"Dreaming, but awake," or the beautiful and the damned
Some personal thoughts and memories about the work and art of David Lynch (1946-2025)
(Jack Nance, in David Lynch’s seminal debut, Eraserhead. All photos courtesy of Criterion Collection.)
As a freshman in college I was already seated in the theater for a midnight screening of David Lynch’s underground sensation Eraserhead when damned luck punctured the thrill—the print never showed.
How fitting. I reflected later that my first experience of his work was subverted—a cruel twist mirroring a complex body of work fashioned out of dazzling Möbius strips, hallucinatory rhythms and peculiar patterns. The collective meanings, associations and depth are unaccountable, inscrutable and sublime.
It would be years until I actually saw Eraserhead. By then Lynch was already a formative figure of my own sentimental education, of film and film artists, and how the best directors fused their own personalities to the material.
Now David Lynch (1946-2025), the man and the artist is gone, following the family announcement on January 15 of his death, on the eve of his 79th birthday.
The legendary folly Dune was my first Lynch experience. I remember being somewhat bored and confused, but there was stuff on the edges, the Langian production design, the eccentric performances, or the quixotic imagery, that underscored the filmmaker’s uncanny ability to collapse boundaries between the avant-garde and the industrial cinema.
Not long after that, of course, his fourth feature, the voluptuous, staggering and startling Blue Velvet, detonated public consciousness. I vividly remember my first screening of the film that September night—at the Fine Arts Theater, in Chicago—just as I was starting to get some pieces published professionally.
“It’s an anomaly—the work of a genius naïf,” Pauline Kael wrote about Blue Velvet. I vehemently disagreed.
A trained painter, Lynch had a genius instinct for working through the abstract and the unconscious. The naïveté was always a cover to make his ideas more accessible.
He stylized his images but always located the dark humor, like the opening sequence in Blue Velvet where a man watering his lawn suffers a stroke and Lynch undercuts our sympathy by having the neighboring dog voraciously lap up the jutting water coming out of the hose.
As the opening frames of Eraserhead proved, the work was intuitive, acute, expressive and beautifully thought out.
The brilliant interplay of sound and image, the atmosphere of dread and decay, sexual repression, kink and noir, rhymed and played off each other like a boxer’s shots to the body—destabilizing, raw, overpowering
The artist was famously reticent, obdurate or misleading about the films. What really mattered was what we thought, and what we took away in the process. I’ll never forget the public embarrassment of the crowd, the nervous reactions and uncertainty about how to respond to what they were seeing.
(Signs and wonders: the opening of Blue Velvet, and what lurked underneath.)
By the time of the pop sensation of Twin Peaks, Lynch was his own adjective (i..e, Orwellian, Kafkaesque, Wellesian). The show premiered new episodes every Thursday night, and the anticipation was palpable.
Making the cover of Time, the epitome of middle America consensus and the cultural establishment, appeared the inflection point, and I worried about the risk of Lynch being commodified.
In May of 1990, Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or, at Cannes. What followed was never linear, and fortunes changed quickly.
His sixth feature, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, had a disastrous reception at Cannes two years later. (“It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be,” wrote Vincent Canby.) When it opened in late August 1992, the distributor withheld any press screenings.
Was Lynch’s time already up?
(I did interview John Roach, who wrote The Straight Story, with Lynch’s third wife and frequent editor, Mary Sweeney.)
My only direct professional engagement with Lynch was at Cannes, a couple of days after the premiere of Mulholland Drive, where the American press was invited to a series of group interviews with the director, and the actors from the film, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux.
If I was able to command the table and ask him a question (or more accurately, shout one), I don’t remember. I remember quite clearly the actors, and their professional attachment, their love of him, and what they were willing to do.
Watts became a star after the film, and Haring rescued from being a B-movie pinup. I was also still rethinking the film, its bravura form and structure, its serpentine meanings, the sinister and damaging evocation of the Hollywood dream factory.
In the major works (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire), Lynch seamlessly suggested the past superimposed over the present tense—his vision of social rot and transgression underneath the placid surfaces echoed the key works of Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock.
Lynch also deftly merged tones and mood, upbraiding his stories with much darker implications coloring a horror noir that intertwined self-discovery with intimations of sex, kink, violation and surrender. “I don’t know if you’re a pervert or a detective,” Sandy (Laura Dern) tells Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), in Blue Velvet.
Eraserhead did not just announce a major director; it was a showcase for some other exceptional talents, the sound designer Alan Splet, actor and production designer Jack Fisk, and the great cinematographer Frederick Elmes.
The films might not have exactly overlapped, but the four-year piecemeal nature of Eraserhead’s production history almost certainly means that Elmes was working with Lynch at the same time he was beginning his collaboration with John Cassavetes, on movies like A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night.
Eraserhead really is Lynch’s Shadows, that movie that broke the seams and really consecrated the New American Cinema. The fact that Eraserhead grew out of Lynch’s early experiences in Philadelphia link to another essential work of the time, Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky.
Watching the film again last night, I was struck by the formal richness and the technical accomplishments. It’s the best entry point to Lynch and his sensibility, his preoccupations and his elective affinities.
The dark and light dualities of female sexuality that is the centerpiece of Blue Velvet (Isabella Rossellini and Dern) and Mulholland Drive (Haring and Watts) emerges in the contrasting temperaments of the two central women in Eraserhead, the nervous, fragile blonde wife (Charlotte Stewart) and the overpowering, carnal brunette (Judith Anna Roberts) who lives across the hall.
The primacy of life—joy, guilt, pleasure, sexual release—are all central motifs in Lynch’s best work, leading to all different manner of breakdown and surrender. The cinema is out of control.
“Heineken. Fuck that shit. Pabst Blue Ribbon.”—Frank (Dennis Hopper), Blue Velvet
There are sharp comic moments in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and moments of dark poetry in Eraserhead and Inland Empire. Lynch’s final feature, Inland Empire completes the circular structure of Eraserhead.
Inland Empire was also shot, over a period of years, on very low-grade PD-150 digital camera sometimes operated by Lynch and his excellent cinematographer Peter Deming, and features a remarkable turn by Dern, playing several different parts, the most significant a Hollywood actress caught in a complicated personal and professional dynamic with her leading man (Theroux) and director (Jeremy Irons) on a troubled production.
Like the best of Lynch, it features musical interludes, free floating stream of consciousness, nightmares and hallucinations, and an unstable plot that invites multiple interpretations. If Lynch refuses to explicate it, that’s his right, and our struggle to make sense of it all.
Or is that, in the end, even necessary? In my head, I’ve often posited different ideas about how the blocks of Inland Empire are connected, like Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive. The daring, mystery and wonder emerges in the discovery, or our desire to make the parts sing
Even if there was time and opportunity, Lynch was never going to admit or even delve into the extent the film marked an autobiographical capture of his privileged outsider status in the industry.
There was always something deeply furtive, transgressive and complicit about the best Lynch films. They invited a natural surrender.
It’s like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! I struggled to grasp it all, the shifting narrators and the slippery switch of time and place. After a certain point, I simply submitted to the text, to its mysteries and sensual pleasures of thought, being and consciousness.
Every time Lynch’s camera slithered or dollied into a darkened room was an invitation to be astonished. So it was the repeated and continuous sense of falling, vortexes, trap doors, scrambled and recombined narratives, bracing, unpredictable and alive to possibility.
One can lament about the highly-personal projects (Ronnie Rocket) he talked about, but never had the chance to make. He was active and prodigious until the end of his life. The films were the films.
Like their maker, they never quite conformed to a single or standard narrative. In my case, the gratification was delayed, the thrill, pleasure and wonder was always constant and true.
Terrific Lynch essay, Patrick!