Obituary
Film 'legend' David Lynch lives on in French arthouse cinemas
A "legend of cinema" wrote the César Academy on social media in tribute to American director David Lynch, who passed away at the age of 78 on Thursday. France has a soft spot for the enigmatic artist, whose works are regularly shown in the country's cinemas.
Issued on: 18/01/2025 - RFI
By: Ollia Horton with RFI
"He is one of the great filmmakers who left their mark on their era, and one we will never forget," the post continued.
Lynch was considered one of American cinema's great auteurs, and was adored by fans and the industry alike. Nominated several times for the Oscars, he received an honorary statuette in 2019 for his career.
His family announced his death via a public statement on Facebook on Thursday. The director had announced last year that he was suffering from emphysema.
Steven Spielberg called Lynch "a singular, visionary dreamer" while Ron Howard hailed him as "a gracious man and fearless artist" who "proved that radical experimentation could yield unforgettable cinema".
Lynch was particularly admired in France, where he won the César award for best foreign film for Mullholland Drive in 2002. His film Wild at Heart starring Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage also won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990.
Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival, called Lynch's death "an immense loss and a very serious blow to the future of modern cinema as he conceived his art".
A distinctive universe
French cinema critic and filmmaker Thierry Jousse told RFI that Lynch had a very distinctive way of making cinema, blending influences including surrealism and the absurdism of novelist Franz Kafka. "He was one of the few artists able to create a world entirely of his own. It's an upside-down universe, a kind of labyrinth where all of his references collided."
Born in small-town Montana in 1946, the son of an agricultural research scientist, Lynch travelled extensively around Middle America as a young man.
He attended fine arts colleges in Boston and Philadelphia before joining the American Film Institute, where he began work on his film Eraserhead.
The 1977 black and white futuristic film about a couple and their grotesque baby was met with mixed reviews from critics, but went on to have success on the underground circuit and become a cult favourite.
'A creative ocean'
This was followed by 1980's tragedy The Elephant Man, also shot in black and white but decidedly more mainstream and accessible, earning him his first best director Oscar nomination.
Based on the diary of Joseph Merrick, born in the United States in 1862 with a condition that gave him a severely deformed physical appearance, it starred Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt.
It also won a French César award for best foreign film in 1982.
French trans gangster musical 'Emilia Perez' wins four Golden Globe awards
In the 1990s, he made the series Twin Peaks, which paved the way for many a prestige television drama. The tale of a tight-knit northwestern town reacting to the rape and murder of a popular but troubled high school girl captivated and shocked Americans.
One of the stars of the series, Kyle MacLachlan, who went on to make several films with Lynch, called him "an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him".
"I owe my entire career, and life really, to his vision," he wrote on Instagram.
Lynch returned to the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival with the actor in 2017 to screen the Twin Peaks film.
Arthouse attraction
Despite only making 10 films in 30 years, Lynch's diverse repertoire is still popular in arthouse cinemas in Paris.
"There's an atmosphere and a universe that continues to attract people," explains Melvine, who works at the Cinema des Écoles in Paris, which is hosting a retrospective of Lynch's films.
"With each screening, it's the same success. We've been showing Blue Velvet for two or three years, for example, and each time it's full," he told Franceinfo.
Film 'legend' David Lynch lives on in French arthouse cinemas
A "legend of cinema" wrote the César Academy on social media in tribute to American director David Lynch, who passed away at the age of 78 on Thursday. France has a soft spot for the enigmatic artist, whose works are regularly shown in the country's cinemas.
Issued on: 18/01/2025 - RFI
David Lynch at the screening of "Twin Peaks" in Cannes, France, 25 May, 2017.
© Jean-Paul Pelissier / Reuters
By: Ollia Horton with RFI
"He is one of the great filmmakers who left their mark on their era, and one we will never forget," the post continued.
Lynch was considered one of American cinema's great auteurs, and was adored by fans and the industry alike. Nominated several times for the Oscars, he received an honorary statuette in 2019 for his career.
His family announced his death via a public statement on Facebook on Thursday. The director had announced last year that he was suffering from emphysema.
Steven Spielberg called Lynch "a singular, visionary dreamer" while Ron Howard hailed him as "a gracious man and fearless artist" who "proved that radical experimentation could yield unforgettable cinema".
Lynch was particularly admired in France, where he won the César award for best foreign film for Mullholland Drive in 2002. His film Wild at Heart starring Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage also won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990.
Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival, called Lynch's death "an immense loss and a very serious blow to the future of modern cinema as he conceived his art".
A distinctive universe
French cinema critic and filmmaker Thierry Jousse told RFI that Lynch had a very distinctive way of making cinema, blending influences including surrealism and the absurdism of novelist Franz Kafka. "He was one of the few artists able to create a world entirely of his own. It's an upside-down universe, a kind of labyrinth where all of his references collided."
Born in small-town Montana in 1946, the son of an agricultural research scientist, Lynch travelled extensively around Middle America as a young man.
He attended fine arts colleges in Boston and Philadelphia before joining the American Film Institute, where he began work on his film Eraserhead.
The 1977 black and white futuristic film about a couple and their grotesque baby was met with mixed reviews from critics, but went on to have success on the underground circuit and become a cult favourite.
'A creative ocean'
This was followed by 1980's tragedy The Elephant Man, also shot in black and white but decidedly more mainstream and accessible, earning him his first best director Oscar nomination.
Based on the diary of Joseph Merrick, born in the United States in 1862 with a condition that gave him a severely deformed physical appearance, it starred Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt.
It also won a French César award for best foreign film in 1982.
French trans gangster musical 'Emilia Perez' wins four Golden Globe awards
In the 1990s, he made the series Twin Peaks, which paved the way for many a prestige television drama. The tale of a tight-knit northwestern town reacting to the rape and murder of a popular but troubled high school girl captivated and shocked Americans.
One of the stars of the series, Kyle MacLachlan, who went on to make several films with Lynch, called him "an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him".
"I owe my entire career, and life really, to his vision," he wrote on Instagram.
Lynch returned to the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival with the actor in 2017 to screen the Twin Peaks film.
'He was all about creating texture'
French film writer and director Nicolas Saada said Lynch was a role model for many filmmakers who came after him, in particular due to his use of sound in his films.
"He was all about creating texture in his films," Saada told RFI. "The depth of his photography, the colours he used. He also created an aural texture. From his very first film Eraserhead, he put a lot of work into using sounds, be they from an industrial source or sounds from the street."
Saada said Lynch had la "sixth sense" when it came to sound production, taking real life sounds and distorting them to create abstract sounds. "On top of that, the music used added to the overall texture, creating a very unique result."
In today's world, where everything is "rational and explained", he says Lynch's approach represented "total freedom" from linear storytelling constraints.
French film writer and director Nicolas Saada said Lynch was a role model for many filmmakers who came after him, in particular due to his use of sound in his films.
"He was all about creating texture in his films," Saada told RFI. "The depth of his photography, the colours he used. He also created an aural texture. From his very first film Eraserhead, he put a lot of work into using sounds, be they from an industrial source or sounds from the street."
Saada said Lynch had la "sixth sense" when it came to sound production, taking real life sounds and distorting them to create abstract sounds. "On top of that, the music used added to the overall texture, creating a very unique result."
In today's world, where everything is "rational and explained", he says Lynch's approach represented "total freedom" from linear storytelling constraints.
Arthouse attraction
Despite only making 10 films in 30 years, Lynch's diverse repertoire is still popular in arthouse cinemas in Paris.
"There's an atmosphere and a universe that continues to attract people," explains Melvine, who works at the Cinema des Écoles in Paris, which is hosting a retrospective of Lynch's films.
"With each screening, it's the same success. We've been showing Blue Velvet for two or three years, for example, and each time it's full," he told Franceinfo.
From 'Twin Peaks' to 'Blue Velvet': Remembering legendary director David Lynch
Culture
From the show
As the film world mourns the loss of legendary director David Lynch, arts24 looks back at the life and career of a true icon. Known for his surreal and unsettling style in films like "Twin Peaks", "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive", he redefined cinema and television, leaving behind a legacy of groundbreaking works. Film critic Emma Jones talks to Eve Jackson about his importance to cinema, his love of France and how he even made the weather interesting.
David Lynch unmasked the decay within American culture
By Billy J. Stratton, University of Denver
'Fix your hearts or die': The unflinching moral compass of David Lynch
(RNS) — With age, Lynch grew more confident that some of his questions had answers.
Filmmaker David Lynch appears during the Rome Film Festival in Rome on Nov. 4, 2017. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis, File)
Tyler Huckabee
January 16, 2025
(RNS) — In a 2007 BAFTA interview, David Lynch said that “Believe it or not, ‘Eraserhead’ is my most spiritual film.”
“Elaborate on that,” prompted his interviewer.
“No.”
I wish he had. I’ve sifted through “Eraserhead” and have found about as much spiritual content there as in any of Lynch’s other work, which is to say: quite a bit.
Lynch, who died on Thursday (Jan. 16) at the age of 78, was creatively fearless when it came to exploring the world beyond our physical senses. His towering body of work has a logic all to its own, one that is not material or even necessarily legible, but is always comprehensible in some distant, undefinable location in our souls.
He was born to a Presbyterian family in Montana and got his start in animation and painting. That “most spiritual film” would be his debut feature, a dark and uncomfortable slice of black comedy that spread like wildfire in the midnight movie circuit. From there he went to the far more conventionally appealing “Elephant Man,” which earned the sort of box office success and Oscar attention that affords a blank check for future projects. He passed on George Lucas’ offer to helm “Return of the Jedi” and opted instead to adapt Frank Herbert’s “Dune” for the screen. That would be a famous disaster and also, in my opinion, the best thing that could have happened to his career.
Having gotten a taste of blockbuster cinema and thoroughly hated it, Lynch returned to the surreal, uncompromising style of filmmaking he’d cut his teeth on, and never left. He churned out “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” honing the dream logic, psychological undertones and oft-imitated but never duplicated idiosyncratic artistry that would come to define his style for four decades. And then came “Twin Peaks.”
The lazy analysis of “Twin Peaks” is that every small American town, no matter how quaint and idyllic on the outside, has evil lurking under the facade. Laura Palmer is simply the unflinching autopsy of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and Lynch is a cynic who wanted to air out the rot at the heart of the American dream. This is what many Lynch-obsessed filmmakers took from “Twin Peaks” in their own inferior pastiches. It’s far too simple a read.
Lynch was, at his core, a deeply moral artist. He saw good and evil as stark, clearly demarcated things. What fascinated him was not that good things could be secretly bad, but that good and bad could coexist in the same person, the same place. In “Twin Peaks,” good and evil are both cosmic entities we can scarcely understand and twin forces working within us. The secret of Laura Palmer is not that she seemed like a good person but was actually a very damaged victim of unspeakable wickedness. It’s that she is both a good person and a very damaged victim of unspeakable wickedness. The secret of Albert Rosenfield is not that he seems like a rude guy who is actually a very noble guy, but that he is both very rude and heartrendingly noble. And the secret of Twin Peaks at large is not that it seemed like a good town but that it is a good town — and also a bad one. The same is true of so many places; so many of us.
Those of us who’ve spent any amount of time in almost any religious institution will find the questions Lynch spent his career asking very, very familiar.
And Lynch approached all this with almost childlike naiveté, using his television and films to interrogate the very open question of where the lines between good and evil lie. His boundless imagination gave him the freedom to go places where few would dare, utilizing his dreamy aesthetic to chart the strangest corners of the human experience.
“We think we understand the rules when we’re adults,” he would say in the 2016 documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life.” “But what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” Lynch refused to understand the rules and that gave his work an unmatched sincerity.
This sincerity fortified him, even when his work would stare into the perverse, the appalling and the mortifying. Lynch’s work could be terrifying, salacious and often transgressive, but it was never malicious. His moral compass was on straight no matter how ugly his subject. “Fire Walk With Me,” the “Twin Peaks” cinematic sequel that premiered to boos but has since enjoyed a well deserved critical reappraisal, is as horrifying a descent into hell as I’ve ever seen in a movie, but at no point does it lose its way in the darkness. Throughout its formidable run time and daunting subject matter, Lynch leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to redemption for victims, their victimizers and viewers as well.
So, spiritually, Lynch was often doing long algebra on screen and, like long algebra, the whole thing could look like gibberish. But to watch a Lynch movie is to feel the truth of it in your guts, to recognize the melodies if not the exact lyrics. He created from the truest part of himself and, in that creation, found something universal.
As he got older, he got more confident that some of his questions had answers. In “The Return,” his “Twin Peaks” finale, which now stands as his final creative work, Lynch himself plays FBI Director Gordon Cole, who sits down with Denise Bryson, his chief of staff who is transgender (played by David Duchovny). Bryson has experienced some transphobia at the hands of her FBI co-workers, and Lynch savors the knowledge of letting her know that he’d put them in their place.
“When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die,” Cole says. You have to say it out loud to get the impact of that sentence, but hearing Lynch deliver it is the only way to really savor its poetry, its rhythm and its moral force.
“Fix your hearts or die” is the sort of thing you want to scream at any number of politicians, billionaires and public figures, but if you don’t want to scream it at yourself first, you’ve missed the point.
And if that’s not spiritual, what is?
(Tyler Huckabee is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and dogs. Read more of his writing at his Substack. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
By Billy J. Stratton, University of Denver
THE CONVERSATION
JANUARY 17, 2025
UPI
Director David Lynch leaves the Elysee presidential palace after receiving the French Legion of Honor award in Paris in 2007. The filmmaker died this week. File Photo by David Silpa/UPI | License Photo
Jan. 17 (UPI) -- "There's a sort of evil out there," says Sheriff Truman in an episode of David Lynch's iconic TV series, Twin Peaks.
That line gets to the heart of the work of the filmmaker, whose family announced his death Jan. 16, 2025. Lynch's films and TV series reflected the dark, ominous, often bizarre underbelly of American culture- one increasingly out of the shadows today.
As someone who teaches film noir, I often think about the ways American cinema holds up a mirror to society.
Lynch was a master at this.
Related
Director David Lynch leaves the Elysee presidential palace after receiving the French Legion of Honor award in Paris in 2007. The filmmaker died this week. File Photo by David Silpa/UPI | License Photo
Jan. 17 (UPI) -- "There's a sort of evil out there," says Sheriff Truman in an episode of David Lynch's iconic TV series, Twin Peaks.
That line gets to the heart of the work of the filmmaker, whose family announced his death Jan. 16, 2025. Lynch's films and TV series reflected the dark, ominous, often bizarre underbelly of American culture- one increasingly out of the shadows today.
As someone who teaches film noir, I often think about the ways American cinema holds up a mirror to society.
Lynch was a master at this.
Related
Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts mourn 'dear friend' David Lynch
'Twin Peaks' filmmaker David Lynch dies at age 78
Many of Lynch's films, like 1986's Blue Velvet and 1997's Lost Highway, can be unsparing and graphic, with imagery that was described by critics as "disturbing" and "all chaos" upon their release.
But beyond those bewildering effects, Lynch was onto something.
His images of corruption, violence and toxic masculinity ring all too familiar in America today.
Take Blue Velvet. The film focuses on a naive college student, Jeffrey Beaumont, whose idyllic suburban life framed with white picket fences is turned inside out when he finds a human ear on the edge of a road. This grisly discovery draws him into the orbit of a violent sociopath, Frank Booth, and an alluring lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens, whom Booth sadistically torments while holding her child and husband -- whose ear, it turns out, was the one Beaumont had found -- hostage.
Beaumont nonetheless finds himself perversely attracted to Vallens and descends deeper into the shadowy world lurking beneath his hometown -- a world of smoke-filled bars and drug dens frequented by Booth and an array of freakish characters, including pimps, addicts and a corrupt detective.
Booth's haunting line, "Now it's dark," serves as a potent refrain.
The corruption, perversion and violence depicted in Blue Velvet are indeed extreme. But the acts Booth perpetrates also recall the stories of sexual abuse that have emerged from organizations including the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts.
As the exposure of such crimes continue to pile up, they become less an aberration but a dire warning of something that's deeply ingrained in our culture.
These evils are sensational and appalling, and there's an impulse to perceive them as existing outside of our realities, perpetrated by people who aren't like us. What Twin Peaks, Lynch's hit TV series, and Blue Velvet do so effectively is tell viewers that those hidden worlds where venality and cruelty reside can be found just around the corner, in places that we might see but tend to ignore.
And then there are the uncanny and eerie worlds depicted in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. The characters in those searing films seem to live in parallel realities governed by good and evil.
Lost Highway begins with a jazz musician, Fred Madison, being convicted of killing his wife. He claims, however, to have no memory of the crime. Exploring the theme of alternate worlds, Lynch thrusts Madison into an illusory realm inhabited by killers, drug dealers and pornographers by merging his identity into that of young mechanic named Pete Dayton. In doing so, Lynch combines the worlds of "normality" and perversity into one.
In the 1990s, artists like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, whose music is included on the official soundtrack of Lost Highway, also confronted audiences with images of decadence and social decay, which were inspired by his own disturbing experiences in Hollywood and the music industry.
These dark themes have since been personified in rich and powerful men like Sean "Diddy" Combs, Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein who, for years, skated along the surface of high society with their perversions hidden from the public.
In his 2001 film, Mulholland Drive, Lynch turns his attention to Hollywood and the wretchedness that seems baked into its very nature.
A wide-eyed and innocent aspiring actress named Betty Elms arrives in Los Angeles with visions of stardom. Her struggle to achieve success -- one that ends in depression and death -- is certainly tragic. But it's also not very surprising, given that she was trying to make it in a corrupt system that all too often bestows its rewards on the undeserving or those who are willing to compromise their morals.
As with so many who go to Hollywood with big dreams only to find that fame is beyond their reach, Elms is unprepared for an industry so consumed with exploitation and corruption. Her fate mimics that of the women who, desperate for stardom, ended up falling into the trap set by Harvey Weinstein.
Lynch's death comes at a time when America seems to be hurtling toward an ever-darker future. Perhaps it's one foretold by politicians turning a deaf ear to acts of sexual assault, tolerating the vilification of victims or even bragging that they can get away with murder.
Lynch's vital body of work warns that the cruelty of such people isn't really what we should fear most. It is, instead, those who laugh, cheer or simply turn away - faint responses that enable and empower such behaviors, giving them an acceptable place in the world.
When Lynch's films were first released, they often appeared as bizarre, funhouse mirror reflections of society.
Today they speak of profound and terrible truths we can't ignore.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on Oct. 25, 2019.
Billy J. Stratton is an associate professor of english and literary arts at the University of Denver.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
'Twin Peaks' filmmaker David Lynch dies at age 78
Many of Lynch's films, like 1986's Blue Velvet and 1997's Lost Highway, can be unsparing and graphic, with imagery that was described by critics as "disturbing" and "all chaos" upon their release.
But beyond those bewildering effects, Lynch was onto something.
His images of corruption, violence and toxic masculinity ring all too familiar in America today.
Take Blue Velvet. The film focuses on a naive college student, Jeffrey Beaumont, whose idyllic suburban life framed with white picket fences is turned inside out when he finds a human ear on the edge of a road. This grisly discovery draws him into the orbit of a violent sociopath, Frank Booth, and an alluring lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens, whom Booth sadistically torments while holding her child and husband -- whose ear, it turns out, was the one Beaumont had found -- hostage.
Beaumont nonetheless finds himself perversely attracted to Vallens and descends deeper into the shadowy world lurking beneath his hometown -- a world of smoke-filled bars and drug dens frequented by Booth and an array of freakish characters, including pimps, addicts and a corrupt detective.
Booth's haunting line, "Now it's dark," serves as a potent refrain.
The corruption, perversion and violence depicted in Blue Velvet are indeed extreme. But the acts Booth perpetrates also recall the stories of sexual abuse that have emerged from organizations including the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts.
As the exposure of such crimes continue to pile up, they become less an aberration but a dire warning of something that's deeply ingrained in our culture.
These evils are sensational and appalling, and there's an impulse to perceive them as existing outside of our realities, perpetrated by people who aren't like us. What Twin Peaks, Lynch's hit TV series, and Blue Velvet do so effectively is tell viewers that those hidden worlds where venality and cruelty reside can be found just around the corner, in places that we might see but tend to ignore.
And then there are the uncanny and eerie worlds depicted in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. The characters in those searing films seem to live in parallel realities governed by good and evil.
Lost Highway begins with a jazz musician, Fred Madison, being convicted of killing his wife. He claims, however, to have no memory of the crime. Exploring the theme of alternate worlds, Lynch thrusts Madison into an illusory realm inhabited by killers, drug dealers and pornographers by merging his identity into that of young mechanic named Pete Dayton. In doing so, Lynch combines the worlds of "normality" and perversity into one.
In the 1990s, artists like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, whose music is included on the official soundtrack of Lost Highway, also confronted audiences with images of decadence and social decay, which were inspired by his own disturbing experiences in Hollywood and the music industry.
These dark themes have since been personified in rich and powerful men like Sean "Diddy" Combs, Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein who, for years, skated along the surface of high society with their perversions hidden from the public.
In his 2001 film, Mulholland Drive, Lynch turns his attention to Hollywood and the wretchedness that seems baked into its very nature.
A wide-eyed and innocent aspiring actress named Betty Elms arrives in Los Angeles with visions of stardom. Her struggle to achieve success -- one that ends in depression and death -- is certainly tragic. But it's also not very surprising, given that she was trying to make it in a corrupt system that all too often bestows its rewards on the undeserving or those who are willing to compromise their morals.
As with so many who go to Hollywood with big dreams only to find that fame is beyond their reach, Elms is unprepared for an industry so consumed with exploitation and corruption. Her fate mimics that of the women who, desperate for stardom, ended up falling into the trap set by Harvey Weinstein.
Lynch's death comes at a time when America seems to be hurtling toward an ever-darker future. Perhaps it's one foretold by politicians turning a deaf ear to acts of sexual assault, tolerating the vilification of victims or even bragging that they can get away with murder.
Lynch's vital body of work warns that the cruelty of such people isn't really what we should fear most. It is, instead, those who laugh, cheer or simply turn away - faint responses that enable and empower such behaviors, giving them an acceptable place in the world.
When Lynch's films were first released, they often appeared as bizarre, funhouse mirror reflections of society.
Today they speak of profound and terrible truths we can't ignore.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on Oct. 25, 2019.
Billy J. Stratton is an associate professor of english and literary arts at the University of Denver.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
'Fix your hearts or die': The unflinching moral compass of David Lynch
(RNS) — With age, Lynch grew more confident that some of his questions had answers.
Filmmaker David Lynch appears during the Rome Film Festival in Rome on Nov. 4, 2017. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis, File)
Tyler Huckabee
January 16, 2025
(RNS) — In a 2007 BAFTA interview, David Lynch said that “Believe it or not, ‘Eraserhead’ is my most spiritual film.”
“Elaborate on that,” prompted his interviewer.
“No.”
I wish he had. I’ve sifted through “Eraserhead” and have found about as much spiritual content there as in any of Lynch’s other work, which is to say: quite a bit.
Lynch, who died on Thursday (Jan. 16) at the age of 78, was creatively fearless when it came to exploring the world beyond our physical senses. His towering body of work has a logic all to its own, one that is not material or even necessarily legible, but is always comprehensible in some distant, undefinable location in our souls.
He was born to a Presbyterian family in Montana and got his start in animation and painting. That “most spiritual film” would be his debut feature, a dark and uncomfortable slice of black comedy that spread like wildfire in the midnight movie circuit. From there he went to the far more conventionally appealing “Elephant Man,” which earned the sort of box office success and Oscar attention that affords a blank check for future projects. He passed on George Lucas’ offer to helm “Return of the Jedi” and opted instead to adapt Frank Herbert’s “Dune” for the screen. That would be a famous disaster and also, in my opinion, the best thing that could have happened to his career.
Having gotten a taste of blockbuster cinema and thoroughly hated it, Lynch returned to the surreal, uncompromising style of filmmaking he’d cut his teeth on, and never left. He churned out “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” honing the dream logic, psychological undertones and oft-imitated but never duplicated idiosyncratic artistry that would come to define his style for four decades. And then came “Twin Peaks.”
The lazy analysis of “Twin Peaks” is that every small American town, no matter how quaint and idyllic on the outside, has evil lurking under the facade. Laura Palmer is simply the unflinching autopsy of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and Lynch is a cynic who wanted to air out the rot at the heart of the American dream. This is what many Lynch-obsessed filmmakers took from “Twin Peaks” in their own inferior pastiches. It’s far too simple a read.
Lynch was, at his core, a deeply moral artist. He saw good and evil as stark, clearly demarcated things. What fascinated him was not that good things could be secretly bad, but that good and bad could coexist in the same person, the same place. In “Twin Peaks,” good and evil are both cosmic entities we can scarcely understand and twin forces working within us. The secret of Laura Palmer is not that she seemed like a good person but was actually a very damaged victim of unspeakable wickedness. It’s that she is both a good person and a very damaged victim of unspeakable wickedness. The secret of Albert Rosenfield is not that he seems like a rude guy who is actually a very noble guy, but that he is both very rude and heartrendingly noble. And the secret of Twin Peaks at large is not that it seemed like a good town but that it is a good town — and also a bad one. The same is true of so many places; so many of us.
Those of us who’ve spent any amount of time in almost any religious institution will find the questions Lynch spent his career asking very, very familiar.
And Lynch approached all this with almost childlike naiveté, using his television and films to interrogate the very open question of where the lines between good and evil lie. His boundless imagination gave him the freedom to go places where few would dare, utilizing his dreamy aesthetic to chart the strangest corners of the human experience.
“We think we understand the rules when we’re adults,” he would say in the 2016 documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life.” “But what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” Lynch refused to understand the rules and that gave his work an unmatched sincerity.
This sincerity fortified him, even when his work would stare into the perverse, the appalling and the mortifying. Lynch’s work could be terrifying, salacious and often transgressive, but it was never malicious. His moral compass was on straight no matter how ugly his subject. “Fire Walk With Me,” the “Twin Peaks” cinematic sequel that premiered to boos but has since enjoyed a well deserved critical reappraisal, is as horrifying a descent into hell as I’ve ever seen in a movie, but at no point does it lose its way in the darkness. Throughout its formidable run time and daunting subject matter, Lynch leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to redemption for victims, their victimizers and viewers as well.
So, spiritually, Lynch was often doing long algebra on screen and, like long algebra, the whole thing could look like gibberish. But to watch a Lynch movie is to feel the truth of it in your guts, to recognize the melodies if not the exact lyrics. He created from the truest part of himself and, in that creation, found something universal.
As he got older, he got more confident that some of his questions had answers. In “The Return,” his “Twin Peaks” finale, which now stands as his final creative work, Lynch himself plays FBI Director Gordon Cole, who sits down with Denise Bryson, his chief of staff who is transgender (played by David Duchovny). Bryson has experienced some transphobia at the hands of her FBI co-workers, and Lynch savors the knowledge of letting her know that he’d put them in their place.
“When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die,” Cole says. You have to say it out loud to get the impact of that sentence, but hearing Lynch deliver it is the only way to really savor its poetry, its rhythm and its moral force.
“Fix your hearts or die” is the sort of thing you want to scream at any number of politicians, billionaires and public figures, but if you don’t want to scream it at yourself first, you’ve missed the point.
And if that’s not spiritual, what is?
(Tyler Huckabee is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and dogs. Read more of his writing at his Substack. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
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