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RIP to a damn fine filmmaker. —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
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This past August, in an interview with Sight & Sound, writer/director David Lynch revealed that he had emphysema and was effectively homebound. “I can’t go out,” he said. “And I can only walk a short distance before I’m out of oxygen.” He didn’t come out and say this was the end of his directing career—“I would try to do it remotely, if it comes to it,” he said—but of course that’s what he was saying. If there’s any filmmaker who could have directed an indelibly great movie over Zoom, it’s Lynch—but it did not come to that. Lynch died yesterday at 78. He’d evacuated his home a few days earlier when the Sunset Fire threatened his home in the Hollywood Hills; sources told Deadline that his health “took a turn for the worse” shortly thereafter.
He leaves behind a creative legacy so specific and incomparable that his name alone—like Hitchcock’s or Capra’s, but maybe more to the point like Kafka’s—has long since become an adjective, a descriptor not just for an aesthetic or a set of stylistic hallmarks but for a whole category of human experience. As the writer David Foster Wallace put it years ago (in an essay quoted by Scott Meslow in his GQ obit for the director yesterday), the word “Lynchian” denotes “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”
Lynch’s last feature film was 2006’s Inland Empire, a sprawling and elliptical three-hour digital-video production that plays simultaneously like the thematic culmination of Lynch’s lifelong project as a filmmaker and the work of a young upstart who’s seen every David Lynch movie, finds his stuff cool but a bit too accessible, and intends to outdo him; it’s a movie that people will be unpacking for decades to come. He had one more major work in him—Twin Peaks: The Return, a followup to the 1990-1991 ABC TV show he’d created with Mark Frost.
The original Peaks was a critical darling in its first season and a critical punching bag in its second, right up until its final episode, which Meslow described in a 2017 GQ retrospective as “a surreal, undiluted nightmare better suited for an arthouse theater than ABC on a Monday evening, capped off with one of the cruelest twists ever aired on TV. If this isn’t the strangest hour of network television in history—well, it certainly belongs in the conversation.”
Among other things, the ‘90s version of Peaks, with its subplots about corrupt local businesspeople hiding secrets while vying for control of an old mill, had been a riff on the nighttime-soap-opera conventions of its day; accordingly, The Return sometimes played like a deconstructive critique of the prestige-TV era the original Peaks had helped pave the way for. (Which may have been an accident; one of the great things about Lynch was that he never seemed to be consciously deconstructing or critiquing anything.) When writer Sean O’Neal profiled the director for GQ in 2017, Lynch was characteristically unwilling to say much about the project, and his collaborators were unable to, since few of them (apart from series lead Kyle MacLachlan) had read the whole thing. “There isn’t really a need to have everybody read the whole script,” Lynch told O’Neal. “So they get their scenes. And when we work together, they ask many questions, and they get answers…People get what they need.”
The Return was Lynch’s final masterpiece, eighteen hours of visionary filmmaking with another knife-twist ending. It was also suffused with a pervasive sense of loss—the list of Return actors who’d died by the time the show aired or passed shortly thereafter includes Catherine Coulson (the series’ iconic “Log Lady”), Miguel Ferrer, Robert Forster, Walter Olkewicz, Warren Frost, and Peggy Lipton. Lynch (who appeared throughout The Return as FBI agent Gordon Cole) is now on that list, too, a fact that will doubtless make The Return that much more poignant to revisit in the future.
We’ll close with a word from none other than Mel Brooks, who hired Lynch to direct The Elephant Man on the strength of Eraserhead, then defended Lynch’s movie from studio meddling.
“He sees the grotesque joke of life,” Brooks said in Sean O’Neal’s 2017 GQ oral history of the director. “He feels it. And he wants to express it. He always wants to tell us who we really are. We need David to tell us. Who are we, really? Part animal, part businessman, part wacko. He knows.” —AP
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