I suspect many people first encountered David Lynch’s movies just like I did: as a teenager, in a basement, with a friend who had a “weird movie” to show us.
That movie, “Eraserhead,” introduced me to a new way of looking at art.
The moody black-and-white, the eerie mechanical score, the surreal behavior of the family in the film.
A man pulling levers, a woman in the radiator, a father with soil piles in his bedroom.
The baby.
It was all brand-new to me, and that was intoxicating. I learned how to interpret movies for the first time trying to understand it all. In realizing some things were unexplainable, I was taught that in art, there isn’t always a single right answer. In accepting that impermeable in-between, I was trained to hear my own voice.
Lynch is like that.
Ironically, “Eraserhead” is even on the – relatively – straightforward side when it comes to his films: being a father is hard, the movie told me. Creating things is hard.
Lynch worked hard to create during his decades-long career. He made 10 feature films, including the celebrated “Mulholland Drive,” “Blue Velvet” and “The Elephant Man.” He created one of the most iconic TV shows of the 1990s in “Twin Peaks.” He directed dozens of short films, wrote books, made music. He even had a signature brand of coffee.
Then, yesterday, Thursday, Jan. 16, Lynch died at 78 years old, just four days shy of his 79th birthday.
Losing Lynch feels catastrophic to our collective creativity.
So many people have been inspired by Lynch’s films over the years, pouring over them like ants on a severed ear. His movies brought surrealism into the mainstream and dreams into the multiplex. His work demonstrated it was possible to make something simultaneously funny, scary, strange and sincere, filled with death, delight and digressions. Traces of his influence are everywhere. “The Substance,” my favorite movie of the year, is filled with homage to “Lost Highway,” “Elephant Man” and “Mulholland Drive.”
Lynch meant so much to so many people. The world won’t be the same without him.
For the record, “Eraserhead” isn’t my favorite Lynch movie – that would be the beautifully bizarre 1990 road romance “Wild at Heart,” starring Nic Cage and Laura Dern – but it has been the one most on my mind since his passing. There’s a sequence in the film of a woman with a puffy, scarred face singing on a stage inside of a radiator. “In Heaven, everything is fine,” she sings over and over.
I sure hope so. Rest in peace, David Lynch.
