Last month, the world lost an icon. David Keith Lynch had many talents: beloved artist, sound designer, and part-time weatherman. Most importantly, he was a revolutionary film director who defied the constraints of genre, creating mind-bending, otherworldly films such as Mulholland Drive and the surrealist mystery series Twin Peaks.
To enter the world of Lynchian creations is to step into a world of unanswered questions, uncomfortable smiles, and norm-shattering worldviews that might leave you with a lingering craving for miniature roasted chicken and a cup of black coffee.
Throughout Lynch’s teenage years, his aspirations stood at the foot of an easel. After graduating from high school, the young painter ambitiously enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. During his practice, Lynch realized that his artwork was destined to come to life. While studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he conceived his first short film: Six Men Getting Sick (1967), a short repetitive animation of six disfigured individuals vomiting with the blare of a siren as its score. This surrealist expression of internal struggles and pent-up emotion is fundamental to Lynch’s stylistic manifestations. Lynch had an uncanny ability to surpass the limitations of normality and to challenge one’s patience, boundaries, and anxieties.
Lynch continued to add to his neo-horror collection of short films, exploring the unsettling, outlandish, and surreal. In 1977, he directed his first feature-length picture: the American cult classic, Eraserhead. This unfathomable and nightmarish production not only introduced to the film world Lynch’s eccentric, unnerving, and otherworldly capabilities but also composed his very own language of storytelling in cinema, which would become a trademark in his legacy as a filmmaker: the weaving together of the ordinary and the absurd beyond any recognizable distinction.
David Lynch’s films leave the audience in a state of limbo, dangling them between reality and fantasy. The terror you possess is concealed, hidden in the subtle and the discomforting, manifesting itself in the prolonged stare of a stranger, eerie grins, empty rooms, or a dark winding path that leaves you uneasy. His aesthetic is elusive; it blurs the line between dread and comfort. His ability to twist the intention behind a simple gesture in a way that feels disorienting and yet curiously personal suspends one’s mind in a dreamlike state. This sense of confusion and unease flows viscerally through Lynch’s characters, who intensify the mystery of these multi-dimensional realms. They provide you with the perspectives of the exposed, the perplexed, and those whose objective hangs in uncertainty, leaving observers no option but to investigate the intention behind their existence.
The obscurity and uncertainty of Lynch’s films that leave even his long-standing companions in bewilderment is a clear reflection of how the term “Lynchian” became an adjective. Even actors like Kyle Maclachlan, David Lynch’s lifelong friend who starred in five of his projects, admits, “No, I didn’t always understand what we were making. Sometimes I’d get a sense of it, and then like on a breeze, it was gone. Other times it seemed to exist on a plane that I wanted to reach but couldn’t quite articulate.”
Lynch’s display of knowledge on surrealist imagery and the complexities of the human experience echo only that of the dreamlike productions of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. However, Lynch’s use of elements such as suspense, body horror, and the peculiar, knitted tightly with otherworldly imagery, illustrates how he rose above the noise in traditional film, television, and artistry. He embraces oddness as a critical aspect of reality, while simultaneously convincing his audience that the monster under the bed is no more foe than friend and provoking viewers to reconceptualize good and evil.
If you find yourself ruminating over the existential experience or simply want to recognize one of the greatest directorial visionaries of all time, brew a dark cup of joe, plate a slice of cherry pie, and dig into the world of David Lynch.