David Lynch: The Great American Surrealist Who Made Experimentalism Mainstream | David Lynch

No director has ever interpreted the American dream with more innocent innocence than David Lynch. It could be the title of any of his movies. Lynch saw that if America dreamed of safety and prosperity and suburban drives and picket fences, it also dreamed of the opposite: of escape, danger, adventure, sex and death. And the two collided, opening chasms and sinkholes in the lost highway to happiness.

Lynch was a filmmaker who found portals to alternate existences and groped in them as if they were erogenous zones, humid openings of existential possibility. He was the great American Surrealist, but his vision was so distinctive that he became something else: a great fabulist, a great anti-narrative deviant, his stories split and swirled in non-sequiturs and Escher loops. Lynch was unique in that he took a tradition of experimentalism in films such as Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon 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? Perhaps Luis Buñuel from the pioneering 1920s, Douglas Sirk from the Hollywood 1940s, Alejandro Jodorowsky from the counterculture 1970s. Or maybe Edward Hopper (whose painting Office at night has something Lynchian about it) or Andrew Wyeth and his mysterious midwest tableau Christina’s world. But “Lynchian” could just as easily mean mainstream or even conservative. Lynch himself wasn’t kidding when he talked about his pride in being an Eagle Scout in his childhood.

And he could direct conventionally plotted (if generically freaky) films like The Elephant Man, with John Hurt as the exploited Victorian fairground attraction, and his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s SF standard Dune – and even the emotive and gentle The Straight Story (whose title admits its extraordinary quality), based on the true story of an old man who drove his lawn tractor from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his estranged brother. Lynch has always been passionate about Americana, and Steven Spielberg quickly cast Lynch as western legend John Ford in his film The Fabelmans.

But with films like his unsettling grave debut Eraserhead and (what for me is his masterpiece) Mulholland Drive, a dark fantasy of Hollywood despair, he showed that the challenge to normality was itself erotic. He emphasized it with the pounding and moaning sound design and inspired musical scores from his long-time collaborator, composer Angelo Badalamenti. I will always remember driving around with everyone at the Cannes Film Festival after the first screening of Mulholland Drive in 2001, all of us giddy and nervous about how very sensual and strange it had been, how witty and how erotic.

Perhaps most notable of all, Lynch’s ongoing small-screen project Twin Peaks presaged decades of contemporary cultural prestige for streaming long-form television. And indeed, none of today’s Sopranos and Mad Men match Twin Peaks for auteur television. Watch the first two seasons of ’90s Twin Peaks, the story of a straight-laced FBI man (played by Kyle MacLachlan) who investigates the metaphysical mystery of a violent murder, and see how the other ends up vowing to collect history over 25 years – and it actually did. The brightly lit, theatrically soapy look of the ’90s TV drama was replaced in the third season by the darker, more somber look of 21st century high-end television production. But it was Lynch, through and through.

“This whole world is wild at heart and weird at the top!” wails Laura Dern’s distraught Lula in Lynch’s Wild at Heart, despondent in her squalid motel room, pregnant with her lover’s child—that is, convicted murderer Sailor, a Presleyan figure played by Nicolas Cage. It’s actually not quite a description of the world as Lynch sees it. In the macabre Blue Velvet from 1986, the world is normal on top, weird underneath, but these layers cannot exist without each other. A clean-cut guy played by MacLachlan, walking home in a suburban American utopia, finds a severed ear on the ground: a symbol of the director’s own hypersensitive perception of underground movements and hidden America. Soon this man is to conceive an obsession with a nightclub singer: part of Lynch’s own long-standing obsession with secret cabarets and occult theatrical rites and his particular fascination with the red curtain that ripples and stirs with the mystery it conceals. A Freudian image, yes, but perhaps Lynchian is the substitute adjective.

Lost Highway, in 1997, was one of his double hallucinations, in which Bill Pullman’s troubled saxophonist and his wife (Patricia Arquette) are terrorized by an anonymous tormentor who leaves videocassettes on their doorstep with footage of the exterior of their house – an idea later borrowed by Michael Haneke in his film Hidden.

But for me, Mulholland Drive is his masterpiece of eroticism and despair, a brilliant riff on how disillusionment in Hollywood is a toxic waste byproduct of the dream factory. The relationship between Naomi Watts’ saucer-eyed ingénue and Laura Harring’s enigmatic troubled woman is one of the great fraught friendships in modern American cinema.

I myself only met Lynch once, and that was online: a video-linked Q&A at the unveiling of his photographs at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. One of the questioners was someone who had been a walk-on in The Elephant Man, and Lynch was instantly hugely excited and insisted that she be brought up on the platform so he could see her face; he could hardly be persuaded not to simply make the rest of the evening his reminiscences with her. Lynch was always plotting ways to smuggle his audience into new territories of fear, desire and pleasure.