David Lynch showed us who we are in dark masterpieces like ‘Eraserhead’

It felt fitting that my city was on fire when I heard the news Thursday that David Lynch had died at the age of 78. Few filmmakers understood the complexities of Los Angeles better than Lynch did, and fewer still seemed so at home with its distinct, otherworldly mixture of beauty and disaster, sunshine and noir. Los Angeles is, after all, where he shot “Eraserhead,” his feature directorial debut about — well, how to describe this sui generis art film in which a lady lives in a radiator and a baby looks like a slimy, stinky bubble-headed alien . But now David Lynch is gone and another part of this town seems to have disappeared with him and I am lost.

Lynch was literally born in Missoula, Mont., but I think he was more properly born in Los Angeles. He went to school here, attended the American Film Institute (“Eraserhead” began as his student project!), and eventually set up a nearby compound where he began delivering lovely weather reports with his unique twang. In the one he recorded for 11 May 2020he sits at a desk with several pairs of glasses on and a mug to be filled black coffee. “Here in LA,” he says, squinting up a window, it’s “kind of cloudy, kind of foggy this morning.” He turns to the camera, ticks off the temperature, and adds, “It should all burn off pretty soon, and we’ll have sunshine and 70 degrees. Have a nice day.”

I always took his signs to have a great day literally. Lynch created some of the most disturbing and haunting work in cinema, but in interviews – many peppered with his trademark interjections like “jeepers” – he came across as approachable. If anything, he looked almost performatively normal, which made him seem even more alien. In 2001, the year his masterpiece “Mulholland Drive” was released, my friend, the critic John Powers, spoke with Lynch. “He still reminds me of Jimmy Stewart,” Powers wrote“not Mr. Smith going to Washington, but the pigheaded possessed from ‘Vertigo’.” Time had already taken its course: “His radiant smile has lost its innocence.”

I’ve rarely received as many angry responses as I did when my rave of “Mulholland Drive” ran. People didn’t just disagree; they seemed as outraged by my review as they were by the movie. Among the most furiously voiced criticisms was that it just didn’t make sense, leaving some viewers frustrated to the point of rage. The thing is, it had confused me as much as it had impressed me on first viewing. Movies should be obvious, but Lynch never was. Worse, he had made a work of art in an industry that despises not only art—unless it hangs on mansion walls—but also artists who do not adhere to its orthodoxy. If his relationship with Hollywood was difficult, it’s because he never seemed a part of it—artistically, spiritually, or otherwise—even when he made more establishment-initiated films.