Wild at Heart and Weird on Top: Remembering the Visionary David Lynch

Posted on January 17, 2025

by Eric P

David Lynch, a dapper and avuncular man who made often twisted and off-putting movies, died Thursday, Jan. 16 at the age of 78. He hadn’t made a new narrative film in almost twenty years, but having already imprinted an entire art form with his uncompromising vision, his legacy was already secure — and enduring. Thanks to TikTok, just last year Gen-Z kids were running around talking about the Eraserhead baby. Not everyone gets to be their own adjective, but just like Kafkaesque, Lynchian is in the books.

Much of Lynch’s career seemed to consist of getting away with things. The only items on his filmmaking resume were a couple of starkly surreal experiments when he was tapped to helm Dune, a big-budget sci-fi epic that was supposed to launch a blockbuster franchise but instead settled for being one of the weirder things Sting ever did.

Later, somehow he talked network TV executives into letting him make Twin Peaks, a prime-time serial that was a defiantly bizarre stew of sex, murder, deadpan comedy, and hallucinogenic dream imagery. Oh, and pie. Other shows on that network’s slate that same season? Perfect Strangers and Full House.

Then he talked network executives into letting him make yet another series. When they cancelled the order, he recut the pilot episode into Mulholland Drive, a noirish standalone theatrical movie full of dark eroticism and opaque storytelling which should have been a mess but instead landed on critics’ lists as one of the best movies ever made.

In Hollywood, an industry town famous for artistic timidity and mortgaged integrity, Lynch always seemed to be doing whatever he felt like at any given time. Blue Velvet: a suburban Reaganite nightmare of rough sex and Roy Orbison and gas canisters. Wild at Heart: a crime caper that asks “What if the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz were an ex-con with an Elvis fixation?” The Straight Story: a cross-country road picture where the lead is 73 and the car is a riding mower with a max speed of 5 mph.

The fact that Lynch got even one of these movies funded is outlandish. The fact that together they comprise an oeuvre of staggering cinematic artistry is, well, kinda Lynchian.

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