In Memoriam David Lynch

Few film-world insiders could have predicted that the maker of cult sensation Eraserhead (1977) would go on to become a world-famous Hollywood director, as well as the owner of a brand of coffee and progenitor of a film style known as ‘Lynchian’. Yet this is exactly what happened in the case of David Keith Lynch, born in 1946 in a typical American provincial town.

Nothing in his youth growing up in small-town America hinted at the sinister – at times violent – films Lynch would go on to make. Or did he sense, even as a child, that another world lurked behind the pristine decor of well-maintained houses, verdant lawns and white picket fences? A world that didn’t stroke with the sunny optimism and can-do mentality America prided itself on? A world where irreproachable, hard-working citizens are in thrall to urges and desires welling up from the subconscious – that dark realm uncovered by Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud?

Maniacal bad guy

Lynch didn’t like to answer questions about the origins, meaning and intentions behind his films. Psychology – that was for others: film journalists, academics and concerned guardians of decency and morality, who frowned upon the actions of maniacal bad guy Frank Booth in Blue Velvet or the trail of havoc that follows lovers Lula and Sailor in Wild at Heart.

Dreams; absurd, inimitable plot twists; violence; sexual manipulation; hidden desires; an indefinable sense of threat: these are just a few of the ingredients that run through Lynch’s filmography. Together, they make up the foundations of the style we know as Lynchian – an adjective that has now even found its way into the highly respected Oxford English Dictionary. The definition is: “Juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace.”

A universe all of his own

It is remarkable that Lynch – frequently described, both as a person and a director, as pleasant, relaxed and genial – was able to realise his artistic vision within the money-fuelled snake pit of Hollywood. Lynch was a painter who worked in the arena of American cinema, and in so doing proved that it was possible to fuse the traditions of Hollywood film noir, the police procedural and the thriller with those of European surrealism.

The result was a universe entirely his own – from the punky horror of Eraserhead to the almost mystical, unfathomable evocation of the worlds of film and acting in Mulholland Drive, where our experience of time and space becomes dislocated and strays far beyond the boundaries of dramaturgical logic.