas about directing “Return of the Jedi,” and that he developed a massive headache when meeting with the burgeoning Marin County mogul. Lucas, he ate nothing at lunch but salad, showed Lynch volumes full of concept art he’d already commissioned, and Lynch knew then that “Return of the Jedi” would not be his own film.
With “Dune,” he did have a chance to give some of his signature flourishes. With Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen, he was able to engage in a level of grotesquerie that was Lynch’s own. Not to mention, he fused outlandish sexuality with utter sadism in the spectre of Sting’s loincloth-clad Feyd Rautha in a manner that would pop up in subsequent work as well. De Laurentiis took final cut out of his hands and ultimately delivered a more pedestrian vision in the version that hit theaters and bombed in 1984. In interviews throughout the rest of his life, Lynch made it clear he disowned “Dune” and that the film was a great source of sadness for him. But it also first paired him with more actors who would populate his growing cinematic stock company: Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, Alicia Witt, and most importantly, Kyle MacLachlan. As viewers of Lynch’s work, you would be very misguided to write off his “Dune.” Compromised though it may be, it’s still a critical film in his development as an artist. Some, including the Slovenian philosopher Slavor Zizek, even consider “Dune” to be among his best work.
And without “Dune,” we surely never would have gotten “Blue Velvet.” A reteaming with Kyle MacLachlan, but also producer De Laurentiis, “Blue Velvet” represented a “one for me” after the “one for them” of his Herbert adaptation. For all the controversy it inspired, all the handwringing interviews asking him about its violence, its sexuality, and, even whether, as Roger Ebert alleged in his review of the film upon its release in 1986, it exploited its lead actress, Lynch’s then girlfriend, Isabella Rossellini, this is a film made by an eagle scout from Missoula, Montana. David Thomson once said “Blue Velvet” was “Beowulf at the International House of Pancakes,” a portrait of picket-fence Americana (picket fences and beautiful rosebuds literally do dot a crystalline blue sky in the opening shot) and the crepuscular darkness underneath, as immediately the film cuts to an image of centipedes and other insects crawling, grasping, and clawing each other beneath the still, picture-perfect surface. Is it even of a metaphor? It’s too literal to be subtext. It’s just text. And indeed the darkness pervades all aspects of this idyllic town of Lumberton, North Carolina (or “Lumberton, U.S.A.” as an early radio broadcast declares, because no town this Andy Hardy meets Hardy Boys perfect could ever belong to just one state). The inky, puce walls of the apartment complex where Rossellini’s nightclub singer lives is as industrially hellish as anything in “Eraserhead.” And of course, Dennis Hopper, huffing nitrous oxide as rapist gang leader Frank Booth is a vision of male bestiality ripped out of a Francis Bacon painting (Lynch has acknowledged Bacon as a key influence on his work).
“Blue Velvet” is one of those watershed moments in movie history. It was to 1986 what “Psycho” was to 1960. And with the particular combination of its extreme violence and sexual panic, and its homespun all-American aesthetic, was it actually a work of outsider art? Or a deeply conservative expression of Reaganism? The ’80s were a time when the ’50s did seem to make a comeback in many aspects of American life. The debates continue to this day, and Rossellini recently told IndieWire what she really felt about Ebert’s accusations that she was exploited while making it.
With “Blue Velvet,” the aesthetic that would pervade much of Lynch’s work from there on out as set: Dramatic mixtures of darkness and light (both metaphorically and in terms of actual cinematography) as extreme as anything Lucas had envisioned in his space saga, but brought to earth to comment on America and the human condition. There would be camp in Lynch’s work: Smeared lipstick figures heavily into both “Blue Velvet” and its Palme d’Or winning follow-up “Wild at Heart.” Moments of spirituality and deep empathy, largely powered by the music from his collaborator Badalamenti. Folksy aphorisms (“Damn good coffee!”). Intentionally stilted line deliveries. And deep, rich soundtracks, crackling and crisping with the hum of the nascent digital era. To that point Lynch’s aural environments had been created by legendary sound designer Alan Splet. In the later works, Lynch would design the soundscapes himself. Even when he’d work with other sound artists such as Dean Hurley, Lynch would often think about the sounds that would tell his stories even before the images.
More to come…
