"David LYNCH (1946-2025) Filmmaker, Avant-Garde" Amadou Bal BA

«David LYNCH (1946-2025), a genius filmmaker, director and producer, rich in his disturbing films, his modernity, his avant-gardism, with a postmodern, philosophical and psychological dimension, between strangeness and concern, honoring Franz KAFKA , LE CORBUSIER and Jacques LACAN» by Amadou Bal BA

«There are always two sides to everything. The films I make, like life, show that everything is made up of contrasts: beauty and ugliness, good and evil, light and darkness,” says David LYNCH, American director, born January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, United States, and who passed away on January 16, 2025, at the age of 78. A heavy smoker, he died of a lung disease. In his artistic creation, between dream and reality, strangeness and anxiety, Good and Evil, David LYNCH had won Oscar nominations for best director for “The Elephant Man”, in 1980, “Blue Velvet”, in 1986 and “Mulholland Drive”, in 2001. Her mother, Edwina SUNDHOLM, of Finnish origin, was a city dweller and her father, Donald LYNCH, from the countryside. “It’s all in such a state of tenderness, all this flesh and this world is so imperfect,” he wrote in his autobiography. Also, David LYNCH's films reflect this tension, this childhood realm of complexity where beauty and the damned come into conflict. “I learned that just below the surface there is another world, and then another world again when you dig deeper. I knew it when I was a kid, but I couldn't find proof. It was just like a hunch. There is goodness in the sky and the flowers, but another force, a wild and decadent pain, also accompanies it all,” says David LYNCH. His childhood memories, a mixture of darkness and light, are, in large part, his source of inspiration. “For my brother to say that I was a “born leader”, but in reality, I was just a kid like the others. I had good friends, but I didn’t feel particularly popular, and I never felt like I was different,” he wrote in his memoirs.

David LYNCH, unlike artists of his generation such as Martin SCORSESE, Francis COPPOLA, Steven SPIELBERG or George LUCAS, is not a child of cinema. Indeed, in 1965, David LYNCH, having little interest in politics, and in particular in the issues of racial tension of his time, went to Philadelphia to study fine arts, a worrying city weighed down by racial segregation, unsanitary conditions and insecurity. “Politics didn’t interest me. I don't think I voted at that time. I was accepted into Beaux-Arts, and I took the bus to Philadelphia. It was my destiny. Jack and I didn't attend classes - the only point of this school was to be surrounded by artists like us. All the students I met were real painters. We made a great group. In Boston, they were jokers in comparison,” he wrote in his memoirs. Indeed, the influences on David LYNCH go far beyond his family. “The Art Life” is how David LYNCH defines it, who is neither a film buff nor a film school graduate. To create cinematic magic, to amaze his audience, he created a dreamlike and sound image, with the aim of disturbing, offending or mystifying. “I like to create films to enter other worlds. For me, film is a magical medium,” says David LYNCH. Cinema must remain magic, a space of dreams, without ignoring reality “Daydreams are of all the most important, those that occur when I am quietly seated in my armchair and I let my mind wander. When we sleep, we cannot control our dreams. I like to dive into a dream world that I have created or discovered ; a world that I chose.”, says David LYNCH

 His centers extend to different artistic fields to which he was first destined, such as painting, music; photography and the plastic arts. “His films thus invite us to constantly rethink our reading grids, since the story, far from being the cornerstone of the work, is only one of the multiple pieces of dense creations taking the form of puzzles which also favor the collision of a priori contradictory elements. Extreme physical and psychological violence rubs shoulders with absurd humor, the irony is never devoid of sincerity, the openness towards other cultural horizons is accompanied by a sometimes reactionary and insidiously nostalgic vision of America. Lynch is both a naive boy scout and a perverse voyeurist, an anguished dreamer and an eternal optimist, an opaque artist and a down-to-earth man,” writes Bruno DEQUEN. In his relationship to artistic creation, the inspirations are multiple. “One of today's most prominent filmmakers, David Lynch, is a director whose vision of cinema is firmly rooted in the fine arts. He was motivated to make his first film while he was a student because he wanted a painting that “would really be able to move.” However, most existing studies of Lynch fail to fully engage with the complexities of his films' relationship with other art forms. Lynch’s cinematic production must be considered as inspired by a wide range of cultural references,” wrote Allister MACTAGGART in 2010. Furthermore, David LYNCH states that when he makes a film, ninety percent of the time, nothing is planned and constructed in advance. “It appeals to the subconscious, a form of resistance to the logical reductive nature of language” wrote Martha NOCHIMSON in 1997. Consequently, David LYNCH, an avant-garde inspired by LE CORBBUSIER, a specialist in film noir, is "a filmmaker of modernity." A key figure in the continuing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting into inner worlds constructed by mood, texture and eerie artifice. We enter these cinematographic interiors famous for being wrapped in plastic, the fundamental substance of Lynch's work,” wrote Justuce NIELAND in 2012. Indeed, in a surreal dimension, David LYNCH combined the intimate and the different artistic expressions of his time, including the Internet and new technologies. Furthermore, in an ordered chaos, between simplicity and esotericism, there is a mystical and orientalist side in the modernist inspirations of David LYNCH. Adept in transcendental meditation, he does nothing like the others “Starting with Lost Highway, director David Lynch has “deviate” in a new direction, a direction in which very confusing images of the physical world occupy a central place in his movies. Seeking to understand this unusual emphasis in his work. He draws this vision from the Holy Vedas of the Hindu religion, as well as from his layman's fascination with modern physics,” writes Martha NOCHIMSON, one of his biographers.

From his cult classic television series “Twin Peaks” to his 2006 film “Inland Empire,” David LYNCH is best known for his unorthodox storytelling style ; the strangeness and the disturbing are omnipresent. An award-winning director, producer and screenwriter, LYNCH twists and disrupts traditional plots and offers viewers a surreal, often nightmarish perspective. His unique approach to filmmaking has made his work familiar to critics and audiences around the world, and David LYNCH creates a new reality for the characters and audiences by focusing on the individual and embracing existentialism. William J. DEVLIN and Shai BIDERMAN explored the philosophical dimension at the heart of the work of David LYNCH is a postmodern artist ; he examined the darkness of the human soul, bad faith and freedom, ethics, politics and religion. “For over thirty-five years, David Lynch has remained one of the strangest, most thought-provoking and most provocative filmmakers. From his first experimental films made while he was an art student in Philadelphia, to his foray into digital cinema with “Inland Empire,” Lynch's filmography is as diverse as it is influential,” Ligoti wrote in 2013. Thomas, Blake BUTLER and Kévin SAMPSELL.

Filmmaker of his time and his time, author of 10 feature films, those who saw “Mulholland Drive” were both disturbed and dazzled by the story of a car accident, at night, of this young girl disembarking in Hollywood, on Mulholland Drive, a magical and legendary 34 km road. “When we get older, we remember our younger years, we compare them with current society, and we don't try to explain what we experienced to the new generations, because they don't care at all. Life goes on. One day, these new generations will have their own memories, and will not be able to tell them in turn,” says David LYNCH, in his memoirs. Also, “Mulholland Drive”, film noir, of postmodernity, is therefore, in large part, a celebration of its final resting place, my city of Los Angeles and its theaters, a factory of dreams, an archetype of new urban forms in rupture with the model of the American city of the 20th century. It is a city of multiple identities. David LYNCH had a house built in Los Angeles in 1987, in which he died.

Between Evil and Good, the city of Los Angeles embodies the cinema industry “I have the impression, here, that the golden age of cinema is still floating in the air. When I drive, especially at night, it's like a residue of suspended dust, a past that has never faded. From one street to another, you can change eras. It's not just a question of architecture. A smell too: the very lively scent of certain flowers, like jasmine, plunges me into a state of reverie,” says David LYNCH. “Mulholland Drive” tells a love story between two actresses: Betty Elms, a young girl from Deep River, who dreams of becoming a movie star, and Rita, an amnesiac actress, in the middle of a nightmare, in search of herself . As the film unfolds, the identities of the two characters become blurred and confused. A great filmmaker, a sophisticated artist of the strange, David LYNCH has innovated in terms of image quality, but also through this frightening and haunting atmosphere in his artistic creation. In this film, a brunette woman with amnesia, after a car accident, wanders the streets of Los Angeles in a daze before taking refuge in an apartment. There she is discovered by Betty, a wholesome blonde from the Midwest who has come to the City of Angels in search of fame as an actress. Together, the two attempt to solve the mystery of Rita's true identity. Another film, “Vertigo” by Alfred HITCHCOK, on ​​the theme of doubles, inspired a large part of David LYNCH's work, particularly with regard to Mulholland Drive. This film is a nod to the demons of America, to the Evil that injustice can cause.

We remember “Eraserhead”, in 1977, a transcendental, spiritualist creation, shot at night, a first film by Davdi LYNCH, or the story of Zombie in black and white.  “When I made Eraserhead, cinema remained an enigma to me. I have never been a movie buff and I still am not,” says David LYNCH. “Eraserhead”, or literally “eraser head”. In this vision of a world without emotion or desire, darkness participates in the creation of the feeling of lack and absence, David LYNCH is marked by spiritualism “Eraserhead is my most spiritually imbued film, but no one has never captured this dimension. What happened was that I was experiencing these feelings, but I didn't really know what they represented about me. So one day I take out a Bible, I start reading, reading, I come to a certain sentence and I say to myself: 'That's exactly it!'" he says in his memoirs. Indeed, the neighbor symbolizes lust in the film, lust which will lead Henry to commit a vice by having sexual relations with the latter, unable to resist her mysterious, disturbing and obscure charm. “What scares the most is not reality, but what we imagine it hides,” says David LYNCH. The film takes on its full meaning during the last quarter of an hour of the film. Henry's head then detaches from his body and sinks into a pool of blood, falling from the sky to land in an alley where it opens. This film, inspired by David LYNCH’s anxiety about fatherhood; her daughter, Jennifer, was born with "severe club feet", which required extensive corrective surgery when she was a child. Jennifer said her own unexpected conception and birth defects were the basis of the film's themes. In this film, a man is abandoned by his friend who leaves him in charge of a premature child, the fruit of their union. He sinks into a fantasy universe to escape this cruel reality. A disturbing atmosphere, a mind-blowing tale, but one of genius, a nauseating journey into the human unconscious. We are shaken by terror, an extraordinary plastic and metaphysical force. “Transcendental meditation is a simple, easy, effortless technique that allows any human being to delve within themselves, to experience subtler levels of the mind and intellect, more refined, and to enter this ocean of pure consciousness, the unified field, the Self,” said David LYNCH. His film, “Dune” is also the story of an enlightenment. “That’s why I made it,” he says; and it is in its hidden meaning, a violent denunciation of the Evil which is gnawing away at America, which no one wants to talk about. Despite its claim to embody the leadership of the so-called free world, inside homes, Evil prowls through various forms of violence, such as incest, and America had exterminated the Native Americans, the first inhabitants of this territory. ; its hegemony over the world was founded on a mass crime, the Hiroshima bomb during World War II, as well as the witchcraft trials of McCarthyism.

“Sailor and Lula”, in 1990, filmed in Los Angeles and New Orleans, a film noir, a romance, is a story in which two lovers flee the young girl's mother who opposes their relationship, as well as only dangerous and mysterious characters who threaten them. It's a trashy version of Romeo and Juliet. The romantic passion that Sailor and Lula experience is not to the taste of Lula's mother, Marietta, who wants to have Sailor assassinated and hires a henchman. Sailor kills him and ends up in prison. Two years later, upon his release, Lula came to welcome him. The lovers flee. It's a thrilling and hallucinatory chase of a bad boy and his blonde sweetheart, pursued by killers sent by the young girl's mother, Johnny Farragut. Sailor and Lula's run through the South of the United States will make the young girl say that the world truly has a "wild heart", of darkness and cruelty. “The whole world is cruel on the inside and crazy on the surface,” says David LYNCH. We are tossed around, in apnea, because the danger is latent, we feel that, inevitably, this escapade will end badly, but we keep hope, because Sailor and Lula form a couple. “The year that “Sailor and Lula” was presented at Cannes, Fellini defended La voce della luna. I was proud that my film was screened right after Fellini’s. It was a consecration for me,” he says in his memoirs.

“Elephant Man”, a 1980 film, recounts, during Victorian England, this deformed and disturbing creature that Franz KAFKA would not deny. In fact, Joseph Carey MERRICK (1862-1890), alias “Elephant Man”, did exist; he is arguably the most famous human monster of all time. “The Elephant Man has something inside him, growing in his body. He was not a perfectly accomplished human being, but he still had very spiritual qualities. It was like two things were happening inside him, one in his body and the other that kept his personality so innocent and good,” says David LYNCH. Extremely sensitive, gentle and thirsty for love, the boy suffering from an unknown illness, who has become monstrous over the years, will quickly be ostracized from society: barely tolerated by his family, he will be violently rejected by the entire world. Precociously separated from his mother, love will forever desert his existence. At the age of twelve, destroyed by his stepmother and constantly rejected by his father, he was forced to leave the family home to try his luck in a factory. What follows is a period of vagrancy, then exposure as a fairground freak and all the human stupidity. . “David really is some kind of genius, that much is clear and clear. It understands the human psyche and emotions, the human heart. He is also quite deranged, he is capable of projecting his emotional and sexual turmoil into his work, and of assailing us with the sensations that assail him,” says Mel BROOKS.

“Lost Highway” is a film that Franz KAFKA would not deny (See my article, on the centenary of this author's death, Médiapart, May 17, 2024), for whom the fantastic or the supernatural are areas of possibility. Indeed, it is a film which exploits the power of our imagination and not a documentation which would put forward the possibility of the existence of a fourth dimension, which would then make the disappearance of Fred Madison possible. It would in fact be a work that explores the way in which our negative vision of the world prevents us from seeing the infinite limits of the freedom that our universe offers us, which is also unlimited, as David LYNCH thinks. The character of Fred Madison does not disappear from the story, he transforms, as in Kafka's “The Metamorphosis”, into another being, here Pete Dayton, who allows him to have a second chance in life, and to experience the world in another way in order to make the right choices and live happily and for a long time. “We don’t have to understand to love. What you need to do is dream,” says David LYNCH. The character of Fred Madison does not disappear from the story, he transforms, as in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", into another being, here Pete Dayton, who allows him to have a second chance in life, and to experience the world in another way in order to make the right choices and live happily and for a long time. “We don’t have to understand to love. What you need to do is dream,” says David LYNCH.

A visionary and very creative filmmaker, the “Twin Peaks” series by David LYNCH has haunted us through its mysteries, with a sort of remake, in 2017, “Twin Peaks, The Return”. The television channel, ABC was well inspired to broadcast this detective series mixed with Soap Opera, built around the death of a high school girl in the northwest of the United States. Indeed, in a filthy erotic-dreamlike mess, David LYNCH films in a mimetic way the unalterable conflict of order and delirium: with a mixture of clinical precision and baroque conflagration. “What if Twin Peaks represented a pivotal moment in the history, not only of television series, but of television in general? What if Twin Peaks marked the moment when television finally reached its secret, capitalist and gnostic end, and by reaching it, signed its end quite simply, that is to say its self-destruction", wrote, in 2010, Pacôme TIELLEMENT.

In 2019, David LYNCH was honored with an Oscar for his entire body of work, and Mulholland Drive won the César for best foreign film at Cannes. “Lost High Way”, according to Slavoj ZIZECK, one of his biographers, inspired by the premises of Lacanian psychoanalysis, is a unique universe of “sublime ridiculousness”, a playful staging and a simultaneous crossing of the fundamental ideological fantasies which support our capitalist society late. “The contemporary world may not exactly be the brightest place one could dream of living in. It’s a kind of strange carnival, where there’s a lot of pain, but which can be quite funny too,” says David LYNCH.

David LYNCH suffered many heartaches and faced various challenges, to finally succeed in his career. “Every year I had a new girlfriend, and I started very young. They were all great. (…). I'm going to tell you about the kiss that remained engraved in my memory. My father's boss, Mr. Packard, came to visit us one summer with his family. They stayed at the research center. Their beautiful daughter, named Sue, was my age, and had come with her boyfriend. They made love together. I was so far from the sex world that I was totally stunned that they were talking about it in front of me. One day, Sue and I left her boyfriend behind to go for a walk together. In the yellow pine forest, a thick carpet of needles, almost fifty centimeters long, formed a layer of humus. It was incredibly sweet. We ran and dove on this soft carpet before kissing languidly. It was like a dream. This kiss was so intense and deep that it lit a burning fire in me,” he wrote in his memoirs.

It was his family who announced his disappearance, a bit of humor which the artist possessed. “There is a big void in the world now that he is no longer with us. But as he said: keep your eyes on the donut, not on the hole,” his family wrote in a press release. David LYNCH has been married four times. His first, from 1967 to 1974, was Peggy LYNCH “Before Peggy, I had several short-term relationships. Peggy was the first girl I fell in love with. I loved Judy Westerman and Nancy Briggs, but they understood nothing about my painting and were destined for another life. Peggy appreciated my work. She was my first supporter. Since I didn't know how to type, she typed all my scripts. She was truly amazing. At first, we were just friends. We talked for hours at the drugstore, near the Academy. It was nice. One day, Peggy told me she was pregnant and, in the end, we got married,” he wrote in his memoirs. Their separation coincided with the filming of Eraserhead, and David LYNCH found work as a newspaper delivery boy at the Wall Street Journal. “In the morning, I was always in a bad mood. For example, I wanted my cereal a certain way and if it didn't suit me, I took it out on Peggy. He happened to run to the supermarket in the early morning to buy me my cereal. I was not fulfilled, Peggy was paying the price. One day, I showed Doreen Small a text I had written before meditating, and she started crying because my story was so dark. As soon as I started meditating, my darkness disappeared. Before practicing meditation, I was afraid of losing my fervor and my bite for cinema. In reality, I realized that it made me even more passionate, and happier, about doing my job. People often believe that anger is a strength, when it is a weakness that poisons our relationships and undermines us from within,” he writes in his memoirs.

His second wife, from 1977 to 1987, was Mary FISK. This period corresponds to the shooting of the film, “Elephant Man” shot in London. Mary FISK had a first miscarriage. His third wife from 2006 to 2007, a brief affair, was Mary SWEENEY, in charge of editing “Blue Velvet”. Throughout their relationship, “He painted constantly. He had a kiln and for a time he made pottery, he designed and built furniture in his workshop. He took a lot of photographs and had several exhibitions in the United States and elsewhere. He never tires, he has a lot of energy, although he does not exert himself physically. I was always pestering him to exercise and quit smoking, but it was no use. When it comes to tobacco, he’s like a teenager,” says Mary SWEENEY. The fourth and final wife, as of 2009, is Emily STOFLE, with rumors of a divorce, which ultimately did not take place. David LYNCH had three children: Jennifer, born April 7, 1968 who had a son in 1995, Sid, Austin, born September 7, 1982 and Riley, born May 22, 1992.

REFERENCES

I – David LYNCH

LYNCH (David), McKENNA (Kristine), L’espace du rêve. David Lynch, par lui-même et par les autres, traduction de Carole Delporte et Johan Frederik Hel Guedj, Paris, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2018, 600 pages ;

LYNCH (David),  «Entretiens», avec Chris Rodley, Cahiers du Cinéma, 4 novembre 1998, 189 pages ;

LYNCH (David), Histoire vraie : méditations, conscience et créativité, traduction de Nicolas Richard, Paris, Sonatine éditions, 2008, 156 pages.

II – Others

ACHEMCHANE (Julien),  «Chez David Lynch révéler le simulacre, pour mieux le célébrer», dossier David Lynch et les arts, Ligeia, 2018, Vol 2, n°165-168, pages 52-62 ;

ARNAUD (Diane),  «David Lynch, l’ultime cinéplaste», dossier David Lynch et les arts, Ligeia, 2018, Vol 2, n°165-168, pages 35-51 ;

CHION (Michel), David Lynch, British Film Institute, 2006, 264 pages ;

DEQUEN (Bruno),  «David Lynch au carrefour des mondes», Images, 2017, page 5 ;

EVRY (Max), A Masterpiece in Disarray, David Lynch’s Dune. An Oral history, 1984 Publishing, 2023, 560 pages ;

LANDRE (Jonathan), L’étrangeté lynchéenne : l’inquiétant cinéma de David Lynch, Université de Montréal, mai 2021, 53 pages ;

LIGOTI (Thomas) BUTLER (Blake), SAMPSELL (Kevin), In Heaven, Everything is Fine : Fiction Inspired by David Lynch, Eraserhead Press, 2013, 356 pages ;

LIM (Dennis), David Lynch : The Man from another Place, New York, Icons, Amazon Publishing, 2017, 186 pages ;

MacGOWAN (Todd), The Impossible David Lynch, Columbia University Press, 2007, 140 pages ;

MACTAGGART (Allister), The Film Painting of David Lynch : Challenging Film Theory, Intellect Ltd, 2010, 203 pages ;

MARTIN (Richard), The Architecture of David Lynch, Bloomberry Publishing, 2014, 240 pages ;

NIELAND (Justus), David Lynch, University of Illinois Press, 2012, 208 pages ;

NOCHIMSON (Marta, P.), David Lynch Swerves : Uncertainty, from Lost Highway to Inland Empire, University of Texas Press, 2013, 295 pages ;

NOCHIMSON (Marta, P.), The Passion of David Lynch Wild at Heart in Hollywood, University of Texas Press, 1997, 272 pages ;

OLSON (Greg), David Lynch : Beautiful Dark (Scarecrow Film Makers Series), First Edition, 2008, 752 pages ;

TIELLEMENT (Pacôme), La main gauche de David Lynch. Twin Peaks et la fin de la télévision, Paris, Travaux Pratiques, 2010, 128 pages ;

WURTZ (Siegfried),  «Stupidité, vulgarité et absurdité de la production dessinée de David Lynch», dossier David Lynch et les arts, Ligeia, 2018, Vol 2, n°165-168, pages 89-98 ;

ZIZECK (Slavoj) BIDERMAN (Shi), The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime : On David Lynch's Lost Highway, University of Washington Press, 2007, 2000, 52 pages.

Paris, January 16, 2025, by Amadou Bal BA.