Lynch's legacy

David Lynch's cinema exists in a place where damnation and transcendence are real, allowing us access to primitive knowledge.

[David Lynch, Lost Highway, 1997]

When David Lynch died last month aged 78, what was noticeable about the tributes was the range of viewpoints that his appreciators had. People were captured by his artistry and individual genius – wayward, eccentric, easily recognisable – and many were delighted by his humour. Others had been shaped by his aesthetics regarding colour, composition, staging and drama; his taste in beautiful actresses formed the sexual proclivities of a generation of adolescent viewers exposed to Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. His attachment to transcendental meditation was recognised.

There seemed a degree of division in the commentary regarding Lynch’s worldview in relation to two political subjects, namely America and the family. Both sides had evidence to back their opinions. Some leftists saw Lynch depiction of the dysfunctional Palmer family (in Twin Peaks) as a warning about the dangers of patriarchy and oppression within the traditional family structure, especially those viewed as conventional and unremarkable from outside but which sustain abuse and cruelty hidden from view. This reading may simply be because left-inclined Americans were deeply impressed by Twin Peaks and have taken it for their own, despite the many contra-indications inherent in Lynch’s work. There is a tendency for us to continue our attachment to a formative influence even when we become aware that we love it despite aspects of that object contradicting our stated politics. In truth, we love an object because we love it, even if we may be attached to what is a partial and distorted mental image.

As some on social media pointed out, Lynch was not warning against the nuclear family. Lynch viewed families in complex ways precisely because he did value the family – not least perhaps because his own marital and paternal experiences were complex and far from ideal. Parental responsibility as a source of guilt and anxiety is at the core of his first masterpiece, Eraserhead. In that film, Henry is afflicted by waves of doubt, revulsion, tenderness and fear when presented with his role as father of an unintended offspring, one that is deformed, sickly. The child demands attention and (once the mother has abandoned Henry and his child) this responsibility weighs heavily on Henry, who is exasperated, ignorant and fearful when he has to care for his mutant child. We sympathise with Henry but are conscious of his failure as a father; we share his revulsion but are likely to be critical of his fecklessness as a carer.

[David Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, 1992]

Time and again in Lynch’s stories, we get glimpses of good families surviving despite strife and malevolent outside influences. We see lasting love, devotion and sacrifice. In Twin Peaks, the Hayward family is seen as a sanctuary of comfort and stability – one that Donna strays from at the risk of her soul. The scene of Major Briggs recounting a visionary dream to his troubled teenage son Bobby is a glimpse of the redemptive power of parental concern and attachment to the traditional support and understanding between father and son, despite differences in outlooks and life stages. It is one of the most moving scenes in the series and it cannot be doubted that Lynch (who co-wrote this episode) considered this the expression of a commendable sentiment. The Palmer family’s dysfunction is horrific because it inverts the expectation that family should be a place of sanctuary and love. Moreover, it is poisoned by the intervention of an outside evil, in the person of Bob, who inhabits Leland Palmer in times of abuse and torture. It is the intrusive violation of the bonds of care that is warned against, not the institution of the nuclear family.

Likewise, Lynch clearly loved America and the most homely aspects of American daily life – classic American cars of 1950s, teenagers going to a dance, good coffee in a diner, mowing the lawn, cornball humour and so on. Lynch was attuned to the subversive – Jeffrey finding a severed ear in the grass, which thrusts him into a dangerous mystery (in Blue Velvet) – but that was not a repudiation of Americana and everyday life. Lynch could appreciate (on one hand) the perverse and extreme and (on the other) the banal and stereotypical. The former did not nullify the latter. Indeed, the fact that Lynch was so open to the dark and disturbing meant that he had an appreciation for the conventional in the full knowledge of the expanse of human nature and the appeal of the grotesque; it was an informed understanding that the reassuring exists alongside the horrific, separated by only the thinnest of membranes.

In short, Lynch loved Americans and Americana in a discriminating but emphatically unironic manner. In Lynch’s films, he was not satirising the iconic elements absorbed during his childhood – the white picket fence, precisely mown lawn and 1950s diner – and when the grotesque intrudes it is not celebrated but shown in its true character, as an abomination that daily resides close to us, threatening to overturn our security and pleasure. Those who interpret Lynch as wholly or primarily subversive miss a vital aspect of his taste and outlook.

[David Lynch, Blue Velvet, 1986]

Why do I admire Lynch as a fellow artist? One aspect is his independence. Despite the necessity for a filmmaker to collaborate and compromise in order to create cinema that relies on partnership, commercial pressures and conventions that curb complete freedom, Lynch made some remarkably free and personal films within the studio system. The one time when he did not have control over the final cut – his highly flawed but fascinating sci-fi epic Dune – caused him to refuse to make films where he did not have ultimate control. The failure of the second season of Twin Peaks was in part due to Lynch not holding true to that principle and partly being distracted by another project; the unavoidable pressure and power of the network led to compromises that fatally undermined the series. The rest of Lynch’s output is as he wanted it to be and is a testament to the force of his personality and the uniqueness of his vision.

It is impressive that an artist driven by the erotic compulsion could make such a mark on the mainstream of American culture. American cinema was subject to Christian domination, which marked out nudity as purely immoral in a way that was not quite the same in Europe, even in strongly Christian societies. Lynch’s sensibilities were shaped by the experience of the 1950s pin-up more than the hippy free-love attitudes towards nudity. For Lynch, the alluring woman (glamorous and poised) held power in his psyche and this meant he treated the erotic woman as something magical, nearly unworldly. He was intoxicated by beautiful women and treated sex as something as potent as violence, birth, trauma and the sacred. Nudity is never casual or cheap. It has real force for the characters and for Lynch himself.

Twin Peaks pushed the boundaries of what could be suggested and shown in mainstream broadcast American television in 1990. The films likewise tested the tolerance of Christians and Feminists towards the explicit, eliciting criticism from both groups. That such Lynchian hymns to the magical erotic found a place in American cinema (somewhere between the low-budget independent cinema and the top-line studio production) and reached a large audience at all is significant, not least because it provides a contrast to the tawdriness casualness regarding nudity apparent in cinema of its time. Peculiarly, Lynch’s intense attitudes to towards female nudity actually aligned him to conservatives rather than liberals, in that he believed that nudity had a psychic force and could elicit tremendous compulsion, which was (if acted upon) potentially transcendental or destructive in its consequences. The liberal belief that sex is consequence-free choice, made by individuals in full command of themselves, with equal impact upon women and men alike is one that is inimical to Lynch.

Lynch’s world is one where evil, sin, damnation, transcendence and communion with the spiritual are real and possible. His characters live in a place where moral choices count and the astonishing exists outside the realm of the explicable and measurable. Lynch’s universe is emphatically not a place ruled by rationalism, materialism, utilitarianism, egalitarianism and equality. Individuals ugly and beautiful do not have the same fates nor the same power; men and women are different from each other; sexual congress has consequences; hell is not just a metaphor; the truth comes in dreams. Lynch’s world taps into primitive knowledge that lies in the ancient core of our brains, accessed through the surreal image and disorienting encounter.

A true artist, David Lynch left a brilliant and haunting legacy for us – one that reveals much more about our inner lives than is usually discussed.