In trying to write on David Lynch one begins to understand why words did not come easily to him. In a beloved clip of the surrealist filmmaker, who died this week at 78, an interviewer asked him to "elaborate" on his statement that Eraserhead is his "most spiritual film" to which Lynch responded affably enough: "No, I won't."
In retrospect, what could he have said? Critics and scholars have striven nobly for decades to translate Lynch's films into language, to find a way to convey the propositions about the mind and the soul and the world they contain. But however much our experience of the films may be deepened by accounts of how they illustrate this or that concept from Lacanian psychoanalysis or Vedantic mysticism, his films often escape the boundaries of the spoken; they tend to transcend the forms of communication they themselves utilize. The experience of them is itself primary. There is always something irreducible and incommunicable about his art. The indelible moments -- the Roy Orbison karaoke in Blue Velvet, the woman in the radiator singing about heaven in Eraserhead, the prophetic utterances in the Red Room in Twin Peaks, the starry night at the end of The Straight Story, the mysteries of Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive -- endure because their meaning can never be exhausted by analysis.
The film scholar Martha Nochimson once told a story about how she confessed to Lynch that she didn't understand a painting by Jackson Pollock that Lynch had admired. Lynch replied that when they encountered the painting together, he could see her eyes move over the painting, taking it in, and that for him that simply was what it meant to understand it. The movement of eyes, the absorption in image and speech, the rapture of emotion and imagination -- these were for him the signs that a viewer was truly receiving what he was trying to express in his art.
Lynch was a painter as well as a director, and many of his own paintings explore the power that language derives from its limits. Strongly influenced by the work of Francis Bacon, these paintings pair surreal imagery with text that at once succeed and fail to describe what we are looking at. A monstrous figure wields a gun and a knife and strides across a barren landscape toward a box resembling a television within which a female figure is confined: "pete goes to his girlfriend's House." A man with a grotesque mask-like visage stands in an empty space, a bloody wound consuming his chest and out of which a protuberance like a giant earthworm extends: "this man was shot 0.9502 seconds Ago."
In his film as well as in painting, Lynch wanted to remind us that the value of language as a means of communication often lies in its ability to flaunt its own inadequacy. All art, he insisted, offers us more than what it could itself convey. It always gestures beyond itself, toward everything it can't say, opening back up everything that is closed off by the comforting illusion of conceptual mastery.
My favorite moment in all of his work comes in an episode of the second season of Twin Peaks in which a brutal act of violence the protagonist has been trying to prevent comes to pass, though he does not know it yet. A mysterious and possibly supernatural figure, an old man apparently wracked by senility, approaches him, puts a hand on his shoulder, and says: "I'm so sorry."
There are no words that can fix anything, no formulation that will make it all okay. And yet in that gentle acknowledgment of futility there is the possibility of transformation -- transcendence. "Silence," Lynch once remarked, "is this basis on which all these sounds and other things come together."
Lynch began his career training in visual art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. There he also began to make short films that leaned heavily on animation. A grant from the American Film Institute allowed him to make Eraserhead, his debut feature, over five years. A dreamlike film stuffed with bizarre and sometimes stomach-churning imagery, it nonetheless won Lynch enough attention to let him take a stab at mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. One of his first attempts was a colossal failure: the 1984 Dune. But by the early 1990s, Lynch had established himself as a popular and bankable director. Blue Velvet became an art-house favorite, Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and the Twin Peaks television series was picked up by ABC.
And then Lynch stopped giving people what they wanted. He retreated from Twin Peaks after the network forced him and his show-running partner Mark Frost to reveal the solution to the show's central mystery. Ratings spiraled; the show was canceled.
Lynch returned with a feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, that bombed at the box office, allegedly got booed at Cannes, and was for years widely considered one of Lynch's worst films. After a five-year hiatus, he returned with a string of films -- Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire -- that radically discarded Hollywood conventions of character and narrative; it was punctuated by a G-rated film, The Straight Story, about a guy driving a lawn mower across Iowa.