
Photo by Scott Dudelson - Getty Images
David Lynch
In an era of supposedly “transgressive” or “quirky” programming available by the shovelful on multiple platforms, it’s gotten hard to recall the shock of “Twin Peaks” when it debuted, April 8, 1990, on ABC. Lynch’s fans knew what to expect after Blue Velvet and surprisingly, the general public was intrigued. Despite the skepticism of network executives, “Twin Peaks” earned high ratings and was rewarded with a second season. The discovery of the dead body of a homecoming queen led into a web of mysteries in that tree-shrouded small town. That town was Peyton Place in the Twilight Zone—a soap opera set in a multiverse. Lynch and his collaborators composed it like a puzzle with missing pieces.
“Twin Peaks” drew circles of avid fans who gathered in emulation of Agent Cooper with pie and coffee every Thursday night for the latest episode. This was still the age before binge-watching. Good television was like good wine, savored slowly, with expectation.
Lynch introduced himself to what was once rightly called an alternative audience through midnight screenings of his indie film Eraserhead (1977), a funny yet disturbing scenario shot in black and white by Lynch with his film school friends over a three-year span whose numerous delays resulted from lack of money. You couldn’t make a film by pointing a phone at something in those days. Eraserhead plays out like a sequence of bad dreams during a long restless night of toss and turn.
Alerted by Eraserhead’s mutant baby and deformed torch singer, producer Mel Brooks hired Lynch to direct The Elephant Man (1980). Loosely based on the true story of John Merrick, disfigured and displayed as a circus attraction by cruel handlers, The Elephant Man speaks to the humane sensibility underlying Lynch’s body of work. Although Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990) included a gallery of sinister, even evil figures, Lynch was sympathetic to characters who understood right from wrong. Light won out over darkness, even if that darkness will inevitably return.
Most film critics didn’t enjoy the privileges of Roger Ebert, who could demand a second screening of an upcoming film before he wrote his review. Pity the average critic in a “secondary market” such as Milwaukee, scribbling notes furiously in the dark, trying to keep up with Lynch’s trains of thought. His films demand repeated viewings. They reveal more each time and give up their secrets slowly (if at all).
With Lynch’s death on January 15, I pulled out my DVD of Mulholland Dr. (2001). The film puzzled me when first released, and after watching it again, I don’t pretend to have the last word (or even my final words), but here are some thoughts, starting with the most obvious.
Mulholland Dr. is about Hollywood’s smarmy side, an often darkly humorous rebuke not only to vacuous stars and smug moneymen but arrogant auteurs as well. And then there is that persistent Lynch subtext of a deep nonstate of sinister, stop-at-nothing figures operating from mysterious chambers to inscrutable ends. Of course, Mulholland Dr. is also about envy, treachery, jealousy and deceit, circling through a labyrinth of delusion, fantasy, memories and false memories. It’s about the way we represent reality to ourselves and how that representation has been shaped by Hollywood. Demons lurk in the shadows and electric lights flicker at the approach of the uncanny.
One way to think about Lynch is to remember that he was a painter by education and inclination. His films can be seen as paintings in motion—not narratives even though they tell stories, and neither realist nor abstract. They most resemble the Pointillism and Fauvism of late 19th and early 20th century French artists who composed pictures from bursts or pinpoints of emotionally vivid color. And color was as vital to Lynch’s filmmaking as sound and music; the existing songs incorporated into his soundtracks do not merely establish time and place (Martin Scorsese) but are essential to the emotional tone. Another approach is to remember that Lynch was an Eagle Scout from a small town shocked by what’s hidden behind the bland facades of respectability.
Lynch’s last feature film was Inland Empire (2006), a movie I disliked as repetitious and dull as I furiously scribbled notes in the dark at the Times Cinema’s advance screening. I never gave it a second chance, but maybe I should. Although Lynch’s films are entertaining, understanding them can be hard work. They demand the willingness to suspend all preconceptions of how movies should tell their stories, especially the way Hollywood represents reality.