One of the most memorable images of David Lynch is not from a movie or movie set, but from the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea, sitting in a director’s chair with a magnificent black-and-white cow named Georgia.
The surrealist maverick put on a performance art show in order to to get Laura Dern a best-actress Oscar nomination for Inland Empire (made in 2006 and ghis last ferure). He had run out of money, and couldn’t afford a billboard ad for a three-hour experimental film.
Shot on low-res video with an improvised script, the tale concernsa an actress who starts morphing into her character, a 1930s Polish woman in a B-movie production that seems to be cursed.
Eraserhead
Lynch’s surreal 1977 feature played the midnight movie circuit for years, steadily earning its reputation as a bona fide cult classic. Its most famous scene features a Kewpie doll emerging from a radiator wearing prosthetic … things on her cheeks, shyly singing “In Heaven,” a song that Lynch wrote with musician Peter Ivers.
“Eraserhead” set the tone for “Lynchian” cinema, defined by dream logic, stylistic nods to earlier eras and a pace that can be either spastic or glacial.
In a 2007 BAFTA interview, Lynch said that “Eraserhead” was his most spiritual movie. Asked to elaborate, Lynch refused, “No, I won’t.” The film’s reputation helped set the stage for his next film, “The Elephant Man,” Lynch’s more accessible movies, which earned eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.
“Blue Velvet” earned Lynch his second Oscar nomination for directing, with its controversial depiction of Isabella Rossellini as a nightclub singer suffering at the hands of a gas-huffing sadist played by Dennis Hopper.
The film opens with Bobby Vinton’s recording of the song “Blue Velvet” played over slow-motion scenes of quaint Americana before the camera lingers on a severed human ear, which is being devoured by insects.
Its depiction of suburbia’s kinky underbelly and a complicated male sadism/ female masochism preceded many future films
Lynch pushed the boundaries of TV with the series “Twin Peaks,” which debuted on ABC in 1990. The show followed MacLachlan, an FBI agent who arrives in Twin Peaks, Washington, to investigate the death of a beloved local teenager. Audiences were captivated by the question of who killed Laura Palmer and mystified by quirks such as the “Log Lady,” who received messages from a piece of wood.
The dream sequence that ended Season 1, with its subtitled dialogue played backward, red curtains and jazzy soundtrack, would later be parodied on “The Simpsons,” “Saturday Night Live” and “Sesame Street.”
Its theme song, written by Lynch’s frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, was a dreamy synth classic.
Lynch revisited the show in 2017, a testament to its enduring popularity.
The Straight Story
In 1999, Lynch did ta G-rated family friendly movie released by Disney. “The Straight Story” tells the tale of a man driving 240 miles on a riding lawn mower in order to visit his brother who has had a stroke. “Twin Peaks” and “Blue Velvet” were about how bucolic scenes of Americana always cloak sordid horrors. “The Straight Story” had no such subterfuge. The film is a joy to watch and points to the complexities of Lynch. He was certainly a master of creepiness, but he also made visual art, wrote about creativity and devoted his life to Transcendental Meditation.
“A filmmaker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering,” Lynch famously said. “You just have to understand it.” Lynch also understood sweetness and simplicity, evident in The Straight Story and parts of Blue Velvet.
Mulholland Drive
“Mulholland Drive” is a fantasia of Hollywood, where wishes and dreams and promises become threats and nightmares. Lynch plucked Naomi Watts from obscurity after pulling her headshot from a pile of photographs. Watts rose to the challenge of the lead role, which demanded the fresh-faced innocence of a Midwestern ingenue; the bitter steeliness of a jilted jaded lesbian; and a scene in which she turns schlocky script into unforgettable psychosexual audition. That scene could be a short film unto itself and effectively served as Watts’s audition for the real-life role of “New Hollywood leading lady.”
The climax of “Mulholland Drive” takes place at a nightclub called “Silencio,” a name Lynch used for the real-life night clubs he opened in Paris and Manhattan (decorated with red curtains).
