You couldn't miss the American monument. David Lynch he went to get shares of cherry pies and sacred cups of coffee in the world from beyond the red curtains. With his departure a total artist, whom we will try to reflect here a few fragments of memories and a promise: that of digging ever further into his labyrinthic universes which, at each viewing, seem even larger than the previous one...
The space of the dream
David Lynch closes autobiography Dream Space, co-written with the journalist and critic Kristine McKenna, with these words: « It is impossible to tell a person's life. The best we can hope for is to capture the ‘Rosebud' – the mystery – of everyone ». And every time Lynch interviewed, he had fun cultivating this mystery, constantly refusing to explain his works. When asked about the meaning behind Mulholland Drive, he claimed not to love « [s] ». He gives to see, he gives to think, he gladly loses his spectator, but he will certainly not serve the recipe behind his twilight atmospheres and his tortured intrigues.
Then, following his advice, let us try to seize Lynch's ‘Rosebud'. The one whose name has become a qualifier adjective of a black, sizzling, dreamlike atmosphere, the one whose only one to hear a note from his favorite composer Angelo Badalamenti for sure to print in his synapses an indelible scene, the one who touched everything and gladly haunted the workshop Same in Paris to make his prints, gave birth his filmography on the head of one of his soon fetish actors, Jack Nance. Electric glass, granular image in black and white, the superimposition on which opens Eraserhead (1977) fun to let the skull of its main actor lay an egg floating in a sidereal space. The black and quadrangular monolith of Kubrick becomes an irregular ovoid meteor on which the camera abounds at the end of a slow – very slow – traveling, while the oppressive breath of the soundtrack which would gladly be described as a sampling lynchian.
We're already confused with Lynch. A crevice, the camera will penetrate a fracture dug into a mysterious container. The inside and the outside no longer make sense. The camera itself penetrates the egg laid by the brains of its main protagonist. The tone is set. We'll have to hang on. But there's no time to sigh on this skinned looking at the sidereal void of a cracked window, Nance alias Henry Spencer becomes father. He made a baby alone. And through the mouth! We will soon understand that this world is sick. Let the flesh necrotize and the organic gargouilli leave room for the industrial screams of the machines. The arm sweats with oil. Blood's already dry. And it's enough to turn on a lever so that the strange deformed baby can regain the place of his cradle.
From banal to sordid
A strange setting in the world that foreshadows a career like no other, nourished by grubby and industrial miasms that a certain Giger would not deny. A dream collaboration but finally aborted on a Dune synonymous with a desert of frustration for the artist Gruerian as well as for Lynch, who ends up signing certain versions of his film by pseudonym-disavowed « Alan Smithee ». However, the antithesis of films by Villeneuvecold and smooth. Lynch feeds his Dune of the same miasms which make the puddles of waterEraserhead opaque, but in an exuberant and colorful universe. The Harkonnen purulent, ointment, while the mutant of the spatial guild floating in its jar d'epice ambulant skates the retina. But if the universe Dune seems a thousand light years from our reality, the same obsessions feed this space-opera as Lynch's more realistic films.
Constantly the director from Montana affixes his nail and scratches the varnish of his initial situations to discover what is hidden beneath. Paul Atreides by Kyle MacLachlan or Lynch behind his camera, these are two kinds of Kwisatz Haderach who have the ability to see and let see beyond. Beyond the smiling facades of the Hollywood universe in Mulholland Drive. Beyond the small, clean gardens, whose red roses are fertilised with blood shed in the grasses too mulched Blue Velvet, Attests to this ear that a long camera movement reveals, snacked by myriad ants. Beyond a seemingly so peaceful village, covered by two twin mountains, which hides behind its facades some very venous secrets. Twin Peaks appears as the keystone of this work, the articulation in which all its feature films s'emboit.
Fire walk with me
It is also rare for a work to find such a posterity and mark the entire television production that follows. It must be said that his false soap atmosphere and that his syrupy (and unforgettable) music of credits had enough to deceive a spectator embarking on a delirium made of a crescendo of slight offsets, at least until the end of season 2 that loosens the dogs. « I'll see you in 25 years. » then assured Laura Palmer, and it must be noted that the promise is kept. Twin Peaks : The Return offers a third season extension, exactly twenty-five years later in the story. And Lynch will amuse him with defeating all the spectator's expectations, for eighteen shocking episodes that probably contain the most dizzying sequences of the director's universe.
« Gotta light? », asks the logger whose mittens put the precious tube of nicotine between trembling fingers. « Gotta light? ». Distorted voice from a terrifying counterworld, exactly like the stamp of the Man who came from elsewhere, whose guttural rales remind us that if Lynch is constantly brought closer to lionirism, he is also a director who has really been able to work the mechanisms of fear and horror in cinema. Prefiguring jumpscare Mulholland Drive, which caused us all to lose a piece of soul in this cunning backyard of a Los Angeles Winkie Fire Walk with meLynch also (and above all) explored the workings of atmospheric anxiety. Anyone who has risked in the labyrinthic visions of Lost Highway knows how simple a device (a phone, a few cassettes, an empty house) allows Lynch to create perhaps the most terrifying scenes of all contemporary cinema.
Images from Sound
A five-sided Möbius ribbon movie on which Lynch slides his spectator, he has never stopped convoking music in his feature films. He himself musician – he released several albums with titles as twisted as Crazy Clown Time or BlueBOB – it is above all his collaboration with Badalamenti who has irrigated his cinema since their meeting on Blue Velvet. Next, it is obviously the meticulous granular and electrical sound-design of his feature films that mark the spectator. But Lynch has had to stop putting the musical question at the heart of his productions, whether by training in front of the camera those who are usually behind a microphone (the appearance of Bowie in Twin Peaks, Sting's in Dune), or moving the whole scene squarely to the heart of its productions. Thus, almost every episode of the third season of Twin Peaks a long musical scene at the Double R Diner, with in apotheosis the landing of Nine Inch Nails for the interpretation of Shes Gone Away. The collision of Universe could not better fall...
You dig in places
Spread the infection where you spread your seed
I can't remember what she came here for,
I can't remember much of anything anymore
She
Yet, given that we are talking about total artist, we cannot miss the rest of the man's graphic career. And in its artistic multiverse, each work dialogues with others, creating a veritable maze of connections whose influences are readily felt. Her photographic nudes marry eroticism and disturbing chimeras whose tortured and violent relents bring us back to Blue Velvet, but also willing to love Lynch for the painter Francis Bacon, at least in his photographs with long exposure giving birth to strange erotic monsters.
Other long-term graphic work, his comic book The Angriest Dog in the World composed of 5 identical boxes whose only text changes prefigures the biting and absurd humour of many of his productions. This is definitely the case in Sailor and Lula and its "cruel on the inside and cracked on the surface", where it is complicated to resist the comic projections of a Nicolas Cage to the best of its form (Did I ever tell you that this here jacket representatives a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom?) and Laura Dern which one would have liked to see even more often in his cinema and which is not left behind when it comes to infusing the feature film of his azimutated energy (Uh oh. Baby, you的d better get me back to that hotel. You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.). Then obviously Twin Peaks Of course, the cosmogony was born of a good dose of mystery, of a glamorous gallery of characters but also (and especially?) of its frequent comedic stalls.
Finally, his lithographs remain whose first naïve style is quickly counterbalanced by his industrial or grotesque motifs. Their enchased and quadrangular limits prefigure the genesis of a cinema frame, ink the birth of a light work. Lithography, film, same fight, it is Lynch himself who asserts it (see quote below). And it's not by bringing the plans together.Eraserhead of this part of his graphic work that will convince one to the contrary...
« It's not inspired by movies, it's inspired by ideas, and films are inspired by ideas too, so it's the same process: ideas, stories, characters. It is theoretically possible that lithography inspires a whole scene or film. »
You will understand, trying to go around David Lynch is a lost business ahead of time. We think we see the end, then the fog dissipates and offers us a thousand other circumvolutions to travel through. If we are sure to miss Lynch, his works persist. Will continue to haunt us. To attract us after them while swearing that they do not exist, as the orchestra faints of Mulholland Drive. Silencio, do they suspect? Before once again bursting their percussions and electric sizzlings, promises of a new trap closing on a willing spectator.
« When everything is very clear, luminous, when everything is there, you might think it's a good thing, but it doesn't leave much space to dream. »
Filmography
- 1977: Eraserhead
- 1980: Elephant Man
- 1984: Dune
- 1986 : Blue Velvet
- 1990: Sailor and Lula (Wild at Heart)
- 1990 – 1991: Twin Peaks
- 1992 : Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
- 1997: Lost Highway
- 1999: A True Story (The Straight Story)
- 2001: Mulholland Drive
- 2006: Inland Empire
- 2014 : Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces
- 2017 : Twin Peaks : The Return
As well as many short films, some of which are available by Here. Among these, we gladly recommend the viewing of Rabbits, a kind of series composed of anthropomorphic rabbits marinated with soap sauce (but quite terrifying) whose passages have been integrated in Inland Empire. On the more comic side, you should not miss his (hilarants) weather reports which he regularly posted on his YouTube channel.
It should be noted that Carlotta Films and Potemkin released almost all of the master's films at the cinema. An excellent opportunity to (re)discover his mythical works on large screen!
Articles on MaG
As much as I keep a great memory of some of the gentleman's works, I can't help but remember that he was, apart from his art, active propaganda for transcendental meditation. A good piece of crap from an abossing sect for which he set up a foundation to promote its precepts among the weakest (young children, prisoners...).
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