David Lynch, the visionary filmmaker who utilized provocative style and surreal imagery to create some of the most memorable cinema, has passed away on January 15th. He had recently been diagnosed with emphysema after smoking heavily for most of his life. Lynch was seventy-eight.
He began studying art at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., later transferring in to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Lynch left after a year, deciding he wasn't getting much out of academia, and set about traveling Europe with friend, Jack Fisk who would later become a production designer and director. Upon his return, Lynch enrolled to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where Fisk was attending. This was when he became interested in filmmaking and made his first short. Lynch applied for a grant with the recently formed American Film Institute to help him finance another short film. He was accepted and made "The Grandmother" in 1970.
Later that year, Lynch moved to Los Angeles to begin studying with AFI Conservatory, making more short films before attempting his first feature film. After several production problems and having to take a loan from his father to help finish the film, "Eraserhead", a bewildering yet intriguing, black & white body horror drama, was completed in 1977. This low-budget indie was intially met with viewer disinterest and negative reviews. But a successful midnight screening run in New York, spreading to San Francisco and Los Angeles, turned "Eraserhead" into a popular cult film.
The comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks saw "Eraserhead" and loved it. He offered Lynch an opportunity to direct "The Elephant Man", an adapatation of the successful Broadway production which Brooks held the film rights, based on the real-life story of a severely deformed man in Victorian London saved from a life in a freak show by a symphathic doctor. The film was a critical and box-office hit, earning eight Academy Award nominations including Best Director.
Following this achievement, Lynch was offerd a chance to turn Frank Herbert's science fiction novel, "Dune" into a movie. Since the film was set in the future, the director added more eccentric touches to the screenplay and production design. However the producer, Dino de Laurentiis was not at all happy with the results, deciding to remove footage from the final cut which dramatically altered the plot. Despite these changes in an ill-fated attempt to salvage the film, "Dune" was a commercial failure upon it's release.
Lynch was still contractually obligated to make another film for De Laurentiis. This lead to an original work from Lynch: a strange, mystery thriller called "Blue Velvet". Set in quiet, small town, a college student discovers a severed human ear in a field which leads him deep into a criminal conspiracy and a romance with a troubled lounge singer. "Blue Velvet" became a critical sensation at the time and now considered a cinematic masterpiece, earning Lynch another Oscar nomination for Best Director.
After his dark romantic-comedy, "Wild at Heart" with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern (which won the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival), Lynch decided to explore television and created "Twin Peaks", a dreamlike, murder-mystery drama. The show only lasted two seasons but has since become a cult classic and had a feature film in 1992, "Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me" which served as prequel to the series. His next two films, a surreal neo-noir drama, "Lost Highway" and "The Straight Story", a true story of a man traveling across states only on a lawn mower, received largely mixed reviews.
But it would be his next film that would go on to be thought of as the finest in his illustrious career. Described as "A love story in the city of dreams", "Mulholland Drive" had originally been conceived as a television pilot. But after executives rejected the program, Lynch set about turning it into a feature film. This Los Angeles set story involves a struggling actress (in a career breakthrough for Naomi Watts) who finds a dazed woman (Laura Harring), suffering from amnesia, living in her home and in grave danger. Mesmerizing, atmospheric and odd, "Mulholland Drive" was very well received (later considered by many films groups to be one of the greatest films of all-time) and won Lynch the Best Director award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and earned his final Best Director Oscar nomination.
Despite this incredible success, Lynch struggled to get another movie made. It would take six years later for him to complete "Inland Empire" with Laura Dern, a one hundred and eighty minute mystery-thriller shot entirely on digital video that is more dense, fragmented and experimental than "Mulholland Drive" and would end up being his final feature film.
What I have loved about Lynch is that he had always refused to offer explanations about his intentions in each of his films, preferring to let the work speak for itself and enjoying the various intepretations that have been expressed. Lynch boldly created dark edged cinema that challenged and provoked yet still featured an optimistic undercurrent that was also an undeniable part of his work.
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