By Landon Huneycutt
“We don’t really create an idea. We just catch them like fish.” — David Lynch
There are a handful of artists I love as much as David Lynch, none of whom I have more of an affinity for. I was in middle school when I first watched a Lynch film. I had acquired a dingy copy of Eraserhead from Manifest on South Boulevard one day, and later that night I watched it. I was transfixed. It was the most beautiful film I had ever seen. There’s a purity to it that is reminiscent of silent film. It’s painterly in its light and texture. The beautifully well-realized sound, with emanations of screams and hisses, cranking and churning, conjured a nightmare already present through the visuals.
That he could establish his voice so clearly in his first feature film is both astonishing and a clear representation of how in tune he was with his artistic sensibilities. Contrary to certain arguments some have against Lynch’s work, they have a logic and a narrative. With Eraserhead, there is an exploration and exaggeration of the nuclear family caught in the destruction of man’s most grand and destructive creation, the nuclear bomb; sex and the fear of fatherhood; one’s childlike wonder being perverted by the world.
Learning that Lynch started as a painter came as no surprise. He wanted his paintings to move, which brought him to filmmaking. This was a man whose art was the result of intuition and dreams — a constant exploration of ideas. The job of an artist is to understand the distinction between intuition and intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts are not ideas; they are simply chatter, with no basis in reflection or interiority. Intuition is when one understands something instinctually without needing a conscious reasoning. Intuition leads to the concept, which then leads to the actualization of the idea.
Even if he were to explain what he was creating and why, it would be counterintuitive to art itself to provide answers to audiences. It would bypass the art. What importance does the atom bomb have in Eraserhead or Twin Peaks, or garmonbozia and its connection to events in the latter? What is the prevalence of electricity? These are questions to answer yourself.
Lynch’s art implores viewers to interact with what they are both seeing and hearing. These beautiful, strange works are not puzzles. Once again, there are narratives and logic to his works. He explored many of the same ideas to reveal how peculiarities and the absurd are not aberrations. His work displays all the beauty and evil of the world, peeling back the layers to reveal the rot, the dirt, the roots and the bugs. He reveals and revels in the strange and absurd, to then further explore both good and evil. His work is celebratory of life’s beauty, while never shying from showing the presence of darkness and evil. For every Bob, Frank Booth or abstract force of evil, there are still roses and sunshine, the music of Julee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti, and, as saccharine as it may seem, love. The operatic endings, memorable characters, unexpected wisdom that champions life’s simple pleasures, horrifying sequences that are the embodiment of a nightmare all converge into the strongest and most intuitive body of work of any artist.
We are celebrating David Lynch’s work here at The Independent Picture House, starting with Eraserhead. Come down to the theater, grab a coffee or two cookies and a Coke and sink into the absurd.