With his departure David Lynch (1946-2025) Cinema loses one of its great creators who left indelible marks on cinematic art and culture over the past five decades.
Like Hitchcock, Fellini, Bergman, and Youssef Chahine in Arab cinema, the name “Lynch” turned into an adjective that refers to the style of his films, and to other films that bear the imprint and influence of this style.
A general feeling of orphanhood afflicts fans of cinema and high culture around the world due to the news of David Lynch’s passing a few days before his seventy-ninth birthday, and phrases such as “cinema is dead,” “the generation of geniuses is over,” and “the last of the greats have passed away,” all of which reflect his great status. Which is occupied by the man’s name, and which was formed through a short-produced career (only 10 feature films, a three-part series, and a number of short films), but very private; It was not an easy journey at all, and it was not built in a day and a night. Rather, it took decades to create and evaluate.
In my opinion, David Lynch’s films have not received the appreciation they deserve so far, and like most great artists, only time will restore their respect and place them in the position they deserve, just as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did when they tried to compensate Lynch for ignoring his works by awarding him an honorary Oscar in 2020.
A strange beginning
Since his first feature film, Eraserhead (1977), the young David Lynch has shown that he comes from another world, to present cinema from another world, other than what the rest of humanity makes. Strangely enough, the film did not achieve significant success at the box office, but it was quickly picked up by a theater that was interested in different experiences and dedicated nightly screenings to it (as a horror film). It attracted the attention of those with special tastes, including the British producer and director Mel Brooks, who commissioned Lynch to make a film entitled The Elephant Man (1980) revolves around the true story of a man who was born deformed. He was bought by a circus owner and turned into a marvel for people to watch at the end of the ninth century. Ten.
Perhaps what attracted Brooks to Lynch was that Eraserhead was also about a child born deformed, but unlike Eraserhead, The Elephant Man was a huge success, both commercially and critically, and was nominated for 8 Oscars, putting David Lynch’s name on the map of world cinema.
Personally, I saw the film, for the first time, during the Cairo Cinema Club screenings, among other international masterpieces such as Wild Strawberry by Bergman, and 8½ by Fellini, and the latter film is considered one of the most influential works on David Lynch. It is interesting that both Lynch and Fellini were born on the same day (January 20), with a difference of 26 years between them. Lynch sought to get to know Fellini and visited him more than once, most recently shortly before his death in 1993.
The Elephant Man was completely different from Eraserhead, as it was a traditional feature film, focusing on the story and human feelings, and devoid of the surrealistic games that distinguished Erasehead. It starred two major British actors, John Hart, and Anthony Hopkins, a young man at the time, alongside Anne Croft in A small role, the film was widely distributed, and made David Lynch famous. But Lynch soon returned to his favorite strange, surreal world with one of his most unsuccessful (commercially) and controversial and controversial films among critics and cinema fans, which was Dune (1984).
Another failure followed by success
The film based on Frank Herbert’s novel (which was recently turned into a series of films directed by Denis Villeneuve) was characterized by its dazzling images, difficult narrative, and special rhythm that were beyond the tolerance of the average audience at the time, although the film began to gain fans and devotees over the years.
Between making difficult-to-digest works like Eraserhead and Dune to digestible, relatively smooth works, David Lynch’s career has ranged over the following decades. Immediately after Dune, he made one of his most successful and beautiful films, Blue Velvet (1986), co-starring Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and his favorite actor Kyle MacLachan, who has become David Lynch’s alter ego since he participated in Dune.
Blue Velvet established David Lynch’s position despite the contradictory reception the film received among its fans and haters. As happened with all of Lynch’s works, time has done justice to it and it has become one of the most famous and beloved works for new generations of viewers and critics.
But if Blue Velvet was relatively palatable, Lynch brought it with a new work that was more strange, radical, disturbing and controversial, which is the film Wild at Heart (1990), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but many attacked its author and the jury that awarded him the award, To this day, it remains shocking even by today’s standards.
Surrealism of crime!
In both Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, David Lynch combined commercial genres such as horror, police suspense, gangster, and the “road movie” within the surrealist style, which relied on the paradox of reality, dream-like narratives, and fantastical events and images. An example of these images is Dennis Hopper and Nicolas Cage singing in the back-play of two soft romantic songs, “In Dreams” and “Love Me Tender,” by Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley, respectively, against a background of violence, sex, and horror in which the events of the two films take place.
A series ahead of its time
In 1992, David Lynch embarked on a new, very daring experiment on his part, and on the ABC television station, which was the creation of the series Twin Peaks, which was immediately considered one of the boldest things that television screens had ever seen, and we can say that it had previously paved the way for the era of “cinematic” platforms and series that we see today, and to Now Twin Peaks is one of the best series in history. After two seasons of the series, Lynch made a film called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as a prequel to the events of the series, before in 2017 he made its third season, which achieved great success. It is Lynch’s last work, with the exception of a few films and a few artistic experiments that he produced. Made over the past years.
Following his example of merging surrealism with crime and horror cinema, David Lynch made his next film, Lost Highway (1997), in which he dealt with a topic that would occupy him greatly later, which was the issue of identity and the spiritual mysteries behind it. It is a theme that he addressed in some way in Twin Peaks, and he will address it later in his last two films, Mullholland Drive and Inland Empire.
Humanity again
After Lost Highway, David Lynch returned again to his simple, human side by making one of his easiest and sweetest films, which is Straight Story, which is based on the true story of an old man who takes a road trip to visit his sick brother after years of separation. It is the only work whose style is completely different from the rest of Lynch’s works.
The very next year, Lynch made his most beautiful and strangest film ever, Mullholland Drive (2001), which, two decades after its making, was chosen as the best film of the third millennium in a massive BBC poll five years ago.
Lynch’s last experiment was with the film Inland Impire in 2006, which was a pioneering experimental work filmed with digital cameras. It did not achieve great success and was not shown on a large scale. After that, Lynch devoted himself to other experiments such as fine art, music and short films, and returned again to his early youth as an experimenter. He searches for the essence of art and life in unconventional templates and forms.
A great loss is the passing of a great and rare artist like David Lynch, but our consolation is that he left this great legacy for many generations who will remember, with a shiver of nostalgia, the eternal joy that his films spread in their minds and hearts, and which will remain for many generations to come.
*Art critic.