David Lynch: The Auteur who Compromised for No One
It is always a strange feeling when someone you feel a sense of attachment to, but never personally knew, passes away. David Lynch’s work has always been very special to me, as it has to so many film fans. When you have spent so much of your time watching, listening, and thinking about the things they have produced, the distant loss becomes heavier. His particular, peculiar style has had such an impact on cinema that it could only be coined after his own name – Lynchian. A style so intrinsic to his films that, unlike other landmark styles or movements in cinema, it is nearly impossible to replicate. The masterful oscillation from the overtly pleasant every day, to the deeply sinister, became his trademark. His rejection of realism that modern cinema became so obsessed with is one that makes every one of his works feel so distinct. The dreamlike puzzle boxes he constructs make you question and second guess every frame you have just watched, but he never loses the heart or emotion in the story along the way. In doing so, Lynch always made you realise the potential of film and why you love the medium to begin with.
Lynch’s melodramatic, ironic, idyllic America most realised in the likes of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and portions of Mulholland Drive, only emphasised that behind every gleeful good morning and how do you do, there is a darkness that pervades each of our lives. Evil will always exist. No matter how hard we try to bury it, fight it, or escape it - its presence remains. This became the recurring idea that exists in many of his works (except in the ever so tender, The Straight Story), concluding in his final, and perhaps his most dour piece, Twin Peaks: The Return. While Lynch’s darkness is what people remember, especially due to iconic and disturbing characters like Frank Booth, Bob, or the Mystery Man; there is equally as much beauty.
Take his terrifying prequel to Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The film chronicles the last days of Laura Palmer before her murder as she is brutally tormented by beings from two plains of reality. It is an unsettling watch, but its final moments are something transcendental. As Laura enters the red room Lynch’s philosophy of death becomes clear as the hand of Dale Cooper rests on her shoulder as if to say, everything is okay, death is not the end. It is a striking image; as Sheryl Lee’s performance reaches an emotional crescendo that accentuates this liberation from torment.
Similarly, Mulholland Drive is a tragic noir with its own moments of genuine terror (Wimpey’s diner anyone?). But within its tragedy lies a dreamlike love story and an overarching eulogy to those Hollywood has forgotten and discarded, which too has its own dark yet ethereal conclusion.
Mulholland Drive is regarded as Lynch’s most acclaimed work (and my personal favourite), the pinnacle of post-modern filmmaking and one that people obsessed over, wanting to understand every detail to determine what is real and what is a dream. However, as Roger Ebert said, admitting to Lynch that he did not comprehend the film fully, “I understand it emotionally and that’s the important thing” and Lynch replied, “Absolutely.” To understand film is to empathise with film and that is all that truly matters.
While the likes of Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Fire Walk with Me and Mulholland Drive take unconventional approaches to their narratives and their emotional hearts, there are two outliers in his filmography that stand as his most conventional narratives, The Elephant Man and The Straight Story. Yet, even when Lynch played by more ordinary standards, he never lost sight of the humanity in his stories. In, The Elephant Man, John Merrick (John Hurt), a disfigured man abused and outcast by society, never loses his own will to express compassion, eventually inspiring many to do not just see him, but hear him.
The Straight Story, a film where an old man named, Alvin (Richard Farnsworth), drives a lawnmower across America to seek his brother’s forgiveness, is so earnest and charming, filled with Lynch’s Candour that only he could write. Farnsworth’s sympathetic performance makes Alvin so instantly likeable that his journey becomes irresistible to watch to the end. Just as in every Lynch film, these stories are lined with tragedy, as all our lives are. It never mattered how ordinary or extraordinary the world Lynch’s film inhabited, he always understood the human detail that made you connect to his stories.
There is a desire to ensure that film follows our own logic, that characters would react as we do, or it follows conventions we all understand. To that, Lynch famously said: “I don’t know why people think a film should make sense when they don’t accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.” Ironically, while being seen as the surrealist that he was, Lynch’s films understood the paradoxical and bewildering experience of life more so than any other filmmaker. Many of his lead characters journey in search for simple answers, only to be faced with the uncanny of their own mind. The search for life’s answers is futile, just as it is to grasp everything Lynch puts forward – and maybe that is just the point.
In the second season of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper utters the line: “Harry, I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”
Perhaps no sentence summates the experience of watching a David Lynch film quite so succinctly as this. Fitting that this comes from the mouth of his long-time friend and collaborator, Kyle McLaughlin, and the character Dale Cooper, who acts as the fictionalised parallel to Lynch himself. Strait-laced, optimistic and with an adoration for black coffee, Lynch’s spirit (and literal self) will remain forever in his dreamlike celluloid.