In David Lynch’s dreams, cinema cracked open a little wider

While searching the Tribune Photo Archives for an image from “Eraserhead,” the 1977 David Lynch film that concluded one phase of my life in cinema in the late 1970s and opened a larger second phase, I found one image from that film, which I believe is the version Lynch’s unauthorized remake of “Life with Daddy.”

When you upload an image from this digital archive, our editing software asks if you want to “know how to describe the purpose of the image.”

This is an offer that Lynch himself would never accept.

“I think it’s almost like a crime,” he told London’s Guardian newspaper. Interview in 2018 When asked to explain the purpose or meaning of his films, they are like fragments of dreams. “Film or painting, everything has its own language, and it is not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language in which it is put, and English will not translate. It will lose.”

What he imagined, made real enough for surrealism eerily close to mundane Americana, became its own adjective, “Lynchian.” Director of, among others, “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Mulholland Drive,” the relatively linear and influential biopics “The Elephant Man” and “The Straight Story,” and two outings of “Twin Peaks.” (Third, if you include “Fire Walk With Me”) and “Inland Empire” He died a few days before his 79th birthday. His family announced his death On social media Thursday.

The cause was emphysema. Lynch started smoking at the age of eight and quit in 2022. For decades an ardent believer in transcendental meditation, he became a fearless advocate for the peace and access to the subconscious it brought him.

Outside forces were less kind. Relying on supplemental oxygen for the final stretch of his life, Lynch succumbed to what was likely to be a life-shortening accident earlier this month from his Hollywood residence and workshop space (which did not burn), due to the Runyon Canyon wildfire.

The elemental dark forces that informed much of Lynch’s work went far beyond fire and icy disease. As a fantasist, he embraced everything, every beautiful and startling paradox of his dreams, known as movies.

Sometimes the aesthetic part remained hidden. In “Eraserhead,” the shy but always excited protagonist, Henry (Jack Nance), learns that he is going to be a father. It’s hard news, and the baby is not what he expected. This is not what viewers expected. Filmed over several fragmented years in Philadelphia, and presented as a shadow world of paranoia and completely justified dreams that (as Shakespeare would say) have no end, “Eraserhead” is strangely funny, almost trance-like. It’s a twisty, moving object, and it found a lingering audience in years when a movie would have taken its time finding one. Lynch’s career was made.

I only spoke to him once on the phone, In 2017marks the first and astonishingly extensive Lynch retrospective at the Music Box Theatre. I mentioned the effect that “Eraserhead” had on me, and how I was basically just another one of the hundreds of thousands of unprepared teenagers who never got over their glorious confusion. Radiator. The woman who lived in one. The sound of a child breathing heavily, or any other element in Alan Splet’s genius sound design, conjures old pipes and wonky plumbing in desperate need of a plumber. Hearing him respond in the voice millions know, from Twin Peaks, or as a farewell, his version of John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, made my heart beat fast. “Thanks, Michael! Thank you so much. That’s great, Michael. Absolutely! Michael, just lovely.” Who wouldn’t want to hear something like this spoken in the voice of David Lynch?

The terrible beauty in his films usually comes at a high cost, in terms of human cruelty, or rather inhumanity, violence, and disease. Like all great film directors – and there are only a few dozen across 130 years or so – Lynch has given the world works that are wholly great while occasionally flirting with self-parody as well as inspiring new generations of filmmakers, artists, writers, or, more often, critics. The Case of David Foster Wallace, Book of Essays.

In “Blue Velvet,” the secrets of the town of Lumberton begin with the discovery of a severed ear on a front lawn. Wallace’s essay on Lynch contrasts with the aesthetics of Quentin Tarantino, a lesser talent in his view. Foster wrote that Tarantino, with his bloodthirsty teenage sensibility, “is interested in watching someone’s ear get cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

I’m still mystified by much of Lynch’s maze-like pursuits of mystery and desire (and yes, to varying degrees, misogyny). Why did “Blue Velvet” impress me the first time and every time, so much more than his next project “Wild at Heart”? Will I love Lost Highway as much as I love his best individual flashes, and nothing is more terrifying than Robert Blake Delivery by Bill Pullman phone?

Considering the entirety of his career, these important little mysteries are pretty trivial. The windmills of our minds can drown out the rumble. They need to be oiled. He told me in 2017 that meditation made him a “happy camper.” Anxiety, sadness, depression, fear, hate, anger, all begin to drift away. You bring gold and say goodbye to trash. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

I asked him the question he never liked. If you’re a happy camper, why are you always drawn to the dark side of your work? What does that mean?

Lynch gave me a few Heh heh. “Well, there are things called stories. Stories have conflicts, life and death situations, and all kinds of different characters in the story they tell. Our world, the real world, conjures up a lot of ideas. It’s full of negativity, and all kinds of things and ideas come from that world, and sometimes I fall in love with certain ideas and want to turn them into something and then it becomes part of the story. But Michael, you don’t have to suffer from that displays suffering. There is light and darkness flowing through everything.”

A year later, two years before he was diagnosed with emphysema, Lynch told The Guardian that he saw this life as one phase, and the next as another phase. “Life is a short journey but it is always ongoing,” he said. “We’ll all meet again.”

Michael Phillips, Tribune critic.