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An Appraisal
In His Dark, Disturbing Visions, David Lynch Showed Us Who We Are
The director himself came off as almost performatively normal. Masterpieces like “Eraserhead” and “Mulholland Drive” said otherwise.
It felt fitting that my city was burning when I heard the news Thursday that David Lynch had died at 78. Few filmmakers grasped the complexities of Los Angeles better than Lynch did and fewer still seemed so at home with its distinct, otherworldly mix of beauty and disaster, sunshine and noir. Los Angeles is where, after all, he shot “Eraserhead,” his feature directorial debut about — well, how to describe this sui generis art film in which a lady lives in a radiator and a baby looks like a slimy, fetid bobble-headed alien. Yet now David Lynch is gone and another part of this city seems to have disappeared with him, and I am bereft.
Lynch was literally born in Missoula, Mont., but I think he was more rightly birthed by Los Angeles. He went to school here, attending the American Film Institute (“Eraserhead” began as his student project!), eventually establishing a nearby compound where he took to delivering delightful weather reports with his singular twang. In the one he recorded for May 11, 2020, he sits at a desk with several pairs of glasses upon it and a mug that must be filled with black coffee. “Here in L.A.,” he says, squinting up at a window, it’s “kind of cloudy, some fog this morning.” He swivels to face the camera, ticks off the temperature and adds: “This all should burn off pretty soon and we’ll have sunshine and 70 degrees. Have a great day.”
I always took his signoffs to have a great day literally. Lynch created some of the most disturbing and haunted work in cinema, but in interviews — many peppered with his trademark interjections like “jeepers” — he came across as approachable. If anything, he appeared almost performatively normal, which made him seem even stranger. In 2001, the year his masterpiece “Mulholland Drive” was released, my friend, the critic John Powers, spoke with Lynch. “He still reminds me of Jimmy Stewart,” Powers wrote, “not the Mr. Smith who goes to Washington but the grizzled obsessive from ‘Vertigo.’” Time had already taken its toll: “His beaming smile has lost its innocence.”
I’ve rarely received as many angry responses as I did when my rave of “Mulholland Drive” ran. People didn’t just disagree; they seemed as enraged at my review as they were at the film. Among the most furiously voiced criticisms was that it just didn’t make sense, leaving some viewers frustrated to the point of fury. The thing is, it had confused me as much as it had wowed me on first viewing. Movies are supposed to be obvious, but Lynch never was. Worse, he had made a work of art in an industry that disdains not just art — unless it hangs on mansion walls — but also artists who don’t conform to its orthodoxies. If his relationship with Hollywood was difficult, it’s because he never seemed part of it — artistically, spiritually or in any other way — even when he made more establishment-consecrated films.
In 2019, the academy bestowed Lynch, this great outsider, with an honorary Oscar. He looked genuinely moved as the audience stood and his longtime collaborators Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini nearly levitated with joy at his side. Lynch spoke briefly and sounded a bit shaky. He thanked everyone who had helped him “along the road,” an apt metaphor for a filmmaker for whom “The Wizard of Oz” was a touchstone. Lynch’s films are filled with references to “Oz,” including “Wild at Heart,” a floridly violent and romantic road movie in which a variation on Glinda the Good Witch (Sheryl Lee from “Twin Peaks”) floats down to aid Nicolas Cage’s Sailor, a gyro-hipped Elvis avatar in a snakeskin jacket.
I don’t much like “Wild at Heart,” despite its moments of undeniable visual beauty, or Cage and Dern’s deliriously vivid, out-there performances as besotted lovers. There’s something too meanspirited about it, and I’ve never been able to get past the opener in which Sailor fatally beats a Black man, a moment that Roger Ebert called out in his review as “a racially charged scene of unapologetic malevolence.” Other interludes in Lynch’s films have filled me with revulsion and dread — any number of sections in his nightmarish yet flat-out brilliant “Inland Empire,” for one — but the beating in “Wild at Heart” still makes me blanch, partly because it features one of the few Black characters I can recall in Lynch’s filmography.
I parted company with Ebert, though, when his “Wild at Heart” review took aim at what he deemed Lynch’s streak of misogyny, citing examples like “Blue Velvet.” I get why Ebert wondered if there was something in Lynch that had led him to create such “hurtful and painful” portrayals of women. By contrast, I saw and still see these images — even the cruelest, most debased and outwardly offensive ones — as raw and unflinchingly honest. Many filmmakers try to disguise their less socially acceptable prejudices, their impolite fears, dislikes and worse, but Lynch always seemed unafraid or maybe uninterested or just unaware about what others thought of his uglier visions.
Among the greatest of Lynch’s female characters is Betty, a sweet, young blond beauty with a sunbeam smile played by a transcendent Naomi Watts in “Mulholland Drive.” Like legions of young hopefuls before her, Betty arrives in Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. There, that dream begins to turn nightmarish not long after she meets her cheerfully salty manager (the tap-dancing film legend Ann Miller), who rents Betty an outwardly charming, old-fashioned bungalow with a pile of dog droppings deposited on the walkway outside. Hollywood’s ghosts fill Lynch’s work, and so does its muck and its filth.
I love that moment, but if I were to choose a signature Lynch scene it would be the opening of “Blue Velvet,” another of his films that made me uneasy on first viewing and that I have repeatedly returned to with ever-deeper appreciation. It opens on a dazzling cerulean sky and the sound of Bobby Vinton singing the title song. The camera tilts down to some blood-red roses with prickly stems set against a white picket fence, a tableau that is followed by shots of a fire truck, more flowers and children. It looks like a suburban pastoral until a man watering his lawn has a heart attack. The song fades, replaced by eerie electronic sounds, and the camera starts creeping through the grass as paradise grows dark, then darker.
When the camera stops, it settles on a frenzy of ants in close-up ravaging something — the music gives way to creepy chomping — and Lynch is already scraping away the patina of American normalcy, with its chemically treated lawns, brutal madmen and brutalized women. Not long after, the heart-attack victim’s son, the hero of this twisted tale, Jeffrey (MacLachlan), finds a severed human ear covered with swarming ants in an empty lot, a derelict twin to his father’s lawn. The ear is at once a clue and a harbinger that leads him to an abused woman, Dorothy (Rossellini). Yet it is Jeffrey who goes on a journey, like the Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” and meets new friends, faces dangers and returns to where he started.
Lynch gave “Blue Velvet” something of a happy ending, one you could interpret as cynical, ironic or oddly sincere, depending on your sensibilities. By the time Jeffrey is back in his Kansas, as it were, he and his sweetheart (Dern) are marveling at a robin with a squirming insect in its beak and Dorothy is safe from the madman (Dennis Hopper). We know that the bird is fake (it’s a taxidermy prop), but the characters believe in their happy ending and I think Lynch believes in it, too. Maybe he had to because he also seemed to believe in all that came before, in the horrors, the terrors and the yawning abyss that old Hollywood tried hard to pretend didn’t exist. Lynch showed us what lies beneath; he showed us ourselves.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis
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