Everything is Fine

From the Lady in the Radiator saying, “In heaven, everything is fine,” this atheist knows better. Late great director David Lynch is in a place of ideas. When he died this past week, all I could ideate about were ideas. He had tons of them. From the scene with his deformed, monstrous child in the world in Eraserhead (1977) to the notes he used from a song about a “Candy-colored clown they call the sandman,” in Blue Velvet (1986) this matador took his audience on trips and flights of fancy.

Sometimes profane but never vulgar, Lynch lifted ideas from his mind onto digital with verve and doses of brilliance. This oeuvre of his might be slight, but it is rich. His Transcendental Meditation recognitions, his weather reports, his penchant for smoking (which would take his life due to emphysema), all coalesced into a singular vision of a man.

His power on the screen, his almost squeaky, twangy Western drawl remains matchless. How he directed stemmed from his childhood where his mother gave him blank pages instead of coloring books in the hopes of encouraging a better sense of creativity.

I first paid attention to a Lynch film with the aforementioned Blue Velvet which showed weirdness, tenderness, and adroitness. The mystery and neo-noir touches continue to be an astonishing addition to his body of work.

As I watched later, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), Things got weirder and weirder. All to my satisfaction. Mr. Lynch’s approach to film showed that he prized ideas and how to convey them from his brain to the world.

Creativity continues to be the mainstay of art but also of business. With his album sales and of course his films, he took the time to make his ideas electricity that could power a large city. His ability to showcase human foibles, heroic characters, and pieces of Americana, he made things seemingly ordinary into things of beauty and worth.

I like to think of Bob’s Big Boy a burger or a coffee only because of David Lynch. This is what he infused in his many pieces. He could take something as everyday and pedestrian as a small town and flip it and find an underbelly as rancid as a fetid corpse.

Then he could display beautiful women in his pictures like Laura Dern and Naomi Watts, he could put Richard Pryor in his final acting role. He could pull on the cord of the universe and release and watch the stars twinkle in the black space above.

Mr. Lynch’s powers extended to creating a foundation and this supplies support to students and veterans. It’s all about ideas. He expanded on the landscape of thinking by crafting distorted, ugly, gorgeous, gargantuan and small images on screens large and small.

With all of these ideas which he treated like catching fish, it was all about shaping, molding, and remolding the various essences of filmic prowess. The cliché goes, a film is made in three parts: It’s written, shot, and edited. Lynch blew this off the hinges like a shotgun blast. He would direct some of his own scripts but he knew that he would one day direct them. He also knew about editing from his time at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He could throw all the elements together and foster an entire aesthetic that belonged solely to him.

As an Eagle Scout, he had the discipline that would follow him throughout his life. Of course his work was supremely strange. But there existed a resonance and an understanding of the human condition. He did it from the perspective of an alien but always maintained his humanity. He just peered into the lives of everyday people and made them extremely extraordinary.

In a span of over five decades, Lynch painted landscapes and portraits of the United States he knew. For his displays of Americanness he shows in Wild Heart (1990), he ironically (or maybe purposefully) earned the Palme D’or. To understand Lynch may be a fool’s errand. And that’s okay. You can see his influence in such creations as Severance (2022-) and Saltburn (2023).

With the might of a mind as intricate as Lynch’s, it’s only right that we look in awe at his great motion picutres. And that’s exactly what his work will always stand for in all of this. In the brief time human beings exist in this universe, it is only right that we have the sense to not just peel away the layers to Lynch’s stuff and watch and rewatch his films, listen to his albums, and appreciate his paintings.

What we ought to do is embrace his works and view our own lives. He never admitted but he was selfish. And that’s a good thing. He was one of the few directors who had rational self-interest on his side. He knew what he was doing and why he was doing it. His work ethic (again the Boy Scouts) permitted him the power to transfigure the world he saw within and allow other people around the campfire to experience something profound and stirring. While it is of course off the wall, his body of work show that he was nothing but a consummate artist. He knew about the business and the artistry because he had time to engage in the world and make it his own. By finding those fish swimming in his subconscious and bringing them to the sunlight, he achieved greater success that makes it more enjoyable to behold the spectacular ideations of David Lynch.

As part of my top six David directors (in no particular order) O. Russell Fincher, Cronenberg, Lean, Mamet, and Mr. Lynch, I appreciate the fact they all convey a simple vision from their thoughts but they often blossom into gorgeous and enthralling scenes that can also be brutal and rough. Mr. Lynch performed such a feat as delving into the darkness and then offering something of levity with depth in the light not just in the bleaker ideas.