David Lynch (1946 - 2025)
Like many other US film-makers, Lynch was a director who peaked early. After the experimental artistry
on his debut feature ERASERHEAD (1977), Lynch’s work on THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980) proved that he could make a commercial bio-pic drama within the studio system. Epic space
opera DUNE (1984) was initially thought a failure, but it’s a
masterpiece of sci-fi horror that daringly combines generic styles and textures
from Star Wars and Alien, into a darkly surrealistic, magnificently cinematic, cosmic fairy-tale... one that a genre-thieving George Lucas had clearly wished his shiny franchise-starter to be. The strangeness of science
fiction and bio-horror themes in DUNE eclipsed nearly all previous space movies, including Fred
Wilcox’s classic FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956).
Lynch became widely and rather wildly celebrated for his almost unique oeuvre of Americana, following DUNE. But various later pictures, especially the modern noir mysteries, focused largely on how so many American dreams became nightmares, with little difference between an uncanny noon daylight and moonless nocturnal scenes. Eerie might have been Lynch’s middle-name, and his sublime visions were extraordinary... but (for me, anyway) he never manages to produce anything that was a match for, or superior to, DUNE.
The only Lynch film I’d not seen, before today, was David’s own Disney adventure THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999), a melancholic, slow-drive road-movie that quickly evoked marvellous nostalgia for me, with my fond childhood memory of riding a red toy pedal-tractor up and down a back lane (access for garages), especially when he’s overtaken by racing cyclists. It’s based on a true story about WW2 veteran Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth, his final film), driving a 1960s’ lawn-mower engine, 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin. There’s a super-cool whimsy about its 'western' style trek, despite the obvious character-study source material, and Lynch’s profound loyalty to exploring American truth.
