Remembering the man whose name became an adjective

I haven't had a chance to reflect on David Lynch before now. When I learned of his passing on Thursday due to complications from emphysema and having to be relocated from his home during the fires, at age 78, it was right at the beginning of a cavalcade of year-end posts that were ready to go up and were going to consume the next four days on this blog. And while some cinephiles might consider Lynch's loss to be reason enough to interrupt that freight train, I am not one of them, which I will explore more in a minute.

I thought of not doing a Lynch in memoriam post at all. I don't consider myself to be the "blog of record" in the sense that I need to note the passing of any influential member of the film community. I don't consider it, or at least don't want to consider it, a sign that I don't care enough about that person if I fail to write a remembrance post. Sometimes the timing and my schedule just don't work out.

But even if Lynch was not always my favorite filmmaker, he was the favorite filmmaker of the most cherished other cinephile in my life, who does the year-end rankings with me and has known me for nearly 50 years. (I've only been alive for 51. In reality, it's more like 48.) Plus, there's absolutely no denying the singular impact David Lynch had on the movies we've watched for the last 40 years, even if he made comparatively few of them himself. 

After all, this was a man whose last name was an adjective.

If you were to call a movie "Lynchian," people would instantly know what you were talking about, if they themselves were the right level of cinephile. And I'd argue that the people who knew what that meant might extend even to people who weren't cinephiles. Twin Peaks had such a cultural moment that even people who had only seen snippets of it knew that it represented a new sort of perspective on storytelling, or at least the first time this perspective had reached a wider audience.

Defining what it means for a film to be Lynchian is an imperfect exercise. It's a "you know it when you see it" thing. Any film that is "weird" might invite the Lynch comparison, but there are a lot of "weird" films out there that are not Lynchian. To be Lynchian, a film must also have sort of gothic noir overtones, and preferably a haunting score. If a character speaks in tongues, all the better. If a beautiful woman dies, all the better, though that probably only applies to Twin Peaks and its various movie versions and rebooted TV versions among Lynch's variegated output.

I do love certain Lynch films. Oddly, I often called his least Lynchian film, The Straight Story, my favorite, though this has since been eclipsed by Eraserhead. I also have a strong fondness for Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man, and have come around on Mulholland Drive after being more befuddled than entranced on my first viewing.

There are also, of course, Lynch films that I struggle with. My one viewing of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me left me perplexed, and I couldn't crack The Lost Highway either, even though I owned its soundtrack for years before I saw it due to Trent Reznor's involvement. And of course his Dune is a trainwreck. Then again, I suppose I am not alone in having these opinions about these films.

Even the two features I haven't mentioned I am more than mildly positive on. Those would be Wild at Heart, one of the last ones I saw, and Inland Empire. Having not yet taken to Mulholland Drive at this point, I was all prepared to hate Inland Empire considering it is also three hours long. Yet I felt myself bewitched by it largely in the way the director would have intended.

The fact that Lynch has not made a proper feature since then, which is nearly 20 years ago, indicates how little he was interested in being any one sort of thing. In the meantime he directed the Twin Peaks reboot series -- which some people love but which I gave up on, even before Nine Inch Nails played -- and numerous shorts. Heck, he was even a weatherman for an LA radio station for a while, mostly as a joke but played straight by him, albeit in his strange, inimitable style. And of course he was also an actor. Despite all these other hats he wore, I know my friend was hoping for at least one more feature, because that was the essential Lynch as we all first came to know and love him.

Because I didn't know and love him quite as much as some other people did, I will leave a better analysis of his art to other people. In fact, since I'm late to the game on this remembrance, they've all already done it, I'm sure some of them quite beautifully.

I will say, however, that Lynch represents somewhat of an unusual case for me: A director with nearly ten feature films (he fell just one short), all of which I've seen. Yes, I am a David Lynch completist, if you are counting only feature films and not all the other stuff from his prolific output of a career that started in the 1960s. 

And you can't be a completist on a director with that many films unless you are acknowledging there is something great and worth reckoning with in those films. I'll say that every time I started watching a David Lynch film, I knew there was a chance that he would reframe my entire understanding of cinema, even the world. 

If Lynch had that impact even on me, one of his lesser disciples, then just imagine how he blew the minds of those who truly love him ... and how hard the past week of knowing he would no longer be with us has been. 

Rest in peace, you weird and wonderful iconoclast.