David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (Icons)

by Dennis Lim

“I like to remember things my own way,” says the Bill Pullman character, explaining why he hates camcorders. “How I remembered them. Not necessarily how they happened.”

Self-taught and decidedly not a film buff, he arrived at cinema from an oblique angle, lacking a priori ideas about how stories should behave or what moving images can do.

Lynch holds a more playful, surrealist view of biology, one in which man, animal, vegetable, and mineral exist on a continuum of matter.

Viewed through this lens, Lynchian behavior has an affinity with what happens on the fringes of polite society, among those who are unable or who see no need to keep up the facade of normalcy.

is not insignificant that many who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s — a sizable swath of Generation X — discovered Lynch in the intimate sanctums of their own living rooms or bedrooms, via a videotape of Blue Velvet or an episode of Twin Peaks.

In Badalamenti, Lynch found a partner who could do with music what he so often does in his movies: push clichés to their breaking point and find emotion in artifice.

Blue Velvet’s traumatized account of a lost innocence is where we start to sense that Lynch’s cinema is one of absence. This will only become more apparent in his later films, most of which circle around forgotten events and vanished people, tracing the contours of the void left behind.

Her agents at ICM dropped her upon seeing the film; the nuns at her old school in Rome called to say they were praying for her. (After the media storm subsided, Lynch and Rossellini confirmed that they were a couple. He separated from Mary Fisk in 1987.)

Reagan, a hologram-like president who sometimes confused Hollywood and actual history, also had his Lynchian aspects.

Blue Velvet could have taken an even darker turn. In one filmed scene that never made the final cut, Dorothy, clad in her blue velvet bathrobe, leads Jeffrey to her rooftop. She removes her red shoe — an obvious reference to the film version of The Wizard of Oz — and throws it off the building. She threatens to follow, leaning over the ledge for a few heart-stopping moments, before Jeffrey pulls her back from the brink.

Even on this crude map, the town looks isolated. “In my mind this was a place surrounded by woods,” Lynch told Chris Rodley in Lynch on Lynch. “That’s important. For as long as anybody can remember, woods have been mysterious places. So they were a character in my mind.”

To grasp the seismic effect of Twin Peaks, it helps to understand the landscape into which the show emerged. The TV terrain of the 1980s was a smaller, safer place. This was at least a decade before the term “showrunner” became common pop-culture parlance, before we came to associate hit shows with their creators: David Chase’s The Sopranos, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, David Simon’s The Wire.

What Twin Peaks fans had in common — whether theorizing on the Internet, exploring Pacific Northwest shooting locations, or, in Japan, where interest was especially intense, staging mock Laura Palmer funerals — was a desire to exist longer in its world.

The question of what killed Twin Peaks is inextricably linked to that of who killed Laura Palmer. When the series identified the culprit, it also committed a kind of symbolic suicide. At least that’s how the lore goes. But a closer look at the rise and fall of Twin Peaks suggests that it may have been doomed from the start, given the suspicion and skepticism that accompanied the hype.

If there is a single theme that dominates the second half of his filmography, it is the power of thoughts to shape the world.

A movie of its moment, Mulholland Drive proved to be Lynch’s best-reviewed film since Blue Velvet. Year-end critics’ polls in the Village Voice and Film Comment named it the best film of 2001. Despite an underwhelming domestic gross of $7 million, it earned Lynch an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, his third; as with Blue Velvet, it was the film’s only nomination. The acknowledgment spoke to Lynch’s stature as a respected Hollywood elder, albeit one who often operates on its margins, and to the power of Mulholland Drive as an industry fable — the ultimate expression of Lynch’s deep love-hate relationship with Hollywood.

His movies are the weird tales that give form to the submerged traumas and desires of our age, perhaps even to questions that have haunted artists and thinkers for centuries: how to explain evil, how to live with fear, how to hold the self together, how to keep reality as we know it from falling apart.