The legacy of all-American surrealism
David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, and Eraserhead, was that rarity — a grant-funded filmmaker who was also a true artist. Staying apolitical in his work, Lynch expressed the personal idiosyncrasy that reflected his upbringing in Midwest America (born in Missoula, Mont., and of Finnish-Danish heritage) as well as his private, frightened knowledge of national terror.
As an aspiring artist, he studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, which exposed him to the city’s social aberrations. In the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, he told filmmakers Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm of a “thick fear in the air, a feeling of sickening corruption and racial hatred.”
Lynch submerged this abject political realization in the practice of surrealist art. Combining dream and nightmare logic, his storytelling fearlessly visualized the subconscious. Lynch’s use of noncommercial techniques (superimpositions, characters displaying double consciousness) was considered unprofitable until Eraserhead, his debut feature, attracted nonconformist, pot-smoking cult audiences of 1970s “Midnight Movies.” This was unexpected for a project that began at the American Film Institute. Founded in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson using National Endowment for the Arts funding, the AFI’s conservatory for patronless strivers eventually was validated by Lynch’s originality.
His post-Eraserhead Hollywood breakthrough with the equally bizarre yet also surprisingly elegant The Elephant Man (1980) went against the orthodox political perspectives that the American Film Institute, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Public Broadcasting System, and National Public Radio were all known for — government- and corporate-sponsored arts organizations dedicated to the mundane ordinariness sought by craven grant applicants who promise to make politically correct “art.”
It was by defying commercial expectations that Lynch surpassed the grant institution formula that had become one with Hollywood’s liberal indoctrination system. (Blue Velvet’s Americana fever dream exposed small-town youths to lurid sexuality rather than the chaste innocence of the John Hughes trend.)
The eruption of common pathologies in Lynch’s films could be financed by industry risk-takers, such as comedian and hitmaker Mel Brooks, who produced The Elephant Man. But Lynch’s artistic pursuit confounded Hollywood’s usual condescension — and he knew it. When the foundation world first acknowledged his struggle, Lynch exclaimed, “It was a total life-changing phone call.” For four years at AFI’s stables, “California sunshine was pulling the fear out of me.” He recollected, “One of my greatest, happiest experiences in cinema. What I loved about it was my own little world where I could build everything and get it exactly the way I wanted it. It was so beautiful. Everything about it. Everything about it.”
Later, with the nightmare surrealism of Mulholland Drive, Lynch would expose the soul-destroying nature of Hollywood. And his finest work, the 1990 television soap opera Twin Peaks, could also be considered a sensitive, comedic Rorschach test, given its all-American grotesqueries — the definition of his artistic expression.
The disturbing surreality of Lynch’s vision went against Hollywood and NEA convention. (He disavowed his 1984 film version of the sci-fi blockbuster Dune, yet its boldness outclasses the inert, two-part Millennial pseudo-epic.)
Lynch’s legacy warns against politically correct mediocrity. His passing should inspire a new national sense that artists don’t conform to government blandishment, but at their best, they force the culture — and the marketplace — to accept and redefine art.