Just remember, 2 racehorses were killed on the set of Dumbland. Second hand smoke, I think.
Nobody haunted our dreams better.
Just remember, 2 racehorses were killed on the set of Dumbland. Second hand smoke, I think.
He was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Not that everything he directed was perfect, but at his best he was able to illustrate the human psyche in a way that legions of imitators have never matched.
He was the best.
He was weird as shit. I liked him.
Man, I don't have the words.
Eraserhead changed how I saw films. Not entirely sure in what way but I was never the same since.
Sail on, David.
Twin Peaks scared me.
What struck me about Lynch was his ability to surface things only seen and felt in dreams. It was like he had a direct line to the subconscious, and where most only have glimpses in waking life, he brought the mass of it roiling into view, awful and beautiful and terrible in its nakedness. It's sad to see him go.
Maybe the angriest dog in the world will take a nap, just this once.
The Straight Story was my favourite film of his. I'm a normie, I guess.
I've seen a bunch of his movies and found them interesting but I don't think I really got most of them. Loved seeing him pop up in small acting parts tho, in Twin Peaks and that one scene in Fablemans. He was always so captivating. Sad he's gone.
A damn fine body of work, an absolute madman, an inspiration for a generation.
I was aware that he was ill (from a lifetime of smoking, mainly), but this still came as a surprise. We were at the cinema to see Nosferatu, and during the break (not a proper intermission - many Swiss cinemas just pause in mid-film so they can sell shit) I saw the notification on my phone. It went all too well with the nightmarish vibe of the movie.
He was one of the greats. Been a while since I've seen one of his movies but recently I watched him in a supporting role in the movie Lucky. In his memory I'm going to watch Blue Velvet soon, a classic of his that I think I'm going to enjoy but somehow I've never seen before.
When I saw Blue Velvet I laughed at the happy ending and how incredibly fake it was. Then I realized it was meant to be fake and what that meant and thought it was a damned genius ending.
The end of Twin Peaks had me stumped though because other than being extremely creepy I could not make head or tails of it. It could have been saying some things just remain a mystery.
I always think of Lynch working at two levels, the emotional and the intellectual.
On the emotional level, he creates an ambience and vibe, or puts really incongruent elements together (horror and comedy), and you can connect with it on an emotional level that you largely just feel and don't need to think too deeply about.
On the intellectual level, I'm in the camp that a lot of his stuff is blatantly allegorical, and the characters or scenes represent a clear idea, I mean that there is a "right" answer that he had in mind, and you can figure it out if you think about it. There's sometimes debate, but when you think about things (or you read other people's ideas), often you'll feel when an idea is the "right" one because it just clicks.
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For me it's sometimes like a game. When you see odd elements in a scene, you assume it's intentional and ask what is this person or element best known for, and how would that thing fit for what this scene or movie is saying? The first time that this worked for me is when I was thinking about, but why does he have Billy Ray Cyrus in this scene in Mulholland Drive (where he's just slept with the wife of the director, Lynch's avatar)? And then you ask, well what was he known for at the time? And the whole meaning came to me one night like at 2am: "They (Lynch's real world producers) fucked his movie, and it broke his heart." And when it clicks, you usually feel that it's right. Right after that scene, the director pours pink paint into the wife's jewelry box, which even at the time I was thinking, okay, that has to be an allegory for something. I figured something out, I don't need to explain right now because it's long, but for me it started with the observation that the director ran into the garage or wherever and there were actually two cans of paint, pink and blue, and he grabbed the pink paint; so if you know what pink and blue mean in his color symbolism, that tells you he made a choice for one over the other.
I think another reason you feel ideas are right is because, for as much as Lynch hides what he meant to express, if you pay attention to his interviews, he actually spills the beans all the time without making it obvious. To give a classic example, people may think that that line of his, that investigating Laura's murder was the goose laying the golden egg, and the producers forcing him to solve the murder in the show just killed the goose and left the show without a purpose, that that was a throwaway line he thought of at the moment (his wording of it may have been somewhat impromptu), but it's actually a key idea that goes to the central meaning of the entire show from the beginning, which you might interpret as: the problem with postwar TV is that lives are captured in 30 minute or 1 hour snapshots, and people forget a person the moment their murder is solved, when their whole life is summed up in the name of the whodunit. But what if we kept the investigation going; then he could dramatize how Laura's life has infinite layers, and she couldn't be just dismissed like that. So it wasn't just a throwaway line, but a key to the whole show's meaning.
There's a YouTuber, Twin Perfect, that put out good videos where he claims to "actually explain" Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive. And I actually think he gets a lot of it more or less right, or it feels right; anyway he's made the most accessible starting points to the conversation. That said, he annoys a lot of people. He completely glosses over the emotional side of Lynch. But also I think his explanations, while technically correct a lot of the time (though I think he gets some things wrong), are pretty superficial readings of them, and I don't think he explains or maybe even realizes how deep Lynch goes with the allegories that TP himself may have uncovered or is on the right track for. So that's why I think it's better to think of his videos as a starting point than as "the answer".
Of course it's best when you think about stuff and figure some stuff out for yourself, or try to first and see how far you get, like I did with that Billy Ray Cyrus scene. (And that's one of the easier ones, but I didn't read it anywhere.) But I think TP's videos (and some write ups you can find out there) are good in that they start you thinking about things that are down the right track, instead of just throwing up your hands and saying this is baffling nonsense, you get a map of some landmarks in the allegories, but if you were being true to the spirit of what Lynch is doing, you wouldn't stop with that map, but keep digging yourself into the deeper layers of those allegories.
Overall you get the idea that Lynch wants you playing along and trying to figure out his movies like an investigator, one reason he loathes just telling people, since the viewer's investigation is the whole point. But he'll give you an answer or something to think about as deeply as you want to dig into it.
Last edited by demagogue; 19th Jan 2025 at 13:42.
Mulholland Drive was probably the first truly great movie of the 21st century. Nothing I've seen before or since made me feel so vividly like I was in a dream. I remember buying the DVD after seeing it in the cinema, and I think it's still the only DVD I've bought that has no chapters. Because it was made to be viewed in one shot, in its entirety, and Lynch wasn't prepared to compromise his vision simply for the viewer's convenience. A true artist.