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The Elephant Man

There may be no more clearly personal work on Lynch's resume than The Elephant Man. It tells the story of John Merrick (John Hurt), a brilliant young man who must contend with loneliness, stigmatization, and objectification thanks to severe physical deformities. Lynch focuses on Merrick's relationship with his friend and doctor, Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), who tends to him when the freak-show barker who cares for him beats him one night. What ensues is the bringing of Merrick—based on the real-life Joseph Merrick—out into the public as a scientific object rather than a person.

"I am not an animal," screams Merrick in the famed climactic scene, and one can see Lynch speaking to critics as much as studios. Lynch's unique perspective and style are not meant to be picked apart clinically, nor should they be used to simply sell someone else's ideas. Lynch, like Merrick, is different, but his concerns and emotions are not isolated or corrupted. When he makes movies, his ends are not simply to freak the viewer out—well, not just that, anyway—but to relate his intimate feelings and opinions. Lynch makes something like a populist biopic here, but he does so without compromising his outlook for a second, which is a tremendous feat in and of itself.

The Straight Story

Lynch has made two movies that can be considered sober-eyed in comparison to his more notoriously hallucinatory works: The Elephant Man and The Straight Story. The former speaks directly to Lynch’s feelings of alienation and beautiful malformation in its detailing of the life of John Merrick, but The Straight Story is different, if not exactly as much as people make it out to be. It’s easily Lynch’s most straightforward narrative, following the true life story of a voyage of Richard Farnsworth’s Alvin, a lonely farmer, to visit his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton) via his old, gas-guzzling rider lawnmower.

For all of Farnsworth’s tremendous charm, death and the struggle to come to terms not only with one’s decay but also with the perishing of those we’ve loved and shared experiences with is at the heart of the seemingly placid film. A stop-off at a bar causes Farnsworth’s retiree to reflect on his time in the military, and his relationship with his disabled daughter (Sissy Spacek) reveals a tenderness that rarely comes to the fore in Lynch films. Then again, it’s only a popular myth that Lynch can’t be bothered to focus on human struggles and prefers to fetishize oddities rather than confront something honest about himself and the world. Much like Alvin, who sets out to do something deeply human and humane, Lynch is revealing himself and ruminating on mortal, urgent issues in The Straight Story.

Wild at Heart

David Lynch’s obsession with “The Wizard of Oz” reared its head in every project he touched. But he never engaged more directly with Victor Fleming’s film than in “Wild at Heart,” which often feels like Lynch’s attempt to make his own version of Dorothy’s journey home. The darkly comedic romance stars Nicholas Cage as Sailor, a bad boy with a deep belief in personal freedom symbolized by his prized snakeskin jacket. Laura Dern is Lula Fortune, his rock ‘n’ roll-loving girlfriend who waits for him to be released from prison and then throws her life away to be with him.

Like so many Lynch masterpieces, “Wild at Heart” juxtaposes wholesome 1950s imagery — Elvis is alluded to almost as often as Dorothy — with Lynchian peaks into the darkest pockets of humanity. Murder, poverty, and sexual violence line Sailor and Luna’s tumultuous road to domestic bliss, but Lynch ends the film on one of the most hopeful notes of his career, with Glinda herself making an appearance to implore the on-again off-again lovers not to give up on what their hearts both know to be true.

It’s ironic that Lynch won his Palme d’Or for a film that few would place in the upper echelon of his masterpieces. But it’s an essential look into a master’s influences that holds up thanks to the charisma of its two leads and Lynch’s timeless gaze. —CZ

“Lost Highway” (1997)

The headlights of a car dart down a dusty highway. An ashen, bugeyed Robert Blake likes to watch. Mobster Robert Loggia goes around offering pornos on VHS. A guy has a glass table rammed straight into his skull like a wedge. There are images in “Lost Highway” as indelible as anything in Lynch’s work, and the deep, crepuscular blacks of Peter Deming’s cinematography are like an oil slick you want to bathe in. This Mobius-strip-like story (does it end at the beginning and start all over again?) about a jazz saxophonist living in the mansion version of Isabella Rossellini’s apartment from “Blue Velvet,” and becoming obsessed with the possibility his wife may be unfaithful, is full of harsh moments and dream logic. And then almost comic cameos from Gary Busey and Richard Pryor. This is one of Lynch’s slipperiest efforts, one best summed up by Patricia Arquette’s film fatale declaration: “And you’ll never have me.” Well, we’ll never have a full handle on “Lost Highway” either, but would we have it any other way? —CB

Ereserhead

Parenthood has never seemed so horrifying. Lynch's 1977 debut feature is a cornerstone of surrealist film, notorious for its inscrutability and macabre imagery. Despite its indecipherable reputation, Eraserhead actually has a deceptively simple plot: Henry Spencer (Jack Nance, rocking an I-just-stuck-my-hand-in-an-electrical-socket hairdo) lives in a bleak industrial city, where his girlfriend (Charlotte Stewart) gives birth to a monstrous creature. After she leaves, Henry is stuck caring for the child, journeying through dream sequences and haunting visions: Women singing in radiators! Men's heads popping off!

With its striking black-and-white cinematography and minimal dialogue, Eraserhead feels like a nightmarish silent film, accompanied by unsettling sound design. It's not Lynch's best movie, but it's certainly unforgettable — like a dream that lingers long after you wake up. —D.C.

Blue Velvet

It’s hard to overstate the divisiveness of Lynch’s Blue Velvet. When it debuted in 1986, Roger Ebert gave it a single sad star and decried it a “sick joke.” Other critics hailed it as a postmodern triumph and new form of cinema. Today, people are still somewhat divided, but the criticism has turned largely positive as it becomes more and more apparent just how deeply Blue Velvet influenced other filmmakers. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is often cited as one work strongly influenced by the unflinching violence of Blue Velvet. In fact, Tarantino borrowed a lot from Lynch over the years, so much so that David Foster Wallace dismissed Tarantino almost completely for taking Lynch’s idiosyncratic surrealism and turning it into shallow commercialism: “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” Indeed. Watching Blue Velvet is harrowing, and there’s no escaping its mesmerizing, stomach-churning, woozy horror. Lynch rips rather than peels the lid off 1950s idealism to show the sadomasochistic, rotting underbelly. Viewers are thrown through a wild tornado of contradictions. One minute we’re laughing (“Fucking Pabst Blue Ribbon!”), and the next both characters and viewers are subjected to intense brutality. Along with Jeffrey, we are dragged constantly between two worlds that are simultaneously identical and fiercely separate—the world of suburban lawns and white picket fences and the horrific, dizzying world of Dorothy. This made people uncomfortable, not least of all Ebert, who chided Lynch for choosing “to interrupt the almost hypnotic pull of that relationship in order to pull back to his jokey, small-town satire.” Ebert’s criticism about the frequent switching between intense horror and suburbia is misguided—he’s misinterpreting what Lynch wants to do. Feeling disoriented is exactly how you should feel, especially the first time you watch it. It’s easy to stress-drink an entire glass of wine in the space of the famous Ben’s apartment scene alone. By the time Blue Velvet ends and you’re left with the undeniable feeling that something is still just a bit off, you’ve got an empty bottle to add to your recycling.

 

Naj(ve)Lyncha(n)st(ven)iji Lynch:

 

The Elephant Man

There may be no more clearly personal work on Lynch's resume than The Elephant Man. It tells the story of John Merrick (John Hurt), a brilliant young man who must contend with loneliness, stigmatization, and objectification thanks to severe physical deformities. Lynch focuses on Merrick's relationship with his friend and doctor, Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), who tends to him when the freak-show barker who cares for him beats him one night. What ensues is the bringing of Merrick—based on the real-life Joseph Merrick—out into the public as a scientific object rather than a person.

"I am not an animal," screams Merrick in the famed climactic scene, and one can see Lynch speaking to critics as much as studios. Lynch's unique perspective and style are not meant to be picked apart clinically, nor should they be used to simply sell someone else's ideas. Lynch, like Merrick, is different, but his concerns and emotions are not isolated or corrupted. When he makes movies, his ends are not simply to freak the viewer out—well, not just that, anyway—but to relate his intimate feelings and opinions. Lynch makes something like a populist biopic here, but he does so without compromising his outlook for a second, which is a tremendous feat in and of itself.

The Straight Story

Lynch has made two movies that can be considered sober-eyed in comparison to his more notoriously hallucinatory works: The Elephant Man and The Straight Story. The former speaks directly to Lynch’s feelings of alienation and beautiful malformation in its detailing of the life of John Merrick, but The Straight Story is different, if not exactly as much as people make it out to be. It’s easily Lynch’s most straightforward narrative, following the true life story of a voyage of Richard Farnsworth’s Alvin, a lonely farmer, to visit his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton) via his old, gas-guzzling rider lawnmower.

For all of Farnsworth’s tremendous charm, death and the struggle to come to terms not only with one’s decay but also with the perishing of those we’ve loved and shared experiences with is at the heart of the seemingly placid film. A stop-off at a bar causes Farnsworth’s retiree to reflect on his time in the military, and his relationship with his disabled daughter (Sissy Spacek) reveals a tenderness that rarely comes to the fore in Lynch films. Then again, it’s only a popular myth that Lynch can’t be bothered to focus on human struggles and prefers to fetishize oddities rather than confront something honest about himself and the world. Much like Alvin, who sets out to do something deeply human and humane, Lynch is revealing himself and ruminating on mortal, urgent issues in The Straight Story.

Wild at Heart

David Lynch’s obsession with “The Wizard of Oz” reared its head in every project he touched. But he never engaged more directly with Victor Fleming’s film than in “Wild at Heart,” which often feels like Lynch’s attempt to make his own version of Dorothy’s journey home. The darkly comedic romance stars Nicholas Cage as Sailor, a bad boy with a deep belief in personal freedom symbolized by his prized snakeskin jacket. Laura Dern is Lula Fortune, his rock ‘n’ roll-loving girlfriend who waits for him to be released from prison and then throws her life away to be with him.

Like so many Lynch masterpieces, “Wild at Heart” juxtaposes wholesome 1950s imagery — Elvis is alluded to almost as often as Dorothy — with Lynchian peaks into the darkest pockets of humanity. Murder, poverty, and sexual violence line Sailor and Luna’s tumultuous road to domestic bliss, but Lynch ends the film on one of the most hopeful notes of his career, with Glinda herself making an appearance to implore the on-again off-again lovers not to give up on what their hearts both know to be true.

It’s ironic that Lynch won his Palme d’Or for a film that few would place in the upper echelon of his masterpieces. But it’s an essential look into a master’s influences that holds up thanks to the charisma of its two leads and Lynch’s timeless gaze. —CZ

“Lost Highway” (1997)

The headlights of a car dart down a dusty highway. An ashen, bugeyed Robert Blake likes to watch. Mobster Robert Loggia goes around offering pornos on VHS. A guy has a glass table rammed straight into his skull like a wedge. There are images in “Lost Highway” as indelible as anything in Lynch’s work, and the deep, crepuscular blacks of Peter Deming’s cinematography are like an oil slick you want to bathe in. This Mobius-strip-like story (does it end at the beginning and start all over again?) about a jazz saxophonist living in the mansion version of Isabella Rossellini’s apartment from “Blue Velvet,” and becoming obsessed with the possibility his wife may be unfaithful, is full of harsh moments and dream logic. And then almost comic cameos from Gary Busey and Richard Pryor. This is one of Lynch’s slipperiest efforts, one best summed up by Patricia Arquette’s film fatale declaration: “And you’ll never have me.” Well, we’ll never have a full handle on “Lost Highway” either, but would we have it any other way? —CB

Ereserhead

Parenthood has never seemed so horrifying. Lynch's 1977 debut feature is a cornerstone of surrealist film, notorious for its inscrutability and macabre imagery. Despite its indecipherable reputation, Eraserhead actually has a deceptively simple plot: Henry Spencer (Jack Nance, rocking an I-just-stuck-my-hand-in-an-electrical-socket hairdo) lives in a bleak industrial city, where his girlfriend (Charlotte Stewart) gives birth to a monstrous creature. After she leaves, Henry is stuck caring for the child, journeying through dream sequences and haunting visions: Women singing in radiators! Men's heads popping off!

With its striking black-and-white cinematography and minimal dialogue, Eraserhead feels like a nightmarish silent film, accompanied by unsettling sound design. It's not Lynch's best movie, but it's certainly unforgettable — like a dream that lingers long after you wake up. —D.C.

Blue Velvet

It’s hard to overstate the divisiveness of Lynch’s Blue Velvet. When it debuted in 1986, Roger Ebert gave it a single sad star and decried it a “sick joke.” Other critics hailed it as a postmodern triumph and new form of cinema. Today, people are still somewhat divided, but the criticism has turned largely positive as it becomes more and more apparent just how deeply Blue Velvet influenced other filmmakers. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is often cited as one work strongly influenced by the unflinching violence of Blue Velvet. In fact, Tarantino borrowed a lot from Lynch over the years, so much so that David Foster Wallace dismissed Tarantino almost completely for taking Lynch’s idiosyncratic surrealism and turning it into shallow commercialism: “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” Indeed. Watching Blue Velvet is harrowing, and there’s no escaping its mesmerizing, stomach-churning, woozy horror. Lynch rips rather than peels the lid off 1950s idealism to show the sadomasochistic, rotting underbelly. Viewers are thrown through a wild tornado of contradictions. One minute we’re laughing (“Fucking Pabst Blue Ribbon!”), and the next both characters and viewers are subjected to intense brutality. Along with Jeffrey, we are dragged constantly between two worlds that are simultaneously identical and fiercely separate—the world of suburban lawns and white picket fences and the horrific, dizzying world of Dorothy. This made people uncomfortable, not least of all Ebert, who chided Lynch for choosing “to interrupt the almost hypnotic pull of that relationship in order to pull back to his jokey, small-town satire.” Ebert’s criticism about the frequent switching between intense horror and suburbia is misguided—he’s misinterpreting what Lynch wants to do. Feeling disoriented is exactly how you should feel, especially the first time you watch it. It’s easy to stress-drink an entire glass of wine in the space of the famous Ben’s apartment scene alone. By the time Blue Velvet ends and you’re left with the undeniable feeling that something is still just a bit off, you’ve got an empty bottle to add to your recycling.

 

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