Journey through the filmography of David Lynch in ten key moments, which helped define the adjective Lynchian – a mixture of strangeness, angst, glamour, violence and black humor, like coffee.
The baby ofEraserhead (1977)
First long, first slap! David Lynch’s graduation film, as experimental and broke as it is fascinating, already prefigures the mysterious atmospheres of Twin Peaks or from Mulholland Drivewith its black and white scenes that seem straight from the dreams of the future filmmaker. Or his nightmares? As lost as its protagonist played by Jack Nance, we cannot look away from this “radiator woman”strangely sexualized, nor of this screaming baby. Disturbing and at the same time so fragile that we would like to protect it. Are you weird? No, Lynchian.
“I am not an animal, I am a human being” In Elephant Man (1980)
Lynch is a filmmaker-musician. Through the combined force of editing and mixing, he knew how to create operatic movements. The sequence in the train stationElephant Man is exemplary. Superimposed on the shrill symphonic music in full swing is the ringing of the locomotive, the breath of the smoke that it releases from its bowels, the frightened cry of a child, the sly murmur of the crowd… All this hubbub arises to the point of stopping short and letting one hear in solemn silence that “I am not an elephant, I am not an animal, I am a humain being… “ which tears the heart and the space.
“Baby wants blue velvet” In Blue Velvet (1986)
The creepiest psychopath in the Lynchian bestiary? We can reasonably put a play on Frank Booth, a lecherous, sadistic gangster, doped with oxygen and bourbon, who sexually assaults Dorothy played by Isabella Rossellini, gets off on perverse scenes, and screams sick incantations (“Baby wants to fuck !”“Baby wants blue velvet !”) before chewing the blue velvet dress of its prey. Hidden in a closet, Kyle MacLachlan watches, dumbfounded, the most disturbing number ever delivered by Dennis Hopper. David Lynch said:Dennis Hopper is Frank Booth and he’s the only one who could have played him. This is both good and bad news. The bad news is that he’s Frank Booth.”
Twin Peaks et le “damn good coffee” de Dale Cooper (1990)
And Twin Peaks struck the public with its very difficult to unravel mysteries and the very dark background of its investigation, the series by David Fincher and Mark Frost is also at times an excellent comedy. The filmmaker has also given himself a particularly stimulating role, Gordon Cole, to give the answer – loud and clear! – to his main actor and friend Kyle MacLachlan. His Dale Cooper is just as amusing in his spare time, the actor bringing his undeniable charm to this unusual agent, addicted to coffee and cherry pieand ready to open his mind to unorthodox methods of investigation. He will encounter the worst of humanity while trying to find out who killed Laura Palmer, but also unforgettable good people, like “the woman with the log” with wise advice, or the bubbly Lucy, secretary at the sheriff’s office. All is not lost, as long as you have good coffee.
La Red Room de Twin Peaks (1990)
At the end of episode 3, Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) enters the dream world. A magical anteroom decorated with red curtains, where the deceased Laura Palmer and the shaman host Michael J. Anderson await, who speaks like a tape recorder being rewound and strings together cryptic statements sounding like old fifties advertisements: “There’s always music in the air”“That gum you like is going to come back in style”…before wiggling to a jazzy tune. Imagine the shock of spectators at the time, who saw their police drama derail live and suddenly wander off into dreamland. The shows were never the same after that night.
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Nicolas Cage sings Elvis in Sailor et Lula (1990)
At the time, Nicolas Cage categorized two types of films, “sexual” or “cerebral”, placing a little quickly Sailor et Lula in the second. However, it is only a question here of physical tensions and impulses. Otherwise why choose two erotic canons from the King’s repertoire to electrify the film from the inside? Love me tender to conclude on the bodywork, and above all Love me on the dancefloor. “Treat me like a fool, Treat me mean and cruel, But love me…” Cage plays the King in front of a languorous Laura Dern. The red of the neon lights covers the frame. Sailor, the man in snake skin, microphone in hand in front of an excited audience, asks, in fact, only one thing: “ to be loved “. Lynch continues his playlist of vintage Americana soluble in his vast colorful world. Rock’n’roll attitude.
David Bowie’s cameo in Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me (1992)
A rock-star filmmaker, Lynch loved hanging out with musicians, old idols or creative partners, from Roy Orbison to Chrysta Bell. In Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me (alias The last 7 days of Laura Palmer), film-prequel to the TV series, hated at the time, adored today, it brought out David Bowie (period Black Tie White Noise) as an unphased, hallucinated FBI agent who disrupts surveillance cameras and speaks in enigmas (“We’re not going to talk about Judy”) – riddles that fans of Twin Peaks are still trying to elucidate today. The two Davids (Bowie and Lynch) come face to face here, the director playing Gordon Cole, head of the FBI who is a bit high-minded, a sort of Tryphon Tourneflower of the Federals. Bowie will return from beyond the grave in season 3 of Twin Peaks in the form of a… giant teapot. But that’s another story.
The appearance of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway (1997)
At a Hollywood party, Fred (Bill Pullman), a musician suffering from severe paranoia, meets a “mystery man” with a painted face, played by Robert Blake, the actor of The sang-froid by Richard Brooks (and the series Baretta). He explains to Fred that they have already met. Let them know each other. The proof: he is at home right now. Um… sorry? Fred calls home to check and… the Mystery Man answers, before bursting into demonic laughter. As the two men talk, note the sounds of the party around them, or rather the sudden absence of them – they have been replaced by a sort of menacing vibration. It is the beginning of the slow dive into the unfathomable darkness of Lost Highway. Or how to make the blood run cold with a simple reverse-shot conversation.
The Winkie’s Monster in Mulholland Drive (2001)
Rarely has an appearance scared us so much on screen. Except perhaps that of Bob, seeming to emerge straight from Hell in Twin Peaks ? David Lynch knew like no one else how to make spectators feel uncontrollable fear. Is it because it appears preceded by all the strangeness of this story between (American) dream and reality? Is it thanks to the warning from a visibly frightened Patrick Fischler himself? No matter how much we turn this monstrous vision in every direction, it is difficult to understand precisely why it is so striking. And that is certainly its strength: returning to primal fears, which we are incapable of explaining. Was the filmmaker filming them to better exorcise them? Or to better haunt us?
The atomic test Twin Peaks : The Return (2017)
Returned to Twin Peaks after 25 years of absence, with a third season (The Return) which turned the brains of those who followed it religiously in the summer of 2017, David Lynch expanded the mythology of the series, and the backstory by Laura Palmer, diving into the nuclear mushroom cloud of the Manhattan Project, during an episode (the eighth) that instantly made TV history. Imagined by the French visual effects company Buf, this atomic trip mutated into a journey towards the cosmos, like 2001, A Space Odysseyto the funeral tune of Threny in memory of the victims of Hiroshimaby Krzysztof Penderecki, a composition that we heard in… Shining. Or a double homage to Stanley Kubrick, among other madness in this labyrinthine and nightmarish episode entitled “Gotta light ?”. Either “Do you have a fire?” – the ultimate Lynchian question.
