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David Lynch Was a Singular Filmmaker Whose Dreams Will Always Walk With Us
David Lynch, the director of "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive" who died this week, was a fearless filmmaker who changed movies.
When Lynch was tapped by Mel Brooks’ production company to direct “The Elephant Man,” it wasn’t a surprise to see that he visualized John Merrick with a kind of awestruck clinical horror that turned disfigurement into poetry. And you could make a comparable claim for “Twin Peaks,” in which Lynch dared to bring a “Blue Velvet” vision to the small screen, effectively kicking off the new golden age of television. He was never one to over-explain his movies, but he created a myth about himself that explained so much: the all-American boy born in Missoula, Mont., in 1946, who grew up in the ’50s and found that fabled conformist era to be at once comforting (the surface) and terrifying (what lies beneath); who attended art school in Philadelphia and experienced the city as such a bombed-out hellhole that he turned it into the ground floor of his imagination; who took five years to create “Eraserhead,” shooting its black-and-white magical hellscape on AFI soundstages in Los Angeles and never revealing how he created the diseased image of the monster baby (which prefigured the creature in “Alien”); who talked about going every single day to Bob’s Big Boy in L.A., where he drank coffee and milkshakes, because that’s how he felt safe enough to let his mind roam free; who dressed like a downtown dandy with his buttoned-to-the-Adam’s-apple shirts and wavy shock of hair, punctuating his speech with gee-whiz aphorisms that made him sound like a cracked Jimmy Stewart; who became a devotee of transcendental meditation, because it was another one of his neo-’50s safe spaces; and who never shot a foot of film he didn’t mean.
Or read this on Variety
