David Lynch Films | David Lynch Filmography | David Lynch Biography | David Lynch Career | David Lynch Awards

The undoubted perversity that runs throughout the works of David Lynch extends to his
repeated and unexpected career turns: coming off the semi-underground Eraserhead to make the semi-respectable The Elephant Man, with a distinguished British cast; then bouncing into a Dino de Laurentiis mega-budget science-fiction fiasco, Dune; creeping back with the seductive and elusive small-town mystery of Blue Velvet; capping that by transferring his uncompromising vision of lurking sexual violence to American network television in Twin Peaks; and alienating the viewers of that bizarre soap with the rambling, intermittently stupefying, road movie Wild at
Heart. Although there are recognisable Lynchian elements, with both Eraserhead and Blue Velvet -his two most commercially and critically successful movies-leaking images and ideas into the pairs of movies that followed them up, Lynch has proved surprisingly difficult to pin down. Given one Lynch movie, it has been-until the slightly too self-plagiaristic Wild at Heart- almost impossible to predict the next step. A painter and animator-his first films are Svankmajer-style shorts The Grandmother and Alphabet -Lynch came into the film industry through the back door, converting his thesis movie into Eraserhead on a shooting schedule that stretched over some years and required the eternal soliciting of money from friends, like Sissy Spacek, who had gone on to do well.

Eraserhead is one of the rare cult movies that deserves its cult reputation, although it is a hard movie to sit still through for a second time around. Set in a monochrome fantasy world that suggests the slums of Oz, it follows a pompadoured drudge, Henry (John Nance), through his awful life in a decaying apartment building, with occasional bursts of light relief from the fungus-cheeked songstress behind the radiator, and winds up with two extraordinarily bizarre and horrid fantasy sequences, one in which Henry's head falls off and is mined for indiarubber to be used in pencil erasers, and the other in which he cuts apart his skinned fetus of a mutant child and is deluged with a literal tide of excrement. Without really being profound, the film manages to worm its way into the hearts of the college crowd, cannily appealing-in one of Lynch's trademarks-to intellectuals who relish the multiple allusions and evasive ?meanings? of the film, and to horror movie fans who just like to go along with the extreme imagery. With The Elephant Man, also in black and white and laden with the steamy industrial imagery of Eraserhead, Lynch, cued perhaps by the poignance of John Hurt's under-the-rubber performance and the presence of the sort of cast (Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud, Freddie Jones, Michael Elphick) one would expect from some BBC-TV Masterpiece Theatre serial, opts for a more humanist approach, mellowing the sheer nastiness of the first film. In the finale, as the mutant John Merrick attends a lovingly recreated Victorian magic show, Lynch even pays homage to the gentle magician whose The Man with the Indiarubber Head might be cited as a precursor to Eraserhead, Georges M?li?s.

Dune is a folly by anyone's standards, and the re-cut television version-which Lynch opted to sign with the Director's Guild pseudonym Allan Smithee-is no help in sorting out the multiple plot confusions of Frank Herbert's pretentious and unfilmable science-fiction epic. Hoping for a fusion of Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia, De Laurentiis-who stuck by Lynch throughout the troubled $40 million production-wound up with a turgid mess, overloaded with talented performers in nothing roles, that only spottily seems to have engaged Lynch's interest, mostly when there are monsters on screen or when Kenneth McMillan is campily overdoing his perverse and evil emperor act. Dune landed Lynch in the doldrums, and his comeback movie, also for the forgiving De Laurentiis, was very carefully crafted to evoke the virtues and cult commercial appeal of Eraserhead without seeming a throwback. Drawing on Shadow of a Doubt, Lynch made a small-town mystery that deigns to work on a plot level, and then shot it through with his own cruel insights into the teeming, insectoid nightmare that exists beneath the red, white, and blue prettiness of the setting, coaxing sinister meaning out of resonant pop songs like ?Blue Velvet? and ?In Dreams,? and establishing the core of a repertory company-Kyle MacLachlan of Dune, Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern-who would recur in his next projects. Blue Velvet, far more than the muddy Dune, established Lynch as a master of colour in addition to his black and white skills, and also, through his handling of human monster Dennis Hopper's abuse of Rossellini, as a chronicler of extreme emotions, often combining sex and violence in one disturbing, yet undeniably appealing package.

Twin Peaks, a television series Lynch devised and for which he directed the pilot film, is a strange offshoot of Blue Velvet, set in a similar town and with MacLachlan again the odd investigator of a crime the nature of which is hard to define. Although it lacks the explicit tone of the earlier film, in which Dennis Hopper is given to basic outbursts like ?baby wants to fuck!,? Twin Peaks is also insidiously fascinating, using the labyrinthine plot convolutions of the typical soap opera-among other things, the show is a lineal descendant of Peyton Place -in addition to the puzzle-solving twists of the murder mystery to probe under the surface of a folksy America of junk food and picket fences. As a reaction to the eerie restraint of Twin Peaks, Wild at Hearts an undisciplined, half-satisfactory movie, a road film which evokes Elvis in Nicolas Cage's subtly overwrought performance and straggles along towards its Wizard of Oz finale, passing by the high points of Lynch's career (featuring players and jokes from all his earlier movies) as it plays out its couple-on-the-run storyline in a surprisingly straightforward and above-board manner. With Willem Dafoe's dirty-toothed monster replacing Dennis Hopper's gas-sniffing gangster, Wild at Heart echoes the violent and sexual excesses of Blue Velvet, including one exploding head stunt out of The Evil Dead and many heavy-metal-scored, heavy-duty sex scenes, but suffers perhaps from its relative predictability.

Both a genuine artist and a cunning commercial survivor, Lynch appeared-in the minds of many critics-to be one of the best hopes for cinema in the 1990s. However, Lynch's promise as a savior had yet to be fulfilled. Unable to get the ill-fated Twin Peaks out of his system after it went unceremoniously off the air without a resolution, Lynch launched a theatrical version of his TV show, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Ironically, it turned out to be a prequel to the events portrayed in the series rather than a sequel, so to date we are still left without a resolution to the labyrinthine mysteries surrounding the puzzle of ?who killed Laura Palmer?? Overlong and oddly underheated, it was a commercial bomb, even with hardcore Peaks fans.-
KIM NEWMAN and JOHN MCCARTY