Provocative and unsettling imagery in works such as ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’ saw films gain cult status
From Eraserhead, his neurotically personal feature debut of 1977, through to the beguiling fantasia Mulholland Drive (2001), via the various iterations of his cosmic television soap opera Twin Peaks, Lynch operated in the darker recesses of the Hollywood hills, flooding screens with voluptuous, provocative and often outright terrifying imagery. The majority of his projects rapidly secured cult status; several will endure among cinema and television’s major works.
Lynch’s body of work extended into painting, photography, design and beyond; he shot promotional material for Michael Jackson’s Dangerous tour, and gave to morning newspaper readers both a widely syndicated comic strip (The Angriest Dog in the World) and his own Signature Cup brand of coffee.
The critic Pauline Kael, who witnessed Lynch’s mid-1980s transition from fringe figure to American art cinema’s new hope, described him as “the first popular surrealist”, reflecting on a directorial persona that was equal parts folksy and eccentric. Lynch merrily confessed to frequenting the Los Angeles diner Bob’s Big Boy every day for seven years, and spent the early 2000s posting weather reports on his website.
David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, on January 20, 1946, the son of Donald Walton Lynch, a research scientist for the US Department of Agriculture, and Edwina ‘Sunny’ Lynch, nee Sundholm, an English tutor of Finnish descent.
In the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, Lynch reflected upon what was a generally blithe but naggingly unsettled upbringing in atomic-age America: he became an Eagle Scout, serving among the ushers at John F Kennedy’s inauguration, but the nature of his father’s work required the family to move towns on a regular basis.
He dropped out of the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts within a year of enrolling, saying: “I was not inspired at all in that place.” He then abandoned a planned three-year trip around Europe with his friend (and soon-to-be-noted production designer) Jack Fisk after only 15 days.
It was only when he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1966 that his ambitions seemed to coalesce. There Lynch found a mentor in the painter Bushnell Keeler, and a wife in his fellow student Peggy Lentz, whom he married in 1967.
A series of short films brought Lynch to the attention of the newly formed American Film Institute, and he was invited to join its Conservatory for emergent talents in Los Angeles in 1971.
After relocating to the West Coast, he spent the next five years tinkering on the strange, obsessive Eraserhead, an entirely distinctive, eternally harrowing vision seemingly informed by its director’s disquiet at becoming a young father (Peggy had given birth to their daughter Jennifer in 1968, before the couple divorced in 1974).
Eraserhead won the director admirers in high places: Stanley Kubrick claimed it as one of his favourite films, while Mel Brooks reportedly embraced Lynch after an early screening, declaring: “You’re a madman. I love you!”
It was Brooks who helped to finance Lynch’s follow-up The Elephant Man (1980), a retelling of the John Merrick story elevated by John Hurt’s committed lead performance and the director’s empathy for its tragic outsider-hero. It was nominated for eight Oscars.
By this point, Lynch had remarried − to Mary Fisk, Jack’s sister, in 1977.
Blue Velvet (1986) now seems like the first full definition of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous adjective “Lynchian”. A subversive coming-of-age tale in which the boyish naif played by Kyle MacLachlan falls under the spell of a sexually masochistic chanteuse (Isabella Rossellini) and her brutal gangster lover (Dennis Hopper), it was wide-eyed and wondrous one moment, deeply disturbing the next.
Lynch sealed his unlikely place within the mainstream with his next project Twin Peaks, a primetime TV series for the ABC network co-created with Mark Frost, the Hill Street Blues writer.
With its young, sexy cast and its abiding murder-mystery hook (“Who Killed Laura Palmer?”), the show became a global sensation, revolutionising television’s approach to serial drama.
For a while it was also an albatross around Lynch’s neck: he could not top it.
His solution was to retreat once more to the fringes, walking away from Twin Peaks during its second run to direct Wild at Heart, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990. The filmmaking became stranger and stranger still.
He had more success with Mulholland Drive (2001), a project born of an abandoned TV pilot and the director’s fascination with the twisting roads around his LA retreat. Intertwining the fates of two actresses, it was immediately embraced as an early 21st-century classic.
Subsequent projects ventured further off the beaten path: Rabbits (2002) was a web series that re-envisioned the sitcom with human-rabbit hybrids, while Inland Empire (2006) was an experimental three-hour splurge.
For a while it seemed as if Lynch might never direct again. Sequestered in his Hollywood Hills studio he returned to painting, weathering his parents’ deaths and a one-year marriage to his long-time collaborator Mary Sweeney.
Then, in October 2014, the cable network Showtime announced that Lynch would be returning to television with a revival of Twin Peaks, picking up where the first two seasons had left off. The result − Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) − was unlike anything aired on television at its moment, and not terribly like the original show, despite the return of several key performers.
Lynch, who in 2019 received an honorary Academy Award, remained cheerily enigmatic in interviews, speaking only to present new variations on the idea that all his works should ultimately speak for themselves.
“Life is very, very confusing, and so films should be allowed to be, too,” he said.
(© Telegraph Media Group Holdings Ltd)
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