“David Lynch: Chocolate-Milkshake Creativity and the dark Shadows of the American Dream”
With four nominations for Best Director, the filmmaker best known for his hair received only an honorary statuette in 2019.
NEW DELHI: For seven years, American director David Lynch drank the same chocolate milkshake at the same time every day from the same spot in Los Angeles, because he believed it helped his creativity.
But judging by the strange apparitions famously featured in his work, from a human ear in the grass to telephones ringing in empty rooms and dancing dwarves in red suits, his imagination rarely needed to be provoked.
From the sadomasochist intrigue Blue Velvet (1986) to the lesbian thriller Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch – who has died aged 78 – garnered a global cult following with his unsettling portraits of American life.
He may be best remembered for his mesmerising network series Twin Peaks, which paved a trail for the iconic television dramas that followed.
In 2016, The Atlantic said, “It would be hard to look at a list of television shows in any given season without finding several that owe a creative debt to Twin Peaks,” praising its influence on directors from Quentin Tarantino to the Coen brothers.
With four Oscar nominations, including a trio for best director, the filmmaker, recognizable by his graying hair, received just one honorary statuette in 2019.
Monstrous attraction
Lynch had a tumultuous childhood, born in Montana on January 20, 1946, but he was one of five children of a scientist father and teacher mother and moved around a lot.
He began painting and shooting short films in the 1970s while at the University of Pennsylvania College of the Arts.
From the start, his work highlighted strange and marginal characters: his first feature film in 1977 was Eraserhead, a grainy black-and-white film about a deformed demonic child.
Supporting himself with odd jobs, Lynch shot his creepy and now cult classic film on a shoestring budget, taking five years as he kept running out of money and had to support his wife and daughter.
“A dream of something dark and disturbing” was how the then 33-year-old Lynch described Eraserhead when it finally came out, set in the bleak industrial landscape of Philadelphia and filled with an eerie stillness that became his hallmark.
Very few who saw it ever forgot the experience, including another Hollywood great, Stanley Kubrick, who praised it.
Lynch furthered his fondness for bringing human deformities to the screen in The Elephant Man, which dramatized the tragic life of Joseph Merrick, who was born with severe physical deformities.
Lynch said of being drawn to the subject, “Initially there was a love of texture, and this idea of going below the surface was interesting to me. There’s the surface of this elephant man and below the surface is this beautiful soul.”
An unrecognizable John Hurt in the title role earned one of the film’s eight Oscar nominations, while Anthony Hopkins played the doctor who befriended Merrick in the years before his death by suicide at age 27.
The international hit put Lynch in the Hollywood spotlight, but his star power faded when he followed it with a failed $40 million adaptation of the sci-fi novel “Dune.”
Twin Peaks phenomenon
Blue Velvet put Lynch back on track — the same decade he was regularly drinking milkshakes — and also marked the beginning of his five-year relationship with the film’s star, Isabella Rossellini.
He returned to the A-list in 1990 with his most influential work: Twin Peaks.
Set in the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington, near the Canadian border, Lynch’s story began with the simple mystery of the young and beautiful Laura Palmer found in a body bag pulled from a lake.
But over eight episodes, a bizarre normality arose and the murder became buried under layers of mystery, investigated by lovable FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by Lynch’s frequent collaborator Kyle MacLachlan.
The show was a hit when it first aired on ABC, part of a bumper year for Lynch, who also won Cannes’ top prize that year with his road movie Wild at Heart.
Lynch helmed a second season of Twin Peaks and a spin-off film a year later, before returning to the world again in 2017 with an acclaimed sequel series for cable network Showtime.
Meditation and photography
The dark side of the American dream was a Lynchian leitmotif, but he moved away from the theme in The Straight Story to tell the true story of a man who rode his lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his ailing brother.
In 2006, with the release of Inland Empire, a bleak portrayal of Tinsel town starring an unsettled Laura Dern as a rejected actress, Lynch retired from filmmaking.
That year, he also married and then divorced his third wife, Mary Sweeney, a film director and producer who was one of his long time collaborators.
In 2009, he married for the fourth time – to actress Emily Stoffel, with whom he had a fourth child.
Because of his work, he was often absent as a father.
“You have to be selfish. And that’s a terrible thing”, Lynch said of his parenting skills in 2018.
“I never really wanted to get married, never wanted to have kids. One thing led to another and that was it.”
Over the past decades, the pack-a-day smoker and coffee drinker has explored other mediums, from photography and singing to becoming a champion of transcendental meditation.
