"An artist," commented David Lynch during a visit to Madrid in 2013, "does not suffer when showing suffering. When you fall in love with an idea, no matter how dark it may be, it is always a pleasant, liberating, creative process. You can shoot a horrific scene, but you are happy inside. That is the key." The phrase came out of his mouth as the smoke did. Lynch smoked, drank coffee, and made movies. Not necessarily in that order. On Thursday, he passed away at the age of 78. His lungs were troubled, with emphysema and the air itself refusing to share space in his chest with nicotine. His family wrote on social media that his passing leaves "a great void in the world" and indeed, few creators have so precisely and absurdly defined modernity in all its extensions, including all imaginable extensions of the word itself: late modernity, postmodernity, cryptomodernity... Lynch founded a universe in himself, his work was him, becoming a mandatory reference not only in contemporary cinema but in art, in the creative process in any of its sublime and ridiculous forms, and in the back of our consciousness.
As he himself would say: "Focus on the donut, not on the hole. It's a beautiful day, with golden sun and blue skies everywhere." That is the message his family wanted to be remembered.
In his essay David Lynch Keeps His Head, David Foster Wallace spoke of a humor "in which the very macabre and the very routine combine in such a way that they reveal that one is contained in the other." In another essential text, The Man from Another Place (Alpha Decay), journalist and programming director of the Lincoln Centre Film Society Dennis Lim referred to his cinema as a cinema of absences, always attentive to the void left by an image when it disappears. Probably, the key lies in the way of combining the common with the extraordinary, the spoken with the silence, the unimaginable with the perfect representation of a dream shared by all, the most brilliant of ideas with the simple and even mundane description of time, of atmospheric time; perhaps, we were saying, in that intermediate and contradictory point is where not so much the secret of his genius lies, which perhaps also, as simply the best definition of his way of being in the world, a way so essential that his passing, indeed, opens a radical fault, a hopeless rupture. It sounds tremendous and, indeed, it is only the beginning. A void.
Freud wrote that "the uncanny causes fear precisely because it is familiar to us." And not far, it was Schelling who tried to explain the precise meaning of that same term (Unheimlich) as the manifestation "of everything destined to remain hidden, secret." When David Lynch visited Spain for the last time, he dedicated most of his busy time - between interviews, talks on transcendental meditation that even Pedro Almodóvar did not miss, and dinners with fans - to drink coffee. And to smoke. As always. He strolled through Madrid with his immaculate image as an icon of the new, with his shirt buttoned up to the neck, and around him a cloud of devotees and curious onlookers tried to find the hidden key to that rare insect that for so long occupied our darkest days and the most sleepless nights. Always on the edge of understanding. Always aware of the horror of the void that lurks behind every everyday gesture, where reality and dream construct the meaning of all this. Or its opposite. How was it possible that a man with such plain, almost simple speech, and with manners so exquisitely refined, had been able at some point and with the greatest precision to define the darkest nightmares of our days?
And indeed, that is the mystery that remains, the perfect and clear mystery of David Lynch, a void in the world.
In each of his always elusive answers, it seemed that everything related to cinema, or television, or anything that was not patient and rehearsed autism, was with him. Lynch confused and was confused. Contrary to what many suspected, the protean, visceral, enigmatic, and perfect in its murky gesture Inland Empire, the horror film of the digital era, was not a testament. Just a year later, he announced the return of the third season of Twin Peaks. Lynch never ended. And he continues not to do so despite his death. And he reinvented television. The end of the second season in 1992 came with a promise from Laura Palmer to return 25 years later. And indeed, that return took place in 2017 with a third season of 18 imperial and lynchean episodes.
It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment or the primal intuition that made Lynch be Lynch. The film The Art Life, by Rick Barnes, Jon Nguyen, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm, tried to do so. And there he embarked on an almost purely alchemical essay with the idea of finding the primordial essence, let's call it that; the seminal moment in which Lynch condemned himself to be Lynch. The documentary, that's what it was, focused on Eraserhead, the 1977 film that gave birth to everything. Among the images of childhood and early adolescence, the filmmaker (in addition to being a musician, painter, advertiser, provocateur, designer, father, and ex-husband) exhibited himself in full creative process. He painted, philosophized, and let himself be surprised by time in an incessant activity.
At one point, Lynch narrated his encounter with the painter Bushnell Keeler. This man not only pushed him to try with brushes, but also urged him to read the book that determined his life (The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri). And he recounted how one day he contemplated (or imagined) the wind stirring the freshly drawn leaves on the canvas. It was then that he conceived the mixed media work Six Men Getting Sick (Six men vomiting): a sculpted screen on which an animated sequence is projected. It would be his first contact with cinema. Then came The Alphabet and The Grandmother. Two minor projects in which, in his own way, a world was prefigured. There, the traces of a universe that runs "inside," in the industrial and blatantly ugly underground of a ravaged consciousness, are already appreciated. Everything as familiar and recognizable as it is exaggeratedly strange. As murky as happy.
And so on until Eraserhead, the film that would change the world, even the history of cinema and parenthood. It was four obsessive years apart from everything and everyone (he is contemporary, for example, with Spielberg, the same Spielberg who would invite him to be John Ford in The Fabelmans) to gestate the cult work that, according to Lynch, entirely unfolds in his head. In his and in any viewer's head who finds themselves, whether they want to or not, drawn by an image as indefinable, distant, and strange as it is profoundly intimate. Always between one thing and another. A breathing potato can become the breath of the universe. Just like that.
Then, against all logic, came the success of The Elephant Man in 1980 (the story of an outcast who, like its director, ends up finding his place in society) and the resounding failure amounting to 40 million dollars of Dune (Slavoj Zizek's favorite work). And so on until Blue Velvet (1986), the hyperrealistic portrait of the slow explosion before the viewer's eyes of the sweetest of utopias. Suddenly, reality is swallowed in the belly of the beast. When Sandy (Laura Dern) points out to Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) where Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) lives, she says: "That's what's scary, that it's so close." And yet so far.
With Twin Peaks came the revolution. "That semiotic wonderland," writes Lim. That or simple chaos. And the most extreme of avant-garde artists achieved the strange grace of popularity. On April 8, 1990, 35.