“Keep your eye on the donut,” as David Lynch liked to remind people, “not the hole.” The substance of a film isn’t the center of what catches your eye, rather the crux of its foundation. The Lynchian style of film is dark and twisted, yet its meaning is beyond its scope. In the way that Lynch made films, what isn’t seen is often more important than what is seen. The mystery is complex, and while his films may evoke confusion, they tend to be the films that stick most.
Perhaps the most studied auteur of the last fifty years, Lynch’s style found a way to maintain the most pitiful prosaic pieces of every day life while juxtaposing the unimaginative with the whimsical. Inland Empire is tailor-made avantgarde, The Elephant Man is a lecture in surrealism, Eraserhead used techniques derived from constructivism for its practical effects. Mullholland Drive and Blue Velvet combine elements of traditional melodrama in its horror. Lynch used different artforms to make his own, unique artform that took movies from straight-forward narratives to complex dreams, changing the way films are directed. Yet, despite a distinct style that takes from each kind of art that can be found in his films, not all that have to even do with filmmaking in a traditional sense, there’s a sense of artistry that is almost unnatural.
Take, for example, the opening scene of Blue Velvet. The innocuous establishment of flowers and the picket fence is a pretty, if not a bit basic, search for everyday comfort in American suburbia while folksy music plays. It’s calming for the viewer, immediately establishing a world that they know, understand, and relate to. That’s when the onion starts to peel for the audience, who sees the atrocities that happen behind closed doors within the community unravel before their eyes. It isn’t necessarily driven by your traditional rising action, climax, falling action plot device, but it’s an inherently haunting human experience that Isabella Rossellini endures through Dennis Hopper. It’s a character study of why Hopper acts the way he does and why Rossellini submits to him in an exploration of lust, drugs, sadism, and masochism that people keep to themselves. In a previous review of Blue Velvet, I’ve penned that “it takes awhile to understand exactly what this film is and perhaps, it’s there-within that lays the obvious charm. Amidst stellar lighting, excellent and tight camera work, a marvelous and stunning aesthetic and wonderful acting performances all-around (Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini all excel in their screentime), is a chaotic premise that experiments in a genre conglomerate with the candor of sexual affliction meshed with the novelty of the eighties, creating a blend of storytelling with a sense of a nostalgic time capsule into the era in which it was devised. The juvenile pasquinade that the film uses to surround the story of the Dorothy and Jeff characters with is wildly entertaining, keeping a movie that’s supposed to be unsettling sincere in its attempt.”
“In the East, the Far East, when a person is sentenced to death” says Robert Blake’s character in Lost Highway, “they’re sent to a place where they can’t escape, never knowing when an executioner may step up behind them, and fire a bullet into the back of their head.” In Lynch’s nonlinear masterpiece, Bill Pullman’s struggle is explored through scenes remarkably similar to each other, but hazier each time. Its Pullman’s memory that kept him hostage to himself with his mind as a place he cannot escape. The exploration of guilt is never quite stated, yet the further you round the perimeter of the center of the donut, the hole fills itself in contextually. Perhaps, this is an over analyzation, but the ambiguity is the selling point of Lynch’s work. Everybody can try to explain why awful things happen, but the more twisted the mind, the more plausible explanations there are. Beyond the structure and validity of its plot puzzle becomes its opening shot: now known as the Lost Highway shot. Using a Panavision camera, the shot of the road through the windshield on a stormy night with headlights illuminating the street as the car slowly speeds up, atmospherically setting the stakes of the film with its audience. It’s a shot that’s been tested and tried many times since, one of many chaotic shots throughout a long career that Lynch meticulously shot repeatedly until he figured out how to perfectly encapsulate the frame he wanted. Lynch filled up a frame like a canvas, as his inner-painter took over the way he approached his art in other mediums.
Framing wasn’t the only aspect, however, that Lynch excelled above all in the artistry of filmmaking. For the movie Eraserhead, a low-budget picture, Lynch used low frequency noises as its score, far more ominous than that of a traditional horror film. Traditionally, a score uses music to be a soundtrack to the events, while Lynch used industrial noises, frequencies of a bass, and isolated instrumentals from classic songs to combine for noise. However, the noise created a scenario where the audience yearns for what is missing. Captivated by the inside of the donut, the mood of the movie is literally as if it’s the 1890s and Carnegie has taken over Pittsburgh. The technical prowess of Lynch is arguably best found in that feature: DIY sound design. Since Eraserhead couldn’t afford Hollywood sound technicians, Lynch creatively found ways to introduce the score. The primary love scene in the film uses a low-frequency noise that was created when Lynch let air run through a microphone that was sitting in a plastic bottle while he bottle floated in a full bathtub.
David Lynch saw film beyond what it was and what it would become. An artist that made music, authored books, and built his own set architecture was primarily a painter that studied all forms of expressionism in the arts. That’s the experience he brought to filmmaking, truly treating it as an artform. A unique voice, the humanization of the horror artistry was found through the Lynch perspective and today Hollywood lost a true legend. David Lynch once said that stories have tangents that open up and become different things, and that’s why you should always leave room in them to dream. For that, cinema will never be the same.
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