David Lynch: Wild at Heart and Weird on Top

Nobody makes films in which the black could be blacker than in the films of David Lynch. His black is a black that is unfathomable, in which it works, which threatens to devour you, in which you believe you can discover things if you only look closer and closer.

In “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive,” Lynch sometimes lets it take up more than half the screen. The soundtrack rumbles in the background. When you look into its blackness, it looks back. You want it darker, sang Leonard Cohen. Hold my beer, says David Lynch. Finding the nightmare in the dream, the darkness in the bright sun, the abyss in the idyll, care in the absence of light, that was the life’s work of the American filmmaker and artist David Lynch, who died on January 16th at the age of 78 is, with sight and after a long illness, which he met with the mischievous humor that characterizes all his works, no matter how profound and perverse they may have been.

Chronicler of our most profound desires

What you most celebrate David Lynch for depends a bit on when you came into contact with him, whether you worship at the altar of “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks” or “Mulholland Drive,” his three masterpieces, or maybe you do “Eraserheaed”, “Wild at Heart”, “Lost Highway”, “The Straight Story” or even “Inland Empire”, supposedly lesser works, but all of them quintessentially Lynch. He should be remembered for his originality, for his willfulness, for his complete lack of interest in wanting to be anything other than David Lynch, this chronicler of our most profound desires, this maker of dream worlds that sometimes come together to form a stringent whole, sometimes in space get stuck without explaining themselves or offering a resolution. Nor does it have to.

This can be clearly seen in the great work that most people will think of when they hear his name. “Twin Peaks”, the series that revolutionized television, that made possible what is now known as the “series boom” and that never left him alone, to which he returned repeatedly. Today it is impossible to explain why this strange series, which Lynch launched together with Mark Frost, brought together all of television America, the last real one, with the cruel mystery at its center of who could have killed Laura Palmer Street sweeper.

Damn good coffee!

People were amazed at this even back then. And then you couldn’t stop watching until you realized that the series wasn’t going anywhere. But perhaps that was exactly their point, aside from copious amounts of black coffee consumed by Agent Dale Cooper, played by Lynch’s alter ego Kyle MacLachlan. “Damn good coffee!” became a household word. The key sentence is different: I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.

This search for the wonderful and strange characterizes the entire career of David Lynch, who was born in Missoula, Montana, but who can only really be imagined as a product of Los Angeles, where he attended the American Film Institute and his first film, too Almost 50 years later, he made the still deeply disturbing film “Eraserhead”, a no-budget underground production in black and white that hinted at all the obsessions and idiosyncrasies of Lynch’s work, a film based on a own planet and seems to exist.

There is nothing like it before or after. Even punk rock bowed to this timelessly distant oddity: “You bawl like the baby in Eraserhead,” sings Jello Biafra in “Too Drunk to Fuck.” Lynch had long since gone a step further and wanted to follow up his acclaimed success “The Elephant Man” with his film adaptation of “Dune” with a major work, but the endless fights and arguments with the producers wore him down and crushed him, only to end up with a film, which is nothing half and nothing whole. And, worse still, you can see what it could have been if only the director had been allowed to do it.

Master of the incomprehensible and incomprehensible

Looking back, the disaster was a stroke of luck. It set David Lynch’s head straight and encouraged him to decide that in the future he would only work on projects over which he had full control, even if that meant they had to be smaller – and therefore more personal, expressions of his Individuality. This is how “Blue Velvet” was created, the film in which all the themes and visual motifs manifested themselves and were able to develop freely, with which one can, despite all of his quirks and obsessions, intrinsically likeable masters of the incomprehensible and incomprehensible (in the literal sense). identified today.

The terror is in the light, in the ideal world, in the white fences and well-tended gardens of the suburbs. The idealized post-war America, its innocence itself, is the true haven of terror, the source of unspoken passions: ants feast on a cut ear. At the end of the descent into the abyss, Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, is waiting, the greatest monster in film history: Baby wants to fuck! Doo-wop music plays and finally “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison, whose voice sounds as if it had been lined with blue velvet, but is interpreted here as if through a distorting mirror by Dean Stockwell that looks like death.

Combination of transgressive sex and violence

“Blue Velvet” is from 1986. “You put your illness in me,” says Isabella Rossellini to Kyle MacLachlan. David Lynch always denied it, but it is the first film to internalize the horror of AIDS in its images. It is a film that caused a stir. And for outrage, complaining people for whom the combination of transgressive sex and violence was too much, especially in front of the supposedly squeaky-clean images of an America straight out of a postcard. In his legendary review, critic pope Roger Ebert writes: “‘Blue Velvet’ is like the guy who drives you crazy by hinting at some terrible news and then saying: ‘Forget it, don’t be so wild.'”

What comes after, including “Twin Peaks”, are all variations of “Blue Velvet”. The innocent lovers on the run can be found in “Wild at Heart”, the film with Nicolas Cage in Marlon Brando’s snakeskin jacket (“A symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom”), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes . At some point Willem Dafoe’s skull will fly off. And Laura Dern says on behalf of all the innocent blondes in Lynch’s oeuvre: “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top!”.

The depraved black-haired one, the innocent blonde one

Then she says something. Lynch takes it literally and, after a break after “Twin Peaks”, follows up with “Lost Highway” (“Dick Laurent is dead”) and “Mulholland Drive”, two noirs that are more ominous and sinister than anything else David Lynch has ever done but also more impenetrable, provocatively inexplicable and enigmatic. “Mulholland Drive” gets to the heart of everything that “Blue Velvet” touched on: the depraved black-haired, the innocent blonde, and then it’s completely different again in this film, which sets a monument to Hollywood, as if David wanted Lynch shows James Ellroy that he has the right to paint the City of Angels blood red. In between there is “The Straight Story”, which is so normal, so gentle, so loving and tender that you can’t believe that every new bend that old Richard Farnsworth makes on his lawnmower at a snail’s pace on the way his brother, for whom he worries, but only more normality awaits.

There is a constant longing for normality that runs through David Lynch’s work, even if his work is anything but normal, which is truer in none than his last film, “Inland Empire,” and another “Twin Peaks.” series, surrounded by countless snippets and petites, mostly shot on video, an expression of an alert mind that always just wants to be creative.

Lynch’s declared favorite film is “The Wizard of Oz”. All of his works are permeated by references, quotations and variations. He himself is Dorothy, his journey as an American artist takes him along the “yellow brick road” past a world of wonders. Not everyone is beautiful. Most are terrible. In 2019 he received an honorary Oscar. When you watch the clips, you’re touched by the fact that he himself seems so genuinely moved by it.

David Lynch will make his last appearance on the screen in 2022. Steven Spielberg cast him in a guest appearance as John Ford, the greatest of all American filmmakers, whom Spielberg met as a young director and who gives him valuable advice: “When the horizon’s at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon is at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit. Now, good luck to you. And get the fuck out of my office!”

Thank you for the films, thank you for the nightmares, thank you for the horizons you expanded that were never in the middle. Damn good coffee! Safe travels, Mister Lynch.