Searching the Tribune’s photo archive for a picture from “Eraserhead,” the 1977 David Lynch film that concluded one phase of my moviegoing life in the late ’70s and cracked open a second, bigger one, I found a single image from that film, which I think of as Lynch’s unauthorized remake of “Life With Father.”
When you upload a photo from that digital archive, our editing program asks you if you want to “learn how to describe the purpose of the image.”
That is an offer Lynch himself would never accept.
“I think it’s almost like a crime,” he told a London Guardian interviewer in 2018 when asked to explain the purpose or meaning of his movies, which are more like fragments of dreams. “A film or a painting — each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language — it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.”
What he imagined, and made real enough for surrealism right down the block from eerily mundane Americana, became its own adjective, “Lynchian.” The director of, among others, “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Mulholland Drive,” the comparatively linear, and touching, biopics “The Elephant Man” and “The Straight Story,” two rounds of “Twin Peaks” (three, if you add the feature “Fire Walk With Me”) and “Inland Empire” died a few days shy of his 79th birthday. His family announced his death on social media on Thursday.
The cause was emphysema. Lynch took up smoking at age 8 and quit in 2022. For decades he was an ardent believer in Transcendental Meditation, and became a valiant advocate for the peace and the access to the subconscious mind it brought him.
An image from David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” (American Film Institute)
Exterior forces were less kind. Dependent on supplemental oxygen in his last phase of life, Lynch underwent what was likely a life-shortening evacuation earlier this month from his Hollywood residence and workshop space (which did not burn), brought on by the Runyon Canyon wildfires.
The elemental dark forces informing so much of Lynch’s work went far beyond fire, and icy pathology. As a fantasist he embraced it all, and every startling, beautiful paradox in his dreamstates, otherwise known as movies.
Sometimes the beauty part stayed in hiding. In “Eraserhead,” the timorous, permanently agog protagonist, Henry (Jack Nance), learns he’s to become a father. It is a difficult piece of news, and the child is not what he expected. It is not what viewers expected. Filmed over several piecemeal years in Philadelphia, rendered as a shadow realm of fully justifiable paranoia and dreams that (as Shakespeare said) hath no bottom, “Eraserhead” is grotesquely funny, trancelike. It is a twisted found object in motion, and it found a long-tail audience in the years when a movie could take its time finding one. Lynch’s career was made.
I talked with him only once, by phone, in 2017, on the occasion of the Music Box Theatre’s first and stunningly expansive Lynch retrospective. I mentioned the impact “Eraserhead” had on me, and how I was essentially just another one of countless hundreds of thousands of un-prepared teenagers who never quite got over its glorious disorientation. The radiator. The woman who lived in one. The sound of the baby whatzit’s labored breathing, or any other element in Alan Splet’s genius-level sound design, evoking ancient pipes and wonky plumbing in desperate need of a plumber. Hearing his reply in the voice millions knew, from “Twin Peaks” or, as a kind of farewell, his version of John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” made my heart skip a beat. “Thanks, Michael! Thanks a lot. That’s fantastic, Michael. For sure! Michael, just beautiful.” Who doesn’t want to hear something like that spoken in the voice of David Lynch?
The terrible beauty in his films usually came at a steep cost, in human or, rather, inhuman cruelty, violence, pathology. Like all great film directors —and there are only a few dozen across 130 years or so — Lynch gave the world masterworks wholly his own while occasionally courting self-parody as well as inspiring new generations of filmmakers, artists, writers, critics or, in the case of David Foster Wallace, essayists.
In “Blue Velvet” the secrets of the town of Lumberton begin with the discovery of a severed ear on a front lawn. Wallace’s essay on Lynch contrasts his aesthetic to Quentin Tarantino’s, a lesser talent in his view. With his adolescent bloodlust sensibility Tarantino, Foster wrote, “is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”
I’m still puzzling through much of Lynch’s maze-like pursuits of mystery and desire (and, yes, to varying degrees, misogyny). Why was I floored by “Blue Velvet,” the first time and every time, so much more than his follow-up project, “Wild at Heart”? Will I ever love “Lost Highway” as much as I love its best individual flashes, none creepier than Robert Blake handing Bill Pullman the phone?
Sherilyn Fenn and Kyle MacLachlan in “Twin Peaks.” (ABC-TV)
Looking at the entirety of his career, these little critical riddles are pretty puny. The windmills of our minds can overwhelm with clatter. They need oiling. Meditation, he told me in 2017, made him “a happy camper. Anxiety, sadness, depression, fear, hate, anger, all that starts to lift away. You’re bringing in the gold, and saying goodbye to the garbage. It’s a beautiful thing.”
I asked him the question he never much liked. If you’re a happy camper, why the eternal pull to the dark side in your work? What does it mean?
Lynch gave me a little heh-heh. “Well, there’s these things called stories. And stories have conflicts, life and death situations, all kinds of different characters in the story you’re telling. Our world, the real world, conjures a lot of ideas. It’s filled with negativity, all kinds of stuff, and ideas come from that world, and sometimes I fall in love with certain ideas and want to make them into something. And then it becomes part of a story. But Michael, you don’t have to suffer to show suffering. And there’s light and dark flowing through everything.”
A year later, two years before his emphysema diagnosis, Lynch told the Guardian he saw this life as one phase, and the next as another. “Life is a short trip but always continuing,” he said. “We’ll all meet again.”
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
