LA room is full, in this spring 1981, ready to discover Elephant Manby David Lynch. The popcorn is gently shared, before a lead silence settled. Until the moment when a spectator, seeing the man with a deformity head let go of a tripal cry in the face of the crowd which tracks him in a pissotière, pushes his own cry, followed by violent sobs. She gets up to leave, and we feel that each spectator understands it, supports it, accompanies it. We remember this little miracle of emotional chemistry between the screen and the room as we remember his life with a film by David Lynch.
It is not a cry of fear, but of humanity, echoing the words spoken just before by John Merrick: “I’m not an animal!” I am a human being! »» We do not leave a film by David Lynch by disappointment, but due to a painful alchemy with his own story.
A week after his death, at the age of 78, we do not see better way to say how the American filmmaker with the crazy brain and elegant courtesy is a rare and endangered species: an artist known worldwide everything By turning films closer to the trying experience than entertainment.
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That you don’t understand much about your film Mulholland Drive (2001) or that we see, once entered the labyrinth of the series Twin Peaks (from 1990), that we don’t care about his pitch quickly – who killed Laura Palmer? – is not a problem, since Lynch intends to make the sensation machine work in us and to think. As if he was telling us to make the film in our own way. Even if it means experiencing trauma, in the good sense of the word, as has been able to say with infinite recognition its actors Laura Dern, Naomi Watts or Kyle Maclachlan.
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