More than any number of Oscars or Golden Globes, an adjective carved into the eternal cinematic lexicon is the true mark of a filmmaker’s immortality. The very word ‘Lynchian’ – denoting a kind of carnivalesque dark surrealism; sometimes fantastical, sometimes macabre, sometimes dreamlike, often eerily everyday – will forever pay tribute to the work of one of cinema’s finest ever auteurs, David Lynch, who died yesterday (January 16) aged 78.
Having begun his directorial career in the realm of grainy, yet highly respected monochrome arthouse movies (1977’s Eraserhead; 1980’s The Elephant Man), Lynch’s unique vision truly crystalised on boldly colourful classics such as Blue Velvet (1986), Wild At Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), for which he received the last of three Academy Award nominations for Best Director. Across this canon he deployed his trademark experimental techniques – dream imagery, fracturing identities, non-linear timelines, plots that twist so strangely they recast his films as puzzle cubes – upon such beloved genres as neo noir, crime drama and the Americana road trip with a master’s eye for striking visual composition, all the better to explore the sinister underbelly of American normality.
To watch a Lynch film was to enter a tangled narrative woodland with barely a smattering of breadcrumbs to guide you towards sense and clarity, and the inherent mysteries embedded at the heart of the director’s work proved endlessly engrossing. His Twin Peaks series of TV shows and 1992 film developed one of pop culture’s most avid cult followings, still picking episodes apart to decipher the series’ true meaning, and there is even much fan love for his 1984 space opera folly Dune.
Born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946 to a transient but somewhat idyllic childhood, Lynch first evolved his visual eye as a student of art and painting, studying at Washington’s Corcoran School Of Fine Arts, the School Of The Museum Of Fine Arts in Boston and, after a foiled plan to move to Europe, the Pennsylvania Academy Of The Fine Arts. A married father of one by the age of 22, in stark contrast to his own upbringing he lived with his new family in the poverty-stricken Fairmount neighbourhood of Philadelphia, which helped to colour his cinematic worldview. “The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense,” he’d tell one biographer. “There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city.”
Purchasing a cheap 16mm camera, Lynch made his first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), at the Academy for just $150. Further surreal shorts – a girl recites the alphabet before bleeding to death in The Alphabet (1968); a boy grows a grandmother from a seed in The Grandmother (1970) – were funded by wealthy fellow students and grants from the American Film Institute. Moving to the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles in 1970, where he was hailed as one of the school’s most promising students, Lynch funded his first full-length film Eraserhead with a $10,000 grant, a loan from his father and the proceeds from a paper round delivering The Wall Street Journal.
Filmed sporadically over four years from a script of just 21 pages, and often shot in some stables where David Lynch lived following a divorce, this arthouse body horror film followed a young man living in a dystopian industrial wasteland, caring for his deformed baby. Following a limited release, this benchmark of shoestring surrealism became a cult hit as a midnight movie – offbeat movies screened late-night on TV and in theatres.
Celebrated by such industry figures as Stanley Kubrick and Mel Brooks, Eraserhead opened the door for Lynch to dabble in more mainstream fare. While still surrealist in tone, 1980’s The Elephant Man was a relatively conventional biopic of deformed Victorian gentleman John Merrick starring established actors John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins and earning a total of eight Oscar nominations.
Having turned down the opportunity to direct Return Of The Jedi, Lynch turned his hand to big-budget sci-fi with Dune, the beginning of a long-standing working relationship with actor Kyle MacLachlan. Such a commercialised environment stifled Lynch’s work: without final cut and feeling compromised, he removed his name from the film following its bombing at the box office.
1986’s Blue Velvet, however, resurrected David Lynch’s fortunes in inimitable style. Infusing his now typically surrealist tale of criminal conspiracy and violently troubled romance with the elegant sounds of 1950s croon pop, he created in the film an aesthetic – an elegantly twisted take on American noir – which he’d expand and explore over his subsequent peak period.
Road movie crime drama Wild At Heart, featuring Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern as lovers on the lam, won Lynch the Palm D’Or at Cannes for its marriage of sex, violence and fantasy tributes to Elvis and The Wizard Of Oz but, surprisingly, key to Lynch’s rise as a central figure in popular leftfield culture was a shift to the small screen with Twin Peaks. A sprawling mystery saga around the murder of high school student Laura Palmer, the show spanned two mystifying series in the early 1990s and spawned a 1992 feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which critic Mark Kermode considered Lynch’s masterpiece.
Returning fully to the film format, Lynch delivered some of his greatest noir work in 1997’s Lost Highway and 2001’s Mulholland Drive (named the best film of the 21st Century so far in a BBC poll), and crafted his most family-friendly movie in 1999’s A Straight Story, following an elderly man on a 300-mile road trip by lawnmower and his only film released by Walt Disney Pictures.
2006’s Inland Empire completed an LA trilogy and his life’s work for film; otherwise, semi-retiring from the film industry, Lynch concentrated on TV work (including a return to Twin Peaks in 2017), online shorts, web documentaries, art exhibitions (he’d describe his paintings as “organic, violent comedies”) and visual music collaborations with acts such as Duran Duran, Nine Inch Nails and Interpol.
David Lynch’s musical interest stretched to on-record work with his film music collaborators such as Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise, and three solo albums of electro-blues and rock between 2001 and 2013, featuring the likes of Karen O and Lykke Li: characteristically, he played guitar on his 2001 debut BlueBob upside down and backwards, lap guitar style. His most recent musical release was with long-time collaborator Chrystabell on last year’s ‘Cellophane Memories’.
In his later years, the director was said to have been housebound by emphysema brought on by a lifetime of smoking, and an evacuation from his home due to the LA wildfires is believed to have contributed to a terminal decline in his health. He leaves behind a legacy of artistic reinvention and cinematic deconstruction for a world growing more Lynchian by the minute.