Rare is the artist whose work is such a game-changer that the only way to describe it is to transform their last name into an adjective. Even rarer is the chance of that ever happening in Hollywood, a place where creativity, especially of the dark and deranged kind, tends to take a back seat to commercial viability and the all-powerful bottom line.
Yet somehow, David Lynch, who passed away Thursday at the age of 78, not only directed a game-changing array of films that can only be defined as Lynchian. He did it a time when the American movie business began to grow, and then balloon, into a franchise-driven behemoth where his brand of off-the-wall work was the last thing the studios wanted.
Case in point: Lynch’s debut, Eraserhead, was released in 1977, the same year the first Star Wars came out. Both were, in fact, box office hits: The Lucas film became one of the first big summer blockbusters, paving the way for the kinds of movies that now completely dominate the business. But Lynch’s brilliant black-and-white freakshow, which began as a student project at AFI, was a smash on the midnight circuit, grossing $7 million off a tiny $100,000 budget made up of grants and donations from friends.
Eraserhead was so ungraspable, so far into left field, that most critics dismissed it at the time. Variety called it a “sickening bad-taste exercise” and The New York Times, reviewing three years later, claimed it was “not a particularly horrifying film, merely interminable.” But audiences were drawn to Eraserhead precisely because it was unlike anything they’d ever seen. Here was a movie that wasn’t giving them a story, or characters that even spoke. There was only a screaming mutant baby and a guy with hair like Frankenstein’s bride, coupled with lots of gory close-ups and shattering sound design.
It was as if Lynch had tapped into something that people had wanted to see all along — something bizarre and grotesque beneath the surface that was waiting to be unearthed by an artist as visionary as he was. And perhaps that’s one way to define “Lynchian”: the lifting away of the facades and illusions of so-called normal life — and so-called normal movies — to reveal something that speaks to our darker selves.
My own first encounter with the Lynchian world had a similar effect. After exhausting all the horror and action flicks at my local video store as a teenager, I took a chance on Blue Velvet, a movie I knew nothing about. I went home, popped the tape in the VCR and, for at least the first few minutes, believed I was watching a high school movie. But then things got weird. A severed ear was lying in the bushes, covered with ants. People weren’t speaking like normal people, but like people pretending to be normal people.
By the time I got to the scene where Kyle MacLachlan hides in a closet to spy on Isabella Rossellini, only to see Dennis Hopper emerge with an oxygen mask screaming “Baby wants to fuck!”, I can tell you that my 12-year-old self was transformed. Once again, it was about Lynch stripping away the appearances of the regular world — in this case small-town America — to reveal how those appearances were false, and always had been. The picturesque suburbs we grew up in, or had watched on Leave It to Beaver, were masking something deeply disturbing: unquenched or unspeakable sexual desires buried inside of us, or hidden behind all the happy families portrayed on television.
My second encounter with the Lynchian was, indeed, on TV. And once again it started off seemingly normal, quickly veered off the rails, then plunged into surreal chaos. I was visiting my grandma in Florida when the first episode of Twin Peaks aired during spring break in 1990. There had been lots of promotion by ABC for its new series, and we were both excited to watch the big Sunday night pilot together. Well, by the time we got to the end of those two crazy hours, I was embarrassed to even look over at grandma. What did we just watch? Why was Kyle MacLachlan again playing a guy who keeps encountering so much batshit crazy stuff? And yeah, who killed Laura Palmer?
I went back home to New York the next week, fairly convinced that my grandma, silently knitting as we watched the show (talk about a Lynchian image), would continue following Twin Peaks until the bitter end, just as I was planning to do. Lynch had now transformed my world in a totally different medium. He had managed to take what appeared to be a small-town crime caper, turn it on its head and twist it inside out, exposing its messy innards to the whole nation.
