David Lynch smoked cigarettes constantly, mostly red Marlboros. Writer David Foster Wallace noticed this when he wrote an essay for a magazine about the filming of “Lost Highway” and visited the set. Sometimes, Wallace said, Lynch would even light a cigarette while one was still in his mouth. This endless smoking contributed to his intense, almost manic creative demeanor, the author was impressed.
One could explain David Lynch’s artistic life, which extends into so many areas from painting to music to photography, solely through his passion for tobacco, coffee and milkshakes. At least his addiction to nicotine pushed him to his physical limits at the end of his life. Just last year, Lynch made it public that he was suffering from emphysema. He was barely able to walk just a few meters. At least he could still make some music. He clung to that, including the idea of making a film from home. You wished for it, believed it. Why not another expansion of “Twin Peaks”? At least some ideas, because they were always more important to Lynch than what they became.
“Twin Peaks” concludes David Lynch’s film work
It didn’t happen that way – and that means “Twin Peaks – The Return”, the sequel, the reunion, the realignment, the third season of the epochal series, which touches on all the themes of his work and which led millions to search for Laura Palmer’s murderer in 1990, his legacy. If you watch even one episode again, it becomes immediately clear that Lynch saw it that way too. All the motifs that appeared in his films, pictures and publicly expressed thoughts came together to form a dark hurricane.
Almost all of David Lynch’s material is dark, from his first short film “Six Men Getting Sick”, which was still strongly oriented towards Francis Bacon, to the cryptic film installation “Inland Empire”. And they are hardly understandable. Lynch loved secrets, he once revealed in an interview. He placed the first of these in his debut “Eraserhead”. For years, the art school student has been working restlessly on his vision of a place far away from our time, in which a young man suddenly becomes a father and thus almost goes crazy. Of course, this is an artist type, despondent and yet hardly affected by the things that are happening around him. But what concerns him and the audience is the alien-looking creature, this whimpering, screaming nightmare creature that he supposedly brought into the world.
The power of secrets
Lynch never clarified what he used for his strange brood. Some speculated it was the head of a calf. But that’s exactly what it’s all about when you see a film by this last great surrealist: stop looking for terms for what is shown and heard, and instead immerse yourself in the images and sounds. Like a showman, Lynch fought for the magic of the spectacle – only for him it was like walking into another world in which the rules of the unconscious set the tone.
Some wondered about the deeply humanistic message of “The Elephant Man” or “The Straight Story,” even though almost all of Lynch’s films and pictures appear nightmarish. The director often raved about his idyllic childhood in Montana and, as an ambassador and practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, was convinced that a spiritual access to oneself and the world around us is of great importance. Also to be creative.
But why all these scenes of horror? Violence and sex seem stranger in “Blue Velvet” and “Lost Highway” than they usually do in the cinema. The director shot intense scenes of brutality and destruction. In “Wild At Heart,” the Sailor played by Nicolas Cage squishes a man. Willem Dafoe later grotesquely shoots himself as Bobby Peru. But Lynch’s films are just as sensual. Lynch once explained that he also became an artist because for a long time he didn’t understand what sex was all about. It is the great secret that precedes all other secrets. The punch line that Lynch borrowed from Hitchcock: In order to get closer to pleasure, the innocent must become a voyeur.
Lynch’s films are dream paintings
Of course, “Mulholland Drive”, this great nod to the horror of cinema, can be read like a dream. But it’s not just about nighttime drama, but also Hollywood as a factory of dreams. Lynch unleashed both dreams on each other. In all of his other films, too, he opened the door to hidden longings and took the laws and even the essence of cinema as an imagination machine more seriously than any other filmmaker.
His image creations are uncanny and absurd, so unique that situations that resemble a David Lynch film are given an adjective. Lynchian. Lynchesque. The parallel to Franz Kafka is not misleading. Lynch’s films are also sometimes Kafkaesque; the Prague writer was also one of the inspirations for his work. Lynch even once wanted to make a film of “Metamorphosis,” but then realized that there was a reason why Kafka banned all illustrations of his beetle creature. A secret must be kept, otherwise art will deteriorate.
Lynch, who never interpreted any of his films in conversation, always openly revealed what fascinated him. Dorothy’s red shoes from “Wizard Of Oz”. Francis Bacon. René Magritte. Cigarettes. Coffee. Factories. Philadelphia (where Lynch came of age and took his first steps as an artist). Mutilations. Deceased creatures (apparently the director had his own collection of pickled animal carcasses). You can literally look for traces of your favorite films: Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard”, Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2”, Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona”.
Meditative calm on set
His films may be cruel and confusing, but Lynch was no berserk or perfectionist on set. During filming it was often bizarrely quiet, no matter what was being shot. Lynch relied on improvisation, creating an almost meditative way of working that was very different from the hectic energy of other film sets. You can see it in the several-hour documentary that is attached to the third season of “Twin Peaks – The Return” on Blu-ray. If things went differently, like with the complicated work on “Dune – The Desert Planet,” Lynch’s vision faltered. The literary source was too powerful. It’s hard to believe that the director for “Return of the Jedi” was in discussion.
Over the course of his almost 50-year career as a multi-talented artist, Lynch managed to produce an iconic work in almost every decade. Very few have succeeded in doing this. But even more than that, he managed to preserve that feeling of the uncanny – and this also applies to the almost unreal forgiveness and calm in “The Straight Story” – in actually all of his creations. Also in weird furniture that he designed himself.
“It’s A Strange World”
“It’s a strange world,” says Jeffrey Beaumont, played by Kyle MacLachlan, in “Blue Velvet.” MacLachlan was something like the acting lynching entity in his films; here he addressed the audience on behalf of the director. Look, this is my world. It’s a surreal world. For Lynch, the absurd or uncanny was not something that was artificially added, but something that was already present in reality and just had to be discovered. Of course, this is our world too, and the power of his images depends on the fact that we don’t want to perceive it at first.
When hell breaks loose in “Eraserhead,” a small, deformed woman living between the pipes of a heating system gives the protagonist one last hope. She sings “In Heaven Everything Is Fine” without a care in the world. David Lynch showed us all the shades of evil because good can only take effect when the night passes.
David Lynch died on January 16, 2025, four days before his 79th birthday. He leaves behind two daughters, two sons and access to a world whose depths one cannot understand – but can enjoy in a perverse way.