Hyperbole is hard to avoid when a great artist leaves us, but it requires no enormous stretch to place David Lynch, who has died at 78, among the greatest film-makers of his generation. Maybe the greatest.
In 2016, a poll of 177 film critics voted Mulholland Drive, his characteristically Möbius-shaped 2001 drama, as the best film of the 21st century. So dedicated was Cahiers du Cinéma, the bible of French cineastes, to the legend that, in 2019, it named Twin Peaks: The Return as the best film of the outgoing decade. This despite that uncommon work being a television series of 18 episodes.
Such parlour games are always pointless. More so when dealing with someone so singular as David Lynch. Critics could get away with calling him a surrealist, but that obscured the emotional truths in which his work dealt.
This was apparent as far back as the unclassifiable Eraserhead, his feature debut from 1977. Midnight audiences reeled at the weird baby who wailed like a tortured cat at night. They laughed at the warbling lady in the radiator. But Henry Spencer, the confused, hurricane-haired protagonist played by Jack Nance, generated the sort of pathos earlier audiences encountered in Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
That was down to an unclassifiable directorial sensibility that combined a gift for depravity with an enthusiasm for the wholesome iconography of small-town USA. You saw that in later work such as Blue Velvet from 1986 and the first, era-defining series of Twin Peaks in 1990.
“Well I grew up in the 1950s,” he told this writer in 2007. “Everyone was driving the sort of gorgeous cars Americans really want. There was just so much optimism, and that must seep into the process.”
Lynch was born in Montana and spent much of his childhood being shuffled about the country as his dad, a research scientist with the US Department of Agriculture, moved from posting to posting. Even after his death, his social media accounts, acknowledging that obsession with small-town Americana, poignantly identify him as “Eagle Scout”.
He began making short films, such as Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), when at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He later moved on to the American Film Institute Conservatory and set to work on what would become Eraserhead. Unsurprisingly for something without precedent, the monochrome urban nightmare took time to gather an audience.
By 1980 it was more than a cult hit, and, when Mel Brooks came to produce The Elephant Man, he was persuaded that Lynch was the man for the job. “You’re a madman! I love you! You’re in,” Brooks allegedly said after a viewing of Eraserhead.
Starring John Hurt as the deformed John Merrick, the film suggested that Lynch might have a career in mainstream cinema. It secured eight Academy Award nominations including those for best director and best picture. It told a linear story. It was based on real events. Dino De Laurentiis, the flamboyant Italian producer, was sufficiently convinced of Lynch’s commercial potential to hire him for a ruinously expensive, critical derided adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. “It wasn’t something I should have done,” Lynch told me. “But fate plays such a huge role in our lives.”
What had set The Elephant Man apart was the oddness knitted into the often sentimental narrative: the hissing gas lamps, the nightmares of tramping pachyderms. De Laurentiis, no fool, recognised this and took on production duties for Blue Velvet. That film, starring Kyle MacLachlan as a young man embroiled in sinister doings around a small-town idyll, was not a financial smash, but it sat at the heart of fashionable discourse and, dragging Dennis Hopper back to stardom along the way, set in motion the director’s high period. In April of 1990 Twin Peaks became a sensation on US TV. A month later, Lynch’s Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It seemed, for a brief magic moment, as if his version of the avant-garde could really sit at the centre of mainstream culture.
It was not to be. Lynch continued to be highly admired – indeed, worshipped – by critics and fans, but he found it increasingly difficult to get feature films financed. “David Lynch can’t get money to make a film. He cannot make a feature. David Lynch!” the American director Jim Jarmusch yelled furiously at me in Cannes six years ago. “He could only make Twin Peaks: The Return because there was a precedent. After breaking his heart, they relented.”
When the work came it remained as strong and distinctive as ever. Mulholland Drive is a masterpiece. Inland Empire from 2006 is still being decoded. There were, infuriatingly, no further features (unless you allow Cahiers’ definition). Lynch himself, married four times, always a delight in person, remained as extraordinary a creation as his untouchable films. And he never explained.
“The viewers are human beings themselves,” he told The Irish Times. “They are like the receivers and have to figure it out for themselves.”
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