A Tribute to David Lynch
David Lynch at a talk in 2008. Photo by _titi via Flickr
There are filmmakers with distinct, impactful visions, and then there is David Lynch, a mind that transcended the possibilities of creativity, surrealism and meaning within film. His films were hauntingly unique, shockingly uncompromising and revolutionary for the art form.
Lynch took the audience on explorations of the dark, beautiful dreamlike worlds around us. His 10 films journeyed across boundless human emotions ranging from the melancholy in his 1980 black-and-white biographical drama, “The Elephant Man,” to the rock n’ roll madness of his 1990 Palme d'Or winner “Wild at Heart.” However, Lynch’s persisting inquiry into surrealist nightmares was his most boundary-pushing.
Denis Villeneuve, director of the newest “Dune” films, noted Lynch’s powerful grasp on the surreal, “Cinema is probably the closest artform, closest to dreams, awakened dreams. And David Lynch was definitely the master, the one who brought us closest to this dream state.”
Lynch’s first feature, 1977’s “Eraserhead,” and his 1986 cult classic “Blue Velvet” embraced the indescribably dreamlike and explicitly controversial. Lynch continued his thematic and atmospheric odyssey with his final two films in the 2000s, “Mulholland Drive” and “Inland Empire,” which acted as uncanny, labyrinthine mysteries.
Outside of the silver screen, Lynch is best known for being the co-creator, alongside Mark Frost, of the hit 90s television series “Twin Peaks.” Its lighting-in-a-bottle combination of an FBI investigation, small-town shenanigans and a soap box parody would descend into legitimately the most frightening sequences of television of all time – before jumping back into the wonderfully absurd.
After a messy studio takeover in the second season, Lynch came back to direct one of the most unhinged series finales ever. However, “Twin Peaks” lived on with the underrated masterpiece of “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,” a prequel film, and his final major work, the limited series “Twin Peaks: The Return” – often regarded as his magnum opus.
Lynch’s work was so significant to the wider artistic world that his films established their own emotive word: Lynchian. As David Ehrlich, Head Film Critic at IndieWire, explained on X, “David Lynch gave us the language we needed to better articulate the indescribable strangeness of our shared reality. ‘Lynchian' is so overused because it’s a viscerally understandable word without any known synonyms. I can’t imagine a more beautiful artistic legacy than that.”
David Lynch passed away on Jan. 25th at the age of 78; while the loss of such a creative mind is immense, his career is a testament to the importance of creativity. In the words of Lynch, “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”