THE DEATH OF A GENIUS: DAVID LYNCH, RIP

David Lynch has died. Perhaps the last time an American death of a cultural icon was so massive was the loss of Warhol. This blog is of the opinion that David Lynch was probably the most significant global artist of the past 45 years; perhaps only David Bowie approaches his immense contribution to multiple senses of art forms and identity in this period, and had such ubiquitous impact.

But Lynch, more even than Warhol or Bowie, or any other film-maker of the period, was consistently and openly also an artist, musician, painter, and writer/visionary. To call him a "surrealist" barely does him justice, and is in many ways misleading. Lynch's transgressive visions were sometimes dreamlike, but controlled evacuations from the underbelly of the conscious/unconscious divide in the psyche/soul - demonic expulsions, like solar flares, or toxins released in the bloodstream; his dreams are never entirely merely random or absurd (like Dylan Thomas serving string in tea cups).

What we know is that Lynch, despite his central paradox of acting like an aw shucks doofus, yet looking like a handsome devil in a well-tailored suit, with a million buck haircut, was the most successful experimental filmmaker of the past 50 years - maybe ever. He managed to make the most innovative TV show ever - Twin Peaks - whose weekly invasion of our "boobtubes" changed the sense of what could happen in reality. Beyond Event TV, this was almost terror, the nightmare world seeping into what was meant to be the safest of experiences, the mind-numbing opiate of the masses, commercial television.

Then with Blue Velvet, which I saw the world premiere of, with Lynch in attendance, and again with (at least) Mulholland Dr. he made two of the best and most disturbing and beautiful movies about existence, and America. Mulholland Dr. has been voted the best film of the 21st century in a major poll, and the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of critics placed it at number 8 of all-time best films.

No one, I think, since Eisenstein (Welles?) managed to so blatantly infiltrate highly avant-garde happenings/events/moments into otherwise genre-based films. As has been noted, his films were in the genres of horror, historical, sci-fi, road movie, crime, Americana, the erotic, and most subjects in-between, but all explored the weird/strange/uncanny nature of human being in the world.

Lynch is most known for offbeat humour, eccentric characters and striking images, but, unusually for a visual artist, his soundscapes - clunking, thrumming, breathing, churning, gurgling - were a central, very visceral aspect of his films. The Elephant Man - perhaps the saddest English-language movie ever made - is almost unbearably humane at times, but sometimes so alien and other, in terms of its sounds, as to be more monstrous than the inhumanity visited on the eponymous hero.

Most people treat Dune (1984) as a joke, a catastrophic failure of wrong material, wrong artist, but, if one stops seeking narrative satisfaction, and instead attends to moments, scenes, events, images, and sounds, most of the film is deliriously satisfying, not least the Baron and his horrifyingly evil world of "heart plugs". Even the "weirding module" - a weapon that uses sound to kill - is aptly named, and emphasises the risks and dangers of sound.

Blue Velvet starts with a found severed ear - hearing loss - and it most terrifying moments have to do with things heard or overheard - songs, repulsive perversities - as well as seen. If Hitchcock is the king of voyeurism, Lynch was the king of the auditory hallucination, a Sonophile, if ever there was one.

Lynchian is defined as the strange invading the normal, but, surely, that is an oversimplification. The normal invading the strange (The Wizard of Oz) and the other way around (see every B-movie) was part of the message of Poe's work, and Hawthorne's, Twain's and even Arthur Miller's. The rot of America was sensed early, by the first generations of American writers - who, also, like Lynch, sensed a transcendentalism at play in America also. The Great Gatsby is suffused with a sense of American innocence corrupted (baseball, love, even the swimming pool). Dickens had already written about the rot of Englishness and England beneath the surface, as did Arthur Conan Doyle, and C.S. Lewis. Not to mention Kleist, Kafka, Hoffman, Freud, or other uncanny German and European writers.

Nor was Lynch's suffusive sense of weird evil strictly historical, directly psychosexual, or precisely religious - unlike Scorsese's vision - it was all that and more; evil was pandemonium, good harmonium. He was, despite what he might claim, Manichean, and though "good" somehow wins out in maybe least half his films (maybe), it barely does, and not unscathed, and not in any way that a normal narrative would recognise.

What Lynch did do, more than anyone before him, in film and TV, was give permission to be excessive - more so even than Bunuel or Welles, to let the bounds of art and reality truly blur - so that the aesthetic - the art work - gained a notable presence and equality (at least) with the quotidian. And I consider him therefore well beyond the French New Wave even, in that regard.

Akin to Oscar Wilde's Portrait, art became its own sake, its own reality in the world, and altering the world. The doors Lynch's characters stepped through, the curtains parted, the stages occupied, either silent or sound-waved, always introduced a new Character - a new Texture - a new Ontology, to more than the art work, to the Real. More than any other artist of equal stature, his work was about Art becoming the Story, and the World never being the same again. He spoke of Mystery, and solving it, but he well knew that however grotesque, the look and sound of things was transformative, as well as transgressive. He was pure Imaginary locked in battle with impure Fact.

He changed our world forever.