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Dreaming with open eyes: Hollywood loses unique spirit with David Lynch
A screaming larva baby. Characters that transition into another without explanation. A murder mystery full of mysterious clues wrapped in nightmares. With David Lynch you never knew exactly what you were going to see, but you knew it was going to be unusual, often grotesquely repulsive and seductively fascinating all rolled into one. Yesterday he died at the age of 78. He had been suffering from emphysema for some time.
“He was influential but impossible to imitate,” fellow director Steven Soderbergh responded to the death. “They tried, but his algorithm only worked for him. Trying to imitate that was at your own risk.”
Film journalist Robbert Blokland also calls Lynch an inimitable filmmaker. “He has inspired people, but there is no real successor. You only have that with a few great directors. Tarantino is also such a person: he has been followed by many, but there is actually no one who has done as well as him. “
Without explanation
Lynch’s films could be dark and incomprehensible, absurdist and frightening, but also full of humor and striking images. The dancing dwarf from Twin Peaks, the gas mask of Dennis Hopper’s perverse sex maniac in Blue Velvet, Nicolas Cage’s snakeskin jacket as a “symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
Lynch did not want to explain exactly what it all meant. He refused to record DVD commentaries, his films had to speak for themselves. “I find it uncomfortable to talk about meaning. It’s better not to know what something means. It’s all very personal and what it means to me doesn’t necessarily mean to someone else.”
For Lynch, the feeling that his work evoked in the viewer was leading. His incongruous narrative style makes viewers complicit. “Fragments are interesting. You can dream the rest, then you are part of it yourself.”
Dreaming in the dark
For Lynch, filming was dreaming with her eyes open, collectively in the dark. The opportunity to explore Freudian desires of sex and violence through the phantasmagoria that the projector conjured up on the silver screen. Fever dreams and nightmares occur frequently in his work, such as in Twin Peaks with the disruptive effect of audio recorded backwards.
“Films allow you to wander into other worlds. It is a magical medium that allows you to dream,” he described his love for cinema. “You can dream in the dark.”
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For Lynch it was a way to explore the human lusts and compulsive feelings that we sublimate in civilized company. The dark emotions behind calm facades. Nowhere did he capture it more symbolically than in the opening montage of Blue Velvet, where, after images of idyllic suburbia, we zoom in on the teeming mass of insects under the neatly raked lawn.
“I’m convinced we’re all voyeurs,” he reasoned. “We want to know the secrets, what happens behind those windows? Not to hurt anyone, but to entertain ourselves. We want to know: what does man do?”
New form of TV
No wonder he returned so often to detective stories, a genre par excellence driven by curiosity. By combining the tired clichés from murder mysteries with his innovative style, he ushered in a new generation of TV series with Twin Peaks in 1990, full of complex, adult themes.
“He showed for the first time that a television series can be more than a new story every week,” Blokland explains. “It could also be an ongoing story that you were drawn into.” Without Twin Peaks, there would be no X-Files, True Detective or The Sopranos.
Despite these innovations, the highest American entertainment prizes remained beyond his reach. He was unsuccessfully nominated for an Oscar four times, and Twin Peaks’ Emmy nominations were also not received. He had more success in Europe: Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or in 1990, and with Mulholland Drive he won Best Director at Cannes.
Blokland thinks it made little difference to Lynch. “I don’t think he cared much about that. This was not a man who cared much about status. He just wanted to do his thing. He also made art in his shed, it was not about honor or fame for him. That also makes him an exception in Hollywood.
Radical experiments
That relaxed attitude and his endearing personality mean that many Hollywood colleagues express their condolences. Soderbergh praises his non-linear and illogical working method, “in which his mind clearly saw structure”. Ron Howard, a more traditional filmmaker as director of A beautiful mind and Apollo 13, says that Lynch’s “radical experiments could lead to unforgettable cinema”.
Steven Spielberg, also more along the classic Hollywood lines, calls him a “visionary dreamer, whose films felt crafted”.
“The world will miss his original and unique perspective. His films have stood the test of time and always will.”
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