Late one Sunday night, I must have been about eleven or twelve, and I’m watching TV in our front room. It was approaching bedtime, so I am anxious because it’s school the next day, when something came on so incredible and awful that my mind managed to make me forget about all that, for the time it was on at least.
After the BBC2 announcer, we fade to black, then see the title: the words Blue Velvet in white transposed over some curtains made from – blue velvet! And then an orchestral take of the song Blue Velvet, over some pristine shots from somewhere or other in flyover America – a picket fence, some flowers, a fire-truck, some children being shepherded to school.
‘Fair enough’, the film seemed to shrug. But little did I realise that that was about as prosaic as it was going to get from hereon in. A man has a heart attack while watering his flowerbeds. Did we then cut back to his wife dropping her tray of lemonade aghast, or a passing jogger striding to come help him? Er – not exactly. Beneath the fallen man there were bugs, hundreds of them – we see closeups of their shiny black shells and crushing mandibles – crawling, clamouring, feasting in the dirt, the pitch darkness below, their wretched noises signalling something altogether uncanny and horrid.
‘Welcome’, the filmmaker seemed to be saying, holding a curtain open to reveal the darkness behind it, ‘to the other place’.
We next see a young man named Jeffrey discovering a severed ear in a field and must quest to find its owner. I think it was probably about then that my parents threw in the towel and sent me off to bed before things got too out of hand. (Only later was I to realise that the really sick stuff hadn’t even happened yet…) But it was too little too late – sorry mum and dad, I know you tried your best – but in that pretty short space of time my mind had already melted and David Lynch had left his branding on another poor sucker for good.
David Lynch is one of those artists that defies categorisation so completely that the only truly accurate descriptor is one that describes himself – Lynchian. Nothing else really seems to do. Sure, over the decades people have trotted out all the usual epithets to describe him and his work – bizarre, surreal, sinister, revolting, beguiling. But none of that really seems to do him justice – not entirely, anyway. This is mainly because Lynch didn’t so much make individual works, so much as create a universe – with each work acting as a kind of porthole to view a particular aspect of it.
Yet with all the ink spilled since his death I have read precious little about how human Lynch’s works are. As someone who grew with him, who went forward and back from that point on that dark Sunday night to gobble up each of his works, the unifying field is their humanity. His works do not so much follow standard plotting from A to B, so much as act as a massive canvass for their central characters’ internal attributes – the jealousy and lust that underpins Betty and Rita’s relationship in Mulholland Drive, the murderous mania within Fred Madison in Lost Highway, the rage that’s barely sublimated beneath Alvin’s octogenarian calm in The Straight Story.
Then, of course, there is his magnum opus, Twin Peaks, which has this very thin veneer of a murder mystery procedural, yet as the quest deepens the town itself seems to reveal itself as a kind of purgatory, trapping its inhabitants eternally. This is none better shown than in the series’ big-screen origin story, Fire Walk With Me, where Lynch miraculously brings back the its murder victim to show her in her final week and, in doing so, breathes life into her – if only for a moment.
All that is true, and yet, at the same time, does not even begin the beginning with him. Like Jeffery we are all questing, seeking to find the owner of the ear but realising, the further on we go, that we will never really be through.
When he was with us he taught me to fix my heart or die. Well, David, unlike you I am still alive, and it is one of your many lessons I have taken to heart. So, I thank you for that and a great deal of dreaming besides.
Written by Ieuan Jones
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