From Laura Miller writing for Slate;
“As soon as a beloved artist dies, the commemorations appear on social media: She was a genius, he was a giant, they were one of the greats. Was David Lynch all those things? Yes, but it seems almost nonsensical to describe him so. Terms like those suit filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese because you can measure other directors against them. But Lynch, sui generis, eluded comparison. We shall not see his like again, because we’d never seen it before either.”
David Lynch, so odd and unique in almost every way, was an artist with a spirit impossible to categorize. A painter turned avant-garde filmmaker, his art and interests also encompassed television, records, books, nightclubs and even a line of organic coffee.
His one-of-kind perspective and style emerged fully formed in 1977 with the release of Eraserhead, a film thought to embody Lynch’s fear of fatherhood. Eraserhead took 7 years to make with production stopping multiple times due to having run out of money. Numerous friends contributed to its eventual $100K budget including Jack Nance, the actor that played the lead in the film. In the end, it played to long runs as a midnight movie in multiple theaters and ended up making over 7 million dollars. I’ve now seen Eraserhead, but I didn’t see it when it came out, I was still years away from discovering David Lynch. In 2004, Eraserhead was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress.
My first ever exposure to David Lynch came in late ’86 and was inauspicious at best. I had just finished Navy Bootcamp and was back in Chicago after a couple months away. There was a girl I had met right before leaving, but we hadn’t gone out on a proper date yet. My idea? There’s a movie playing at the Music Box I heard good things about. You know where this is going, Blue Velvet isn’t the first movie you’re gonna recommend for a first date, Dennis Hopper made sure of that. This, from the New York Times obit;
“The heart of the film, which starred Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern and Mr. Lynch’s sometime alter ego Kyle MacLachlan, is a 20-minute sex scene replete with voyeurism, rape, sadomasochism, implied castration, all manner of verbal and physical abuse, elaborate fetishism, and a ritualized kinkiness for which there is no name.”
I was one and done with that girl, most likely figured I made bad decisions. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed that screening of Blue Velvet a lot, cause I like weird, but if I’m being honest, I blamed the movie at the time for losing me that girl. So in ’86, I was one and done with Lynch, but little did I know that 4 years later, I’d be irrevocably bitten by David Lynch for evermore.
Speaking of the Navy, the first movie I saw after getting out of the service in August of ’90 was David Lynch’s next film. Wild at Heart was such a pleasure to discover, it felt to me like the best a movie could be, the most you could ask for. A self-described black romantic comedy and crime film, it followed the protagonist pair Lula and Sailor, magnificently acted by Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage on their journey on the run from Lula’s mother and her engagement with multiple bad actors to fulfill her desire to kill Sailor. Wild at Heart is just an outrageously strange rolling odyssey featuring once in a career performances from Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rossellini and Harry Dean Stanton, in addition to Dern and Cage. And not to spoil anything, but Lula and Sailor have a baby boy, and they name him Pace, which was the name I gave my first ever cat which I got on Halloween of ’90… so that was the scenario that made David Lynch a Patron Saint for me. Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.
Lynch wasn’t what you’d call prolific in terms of his overall output of films, there were only 10 of ‘em. He did spend some significant time on Twin Peaks for television, but by the time I got to it, it was already known that the show was cancelled by ABC on a cliff-hanger and I never invest any time into a show that’s incomplete, so I’ve never seen those. I did enjoy Lost Highway very much, Bill Pullman, a great performance from the classic Robert Loggia and Robert Blake’s final film. Loved Trent Reznor organizing the music for this one as well, a harbinger of his future work in film scoring and just a great soundtrack. I enjoyed Mulholland Drive as well, which is widely considered to be Lynch’s masterpiece. Not for me, but I get it. His final film, Inland Empire from ’06 I haven’t yet seen, but it’s on my list.
From the New York Times Lynch obit, this feels right on it;
“Mr. Lynch’s style has often been termed surreal, and indeed, with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs and eroticized derangement of the commonplace, the Lynchian has evident affinities to classic surrealism. Mr. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Mr. Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational.”
Patron Saints represent historical figures, cultural figures who have embodied the largest forces of inspiration to Optiflux and how we look at creativity. A Patron Saint can be alive or dead, when they die, these bios also become obituaries. Be aware that Patron Saint pages can and will be added to whenever any new, interesting facts become known. Documents in flux, that’s the idea.
