When looking at a figure like Lynch - who has been a giant presence within any kind of art or culture I’d deign to care about, throughout my life - it would be all too easy to begin throwing ill-judged superlatives around.
For instance, in terms of what we might colloquially refer to as “being weird” - or, more precisely, using art and narrative to open the gates to previously unknown realms within/without/above/beneath the fabric of quotidian reality - I’d tend to remove him from any discussion around late 20th/early 21st century filmmakers, and instead place him in the same category as figures as diverse as Lovecraft, Burroughs (W.S., not E.R., although he’s cool too), Blake or Dali.
Like all of the above, his explorations of unmapped terrain are so totally suffused with his own personality, his own background and aesthetic concerns, they’ve become melded into a totally singular body of work, which for the most part defies comparison with that of any contemporaries in their chosen field. Instantly recognisable yet totally inimitable, impenetrable as an eerily misshapen hunk of granite in the middle of the cultural highway.
Unlike the others on the above list however, Lynch consistently managed to filter this vision through an industry requiring millions of dollars, labyrinthine layers of corporate approval and hundreds of collaborators, and still somehow managed to deliver it to receptive audiences in a form which felt like more-or-less 100% proof.
And, in stark contrast to the aforementioned exemplars, he achieved all this whilst still giving every impression of being a real swell guy, whom I’m sure most of us would have loved the opportunity to share a cup of (damn fine) coffee with - his sense of humour and unflappable, humane optimism as unique and cherished as his approaches to art, craft, metaphysics and whatever else.
But, yeah - overblown superlatives and vast generalisations. Probably not helpful.
Strategy # 2 when composing an obit post meanwhile, is to take the personal angle, so let’s do that.
Have I ever told this blog the story of how I first discovered the work of David Lynch? I don’t believe I have, so, ok, here we go…
I must have been about 14 or 15 years old, and (being a slow starter in this regard, with censorious parents and little access to non-mainstream culture to draw upon), my entire knowledge/experience of cinema comprised science fiction (which I loved across all media), dumb blockbusters and even dumber comedies. Maybe the occasional black & white classic mixed in there, but that was about it.
David Lynch, at the time, was going through an extended period of critical disapproval / disappearance from The Official Culture (post-‘Fire Walk With Me’, pre-‘Mulholland Drive’), and as such his name meant nothing to me.
‘Twin Peaks’, at this point, seemed to be treated as a quirky cultural phenomenon which had come and gone some years beforehand, mentioned in print only in relation to the various cast members whose careers it had helped launch, whilst a year or two later, I recall ‘Lost Highway’ achieving only a very marginal release in the UK (did it even go straight to video?), and receiving Ebert-esque reviews of the, “oh, is this guy still making his pretentious, sleazy films which make no sense” variety.
This was the late ‘90s, pre-internet void in other words, and if you were looking for “weird movie directors” and had no access to somewhat more enlightened alternative/underground print media, you were pointed straight in the direction of Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam - do not pass Go, and do not collect $200.
BUT ANYWAY. One day during the school holidays, my parents had assigned me the task of going through a box of unlabelled, recorded-off-TV VHS tapes, to find out what was on them, and to determine whether or not it was worth keeping. (Nearly three decades later incidentally, it occurs to me that this chore sounds like pretty much the most fun day that I could possibly imagine having - but, I digress.)
So, you probably saw this coming, but, second or third tape out of the box - it was ‘Blue Velvet’.
(How it got there, I have no idea, but I can only assume it was a result of my parents’ habit of occasionally setting the video to record a movie which had been given a five-star rating in the Radio Times, then either forgetting about it or deciding they didn’t like it, or something along those lines.)
Not only was it ‘Blue Velvet’ furthermore, but (presumably due to the fact that either the video player’s timer or the TV schedules were constantly fucking up), the tape had missed the entire opening of the movie (including the all-important credits), beginning - so memory serves - shortly before the moment in which the camera descends into the severed ear.
You can picture the instant “what the fuck is THIS” reaction from teenage me, and likewise imagine the effect which the rest of film had on me; an overwhelming mixture of danger, terror and total bafflement / disorientation which I daresay I’ve been searching for in cinema ever since.
This must have been a BBC broadcast, because there were no ad breaks, and no on-screen idents to let me know what I was watching, or to reassure me that it was actually a commercially released motion picture and not some insane, Videodrome-esque televisual hallucination. (In analogue, pan-and-scan form, with all detail and texture rubbed off the images and sound, such distinctions could easily get a bit blurry.)
The only thing which served to ground me through this fateful viewing was (ironically enough, given how terrifying he is in the film) the fact that I recognised Dennis Hopper. So I knew this thing was… at least kind of legitimate?
With the unlabelled tape subsequently ferretted away somewhere as a powerful piece of contraband, the next thing I recall - imagine this, youngsters - actually going to the local library, finding some massive movie reference book, and looking up the entry on Hopper to try to figure out the identity of this insane spectacle which had wreaked such untold havoc upon my impressionable young mind.
Naturally enough, it was easy to pinpoint the culprit as ‘Blue Velvet’, to follow this to the corresponding entry for David Lynch… and what follows from there is fairly self-explanatory.
My brother and I were just reaching the age where our parents were easing up and allowing us to buy / rent tapes without close supervision, and so a weird twofer of ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Wild At Heart’, the first season of ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘The Elephant Man’, ‘Dune’, the initial VHS release of ‘Lost Highway’ and (wow) a DVD of ‘Fire Walk With Me’ were gradually acquired over the next few years, as we spent our days muttering darkly about fire, cherry pie and the nature of “the other place”.
I’m not going to say that this process was directly responsible for my signing up to take an A-Level in Film Studies aged sixteen (by then toting Lynch, Cronenberg and Romero as my heroes, despite having only seen a merest handful of each of their movies), or for anything that’s happened since as I’ve moved deeper into an obsession with / appreciation of film during my adult life; but it definitely played a part.
I’m sure that others, across multiple generations, have similar tales to tell, which is all basically a long-winded way of getting around to the point that, whilst the appeal of Lynch’s work will probably never be universal (and I can easily sympathise with the frustration those immune to its charms must feel as the likes of me bang on, and on, about it), he nonetheless managed to reach an almost unfeasibly large number of people across the globe, and to touch and change each one of us more deeply than we perhaps know how to understand.
He has left us with feelings, ideas, images and sounds which will remain with us throughout our lives, but which will never become settled, nostalgic, over-familiar; they will always be alive, always changing, always lurking just around the corner, behind the trash cans outside Winkies - always wild.
And, churlish as it may seem to make such a comment about an artist whose achievements were so unprecedented, and who left us with eighteen solid hours of new directorial material (which I must get around to re-watching, incidentally) just a few short years ago - it still pains me deeply to realise there will now be no more of them.
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