Well, a couple of days late, but yes, David Lynch dead at 78. He'd been seriously ill, housebound with emphysema for the last year, so not a shock but still a loss. A few people here seemed to enjoy his stuff and get something from it. Not all of his work was perfect, but it had (many, many) moments of genius that few film and TV directors achieve, and it was never boring. I'm a huge fan of Eraserhead, Mulholland drive, Blue Velvet, Elephant Man, Dune, Twin Peaks and so on.
Without getting too I did 1.5 years of a fine art degree about it, what I like about Lynch is that he gets that cinema is a language and you use that language to say something that can only be said in that language.
It's not about the words that are said or how things look or move or the sounds, it's all of it together.
I can't think of anyone else who had that understanding of cinema while making things that were so broadly enjoyed.
It was a shock to hear the news. I am a big fan of Twin Peaks (especially The Return) and the films of his that I've seen (and yet somehow have managed to miss a few biggies, something I need to remedy).
Well, unless Mark Frost flies solo there won't be a Twin Peaks 4. Since both Lynch and Frost were open to speculation, Lynch in particular suggesting the story around Carrie Page (Laura Palmer) was "calling", that's sad.
After watching a number of earlier hollywood productions (1920s -- 1950s) of detective stories, romances, horror, noir, and scifi, I've come to regard Lynch as a cinephile who stitched together impressionistic enactments of disparate favourite clips from forgotten eras, larded over with mysticism and magic to connect things. As the saying goes, all artists borrow, great artists steal. He certainly breathed life into a stodgy and formulaic industry, thus spawning a new wave of Lynchian templates to chew on. I don't think he was nearly as weird or radical or louche as, say, Ken Russell (and many others).
I think he had a lot of fun with what he did. Fun has a bad rap in art-fag circles; you're supposed to suffer. But TP wouldn't have been the same without that vein of humour in the weirdness: Cooper's love of damn fine cups of coffee, Lynch's own comic turn as Deputy Director Cole.
He had a great sense of comedy, and an unerring appraisal of usian society and its signature motivations, such as venality and lust. Some of his story arcs veered into a weirdly victorian sentimentality, like he was dabbling in morality plays. Maybe some of his efforts suffered for too many ideas.
For me, there's nobody who will quite do instead of him. When I have a need to watch something by him, then I don't want somebody else. Shame that there won't be anything new.
If you really want to get nonsensical, read the artspeaky captions. Note Lynch hired the photographer William Eggleston as a consultant on Twin Peaks. So this is may be more properly labelled Egglestonian.
If somebody aims for a dreamlike quality (whatever that may mean in any given case) then they have something in common with some of the work of David Lynch. At school, although I had little aptitude
I tried my best at mathematics and always aimed to get the right answer. I suppose that makes me Newtonian or Einsteinian.
No, not Lynchian as an adjective. As Drew observed up there, "It's not about the words that are said or how things look or move or the sounds, it's all of it together".
in a while I shall walk across the room, and on the basis that we have the count of arms and legs in common, I shall do it in a King Charlesian manner.
Surely it's only a coincidence that "Lynchian" (click) is attached to the review headline (click), days after the obituaries and assorted, breathless hosannas.
I'm a big admirer myself, and so I'm very interested in all of Lynch's trajectory: the striving, the triumphs, and yes the failures. Within a certain cultural context, he was an original, though perhaps less so than his most uncritical consumers realize. Go out there and seek Lynchian stuff that predates Lynch, or occurred independently, it's not difficult even if it's not necessarily ironic. Lynch was about looking under the surface, if nothing else.
The comparison does a disservice to the photographer under review. He is unwhite(!), unamerican(!), and (according to the review synopsis) produces "a photographic world view influenced by French modernism, new wave aesthetics, creolisation and Haitian spiritualism."
FWIW almost all photographs can have a "dreamlike" quality, because they are all unreal representations of reality. This makes it really difficult to separate out imputed artistic intention from snapshot randomness.
Not much by way of commemoration, but IMDB did feature a "rating list" of his work which was an interesting reminder of some of his lesser known things - which Jim has kindly given me the opportunity to view (in one case for the first time). I have never seen The Straight Story and I shall watch with interest.