Remembering David Lynch in the place where ‘the beautiful and the cursed collide’

Acclaimed American filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78. Although the cause of his death has not yet been publicly announced, Lynch, a lifelong tobacco aficionado, revealed in 2024 who suffered from emphysema.

Best known for films such as Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), as well as the influential television series Twin Peaks (1990-91), Lynch – a committed transcendental meditator who worked on multiple mediums, such as painting, photography and music – was a true creative visionary.

Lynch’s impact on popular culture has been profound, both through his commercial success and his constant pushing of artistic boundaries. The fact that the term “Lynchian”, referring to something with a mysterious or threatening dreamlike quality, has passed into our shared cultural lexicon attests to this.

The beautiful and the cursed

In the introduction to Lynch’s memoirs Space to dream (2018), his co-author Kristine McKenna writes:

We live in a realm of opposites, a place where good and evil, spirit and matter, faith and reason, and carnal lust, coexist in an uneasy truce; Lynch’s work resides in the complicated area where the beautiful and the cursed collide.

Inspired by the energies of surrealism, Lynch’s work delves into the darkest recesses of human behavior, while celebrating the haunting beauty and strangeness associated with everyday existence.

We see it in Blue Velvet. This violent and sexually explicit film by Lynch, considered today a true cinema classic, caused general shock and consternation upon its release. It’s an unflinching exploration of the darkness and depravity that lurks beneath the polished facade of suburbia.

The film’s iconic opening sequence sets the stage. A clear blue sky, red roses and a dazzlingly bright white picket fence. A fire truck moves at a snail’s pace and a man hangs on to it, smiling and waving. Some schoolchildren cross the street while a middle-aged white man tends to his garden. Suddenly, he collapses, clutching his neck and writhing in pain.

Lynch’s camera zooms in on the grass until we encounter a mass of insects writhing beneath the surface. The serene soundtrack has been replaced by a sinister, throbbing bass track.

Lynch notes the film’s descent into the realms of the disturbing and the grotesque. In the end, the viewer, shocked, asks: “Why are there so many problems in this world?”

Lynch, whose work avoids easy and conformist answers, leaves the search for an answer to us.

Become an artist

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana (United States), on January 20, 1946, and his childhood was spent moving from one state to another. In college he set out to become a painter, and again attended several art schools in different states, including a trip to Europe.

It was at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia that Lynch began experimenting with film as a medium. Despite dropping out of school two years later, he stayed in Philadelphia and continued painting. He also made his first short film, the self-explanatory Six Men Getting Sick (1967).

In 1970, after receiving a scholarship from the American Film Institute, Lynch moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at the institute’s film school and began working on the film that would become Eraserhead.

Lynch’s debut feature is a hallucinatory, nightmarish portrait of domestic life in an industrial wasteland: a strange world where a boiled chicken writhes on a plate, a hideous mutant baby torments its desperate parents, and a lady who lives inside a radiator sings gloomy songs.

A famous career

Eraserhead was a popular success and attracted the attention of Hollywood.

His first major commission was a film based on the life of Joseph Merrick, a severely disfigured Englishman who became a celebrity in 19th-century London. Featuring a memorable starring role by John Hurt, The Elephant Man (1980) was a huge critical and commercial success. It received eight Oscar nominations, including Lynch’s nomination for best director.

After turning down the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), Lynch directed Dune (1984), an ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel of the same name. The film was battered by critics and was not liked by the public.

It was followed by Blue Velvet, which marked Lynch’s second Oscar nomination for best director.

Lynch’s equally provocative Wild at Heart (1990), a hyper-violent black comedy in which he dared The Wizard of Oz, won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

In Twin Peaks he became interested again in the more sinister side of American small-town life. Around the murder of teenager Laura Palmer, the series combined elements of mystery, soap opera and absurdism. It was a global phenomenon.

His other projects were the aggressively avant-garde Lost Highway (1997), the unabashedly sentimental and idiosyncratic True Story (1999), and the surrealist film noir Mulholland Drive (2001).

Considered Lynch’s masterpiece, this elliptical reverie earned him the best director award at Cannes 2001. In 2022, it ranked eighth in the magazine’s critics poll. Sight & Sound about the best movies of all time.

A fitting ending

Lynch continued to experiment with narrative and the possibilities of the cinematic form. In what turned out to be his last feature film, the long and challenging Inland Empire (2006), Lynch embraced low-resolution digital video and virtually dispensed with conventional storytelling.

The complexity of Inland Empire paved the way for Lynch’s triumphant return to television. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) picked up the story 25 years after the end of the original series.

This 18-episode series, which in my opinion is on par with – if not above – Mulholland Drive, serves as a worthy culmination of Lynch’s career.

In classic Lynch fashion, it concludes on a genuinely shocking note, creepy and ambiguous, that lingers long after the screen fades.

This article was originally published in English.