In Memoriam: David Lynch (1946–2025) – the surrealist who brought experimentalism into the mainstream

By: Peter Bradshaw, film critic
Translation: Telegrafi.com

No director has interpreted the American dream with more pure innocence than David Lynch. That could be the title of any of his films. Lynch understood that if the United States dreamed of security, prosperity, suburban homes, and white picket fences, it also dreamed of the opposite: escape, danger, adventure, sex, and death. The two collided, opening up hidden chasms and potholes on the dead-end highway to happiness.

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Lynch was a filmmaker who found gateways to alternative existences and navigated them as if they were erogenous zones, humid spaces of existential possibility. He was a great American surrealist, but his vision was so unique that he became something more: a great fabulist, an opponent of conservative narrative. His narratives split and spun in a logic that did not follow from argument. Lynch was unique; he adapted the tradition of experimentalism in the cinema of artists like Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid with [the silent short film] Afternoon networks [Afternoon Masses, 1943] and brought it into the commercial mainstream, mixing it with pulp noir, soap opera, camp comedy, erotic thriller, and supernatural horror.

Who was Lynch most like? Maybe Luis Buñuel of the pioneering 1920s, Douglas Sirk of the Hollywood of the 1940s, Alejandro Jodorowsky of the counterculture of the 1970s. Or maybe [painter] Edward Hopper (whose painting Office at night there is something typical of Lynch) or Andrew Wyeth and his mysterious painting, Christina's World. But “lynch” can also mean mainstream or even conservatism. Lynch himself wasn’t kidding when he spoke of the pride of being an Eagle Scout in his childhood.

And he could direct films with conventional (albeit strange) plots, like The Elephant Man [The Elephant Man], with John Hurt playing the role of a Victorian circus performer, or the adaptation of Frank Herbert's work, Dune [Dune, ] – even The true story [The Straight Story], an emotional film (the title of which suggests simplicity), based on the true story of an elderly man [Alvin Straight] who traveled from Iowa to Wisconsin on his tractor to visit his elderly brother. Lynch has always been passionate about American culture, and Steven Spielberg cleverly cast him in the role of Western legend John Ford in his film Fablemen [The Fabelmans].

But, with his films, like his dark debut, Rubber head [Eraserhead], and (what for me is his masterpiece) Mulholland Drive [Mulholland Drive], a dark fantasy about Hollywood despair, he showed that the challenge to normality was erotic. He emphasized this with his concept of eerie sounds and musical scores inspired by his longtime collaborator, composer Angelo Badalamenti. I will always remember the atmosphere at the Cannes Film Festival after the film's first screening in 2001, when we were all intoxicated and agitated by how sensual and strange the film was, how ironic and how erotic.

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is that his ongoing television project, Twin Peaks [Twin Peaks], anticipated the cultural prestige of today's long-running series by decades. In fact, neither The sopranos [The Sopranos] and neither Crazy [Mad Men] do not reach the level of Pixit's Twins in terms of an authorial work. Watch the first two seasons of Pixit's Twins from the 1990s, the story of an honest FBI agent (played by Kyle MacLachlan) who investigates the metaphysical mystery of a violent murder, and watch as the second season ends with a promise to continue the story 25 years later – and, in fact, that is what happened. The soap opera-like look of 1990s TV dramas was replaced in the third season by a darker, more melancholic aesthetic typical of high-end XNUMXst-century productions. But that was entirely Lynch’s work.

"This whole world is wild at heart and strange on the surface!" cries a desperate Lula, played by Laura Dern in the film. Wild at heart [Wild at Heart] of David Lynch, stricken in her miserable motel room, pregnant with the child of her lover – namely, the convicted murderer Sailor, a Presleyan figure played by Nicolas Cage. However, it is not exactly a depiction of the world as Lynch sees it. In the macabre Blue velvet [Blue Velvet, 1986], the world is normal on the surface but strange deep down – and these two layers cannot exist without each other. A normal-looking young man, played by Kyle MacLachlan, while walking through a suburban American utopia, finds a severed ear on the ground: a symbol, perhaps, of the director’s hypersensitive perception of the hidden and the American underworld. Soon, this young man will develop an obsession with a nightclub singer – part of Lynch’s long-standing obsession with secret cabarets and occult theatrical rituals, as well as his particular fascination with the red curtain that flutters and conceals mystery. A Freudian image, no doubt, but perhaps above all a Lynchian image.

Highway to nowhere [Lost Highway, 1997] was one of his double-identity hallucinations, in which troubled saxophonist Bill Pullman and his wife (Patricia Arquette) are terrified by an anonymous stalker who has left videotapes of the exterior of their house on their doorstep – an idea later borrowed by Michael Haneke in the film hiding [Cache].

But, for me, Molholland remains his masterpiece of eroticism and despair, a brilliant interpretation of the fact that, in Hollywood, disappointment is a toxic residue of the dream factory. The relationship between Naomi Watts, with her large, innocent eyes, and Laura Harring, an enigmatic and troubled woman, is one of the most tense friendships in modern American cinema.

I've only met Lynch once, online: a video chat about his photography exhibition in London, at the Photographers' Gallery. One of the people who asked questions was someone who had had a passing role in The Elephant Man and Lynch was immediately moved, insisting that he be brought to the platform to see her face; she reluctantly complied, not wanting to make the entire evening a memory of him with her. He was always trying to find ways to take his audience into new territories of fear, desire, and pleasure. /Telegraph/