Despite never quite knowing what I was watching, David Lynch films were an important step in my cinematic journey. His movies were both almost child-like and also extremely disturbing. Some of them were more straight forward, while others were puzzles you had to put together in the dark, and with missing pieces to boot. They were always strikingly photographed, with protagonists that ranged from simple and naive(Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet) to psychotic and dangerous(Sailor Ripley in Wild At Heart), and you couldn’t figure his movies out on first watch. I’m still trying to figure out Lost Highway nearly 30 years later.
The first David Lynch film I saw was Blue Velvet. My parents rented it and I snuck a peek when they weren’t home on a Saturday afternoon. It felt like some dizzying dream; Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern’s young couple stumbling upon a severed ear and trying to figure out who it belonged to. That led down a dark path with darker characters, like the imprisoned Isabella Rossellini, the psychotic Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth, the great Dean Stockwell and THAT scene where he lip syncs Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”.
There was just so much in that movie that my pre-adolescent brain couldn’t comprehend. That led to my brother bringing home Eraserhead late one night. We sat up and watched it and were kind of blown away. We didn’t know what the hell we were watching but we couldn’t get enough. The dingy industrial hiss, grainy black and white photography, the absurd performances, the baby bird-like infant, and the woman in the radiator…it all built itself into a masterpiece of oddities and grotesqueries. That film alone opened the door to surrealism and metaphor for me.
Most of my formative years into adulthood I was obsessed with David Lynch; The Elephant Man, Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, these were all moving images and ideas that were entry into the imagination and philosophy of David Lynch. He saw that the beauty and darkness existed equally in our small towns and psyches. They were the ying and yang existence itself was built upon. You couldn’t have one without the other. His best work was a meditation on it all. Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Wild At Heart, and Mulholland Drive I believe are Lynch firing on all cylinders. They are dark American masterpieces.
Of course Twin Peaks and a bizarre cinematic turn with Dune are the entry points for many. While I attempted to watch Twin Peaks when it originally aired, I never quite clicked with it. But due to Lynch passing I feel I owe it to myself to give it another go.
David Lynch was a huge part of my film education, and will continue to be for as long as I’m watching movies. He’s the perfect example of not judging a book by its cover. The Boy Scout from Missoula, Montana had many stories to tell. His art was very much singular and his own. And we will more than likely never get another filmmaker/artist/human like David Lynch again.
And that makes me pretty sad, honestly.
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