David Lynch: The dark side of the American dream

For seven years, US director David Lynch drank the same chocolate milkshake each day at the same time from the same place in Los Angeles because he believed it helped his creativity. But given the famously weird apparitions in his work, from a human ear in the grass to telephones ringing in empty rooms and dancing dwarves in red suits, his imagination hardly needed to be fired up. From the sadomasochist intrigue “Blue Velvet” (1986) to the thriller “Mulholland Drive” (2001), Lynch — who has died aged 78 — gained a global cult following with his unsettling portraits of American life.

He may be best remembered for his mesmerising network series “Twin Peaks”, which blazed a trail for the prestige television dramas that would follow. “It would be tough to look at the roster of television shows any given season without finding several that owe a creative debt to ‘Twin Peaks’,” said The Atlantic in 2016, hailing his influence on directors from Quentin Tarantino to the Coen brothers.

With four Oscar nominations including a trio of best director nods, the filmmaker recognizable by his shock of white hair took home just one honorary statuette, in 2019. Lynch had a peripatetic childhood, born in Montana on January 20, 1946 but moving around several times as one of five children with a scientist father and teacher mother. He began painting and shooting short films at arts college in Pennsylvania in the 1970s.

From the start, his work spotlighted weird and marginal characters: his first feature in 1977 was “Eraserhead”, a grainy black-and-white film about a deformed monstrous baby. Supporting himself with odd jobs, Lynch shot his creepy and now cult classic on a shoestring budget, taking five years because he kept running out of money and had a wife and daughter to support.

“A dream of dark and troubling things” is how the then 33-year-old Lynch described “Eraserhead” when it finally appeared, set in the depressed industrial landscape of Philadelphia and infused with an eerie calm that would become one of his hallmarks.

Few people who saw it forgot the experience, including another Hollywood master-in-the-making Stanley Kubrick, who expressed admiration.

Lynch pursued his penchant for bringing human deformities to the screen in “The Elephant Man”, dramatizing the tragic life of Joseph Merrick, who was born with severe physical deformities.

“Loving textures to start off with”, Lynch said about why he was drawn to the subject, “and this idea of going beneath the surface was intriguing to me. There is the surface of this elephant man and beneath the surface is this beautiful soul”. An unrecognisable John Hurt in the title role earned one of the film’s eight Oscar nominations, while Anthony Hopkins played the doctor who befriended Merrick in the years before his death by suicide at the age of 27.

The international hit propelled Lynch into the Hollywood limelight, but his star power dimmed after he followed it with a calamitous $40 million flop adaptation of the sci-fi novel “Dune”. “Blue Velvet” got Lynch back on track — made the same decade he was ritually downing milkshakes — and also marked the beginning of a five-year relationship with the star of the film, Isabella Rossellini. He returned to the A-List in 1990 with arguably his most influential work: “Twin Peaks”. Set in the fictitious town of Twin Peaks in Washington near Canada’s border, Lynch’s tale began with the simple mystery of the young and beautiful Laura Palmer found in a body bag fished out of the lake.

But over eight episodes, a quirky normality curdled and the killing became buried under layers of mystery investigated by the endearing FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by frequent Lynch collaborator Kyle MacLachlan. A hit when it first aired on ABC, the show was part of a bumper year for Lynch, who also scooped Cannes’ top prize that year with his road movie “Wild at Heart”. Lynch made a second season of “Twin Peaks” and a spin-off film a year later, before again returning to the world with an acclaimed sequel series for cable network Showtime in 2017.

Agence France-Presse