David Lynch, 78, died in Los Angeles on January 15. While the world will remember him for his surrealist films, tinged with the stuff of dreams, he also left behind advertisements for the big names in luxury goods and, even more personally, the paintings and drawings he produced in his spare time.
A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, David Lynch came to Hollywood filmmaking through drawing and painting, his final project being to animate his pictorial works in a way that was as innovative as it was amusing.
But already, his dark universe, as singular as it is disturbing, tinged with absurdist humor, is starting to win over his classmates and teachers. According to an equally Lynchian legend, it all started withan electric shock: his encounter with the tortured works of Francis Bacon.
This sense of visual drama was to follow him througha dozen films over the next thirty years, some of which left a lasting impression on the retina, such as Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet. He was less fortunate on television, however, having created a television UFO in two seasons: Twin Peaks.
Freaks and false pretenses
If David Lynch were a musical work, it would undoubtedly be a lively, innocent tune in the image of the 1950s, the golden age of American consumerism in which he grew up. However, this is to underestimate his taste for the bizarre, to the extent that Percy Faith’s Theme from a summer place, as naive as it is distressing in its instrumental ritornello, (too) easily sums up his character. A track that’s both the candy of an era and the sanitized music of an elevator. The Montana native maintains a close link with his childhood memories of cherry pies, drive-ins and red neon diners serving burgers, fries and milkshakes.
As one of his favorite actors, Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks), recalls, he retains very precise multisensory memories, such as the time of day he liked to enjoy his milkshakes at Bob’s Big Boy, so that they were at a certain temperature. He is equally meticulous when it comes to choosing the music for his films, finding in Angelo Badalamenti his sonic double.
This taste for the strange and the “freaks ” (bizarre personalities, both physically and psychologically) is said to have been born of a visual shock in the presence of his brother: the sight of a naked woman in the middle of the street. Neither moved nor amused, he burst into tears, imagining that the worst must have happened, even in a small town that looked too perfect to be honest. He learned a lesson that runs through all his work, namely that even the most peaceful villages are home to disturbed people who do things they’d rather keep secret.
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