Welcome to Lynchland, a slight but enjoyable documentary devoted to the life and work of America’s premier cinematic surrealist, received an emotional reception Wednesday afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival. The love for David Lynch, who died at age 78 in January, was palpable inside the premiere in Cannes’ fabled Palais des Festivals, with numerous fans and industry admirers of the auteur in tears as the lights came up.
Lynch’s oldest son, Riley Lynch, was on hand to introduce the documentary alongside its director, French filmmaker Stéphane Ghez.
“This festival really meant a lot to my dad and it’s just so cool to be here,” said Riley Lynch, 33 years old and an aspiring filmmaker himself. “The last time I was here was in 2002 — when my dad was president of the jury — and I had my 10th birthday party here. Sharon Stone brought out the cake — pretty cool,” he said. “Thank you guys so much for having me. It’s a very emotional time and I’ve not seen this film yet, so I’m excited to watch it with all you.”
With a runtime of just one hour, Welcome to Lynchland serves as an introductory primer on Lynch’s singular body of work, tracing the basic contours of his life and legacy, while hazarding a few rosebud-like theories for his career-long twin obsessions with 1950s-style American innocence and the nightmares lurking in the shadows.
Structured in linear fashion—an ironic contrast to Lynch’s famously non-linear narratives — the documentary moves briskly through the director’s career, beginning with his debut feature, Eraserhead, which he famously spent five years making for less than $100,000, laying the groundwork for his lifelong commitment to artistic independence and unfettered visual experimentation. The Elephant Man and Dune then mark Lynch’s entry into the Hollywood system, with the former a critical triumph and the latter a torturous misfire that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
His response was Blue Velvet, a film that reasserted his control and cemented his reputation as a visionary chronicler of suburban darkness. Actress Isabella Rossellini reflects on the film’s disturbing material and autobiographical elements while resisting reductive interpretations.
Lynch’s later trilogy of California-set projects, the Palme d’Or-winning Wild at Heart, the dreamlike Mulholland Drive, and the fragmented Lost Highway, receive thoughtful attention, while the tonal outlier The Straight Story goes conspicuously unmentioned. Ghez includes commentary from collaborators such as Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, and Kyle MacLachlan, as well as Lynch’s biographer and former partners, adding warmth and intimacy to the biographical sketch. An eccentric “exegetical expert” also appears, humorously acknowledging the futility of trying to pin down definitive meanings in Lynch’s work.
Dern makes impassioned and thought-provoking assertions about the primacy of Inland Empire in Lynch’s oeuvre, and the archival behind-the-scenes footage of the director at work on that freewheeling, multi-year indie project is especially revealing. If Welcome to Lynchland ends up shifting sentiments among the Lynch converted in any way, it will likely be a reassessment of Inland Empire, which baffled many critics at the time of its release in 2007 (it currently has a 72% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes).
Lynch was a Cannes regular throughout his career and his pioneering work was recognized especially early in France, where spent significant portions of his later years working on visual art projects. Lynch famously —and controversially — won the Palme d’Or with Wild at Heart in 1990, his first appearance in the festival’s main competition. At the festival’s now legendary awards ceremony that year, Lynch and his cast were showered with bravos and boos in equal measure, reflecting how sharply the ultra-violent surrealist romantic road movie divided Cannes critics of the day.
