How did David Lynch become a movie icon?

On Thursday morning, I happened to be re-reading Pauline Kael’s classic 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and Movies.” A few hours later, I learned that David Lynch had died, and a sentence from the article immediately came back to me: “The world doesn’t work the way the textbooks say it does, and we are different from what our parents and teachers expected.” To be.” I sensed Lynch’s critical spirit in Kyle’s observation. Lynch, more than any filmmaker of his time, confronted carefully negotiated lies and bore the burden of alienated identities. Many films are called “revelations” and “insights,” but Lynch’s films seem made to embody these terms: he sees what has remained unseen and reveals what has been meticulously hidden, and his visions break the veneer of respectability to depict unbearable truths in fantastical form.

With 1986’s Blue Velvet, Lynch instantly became the quintessential director of the Reagan era, detonating the hypocrisy and hypocrisy surrounding him in ways that went beyond observational reporting. In a drama about the criminal underside of a small town, nefarious schemes involving officials leading a double life emerge. The machinations resemble less coherent plots than echoes of vague dreams—violent, predatory dreams that seem like the underside of the utopian myths Americans have so eagerly bought from their Hollywood boss. Despite its searing precision, the film feels as if it is thrown onto the screen in the heat of artistic and figurative urgency. Lynch’s work, with its bold invention and brilliant grasp of symbolic detail and alien worlds, is reminiscent of cinema’s other great surrealist, Luis Buñuel, but with its specifically American and domestic perspective, it also brings to mind a cinematic modernization of the works of Sherwood Anderson. “(Waynesburg, Ohio).“.

Lynch’s ambition reached full bloom in a network television mega-hit, a medium that rarely welcomes huge, ambitious work: “Twin Peaks,” which aired its two seasons in 1990 and 1991. For all its fantastical riots and hallucinatory depths, the show was another portrait of a Winesburg-style town and of the more elaborately interwoven relationships between a large cast of characters. Like Blue Velvet, it was a story of crime, impunity, sexual violence and the strenuous efforts to keep it hidden. Lynch expands the dark visions of “Blue Velvet” to put the visible world upside down – the disturbed surfaces, the disturbing illusions of a small town, and the strange strangeness of its ordinary life, all coming together in one horror, the murder of a teenage girl named Laura Palmer. Although the series was groundbreaking, it never quite lived up to its promise (the television format remained strong), and when it was cancelled, it quickly became clear that Lynch himself wasn’t finished with it. After directing only six of its thirty episodes, he followed the series with the feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a prequel that allowed him, essentially self-revision, to deepen the series’ pictorial subjectivity. have touched.

Lynch, who was born in 1946, finished his first feature, “Eraserhead,” an extremely low-budget production, in 1977, and from that highly creative beginning to the end of his career, he experienced the paradox of surrealism — the effort it takes to bring a film like that to light. He put in the pictures a fundamentally literary concept. Lynch started out as a painter but also became a writer, poet, memoirist, and screenwriter (not to mention a musician). The pictorial surrealism of Dali or Magritte comes with humor, because it is easy to manipulate aspects of reality with a paintbrush. (This is also why the fantasy worlds of most CGI scenes are so self-serious: one drop of self-deprecation and inflated privilege will pop like balloons.) But in literature, it’s not easy to suspend meaning, and it’s even harder That is making it more difficult. Apparently nonsense starts with meaning. The danger of surrealist cinema is that its main inventions are conceptual, that is, creating brutality on the page and implementing it only on the screen. “Eraserhead” is a simple but stunning proof of concept movie that comes to life in dreamlike visuals despite being tied to an overwrought, inconsequential script. However, after Mel Brooks realized the power of Lynch’s ideas, he hired him to direct The Elephant Man (1980), which Brooks co-produced. In retrospect, the film arguably appears to be one of his least Lynchian works, yet his sympathetic sensitivity and his instinct for passionately capturing concrete images combined to create a masterpiece of historical reconstruction.

Lynch followed this up with his 1984 adaptation of Dune, a project doomed to failure by studio meddling, which nonetheless indicates how radically he could reshape familiar genres, if given the chance. He found himself in a predicament similar to that of Buñuel, whose early films were collages and parodies, and who eventually broke into the industry by channeling his biting symbolism into familiar narrative forms. Lynch did this too, but the formats and studios he faced were particularly harsh, and he found a distinctively modern solution – but it took an extremely long time to do so.

After “Twin Peaks” and “Fire Walk with Me,” Lynch headed into strange new territory: inward. His 1997 film “Lost Highway” is a complex variation on noir themes; Although it gets lost in its hectic byways, it nevertheless results in highly innovative stylistic flourishes that suggest a self-focused psychoanalysis of Hollywood genres and tropes. The film represents a major step on what has turned out to be a long and winding road toward its eventual cinematic reinvention. He stayed with Hollywood for 2001’s Mulholland Drive, which began as a TV pilot and played like one, but was suffocated under the bulk of its story. Toward the end, the film is invigorated by reversal, an exchange of identity that is as cleverly conceived as it is vividly depicted. However, the psychological resonances, while profound, are vague, and the symbolic touches are subtle and easy compared to the complexities of “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks.” A mystery that remains a mystery, “Mulholland Drive” is the kind of mystery that could almost have been designed to generate discourse, and as such, it has become an object of cinephile veneration.

“Mulholland Drive” was not a commercial success, and as studios were increasingly closed to directors’ free ideas, Lynch’s career stalled. However, he continued his explorations within the world of cinema, making Inland Empire (2006), which he shot on consumer video and did his own cinematography. This film was conceived experimentally: Lynch began without a script, instead writing day after day throughout filming. The result is as tied to the text as if the script had been settled from the beginning, despite the flashes of wonder and urgency from Lynch’s camera work and the special effects afforded by the video production. Such moments of creative delight were intermittent embellishments to a diffuse effort.

While Lynch was pointing his camera into his own environment, the filmmaking environment, there was one very important place Lynch did not point it: toward himself. This was about to change, and it led to one of the greatest displays of artistic self-renewal in modern cinema. His next major project, “Twin Peaks: The Return,” which aired on Showtime in 2017, added, across its 18 episodes (all of which he directed), nearly as much screen time as all of its theatrical features combined. The Return expanded the conspiratorial chaos surrounding Laura Palmer’s murder to cosmic proportions; It could almost have been subtitled “Apocalypse Now,” and conceptually, it does more to fulfill the implications of that phrase than a Francis Ford Coppola film does. Lynch’s film also achieves the conceptual implications of the director’s lifelong exploration of his subconscious, his spontaneous and exaggerated fantasies.

Throughout Lynch’s career, when his range of images seemed uninhibited, as in Inland Empire, the effect was like hearing him recount his dreams—experiences that only he had and that remained more or less uncommunicable. When images were tightly connected, as in Twin Peaks, the effect often seemed calculated to produce meaning rather than embody the free flow of the unconscious. But in “The Return” Lynch often went beyond the script in the performance sequences, and even the humor, which was so striking that it seemed to penetrate the screen itself. The most important deployment of his newfound sense of tone and performance, and the most important new way in which he put his direct innovative powers into the series, was by placing himself personally and physically at the center of the show. In The Return, Lynch reprises his role as FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole from the first two seasons and the film, but now he makes the character stand out both dramatically and visually – and brings Cole to life with a sparkling, original performance. match. Lynch plays Cole as a secular prophet, a grandiose, imposing presence who dispenses wisdom and judgment with a self-deprecating yet prophetic intensity.

Not only is Lynch’s performance one of the greatest of any filmmaker to appear in his own work; It is an era that embodies a cinematic era. In a gradual manner, week after week, Lynch was doing what his peers in world cinema, such as Agnès Varda (“Me and the Takers,” “The Shores of Agnès”) and Jaafar Panahi (“This Is Not a Film”), were doing. “Taxi,” they will do when industrial or political conditions make it difficult for them to make films: they put themselves in the frame, and highlight their characters. By making himself the most recognizable face and voice of his most powerful directorial venture, Lynch has made himself A symbol of his art – and, in fact, the main emblem of the cinema of his time.

However, this incarnation is troubled, bearing the burden of the physical, social, and moral atrocities that Lynch brought to the screen throughout his career. He is a visual visionary first and foremost, but he is not only visual: there is more Dostoyevsky in his films than in Visconti’s “White Nights” or Bresson’s “Une Femme Douce”; And Kafka more than in Wells’s “The Trial”; More Freudian than in Huston’s “Freud” or Cronenberg’s “Dangerous Method.” It is terrifying to imagine that, under Lynch’s stoic and heartfelt gaze, it contains the screams and gasps, the sirens of terror and the shivers of fear, the tangled world of superficial evils and deeper evils, that he presented in his films. Signs of this inner turmoil can be seen in a film like The Straight Story from 1999, in his tender vision of an elderly man taking a long drive on a lawnmower to visit his estranged brother. The film plays out something like what those who don’t dream of horror call a vivid dream — a redemptive, secular vision of love and solidarity. It’s a vision embodied by Lynch’s screen presence in The Return, as a survivor of the knowledge and obsessions he relentlessly presented for half a century, from which he emerged principled, relentlessly humane, and compassionately steadfast in the world. end. ♦