Saturday, 18 January 2025

R.I.P. David Lynch



David Lynch. Image: Adam Bordow/BW


It's hard to know what to say when someone of David Lynch's cultural stature passes away. Anything even half intelligent one might say about the facts of his career as a director, painter, musician (and transcendental meditation advocate, amongst other things) has already been covered by the time one can even begun to process the information. Others have almost as quickly filled countless megabytes and column-inches with reflections on the possible 'meanings' within the work, and wider significance within the cultural landscape. In the time it took me to get here, I've even read one semi-poetic discussion of the life-long (and life-shortening - as it transpired) smoking habit which almost seemed to define him as much as the work for some.

On reflection, perhaps the whole smoke thing is as good a signifier as any for an artist whose work was so saturated in the ineffable, and so resistant to being pinned down. It also speaks to his approach to life as an endlessly unfolding creative process. Lynch himself spoke of the 'Art Life', describing with relish how each creative gesture would blur seamlessly with his endless chains of coffee and cigarettes - each becoming the next in real time. Ultimately though, that's in danger of becoming yet more romanticised 'myth of the artist' stuff really. It feels like the only meaningful response at this stage is a more personal one, accompanied by some of the man's own unmediated words.


Image: Studio Canal/Les Films Alain Sarde/Asymmetrical Productions/
Babbo Inc/The Picture Factory/Bridgeman

When all else is said and done, Lynch's films and TV work (and let's face it - this is what will be remembered longest) have moved and stimulated me more than pretty much anything else achieved in those media. In my view, no one else has managed to blur the boundaries between moving images and dreams quite like Lynch. The logic at work within them is dream logic. This is why, just like the dreams we experience immediately prior to waking, they seem more vivid, more affecting, more divorced from convention, and more engaging of thought and feeling as sides of the same coin than any other cultural artefact I've encountered. It's why they resist traditional analysis so pleasingly. It's why even Lynch himself didn't always know what might happen - even as a mood or association emerged in real time on set. It's why, for those of us who relish questions and possible interpretations, far more than answers and definitive statements, Lynch is the go-to, par excellence. And I really don't care if he is the kind of film director 'someone like me' would like. I just do.

'Eraserhead', 'Twin Peaks', 'Lost Highway', 'Mulholland Drive' - these are works I can return to repeatedly, and never quite get to the end of. Certain scenes and images will remain indelibly stamped on my memory in perpetuity (I've mentioned more than a few on here before). The concluding credits may be rolling, but my response is slightly different each time, and I'm already anticipating the next time I can fail to '(ex/mans)plain it all away. Each work seems to mean so much, but I really don't want to know exactly what. In the process of not knowing, I may have been horrified, haunted, baffled, or felt like I'm falling in love. I may have gasped, laughed out loud or chuckled inwardly, confronted my own deepest fears, or just gazed longingly at the sheer formal elegance of Lynch's craft. I may have loved and despised humanity in equal measure. I may have gasped at the sheer audacity of it all (on a spectrum from the gleefully cheesy to the truly profound), and even, most surprisingly - meditated without irony on the existence/nature of good and evil). I'm not sure what else I could ask from an art experience, and I thank him for it.

Anyway, enough of me. Lynch really should get the final/not final words...


"If you get an idea that’s thrilling to you, put your attention on it and these other fish will swim into it. It’s like a bait. They’ll hook on to it and you’ll get more ideas. And you just pull them in."

"I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense."

"Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd. But I don’t just find humor in unhappiness – I find it extremely heroic the way people forge on despite the despair they often feel."

"In a way failure is a beautiful thing, because when the dust settles there’s nowhere to go but up, and it’s a freedom. You can’t lose more, but you can gain."

"A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose."

"Certain things are just so beautiful to me, and I don’t know why. Certain things make so much sense, and it’s hard to explain."



All quotes: David Lynch.

Individual sources can be found in: Adrian Horton, 'A life in quotes: David Lynch', London, The Guardian, 17.01.25




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