RIP David Lynch

David Lynch is gone, which news I must say surprised me less than it seems to have surprised some… I mean, the guy acknowledged just last year that he was fucked with emphysema from a lifetime of smoking to the point where he could barely breathe enough to walk across a room, and he went downhill from there; having to be evacuated during the fires currently wiping out Los Angeles seems to have triggered his final decline. To be perfectly honest, I was always a bit of a Lynch sceptic…

…and I wasn’t entirely alone in that, indeed I had some good company as you may see (full marks, obviously, to the marketing team behind the above ad, and I will concede that I enjoyed Lost Highway rather more on a second viewing some years later), but I do know I’m in a relative minority, judging by the outpouring of grief online. I’ll cop to that. I could never escape the feeling Lynch was one of those “surrealists” who succeeded in getting critics to describe his work that way so that he never had to justify it…

…and this is a problem I’ve always had with invoking surrealism, in that I think it potentially offers a sort of get out of critical jail free card for any old contrived nonsense. And yet, having said that, I will admit to feeling a sense of… sincerity, I suppose, is the word I mean, but I don’t quite know if that quite describes it. I’m not really sure. But, on that second viewing of Lost Highway I mentioned above, I also had a second viewing of Mulholland Dr. (it was a Cinemathque double bill at the Chauvel in the oughts), and I didn’t like that any more second time round but I did get the feeling of Lynch meaning this. However wilful it might be, it was also quite deliberate and Lynch was serious about it.

And maybe Lynch was just never my particular flavour of strange, cos I have liked an awful lot of strange stuff in my time. Maybe, if surrealism is about the irrational and the unconscious and all that, then so are one’s reactions to it… if a given “surrealist” work clicks for you then maybe there is no real reason you can give for that, maybe it’s just an instinctive thing. For example, I have no issues with Jean Cocteau’s films like I do with Lynch’s, and I don’t know that I can say why (and I actually DO recall liking Eraserhead, also for reasons I don’t know that I understand). Maybe some things just don’t work for me, even though they clearly do for a lot of others. It’s a me thing more than a him thing. In any case, one thing is clear from the discourse: he seems to have been a good guy and generally decent person, and people liked him with good reason. Makes a change from discovering your heroes are shit.