Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
By DAVID JAGER January 29, 2025
David Lynch, one of the most enduring and visionary filmmakers of the last fifty years, marked a revolutionary turning point in modern cinema and television. The maker of such films as the midnight cult classic ‘Eraserhead’, the neo-noir ‘Blue Velvet’, or the dark Hollywood masterpiece ‘Mullholland Drive’, Mr. Lynch forever changed American film and television making. Such was the originality and scope of his vision that his last name came to be used as an adjective. “Lynchian” is now a universally recognized descriptor for anything uncanny, dreamlike or unsettling on a screen. And this within his lifetime.
Lynch passed away last week at the age of 78, as announced by his family on social media. The director had been recently battling with emphysema. Tributes poured in immediately. The actor Kyle MachLachlan, who Lynch cast as his leading man in Blue Velvet, Dune, and as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, released a statement on Instagram: “David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that make us who we are.”
Mr. Lynch strained American cinema through the lens of his own peculiar surrealism, spawning an entirely new sensibility in the process. He gleefully twisted the well-worn tropes of the silver screen and film noir into nightmarish pretzels. Viewers would find themselves in familiar wholesome settings until things took a bizarre turn. His plots were baffling mazes: heavy on atmosphere and unsettling characters and light on resolution. Watching a David Lynch film is never about narrative coherence. It’s about marinating in his utterly unique world view.
Mr. Lynch began as a painter, but became fascinated with film making as an attempt ‘to make his paintings move.’ His first movie Eraserhead was a labor of love that spanned five years as he continuously ran out of money. Filmed in black and white and set in a bleak rooming house, it follows a deeply anxious young man who must care for a baby, allegedly his own, that resembles a gasping, deformed salamander. It’s midnight debut in 1977 was largely ignored, but the sheer inventive weirdness- salamander baby doesn’t cover half of it- assured its cult status. He then directed ‘The Elephant Man’, a relatively straightforward and touching drama starring John Hurt and Sir Anthony Hopkins. In 1984 he then helmed his first and only mainstream blockbuster, the wildly ambitious ‘Dune’, which opened to mixed reviews and a flat box office. It was a colossal effort and to many a triumph, but it remained a sore spot for the director.
But Mr. Lynch truly found his auteur’s voice with ‘Blue Velvet’, a small-town crime thriller which starred Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey Beaumont, a young man who finds a severed human ear in a field. Beaumont takes the ear local police in a paper bag, eventually pitting himself against a terrifying and frankly psychotic Dennis Hopper as the underworld villain Frank Booth. Laura Dern plays his ingenue girlfriend and Isabella Rosselini does a star turn as the deeply conflicted and abused femme fatale. Beginning with roses over a white picket fence, it quickly spirals into some of the most inventive cinema of the last thirty years.
Film Producer Donald Rosenfeld, who befriended Lynch while filming the documentary ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ (Lynch is featured in it) said “Blue Velvet remains, to my mind, one of the unequivocal cinematic masterpieces of the last forty years. It’s hard to think of any other film that reaches its iconic status or even touches it.” Mr. Lynch had hit creative and critical pay dirt, and he continued to mine the unique cinematic world he had created. Nearly everything that followed would be variations on a Blue Velvet theme.
In 1990 this reached a fever pitch with the wildly popular ‘Twin Peaks’, a drama centering on the small lumber town of the title. Allegedly about the murder of the young Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee) it once again featured MacLachlan as the unfailingly earnest FBI agent Dale Cooper. The premise, however, quickly became a pretext for increasingly labyrinthine and weird subplots. Agent Cooper would fall into trances, contact a backwards talking dwarf and a giant, discover a white slave ring, and eventually becomes trapped in the infamous ‘Black Lodge’, a sinister interdimensional worm hole.
The American viewing public lapped it up for three seasons, eagerly anticipating each new wonky sidetrack and character. ‘Log lady’- a recluse who carried a swaddled log as an infant and dropped cryptic clues- was a favorite. “Who killed Laura Palmer” became a national obsession or par with “Who shot JR?”. Laura Palmer’s ‘secret diary’ (penned by Lynch’s daughter Jennifer) even appeared on bookshelves as an accompaniment to the series. It sold briskly.
This spectacular success meant Lynch was free to pursue his own vision. “Wild At Heart” features Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern as rock n roll rebels pursued by a vengeful mother (with continuous references to the Wizard of Oz). “Lost Highway” follows Bill Pullman as a LA jazz musician tormented by jealously and a particularly creepy Andrew Blake, who may be the devil himself. “Mulholland Drive” which features Naomi Watts as a has been Hollywood actress reinventing herself as a fresh faced ingenue, won him Best Director at Cannes in 2001.
Mr. Lynch’s last cinematic effort, “Inland Empire”- starring Laura Dern as an actor possessed by her own character- was his most unconstrained effort, taking viewers on a three-hour odyssey that revisited many of his old obsessions, but often careened off into incoherence (much of the film was improvised). Devotees of Lynch hailed it as a triumph, while others claimed they’d had enough of the disorienting Lynchian funhouse. A 2021 recap of Twin Peaks, titled ‘The Return’ was his last television project. It galvanized original fans but seemed more intent on pursuing his own private obsessions without any guide ropes. Some critics raved that he had extended television into unprecedented areas. Others simply scratched their heads.
Lynch became a beloved public figure in his later years. In person he was surprisingly earnest and guileless, not so much sinister film auteur as the head of a small-town masonic lodge. He was generally given free rein to pursue personal and public projects at will. A lifelong practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, he opened a school for ‘consciousness-based education’, The David Lynch Foundation. He would also pop up in unexpected cameos, such as his delightful turn as a crabby and eccentric NBC executive in Season 4 of the Louis CK comedy series, “Louie”.
His late output notwithstanding, Lynch’s status as a titan of contemporary film and television is unquestioned. His imprint on the American zeitgeist is indelible and incontrovertible. His biggest contribution was to expose the American cinematic unconscious for all to see, and he did so by erasing the line between dream and reality at every opportunity. Not since Frederico Fellini has a director done so much to explore film as an oneiric medium. Lynch saw the American dream through a glass darkly, as only he could, and the public is infinitely richer for it. WM
David Jager is an arts and culture writer based in New York City. He contributed to Toronto's NOW magazine for over a decade, and continues to write for numerous other publications. He has also worked as a curator. David received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 2021. He also writes screenplays and rock musicals.
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