How David Lynch became an icon of cinema

Thursday morning I happened to reread Pauline Kael’s classic 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” A few hours later, I found out that David Lynch had died, and a line from the play immediately came back to me: “The world doesn’t work the way the textbooks said it did, and we’re different from what our parents and teachers expected . us to be.” I sensed Lynch’s critical spirit in Kael’s remark. Lynch, more than any filmmaker of his time, faced carefully argued lies and reckoned with the burden of alienated identities. Many films are called revelatory and visionary, but Lynch’s films seem to exemplify these terms. He sees what is kept invisible and reveals what is kept carefully hidden, and his visions shatter the veneer of respectability to depict in fantasy form unbearable realities.

With “Blue Velvet,” from 1986, Lynch instantly became the exemplary filmmaker of the Reagan era, blasting through its surrounding hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness with methods that went beyond observational reporting. In a drama about the criminal underbelly of a small town, he uncovers sinister plans involving officials leading double lives. The plots are less like coherent conspiracies than like the mysterious reverberations of dreams—violent, predatory dreams that seem like the underside of the virtuous myths Americans eagerly bought from their Hollywood president. For all its sharp-eyed precision, the film feels flung onto the screen in the heat of artistic and diagnostic urgency. Lynch’s work, with its bold invention and exquisite realization of symbolic details and uncanny worlds, recalls cinema’s other great surrealist, Luis Buñuel, but with its specifically American and local perspective it also brings to mind a cinematic update of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.”

Lynch’s ambition came to full bloom in a monumental work for network television, a medium that rarely welcomes the monumental and ambitious: “Twin Peaks,” whose two seasons aired in 1990 and 1991. For all its imaginative riots and hallucinatory depths, the show was another portrait of a Winesburg-style town and of the even more elaborately intertwined relationships between a teeming cast of characters. And like “Blue Velvet” it was a tale of crime and impunity, of sexual violence and the extensive effort to keep it hidden. Lynch expands on the dark insights of “Blue Velvet” to turn the seen world upside down—the disturbed surfaces and unsettling phantasmagoria of a small town and the equally uncanny strangeness of its ordinary life, all of which coalesce into a single horror, the murder of a teenage girl named Laura Palmer. As groundbreaking as the series was, it didn’t quite live up to its promise (the format of television remained strong), and when it was cancelled, it quickly became clear that Lynch himself wasn’t done with it. After directing only six of its thirty episodes, he followed the series with a feature film, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992), a prequel that allowed him, essentially self-revising, to deepen the imaginative subjectivity that the series had. had touched.

Lynch, who was born in 1946, completed his first feature, “Eraserhead,” an ultra-low-budget production, in 1977, and from that wildly inventive beginning to the end of his career, he experienced the paradox of surrealism—the effort to put in pictures a fundamental literary concept. Lynch started out as a painter, but also became a writer, poet, memoirist and screenwriter (not to mention a musician). The painterly surrealism of a Dalí or a Magritte is endowed with humor because it is easy to manipulate resemblances to reality with a brush. (It’s also why the fantasy worlds of most CGI spectacles are so grimly self-serious: A single dot of self-deprecation and the overinflated franchises would pop like balloons.) But in literature, it’s not easy to stop making sense, and even harder to make. apparent nonsense begins to make sense. The risk of surrealist cinema is that its most important inventions are conceptual – creating the wildness on the page and simply executing it on the screen. “Eraserhead” is a minimal yet spectacular proof of concept for movies that come to life in stunning dreamlike visuals despite being bound to burdensome and inconsequential scripts. Still, Mel Brooks, recognizing the power of Lynch’s ideas, hired him to direct “The Elephant Man” (1980), which Brooks co-produced. In retrospect, the film seems arguably one of his least Lynchian works, and yet his empathetic sensibility and his instinct for passionately tactile imagery combine to create a masterpiece of historical reconstruction.

Lynch followed this with his 1984 adaptation of “Dune,” a project doomed by studio interference that nonetheless suggests how radically, given a chance, he could reconfigure familiar genres. He found himself in a dilemma similar to Buñuel’s, whose first films were collages and parodies, and who eventually broke into the business by channeling his wry symbolism into familiar narrative formats. So did Lynch, but the formats and studios he faced were particularly unforgiving, and he found a distinctly modern solution—but it took him a painfully long time to do so.

After “Twin Peaks” and “Fire Walk with Me,” Lynch entered strange new terrain: inward. His film “Lost Highway”, from 1997, is an intricate variation on noir themes; even as it loses itself in its own frantic ways, these nonetheless give rise to magnificently inventive stylistic flourishes that suggest a self-focused psychoanalysis of Hollywood genres and tropes. The film represented a major step on what turned out to be a long and winding road to his ultimate cinematic reinvention. He stayed with Hollywood in “Mulholland Drive,” from 2001, which started as a TV pilot and acting like it, smothered under the bulk of the story. Near the end, the film is energized by a mirroring, an identity switch as cleverly conceived as it is clearly filmed. Yet the psychological resonances, though deep, are vague, and the symbolic touches thin and ordinary compared to the intricacies of “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks.” A mystery that remains mysterious, “Mulholland Drive” is the kind of puzzle that could almost have been designed to generate discourse, and as such has become an object of cinephile veneration.

“Mulholland Drive” was not a commercial success, and as the studios became increasingly closed to the directors’ freewheeling ideas, Lynch’s career stalled. Still, he continued his explorations into the film world, making “Inland Empire” (2006), which he shot on consumer-grade video, and making his own film. This film was conceived experimentally: Lynch began without a script, but instead wrote day by day during filming. The result was as text-bound as if the script had been settled from the start, despite the flashes of wonder and urgent escapes from Lynch’s camerawork and the special effects made possible by video production. Such moments of creative exhilaration were periodic embellishments of a diffuse stroke.

As he pointed his camera deep into his own environment, filmmaking, there was one very important place that Lynch had not pointed it: at himself. This was about to change, and it led to one of the greatest displays of artistic self-invention in recent cinema. His next major project, “Twin Peaks: The Return,” which aired on Showtime in 2017, added across its eighteen episodes (all of which he directed), to nearly as much screen time as all of his theatrical features combined. “The Return” expanded the scope of the conspiratorial chaos surrounding the murder of Laura Palmer to cosmic dimensions; it could almost have been subtitled “Apocalypse Now,” and conceptually it does more to fulfill the implications of that phrase than Francis Ford Coppola’s film. Lynch’s film also fulfills the conceptual implications of the director’s own lifelong exploration of his own unconscious, of his own spontaneous and extravagant imaginings.

Throughout Lynch’s career, when his repertoire of images seemed unbound, as in “Inland Empire,” the effect was like hearing him talk about his dreams — experiences that only he had had and that to some extent remained uncommunicated. When images were tightly bound, as in “Twin Peaks,” the effect often seemed intended to make sense rather than truly embodying the free flow of the unconscious. But in “The Return,” Lynch often pushed beyond the script’s boundaries in sequences of performance, even humor, so startling it seemed to burst through the screen itself. The most decisive application of his newfound sense of tone and performance, the main new way in which he put his own immediate powers of invention into the series, was to put himself, personally, physically, at the center of the show. In “The Return,” Lynch reprises the role of FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole from the first two seasons and the film, but he now makes the character both dramatic and visually prominent – and he brings Cole to life with a flamboyantly inventive performance for battle. Lynch plays Cole as a secular prophet, a grand and monumental presence who dispenses wisdom and judgment with a self-deprecating yet oracular intensity.

Not only is Lynch’s performance one of the best by any filmmaker appearing in his or her own work; it is one that characterizes a cinematic era. In a gradual, week-by-week manner, Lynch did what his peers in world cinema, such as Agnès Varda (“The Gleaners and I”, “The Beaches of Agnès”) and Jafar Panahi (“This Is Not a Film”) ,” “Taxi”), would do so when industrial or political conditions made it difficult for them to make films: they put themselves in the frame and emphasize their personalities. By making themselves the most distinctive face and voice in their mightiest directorial project, Lynch made himself the icon of his own art – and indeed an important emblem of the cinema of his time.

Still, this incarnation is a troubled one, bearing the brunt of the horrors, carnal and social and moral, that Lynch brought to the screen throughout his career. He is first and foremost a visual visionary, but not only visual: there is more Dostoevsky in his films than in Visconti’s “White Nights” or Bresson’s “Une Femme Douce”; more Kafka than in Welles’ “The Trial”; more Freud than in Huston’s “Freud” or Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method”. It’s terrifying to imagine that beneath Lynch’s stoic and heartfelt spirit he holds the screams and slashes, the sirens of horror and shudder of fear, the tangled world of surface evils and deeper evils that he presented in his films. The signs of this inner turmoil can be seen in a film like “The Straight Story,” from 1999, his gentle vision of an elderly man’s long drive on a lawnmower to visit his estranged brother. The film plays like what those who don’t dream of horrors would call a living dream – a secular redemptive vision of love and solidarity. It is a vision that Lynch’s climactic screen presence in “The Return” embodies, as a survivor of the knowledge and forebodings he carelessly dispensed for half a century, from which he emerged granitic principled, unflinchingly humane, empathetic steadfast to the end.