‘The complicated zone where the beautiful and the damned collide’: remembering David Lynch
- Written by Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
The acclaimed American filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78. While a cause of death has yet to be publicly announced, Lynch, a lifelong tobacco enthusiast, revealed in 2024 he was suffering from emphysema.
Best known for films such as Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), as well as the hugely influential television series Twin Peaks (1990–91), Lynch – a committed transcendental meditator who worked across multiple mediums including painting, photography and music – was a true creative visionary.
Achieving mainstream commercial success while continually pushing artistic boundaries, Lynch’s impact on popular culture has been profound. The fact that the term “Lynchian”, shorthand for a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace, has passed into our shared cultural lexicon attests to this.
‘The beautiful and the damned’
In the introduction to Lynch’s memoir Room to Dream: A Life (2018), his coauthor Kristine McKenna writes:
We live in a realm of opposites, a place where good and evil, spirit and matter, faith and reason, innocent love and carnal lust, exist side by side in an uneasy truce; Lynch’s work resides in the complicated zone where the beautiful and the damned collide.
Drawing on the energies of surrealism, Lynch’s work delves into the darkest recesses of human behaviour while celebrating the haunting beauty and strangeness associated with everyday existence.
We see this in Blue Velvet. Now regarded as a true cinematic classic, Lynch’s violent and sexually explicit film caused widespread shock and consternation on initial release. It is an unflinching exploration of the darkness and depravity that lurks beneath the polished facade of suburbia.
The film’s iconic opening sequence sets the scene. A cloudless blue sky, red roses and a dazzlingly bright, white picket fence. A fire truck is moving at a glacial pace, a man hanging off the side, smiling and waving. Schoolchildren are ushered across the road, while a middle-aged white man tends to his lawn. Suddenly, he collapses, clutching his neck and writhing in agony.
Lynch’s camera zooms in on the grass until we are confronted with a writhing mass of insects hiding beneath the surface. The serene soundtrack has been replaced with an ominous, throbbing bass track.
Lynch signals the film’s descent into the realms of the unsettling and the grotesque. By the end, the shell-shocked viewer is left wondering: “Why is there so much trouble in this world?”
Lynch, whose body of work eschews easy and conformable answers, leaves it up to us to decide.
Becoming an artist
Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20 1946, spending his childhood moving between various states. For college, he set his sights on becoming a painter, and again moved around various art schools in different states – including a trip to Europe.
It was at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia when Lynch started to experiment with film as a medium. Despite dropping out two years later, he stayed in Philadelphia and continued to paint. He also made his first short film, the self-explanatory Six Men Getting Sick (1967).
In 1970, having been awarded a grant by the American Film Institute, Lynch moved to Los Angeles, where he studied filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory and commenced work on the film that eventually turned into Eraserhead.
Eraserhead, Lynch’s debut feature-length film, is a hallucinatory, nightmarish treatment of domestic life set in an industrial wasteland: a bizarre world where a cooked chicken squirms on a plate, a hideous mutant baby torments its despairing parents and a lady who lives inside a radiator sings mournful songs.
A celebrated career
Eraserhead was a hit with art house audiences and brought Lynch to the attention of Hollywood.
His first major commission was a film based on the life of Joseph Merrick, a severely disfigured Englishmen who became a celebrity in 19th century London. Featuring a memorable leading turn from John Hurt, The Elephant Man (1980) was a major critical and commercial success. It received eight Oscar nominations, including for Lynch as best director.
Having turned down the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), Lynch signed up to make Dune (1984), an ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel of the same name. The film was savaged by critics and did not play well with audiences.
Blue Velvet came next, along with Lynch’s second best director Oscar nomination.
The equally provocative Wild at Heart (1990), Lynch’s hyperviolent black comedy which doffs its cap in the direction of The Wizard of Oz, won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.
Twin Peaks was again interested in the more sinister side of small-town American life. Revolving around the murder of teenager Laura Palmer, the series combines elements of mystery, soap opera and absurdism. It was a worldwide phenomenon.
His other projects included the aggressively avant-gardist Lost Highway (1997), the unabashedly sentimental and idiosyncratic The Straight Story (1999), and the surrealist noir Mulholland Drive (2001).
Widely regarded as Lynch’s masterpiece, this elliptical fever-dream of a movie landed Lynch the best director award at Cannes in 2001. In 2022, it ranked eighth in Sight & Sound’s critics’ poll of the best films of all time.
A fitting end
Lynch continued to experiment with narrative and the possibilities of cinematic form. In what turned out to be his last feature film, the long and challenging Inland Empire (2006), Lynch embraced low-resolution digital video and pretty much dispensed with conventional narrative storytelling.
L-R: Emily Stofle, David Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan and Desiree Gruber at the screening of Twin Peaks at Cannes, 2017.
AP Photo/Alastair Grant
The sprawling complexity of Inland Empire paved the way for Lynch’s triumphant return to television. Lynch’s final substantive work, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) picks up 25 years after the original series left off.
This 18-episode series, which I believe stands as the equal – if not the superior of – of Mulholland Drive, serves as a fitting culmination of Lynch’s career.
In classic Lynchian fashion, it concludes on a genuinely shocking, hair-raising and ambiguous note, one that lingers with you long after the screen fades to black.
Authors: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
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