David Lynch Has Died

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I really enjoyed Blue Velvet the first time I watched it in the early 90s, but not quite as much when I saw it again a few months ago. I love Wild at Heart; I think it turned me on to some of Cage's (good) movies and Dern's movies. Of course Mulholland Drive was great. How about Inland Empire? Any love for it? I liked it.
 
an0maly said:
One of the most original and creative artists in history, virtually incomparable in film, his works have inspired a number of great directors. In terms of surrealism and breaking boundaries of a given art form in a completely singular way, you can only compare Lynch to Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali.

Eraserhead is the closest thing to having a nightmare that you can experience in cinema, and when I first saw it in a theater, I was sure I would never have a stranger experience with art in my lifetime. That was until Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return. That show is beyond words or sentences any human could come up with. In making two conventional films, he showed he could do that as well, and equal to most any great director, with The Straight Story and The Elephant Man.

His supreme masterpiece Mulholland Drive is now on the prestigious and once a decade Sight and Sound lists of the greatest films of all time, including at number 22 on the worlds' film directors poll.

Directors’ 100 Greatest Films of All Time

Every decade since 1992, Sight and Sound has complemented its celebrated critics’ poll by formally sounding out the world’s leading directors on the ten films they believe to be the greatest of all time. Though it has always been global and inclusive in scope, the poll has expanded...
www.bfi.org.uk

We have lost one of the most important artists of our time.
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Yeah, I remember seeing Eraserhead at a small art house in NYC. I had the same reaction as you. What a weird movie.
 
I've been re-watching Twin Peaks with my daughter recently (re for me, first time for her). Very sad to hear. He made some of my favorite art.

early 80s era anecdote: my folks left my brother (7) and I (11) home while they went out for dinner one evening and they returned to find us both bawling our eyes out as we had just finished watching The Elephant Man on cable.
 
Icky Mettle said:
Mel Brooks was actually one of the producers behind the Elephant Man but didn’t want his name attached to the picture because he felt that if it were, people would get the wrong idea about the movie.
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Makes sense. Of course his wife had an important role in the film as well.
 
I started watching Inland Empire today and I'm struck once again by how un-programmatic his surrealism is. Parts of the film--parts of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive to boot--can be parsed intertextually via Billy Wilder's 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, which is sort of the ur-film for cynical takes on the Hollywood film industry.

But try as you might too put his films through the critical paces to argue for this or that, the excessiveness of his imagery makes straightforward close reading and/or interpretation into an exceedingly difficult task. Given the ambitions of his imagery and (anti)narrative, most closelly-textual conclusions will seem parochial.

For example, a close-up of Laura Dern's character includes a ton of "eye light" or "catch light"--reflections caught on her eyes. Or the fuzzy, smudgy quality and countless light artefacts that follow from his decision to use low-res video for the film--there's no easy figuring out how those formal elements contribute to what the film is about.

Or doing the fucking locomotion!
 
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breepf said:
I started watching Inland Empire today and I'm struck once again by how un-programmatic his surrealism is. Parts of the film--parts of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive to boot--can be parsed intertextually via Billy Wilder's 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, which is sort of the ur-film for cynical takes on the Hollywood film industry.

But try as you might too put his films through the critical paces to argue for this or that, the excessiveness of his imagery makes straightforward close reading and/or interpretation into an exceedingly difficult task. Given the ambitions of his imagery and (anti)narrative, most closelly-textual conclusions will seem parochial.

For example, a close-up of Laura Dern's character includes a ton of "eye light" or "catch light"--reflections caught on her eyes. Or the fuzzy, smudgy quality and countless light artefacts that follow from his decision to use low-res video for the film--there's no easy figuring out how those formal elements contribute to what the film is about.

Or doing the fucking locomotion!
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I still haven’t seen Inland Empire or Twin Peaks, but will be starting that series soon. Wild at Heart is the one that hooked me on Lynch.

But regarding Mulholland Drive and Sunset Boulevard, there are a lot of homages and parallels. With the most obvious (to those familiar with LA) being that they are actually parallel roadways winding all the way through LA from east to west, with Sunset running along the foot of the Hollywood hills and Mulholland running through the top of them.

Here’s a site that points out a bunch of these:

Sunset Blvd. Connection
 
Many people don’t know that Lynch worked in other artistic media as well. I went to see this exhibition a couple years ago, with some paintings I really liked, including one that had a direct reference to the cowboy in Mulholland. But the most interesting things were his sculptures and his fascination with lamps and electricity. It was cool to get another peek into his mind from a different perspective.

www.pacegallery.com

David Lynch: Big Bongo Night | Pace Gallery

Pace is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new and recent work by David Lynch, marking the artist’s first show with the gallery.
www.pacegallery.com www.pacegallery.com
 
duluoz said:
I still haven’t seen Inland Empire or Twin Peaks, but will be starting that series soon. Wild at Heart is the one that hooked me on Lynch.

But regarding Mulholland Drive and Sunset Boulevard, there are a lot of homages and parallels. With the most obvious (to those familiar with LA) being that they are actually parallel roadways winding all the way through LA from east to west, with Sunset running along the foot of the Hollywood hills and Mulholland running through the top of them.

Here’s a site that points out a bunch of these:

Sunset Blvd. Connection
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Watching Inland Empire, I noticed for the first time that Lynch actually reshoots the brief snippet from Queen Kelly, a silent-era Gloria Swanson film that Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis watch in Sunset Boulevard. (The director of Queen Kelly was Erich von Stroheim, who plays Desmond's butler and former director in Sunset). Not to mention that Laura Dern's character lives in a sort of baroque, Spanish-style mansion ala SB.
 
duluoz said:
I still haven’t seen Inland Empire or Twin Peaks, but will be starting that series soon.
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You've never seen Twin Peaks?

In a way, I'm super jealous of you. It's one of those shows I would love to be able to erase completely from my brain and then get to experience anew.

I hope you'll come back and let us know what you think once you've finished it.
 
Lynch's Dune has its problems--he has the unenviable task of telling a 6-hour story in 2. Dino De Laurentis was not known for his subtlety, so you get what seem to be truncated, badly-paced, and tossed-off scenes that likely "breathed" more in a longer but less commercial cut.

But part of the problem is that 80s film critics did not have a handle of Lynch's developing aesthetic. For instance, there were criticisms of the special effects in Dune--they looked cheap and unrealistic. I think the sfx look great--the blocky, Tron-like armor, for instance. In any case, Lynch's career bears out the conclusion that he preferred startling, unreal special effects--Twin Peaks: the Return makes this point obvious.

Finally, I'd just say that I really enjoy the Lynch adaptation because it makes these different worlds feel gritty and dissimilar. Whether it's on Arrakis or Geidi Prime or whatever, Dune 2 can't get away from the crisp sheen of an enormous sfx budget.
 
UNCMSinLS said:
Yeah, I remember seeing Eraserhead at a small art house in NYC. I had the same reaction as you. What a weird movie.
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All the art house theaters here have been playing his stuff for weeks now. I went to see Eraserhead for what I thought was the first time last week, but I realized early on that I’d seen it before, ages ago. Must’ve been in an altered state at the time, fittingly.
 
Anybody seen The Substance? Definitely some Lynchian influences there (also Cronenberg)..
 
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