Opinion by Pooja Pillai
He upended genre expectations even while working within a genre. What Lynch was really showcasing in his films was a kind of “superreality”, the truest possible imitation of life where often, nothing makes sense.
US director David Lynch, President of the Jury at the 55th International Cannes Film Festival, stands in front of a wall of photographers during a photocall in Cannes May 15, 2002. (Reuters File Photo)
Jan 17, 2025 18:13 IST First published on: Jan 17, 2025 at 18:04 IST
Where did David Lynch get his ideas? Here he is, on the subject: “I think they (ideas) exist like fish. And I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful big ones swim kinda deep down there, so you have to be very quiet and, you know, wait for them to come along.” One can imagine then, that the filmmaker, who died aged 78 on January 15, fished for his ideas in the psychological equivalent of the Mariana Trench. The deepest part of the ocean, where no light has ever penetrated, is where all the weirdest — and most fascinating — fish swim: The alien-like angler fish with its bioluminescent lure (familiar from Finding Nemo), the barreleye with its see-through head, the vampire squid with its Nosferatu-like cape. All apt analogies for Lynch’s films — both shorts and features —and the one series that arguably changed television forever. In his creations, the odd, the grotesque, and the frankly terrifying swim along just fine, where they seem to just belong.
Not that Lynch was interested in horror for horror’s sake. None of his work can even truly be classified as horror, despite the many unsettling elements woven into what were essentially timeless themes that storytellers have always drawn on: Paranoia and madness (Eraserhead), light versus dark (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet), the relentlessness of fate (Mulholland Drive, The Lost Highway). His ingenuity lay in taking the deeply familiar — small-town, “family values” America or Los Angeles, city of dreams — and scratching the surface to reveal the violence and horror that lay beneath. His most obvious gesture to this was in Blue Velvet (1986), which tracks a college-going youngster’s growing entanglement with his hometown’s dark underbelly of drugs and exploitation after he finds a severed ear on a vacant lot. Early in the movie, the camera tracks down from the blue skies and green, perfectly-mown grass of suburbia to the subterranean life, of worms and insects, that seethes beneath. But that was a rare occasion of hand-holding, where the filmmaker made his intentions clear.
The Montana-born Lynch, who had originally trained as a painter, made his entry into cinema with a far more enigmatic film. Eraserhead (1977) was his first feature, after years of playing around with the shorter format — trying to make paintings that move, as he once put it. When he was a child, he would recall in a Rolling Stones interview in 1990, his mother had encouraged him to draw on plain paper, rather than in colouring books which show how to “colour inside the lines”. His penchant for straying outside the lines stymied many viewers of Eraserhead, a puzzle box of a film which seemed to tell the story of a man’s descent into madness following the birth of his deformed child. The film was, in fact, inspired by Lynch’s own fear of fatherhood, and many of its scenes sought a cinematic recreation of the rough Philadelphia neighbourhood, of broken windows and aborted dreams, where he and his first wife, Peggy Reavey, found themselves early in their marriage. But that was Lynch’s special talent, to take something familiar and upset all expectations about it. In early screenings, he would admonish the audience asking the most obvious question about the film: “Don’t ask about the baby!”
Lynch’s approach found its most successful expression in Twin Peaks, the 1990-91 TV show that is arguably the only reason that series like True Detective, Broadchurch, Mare of East Town, Stranger Things and even Mad Men exist today. The story of who killed Laura Palmer could have been a straightforward whodunit about the murder of a teenage beauty queen that rocks an idyllic town. In the hands of Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost, it became an autopsy of the American dream, laying bare the awful truths that hide just beneath the everyday. It’s not like murder mysteries or crime procedurals didn’t exist on TV before Twin Peaks snaked into the mainstream, its theme music (by Angelo Badalamenti) providing a haunting refrain to many a small town nightmare. The reason the show remains a gripping watch even today, more than 30 years on, comes down to Lynch’s gift for subversion. A murder mystery that completely dispensed with realism and all the formulae of the genre, Twin Peaks followed its own dream logic — complete with a nightmare realm of entities and a purgatory-like “Red Room”.
In fact, it was a classic Lynch move to upend genre expectations even while working within a genre. For example, Mulholland Drive (2001), for which he won Best Director at Cannes, was a neo-noir, but only in the broadest sense. The story of Betty, an aspiring actress who arrives in Hollywood and immediately runs into a mysterious femme fatale, quickly flips over to reveal something much darker and sadder. Widely considered to be his masterpiece, Mulholland Drive is part of what is referred to as Lynch’s Los Angeles trilogy (the other two films being The Lost Highway and Inland Empire), where he left the charms (and horrors) of suburbia to explore the LA underworld of struggle and exploitation.
It could be argued that no one, not even Lynch’s most devoted fans — whose numbers include filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick — ever fully understood his creations. But these works were never meant to be understood in the sense that so much of art is meant to be understood. What Lynch was really after was a kind of “superreality”, the truest possible imitation of life where often, nothing makes sense. “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense,” Lynch once said, “They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.” In other words, don’t ask about the baby.
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
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