[COLUMN] David Lynch Was a Truly Singular, Truly American Artist | by Darren Mooney

It was reported yesterday that filmmaker David Lynch passed away at the age of 78.

There is a tendency when writing about David Lynch to focus on the director’s eccentricities: the Woody Woodpecker dolls, the bizarre Oscar campaign for Laura Dern for Inland Empire, the online weather reports, the weirdness of his films, the weirdness of his commercials, the fact that “Lynchian” is an adjective with a very clear but difficult to define meaning, Mel Brooks’ famous description of Lynch as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.”

These were all facets of David Lynch, perhaps the most central surrealist artist in American pop culture since the end of the Second World War. Lynch attained a public profile that was relatively rare for an artist of his kind, particularly into the turn of the millennium. For all that Lynch was an absurdist whose work could be obtuse and reject categorization, he was allowed to occupy a place of primacy in American culture. He was truly respected and venerated.

George Lucas wanted Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi. Steven Spielberg wanted to direct the second season premiere of Twin Peaks and cast Lynch as John Ford in his auteurbiographical film The Fabelmans. ABC hired Lynch to create Twin Peaks, which not only aired on national prime time television, but became an international sensation. Even outside of his art and his films, Lynch was a beloved public persona, holding down recurring roles on sitcoms like Louie and The Cleveland Show.

This gets at the paradox of Lynch. Lynch might have been a truly singular artist, but he wasn’t an outsider. Lynch was part of the mainstream. He was on the cover of Time. He won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Wild at Heart in the same year that Twin Peaks was dominating the culture. Mulholland Drive has been named the best film (to date) of this young century. Cahiers du Cinema named Twin Peaks: The Return the best film of the 2010s. Lynch was nominated three times for the Best Director Oscar, even if only one of his films was nominated for Best Picture. He was the people’s surrealist.

Lynch was also quintessentially American. He famously drank a chocolate milkshake from Bob’s Big Boy Burgers every day for seven years, even timing his arrival for 2:30pm because that was when he deemed the milkshake machine to be working optimally. “There’s a beautiful thing about a diner,” Lynch would remark of that kind of restaurant. “Your mind can go into dark places, but you can always return to the warmth and comfort of a well-lit diner. It’s a nice place to think.”

Indeed, for all that Lynch cultivated a quirky persona, he was a shrewd businessman. He would famously sell copies of his own movies from his website, including the infamous Eraserhead box. He was also a pioneer of online-only content, setting up a subscription model on davidlynch.com in December 2001. For a monthly fee, fans could subscribe to his animated series Dumbland or his surrealist sitcom Rabbits. Lynch was ahead of the curve in this regard. He launched his own brand of coffee, “David Lynch Signature Cup.”

Even late into his career, Lynch was an innovator. He was one of the first major directors to pivot to digital, alongside filmmakers like George Lucas and Michael Mann. Inland Empire remains one of the definitive examples of early digital filmmaking alongside Collateral or Miami Vice, before the format crystalized into a cheaper imitation of film stock. “The thing about digital is it’s absolutely anything you can think you can do,” Lynch boasted. “The sky’s the limit. It is a vast world that’s there to be discovered.” Inland Empire would, tragically, be Lynch’s last theatrically released feature film.

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana in January 1946. His father worked for the Department of Agriculture. When he was two months old, the family moved to Idaho. When he was two years old, they moved again to Washington. The family moved around a lot during Lynch’s childhood: North Caroline, Idaho (again), Virginia. However, by his own account, Lynch had a perfect and idealized childhood. "Super happy household,” Lynch would explain. “It was as if there was just a foundation of love, and off we went, each in our own direction.”

This may explain why so many of Lynch’s movies and shows feel rooted aesthetically in the 1950s, even if they are not literally set in that decade. There is a decidedly retro vibe to movies like Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and even Mulholland Drive, along with shows like Twin Peaks and quite literally with On the Air. Even something like Dune feels very much indebted to the cinematic spectacles of that decade, even more than it feels like an attempt to directly emulate Star Wars.

Lynch’s films and shows deal with pretty heavy themes, consistently returning to ideas like domestic and sexual abuse or drug addiction or murder. In many cases, most obviously Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, there is a juxtaposition of these horrors against a romantic and nostalgic ideal of suburbia. Blue Velvet famously opens by inviting the audience to dig into the dirt underneath the white picket fences and perfect lawns, to discover what horrors are waiting.

Because of this, there was a tendency to treat Lynch as a subversive, to suggest that he was deconstructing or critiquing the fantasy of American suburban life. This does not seem to have been the case. Throughout his filmography, Lynch seems genuinely invested in the romantic ideal of these surroundings, most likely drawing from his own idealized childhood. The darkness is there not as some fundamental truth, but as a shadow. Et in suburbia, ego.

This gets at the power of Lynch as a filmmaker. Discussions of Lynch’s work often paint his art, his films and his television shows as “very confusing”, “difficult to interpret” or “incomprehensible.” It is certainly true that Lynch’s work does not lend itself to a neat unpacking. There is no single key that unlocks Lynch’s filmography in the same way as understanding Steven Spielberg’s familial anxieties, Christopher Nolan’s obsession with time or Martin Scorsese’s Catholicism.

The imagery in Lynch’s movies cannot always be cleanly decoded by outsiders. This is often because the imagery is often intensely personal to Lynch. Blue Velvet, for example, is rooted in Lynch’s childhood memory of seeing a naked and disheveled woman wandering down the street, an image for which he was never given context. The weird frog-moth creature in Twin Peaks: The Return is not an abstract manifestation of evil, but an image Lynch remembers from a youthful trip to Europe.

Indeed, there are films where it feels very easy to deduce the intensely personal dynamics driving production. His first feature film, Eraserhead, is perhaps the easiest Lynch film to follow outside of The Elephant Man or The Straight Story once the viewer figures out that the film is a prism through which Lynch can work out his frustration with moving to the urban environment of Philadelphia and his deep-seated anxieties about becoming a father for the first time.

This is not to imply that viewers cannot derive more universal meaning from Lynch’s imagery, but that Lynch’s stories mean particular things to him. “I love stories, but I love stories that can hold abstractions, and cinema can say these too difficult-to-say-in-words things,” Lynch has explained. “A lot of times, I don’t know the meaning of the idea — and it drives me crazy. I should know the meaning of the ideas, and I think about them.” He elaborated, “I should know the meaning for me.” He assured the questioner: “You do know. For yourself. And what you know is valid.” It’s an incredibly magnanimous way of thinking about one’s art.

In some ways, this is the difference between Lynch and many of his imitators. Lynch’s work has a deeply personal meaning to him, while many of the films inspired by Lynch feel like pale imitations of another person’s work. There is an earnestness to Lynch’s art. His films and television shows never felt like they were being weird for the sake of being weird or because that is what audiences expected them to be. They were instead articulations of concepts so deeply personal to Lynch that expressing them to others could feel strange and surreal.

Indeed, there is a sense that Lynch is such a strong visual artist because he is trying to communicate things that cannot be clearly expressed through verbal language. “A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words,” he argued. “The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.”

It always feels odd to write in the first person in these pieces, but that was always what appealed to me about Lynch as a filmmaker. I tend to be a fairly analytical critic. I study, I read, I research. I try to understand cultural and historical context, to understand iconography and imagery in a particular time and place. Lynch was always the rare filmmaker who completely bypassed that side of my brain, because I knew instinctively that these images held meaning to him that I would never be able to accurately decode unless he told me – and Lynch (rightly) had very little interest in doing that.

This forced me to engage with Lynch’s work on a purely emotional level, and that was always one of the director’s key strengths. It might not always have been clear what Lynch meant in a literal sense, but it was always possible to get a sense of how he felt. Lynch’s movies are overflowing with emotion and sentiment, feeling and humanity. This is perhaps most explicit in The Elephant Man, where multiple characters react to their meetings with John Merrick (John Hurt) by just staring into space, being deeply moved by the connection that they have made to this human soul.

Indeed, it’s interesting that curiosity is a recurring motif in so many of Lynch’s movies. As much as audiences have spent decades trying to figure out David Lynch, his films often felt like he was trying to figure out people. Lynch’s movies often feel like the work of a person deeply confused by the intricacies of human interaction. He openly acknowledged the strangeness of his relationships to the women in his life – and even his regret and confusion at how things unfolded – and that is clear in his films, which are often about the difficulty of understanding and reconciling women.

Lynch’s films are preoccupied with mirrors, echoes, doppelgängers and doubles. They often seem preoccupied with characters who have fallen into a life that is not their own, as Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) does by becoming Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) in Lost Highway or that Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) does by becoming Dougie (MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks: The Return. Lynch also seems confused by the existence of evil and violence, the horrors that people can inflict upon others.

This is another of the great recurring motifs in Lynch’s work, the idea that violence can be so irrational and so illogical that it tears a fabric in either reality or in a person’s soul. Lynch has acknowledged that Lost Highway derived from his attempt to understand the O.J. Simpson case, but it is also very evident in how Twin Peaks approaches the character of Leland Palmer (Ray Wise). There is a strong sense that human beings are as confusing to Lynch as he can be to audiences.

This was the beauty of David Lynch. Lynch was a surrealist and an absurdist, but his work resonated profoundly with the wider culture because it spoke to something both personal and universal, something impossible to express through mere words. Lynch was one of the great American artists. I don’t know that I understand that, or that I ever will. But I know, profoundly, that I feel it.