David Lynch: An Appreciation

Guest Post By Gary Mullinax:

David Lynch was a movie director who started with a slimy baby that looks like a skinned rabbit (and might really have been one), then gave us a red-suited midget who talks and sings backwards and a severed ear covered with bugs resting on a plush suburban lawn.

What were the chances that guy would become so respected in Hollywood that heavies like Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard couldn’t say enough good things about him after he died Wednesday at 78 from emphysema.

But my favorite comment came from comedian Patton Oswalt:

David Lynch died, he said, “At least that’s what the horse wearing a fez just told me in a dream.”

Lynch rarely abandoned his movie weirdness while earning the establishment’s respect. But he was not a particularly weird person. Actual crazy people don’t usually have that much success. His secret was not just talent but an intense drive and laser-like focus. No Hollywood lifestyle for him. “I don’t go out,” he once said. Mel Brooks called him Jimmy Stewart on acid. When he plays FBI agent Gordon Cole in “Twin Peaks: The Return” (maybe his best work) I imagine the square, laconic, flat-talking agent to resemble his creator.

Lynch’s first film was a 1967 short called “Six Men Getting Sick,” made while he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The movie wasn’t particularly significant but I just wanted to type out that title. His first important movie was 1977’s “Eraserhead,” with the slimy baby, shot in a dark, creepy, post-industrial Philadelphia.

The cult film was so successful in its way that he was given a chance to direct a mainstream movie about a hideously deformed Englishman. “The Elephant Man” maintained a Lynchian mood but earned him the first of three Oscar nominations. It was impressive enough that George Lucas asked him to direct “Return of the Jedi.” Lynch refused, but, oh, if only.

Lynch, who was also a painter and musician, continued to keep Hollywood off balance, His early ‘90s series “Twin Peaks” (with the midget, a dead prom queen and a very creepy drifter) played on that most mainstream of media, television. It’s often considered one of the all-time best TV shows. Lynch earned eight Emmy nominations for it. The 2001 surrealist movie “Mulholland Drive,” about Hollywood dreams and nightmares, felt like a cult film but had enough mainstream qualities to show up on lists of the best movies of the decade, the century, all time.

David Lynch also had the finest head of hair in Hollywood.