David Lynch, 1946–2025

lynch.jpg

Photo by Frank Connor from The Elephant Man: The Book of the Film (1980).

I feel at a loss for words on this occasion, Lynch’s films have been a continual presence in my life since I saw The Elephant Man in 1981. I’d actually been thinking of watching some of them again, maybe even having a full-on Lynch season the way I did in 2018 when I watched everything in sequence, from his early shorts through to Twin Peaks: The Return which at the time had just been released on disc.

A few random thoughts:

• My first sighting of Eraserhead was on the big video screens at the Hacienda in Manchester in late 1982. Claude Bessy used to play clips from his video collection, all of them silent because a DJ was usually playing music at the same time, so you’d end up seeing confusing, contextless shots from films like A Clockwork Orange, Shogun Assassin, various Andy Warhol films, and so on. I got to see Eraserhead in full shortly after this at a proper cinema on a double-bill with George Romero’s The Crazies. The Romero was fun but the Lynch was a doorway to another world.

lynch3.jpg

Photo from Lynch on Lynch (1997).

• Anyone writing about Lynch’s early features, especially Eraserhead, ought to mention sound designer Alan Splet. Lynch himself was always full of praise for Splet; the pair worked on the soundtracks together but Splet had a unique way of processing sounds which is all over the early films from The Grandmother on. You can gauge Splet’s sonic invention by watching The Black Stallion, a Lynch-less film for which Splet won an Oscar, where the sounds of panting horses are stranger than anything in any other film about horses or horse-racing. If you were familiar with Splet’s weirdness then his absence from Wild at Heart was a significant loss; Randy Thom is a good sound designer but he’s not in the same league. As Paul Schütze noted in his Splet obituary for The Wire in 1995, the soundtrack of Eraserhead is one of the foundations of the whole “dark ambient” genre of music.

• Some favourite Splet moments in Lynch’s films: the industrial sounds that accompany Treves’ walk through the East End in The Elephant Man; the visit from the Guild Navigator at the beginning of Dune; Jeffrey’s dream in Blue Velvet.

• For all the times I’ve watched Blue Velvet I still don’t know what that thing is hanging on Jeffrey’s bedroom wall.

• Lynch films are dog films.

• It was difficult not to feel like a Lynch hipster in 1990 when the world at large was forced to confront Lynch’s imagination via Twin Peaks and (to a lesser extent) Wild at Heart. We had to endure a year of people who’d spent the past decade ignoring Lynch’s films offering their opinions, along with inane comments such as “But does he have anything to say?” It was a relief when Fire Walk With Me came out and drove away the lightweights. I remember Kim Newman pointing out in his Sight and Sound review that the Twin Peaks prequel was more of a genuine horror film than many films explicitly labelled as such. The same could be said of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

lynch2.jpg

• I was pleased that Lynch was invited to contribute to the Manchester International Festival in 2019; I got to see some of his paintings and also buy Twin Peaks badges and Lynch postcards. Best of all, however, was the two weeks or so when his face was peering out of posters at tram stops and (as he is here) gazing down on pedestrians in my local high street. I’ve mentally tagged that pole as The David Lynch Lamp Post ever since.

Okay, maybe not so lost for words after all…

• Elsewhere:
(offline) Lynch on Lynch (1997), edited by Chris Rodley. 270 pages of interviews which aren’t always very revealing but which still contain a wealth of detail and anecdote about the making of the films. Also a fair amount of discussion about his paintings and other artworks.
(online) 46 issues of Wrapped in Plastic, the Lynch fan magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Lynch dogs
42 One Dream Rush
Through the darkness of future pasts
David Lynch window displays
David Lynch in Paris
Inland Empire

8 thoughts on “David Lynch, 1946–2025”

  1. As ‘culture’ tips further down into the TikTok void, Lynch’s career feels even more like a guide on how to navigate and nurture creative obsessions in this life. From coffee to cartoons, music to mediation… and of course, the films – it always felt like he was giving it 100%, and never just for the money. Nice article, John: you’re right about Splet’s contributions (Eno to DL’s Bowie?) and it was good to read the words CHEESE NIGHT on the board below the Lynch banner!

  2. A huge loss. With the disappearance of these people the possibilities in art and life seem to shrink. I’m sure there must be equally gifted artists “out there” but the forces and circumstances of current real life ranged against them seem enormous. Maybe it was always like that and the last 75 years have been a blip? Thanks as ever for your thoughtful words.

  3. Martin: Yes, “Cheese Night at the Dog and Partridge” sounds closer to Wallace and Grommit than Lynchland. The pub has since changed its name and I think the cheese nights have been discontinued.

    Eno & Bowie is a good comparison since Splet was very concerned with the treatment of sounds (and Eno and Bowie also have their own Lynch connections). I’m sure Lynch knew what he wanted but he still needed someone to help him achieve his intentions, he says as much in the Lynch on Lynch book. I think he got some of the Splet quality back eventually via his own sound processing and the work he did with Dean Hurley who obviously learnt from Splet’s example.

    Graeme: Thanks. I think other people are out there—the Quay Brothers are still managing to do their own thing against all the odds—but it’s always a struggle. Being in the right time and place is also a great help. Lynch, Jack Fisk, Alan Splet and Terrence Malick all got a start at the AFI; someone starting out today would have to find other ways of getting where they wanted to be. Whoever you are and wherever you are you need persistence as well. Eraserhead was nurtured by the AFI but it still took several years to make. “Persistence is all” as Coil used to say.

  4. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Lynch. I assumed he had a few more years ahead of him, and we might be seeing more; you never know. I saw “Eraserhead” very early- must have been 1978 – at a college showing. My girlfriend hated it, ha ha. I considered it the dawn of a new cinematic era.

    Later, I practically evangelized for “Blue Velvet” but encountered confusion and frowns from those I convinced to try it. That pretty much put an end to my promoting of non-formulaic entertainments to my friends and acquaintances. As for “Elephant Man”- I think Lynch single-handedly changed the way directors depict Victorian England.

    I must confess that although a huge fan of Lynch, I’ve never seen “Twin Peaks”. At first, I was suspicious of it being done for television, and feared Lynch was “selling out”. When it became a pop-culture lodestone, I was alienated further. One of these days, I might tackle it. Feels like taking on quite a corpus in itself, now.

  5. I had a similar thing with Blue Velvet, tried showing it to my sister and her partner and they both said it was okay but didn’t really get it at all.

    If it wasn’t for Twin Peaks: The Return I’d say you could do without the original series. It’s very much Lynch-lite, even though some of it seemed like strong and weird stuff for Americans at the time. Here in Britain, TV had been more adventurous and a lot more challenging since the 1960s. The pleasure was in seeing familiar Lynchisms being smuggled into an area where they didn’t belong. The thing is, the first series is only really good when Lynch himself is directing. That gives you about five or six episodes out of the thirty that were made. Once the series was past the halfway mark the storylines began to wander, with attempts at comedy and a very boring noirish thread. But if you miss all of this then The Return wouldn’t make much sense at all, and that series is Lynch working at 100% throughout.

    My advice if you’re curious would be to watch the original series but if the episode isn’t directed by Lynch himself then don’t worry about fast-forwarding through any of the stuff that doesn’t involve Agent Cooper. The Cooper thread is the important one, it’s this which is continued in The Return.

  6. One thing that appeals to me about Lynch’s films is that they explored all the colours of the rainbow, the entirety of the human condition. There is a warmth in his work that, I think, makes the darkness and horror he conjures stand out in sharp relief. One thing I have noticed is that, even though it has been many years since I last viewed them in their entirety, LOST HIGHWAY seems colder than, say, MULHOLLAND DRIVE and INLAND EMPIRE. Could this be because it has a male protagonist? Some male directors, when depicting the suffering of women, lose sight of the task and succumb to a voyeuristic sadism; Lynch, however, never forgot his humanity even when portraying the most harrowing and disturbing scenarios. TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and ERASERHEAD are my favourites, I think. Which films of his do you find yourself returning to?

  7. My three favourites are Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. It was a thrill when I was in Los Angeles and got driven past those small cottages that appear in the latter. I think Wild at Heart and Lost Highway suffer somewhat from being based on Barry Gifford’s writings, I don’t think he was a great match for Lynch’s sensibility the way Mark Frost was even though Lynch said he loved Gifford’s characters. Wild at Heart won the main prize at Cannes but this has always felt like a belated nod to Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet is perfectly constructed which Wild at Heart certainly isn’t, Lynch says he tacked on the happy ending. I think Lost Highway is better but a lot of it feels remote in a way that (again) Blue Velvet doesn’t at all.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Discover more from { feuilleton }

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading