Rarely is an artist whose work is so game-changing that the only way to describe them is to turn their last name into an adjective. It’s even rarer for this to happen in Hollywood, a place where creativity, especially the dark and distorted kind, tends to take a back seat to commercial viability and a strong bottom line.
And yet, somehow, David Lynch, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 78, didn’t just direct a bunch of game-changing films that can only be defined as Lynchian films. He did so at a time when the American film industry was beginning to grow, then balloon, into a franchise-driven behemoth where his off-the-wall branding was the last thing the studios wanted.
Case in point: Lynch’s debut, eraserIt was released in 1977, the same year as the first star wars out. Both, in fact, were box office hits: Lucas’ film became one of the first big summer blockbusters, paving the way for the types of films that now completely dominate the business. But Lynch’s gorgeous black-and-white show, which began as a student project at AFI, became a hit on the midnight circuit, grossing $7 million on a small budget of $100,000 made up of grants and donations from friends.
eraser It was so incomprehensible, so far out in left field, that most critics at the time dismissed it. diverse He called it “an exercise in disgusting poor taste” and New York Timesreviewed three years later, claimed that it was “not a particularly terrifying film, just an endless one”. But the fans were drawn to it eraser Precisely because it was unlike anything they had ever seen. This was a movie that didn’t even give them a story or characters that spoke. There was just a screaming mutant baby and a man with hair like the Bride of Frankenstein, along with lots of bloody close-ups and broken sound design.
It was as if Lynch had tapped into something people had wanted to see all along—something strange and grotesque beneath the surface that was waiting to be discovered by a visionary artist like him. And perhaps this is one way to define a “Lynchian” film: stripping away the facades and illusions of so-called normality – and so-called normal films – to reveal something that speaks to our darkest selves.
My first encounter with the world of Linqian had a similar effect. After exhausting every horror and action movie at my local video store as a teenager, I jumped at the chance Blue velveta movie I knew nothing about. I came home, opened the tape on the VCR, and thought, at least for the first few minutes, that I was watching a high school movie. But then things got weird. The severed ear was lying in the bush covered in ants. People were not talking like normal people, but like people pretending to be normal people.
By the time I got to where Kyle MacLachlan was hiding in a closet to spy on Isabella Rossellini, only to see Dennis Hopper emerge with an oxygen mask screaming “The kid wants to fuck!”, I could tell you that my 12-year-old old self had transformed. Once again, it was about Lynch stripping away the trappings of the ordinary world — in this case small-town America — to reveal how false those trappings were, and always had been. The picturesque suburbs we grew up in or saw Leave it to Beaverthey were hiding something very disturbing: wild or indescribable sexual desires buried within us, or hidden behind all the happy families depicted on television.
My second encounter with Lynchians was actually on television. Once again, what started out looking normal quickly went off the rails, then descended into surreal chaos. I was visiting my grandmother in Florida when the first episode of the series came out Twin Peaks It aired during spring break in 1990. There was a lot of promotion by ABC for their new series, and we were excited to watch the big pilot on Sunday night together. Well, by the time we got to the end of those crazy two hours, I was embarrassed to even look at my grandmother. What did we just watch? Why was Kyle MacLachlan once again playing a guy who keeps experiencing a lot of crazy things? And yes, who killed Laura Palmer?
I returned to New York the next week, fully convinced that my grandmother, who had been knitting silently while we watched the show (talk about a Lynchian picture), would continue to watch Twin Peaks To the bitter end, just like I planned to do. Lynch has now shifted my world to a completely different medium. He managed to take what seemed like a small-town crime, turn it upside down and twist it inside out, exposing its messy innards to the entire nation.
with Twin PeaksLynch wasn’t just revealing, once again, the darkness and strangeness that reigns behind the humble facades of American life. He was demonstrating how these facades were built and promoted through the series he was remaking every Thursday night on ABC. And perhaps this is another definition of Lynchian: twisting familiar genres and tropes, like a typical TV murder mystery, until those genres and tropes begin to disappear, leaving behind something far more sinister and disturbing – something that was never meant to be on a TV show. to do.
Contrary to the many books, articles, film tutorials, and podcasts about his work, Lynch didn’t seem to have big theories about the things he made, but rather made things whenever he could. He was an artist who worked in many media: film, television, music, transcendental meditation, weather reports on his website, and most consistently in painting and fine art. (documentary film 2016, David Lynch: The Artistic Lifeoffers a rare glimpse into his process as a visual artist.) As much as people tried to find meaning in his works, especially his most famous films, he kept his head down and kept working, even when it became increasingly difficult for him to do so. Do it in Hollywood.
The culmination of this conflict – between a major artist and the popular art form of film he was constantly circumventing – was his 2001 masterpiece., Mulholland Drive. The series started out as just another ABC series, was dropped by the network in the pilot (rumor has it that Lynch refused to remove a close-up of a feces from the edit) and, with additional filming, turned into one of the great anti-serial series. -Hollywood movies ever made. in Mulholland DriveLynchian form and function combine perfectly in this story of Tinseltown dreams that drift into nightmares.
The intent was clear from the start, when a dance number set to Linda Scott’s hit pop hit “I’ve Told Every Little Star” veered into a scene of distortion. (Lynch loved to play with 1960s songs: Watch Dean Stockwell’s charming lip-sync of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” Blue velvet.)
From there, Mulholland Drive The film transitions into what feels, for at least 5 minutes, like another story of a smart young woman (played by Naomi Watts in a career-defining performance) who shows up in Los Angeles to become a star. But things go off the rails so quickly, before descending into mystery, that the aspiring actress’s plot becomes yet another facade for Lynch to tear down. He not only mocks Hollywood and its star system, but asks us to consider whether behind this system there is a shadow world in which all our identities end up dissolving.
Although this all sounds heavy-handed, one shouldn’t forget that many of Lynch’s films, like the man himself, were marked by a kind of dry, sarcastic humor that undermined some of the inherent darkness. What many viewers and critics found strange, Lynch probably found funny. One of the best definitions of Lynchian humor and sarcasm was articulated by the late David Foster Wallace in his seminal essay on the making of comedy. Lost Highway”, titled “David Lynch Keeps His Head”: “The academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term refers to a certain kind of irony in which the very horrific and the very mundane come together in a way that reveals the permanent containment of the former within society. last.’ But like postmodern words or pornography, Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that can ultimately only be defined superficially, that is, we know it when we see it.
Lost Highway is a good example of a film that seems so decidedly Lynchian at times that it almost descends into self-parody. However, when I first saw it in 1997, I nearly walked out of the theater, terrified by the completely demented Robert Blake charging toward the screen with a video camera. Even the opening credits, during which Angelo Badalamenti’s stunning score plays over a shot of a highway at night, felt both ironic and haunting, as if the director were mocking the idea of a road movie while trying to scare the hell out of us.
In the coming years, Lynch’s less popular films e.g Inland Empire, Straight story Or the 1984 amendment to Sand duneswill likely be re-evaluated, as will a critically heralded but yet to be seen third season Twin Peakswhich aired in 2017. The latter contained some of the most baffling scenes ever played in a television series, purely Lynchian moments that can be both startling and baffling at the same time.
Twin Peaks: Backas it was called, would be the director’s last fully realized work, although he continued to make short films, and much else, until his death. His first and last big screen appearance was, to the surprise of many, in the 2022 drama film directed by Steven Spielberg. FabelmansHe appeared in the final scene as Hollywood legend John Ford.
It may have seemed like another irony for Ford to play Lynch. The two could not be more opposed in style and content: Ford, who has won nearly as many Oscars, favored bold scenic spectacle, uninhibited lyricism, and outsized emotions—qualities far removed from Lynch. who never won an Oscar for his work and only received an honorary statue in 2019. But like Lynch, Ford’s signature was so unique that we now use the term “Fordian” to describe him.
If Fordian means classic Hollywood style at its absolute peak, Lynchian means what happens when that style, co-opted by today’s Hollywood films as commercially meaningless, veers in a bold new direction that exposes the hidden horrors and absurdities of life. David Lynch may still be viewed by many as a pioneering film director, but like Ford, he will eventually come to be known as one of the major American directors of his time – an artist whose work is as recognizable as his namesake.