By Bethany Banks, Second Year English
The American director found beauty in the terrifyingly surreal, found solace in meditation, and left the line between dreams and reality impossibly blurred.
One month ago, the death of American filmmaker David Lynch deeply moved the film industry and audiences alike. Renowned for his artistic touch, his films have the power to shock with grotesque surrealism, and strike awe with intense beauty. In any case, Lynch was a singular visionary, with a style so distinct, the term ‘Lynchian’ has been coined to describe works that evoke a similar tone and atmosphere.
Perhaps most well-known for his small town mystery drama series Twin Peaks (1990), that follows the FBI investigation into a prom queen’s murder, Lynch’s first film Eraserhead (1977) is a far cry from the brooding forests and melodramatic tone of Twin Peaks and its following series and film. Shot in black and white, Eraserhead is an immensely unsettling portrayal of the fears of fatherhood as a man struggles to take care of his deformed child in a desolate landscape. Although it is Lynch at his most horrifying, the film’s surrealist imagery, meticulous sound design and repeated wandering into a dream-like landscape are key elements of Lynch’s signature style.
These ideas can be seen across the span of his artistic career, up to his final and less well-known feature film, Inland Empire (2006), a psychological thriller that explores the nightmarish events that take place when a Hollywood actress, played by Laura Dern, begins to inhabit a character she played on a cursed film production. Dern has starred in two of Lynch’s other films, Blue Velvet (1986),and Wild at Heart (1990), and has a main role in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). She speaks incredibly highly of Lynch and her time working on his films. In a heartfelt tribute letter to Lynch after his death, Dern states ‘Artistically, I found my person in you’, a ‘genius who gave us… some of our most iconic imagery and impacted our dreams.’
The idea of dreams, and the blurring of dreams with reality, is integral to Lynch’s work. On Inland Empire, critic Mark Fisher described the film as ‘like a series of dream sequences floating free of any grounding reality, a dream without a dreamer.’ The thread of nonsensical dream logic that weaves its way through Lynch’s films has left audiences equally in awe and put off, and usually always bewildered. Dreams are not only the language of his films, but their landscape. Failing to reveal any other specifics about the meaning of his highly regarded neo-noir mystery Mullholland Drive (2001), Lynch gave the film only one tagline: ‘A love story in the city of dreams.’
Surreal, confusing, and often downright disturbing, the joy of Lynch is in watching his films and becoming immersed in the beauty and madness – becoming the dreamer to experience the film’s dream. Lynch’s fascination with the inner working of the human mind is apparent both on and off screen. A pioneering practitioner of transcendental meditation, Lynch set up his own foundation to teach the benefits of this practise, most importantly being a deep sense of calm within when letting the mind settle inwardly.
Lynch sings the praises of transcendental meditation in his lesser-known autobiography published in 2006, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, the title referring to his statement that ‘ideas are like fish.’ When reading the director’s famous notion that in order to catch the big ideas, you have to dig deeper into a transcendental state of consciousness, the impact of transcendental meditation on his approach to filmmaking is clear. Lynch’s exploration of the human psyche reveals psychopathy that lurks beneath the veneer of seeming normality - like the dark secrets that hide in the picturesque small-town of Twin Peaks, and the twisted suburban erotica of Blue Velvet.
From Eraserhead to Inland Empire, Mullholland Drive to Wild at Heart, Lynch’s filmmaking is always strikingly artistic, haunting, and thought provoking. A director that urged his audience to expand their minds and poke further into the meandering depths of the consciousness, David Lynch will be sorely missed. His creative impact on the film industry will not soon be forgotten, and he will be heralded as an inspiration for many generations to come.
What is your favourite David Lynch film to remember the director by?
