We lost artist David Lynch on Jan. 15, just five days before his 79th birthday. As a writer, director, painter and designer, he spent his entire career finding ways to map the human subconscious, making movies that feel like glimpses of half-remembered dreams, scripts that turn dream logic into tactile reality and paintings that found more layers behind the darkness than we ever knew were there. I’m as guilty as anyone for overusing the words “genius” or “visionary,” so instead of using either word to describe David Lynch I will just say this: Thank you, David Lynch, you were one of the best to ever do it.
What I find so fascinating about Lynch is that if his work is viewed outside of the context of who he was and his history, Lynch appears to be a tortured artist, high on his own supply. But he grew up in the land of white picket fences and perfectly manicured lawns with a loving mother and father he doesn’t remember ever hearing fight a single time.
After spending so much of his youth up to his neck in the Middle American Dream, finding the darkness contrasted against the smooth, unblemished surface became a recurring motif in almost everything he made.
One of his earliest memories as a child was playing outside with his brother and seeing a naked, crying woman walking down the neighborhood street. This became one of the seeds, and most haunting images, of his 1986 masterpiece, Blue Velvet.
But again, Lynch wasn’t some tortured artist using the canvas of cinema as a form of therapy. He thought being an artist mostly comprised drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and, every once and awhile, meeting a woman. Yet, looking at his earlier work, one would absolutely think he had a traumatic childhood that he was still working out ways to process.
His 1970 short, The Grandmother, follows a little kid who is neglected and abused by his parents, so he plants some seeds and grows a weird grandmother. It’s an amazing short, filled with so many of the absurdist touchstones that came to define his style.
Lynch always took details from his life as inspiration. Moving from the idyllic small town life to a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia—contrasted with the unexpected pregnancy of his wife and birth of daughter, Jennifer—provided the spine for 1977’s Eraserhead, a body-horror experiment in surrealistic panic that feels steeped in the fear of fatherhood and the paranoia of a violent world outside one’s door.
But Lynch himself said that not a single critic ever really understood Eraserhead for what it was trying to say, so please don’t mistake anything I say about his work to remotely resemble his intentions. I always assumed most of his work was about finding the rot at the center of the American Dream, but the older I get, the more I realize it’s always been more than that. There is no singular theme. His work is like life; only understood while living.
His 1990 insane howl at the moon, Wild at Heart, imprinted Lynch into my brain at 12 years old. Seeing the fearlessness of how he moved the camera, the pure uninhibited insanity he conjured from his actors and luxuriating in the dreamy darkness of Angelo Badalamenti’s score made me realize that there were no borders to cinema—that as large as one’s imagination could possibly be, movies were still a wide-enough canvas on which to splash those ideas.
Without Wild at Heart, without the epiphany of the limitlessness of art, I’d be a different person today.
It doesn’t matter where someone discovered him. Whether it was the grime of 1997’s Lost Highway, the calm quiet of 1999’s The Straight Story, the neo-noir splash of sex and death of 2001’s Mulholland Drive, the flawlessly framed The Elephant Man from 1980, the original water-cooler show Twin Peaks or even the sci-fi insanity of 1984’s Dune, Lynch’s work touched everyone differently. Just a gentle tap on the shoulder before his booming voice asked if they wanted to see something weird.
David Lynch changed movies forever. Changed me forever. In my youth, I spent so much time trying to decode his work so I could be the smartest person at Denny’s with my watery, black coffee and bottomless pack of Camels, arguing what Lynch meant with the ending of Mulholland Drive. But then a quote I read of his quieted that part of my brain and just let me exist with his art instead of trying to tame it.
He told the Los Angeles Times in 1989, “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”
