R.I.P. David Lynch

The auteur's work was meant to be felt, not understood.

I don’t know that I can write anything more meaningful or eloquent about David Lynch than everyone else has written since his death was announced yesterday. But I still feel like I have to acknowledge the loss. After all, his impact on cinema was such that his name has become an adjective. It seems wrong to say nothing.

So.

Lynch’s work was often called “surreal,” “weird,” and “experimental,” but I think a better term for it would be “non-traditional.” He was certainly capable of producing “normal” narrative films, as evidenced by movies like The Elephant Man (1980), The Straight Story (1999), and his ill-fated adaptation of Dune (1984). But the work for which he’s most famous, though not completely abstract in the Stan Brakhage sense, are not your classic Syd Field textbook screenplays: Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006), and the Twin Peaks saga, which unfolded on television and in film from 1990 to 2017.

Lynch was a vocal proponent of Transcendental Meditation (or TM), not just for the sake of one’s mental and spiritual health, but for its creative benefits as well: he even wrote a book about it, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, in 2006. Speaking about the practice in 2012, Lynch said:

“There’s an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness inside each one of us, and it’s right at the source and base of mind, right at the source of thought, and it’s also at the source of all matter… This pure consciousness is called by modern physics ‘the unified field.’ It’s at the base of all mind and all matter, and modern science says all matter, everything that is a thing, emerges from this field. And this field has qualities, like bliss, intelligence, creativity, universal love, energy, peace. And it’s not the intellectual understanding of this field, but the experiencing of it that does everything.”

I think that last part - “it’s not the intellectual understanding of this field, but the experiencing of it that does everything” - sums up Lynch’s modus operandi. I don’t think he ever intended his non-traditional narratives to be understood intellectually; I believe he was trying to transcend intellect and language, to convey something more profound that can only be felt, not articulated. To watch Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive and try to figure out “what happened” is to miss the entire point; the viewer shouldn’t ask what the work “means,” they should only experience the emotions it provokes.

Lynch isn’t the only filmmaker to operate on such a methodology. But I still believe it’s one of the reasons his work was so singular. As I said before, we commonly use the adjective “Lynchian” to describe dreamlike films - his influence is all over recent movies like The Substance and I Saw the TV Glow - but like any true auteur, only David Lynch could ever make a true David Lynch picture. At his best, he wasn’t trying to satisfy anyone but himself; his films were acts of authentic, unadulterated self-expression, and his death leaves a hole in cinema that can never be filled.