The family of David Lynch announced the director’s passing on January 16. After being evacuated from his Los Angeles home during the Southern California Wildfires earlier this year, he succumbed to emphysema. His birthday was five days away, he would have been 79. Leaving behind him is a legacy of cinema, and its absurdness.
Lynch was known for his work in surrealist cinema. Before his breakthrough with Eraserhead, Lynch left an impression among his peers. His first film, “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)”, was a student project during his enrollment at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The film is a one-minute animation of a painting by Lynch, looped six times. It was a product of Lynch’s fascination with paintings and wanting to see them move. For the movie, he learned basic stop-motion animation skills, which he would come to utilize later for his short movies “The Alphabet” and “The Grandmother”.
These three short movies had a distinctive style to them that most would find hard to articulate, which is why an adjective was made. The Oxford Dictionary describes Lynchian as “characteristic, reminiscent, or imitative of the films or television work of David Lynch.” They would come to define Lynch’s career as a filmmaker. Lynch left the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after three semesters before moving to Los Angeles, where he would start work on a movie that would become to be known as “Eraserhead”, a film Lynch believes is massively misinterpreted. Yet, instead of being disregarded by audiences, it instead led to the inspiration for other filmmakers to use.
Stanley Kubrick called it one of his all-time favorite movies. It isn’t hard to point out he similarities between the two filmmakers; both were perfectionists at their crafts, with Lynch taking over the roles of not only director, but also music composer for “Eraserhead”, while Kubrick was known for his grueling filmmaking process that often put his talent under stress. Lynch, fortunately, had no such controversies. Lynch’s direct influence on Kubrick was evident in his adaptation of “The Shining”, using the tone of “Eraserhead” as the foundation for his movie. Both movies share a dreadful and uncomfortable, yet effective atmosphere.
Lynch’s influence can be found through the world of television as well, thanks to his work on Twin Peaks. David Chase, the showrunner for HBO’s “The Sopranos”, credited “Twin Peaks” as an inspiration for the show. The dream sequences Tony Soprano goes through can be accurately described as Lynchian.
Darren Aronofsky, Guillermo del Toro, David Cronenberg, and many other filmmakers have had their works influenced by Lynch. He was not the first of his kind. David Cronenberg made absurdist cinema before David Lynch did, but Lynch was the most influential. He inspired a lot of filmmakers and artists who would go on to showcase his influence, but those directors have come to define their own style. Forcing the audience to confront the illogical, and to find meaning in the absurd, is why there is no director like David Lynch.
