A country losing one of its great artists feels like a piece of its fabric being ripped away, leaving it just barer than it was before. David Lynch, the visionary filmmaker, painter, musician, author and actor, died Jan. 15, and America is ever more desolate for it.
Writing any remembrance of Lynch is a daunting task. How does one even begin to express the sort of impact he had, not only on the film and television industry but on culture at-large? What words does one use to describe a titan? It’s not easy in the slightest, but I will try my best.
Lynch was the quintessential American surrealist, one of the few to truly take the mantle from the French and, possibly, the only one to do it in a way that genuinely straddled the line between the mainstream and the avant-garde — Lynch was never only one or the other, he never intended to alienate audiences nor to sacrifice his own artistic vision. “Twin Peaks,” co-created by Lynch and Mark Frost, was a veritable hit. There’s an anecdotal story that Queen Elizabeth II once skipped out on a private performance from Paul McCartney to watch the newest episode. But it not only had immense appeal: it genuinely experimented with what television could look like.
But it just seems unfair to champion Lynch based only on his commercial success, that was never the precise point of his artistry. As any artist, Lynch sought to express his interpretation of the world around him.
“I don’t know why people expect art to make sense,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”
It’s not far-fetched to consider his art an attempt at dealing with the contradictions and absurdities of the human condition, an attempt, really, at representing the bizarre and eccentric, but also dark, recesses of his country’s unconscious. He was the shadow chronicler of the American experience.
A sound mixer for “Blue Velvet” once told Lynch that the film was “like Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch.” Lynch particularly liked this quote, he used it over and over again to promote the project, and it’s easy to see why.
With “Blue Velvet” — and, really, all his art that seeks to represent and analyze Americana — he’s positioning these two artists as anything but opposites. How is it possible that the “Four Freedoms” might exist alongside “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” that these two things might exist in dialectic harmony with each other? Lynch never pretends to know the answer, but he was fascinated with presenting the question regardless.
It's an important aspect of his work, then, that his American aesthetic was never ironic — I don’t believe his work was ever so nihilistic enough to present it as such. A severed ear in a field was never explicitly chosen to represent an antonym to small-town culture, a teenage girl washed up on a riverbank was never meant to be a sarcastic reminder of the nation’s underbelly. If Lynch was anything, he was earnest: he was sincere in depicting the darkness he’s known for, but he was sincere in all the good parts too. In his own fantastic, surreal way, he painted a picture of the United States in whole, in all its qualities.
“This is the way America is to me,” he said in an interview with Chris Rodley. “There is a very innocent, naive quality to life, and there’s a horror and a sickness as well. It’s everything.”
Lynch’s oeuvre is an assemblage of surrealist projects by an Eagle Scout from Missoula, Minnesota; it’s a surrealism specifically molded and tailored for the social conditions of the country he was born in and, yes, even loved. There’s just as much Salvador Dalí and André Breton in his creative DNA as there is Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan. He was, simply put, one of the Great American Artists, and it’s only appropriate to eulogize him as such.
Following his death, in a statement Martin Scorsese, called the director’s works “images on the screen unlike anything that I or anybody else had ever seen.” It’s true that Lynch was a singular figure in film history, a filmmaker whom many have tried to emulate but few, if any, have truly succeeded in doing so. We may never have a master quite like him again. There’s a blank void now in the world where he once stood, but perhaps we mustn’t look to fill it. Perhaps, we should leave it there to remind us of his stature.
David Lynch is gone; his work is all that have we left. We’re lucky for him to have existed at all, though, and to have shared this planet with him for any amount of time. And, despite it all, the idea of him, his Platonic form, still exists. What else, at this point, could be more comforting?
