There may never be another man like David Lynch to come along. One who so viscerally and unforgivingly sought to realize his vision for storytelling. Sure, many come close. But there’s none who really broke through to the mainstream like Lynch had the courage and ability to. In doing so, he forever changed cinema, daring audiences to dream deeper and think bigger than maybe they ever had before in the pursuit of telling stories.
He once said in his memoir Catching the Big Fish “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” I don’t think there is a better term to describe the impact he had on anyone who come to view his work.
I never met Lynch personally, and as such I don’t have any anecdotes to share about a whirlwind interview or personal advice he gave me. I also don’t have the fortune of addressing who he was as a person. But that is the experience of most who have come to know him and his work. He was just entering what would come to be the twilight of his life and career as I was only still forming my love of film and attempting to catch the big fish. But still, through his work, I feel that connection there. I can hear him, through the intense imagery he presents on screen, that he’s asking me to look a little deeper at the medium I have come to love.
While he a visionary on screen, Lynch was a purveyor of his own singular way of being off it. He often encouraged audiences to think, feel and interpret his films on their own. He reveled in refusing to answer questions directed at what his films mean. Famously in an interview he boldly stated that Eraserhead was his most spiritual film. When asked to elaborate on that, he simply stated “No”. That was the epitome of who Lynch was.
On screen, he revolutionized the way we think about film. Eraserhead is Lynch at perhaps his most experimental. Blue Velvet brought his surrealist style to the mainstream in a compelling, mysterious way. Twin Peaks turned the way we think about tv dramas on it’s head. Mulholland Drive is arguably Lynch at his peak. And nearly all filmmakers who have come after him credit his work as major inspirations in their own. While he never won any major awards for his work, he nonetheless defined the art in his “Lynchian” way.
Hearing of his death earlier this week really impacted me. With Los Angeles continuing to be torn apart by fires, the news that David Lynch passed away felt surreal. Almost as if it came out of one of his films. He was one of those figures who, even at 78, you never expected to pass, he would instead just remain. Even as he battled emphysema, he never faltered from who he was.
Directors, big small or otherwise, are artists. That goes with the territory of creating something. But David Lynch was more than an artist. He was a pioneer, one who dared us to dream and then challenged us to confront what those dreams mean. I will forever be grateful for his contributions to film. He once said that “Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all”. Well sir, what you gave us may be the best coffee of them all. And while he may be gone, we are more than lucky that his art will remain, forever allowing us to dream.