“I love the logic of dreams…anything can happen and it all makes sense.”
——David Lynch
The first thing I thought of was bugs.
if you have seen blue velvet, And then you remember the title sequence - whether you loved or hated David Lynch's 1986 all-American masterpiece, it's not a movie you'll forget. The camera pans to a white picket fence as Bobby Vinton croones his 1963 version of the song of the same name. The roses dotting the bottom of the frame are so red that it hurts your eyes to look at them. A fire truck drives by with a Dalmatian on the sideboard. Crossing guards help school children cross the street. A woman drinks coffee and watches a movie on TV in her suburban living room. Her husband was watering the yard outside. It's a picturesque day in small town America.
The man then tried to unhook the hose and fell to the ground without warning. A dog holds an upward splash in its jaws as a toddler strolls in from the background holding a lollipop. Then the camera begins to descend, descend, descend into the grass. The soundtrack is filled with evil chatter and what appears to be dozens of shiny black bugs squirming and gnawing at each other. Judging from the slight glow on their carapace, they might be beetles or ants - the latter soon appeared, flitting past a severed ear. But nevertheless, these creatures are rummaging beneath the surface of a calm, completely removed from the Eisenhower era. Everything looks swollen above the ground. What happens underground, however, is a different story entirely.
Lynch, who has died aged 78, was fond of quoting a sound designer who said of his mysteries: "It's like Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch." When asked about the film by Chris Rodley in a book interview Lynch to Lynch, However, the director offers a more revealing description: "This is what I think of America. There's a very innocent, innocent quality to life, but also a fear and illness. That's everything." In between. The middle ground of is where Lynch has spent his entire career: in his paintings and writings, in his short films and TV shows, and even in his daily online weather forecasts, there's something somehow at once childlike and menacing. quality. But especially in his films, dreams—Lynch’s lifelong preoccupation—can turn into nightmares faster than you can down a good cup of coffee.
Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946 and grew up throughout the United States thanks to his father's job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He spent his formative years in Spokane (Washington), Boise (Idaho), Durham (North Carolina) and Alexandria (Virginia). The director describes his childhood as "elegant houses, tree-lined streets, milkmen, building backyard forts, buzzing airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America That's how it was." He was an Eagle Scout and his troop attended President Kennedy's inauguration. When people are asked to describe what it's like to work with Lynch, the first thing they usually mention is that he's traditionally "nice" and "clean-cut." The constant stream of "OMG"s feels so dated, and so jarring, that when coming from someone whose films are so full of darkness and genuine transgression, they'd swear it was a pretense. That's exactly what he said. But he also knew exactly what kind of bugs were squirming beneath all this beauty.
At the suggestion of good friend and future collaborator Jack Fisk, Lynch traveled to Philadelphia and enrolled in art school, determined to become a painter. He soon found his interest in film, making a number of short films known for their surrealism, disturbing mood, and blend of animation and live action. He eventually moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Peggy, and their young daughter, Jennifer. However, his insecurities about parenthood and time spent in industrial Philadelphia greatly influenced his feature debut. It took nearly five years, several grants, and many stops and starts eraserhead, It's a black-and-white fable about a man named Henry, played by Lynch's long-time colleague Jack Nance, who's known for his extremely vertical hairstyle. Henry unexpectedly becomes a father and must deal with a baby that screams and cries like a small animal. (Ask him how he created this image in his book Newborn midnight movies, Lynch deflected the question, admitting only that "you really don't want to know." Consider that he later photographed what he called a "chicken kit," an actual chicken whose disassembled parts resembled the models he made as a child Aircraft kit, we almost certainly don't want to know. )
Any parallels to Henry's insecurities about his children and the film's writer-director's realistic feelings about fatherhood are probably not coincidental—you get the sense that, no matter how hallucinatory and otherworldly things get, this is all coming from a personal place . Lynch's shadow. Released to an unsuspecting public in 1977, Eraserhead Initially leaving the crowd bewildered and bewildered. It wasn't until producer and exhibitor Ben Barenholz started showing the film at midnight around the country that the film gained a cult following of freaks and a cult following obsessed with its strange, unsettling wavelength. "(It's) not a movie I'm going to fall head over heels for," claims the new film village voice The reviewer assigned to cover the book was a young man named J. Hoberman. "Although if someone dropped the reels of it in the middle, I would consider that a revolutionary act Star Wars."
Somehow word of the film got to Mel Brooks, who screened it and loved it. His production company, Brooks Films, is producing Elephant Man, A biopic about Joseph Merrick (his name is changed to John in the film), whose deformities caused by a genetic disease made him a celebrity in the 19th century. Lynch has said that he chose the script based on the title, and Brooks pushed hard to hire him to direct the film, despite well-heeled questions about why the man making this strange film would be a good fit for the famous drama. Obtained results Elephant Man Eight Oscar nominations, including a Best Director nomination for Lynch. He has now become a lucrative commodity in Hollywood, with George Lucas and Dino De Laurentiis both asking him to direct big-budget sci-fi blockbusters. He chose De Laurentiis's Choice, adapted from Frank Herbert's novel dune. It nearly derailed his burgeoning career and split the director in half.
Lynch's version of the intergalactic savior found its mojo, undergoing massive critical re-evaluation over the past decade or so, but at the time he almost came close to being locked up in director's prison forever. However, he owed De Laurentiis another project, so he began writing the script based on a vision he claimed one night. "I don't like the song 'Blue Velvet,'" Lynch said in his 2018 hybrid biography/memoir Dream room. "Then one night I heard it and it combined with the green lawn at night and the woman's red lips seen through the car window - there was some kind of bright light shining on this white face and red lips superior."
blue velvet This may have been the defining film of the Reagan era, circa 1986—a throwback to a bygone era that violently punctured the glittering myth of the city on a hill and asked us to turn our attention to the candy-colored sand people doing the impossible in enclosed places. Metaphorical things. This is where the term "Lynchian" was coined to describe his unique style that blends surrealism, satire, dry humor and serious horror. This adjective defines all of his subsequent works, both in comparison to and in contrast to that emotion. (The most shocking film Lynch ever made remains straight story, His 1999 Disney film tells the story of an old man who drives a lawnmower across the country to visit his estranged brother, simply because He plays it completely straight.) if his follow-up, twisted The Wizard of Oz Respect wild heart (1990) initially suggested that Lynchian was an acquired taste, but his other project that year quickly proved that the mainstream was ready for a small-screen version of his signature storytelling style.
It's hard to sum up just how radical and popular Lynch and co-founder Mark Frost's work has been. twin peaks It was when it was on TV in the early 1990s, or how quickly it became quoted often"peyton square The "acid" vibe and quirky characters became part of the daily vernacular. Lynch appeared on " time magazine, Everyone wants a piece of cherry pie. It faltered in season two, but by that time, Lynch and Frost revealed that this template for the future Dead Girl program was actually a story of abuse. Another perfect suburban facade, another saucer full of secrets messily devoured in the shadows. The 1992 prequel, Twin Peaks: Walk with Me, Leaning more toward the family trauma aspect—audiences at the time again recoiled, and the film was again considered a rough gem a few years later—when Lynch eventually returned to Twin Peaks , Twin Peaks: The Return In 2017, he quenched nostalgia with a stronger, more ergot-like anesthetic. Its eighth episode, which traces the roots of modern evil to the Big Bang of the atomic age, remains one of the most harrowing things to ever air on premium cable.
Lynch would continually pour his patented nightmare sauce into the collective water supply, giving us great movies like this lost highway(1996); great movies like mulholland drive (2001), which started out as an aborted TV series, may well be the real L.A. Eats Yourself masterpiece of the 21st century; and The Incomprehensible is like inland empire (2006). He abandoned film in favor of digital video before it became standard operating procedure, departing less from industry standards and more from artistic standards—video closer to the visual texture of his dreams. He played a recurring role in the show twin peaks, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole was nearly deaf and would continue to occasionally turn in front of the camera, from Louis Steven Spielberg's Autobiography The Fabelmann family, Played as well as John Ford. (Make him into Seeker The writing apparently comes from film historian Mark Harris, whose husband Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay. )
There are similar documentaries Lynch (1), follow him as he directs inland empire — You can watch it on the Criterion Channel — and David Lynch: Artistic Life, You can ride shotgun as you wander around his studio in the Hollywood Hills. He continues to paint, write and maintain a dedicated online presence. Occasionally there are rumors and rumors that something new is coming. When John Mulaney did his meta talk show Everybody's in Los Angeles Last year, he mentioned that he had Lynch as a guest. The filmmaker declined the offer, saying "I'm at work right now and need to keep an eye on the donuts." In the cover story sight and sound Last September, the lifelong smoker revealed he had emphysema but had no plans to retire. Fans hope we get at least one more Lynch movie, another TV series, and one WTF short after another.
Now that David Lynch has died, he left behind a remarkable body of work that depicts the new, weird America he witnessed firsthand, just as the bugs lurking beneath our nation's manicured lawns are crawling in abundance. The moment he came out of the ground. He is a great, astonishing chronicler of America's dark times. But above all, he was a true artist, following his unique muse across the barriers of imagination and rational thought. “The artistic spirit kind of becomes the artistic life,” he admitted in a 2016 documentary. “The idea is, you drink coffee, you smoke, you draw, and that’s it…” It’s basically work and The incredible happiness that life brings. "Mission accomplished.