Awarded in 1990 at Cannes for “Sailor and Lula”, the American filmmaker died this Thursday, January 16 at the age of 78. From “Twin Peaks” to “Mulholland Drive”, he irrevocably left his mark on the seventh art with a cult and unparalleled work. In ten films, a look back at the artist’s filmography.
Eraserhead (1977)
Swollen flesh, shaggy hair, velvet curtain (already), tattered bricks… Hypertextured monstrosity, nourished by metallic rumblings as well as synthetic sounds, David Lynch’s first feature brings the materials to the boil in a Kafkaesque trance borrowing from the surrealists as well as the expressionists . Without resembling anything known, except Lynch’s paintings. An industrial no-man’s land maze made of singing mutants («In Heaven Everything Is Fine»), of bilious chicken, of space travel. An aesthetic shock.
Victorian London drawn in the purest, deepest blacks and whites to tell the life of John Merrick, a monster with a misshapen face exhibited in a circus, taken in hand by the surgeon Frederick Treves who will discover in Merrick a sensitive being and sophisticated. Free adaptation of the life of Joseph Merrick and key to the immense field of exploration that will become the work of David Lynch, the first major step and towards the general public that we owe to Mel Brooks, superlative clown and inspired producer , enthusiastic and adventurous.
Gigantic petaudière passed through multiple hands (notably that of Alejandro Jodorowsky) before being recovered by producer Dino de Laurentiis who entrusted it to Lynch, Dune is not the blockbuster expected. While being criticized for condensing Frank Herbert’s saga to the extreme, Lynch creates a slow space opera, less interested in space and the deserted expanses of Arrakis than in what is happening inside. The delirious baroque settings, and the inner wanderings of Paul (Kyle MacLachlan, whom he will find on Blue Velvet et Twin Peaks). Resounding commercial failure. An ugly duckling that we love very much; almost as much as the murderous and brilliant criticism then published in Libé.
The neat fences of the suburban suburbs, the neatly trimmed lawn, the immaculate streets and alleys – and behind them, the horror that smolders, secret and unspeakable. College student Jeffrey Beaumont returns home to North Carolina after his father suffers a heart attack. On his way home from the hospital, he finds a severed human ear in a vacant lot which plunges him into the shady heart of the small town, nourished by sex, violence, drugs, sadomasochism, kidnapping, velvet hangings and enamored bluettes.
The picaresque, bloody and sensual love story between Sailor (Nicolas Cage), a romantic little hit, and Lula (Laura Dern), an electric fiancée, actively sought by her mother, who has sent broken killers after the couple to voodoo practices. At the heart of a hellish, ravaged world, Lynch tells of the possibility of being not only happy, but disproportionately, passionately, exaggeratedly happy. A fairy tale full of exploding skulls, rotting teeth, rock’n’roll and wild hugs. Palme d’Or at Cannes 1990.
Twin Pea s : Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Sold as an appendix to the series Twin Peaks, of which he claimed to reveal the multiple mysteries remaining unresolved at the end of two television seasons, Fire Walk With Me in fact proposed precisely the opposite: a dizzying, unrecountable and trying descent into the heart of truth, into its deep and unattainable layers. If Elephant Man is the film that opened Lynch to the general public, Fire Walk With Me is the one who threw everyone, unceremoniously, into a large pit of flames.
From a dark story of blackmail with stolen video, of threat by the filmed image, Lynch draws a false film noir with mirrored blondes and brunettes, an occult film to the point of abstraction, where the surgical gaze of the filmmaker on banal objects or places (a banal backyard of a Los Angeles restaurant) seems capable of transforming the very nature of things, to the point of making them foreign and terrifying. Like these characters reduced to the state of signs or this Hollywood eaten away from the inside. A schizophrenic labyrinth, torn in the middle, carried by the soundtrack of Angelo Badalamenti and the deranged specter of David Bowie. The culmination of a path started twenty years earlier with the baby monster Eraserhead. A masterpiece.
When he learns that his brother Lyle, who lives as a recluse and to whom he has not spoken in years, has suffered a heart attack, Alvin Straight decides to visit him. Aged and diminished, he can no longer drive and sets off on this nearly 400 kilometer journey between Iowa and Wisconsin at the wheel of a… self-propelled lawn mower. Clear, light film, as if unburdened, of such simplicity that, upon its release, it completely disconcerted the director’s fans.
A young actress arrives in Hollywood to make her mark and gradually sinks into a nightmare dream with sprawling ramifications. With Mulholland DriveLynch enters the most accomplished and remote territories of his vision, the one where the landmarks disappear, where the last markers are erased. A film that is not made to be seen but rewatched, revisited, constantly. With each new viewing, the pulsations intensify, the whispers become clearer, the attires more intimate. Sensation film, sum film. An unsurpassable reference for many, too.
Behind the velvet curtain, under the straight-cut lawn, after the fire pits, at the end of the lost highway, what remains? A tunnel, long, unforgiving and cold. Where an actress – again – auditions to get a role. Where a hypnotist kills with a screwdriver. Where prostitutes roam Poland in the 1930s. Where rabbits speak an indecipherable language. Where you will have to advance like in a blizzard, ready to fight. Not a movie, a scream. Scary. Captured from the darkness of endless space.
Source: www.liberation.fr
