David Lynch | The Artistic Heights of a 20th Century Genius

“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even

considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

- Hunter S. Thompson.

On the 15th of January one of the few 20th century western geniuses we had left passed away.

‘There he goes’ - the man who had opened my eyes to the power that the medium of film held: being an emotionally prompting wormhole to the depth of your soul through image and sound. David Lynch is my personal favourite filmmaker. My journey with Lynch’s work truly began during my first term at university, we had an assignment to study a short film and prepare a presentation on said short film for the class. I stumbled across, and then chose to study the short film ‘Fire (POZAR)’ directed by David Lynch in 2015 (Note: I had already seen, and loved Mulholland Drive & Eraserhead). I fell in love with this concoction of mixed media imagery, and how everything within the frame was interacting. For something so surreal and unlike anything I had ever seen before, it felt so tangible, like I could reach out and touch it. I’ll never forget my lecturer's feedback to my work, though- to paraphrase: ‘I don’t think you can call this a short film.’ The combination of surrealist animation and painting, with little narrative notwithstanding, Fire (Pozar) remains a series of moving images that tell a story, and swell an emotional response (a film). Therefore, I was, and still am, confused at how a film lecturer, whose entire job is to motivate his students into pursuing the artistic language of cinema could possibly be so quick to dismiss something of this calibre in film. David Lynch was always reluctant to spoon-feed audiences a story and rather opted to speak, often exclusively through his work & thus, in retrospect, the first lesson I learnt from David Lynch was to question people and certain institutions that would try and tighten the boundaries of what could be expressed in the media of cinema.

It’s largely this philosophy of pushing boundaries within artistic mediums, combined with the catalyst of his unbound imagination and creativity, that is responsible for David Lynch’s body of film work, which is, for my money, the greatest cinematic oeuvre ever finished. The importance of this work is exemplified by the near-household term“Lynchian” —perhaps overused, but for good reason. David Lynch gave us a word to describe the indescribable within our shared reality. As David Foster Wallace puts it:“The term refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter.” Think of Laura Palmer’s life in Twin Peaks, and how Lynch’s grotesque surrealism, and love of the suburban Americana aesthetic expose how that the evil within the white picket fence is not coming from an external source but rather from within. It must also be said that this is only one side of the Lynchian; a deep understanding of people and empathy for the human experience also underscore everything Lynch did. If you pick apart any of his films—whether it be the likes of his avant-garde hellscapes Eraserhead and Inland Empire, his dream-noirs such as Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, or his American road-trip films Wild at Heart and The Straight Story—you will always arrive at a core made from an unwavering sense of humanity.

The importance of this oeuvre cannot be overstated. His work is responsible for many seismic shifts

within film and television. Eraserhead became a staple of the midnight movies and was iconic director

Stanley Kubrick’s favourite film. Blue Velvet was ahead of its time in how it deconstructed American

suburban life and reshaped American culture. Lost Highway and Inland Empire act as complete

deconstructions of the art form and rewire cinematic language. Mulholland Drive is often referred to as the most important film of the 21st century so far, as voted by the BBC (I’d agree). And, of course, Twin Peaks changed the world not once, but twice—first in 1990, and then again when it aired its third season, The Return, in 2017. This final 18-part series is now definitively the culmination of his life’s work. Every idea, theme, piece of symbolism, and iconography that Lynch ever experimented with in his films, paintings, music, and various other mediums culminated here. He dedicated his life and his art to opening a portal to different worlds, fuelled by the logic of dreams.

On the heights of David Lynch— few have climbed.

Written By Matt Cooke | IG: @dontlookbackmatt