The world just got duller and a whole lot less weird. David Lynch, the man who gave us "Eraserhead" and created "Twin Peaks," died just short of his 79th birthday.
I fell in love with Lynch's work from the first frame I saw the black-and-white fever dream called "Eraserhead," which I watched just before entering college as a film major. Lynch was making films like no one else. I also had the opportunity to see some of his earlier short films at the then-La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. It was like he had been dropped on this planet to share his otherworldly perspectives with us.
I had the pleasure of interviewing him multiple times, with the answers delivered in that peculiarly delightful voice of his. But Lynch was something of a conundrum. In interviews, he was affable, cheerful and genuinely, "ah-shucks" nice, with an appealingly boyish quality. Yet he also created some of the most disturbing images ever committed to film. Not scary — that's too simple and easy to brush off. His films had the ability to unsettle you and create unease in ways that made the most mundane things seem terrifying.
Whether it’s the nightmarish world of "Eraserhead," the demented terror provoked by Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet," the opening head-bashing in "Wild at Heart" or the murder of a young girl in "Twin Peaks," Lynch knew how to put an audience on edge and infect their brains with images, feelings and soundscapes they couldn't shake.
But you won’t find any darkness lurking in Lynch’s childhood, which he described as “completely normal and completely happy.” Nor will you find actors or technicians complaining about dark clouds hanging over a Lynch set.
“When David works, he really has this great sense of fun,” Kyle MacLachlan recalled about his experience shooting "Twin Peaks." “It’s fun to create that kind of dark stuff because when you’re finished with the take, it’s not dark anymore. It’s fun to dip into that place and get kind of titillated by it and then come back out again.”
Which brings us back to Lynch’s films. They were often fascinated with the contrast between a white-picket-fence America and a netherworld that lurked beneath. Part of Lynch’s fascination with this contrast comes from the fact that he did grow up in a safe, middle-class environment but became aware of a darker world beyond his — or perhaps just imagined it.
“I did visit New York City quite frequently when I was very small,” Lynch recalled, “because my grandparents lived there, and that was a huge contrast, and a huge ball of fear to me.”
It's been almost a decade since his last feature film, "Inland Empire," but Lynch remained constantly busy turning out shorts, videos and his absolutely delightful and weird weather reports.
Lynch was weird in the most blissfully positive, provocative and delightful way. He will be deeply missed, and there is a void that will never be filled by anyone else. And that's the mark of his genius: He can't be copied or imitated because there is, and forever will be, only one David Lynch.
