Thursday morning, I happened to be rereading Pauline Kael’s classic 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” A few hours later, I learned that David Lynch had passed away, and a line from this work immediately came to mind. We should be. ” I sensed Lynch’s critical spirit in Kale’s statement. More than any other filmmaker of his time, Lynch confronted carefully asserted lies and considered the burden of marginalized identities. Many films have been called revelatory and visionary, and Lynch’s films seem made to embody these words. He sees what has been hidden from view, reveals what has been carefully hidden, and his vision shatters conventional wisdom and portrays excruciating reality in the form of fantasy.
With 1986’s Blue Velvet, Lynch quickly became the paradigmatic filmmaker of the Reagan era, breaking down the hypocrisy and sanctimony of his surroundings by going beyond observational reporting. In this behind-the-scenes drama about small-town crime, he uncovers a nefarious plot involving an official leading a double life. This plot is more like a mysterious echo of a dream than a coherent plot. The violent, predatory dream appears to be the flip side of the benevolent myth that Americans so eagerly bought from their Hollywood president. Despite its razor-sharp precision, the film feels thrown onto the screen in the heat of artistic and diagnostic urgency. Lynch’s work, with its bold invention and exquisite realization of symbolic detail and macabre territory, is reminiscent of another great surrealist in cinema, Luis Buñuel, but especially in the American and a local perspective, reminding us of Sherwood Anderson’s film updates. “Winesburg, Ohio”
Lynch’s ambitions came into full bloom in his monumental work on network television, a medium that rarely welcomes the monumental and ambitious. “Twin Peaks” aired for two seasons in 1990 and 1991. Despite the depth of its imaginary riots and hallucinations, the show was another Winesburg-style portrait of the town, depicting even more intertwined relationships among its large cast of characters. . And like “Blue Velvet,” it was a story of crime and impunity, sexual violence and elaborate efforts to cover it up. Lynch extends the dark insights of “Blue Velvet” to turn the seen world upside down. The disturbed surfaces and disturbing fantasies of a small town, and the equally eerie strangeness of everyday life, all rolled into a single horror. The murder of a teenage girl named Laura Palmer. While the series was innovative, it didn’t quite live up to its promise (television formats remained strong), and when it was canceled, it quickly became clear that Lynch himself wasn’t done yet. It became. Directing only six of the 30 episodes, he followed the series with the feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). This prequel allowed him to deepen the series’ imaginative subjectivity while essentially reinventing himself. was touching.
Born in 1946, Lynch completed his first feature, the ultra-low-budget Eraserhead, in 1977, but from the beginning of his seminal work to the end of his career, he was devoted to the surrealist paradox. I experienced it. Translating fundamentally literary concepts into images. Lynch started out as a painter, but also became a writer, poet, memoirist, and playwright (not to mention a musician). The painterly surrealism of Dali and Magritte is imbued with humor. Because it’s easy to manipulate the appearance of reality with a paintbrush. (This is also why the fantasy worlds of most CGI spectacles are so grimly self-serious; all it takes is one self-deprecating prick to pop an overinflated series like a balloon.) But , in literature, it is not easy to stop trying to understand the meaning, and it is even more difficult to understand. What seems like nonsense begins to make sense. The risk of surrealist cinema is that its main invention is conceptual, creating wildness on the page and simply executing it on the screen. “Eraserhead” is a minimalist yet brilliant proof of concept for a movie that comes to life with fantastical, dreamlike imagery despite being bound by a cumbersome and inconsequential script. However, Mel Brooks recognized the power of Lynch’s ideas and hired him to direct “The Elephant Man” (1980), which Brooks co-produced. In retrospect, the film appears to be arguably one of his least Lynchian works, yet his empathetic sensibilities and instinct for passionately tactile imagery combined to create a history He created a masterpiece that reconstructs the world.
Lynch followed this up with the 1984 adaptation of Dune. The project was doomed by studio interference, but it still shows how a familiar genre can be radically reimagined if given the chance. He found himself in a similar predicament as Buñuel, whose first films were collages and parodies, and who eventually entered the industry by distilling poignant symbolism into familiar narrative forms. Ta. Lynch did too, but the format and studio he faced were particularly unforgiving, and while he found a uniquely modern solution, it took him a very long time to do so.
After “Twin Peaks” and “Fire Walk with Me,” Lynch turned into strange new territory: inward. His 1997 film Lost Highway is a complex variation on noir themes. While straying into hectic asides, these produce grand, original stylistic flourishes that suggest a self-centered psychoanalysis of Hollywood genres and tropes. This film represented a major step on his long and winding road to ultimate cinematic self-reinvention. He began his Hollywood sojourn in 2001 with “Mulholland Drive,” which started out as a TV pilot, with much of the story hidden and played just like that. Near the end, the film is enlivened by a mirroring, an exchange of identities that is as cleverly conceived as it is overtly filmed. Still, the psychological resonance is deep but vague, and the symbolic touches are thin and unremarkable compared to the complexities of “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks.” Mulholland Drive remains a mystery, a puzzle that seems designed to generate discourse, and as such has become an object of cinephile adoration.
“Mulholland Drive” was not a commercial success, and Lynch’s career stalled as studios became increasingly closed to the director’s freewheeling ideas. Still, he continued to explore the inner workings of the film world, doing his own filming and producing the consumer video film Inland Empire (2006). The film was conceived as an experiment. Lynch started without a script, instead writing one day at a time during filming. Despite the sense of wonder and urgency emanating from the special effects made possible by Lynch’s camerawork and video production, the result is bound to the text, as if the script had been set in stone from the beginning. Moments of such creative elation were intermittent embellishments of the diffuse slog.
While Lynch pointed his camera deep into his own environment, the environment of filmmaking, there was one very important place he didn’t point his camera at. It’s yourself. This is about to change, leading to one of the most spectacular displays of artistic self-reinvention in recent cinema. His next major project, “Twin Peaks: The Return,” which aired on Showtime in 2017, has a total of 18 episodes (all directed by him) that are longer than all of his theatrical films combined. They are almost the same length. “The Return” expands the scope of the conspiratorial confusion surrounding Laura Palmer’s murder to a cosmic scale. It could almost have been subtitled “Apocalypse Now,” but conceptually it fulfills the meaning of the word better than Francis Ford Coppola’s film. Lynch’s films also fulfill the conceptual meaning of the director’s lifelong exploration of the unconscious, spontaneous and extravagant imagination.
Throughout Lynch’s career, when a repertoire of images seemed to be unleashed, as in “Inland Empire,” the effect was as if he was dreaming of his own dreams, experiences that only he would experience and to some extent incommunicable. It felt like I was listening to someone say something. When images are tightly linked, as in Twin Peaks, the effect often seems calculated to create meaning, rather than truly embodying the free flow of the unconscious. did. But in The Return, Lynch delivered a series of performances that often pushed the limits of the script, and even delivered some surprising humor that seemed to pierce the screen itself. The most important development of his newfound sense of tone and performance, and the most important new way of injecting his own instant inventiveness into the series, was to put himself personally and physically at the center of the show. It was to put it. In “The Return,” Lynch reprized the role of FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole from the first two seasons and the movie, but this time he made the character stand out dramatically and visually, giving Cole a flashy and original performance. breathed life into it. Match. Lynch plays Cole as a secular prophet, a grand and monumental figure who dispenses wisdom and judgment with a self-deprecating yet oracle-like intensity.
Lynch’s performance is not only one of the best of any filmmaker in his own work; It’s a symbol of the era of cinema. Lynch does what his international film peers like Agnes Varda (The Gleaners and Me, Agnes Beach) and Jafar Panahi (This Is Not a Movie) do, week in and week out. I gradually started to do it. ”, “Taxi”) are suitable when industry or political circumstances make it difficult to make a film. They put themselves in the frame and emphasize their individuality. By establishing his most distinctive face and voice in his most powerful directorial project, Lynch made himself an icon of his art and, indeed, the best of cinema at the time.
But this incarnation is a troubled one, burdened with the carnal, social, and moral horrors that Lynch brought to the screen throughout his career. He is first and foremost a visual visionary, but not only visual. There’s more Dostoyevsky in his films than in Visconti’s White Nights or Bresson’s La Femme. It’s more Kafka-like than Wells’ The Trial. It’s more Freudian than Huston’s “Freud” or Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method.” Imagine that beneath Lynch’s stoic, heartfelt expression lies the shrieks and slashes, the terrifying sirens and shuddering horrors that he portrayed in his movies, a world of superficial and deeper evils. It’s a scary thing to do. Traces of this inner turmoil can be seen in films such as the 1999 film Straight Story, a tender vision of an old man on a long trip on a lawnmower to visit his estranged brother. The film plays like what those who don’t dream of horror would call a living dream: a worldly redemptive vision of love and solidarity. It’s a vision that Lynch embodies in his screen presence, which culminated in “The Return,” as a survivor of half a century of lavished knowledge and premonitions, from which he developed the Granite Principles. He was unwaveringly humane, empathetic, and steadfast in his approach. end. ♦
