
The unforgettable legacy of David Lynch: an authentic artist and surrealist genius
WRITTEN BY Aimee Ferrier
“In heaven, everything is fine,” sings the Lady in the Radiator from David Lynch’s debut feature, Eraserhead. The filmmaker, an iconic visionary whose meditations on dreams, humanity, life, and death have inspired many, has passed away at the age of 78 following a battle with emphysema. The director’s surrealist oeuvre was truly groundbreaking, and he will be remembered as a true artist, responsible for ushering many avant-garde techniques into modern cinema and always remaining faithful to his innate creative impulses, regardless of how strange or unconventional they seemed.
The filmmaker began his career in the 1960s, initially intending to become a painter. While Lynch continued to make paintings over the course of his life, it was film that proved to be his true love. He made his first short, Six Men Getting Sick, in 1967, which featured animated paintings made to appear as though they were vomiting. This was the first indication of Lynch’s penchant for making films that were wholly unusual and inventive, and shortly after, he released more strange short films, like The Alphabet and The Grandmother.
Lynch’s style was established from the get-go; this was a man who didn’t care if his ideas seemed unintelligible on the surface; he had faith that his audience would be able to decipher them, or at least take something from what he had made. You can watch a Lynch picture without fully understanding the narrative, like Inland Empire, but still feel a profound sense of emotion as a result of his masterful directorial skills and powerful cinematic choices. His use of music and visuals, paired with his ability to squeeze the most affecting performances out of his actors, always resulted in terrific pieces of cinema that continue to endure – confusing or delighting viewers, sometimes simultaneously.

Lynch’s debut feature, Eraserhead, was released in 1977, and famously featured Jack Nance as Henry Spencer, a man struggling to look after his alien-like baby. It was a popular midnight movie, although it divided contemporary critics due to its utterly unique and surreal use of narrative and shadowy black-and-white visuals. It remains one of his most accomplished pieces of work, not just because of its brilliance but also because Lynch was able to complete it after years of funding issues, never giving up on his vision.

From there, he followed Eraserhead with The Elephant Man, one of his most emotionally driven films. Telling the moving tale of John Merrick, a man treated like an animal because of his bold deformities, Lynch’s gorgeous film advocates for Merrick’s humanity in spite of everyone around him seeing him as nothing but a monster. While it is one of Lynch’s most digestible movies, it is in no way a departure from his style; at the heart of The Elephant Man is an exploration of what it means to be good and to be human and how easily life can treat innocent people so cruelly.

Twin Peaks, Lynch’s era-defining television series co-created by Mark Frost, continued to explore these themes on a wider scale, introducing us to his most important character: Laura Palmer. The homecoming queen might be dead in the first episode, but her spirit haunts every instalment as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper comes to Twin Peaks to investigate her murder. As the secrets of the town’s quirky inhabitants are uncovered, Laura becomes a symbol of shattered dreams, her death representing the murkiness that can be found within the heart of America.
Lynch often explored the destruction of the American dream within his work, such as in his gorgeous yet twisted tale Blue Velvet and his noir-inspired Mulholland Drive. Both films are rich with eroticism, danger, and mystery, and Angelo Badalamenti’s jazzy scores, both seductive and curious, help to set the scene for Lynch’s bold ideas. Mulholland Drive, released in 2001, saw Lynch confuse many viewers with its twisting tale of dreams and the harshness of reality, the movie blurring the lines between the real and the imagined. It also attacked the darker side of Hollywood, depicting the iconic land of dreams and stardom as a much more bleak and unforgiving reality.

He expanded on these themes with Inland Empire, perhaps his most Lynchian film of all, which saw Laura Dern give a career-defining performance. The movie is like one long nightmare, with Lynch doing all he could to create a consistently unnerving and confusing atmosphere, whether that be through a strange ‘Locomotion’ dance sequence or Dern’s contorted face screaming at the camera. Released in 2006, the film might’ve seen like an odd move for Lynch – it was long and partly shot on a Sony handheld camera by the filmmaker – but it was a testament to his reluctance to give into the studio system and make something that would appease viewers.

Inland Empire might’ve only scrapped $4 million at the box office, but it couldn’t have encapsulated Lynch’s artistry any better. It remains the last feature film he made, while his last major project was Twin Peaks: The Return, released in 2017. Could Lynch have bowed out on anything more spectacular? A show that, 25 years later, revisited his most beloved characters and expanded the universe in which they existed – answering questions long unanswered – was the perfect creation to mark the end of his impressive career.
Lynch’s impact on cinema was mighty, bringing surrealist ideas further into the mainstream and bridging a gap between experimental cinema and Hollywood. His influence has rippled through cinema since the ‘70s, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker who doesn’t believe Lynch to be anything less than a genius. With his magnificent oeuvre, Lynch gained a reputation as one of the most well-respected filmmakers of his generation, able to create iconic films with such a distinctive and unusual style. He proved that with enough integrity and a strong sense of who you are as an artist, you can make powerful work that will touch people across the world.
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SOURCE: Farout Magazine