David Lynch: 2021
A chronological journey through his films
The Pure Cinema podcast did two three-hour episodes on the films of David Lynch in April this year. I listened along, thinking I’d seen many of his films, but I quickly realised I hadn’t. In fact, I had only seen the first series of Twin Peaks on TV in 1989, and The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive in the cinema when they were first released… twenty years ago. I actually had this massive blind spot in my film knowledge. Someone once suggested that my writing reminded them of Lynch, which I took as an amazing compliment, and I thought I could see what they meant, but the term Lynchian can be used as a clichè for a kind of quirky, surreal darkness, and listening to Elric Kane and Brian Sauer talk about his films, his work is that in places, but also much more.
Inland Empire (2007)
An unusual and meta experience, but after three hours, as the end credits roll, I find I’m crying, because of the joyful music, yes, and because I’m exhausted.
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Mulholland Drive (2001)
Events organically unfold, the images are striking, the narrative is confusing, characters are not who they seem to be, and in the last twenty minutes he reveals what’s really going on, sort of.
The Straight Story (1999)
If David Lynch were trying to somehow redress all the darkness of his earlier films in one go, then he would make The Straight Story.
Lost Highway (1997)
Lost Highway is a puzzle. It opens with a jealous husband who thinks his wife is having an affair, and ends with a deadly resolution, but what happens in between is ambiguous and complicated.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
A howl of pain from Laura Palmer, the murdered girl that opened the story of Twin Peaks. It’s difficult, heavy, hard to watch in places, and grapples with incest, rape, drug-taking, murder and domestic abuse.
Wild at Heart (1990)
Wild at Heart is a series of deliberately melodramatic, hyper-violent and sexual scenes stitched together into a road movie, with a tenuously-made connection to the Wizard of Oz.
Blue Velvet (1986)
Blue Velvet has a fearsome reputation but is also culturally beloved. Dennis Hopper’s over-the-top performance has become iconic, and its themes foreshadow those in the massively popular Twin Peaks.
Dune (1984)
I went into Dune thinking I would see something the critics were missing – I mean, how could the director of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man direct a complete dud? – and... it’s so over-the-top, it manages to not be awful.
The Elephant Man (1980)
The Elephant Man is as traditional and straightforward as Eraserhead is surreal and obtuse. Both are black and white, and Lynch does use some dream imagery in The Elephant Man, but they’re at opposite end of the narrative spectrum.
Eraserhead (1977)
So imaginative and pure and watchable and laugh-out-loud funny, which I didn’t expect at all. A psychosexual puzzle about the horrors of unplanned parenthood, marriage, intimacy, capitalism, poverty, dreams – you can take it any direction you like.