David Lynch

David Lynch (Missoula, Montana, USA, 1946) is a filmmaker with a double face in his filmography. There are the normal, realistic stories – adjectives used in a very, very broad sense, mind you – where The Elephant Man , Dune , Wild Heart , A True Story fit . And there are the stories where reality and dream are intermingled, as if it were a game, which include, to a greater or lesser extent, Erasing Head , Blue Velvet , Twin Peaks , Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me , Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Although I admit the limitations of the division: Lynch crosses borders with ease.

When Lynch was young and wondering what to do, he took to drawing and painting. Thanks to the painter Busnnell Keeller, Lynch began an irregular career in painting, where subjects combine the familiar and the sinister; the title of a painting, “The shadow of a twisted hand over my house” is very eloquent.

Six Men Throwing Up , Grandma … were short in 16mm, which took on Lynch’s avant-garde efforts. The meaning of his experimental cinema was obscure, and to find explanations, Lynch referred to his own work; if he could put it into words, he would have said it like that. I would say the same about his later cinema, where he spoke of ideas outlined in a “state of half sleep.” They are not dreams, in which you have no control, but the closest thing to a dream that a conscious creator can deliver.

Lynch did not study at a film school. But he knew how to surround himself with collaborators with whom he was comfortable, and with whom he repeated from film to film. Regulars include composer Angelo Badalamenti , cinematographers Freddie Francis and Frederick Elmes , art directors Jack Fisk and Patricia Norris, actors Kyle MacLachlan , Dean Stockwell , Isabella Rossellini , Laura Dern …

It took five years to give the final clapperboard to Erasing Head in 1976. Its strange and cryptic character caused a division of opinions. Seekers of something “different” were pleased with Jack Nance ‘s quiff, and Kubrick loved it. This made it possible for him to shoot, also in black and white, The Elephant Man , a beautiful discourse on the beauty of the soul.

The daydreams of some of Lynch’s films can be exhausting, but he is a filmmaker who proves to be capable of telling any story. He simply must interest you. As it happened with A True Story . The simple feat of Alvin Straight, who rides a lawn mower, goes from Iowa to Wisconsin to get to the house of his sick brother, before it is too late for a desired reconciliation, moved him. When his wife Mary Sweeney showed her the script she had written with John Roach about this “true story,” she agreed to make it into a movie. It is curious that The Elephant Man and A True Story, the two best films of the man of games and the morbid worlds, of the strange dualities and the capricious changes of identity, are based on reality. Although it is a surprising reality. They are truly “straight stories”, as opposed to the “unstraight”, twisted ones, Twin Peaks , Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me , Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive .