When Laura Dern remarks that the “whole world is wild at heart and weird on top”, a bizarre and memorable line that drops late in 1990’s Wild at Heart, she was talking David Lynch’s language.
Lynch, the American auteur, who has died at the age of 78, wrote the screenplay and directed the film, which, like all his works, offers a skewed view at this world, its wild heart, and all its weirdness.
Lynch was a visionary, a dark artist with mastery of the surreal. Let’s just call him a genius, a flawed one. Eraserhead, his debut feature from 1977, is breathtaking, original and one of the strangest films ever put to celluloid. A grim nightmare of a parent-to-be, fleshed out for the screen in unforgiving black and white. There’s no experience like it. Eraserhead will never get old.
Where Eraserhead terrifies and baffles, Lynch had no trouble steering a film with linear precision. His Oscar-winning 1980 biopic on Joseph Merrick, The Elephant Man, is powerful and touching, and with John Hurt (playing “John” Merrick) rendered unidentifiable under a mound of prosthetics, and only able to deliver lines from the left corner of mouth, the late Brit delivers a masterful performance – directed by Lynch.
If you know where to look, elements of Eraserhead lurk throughout The Elephant Man. Lynchian ideas are sewn into all his films.
The sad tale of Merrick enjoyed commercial and critical success with eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. Lynch’s most accessible film, Blue Velvet from 1986, was Oscar nominated, as was 2001’s Mulholland Drive, which launched the career of Australian actress Naomi Watts.
Lynch’s 1982 adaptation of Dune is both a spectacular misfire — at the box office, anyway — and a challenge so ambitious, a previous, failed attempt by Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky is considered one of the greatest films never made, a story told in the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. YouTube’s foremost expert on the “Dune” universe, Quinn’s Ideas, has a soft spot for Lynch’s dense-but-awesome version. Somewhere, maybe, hopefully, there’s a director’s cut of that film, sitting forgotten in a dungeon. An epic fail it is not.
When grunge owned the airwaves, and the Big Day Out spread its wings around the country, every kid with an alternative lean would carve out time for Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks was a pop culture phenomenon. Airing in 1990-91, the series was darker than anything on TV, and made Beverly Hills 90210 look like processed cheese. After two seasons, “Twin Peaks” went down in a twisted, Lynchian blaze of glory, spawned a feature film, the prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and, much later, in 2017, a third season.
Lynch’s unique mind wasn’t wedded to film and TV. The American creative cut more than a dozen music videos, including clips for Nine Inch Nails, Moby, Interpol and for his own compositions. His late 1990s commercials for Playstation 2, the “Welcome to the Third Place” campaign, were black masterpieces, alien. Lynchian. In 2014, Lynch worked with Duran Duran on the Rock Hall-inducted British band’s “Unstaged” concert film, and, separately, curated the Festival of Disruption in New York.
Lynch also produced several documentaries, including the profound My Beautiful Broken Brain, which explored the life of Lotje Sodderland, who following a stroke 2011, after which she would see the world in an all-new light. Sodderland was inspired by Lynch and his work. Late in the film, the two meet and talk. In those rare moments, we’ve invited to step inside and explore Lynch’s own beautiful broken brain.
“Lynch was a creative superhero for me, from the moment I first saw his film Eraserhead as a teenager. His imagination, innovation, style and humour will remain an enormous inspiration,” reads a statement from founding keyboardist Nick Rhodes, posted on the official Duran Duran social pages.
“Curious about the unknown and never afraid of a dark alley, he was an uncompromising, experimental artist, with a truly unique vision. Sadly, the weather today in California is stormy and there is no lucky number.” The message signs off, “Thank you, and goodnight David. May your dreams become evermore surreal.”
Lynch revealed last year that he had been diagnosed with emphysema after a lifetime of smoking, and that we would be confined to his home. His death was confirmed in a Facebook post, his family writing, “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’”
Lynch married four times and had four children, but never won a competitive Academy Award. In 2019, he was presented with an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.
