Filmmaker David Lynch has died, age 78.
He started in animation. His experimental student films made at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, like Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) and The Alphabet (1968), were extensions of Lynch’s fine art, conceived as museum projections. The Grandmother (1970) took his medium into a hybrid of live-action, animation, painted and sculptured art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ_t1eOAipo
Later, after five years in production at the American Film Institute’s Conservatory for Advanced Film Studies, Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) burst onto the midnight movie circuit like a primal scream.
Despite the morbid imagery, Lynch displayed his unique sense of the absurd while promoting Eraserhead seated on a sofa flanked by Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan –– five Woody Woodpecker dolls rescued from an L.A. flea market — whom he claimed espoused an “all pervading happiness underneath everything.”
David Lynch and Woody Woodpecker(s) promote “Eraserhead” pic.twitter.com/JUuIqrifwu
— cartoonbrew.com – Animation News (@cartoonbrew) August 25, 2021
Much conjecture has been written about the meaning and the methods Lynch and his team devised to bring to life the story of Eraserhead’s Henry Spencer, his mewling, malformed infant offspring, and their strange existence living in the shadow of a nightmarish pencil eraser factory. Lynch designed and filmed the production in a rustic studio at the AFI where he lived with his production team and created a unique creative environment. In later years, Lynch refused to indulge any and all attempts at analysis of the film, and he takes his secrets with him.
Lynch’s enigmatic imagery resurfaced in The Elephant Man (1980), based on the life of Joseph Merrick, a sweet-natured Victorian Londoner with a debilitating congenital disorder. Lynch’s Dune (1984) remains his one foray into mainstream science fiction, a grueling production with exquisite design. Blue Velvet (1986) ushered in a return to Lynch’s uniquely personal cinema, depicting a candy-colored suburbia teetering on the edge of an abyss, which manifest again in his television serial Twin Peaks (1989) co-written with Mark Frost.
He returned to the bucolic Northwest murder mystery, appearing onscreen as hearing-impaired FBI chief Gordon Cole, in the feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and in the shocking and surreal 18-episode finale Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). The Showtime series finale, set 25 years after the murder of prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), contained some of the most bizarre imagery Lynch ever put on screen, simultaneously dreamlike and apocalyptic, courtesy of his visual effects collaborators at Buf Compagnie in Paris.
Lynch’s films Wild At Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and his three-hour surreal Inland Empire (2006) film noir shot on Mini DV format are all highlights that mystified, shocked, enchanted, and sometimes infuriated critics. The Straight Story (1999) remains an enigma, his only film from another writer’s screenplay, for Walt Disney Pictures, a contemporary rural fairytale about an elderly man who embarks on an odyssey via a riding lawnmower, but that also stands as evidence of Lynch’s underlying charm.
Lynch never fully left behind his roots as a cartoonist and animator. In comic strip format, Lynch created The Angriest Dog in the World for eight years (1983-1992) at the Los Angeles Reader, and he later animated a similar scenario of urban torpor and rage in Dumbland (2002), a series of webcartoons with simmering black-and-white line drawings that Lynch directed, voiced, and drew (with a mouse), and which he pronounced as “very stupid, very crude.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx6c0tSo1dI
He occasionally ventured into animation in later years, including the 2015 short Fire (Pozar), which he wrote, drew, and directed. The film was animated by Noriko Miyakawa:
Lynch was a devotee of transcendental meditation, rock and roll, quinoa, cigarettes, and the Los Angeles weather, which he reported on daily through the Covid-19 pandemic. He often ended his weather reports with a salutation, which his family posted to his Facebook death announcement: “It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”
