David Lynch — cinematic legend, sculptor of oddities, and avant-garde painter — passed away two weeks ago at the age of 78.
His death has been difficult to swallow. Lynch is a household name in U of T’s Cinema Studies Institute. Lifelong friendships are often founded on the question “What is your favourite Lynch movie?” After school hangouts aren’t complete without a blunt and a Lynch Criterion rerelease. It feels strange adjusting to a world where Lynch is now referenced in the past tense.
While Lynch’s career is widely celebrated in film circles, there are many who are either oblivious to his work or find his dense oeuvre too daunting. In honour of his passing, here are three of my favourite films that David Lynch directed.
Eraserhead (1977)
Lynch debuted in cinemas with Eraserhead, a kooky, black-and-white body horror with a well-deserved reputation for traumatizing unassuming spectators. Set in an unnamed industrial city, where the passage of time is marked by plangent factory noise, the film follows Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) and his girlfriend Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) as they navigate an unwanted pregnancy. In such a noxious wasteland, no child is born immaculate. Indeed, the creature that slithers out of Mary’s womb is a difficult sight to endure. Swaddled tightly in cloth, the child has a pencil-thin neck and an oblong, fish-like head. Tiny round eyes dot its face, and its raw skin is sluiced in slime. Mary’s conception can hardly qualify as human.
The baby cries into the long winter night, wailing an omen of sleepless madness. One early morning, or late at night — to an insomniac, it’s all the same — mother Mary dashes from the house to preserve her sanity, leaving the child in Henry’s care.
In her absence, the weight of Henry’s paternal responsibility leaves him petrified: what could possibly be more frightening to an indolent father than taking care of his own baby? Unable to offload chores to his weary wife, Henry sits in a room and stares blankly at the wall while the baby-thing clamours in the background. It is a revealing display of incompetence; Henry’s doltishness is a satirical spin on the uneven, gendered distribution of domestic labour.
Eraserhead quite literally ends on an explosive note. The attrition warfare that is parenthood, or perhaps plain curiosity, drives Henry to slice open his offspring. Blood, pus, and other mysterious secretions gush out from the rivened body, raining across the frame. The unforgettable scene marks a violent conclusion to the baby’s life and simultaneously, the liberation of Mary and Henry’s — and of course, the birth of Lynch’s cinematic venture.
Blue Velvet (1986)
Blue Velvet, Lynch’s career-shifting film, opens with a montage of petty bourgeoise iconography: white fences behind ruby flowers, firemen waving pageantly, streets with xeroxed homes, a pudgy old man watering his verdant lawn — images that compose the American Dream. Then, suddenly, the man falls to the ground. As he writhes in pain, his sputtering hose points phallically toward the sky. Slowly, Lynch zooms into the collapse of serenity; the camera leans closer and closer, past the garden, through blades of grass, and into a dark, microscopic world teeming with bugs.
The disfigured man is father to Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a fresh-faced college student who returns home to find this tragedy. On his way back from a hospital visit, Jeffrey stumbles upon a veiny, severed ear in the middle of a field. The grotesque intrudes into suburbia — a thematic clash. Fascinated by the mystery organ, Jeffrey transforms into a pseudo-detective on the hunt for answers. His curiosity leads him to Dorthy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a nightclub singer who performs ‘Blue Velvet’ nightly, and her abuser, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Soon, Jeffrey is ensnared in their complex world of drugs, state corruption, Oedipal tensions, and sadomasochistic desires. A properly perverse assemblage.
The conspiracy Blue Velvet poses is as follows: innocence is not as pure as it seems. Lurking in the shadows of middle-class heaven, hidden behind freshly mowed lawns, chintzy wallpapers, catalogue furniture, and other such wealth signifiers, is a world of barbaric violence. Eschew moral dialectics; the priestly and the degenerate are two sides of the same coin. After all, where better for ‘evil’ to hide than in the hospice of ‘good?’
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Mulholland Drive, known to me as the sapphic bible, is Lynch’s most acclaimed work — and for good reason. The film initially presents itself as a Los Angeles neo-noir. Betty (Naomi Watts) is a small-town girl who moves to Hollywood to pursue her acting dreams. However, this plan is complicated when the aspiring starlet befriends Rita (Laura Elena Harring), a brunette resembling Rita Hayworth, who remembers nothing except that her life is in danger. With an inexhaustible optimism that only a perky blonde could emit, Betty attempts to make her name in the cutthroat movie business while helping Rita recover the gap in her memories to fend off her suit-clad predators.
By this point in his career, Lynch was the master of uncanny filmmaking; with ease, he invoked the spectator’s unease without slipping too far from ‘the familiar.’ His control over the eerie is evident throughout Mulholland Drive’s many dark, phantasmagoric moments, but especially in — and here, I use a superlative I don’t invoke easily — what might be the most harrowing scene in film history: Betty and Rita’s visit to Club Silencio. In a sparse auditorium, a woman lip-syncs a Spanish cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” But the words don’t match her lips. As the music trails behind her performance, it reveals itself as a farce. Betty and Rita’s reaction is one of utter horror. Their faces contort into ghastly expressions at Lynch’s visual demonstration of time-out-of-joint.
Fame and remembering: two not entirely unrelated concepts. To reach stardom is to be forever cherished in the heart of the masses; likewise, being unforgettable is the prerequisite for even hearing back from a casting agent. In the second half of Mulholland Drive, the narrative suddenly careens to reveal that it was all a dream: there is no Betty, Rita, enemy, or Club Silencio. Everything was a mirage composed by Diane Selwyn (also played by Naomi Watts), a washed-up actress suffering from severe depression through irrelevancy. The plot twist here feels less like a shock for shock’s sake — a cliché cop-out — and more like an astute implosion of the Real. Betty/Diane or Diane/Betty? Lynch leaves us guessing as to who the actual impostor is.
Nothing ever dies
In my grief, I’ve binge-watched Lynch’s entire filmography. His work, quite literally scripted after dreams, turns each viewing into an excursion into his subconscious. In other words, Lynch’s films function as an index of his mind, as a preservation of his symbolic logic. To paraphrase a line from The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch cannot die. While his body may unravel, ferment, and decompose, his spirit is embalmed inside his movies, to be released with the press of play. Lynch, forever present; Lynch, immortalized by his art.
