It has been a week since David Lynch passed away, and many great tributes have already been written about him. I’m tempted to say that I needed a week to process his passing and figure out what I wanted to say about him, but the truth is I was just too damned busy to write anything. In fact, I knew instantly what I wanted to say—simply, that Lynch was a very important person in my life, and in the lives of many of my friends.
I was a college English major in 1986 when Blue Velvet came out, and it hit me and my circle of arty friends like an atomic blast. I already knew of Lynch’s work (I was one of the few kids to see The Elephant Man, and in an actual movie theater, no less), and I knew that he was a director of enormous visual and thematic power. But even I was unprepared for Blue Velvet. On the one hand, it’s a murder mystery, an homage to the noir films of the 1950s in which an unsuspecting suburban kid discovers a hidden world of violence, evil, and, (of course) depraved sexuality. On the other hand, it’s a surrealist vision of the inner world of a modern young man (and, probably, many young women). I was roughly the same age as the main character, Jeffrey Beaumont, in 1986, and so the film had special resonance. I felt like the landscape of my own imagination was a strange blend of the beautiful and the grotesque—often in the same image. And that’s exactly what the film captures, somehow.
Dennis Hopper was an aging has-been when he took the role of Frank Booth, the leering sadistic dark-father of the movie (a horrific replacement for Jeffery’s real father, languishing in the hospital after a stroke). “I have to play Frank Booth because I am Frank Booth,” Hopper said, and it’s easy to believe him, being himself a relic of the counterculture that arose in response to the tidy, sanitized suburban world that Blue Velvet both satirizes and celebrates. The role of Frank Booth required the unleashing of many inner demons, and Hopper had plenty to spare.
Hopper also said that he was attracted to the script because all of the characters in it—Jeffrey, his sweet girlfriend Sandy, Frank, and the tormented femme fatale Dorothy—all seem like different psychological aspects of one person, a spectrum of inner-selves that runs from very light to very, very dark.
A few years later, when Lynch created his brilliant TV series Twin Peaks, he became, for a short time, the coolest person in America. Cooler than any actor or rock star or writer or artist. Being in grad school by that time, I had a conspiracy with a friend of mine to reference David Lynch in every session of a film class we were both taking. (This was great running joke, in part because there was, always, a valid reason to bring up Lynch in any discussion of film. We did get some strange looks from the professor, though.) But, for me, Lynch’s real peak came in 1986, with the release of that one masterpiece, Blue Velvet. It made a big impact on me as a film goer and as a budding writer, as did Lynch himself.
Godspeed, Mr. Lynch…!
Ash Clifton, Writer 